Loud And Quiet 57 – Metronomy

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 57 / the alternative music tabloid

EMA Daniel Miller Slint School of Language 65Daysofstatic Lizzo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete

Metronomy

It must be love

contents

welcome

School of language – 12 Daniel Miller – 14 Slint – 16 Lizzo – 20 Lorelle Meets The Obsolete – 22 65daysofstatic – 24 eMA – 26 Metronomy – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 57 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

EMA Daniel Miller Slint

Co ntact

Contr i b u tor s

A dve r t isi ng

in f o@lou dandq uie t.com

Amy P e tti f e r , aust in l a i ke , Chr is Watke y s, dais y j o ne s , davi d zammi tt, Danie l D y l a n-W r a y , dan ke ndall , Danny Cante r , Elinor Jones, Edg ar Smi th, Fr anki e Nazar do, jack do he r ty , jame s we st, Jani ne Bu ll m a n, je nna f oxton, joe g og gi ns , josh su nth, le e b ull m a n, Gab rie l Gr e e n, Ge m har r is , Mandy Dr ake , Mi ke Bu r ne ll , Nathan We st le y, Owe n Richa r ds , P hil Shar p, Re e f Y ou nis , Sam cor nf or th, samu e l ba ll a r d, Sam Walton, Ti m Cochr a ne , thomas may, tom f e nwi ck

a dve r tis e @l o uda ndqu i e t.co m

School of Language 65Daysofstatic Lizzo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete

Metronomy

It must be love

c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy PH I L S HARP

There’s a hole in our relationship with Metronomy.

They first properly featured in Loud And Quiet as a trio, in 2007. Our photoshoot was the same week they’d signed a record deal that was a long time coming, with their label ever since, Because Music.

They were in the middle of a weeklong bender, and drunk. More delays meant that the group’s second album, ‘Nights Out’, wasn’t released until late 2008, when, so impressed with this skewed electronic concept piece, the band featured on the cover of our first issue published in newsprint. By the time they headlined a stage we were curating at the now defunct Offset Festival in 2009 they’d become a big deal – too big for our tented arena.

The health and safety police bumped the group up to the main stage minutes before they were due on, causing everyone who was in the tent to rush its canvas walls and tear them to pieces. That was pretty much the last time I saw Joseph Mount and his band. So the hole is the size of ‘The English Riviera’.

I was never too taken by Mount’s third album, myself, although I’ll admit that stubbornness played its part there. I’d loved ‘Nights Out’ too much for anything to match up, and accepting Metronomy as a full band, rather than the pissed, drummer-less trio I’d first met, was my cross to bear. I’m not good with change. And besides, we rarely feature anyone twice in our magazine, this month being only the second time ever that an artist has featured on our cover for the second time, and we’ve now published 88 issues. So when I say there’s a hole in our relationship with Metronomy, it’s because they’re one of a few bands that I feel we’ve got a genuine relationship with.

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve come to terms with Gabriel Stebbing leaving the band, and the glossy AOR of ‘The English Riviera’, because when I met with Mount twice last month, I realised that most of all, it’s change that is his driving force.

Stuart Stubbs

Lo ud And Qu ie t PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW 1W 8TH Ed itor - Stu ar t Stu b bs Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r S ub Edi tor - Al e x W ilsh ir e film e di tor - Roe b u ck

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T his M o nth L & Q L o ve s ANNA MEARS, A SH COL L I N S, JAMES P ARRIS H , JANE TH IRD , J o hnny B r o ckl e hur s t, L AURA MART IN , NAT CRAMP , Si m o n gl a cke n, W IL L L AwRENCE , ZOE M IL L E r , The v ie ws ex pre ssed in Loud And Qui et are those of the re spect i ve contr ibutors and do not nece ssar i ly ref lect the opinions of the magaz ine or i ts s taff.

All ri ghts res erved 2014 Loud And Quiet.

ISS N 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Com pany L TD .

Dis tr ibuted by loud and qui et & forte

THE BEGINNING

Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / These New Puritans will this month open an interactive exhibition in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory at creative space 180 Strand.

