Beach House – Teen Dream

For SUPERSWEET

Baltimore duo Beach House make their debut on Sub Pop with Teen Dream. Its forwards-shift will renew the admiration of fans of their previous two albums – fans among whom Beach House can already count Ed Droste (of Grizzly Bear) and Julian Casablancas (of embarrassing Christmas songs). Starry supporters seem par for the course with Beach House, whose audible clarity of vision seems only to intensify with each release.

Teen Dream finds Nico-sound-a-like Victoria Legrand more enchanting than ever, her gorgeous, throaty drawl intoning ‘more, you want more…’ on ‘Walk In The Park’ as though no one could ever have asked for less, then suddenly lost, full of air in ‘Used To Be’. Legrand – the niece of French composer Michel Legrand – sometimes suffered from a waning fidelity to tunefulness on previous releases. Suddenly confident, her vocals now fill Beach House’s music with a richness that crosses decades and continents, and makes this the most rewarding of all their work to date.

Her partner, Alex Scally, nails his colours to the mast here too. Attentiveness to rhythm, where before atmospherics prevailed, lends ‘Mile Stereo’ and the utterly brilliant ‘Norway’ vitality beyond breezy dream-pop, pushing Beach House into a much brighter, eyes-wide state of consciousness. Whether in the emotive, wandering piano arrangements of sparse ‘Real Love’ or the rousing pseudo-classical harpsichord of ‘Take Care’, Teen Dream beats out the dust from their sepia-tinged past, bringing Beach House into 2010 with a directness that will widen their commercial remit beyond the neophytes at Pitchfork HQ.

And well it should. 2010 sees bedroom pop rise to prominence, its sugary melodies set down on four-track recorders and exhaled into the outside world, introverted and wistful. Left out in the cold by the politics of modernism and its crashing economies and corrupt central governments, music is finding oxygen in imagined havens. Band names from the likes of newcomers Summer Camp and Sleep Over invoke the nostalgic comfort of life apart and before the grit of the everyday. Beach House do that too. Only with three albums under their belt, Beach House, suddenly more vital and grown than ever before, will be the band whose outstretched hand you’ll take this year.

Virgin’s Top Bloggers

…is where you can find my latest blog on Philly’s constant hitmaker, Kurt Vile.

The Quietus 2009 Wreath Lectures: Lily Allen’s Trainers, Lady Gaga’s Willy & Notions Of Gender In The 00s

“Never retreat, never explain, never apologise; just get the thing done and let them howl.” Nellie McClung

“As long as you have to persuade female stars to take their clothes off to sell records, there isn’t going to be a culture of respect.” Lucy O’Brien

Was 2009 the year of the female? That’s certainly what some sectors of the press would have you believe. When Krissi Murison was announced as the new editor of the NME in July the Independent proclaimed ‘Girl Power Rules’. That same month it was revealed that a record five of the total twelve Mercury Music Prize nominations were for women, while earlier in the year the BBC Sounds of 2009 had been swamped with girls: Florence, Little Boots, La Roux, Lady Gaga, VV Brown. Sky called it ‘the New Girl Power’ and the Mail noted the rise of the ‘laptop Madonnas’.

But the women behind the hype were quick to shun the idea that girl power was back. Victoria Hesketh (Little Boots), told Sky News it was ‘dismissive’ to group emerging artists by gender, adding “it’s kind of bad – a girl isn’t some kind of genre you know.” Murison tried her best not to be drawn on the subject of her being female, repeating the phrase “the most interesting story about my appointment is that there is no story” in more than one interview.

How did ‘girl power’ become a dirty phrase? Read the rest of this article at The Quietus…

N-Dubz, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 10/12/09

For The Telegraph

Whatever happened to grime? At the beginning of the decade, MCs suddenly emerged from the shadow of DJs to serve up a whole new, literate angle on UK urban life and music. It was raw, fresh and heralded as a revolution that seemed to be only just beginning when Dizzee Rascal scooped the Mercury Prize in 2003.

So it comes as a surprise that grime’s recapitulation in 2009 is its first real taste of mainstream success, and not without a price. The interim years of middling sales and waning media interest tested the genre’s evolutionary potential. If early grime struggled to sell, its recent tempering with softer strands of electro, pop and r’n’b has all but flooded the charts with a slew of distinctly British rappers scoring number ones apace, Dizzee Rascal and newcomer Tinchy Stryder among them.

