www.list.co.uk/music Record Reviews Music
ROCK PEARL JAM Backspacer (Universal) ●●●●●
Pearl Jam finally kick back and enjoy being rock stars on Backspacer, their ninth studio album. Rushing out the gates with four raucous rock tracks (‘Gonna See My Friend’, ‘Got Some’, ‘The Fixer’ and ‘Johnny Guitar’) before switching gear for a more acoustic and considered second half. But if you scratch the surface there’s all the emotional depth you’d expect from these grunge veterans. Now they are channelling The Rolling Stones and The Stooges as much as their hero Neil Young, and with ‘Just Breathe’ and ‘The End’ they have come up with two of the most heartbreakingly beautiful songs of their 19-year career. (Henry Northmore) GRIME POP CHIPMUNK I Am Chipmunk (Jive) ●●●●●
rather be Ian Curtis or Chris Martin. For all that Smith’s sonorous tones reflect those of the late Joy Division singer, his band’s music is less soundtracking industrial ruin, more fretting over your carbon footprint. Early indications are promising. The title track starts off like a John Carpenter soundtrack before deploying the histrionic guitars, and ‘Bricks and Mortar’ takes obvious inspiration from Brad Fiedel’s Terminator theme. Yet the record runs out of urgency as it continues, as pale imitations of The Smiths (musically in ‘The Boxer’; thematically in the clunkily titled ‘Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool’) lack conviction. (David Pollock)
ELECTRONICA ANDREW WEATHERALL A Pox on the Pioneers (Rotters Golf Club) ●●●●●
Although this is technically Weatherall’s solo debut, we can’t discount his legacy as the man responsible for Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen. Or, no matter what the title says, his pioneering work as producer of Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, among other 90s touchstones. So if this record harks back to the good old days, it at least rings with the authenticity of someone who was there at the time. With Weatherall himself singing as if from the heart of a smoke-filled room, the album explores dancehall, ambient dub, electro and post-punk in building an atmospheric soundtrack for the city at night. (David Pollock)
UK grime is defined by its fury and bravado and Chipmunk rolls out a debut that suggests there’s scope for having some heart too. After demolishing the charts with the simpering proto- Kanye ‘Diamond Rings’ (which features Glasgow soulstress Emeli Sandé), he’s delivered an album evenly split between itchy pop hooks, fatally misjudged tributes to his nan and hood up, head down bangers.
He sounds like every sufficiently paranoid 20something, filled with swagger but secretly aspiring to be understood. There are flashes of ingenuity here suggesting that there are much better things to come. (Mark Robertson)
ALSO RELEASED
Various Warp Box Set (Warp) Celebrating the twentieth birthday of the groundbreaking Sheffield electronica label we get a mammoth ten-disc box set of 10in EPs with the label’s artists covering each other, new unheard tracks, special one- off mixes, favourites selected by fans and co-founder Steve Beckett, plus a 192- page booklet. In short, pretty classy and pretty special.
Various Disco Discharge (Harmless) Disco came at us in a myriad of styles and shades back in the day and these expansive, lovingly compiled and considered double- disc collections celebrate the fact. Subtitled: Classic Disco, Disco Ladies, Euro Disco and Gay Disco and Hi-NRG all filled with original 12in versions that saves you searching endlessly through eBay for the vinyl pressings. Lovely artwork and Alan Jones penned sleeve notes to boot.
Portico Quartet Isla (Real World Recordings) Describing themselves as an ‘indie band that plays post jazz’ is more about the look than the sound. This John Leckie produced album shows off the band’s use of peculiar dome-like instrument the hang, solidifying their evocative atmospheric sound behind a sax-driven jazz base. Band of Skulls Baby Darling Doll Face Honey (You Are Here) Despite having the worst name for an indie band since oooh, the last really crap indie band with a crap name, this debut is a very creditable melange of noisy post-Dino Jr, sub-Mary Chain posturing. Actually way better than it sounds on paper.
8–22 Oct 2009 THE LIST 67
ROCK THE TWILIGHT SAD Forget the Night Ahead (Fat Cat) ●●●●●
Bedeck Kilsyth in spandex bunting: it’s just gone down in rock mythology. The market town’s secrets, skeletons and cherry trees cast an everlasting darkness across this second, impressive album from North Lanarkshire’s loudest sons, The Twilight Sad. The clamorous quartet’s heart-stopping yarns of domestic aversion and
climbing the walls first canonised their stomping ground in 2007’s Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters. Since then, however, our overwhelming melodists have taken on, toured, and seduced the world. Has it altered their outlook? Not on this watch. Beyond references to
Ballard and Godard – beneath universal themes of depravity and entanglement – The Twilight Sad’s evocative rock is embedded in a backdrop of localised small towns; houses; minds.
Hence vocalist James Graham disturbs indie blare with folklore that
covertly insinuates neighbourhood bloodshed (the piano meltdown of ‘At the Burnside’, the nebulous drive of ‘Interruption’); mutilation (the brutal, brilliant, pop-propelled ‘I Became a Prostitute’); and congenital immorality (on tea-time horror-ode, ‘The Room’, a highlight which exhumes the aural volatility and nagging imagery of the band’s as-yet-unsurpassed debut). Forget the Night Ahead reconfigures three decades of Scots rock into a
fairly intransigent wall of noise: Big Country, The Cocteau Twins, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Mogwai and Arab Strap all play a part. An honorary nod goes to Wish-era Cure, and a memo goes out to Glasvegas: you wish. The Twilight Sad’s domain remains unsettling and imperative. Let us hope
they’re stadium-bound, these Central Belt harbingers of the tiny and unforgivable things that underpin our day-to-day. (Nicola Meighan)
big thing than any close sonic similarities. Phonat’s itchy future funk does share an impatience and sense of fun, however, and on evidence of this debut, he’s got the time and the tools to take his sound to their level. (Mark Robertson)
INDIE ROCK THE LAW A Measure of Wealth (Local Boy) ●●●●● Galling as it must be, comparisons with fellow Dundonian upstarts The View are hard to resist when taking on The Law. Both are undeniably cut from the
same cloth as youthful champions of raucous, anthemic, singalong indie-rock with celebrated live prowess ably bottled by one-time Oasis producers. But if The View’s second release furthered their reputation as impudent hellraisers and rough diamonds of this swaggering Scotch Britpop with baws, The
Law’s debut presents a more consistent, polished and straightforward songsmithery that still encapsulates the high spirits of Dundee’s feral youth. The Gallaghers can consider themselves supplanted. (Mark Edmundson) INDIE EDITORS In This Light and on This Evening (Columbia) ●●●●●
A third album from Editors, another smotheringly pretentious title and another internal debate about whether singer Tom Smith would