‘Magnetic Field’ puts on display the trio’s ‘Magnetic Resonator Piano’, an electronically-augmented acoustic piano used heavily on last year’s ‘Field of Reeds’ LP, which uses a series of magnets combined with sensors to resonate, bend and torment the piano’s strings. The exhibition runs from 14-21 April. www.thevinylfactory.com

Try this at home

Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith www.garetharrowsmith.com

Nobody likes a show off: Jack Doherty’s heavy diet of Prog Rock / Prog rock is overblown.

Prog rock is technical.

Prog rock makes me sick.

I’ve always hated prog rock. And I’ve always felt like I should.Those BBC 4 punk documentaries tell me it’s the cool thing to do. And I’ve always wanted to be cool.

Recently, I’ve started to think that I should listen to some of music’s silliest genre, if only to justify my hatred. Who knows, I might get converted. Maybe the one thing missing from my musical palette is a good old-fashioned lute interlude.

So, in an unanticipated burst of spontaneity, I grabbed my cape, pulled up a beanbag chair and delved into the nonsense, one concept album at a time.

I regretted it instantly. As the first notes burst out from a famous Yes album, my worst fears were realised – prog rock sleeps with solos. Flute solos, synth solos, guitar solos, covering every inch of your eardrum like a cancer you just can’t kick.

I ploughed on, searching for some respite. I chucked on ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’, the prog album for people who don’t like prog albums.

Surely it would be my lifeboat; an album to stop me drowning into the syrupy hell. It wasn’t. So I drowned. Apparently jazz music dressed as prog isn’t particularly buoyant.

‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ faired no better. Did you know there’s a track on there featuring a hundred ticking clocks with alarms that then ring all at once? As a song.The ticking of clocks. I’m not making this up.

I’m not sure how, but things got worse from

here. I was pummelled further and further into a daze. A daze of wizardry, chord progressions and mythology. Not the type of daze I enjoy at all.

After hearing some dullness by a guy called Tull I passed out. But even sleep couldn’t save me.

Peter Gabriel was stood waiting in the dreamland, flower mask on his face, SNES controller in his hand. He challenged me to a game of Mortal Kombat, and of course, I accepted. I’ve always been more of a Street Fighter man, but Peter didn’t have Street Fighter, so Mortal Kombat would have to do.

He decided to be Raiden, obvious choice. Never has a computer game character embodied the traits of a musical genre more than Raiden, with his overblown fighting moves and frustratingly long electric attacks. I opted for Scorpion. If anyone could destroy prog rock, he could.

In a matter of seconds it was over. Scorpion 1 – Prog Rock 0.

Peter Gabriel chucked his controller at his surprisingly mediocre television set and started to weep, uncontrollably. He was a broken man. It might have only been a dream, but it was glorious.

I woke up from this heaven with an indescribable pain in my belly. I jumped up from the sticky beanbag and scurried towards the bathroom. As I passed the dining room I realised that I wasn’t going to make it. It had to come out now. So I keeled over and emptied the contents of my stomach onto the cheap vinyl floor. It felt good. I’d have to mop up some half digested pasties, but that didn’t matter.

The prog had gone. Everything was right with the world again.

Prog rock makes me sick.

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Loud And Quiet will, for the second time, be the UK print media partner with Primavera Sound this year, with copies of our paper available in special welcome packs at the Barcelona edition of the festival. www.primaverasound.com Experimental vinyl label Blank Editions have announced a series of cassettes including an archived Electricity In Our Homes project from 2006 called War Room, a new Neils Children mini album and the overdriven anti-pop debut release from London band Niqab. The label will press as many cassettes as are pre-ordered before April 14th. www.blankeditions.com Poor Frank Ocean was made to return his $212,500 advance from Mexican restaurant chain Chipotle this month after the company dared to include their logo on the web advert he’d provided a track for, upsetting the singer who then backed out of the deal. Bastards! They were only paying him a total fee of $425,000. www.chipotle.com A new social network has launched especially for musicians called Meet&Jam. It’s basically a cross between Match.com and the scabby pin board in your local guitar shop advertising band vacancies. Users can find new projects and band members, and also book studio time and rehearsals spaces. www.meetandjam.com Dom Yorke

books + other

Constant Flux The DIY label and promotions company that supports bands with learning difficulties / as others from the nascent learning disabled music scene such as Daniel Wakeford, Beat Express and UltimateThunder.

Phoenix says of the shows and the scene: “When I first started working within this world, the only opportunities for these musicians was to play a 1015 minute set in-between a couple of DJs at a club.

