The world could use a few more Esmé Pattersons. On her last outing, 2014’s Woman To Woman, the Denver songwriter built a record around one simple concept: the right-to-reply of some of pop’s most iconic (yet slandered) female characters, from Billie Jean to Jolene. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple and radical at the same time, you immediately wonder how it hadn’t already been done to death. Supposedly, the whole thing was recorded in a day. For new record We Were Wild, Patterson’s own voice returns to centre stage, and the results carry an insidious charm of their own.
At first glance, despite – or perhaps because of – their cosmopolitan glamour, The Kills appear to be a decidedly old fashioned proposition. Jamie Hince, he of the supermodel girlfriends and haircut reclaimed from the Cardiff Barfly’s 2005 heyday, still carries the same Lou Reid swagger, whittling the band’s blunt edges into something altogether more dangerous. Then there’s Alison Mosshart, her of the ink-black huskiness that made Jack White seem like the comic relief in The Dead Weather, a Nico in waiting. Fortunately for us, Ash & Ice continues to throw out all that lame, misogynist bathwater, while holding on to the rock’n’roll baby at the centre of their craft.
Against the odds, Tegan and Sara kind of rule the world now. Jack Antonoff, the guy from fun. and co-writer for the likes of Taylor Swift, recently described the phenomenon: “You would go into the studio with an artist and you’d be like, ‘What are you into lately?'” he says. “And they’d be like, Heartthrob. What kinda vibe do you wanna do? Heartthrob.” Now the Quins are reunited with pop genius Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia, countless others), are they about to go stratospheric with eighth album Love You To Death?
“One thing Victoria and I can agree on is that our music is its own world. And, I think that’s very much what the ‘beach house’ feel is: going off to a different world. It’s not really a vacation; vacation for me is when you go away, but you’re still thinking about all the things you’ve left behind.”
– Alex Scally
Dream I: Auburn and Ivory
Victoria likes to sleep during the day, so that she dreams in warm colours; so that she wakes up at 4pm; so that the sweet sepia afterglow of the bonfires and apple orchards that scatter ashes and seeds through the scenery of her mind’s eye are briefly unanimous with the afternoon sun. Some days there are no pictures, just a particular warmth, or the scent of woodsmoke married with bourbon.
Today there is a ringing sound.
It calls out across the bonfire, and maybe it is the bonfire; every pitch slide and timbre feels like an auburn spark set to an starry night’s ivory flashes, flaring up as brightly as the echoes left behind it signal a darkness. It’s swirling round and round, there’s a fever to it now, and as the warm specks flicker up and fail, there’s another sound; a low, churning sound, like the mechanical waltz of a child’s music box. And suddenly it is a waltz, and suddenly the fire and the stars are flickering in unison, and they’re calling it a song.
“Real love,” Adrianne Lenker declares about 10 minutes into Big Thief‘s debut,“is a heart attack.” Hers is a lexicon of split lips, blackened lungs, all the interstitial cracks that provide rough outlines for a human body, the scribbles of a deity bent on gallows humour. Like so many of their Saddle Creek forebears, Big Thief can’t help but stare at your wounds; not because they’re sadists, but because they’ve noticed something incredible in the way you choose to cauterise them. It’s a shared experience, and one that Masterpiece documents with stirring emotional fortitude.
There are two kinds of strangers: the ones who arrive that way, and the ones whose shadows lengthen over the course of time. On the title track of Marissa Nadler‘s 7th album, we learn which of the two this record is primarily concerned with. “I am a stranger now,” she sighs, and it’s that temporal qualifier tacked on the end which pushes the album’s themes beyond an implied ending, and towards the wreckage left in its wake. What follows, both lyrically and musically, is a hugely accomplished addition to her brand of saloon-at-the-end-of-the-world Americana, and a worthy follow-up to 2014’s sumptuous July.
“But I think I’m gonna kiss you,” she says, finally, a dramatic pause teased out across eons. It’s the emotional money shot on “Winterbreak”, the highlight of MUNA‘s second – hell, let’s call it – their breakthrough EP, The Loudspeaker. The line follows a rhyme on “tentative ellipsis” and “parting of your lips,” which, frankly, is already enough to engage me in journalistic hyperbole mode: as much as I lost my shit alongside everyone else the first time I heard “The Mother We Share”, you start to feel like the perfect pop promise of a band like Chvrches could finally be realised in the dark, stormy-night elegies bequeathed to us here.
People sometimes ask me when I was happiest, and I say, “Oh, you know, a bit of everything,” because I’m not really listening and I assume they’re asking about my taste in music. When I think about it, though, it’s never a specific occasion, but snatches of memory that come floating back at seemingly uncoordinated interludes. The goal I scored from an unlikely scissor kick on the school football field; but not that day, because later I sprayed Lynx in my eye. The laugh elicited by an old girlfriend when I fell off a tire swing; but not that day, because I fell off a tire swing. The first time I successfully bred a gold chocobo on Final Fantasy VII; and actually the whole damn day, because some joys cannot be bridled by circumstance.
What all of these moments share is that they took place before Manic Street Preachers released “Together Stronger (C’mon Wales)”. Not one of them is compromised by the knowledge that the band who spat The Holy Bible at an unsuspecting world has now pressed a soft, dripping flannel down the back of international football. I can’t live with that.