Only in this reimagining of grime could a group like N-Dubz ever come to the fore. The sold-out London date of their Christmas Party Tour is a mere whiff of the trio’s immense adolescent appeal. Shepherd’s Bush Empire is crammed with made-up teenage girls and hoodie-sporting boys in the mirror image of the band onstage. Tula ‘Tulisa’ Contostavlos, the group’s scantily clad, platinum blonde singer, showcases a throaty r’n’b vocal on girlish ballads echoed word perfect by the crowd, while tiny cousin Dino ‘Dappy’, cuts an entertaining if slightly ridiculous jester in his trademark woollen hat.

Together with school-friend Richard ‘Fazer’ Rawson they are grime’s best-loved cabaret act; a three-times MOBO-winning, hugely popular band of entertainers whose commitment to their long-serving fan base has paid dividends in album sales. Their debut, called ‘Uncle B’ after Dappy’s deceased father and one-time Mungo Jerry band-member, has sold over half a million copies. N-Dubz will be hoping to better that with the release of second album ‘Against All Odds’ last month and its ringtone anthems of teenage pregnancy (‘Shoulda Put Something On’), infidelity and love, including their own version of the number one single ‘Number 1’, originally a collaboration with Tynchy Stryder,

The formula is simple – inane adolescent lyrics delivered in hamfisted rhymes, jacked up with slick production and sugared by Tulisa’s pseudo-feminist interjections. Live, the theatrical, high-energy performances are hungrily received, but this can’t save a set awash with technical problems and shambolic organisation. Tracks skip and stop, band members keep running on and off-stage, and at the end of an hour N-Dubz and audience alike seem frayed.

This is grime’s blandest incarnation – a highstreet reworking of what once promised to revolutionise the decade in music. It’s just a shame that the grit and menace that set early grime apart had to be extracted before the genre could tap into this level of commercial appeal.

Royal Bangs – Let It Beep

For The Quietus

Why don’t more people know about this band?
A five-piece from Knoxville, Tennessee – that’s Kings Of Leon country to just about everyone this side of the pond – Royal Bangs prove that the south doesn’t just breed retro-rock anthem botherers. Far from it: if their 2008 debut ‘We Breed Champions’ announced this band with a dizzyingly well-informed reassembly of everything that happened in New York this decade, ‘Let It Beep’ widens these parameters even further, to include Euro-trash, electro-funk, 70s power rock some seriously stroppy drumming.

They’re a band whose influences are stitched into their outerwear – the Strokes and the Walkmen run through as much as Kraftwerk and the odd Radiohead-esque loop – but there’s ladles of intelligence in what’s attempted and it shows in every perfectly-timed tempo chop and weirdly-cut riff.

What’s more, there’s every reason to believe that Royal Bangs embrace these concepts – the exercise of making good from the scraps of much-loved music in their heads. ‘Let It Beep’ was created to fuse the mutually opposed concepts of electronics and seventies rock following frontman Ryan Schaefer’s stint as a Euro-dance sponge this year, lucky man. While the cheese supposed by this is more than a little evident on the glitchy drumming and sunnyside up synths of ‘Brainbow’ (not to mention that robotic vocal refrain), there’s plenty more depth to be found in between the heady layers of ‘Poison Control’, with it’s jazzy syncopated riffs and a knob of lovely distortion spread over the bass, or in the Bach-like keyboard refrain of ‘Shit Xmas’ that descends into garage mayhem for the breakdown.

Penny-pinchers take note, this is top value stuff that gets no better than with ‘My Car Is Haunted’, the stand out track for its sense of measure next to the sometimes overly-hectic noise of the rest. This is rock music made in the mould of TV On The Radio – dirty guitars and multiple layers of percussion – and put together with extremely smart production. It’s this production, this slick understanding of when and where things go, that makes the whole of ‘Let It Beep’ a satisfyingly raucous listening exercise. Any less care, and the whole album would be marred by over-saturation.

‘Let It Beep’ is the sound of a band with something to prove – namely growth, development, shit-loads of ambition. But it’s no where near seminal. Here’s hoping it bends ears ready for what comes next.

Bon Iver – Blood Bank

for NME’s Top Tracks of 2009

You barely notice the lyrics on Blood Bank at first, being so saturated in those dense, soft-focus guitars and the whisper of the high hat. But listen past Vernon’s howling at the waning crescent moon and the elegant metaphor of blood=love appears and resounds into his dark night, magnificent.

Taylor Swift at Wembley Arena 23/11/09

For The Telegraph

Taylor Swift is walking right down the middle of Wembley Arena – no mean feat considering that row upon row of hysterical fans stand between the American country pop star and the front. A couple of bouncers help her through while she turns this way and that in a knee-length blue dress and cowboy boots, hugging and thanking as many people as she can. If Kanye West attempted to crash onto the stage right now, as he did in the middle of Swift’s acceptance speech at the recent MTV awards, he’d likely be torn to shreds by thousands of tiny pink fingernails.

