June 2017 Review

Yep, this is late. Mainly because I was busy sunning it up in the Med for a week and a half. I tried writing all this when I was there, but. Nah. Sorry/not sorry. This month's top album is an utter belter. If you listen to nothing else from June, then I implore you listen to that because it's got the makings of a modern classic. ON WITH THE SHOW!


The Rest:


Algiers - The Underside Of Power - B

Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up - B

Kool G Rap - Return Of The Don - B

Royal Blood - How Did We Get So Dark? - D

I have very little time for power duos. They go one of two ways - Either they stick rigidly to the 2-piece formula, which closes a lot of doors and makes for plain compositions which are forced to stick to basic song structures, or they expand the sound by inviting extra musicians in or dub over parts in the studio, in which case - It's clearly not a duo, is it! Neither of these two options are exciting in any way, frankly.

Royal Blood, the garden-variety rockers from Brighton are the first such type. At the end of the day, when all you have for dynamic range is 3 big on/off switches labelled VOCALS, BASS and DRUMS, if your churning out basic cookie-cutter rock music then the format gets tired very, very quickly. How Did We Get So Dark? offers no change to their self-titled debut record in terms of style. It's still teeth-clenchingly derivative and juvenile to the point of sheer frustration. Avoid like the Central Line on a hot summer Friday at 5pm.


The Best:


01: Lorde - Melodrama - A

Lorde still feels like a new artist, maybe because she's been in the spotlight for most of her teen years, but with her excellent debut Pure Heroine now 4 years old, it's high time we saw this talented songwriter back on the big stage. Melodrama is a superb, finely crafted statement on loneliness and the ambivalence of solitude. It's a hugely important release for 2017.

Musically, the record rolls out of the speakers with ease, the sound is fresh and tight, and some of the instrumentation and structure is breathtaking. Of course, this is a pop record, and there are obligatory singles - Homemade Dynamite, Perfect Places and Green Light are shrink-wrapped and ready to go on any top 40 radio station you'll care to listen to in the next 6 months - But there's something about Melodrama that puts this above the sphere of Just Another Cool-Pop record.

That would be the strikingly intelligent level of self-reflection on show throughout the lyrical content of this record. While she co-wrote Melodrama with Jack Antonoff, (the guy out of the band that did that awful "Tonight, we are young" song) it's clear that the majority of the words on the album come directly from Lorde herself. The lonely piano piece Liability is the kind of intricate emotional songwriting most lyricists can only dream about producing. The song is a musing on the issues surrounding fame, but is also a personal statement, an apology to her friends for her own intensity. The rest of the album plays out like that - Melodrama, is after all, a loose concept album. It's about that isolated anxiety everyone has felt at some point, which is hard to put into words, but amounts to: "Wait, what if everyone hates me?"

That's what makes Melodrama so achingly relatable, it relentlessly taps into that 21st Century Millennial ennui that anyone under the age of 35 has had delivered to them in buckets. It's a documentation of our time, it's a fulfilment of unrequited dreams for a (L-O-V-E-L-E-S-S) generation that have had to do everything the hard way. Undeniably, Lorde is one of the best young stars in this era of traditional pop revival, and if Melodrama and her debut are anything to go by, she could end up being one of the finest songwriters of this decade.

02: Ride - Weather Diaries - A

Ride are famous for their standard-bearing genre-defining Nowhere, a 1991 Shoegaze megalith that gave them a permanent seat at the table with the alternative guitar gods of the 90's. Like many of those bands, their sphere of influence has shrunk, but also like many of those bands, Ride have got on the boomerang hype of this era of reunion, started back in 2007 when Led Zeppelin got back together for a couple of shows. Since then, an endless stream of broken up bands have returned to the release/tour/festival circuit, and to be fair, many of their albums have been disappointing - Take the dull releases from Slowdive and The Jesus And Mary Chain from earlier this year as examples - But Weather Diaries, Ride's first album in 21 years, is different.

