Things you may have missed...
People, often bored housewife types approaching their autumn years, complain of waiting hours for a bus, only to see three arrive at once. Along with lambs rejoicing in fi elds and that fi rst tingle of hay fever, the arrival of Spring has, all at once, brought with it a series of long overdue comeback albums from The Flaming Lips, The Yeah Yeahs, Placebo, and Morrissey.
Indeed while us student types were stuffi ng our face with chocolate and failing to get tickets for Reading, the music world continued as normal, so if you missed it all I’m here to summarise. After getting over the initial, and inevitable disappointment that Morrissey’s Ringleader of the Tormentors doesn’t sound exactly like The Smiths, it becomes rapidly clear that this is one of his most impressive, and most musically innovative solo projects to date.
There is no real deviation from the narcissistic crooning we have come to love, but his voice on tracks such as I Will See You In Far Off Places and Life is a Pigsty are given a powerful musical counterweight. Meanwhile Mike Skinner (a.k.a The Streets), has made an album to tell us how famous he is. The Hardest Way to Make An Easy Living is a reasonably entertaining, if not vaguely formulaic, cocaine soaked odyssey about life in the limelight.
While he’s convinced he’s ironic enough to pull this off, most of it’s navel-gazing, with only Never Went To Church saving the album. At War With The Mystics the new offering by The Flaming Lips is perhaps the most disappointing of the bunch, if only because of their failure to pick up where their 2002 masterpiece Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots left off.
Any evidence of melody or intelligent song writing remains submerged beneath gallons of superfl uous bleeps, auxiliary synth effects and squeaky samples (such as the yayayayaya from new single Yeah Yeah Yeah song), which become irritating faster than you can say “horrendously overproduced”. To make things confusing, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs have fi nally returned with their second album.
Shorn of the moments of sparse, reverberating synth echoes and haunting vocals which characterised their debut, Show Your Bones is a darker and subtler affair. While there is nothing as forceful as Maps or Y Control, Gold Lion, with its delicate balance between acoustic strumming and a catchy, commanding chorus is not far off. Placebo have managed to salvage the good name that they came close to throwing away with 2003’s Sleeping With Ghosts.
Meds, while not up to the standard of Without You I’m Nothing, actually has some more anthems with Because I Want You, and some guest vocals from Michael Stipe and the Kills’ VV makes their sound more exciting and varied and, finally, less whiny.
20th Apr 2006