Music
The British music scene is in a state of deep malady. It's true. And how do we know this? Because the NME has decided that we need to be told every couple of weeks what the next big thing is. But, for every Andrew WK and White Stripes, there is a Strokes and now it seems, a Haven. You see, you simply can't go round having the NME say things like "People will love Haven as passionately as they do The Smiths and The Stone Roses" and expect to make a favourable impression on anyone bar those poor Travis-and-Coldplay-buying souls who know nothing of the originals, have never even heard of The Velvet Underground and have hit middle age too early. Especially when it's flagrant bollocks.
In a way you can see where the NME is coming from though. On paper it would be very difficult to find anything particularly wrong with them: It's produced by Johnny Marr, the band are managed by Joe Moss who managed both The Smiths and Marion, and Gary Briggs has got a fantastic falsetto voice. But then again so does Matt Bellamy. See where I'm coming from? There are some nice little guitar lines à la Coldplay, and sentiments that Travis are relying on making a career out of, but as a direct result the whole album is fairly bloody boring - there's no real sense of purpose and ambition.
Take the song titles for example: 'Where Is The Love', 'Out Of Reach' and 'Keep On Giving In' to name but a few. Is this the sign of a raw emotion that everyone can relate to, or merely that this lot have so little originality that even the album sleeve is a clear imitation of the Roses' debut - a band photo adorned with Jackson Pollock-esque paint splodges. And what makes it even worse is that it's not even as good as John Squire's work with a paintbrush, let alone a guitar.
The one saving grace for this album is 'Let It Live'. In a way it's as predictable as everything else, but with one fairly major difference: it is genuinely uplifting - an indie anthem that you can really jump round the ceiling to. The dull drumming found throughout the album finally finds a track to really drive through, whilst the wah-wah guitar is a refreshing and far more interesting texture than the arpeggios which appear elsewhere. Admittedly it's no 'Something For The Weekend', but I'm clutching at straws here.
So, the NME have got it wrong again. Doubtless though, Between The Senses will find its audience amongst the Mondeo-driving over-thirties, and some dickhead will probably write in to complain that Haven are actually amazing, pointing to the fact that 'Say Something' is all over daytime Radio 1 to prove his point. Hopefully some of you will see that it actually proves mine.
Reading. How the fuck did the first great debut album of the millennium emerge from Reading? Geographically unfashionable they may be, but The Cooper Temple Clause have got absolutely everything else right. See This Through And Leave is the organic integration of streamlined rock and electronic experimentation, a Technicolor worldview expressed via darkly oblique lyricism, direct action defiantly refracted through the postmodern gaze of the self-reflexive eye. It's best described as the aural equivalent of David Lynch, and it rocks.
The insistent challenge of propulsive mission statement 'Let's Kill Music' is the essence of the war on mediocrity, whilst 'Who Needs Enemies?', veering from throaty snarl to euphoric jazz finale, indoctrinates the listener ("First we'll teach you how to mingle, then we'll teach you how to kill") before discarding all allies in a decisive reinforcement of their strictly individualist stance. Although TCTC vigorously refute those Hawkwind references, the prog ethic - to do more, to be more - is here in its purest form, from the pseudo-meditative chant of 'Did You Miss Me?' to the psychedelic samples of '555-4823'. 'The Lake', a gorgeously melodic churn of spacey, Mansun-esque guitars, injects ambiguity into its strangely self-sufficient supplication, whilst nine-minute closer 'Murder Song', a dense, funereal swirl addressing the longevity of both mortality and art, is absolutely chilling. Already frighteningly good, TCTC have turned in a truly wonderful debut. Watch this space.
You've got to pity poor Jason Pierce: no matter what he does to change things, everything stays the same. I mean, who else could sack his entire band, spend four years on an album and still end up producing little more than a disparate collection of pale rewrites of past glories? For all of his attempts to move on, Pierce appears rooted to the past.
Thank God, then, for 'Do It All Over Again', a track unique not only for its status as Let It Come Down's sole venture into unchartered territory (for Spiritualized at least) but also as an articulation of the inevitable problem in life: "I'm sitting here looking at the TV burning holes in everything that I get, You'd better come right down and do it all over again." Oh, and it sounds stunning, a suitably upbeat tune for once tied to the customary epic orchestration.
Upon it's release, Let It Come Down was widely described as Pierce's rehab album. Rubbish of course - this track alone proves that the drugs do work, and when that drug is daytime television, so much the better.
2002 has to be as difficult a time to make a dance record as any time before it. With the Chemical Brothers' beats consistently ahead of the competition and now the Avalanches redefining the art of sampling, any band trying to find their niche in the world of dance indeed has a daunting task ahead of them. So how do dance-duo LHB respond to such difficulties? Well, simply, if it isn't broke, why fix it? From the opening track, 'No Transmission', using some of the most bland samples one is likely to hear on any album this year, to the following track, 'Everybody Sees It On My Face', where the opening moments of the song seem eerily similar to Underworld's inter-song dialogues on Beaucoup Fish, one gets the impression LHB might not have had the greatest ambitions in making this record. There's very little in the way of innovation and indeed quite a bit in the way of following in the footsteps of techno's masterminds. Still, the album has its rare moments of redemption, with tracks like 'Olivia Newton Christ', but there's really nothing lost, nothing gained here; just one more dance record for history to forget.
The second offering from British rock newcomers Vex Red does everything they need to keep up the pace in the build-up to the release of their debut album. 'Can't Smile' is, fairly obviously, not the happiest of songs. Frankly, it's downright grumpy, but hey, you've got to suffer for this sort of art, though the overall sound is far removed from the sort of output usually associated with nu-metal producer extraordinaire Ross Robinson. Terry Abbot's passionate lyrics and melodic singing style put Vex Red far closer to the likes of Linkin Park than Slipknot in the "metal anthems" stakes (minus the white-boy raps).
Building up solid walls of guitar-based sound is what Vex Red do best, and they demonstrate it here, toying with refreshingly off-kilter beats before moving on to a roaring climax. The press release's references to the likes of Squarepusher and the Aphex Twin may be a little pretentious, but judicious use of electronica adds to the swirling strength of VR's sound, complementing but not overpowering the defiant vocals. What does this indicate for the forthcoming debut album? It may be a little premature to rule out smiling just yet.
La Mode turn things down, then, and also release the fourth single from Exciter. Generally fourth singles are slower and lacking, but this has appealing elements. Sounding a lot like Erasure's brand of shiny monologue synth-pop, this band explain in a few bass-laden minutes why they are still relevant. Whilst the denizens of the pop world treat love as endlessly good and
uplifting, Depeche Mode remind us that, well, bad sex does happen. Here we get "When you're born a lover, born to suffer, like all soul sisters and soul brothers". No, it isn't their finest moment, it is not a 'No Good' or 'Never Let Me Down', and this is just an advertisement for why the album would have been a wise purchase but for the endlessly proliferating chain of chart singles. As De Man wrote, "Meaning posits meaning ceaselessly". As I wrote, "The charts posit shit. Ceaselessly."
7th Feb 2002