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GRUNGE ROCK MELVINS Walk with Love and Death (Ipecac Recordings) ●●●●● POP SAINT ETIENNE Home Counties (Heavenly Recordings) ●●●●●
One delightful thing about Melvins is that they pay zero heed to the notion of the ‘proper’ album. Any one of their releases in recent years – one-off collaborations, an antique lineup reformed, an album with multiple guest bassists, a covers record – would, for other bands, be temporary deviations from the steady path. But for Melvins, the unpredictable is standard operating procedure. Which brings us to A Walk with Love and Death, their first double album. The ‘Death’ disc is a lean collection of fine tracks that could have appeared
on any of your favourite Melvins albums. Opener ‘Black Heath’ is from the lush, softer end of their oeuvre, culminating in the kind of elegantly nimble, time- bending exercise for which Melvins don’t get nearly enough credit. They’re more often feted for excelling at super-heavy and grindingly slow violence like ‘Euthanasia’ but also have a surprisingly neat line in charmingly poptastic stadium rock, like ‘What’s Wrong with You?’, sung by latest bassist, Steven McDonald (ex-Redd Kross). ‘Love’, the soundtrack to an as-yet-unreleased-but-horrifying-looking short film by Jesse Nieminen, is something else. An amorphous swamp of semi-overheard conversation, field recordings, noisy clatter and ambient drifting murk, it does a great job of sucking you into its ooze, but is perhaps not destined to soundtrack many beach parties.
Nostalgic histories of the 1990s British music scene tend to white out Saint Etienne. Possibly there’s a combination of depressingly blokey blindness to the fact that women other than Patsy Kensit and Trainspotting’s Diane existed in that decade, or residual rockist discrimination against any music which dared to embrace synthetic acid house as much as it did proper oak-smoked 1960s nostalgia. Sarah, Bob and Pete have risen to the challenge of pleasing fans from ye olden days by writing a concept album devoted to the joys of England’s Home Counties.
Preceded by promo images of a leafy, detached suburban villa and the trio dressed in finest camel and cashmere, the album is punctuated by excerpts from Radio 4’s The Reunion, Ken Bruce’s ‘PopMaster’ and the sound of birdsong and choristers. The retro-futurism is perhaps needlessly over-emphasised by the added harpsichord on ‘Whyteleafe’ and pan pipes on ‘After Hebden’, yet Home Counties makes tangible the element of harking back which has driven Saint Etienne on since they first emerged.
It evokes a mythical pop cultural golden age built on timeless style, from the spine-tinglingly organic Northern Soul orchestra of ‘Underneath the Apple Tree’ to the masterful fusion of LCD Soundsystem cowbells, Club 18–30 disco-funk and Sarah Cracknell’s ever-alluring Dusty Springfield tones on ‘Dive’ and the sinister Sigur Ros atmospherics of ‘Breakneck Hill’.
Given their almost identical running times, curious listeners may wonder whether In all but lyrical content (‘What Kind of World’s very overt ‘let’s find another
‘Love’ and ‘Death’ are intended to be played simultaneously. A double album with a secret third sounds like the sort of thing Melvins might do. Sometimes the two are startlingly in sync and complementary; sometimes much less so. But when they cohere, whether by design or accident, when we walk with both love and death in our minds, it opens up a deeper appreciation of the whole. Precisely the kind of pretentious guff Melvins would beat to a pulp with a breezeblock. (Matt Evans) ■ Out Fri 7 Jul. country’ aside) this is the Brexit concept album you never knew you wanted to hear, yet to reduce it to some kind of whimsical Good Life caricature of straight-laced stockbroker-and-civil-servant belt life, of the kind Blur and the Who used to do, is to demean it somewhat. The group are singing of home, and this is a record heavy with genuine fondness and nostalgia; were Saint Etienne’s Home Counties a country of their own, we’d all want to live there. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 2 Jun.
