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RECORDS Music
ELECTRONICA LAMB 5 (Strata) ●●●●● Have you ever seen anything more quintessentially 80s than Lamb’s cover design for 5? No, we’d venture, you haven’t. Yet curiously, their big comeback album (they’d put themselves on ice since 2003 and not, as you might guess first time, during the summer of Thatcher’s 1983 election victory) starts with a number that should really be the pumping theme tune to an American medical drama. Perhaps this is their idea of modernisation. Some mildly diverting aural oddities abound here, such as the occasional clang of what sounds like a synthesiser being chucked angrily off the walls of a neglected coal cellar. Dated, for sure, but thankfully Lamb are meek enough not to scorch the ears entirely. (Brian Donaldson)
REGGAE REMIX PROJECT STEVE MASON & DENNIS BOVELL Ghosts Outside (Double Six/Domino) ●●●●●
Taking its cue, consciously or otherwise, from the 90s vogue for dub reinterpretations of entire albums (notably Primal Scream’s Echo Dek and Massive Attack’s No Protection), Ghosts Outside is a reggae reappropriation of former Beta Band-er Steve Mason’s Boys Outside solo album created with former Matumbi mainman and Linton Kwesi Johnson, The Slits and Orange Juice producer Bovell.
It’s a rich, lazy (not in the pejorative sense) record, with Mason’s whispered vocal floating over the blissed-out summertime horn stab of ‘Dub I Just a Man’ or the easy electronic skank of ‘Letter Dub’. Not one to grab you, instead this album sinks into your bones like joint smoke into the walls. (David Pollock)
PLAINTIVE POP FAKE EYELASHES A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese (Creeping Bent) ●●●●● Katy Lironi’s pedigree as a chanteuse dates back to her turn in C-86 swoonsters Fizzbombs, followed by a stint fronting bubblegum stompers The Secret Goldfish. This latest vehicle for Ms L’s sublime cooing is an infinitely more laidback affair. Think Saint Etienne-style ballads without all the London-centric reference points, and instead imbued with a melancholy worthy of bedsit-era Tracy Thorn. This solitary, gal-in-exile feel is fleshed out on a still lugubrious ‘If You Made It Easy for Me’ by a mellowed out band arrangement, while electronic skitters underscore the equally plaintive ‘If I Could Only Cry’ on a late- night affair that sounds in need of a cuddle. (Neil Cooper)
SOUL DIVA COMEBACK BEYONCÉ 4 (Sony) ●●●●●
Spectacular and summer-defining festival appearances notwithstanding, Beyoncé Knowles’ albums have so far failed to entirely capitalise on her unerring ability to work a solid gold, 24-carat pop classic when she’s given one (see: ‘Crazy in Love’, ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’). Although this is a superbly produced and supremely confident collection of rich, modern soul ballads, it doesn’t quite buck that trend. She’s devastating with the right power-lyric (‘1+1’s ‘make love to me-hee’; ‘Rather Die Young’s affecting ‘rather die young than live my life without you’), but the closest she gets to pop history here is the dutty, carnivalesque sub-MIAisms of ‘Countdown’ and ‘Run the World (Girls)’. Fun, but new ground remains unbroken. (David Pollock)
HIP HOP WU TANG CLAN Legendary Weapons (E1) ●●●●● INDIE-ROCK JON FRATELLI Psycho Jukebox (Island) ●●●●●
FOLK-ROCK THE BLUE AEROPLANES Anti Gravity (Art Star/Albino Two) ●●●●● ALT FOLK SHE KEEPS BEES Dig On (Names Records) ●●●●●
There’s now apparently no such thing as a full Wu Tang Clan album anymore. Legendary Weapons is the first ‘official’ Wu LP since 2007’s Eight Diagrams, and it bears many of their hallmarks – raps that cut like throwing stars and kung-fu movie samples galore (plus one from The Wire, in which Method Man starred). But only RZA and Ghostface Killa contribute broadly, with the other core members appearing as if guests. It adds to a general feeling of half-
arsedness that the lightweight production does little to contradict. Name-checking Charlie Sheen and rhyming about ‘pissing out tiger blood’ on ‘Meteor Hammer’ is the sort of thing that will date about as well as a tattoo for an ex-girlfriend. (Malcolm Jack)
Jon ‘Fratelli’ Lawler is deep in the red in the credibility stakes after the ubiquitous ‘da-dah-dah-da’ nightmare that was ‘Chelsea Dagger’, and Psycho Jukebox is unlikely to see the Glaswegian achieving a volte-face in many people’s affections. Kinks-y garage thrum ‘Daddy Won’t Pay Your Bill’ is as good as things get; ‘Santa Domingo’ is the record’s nadir – a lunk-headed R&B stramash with rhyming-couplets nonsensical enough to make Noel Gallagher sound like WH Auden. He homages affectionately and convincingly – ‘The Band Played Just For Me’ channels early Springsteen; ‘Oh Shangri La’ is a Slade-style slice of 70s glam- stomping. Lawler can arrange a song well, but as things stand, his debts to our ears remain largely unpaid. (Malcolm Jack) Long before REM lost their edge, Bristol’s Blue Aeroplanes were their English counterparts, ploughing an urgent furrow of spikily jangular folk-rock with multiple guitars zinging about every which way, all set against the backdrop of lead auteur Gerard Langley’s tumbles of opaque, semi spoken-word murmurs. Thirty years and forty- two members on, several generations of Aeroplanes combine for this fresh-as-a-daisy sprawl through more of the same. From the opening firework bursts that precede the foreboding swirls of ‘Sulphur’ to the elegiac ‘Cancer Song’ that closes things, this is a dense epic chiming with wisdom and experience, art-rock’s rich tapestry personified anew. (Neil Cooper)
The Brooklyn based lo-fi alt-folk duo returns with a self-recorded album, laid out last winter in a log home in New York’s Catskill Mountains – a change from the couple’s usual recording set-up in their city apartment.
Once dubbed the White Stripes in reverse (Jess Larrabee plays guitar and sings, Andy LaPlant plays drums), this is raw, stripped-down blues-rock with Larrabee’s throaty, retro style of singing comparable to the likes of Patti Smith, Cat Power or a less theatrical PJ Harvey. Standout tracks are opener ‘Saturn Return’, ‘Sister Beware’ and first single ‘Vulture’. The lady once said she sings until her stomach hurts. On listening to this album, that’s a fairly believable statement. (Lalita Augustine)
21 Jul–4 Aug 2011 THE LIST 69