Finally back onstage she waits – little pink mouth agog, eyebrows habitually arched – while her adoring audience scream for nigh on ten minutes. There are 12,500 people (mostly young girls) in attendance tonight, a figure not far off the £13,000 Swift donated to Children In Need live on British television just three days earlier. Between then and now she has appeared in LA via satellite to accept no less than five American Music Awards, beating both Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga to artist of the year.

Though Swift only broke through in the UK this year with her second album Fearless, her global album sales already exceed 10 million, and she performs with the steady confidence of a superstar. Still just nineteen, she glows with youth, tossing her platinum blonde curls and carrying her lanky frame with practised grace, taking care to high-five the VIP fans flanking the stage every time she passes. This two-hour show is impressive, high-energy stuff – full of costume changes, set pieces and dance routines.

Miley Cyrus, that other current American teen sensation, appears in an opening video montage to particularly amplified screaming and we are reminded that though Cyrus and Swift are both ruthlessly marketed to young teenage girls – perhaps the last mass record buying audience – Swift is not part of the clique of pin-ups who have emerged from the Disney TV shows High School Musical and Hannah Montana. Rather, this is the girl who was so determined to be a singer that at the age of 11 she was handing out demos in Nashville, hundreds of miles from her home in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. She writes nearly everything she sings (call it country, but this is pure pop) and can carry the whole arena even without her seven-piece backing band, playing a customised guitar with remarkable skill.

Her secret’s not her talent – she can write, but her vocals often err on the flat side – yet Swift is the very opposite of a diva: self-made, grateful, unpretentious and hardworking. She’s every young girl’s best friend, and judging by the noise they’re making tonight, Swift’s got a fair few friends to her name.

Financial Times: On Show

For the Financial Times
Published: November 13 2009 23:56 | Last updated: November 13 2009 23:56

Hands-on design
A new exhibition focuses on ergonomic design, from the humble tape measure to vast and complex transport systems. Ergonomics: Real Design celebrates the relationship between man and machine in an increasingly technological society. Interactive displays will demonstrate how the principles of ergonomic design are applied to create usable items, with prototypes and examples including a television remote control and the control room at Cern, the European nuclear research group. The exhibition, a collaboration between London’s Design Museum and Brunel University, is being staged to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Ergonomics Society.

‘Ergonomics: Real Design’, Design Museum, London, November 18-March 7 2010, tel: +44 (0)20-7940 8790, www.designmuseum.org

First for art in UAE
Abu Dhabi Art is the first government-organised platform for modern and contemporary art in the United Arab Emirates. The weekend will run as a boutique-style art fair and will include five design workshops in collaboration with Germany’s Vitra Design Museum. Attendees can participate in day-long events exploring contemporary design methods. Furniture designers Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri of Bokja Design, Lebanon, will also participate as part of a presentation dubbed “Design Movement”.

Abu Dhabi Art, Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, UAE, November 19-22, tel: +971 2-406 1501, www.abudhabiartfair.ae

A winter’s sale
Now in its 17th year, the Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair attracts 20,000 visitors and about 150 exhibitors to Olympia, west London, each November. With exhibitors approved by a panel of experts and official advisers on hand throughout, experienced and new collectors alike can buy with confidence. The weekend will offer an array of investment opportunities in reputable names such as Chippendale, Cartier, William de Morgan and Fornasetti.

The Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Olympia, London, November 16-22, tel: +44 (0)871-230 5592, www.olympia-antiques.com

Get Back Guinozzi!

For Stool Pigeon OUT NOW!

“It was very simple,” singer Eglantine Gouzy of Get Back Guinozzi starts, “One winter we started to work on nine tracks. Then I went to the jungle, and then went back into the studio and did six more tracks, and then I had a baby.” Simple.

Slight and dark, with painted lips and patterned clothes, Eglantine elaborates in idiosyncratic, lilting English on her time in the wild. “I wanted that for a long time, to be Mowgli in the Indian jungle. I wanted a remote place but with electricity to record things, completely different from Brixton or Paris, where I lived before. Karnataka is a state in India, it’s hilly and completely jungley, with animals. I was a bit crazy, being alone like that.”

Much of Carpet Madness was created before Eglantine’s trip, growing from The Raincoats’ and The Slits’ sense of abandon, musical partner Fred Landini’s love of reggae, and the British pop obsessions of a younger Eglantine: The Cure, The Smiths. Now both in their late thirties – “We’re all teenagers!” Eglantine grins – their music sways with tropical abandon, lyrics dissolve into giggling, hooting and panting and melodies languish in the warmth of stately, circular harmonies.