POWER POP BREAKFAST MUFF Eurgh! (Amour Foo) ●●●●● ROCK CIRCLE Terminal (Southern Lord) ●●●●●
Breakfast Muff comprises a membership roster which has served time in local squads Joanna Gruesome, Rapid Tan, Spinning Coin and Hairband. Glasgow’s lo-fi power-punk trio is a band which combines ferociously functional DIY music with the sharpest, most up-yours lyrical edge we’ve heard in some time. The key track here, simply because the title grabs the attention and demands you skip to it, is ‘R U A Feminist’. It’s a fierce band manifesto and a stamp on the balls for any right-on bro who dares lather themselves in the language of feminism as a cheap chat-up line while using women as an avatar for their own emotional aggression. Their lyrics are slogans dripping with righteous anger (‘You’re a feminist until I won’t fuck you / you’re a feminist until I talk to other guys . . . no, I don’t owe you anything . . . you’re not a fucking feminist!’) and if the music is fairly by- the-numbers power-pop, it’s at least played with determination as they spit out their glorious, serrated lyrics. ‘I want to wear your skin / to my birthday party,’ harmonise Eilidh McMillan and Simone Wilson on ‘Birthday Party’, slipping in a weird key-change mid-lyric over Cal Donnelly’s desperate lead vocal.
‘Sorry we’re fucked up / you made us this way / we are better than you!’ holler McMillan and Wilson on ‘Babyboomers’, channelling Jack Palance and Bill Hicks in their merciless urging for a pan-generational shoot-out; ‘I Like To’ is a hypnotic, X-rated Everly Brothers-style ballad singing the (very graphic) praises of sexual
For Circle fans, every new release is an adventure. Since their 1993 debut, this Finnish collective have released more than 30 albums, all entirely unique but also unmistakably Circle. There’s a combination of gleeful mischief and lethally intense focus that characterises everything they do, from metal semi-pastiche to amniotic jazz abstraction to muscular, psychedelic Krautrock. There was that one time when Circle weren’t Circle (the year they leased their name to a death metal band) while the ‘real’ Circle operated under the name Falcon. As you do.
Terminal finds them returning with heads full of rock. Opener ‘Rakkautta Al Dente’ stitches together a succession of lost Zeppelin riffs and impassioned wails, but its cock-rock swagger is subverted as it melts into a gloopy disorienting space-rock puddle. The title track brings plenty of Stooges-style bite’n’strut, but also a gleeful- yet-forlorn melodic refrain that adds a little soul to the punky posturing. ‘Saxo’ finds Mika Ratto barking like a canine drill sergeant over a bruising 6/8 pulse that segues seamlessly into heavy ritual post-punk and overblown operatic 80s art-pop.
Taking fragments of bombastic old-school heavy metal and reassembling them in the dark, ‘Imperiumi’ is a slightly peculiar headbanger’s delight. And while reminding people of lumpen boors Kasabian is rarely a source of happiness, closer ‘Sick Child’, with its plodding blokey-shoegaze groove and wordless snide vocal, manages to straddle both of those things by virtue of sheer bloody-minded repetition.
liberation; ‘Duvet’ rides on an invigorating, breakneck riff worthy of Blur at their least reserved and most Graham Coxon-led. They sound raw, unschooled and magnetically compelling throughout, smelting the knowing wryness of Moldy Peaches and the committed anger of Bikini Kill. If the sound of punk is now a heritage concern, its youth, anger and desire to pound the listener awake with the ferocity of imagery and language is reborn in Breakfast Muff. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 7 Jul.
Circle have released more innovative, forward-thinking, adventurous, experimental, intellectual and just-plain-strange records. But Terminal is among their most pleasurable collections. There’s something joyous about the way in which they take such overly familiar rock tropes and treat them with precisely the right amounts of moist reverence and granite-faced disdain, all shot through with that ineffable, infuriatingly elusive Circleness. (Matt Evans) ■ Out Fri 23 Jun. 1 Jun–31 Aug 2017 THE LIST 91