Maturity is something I find overrated in music and songwriting. Most of the best material an artist will produce is in their teens or 20s, and it's a depressingly common trope that a musician's vitality and relevance will wane as they get older, and inevitably more comfortable. That's what my main objection is to many of these comeback records - They're all too safe. Happily, Weather Diaries spins that all 'round. Ride have used their mellower shades to create music that benefits from the smoother edges of adulthood. The album plays front-to-back with a sheen of quality songwriting piqued with long sections of guitar walls, droney noise channels and other such Shoegaze staples. It's an unmistakably classic sound that can still clash heads with modern guitar music. All I Want is the peak of this album for me, a song that encapsulates the entirety of the project in one slice of power chords, minimal vocal looping and reverb dials up to the max. This is one of the few Dads-Getting-Back-In-The-Game-To-Fund-A-Messy-Divorce releases that deserves attention. A fantastic return.

03: alt-J - Relaxer - A

alt-J were the indie darlings of 2012, crashing on to the scene with the seminal An Awesome Wave, a deep, layered and luscious debut that placed them permanently on the musical landscape. Global tours, appearances on The Jonathan Ross Show and universal acclaim followed. Fast forward 2 years to This Is All Yours, their dreary sophomore effort, and the first without founder member Gwil Sainsbury, and alt-J's world had changed. It was far less exciting, absurd to the point of parody at times, and showed a darkened edge to the band, a group of musicians moving in an unwanted direction. They had to come out swinging on their third album. Relaxer is thankfully a return to form, and offers a measured take on their career to this point. The Nerd-Folk mumblers are back.

Relaxer's distilled nuance belies an immense amount of energy in each track. The Prog/Orchestral mash-up on 3VV announces the album like a shaft of light through the heavens. As an intro track, it's extraordinary, setting the scene for the band's idiosyncratic palate, and is probably the best song on the record. Another highlight is the tense cover of House Of The Rising Sun. Of course, this song has been covered by basically everyone who's ever picked up a guitar, and so it's a testament to their musicianship and creativity that the boys manage to create a version of this song that actually is unique. What really pushes this over the edge for me though, is the fact that they wrote a new verse for it. That really is on another level, and representative of Relaxer as a project - This is a comfortable, effortless alt-J record, the one they should have put out 3 years ago.

There's no straight-up single on Relaxer. Those who listen to this album waiting for a radio friendly burst akin to Breezeblocks or Left Hand Free will leave bereft, but they'd be missing the point. This is a project for the band, not for the fans. This album is alt-J levelling out to a cruising altitude. That the band chose Adeline, a sparse, guitar-scratched composition as a lead single for this album says it all - They're doing what they damn well want, and if that means no Apple-Music-ad-worthy tunes, then so be it. Relaxer challenges you to join alt-J on their own personal astral plane. It's your choice whether or not you want to go there with them.

04: Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory - B

Vince Staples is barely in his 20's, but his presence is already rippling through the American Hip-hop world. Big Fish Theory, his latest project, is a club banger/Hip-hop hybrid album that presents a wide selection of musical moods to accompany Staples and his laid-back, righteous delivery. The album is a solid run of beat-driven tunes, each one a choice selection from one of several top producers who worked on the project. On Big Fish Theory, Vince Staples offers his opinion on what he sees as the great folly in Hip-hop - The vast difference between the image rappers portray in public and what their day-to-day existence actually is.

The only criticism I could level against this glittering piece is that it's too short; Any rap record of this style under 40 minutes could barely be considered more than a mixtape. It's not just the literal length though, guest appearances (aside perhaps from Kendrick Lamar's centrepiece verse on Yeah Right) are too fleeting. Having said that, the snappy style complements Staples' concise verses. His words are straightforward, and he makes no bones about his observations. Big Fish Theory is certainly a step away from Summertime '06, and there is a lot of evolution in the sound from that previous release. With Big Fish Theory, Staples is charting out his empire, but we're still waiting for a stone-cold classic from this young Hip-hop starlet.

05: James McAlister - Planetarium - B

06: Anathema - The Optimist - B