Fred and Eglantine used to make music in one take – he sent her the tapes over from the French Riviera, she added the vocals in drizzly Brixton, bish bosh. “The way that I sing is really spontaneous. I think about singers I like, like for King’s Song I thought about Elvis, for LA I’m talking about Ariel Pink,” Eglantine says of this process. The rough originals were cut up and remixed by Michael Beckett (of German electronic outfit Schneider TM) and will be presented for your live listening pleasure in the UK this month, fortified by a five-piece band. Fat Cat have just released Carpet Madness, a window on the jungle in the icy British winter. Simple.

Clash Album Reviews: December 2009

OLA PODRIDA
BELLY OF THE LION
WESTERN VINYL
David Wingo’s sophomore release under the moniker Ola Podrida navigates a familiar path through the American folk of Iron and Wine or Sufjan Stevens, setting itself apart from these peers with understated poetical lyricism. Hailing from Texas, Wingo evokes the torn emotions of a claustrophobic rural existence as seen through adolescent eyes, but withoutever straying into sentimentalism. In low points it’s innocuous, as in the yawn of slide guitars on the country ballad ‘Sink Or Swim’, but when this lion’s belly growls it consumes absolutely. ‘Donkey’, the pick of the pride, is a triumph, its upwards melodic march to trumpet fanfares demonstrative of Wingo’s superlative ear for orchestration. Though not consistent enough to dazzle, Belly Of The Lion nonetheless enchants with subtle artistry.
6/10
GET 3 SONGS: Donkey, Your Father’s Basement, Roomful Of Sparrows
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Iron And Wine, Sufjan Stevens, Justin Vernon

THE SHAKY HANDS
LET IT DIE
KILL ROCK STARS
Big pond to swim in, classic rock. For their third album The Shaky Hands have dusted off the gritty, lo-fi preoccupations that once earned them comparisons to The Strokes and plumped for a much cleaner rock ‘n’ roll sound. Educated in the revered school of Tom Petty, Springsteen and The Band by way of post-punkers REM, the Portland natives plug a resolutely retro vein that struggles to break from the mainline of their influences. While the A-side stomps with the tight, mid-paced 4/4 of more rattled numbers, its flip side meanders through rock ballads and poppier fare which hang from the quivering vocal of Nick Delff. Without the noisier production favoured for previous releases, The Shaky Hands are goldfish in a more seasoned shoal of rockers.
5/10
GET 3 SONGS: Allison And The Ancient Eyes, Caught In The Storm, Let It Die
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: The War On Drugs, REM, The Rumble Strips

MIIKE SNOW
SELF-TITLED
COLOMBIA/SONY
Miike of the double I is not, in fact, a man, but a Swedish double act comprised of childhood friends. Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg concoct thematic, pristine pop, echoing nineties dance and the slicker hits of this decade. The duo know their way around a studio – previous work includes production duties on Britney Spear’s Toxic and for Daniel Merriweather (with Mark Ronson). This eponymous debut marks out chart-friendly territory with dumbed down lyrics to match, sang through grating falsetto in ‘Song For No One’ or in the glam oom-pa of ‘A Horse Is Not A Home’. What saves it from total spuriousness is the undeniable gleam of impeccable mixing, but even that won’t endear outsiders to a sound that’s aiming straight for the mainstream.
5/10
GET 3 SONGS: Animal, In Search Of, Plastic Jungle
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Dan Black, Scissor Sisters, Frankmusik

COMANECHI
CRIME OF LOVE
MEROK
It would be easy to dismiss Comanechi as all style no bile. It would be easy – what with drummer/vocalist Akiko Matsuura being chief icon for a generation of Japanese kids, collaborating with men-about-town The Big Pink and getting friendly with hipster magazines – but it wouldn’t be right. The reputation this boy-girl duo have accumulated from ferocious live performances rings true on a bloody, screaming pulp of a record that pursues grunge into the dead of night and then bludgeons it senseless with a loosely-gripped mace of punk. Whether squealing banshee-like or murmuring sex, Akiko’s perfectly off-key with the grind of Simon Petrovitch’s distorted guiter riffs. Together they’ve made an album that should carry stickers warning of blunt-force trauma.
8/10
GET 3 SONGS: My Pussy, Close Enough To Kiss, Naked
DIG IT? DIG DEEPER: Siouxie and The Banshees, Huggy Bear, Bikini Kill