Just being able to play with other bands is a huge step forward. It’s important for any musician or scene to have cross-pollination of ideas and influences and one of the best ways to do this is to play with your peers, learning disability or no learning disability.”

With the on-going success of groups like PKN, and the birth and continuing growth of Constant Flux, awareness is gradually being raised. “That’s a large part of it,” says Phoenix. “There is a long history of people with learning disabilities being out on the fringes of society, in institutions, homes, etc., and this ‘out of sight’ situation unfortunately creates a certain ignorance and fear that in extreme cases manifests itself in hate crime. I think one of the biggest obstacles is being able to engage with society and the community in a positive, nonjudgemental and open way.” www. constantflux.co.uk

In the world of music documentaries, in 2012 everyone fell in love with Sixto Rodriguez, the humble enigma that magically appeared via the Oscar-winning Searching for Sugarman. For a small few, however, there was one music film that stood out above all others that year: The Punk Syndrome, a touching, hilarious and exhilarating documentary on the Finnish punk group Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät (pictured) whose members all have learning disabilities. One such fan of the group is Richard Phoenix (frontman of Sauna Youth), who has a background in working with people with learning difficulties and decided he wanted to see the group himself. “It was actually after hearing PKN that Constant Flux came about,” he says. “I wanted to see them play, so I started an organisation and got £10,000 from the Arts Council to make it happen!”

Constant Flux is a promotions company and record label that puts on shows and puts out records for musicians with learning disabilities.

The most recent is an April UK tour by glitch group The Fish Police (starting in Nottingham on the 4th and ending in Swansea on the 11th), who will be playing a series of integrated shows with bands like Fair Ohs, Cowtown, Cold Pumas, Ravioli Me Away, Caves, Sissy Hex and L’Amour Des Reves, as well

Singing From The Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs

by JP Bean paber & Faber

During the 1950s and 1960s a revolution was taking place in smoky rooms above pubs across the land.

This was the folk revival, where a generation of musicians rediscovered their own heritage of native folk songs and drew inspiration from the blues and folk musicians from America, such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. In Singing From The Floor we hear the stories of folk revivalists such as Martin Carthy and Peggy Seeger as they tell the tale of the revival’s humble beginnings and its links to the CND movement, through to the zenith of the ’60s and ’70s, the barren years of the ’80s and ’90s, and, for a happy ending, the arrival of modern artists such as Sam Lee and Eliza Carthy.

Mods: The New Religion

by Paul ‘Smiler’ Anderson

Life after life

by Kate Atkinson

Omnibus press

Black Swan

Astonishingly, it’s now fifty years since London starting swinging and the Mod was born. Paul Anderson’s Mods: The New Religion explores the movement from every which way with a care and attention to detail that befits the scene that gave us sharp suits and speed pills set against an upall-night soundtrack. Mods... traces the scene back to its earliest roots and captures the influences that came together to create a uniquely British street culture.The book includes interviews with those who were actually there coupled with Anderson’s lovingly researched examples of pictures, art, fashion, advertising and graphics, and seems a very fitting way to mark the movement’s fiftieth birthday.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again until you finally got it right? Follow Ursula and her family through this highly ingenious whirlwind of a novel set during the Second World War in Life After Life, a book that could break your heart and also make you think profoundly about the roads you take in your own life. Kate Atkinson’s recreation of war-torn London is masterfully crafted and one of the best fictional renditions of that time and place yet put to paper. The book (which last year landed in the New York Times’ top 10 of 2013) reminds us of lives vanished without trace or memory and lives that had hardly begun.

An award-winning novel that will leave you breathless and wanting more.

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Words by Daniel Dylan Wray / Photography by Owen Richards

b y ja nine & L ee b ullm a n

getting to know you

Mac DeMarco Once known as Makeout Videotape, before accidentally impersonating Chris Issacs on his 2012 debut album ‘Rock and Roll Night Club’, Canadian goof Mac DeMarco answers our Getting To Know You questionnaire in an attempt to prove that recording artists are people too /

The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “Remember, the donkey’s balls are always reddest right before the sunrise.”

The most famous person you’ve met “Lindsay Lohan”

Your favourite item of clothing “Wrangler jeans”

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building “My dentures”

Your biggest disappointment “My penis”

The worst date you’ve been on “I went on a date with Jennifer Lawrence last time I was in LA, she wouldn’t put out.

