July 2017 Review

July wasn't that shining for music. Maybe I chose the wrong stuff to listen to, but in the end I came out with a solitary A rating from 13 albums. I was all pepped up and ready to give the Arcade Fire album a big thumbs up and thee top spot, until I heard it. I heard a few things about how bad it was and I thought "Nah, never! This is the band that gave us Mountains Beyond Mountains for goodness sake!" But yeah, it's really bad. I'm not even gonna try and get tickets for their tour. Everything else was pretty good, though. A couple of solid rap releases, an experimental EP from one of my musical heroes, a tight catchy rock record and an album from a counter-culture legend are the top 5 this month.

The Rest:


Arcade Fire - Everything Now - C-

You know that trope that you see everywhere? Those bank adverts with vanilla poetry trying to be all kitchen sink about the modern world, or when BBC runs an article asking Are Millennials Killing The Glass Blowing Industry? Or when your dull friend from school who you've not seen for a decade posts up a Clickhole article titled A Photographer Removed The Phones From All These Pictures Of People And Like, Wow Man So Deep And Meaningful, Such A Fresh Take? Well, guess what! Arcade Fire have done an album all about that, and it's called Everything Now! They must have been up all night thinking of that title.

The beginning of the album promises so much - A quiet intro building up to an ABBA-inspired piano line that pierces through the darkness atop a pulsing rhythm, which announces Everything Now with the grandness we've come to expect from Arcade Fire's traditionally strong album starts, but unfortunately, the whole thing goes downhill sharply from that point. With Electric Blue, a synth-rock blaster as an exception, Everything Now, on the whole, plays like a Killers cutting room floor studio session. Compare with huge moments from years past like Wake Up, Power Out or Ready To Start and there's no contest. Musically, this is absolutely the worst album Arcade Fire have put out to date.

The lyrics are obtuse and ham-fisted to the point where it feels like a joke. Moments such as Chemistry, an upbeat throwaway song that may or may not be ironic, the 3 minute double track Infinite Content and Infinite_Content, with it's painfully trite "observational" lyrics "Infinite content, infinite content/We're infinitely content" presented over and over as if the meaning behind them is this monumental revelation no-one has thought of before, and We Don't Deserve Love, the last song proper, a dreary indulgence that clocks in at six and a half minutes are amongst the band's lowest ever. To go from Reflektor, the expansive zeitgeist masterpiece of 4 years ago to this is one of the steepest drops in form of any artist I've experienced in some time.

It's just really, really tiring to be bombarded with this kind of bullshit, (which is ironic, considering) and for a standard-bearer of the millennial generation's musical landscape to now participate in this kind of shallow self importance is beyond frustrating, and is little more than an insult to the fans who grew up through their teens on them in the mid-00's, loved them and made them millionaires. Sorry for ranting, everyone. I'n gonna have a few beers and listen to Funeral.

Boris - Dear - B

Foster The People - Sacred Hearts Club - C

HAIM - Something To Tell You - C

Lana Del Ray - Lust For Life - C

Melvins - A Walk With Love and Death - B

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Doom Patrol - C


The Best:


01: Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy - A

Hip-hop's problematic bizarro-altar boy is back. With his own music label, clothing brand, and media streaming channel to run, Tyler could be forgiven if he had taken some time between releases. But barely 2 years on from his whacked-out opus Cherry Bomb, we have the opportunity to embark on another guided tour around Tyler, The Creator's carnival of satanic delights.

Tyler's brand on Flower Boy is heralded by the plucked strings, the radio-jingle female choruses and his own shape-shifting vocal style. He's low-key one of the most creative and original artists on the scene right now. He's not occupying the same stadium-filling, global sensation platform as Kanye, Drake or Kendrick, but his work over the past few years has been just as worthy. Tyler has managed to teeter on the knife edge of commercial viability and critical acclaim for his last 3 releases. Time will tell if he will explode into a Hip-hop supernova or shrink into a cultish backwater, but at least with Flower Boy, he's given himself a little while longer on the cusp.

His evolution as an artist over his full-length catalogue is pleasingly traceable, and the maturation present on Cherry Bomb has extrapolated further; Flower Boy is dreamier, headier, plusher. There are still a few sinkholes of darker material though, pressure drops that pique the ambient melancholia and stretch out the longevity of this project, sly nods to his psychotic past on Goblin. While Cherry Bomb is clearly his finest moment to date, Flower Boy is a vital component of Tyler's creative psyche, and represents the further cooling of his once-livid persona.

02: Nine Inch Nails - Add Violence - B

As the 2nd EP of a promised trio of releases, Add Violence has set Nine Inch Nails on collision course with the end of this year, and the expected denouement of a series that has already yielded some excellent moments. Some fans are speculating a full length record at the end of the greyscale rainbow, pointing to lyrical cues and hints embedded in videos and artwork. We'll have to wait and see on that, but for now Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are gradually cracking the window to their world and letting the light stream through.

The wide scope of musical styles on this E.P is exciting, and offers an insight into what could end up being the most creatively unfettered era of Nine Inch Nails to date. While the 80's synth driven Less Than stands with Head Like A Hole, Discipline and The Hand That Feeds in the upper realms of the hook-laden singles arena of Reznor's work, Add Violence also contains the longest ever Nine Inch Nails track - The Background World, whose muffled lyrics and gradually decaying outro is sheer pornography for fans of Reznor's envelope-pushing, harsh soundscape material. This Isn't The Place is the best song on the E.P, a slow plodder with little structure and whispered vocals, bearing all the hallmarks of Reznor and Ross's atmospheric soundtrack work post-With Teeth.

It's a huge step for Reznor to have Atticus Ross as an official member of Nine Inch Nails, and it's been drastically understated. This is a project now approaching it's 30th year, and not once before has Reznor officially accepted someone else into the group. Trusted collaborators such as Robin Finck, Charlie Clouser, Alessandro Cortini, Chris Vrenna and Danny Lohner have all worked extensively with Nine Inch Nails and never been an official member. By inducting Ross into this new role, Reznor is making a big statement about how he expects the band to evolve over the next few years. Maybe we'll get a new album, perhaps something different altogether, but in any case, come the end of 2017, the picture will be much clearer about this new release era from the band.

03: Shabazz Palaces - Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines/Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star - B

These are technically two separate releases, however as they came out within weeks of one another, I'm counting them as one double album. Shabazz Palaces, the enigmatic duo from Seattle are one of cerebral Hip-hop's uncut diamonds. I'd never heard anything else they've done before this pair of astral-plane surfing albums came around, and I was pleasantly surprised at the scale of this ambitious project. There's not a lot of discernible switch-up in style between these twin releases, however Gangster Star is probably a little more accessible than Jealous Machines.

The group draw lyrical sensibilities from obvious sources like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, whereas the deep, penetrating music verges on Trip-hop at times, with sounds which UNKLE and DJ Shadow fans will find familiar. It's a spacey, perky soundscape that makes this double album a delightfully easy listen. Shine A Light, the lead single, a King-Geedorah-era DOOM inspired instant classic is the best song on either record, and for all the brainy wordplay on these Quazarz releases, it's the sub-3 minute sample-and-strings piece that takes the top spot. That's somehow fitting.

They can sometimes delve a little too much into self-indulgence at times, leaving beats playing too long after the meat of the song has been done with, or adding a 3rd verse where 2 will suffice, and of course a double album from such a little-established act is a big statement to try and pull off, but this is still a great project, and a hidden gem in 2017's glittering rap-spectacular. We are certainly in a golden age of the genre.

04: Broken Social Scene - Hug Of Thunder - B

05: The Fall - New Facts Emerge - B