Of course, the Manics spent their force years ago. Precisely how long depends on your level of sympathy with efforts made to channel the old fire (Journal For Plague Lovers, Futurology), but nonetheless, it’s unfair to expect anything other than tired nods to former glories. On their new track, though, the level of apathy directed at producing anything of artistic merit approaches a magical quality all of its own, almost as if they’ve struck on a new way to provoke a hostile public. It’s just that 25 years ago it was “You Love Us”, and now it’s the insinuation that Aaron Ramsey is a world class footballer.
Like “Three Lions”, the track begins with the sound of terrace chanting, followed by exuberant commentary about heartache, followed by an initial wave of crowd-sourced indie rock gusto. When the verse arrives, it sounds a bit like “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” by Andy Williams, which sounds ridiculous until James Dean Bradfield starts actually singing the melody to adjusted lyrics: “But now that France has arrived, it feels so good to be alive.” Oh, you’re lampooning us. It was a simple lampoon. Then there’s a bit rhyming “Gary Speed” with “heart on his sleeve”, and after that it all gets a bit blurry.
I remember buying The Holy Bible on CD as a 14 year old. I didn’t have a CD player, so for a long time I just read the lyric booklet and imagined what the songs would sound like. “Yes” was a rap, for example, and I could still rap the version that existed in my head to this day. But that’s the point. The lyrics were so densely packed that it seemed impossible that any of it could be scanned into a rock song without sounding ridiculous. And yet! Through an alchemy unrivalled before or since, JDB transformed the garbled rhetoric handed to him by Nicky and Richey into musical gold, as if reeling off a list of serial killers or countries impoverished by US imperialism formed a logical accompaniment to post-punk guitar riffs. All of which makes it more galling that a simple, thumping turd of a line like “When Gareth Bale plays, we can beat any side” sounds exactly as bad as it looks. If anything, it actually sounds worse than it looks written down.
Even the dullest of us have known love, if only for a short time. But those future glories – weddings, and late winners, and New Year’s kisses, and such – will forever now be tarnished. The salt that collects in my eye from watching younger family forge their own muddy paths, the way I did, cannot be tears of joy. After hearing the voice that sang “hospital closures kill more than car bombs ever will” intone, with the same force of meaning, that “with Ashley Williams, we can win any fight”, any renewed bliss will come to me adulterated by its presence, like the jolting remembrance of herpes flushed through a young bride.
After today, nothing can be perfect again. New career highs will be tainted by the faint but pervasive fart smell memory of this song. No fresh swathes cut through my neural passageways – not the first steps of a child, nor of my own in a new country, nor of my last in the country I knew best – can ever wipe clean the stained imprint of Hal Robson-Kanu’s name lazily printed on a sheet of A4 paper, a shit prop to a shit music video.
One day I hope I will have children of my own, and that they can understand the duress of our times. That we survived a collapsed housing market, a collapsing national health service, a culture that knew the price of knowledge and the value of content. I know that they won’t. Words are cheap, and they’ll see that. I know that when my daughter looks up at me and asks what I did in the great viral media wars of 2016, I will have no choice but to look her in the eye and say, “Forgive me, child, for I tolerated it.”
Ready to feel old, 90s kids? Everything you love is dead. Or worse, reanimated: stitched together with swatches of hot neon and cool pastel, jumbled into a cruel parody of the human form, staggering down your street in the rain, rapping harder and harder against your door now, begging to be let in, to return home. You glance over at the monkey’s paw on your desk, only one finger raised now; it’s turned back into a Brat Award. The banging won’t stop, but you know that thing at your door isn’t EMF – or at least, not as you remember it. It’s James Atkin performing Schubert Dip in full. Don’t answer it.
Not that you’re likely to find Dream Wife compromising their youth for a weekend in Minehead. Even if they were old enough to call it nostalgia, those kind of line-ups would be wasted on the Brighton-based trio; one suspects they harbour the good taste to pick Shampoo over Shed Seven all day long. But their heart lies in a particularly American 90s: one that revolves around David Lynch, Kathleen Hanna, Carrie Brownstein, mixtapes, fanzines, anything shrouded in ambiguous hues. (“We only dream in pastel colours,” they literally said in an interview last year.) In fact, the Brighton-based act initially started as a parodic art project, three feminist art students picking apart the key girl group signifiers and piecing them back together in their own way. More Derrida than Frankenstein though, right? We caught up with Alice, Bella and Rakel to get their hot take on art, music and feminism. And boy, did we get some big answers.
Ah, the soundtrack. Chances are your favourite band (or their increasingly disengaged guitarist) has indulged in a 40-minute laptop sojourn around a documentary about Indonesian sloth wrestling, before skulking back to the day job of arguing about drum fills. 10 years pass, and everyone quietly accepts that it happened without having to ever talk about it again. Not so for Mogwai, whose 2006 accompaniment to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was considered such a triumph – and rightly so – that they wheeled it out for a string of dedicated live dates seven years later. 2013 also saw the band soundtrack French drama Les Revenants and find time for an 8th studio album, Rave Tapes. Now they’re back to score Atomic: Living In Dread And Promise, documentarian Mark Cousins’ sobering insight into the horrors and anxiety of the nuclear age.
Matthew Neale 