Your guilty pleasure “Pissing in the bath” You worst injury “Busted half my front tooth off”

What is success to you?

“No Job”

The worst birthday or Christmas present you’ve received “My girlfriend passed away on my birthday last year” Your favourite word “Buttcheeks” Your pet hate “My girlfriend, Kiera”

Your hidden talent “Sword swallowing” What do you think of E cigarettes?

“Fuck that shit”

Your biggest fear “Large scale bukkake”

If you could only eat one food forever it would be…

“Philly cheese steak” The worst job you’ve had “Road construction” The film you can quote the most of “Austin Powers” Your favourite place in the world “Hooters” Your style icon “Christian Bale in The Fighter”

The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them “Tim Allen”

The best book in the world “The Bible †”

The characteristic you most like about yourself “Extremely small, almost inverted vagina-esque penis”

The thing you’d most like to change about your physical appearance “I’d have a huge cock” What talent do you wish you had?

“Sword swallowing” If you could go back in time, what would you tell your 15-year-old self?

“Dude, Kiera’s boobs are THAT chill!”

How do you want to die?

“Chilling”

The one song you wished you’d written “The jingle from the original ‘My Buddy’ commercial”

Your best piece of advice for others “Love your mom”

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Tell me About It

David Brewis This month, David Brewis releases his second solo album as School of Language. Sam Walton met the Field Music member to let him do the talking photographer: GEM HARRIS / writer: SAM WALTON

On his Twitter profile, David Brewis describes himself as “one half, third, or quarter of Field Music, depending on what biog you read.” But regardless of the fractions, he is definitely the only faculty member of School of Language – a project he invented in 2006, back when Field Music were blazing a trail for the north-east postpunk revival alongside Maximo Park and the Futureheads. Resurrecting the name in 2014, Brewis’ second solo album became something of an exercise in catharsis for its author when, during a lyric-writing session, he ended up blurting out his autobiography up to the night he met his wife, aged 20. Accordingly, ‘Old Fears’ is steeped in nostalgia, poignancy, a bullishness that only teenagers possess and a humble selfawareness that only arrives well afterwards. It is also, in its final moments, unrepentingly and gloriously romantic.

But this is no heads-down, serious retrospective – Brewis’ Sunderland roots wouldn’t allow such selfindulgence. Indeed, while occasionally lyrically wistful, ‘Old Fears’ is also shot through with playful, taught-wound funk, skewiff two-bar solos that never get repeated and unashamedly Chakha Khan-flecked drum programming that seems precision-engineered for dancing. “I did want to make the kind of record that my wife and I could dance to in the kitchen,” admits Brewis over an appropriately austere pot of loose-leaf tea in a Kings Cross cafe, and that figures: ‘Old Fears’ eschews the grand, proggy flourishes of Field Music – save for the record’s jaw-dropping final thirty seconds, which features some frankly rapturous sax – in favour of empty space and one-off melodies.

As the greatest hits of the late seventies and early eighties float over the cafe’s PA system and the topics move around, Brewis talks good albums, growing pains and, with noticeable discomfort, the concept of “groove”...

“There are certain precedents to ‘Old Fears’ on previous Field Music albums, where certain tracks were specifically based around – I’m going to use a terrible word now – a ‘groove’.”

The word just makes me cringe. That’s maybe a sociological thing of my time: I associate the word “groove” with stoner mates in small towns in the north-east listening only to The Stone Roses. It just seems a bit self-indulgent.

When you divorce groove from dancing it feels like the kind of thing that people at music college talk about but have no innate understanding of. It becomes very head-driven, and all about chops, about the movement of your hands.

There are a few of my songs on old Field Music records that are funky in a strange kind of way. I mean, I really like that style of technological R’n’B pop, like the first two Justin Timberlake albums, and that was in my mind a little when I went into the studio this time, although I’m pretty confident now that no matter what influences I bring in, I’m going to do them so wrong that they’re going to end up sounding like me. That happens with every aspect of influence for me – I miss by just enough that you can tell what the influence is, but it doesn’t sound like it.

“Lyrically, there are really specific things and times that I’m talking about here.”

On Field Music records we talk about personal things, but abstract them to a degree. Here there’s less abstraction.

The record’s basically about my life up to and including meeting my wife when I was 20, in 2001. It’s about the way I was then, and how I’ve coped with various changes, and how certain things just aren’t an issue anymore, because – and this is going to sound ludicrous – my life now feels complete in a way that it didn’t before. Which I suppose is lovely. I mean, it’s cheesy, but it’s lovely for me!

I wrote lyrics over the space of three days: I booked myself into the studio, turned the lights off and sat in front of a blank screen and wrote 3,000 words. I’d never done lyrics like that before. Everything came out of editing these few thousand words of nonsense, free association, whatever, and now they’re set! I’ve had to get over a certain amount of embarrassment towards some of them.

I mean, on ‘A Smile Cracks’ I’m basically saying, “you know when I was 19, this is the kind of thing that I did, and it was pretty cool”, and put that on record. But then again, age 19 is the time when you can get away with doing that kind of stuff. I’m glad I’m not trying to do any of that stuff now, to have got it out of my system and have got through it.

But there were definitely thoughts that I wanted to be on the album, and subconsciously they made their way in during the three-day splurge.

Specifically, I wanted to talk about the things that I’m scared of – the fears that motivate lots of what I’ve done, or do, and try and confront them a little bit. Most of those fears were at their apex at age 18, 19, 20, at university, feeling ridiculous and lost and a bit floaty.

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“Sunderland and Newcastle are very different” In Newcastle there’s some sort of musical infrastructure – there are venues and there’ve always been bands and there’ve always been recording studios. But Sunderland hasn’t had any of those things, so we’ve had to create our own ramshackle infrastructure, and that’s allowed us to be freer – it fosters independence. There’s never an aim of, ‘oh, once we’re good, we can go and play this venue, or support this band’ – it’s more like, ‘we want to play, so where do we play? So let’s book that room and borrow this PA and let’s put on a happening and it’s going to be exciting and different.’ There wasn’t a clear sense in Sunderland of how you became a band or played the music industry game.

I mean, the accepted sound of Sunderland is still Oasis covers bands, essentially – and being somewhere like that does guard against pretentiousness, even if that’s what we’re sometimes accused of. I mean, if you ever go on a Sunderland Football Club fan forum where they’re talking about music, we get as much of a slagging as much as we get praise for being those arty, vegetarian, sandal wearing slangs.

The culture in Sunderland is football, with a mining and shipbuilding heritage, and that heritage indirectly spills into the music, I think, in that there’s a definite feeling that it would be embarrassing not to work hard, and that self-satisfaction should derive from a job well done rather than doing anything particularly flash. And that’s how I feel, too: I was brought up with a feeling that to not try your hardest was a waste – and that’s the worst thing you could do. It’s okay to get things wrong. It’s even okay to do the kind of thing that pretty much makes you an outcast in your own town, as long as you work really hard at it.

“A lot of the sax’s bad rep is entirely justified…” …because it generally feels like it’s been done for the musician’s benefit than the listener’s benefit. It’s overused, over-emotive, like a symbol for something rather than the thing itself, but there’s something quite comforting about something so overblown. I didn’t intend to use the sax that way though. The idea for it on ‘Old Fears’ came more from – and this is going to sound annoying, sorry – kind of ecstatic free jazz, where it was more about having this little emotive explosion rather than more melodic stuff. I’m a big John Coltrane fan – his records are quite mellowed out and then the bells will start ringing and a screaming, painful sax will just blow itself out from that. His albums quite often had these explosive moments, as if there was too much saxophone to be contained within the rest of the music.

Then again, if it comes out sounding like ‘Careless Whisper’, I’m okay with that as well. Some records like that – even incredibly simple records – can have a depth that keeps me going. I’m still hearing new things: yesterday, my brother [Peter from Field Music] wanted to talk about the chords to ‘Careless Whisper’. ‘You know, it’s such a great song, Dave, you really have to get into this,’ he said, and still I don’t get the chord changes in it, so it must’ve stood the test of time.

“Before I listened to Prince, I thought the definition of a good album was one that was really consistent.”

I used to think he was just a singles guy, but in a way, getting to love Prince was getting to accept that albums don’t have to be consistent. There’d be weak songs, but you just have to accept all the ridiculous things he’s trying to do: an album can work without having to be a succession of individual pop songs.

You can get away with all sorts of things, providing it flows right and you construct it right – if you construct it in the same way you might construct a particularly weird pop song. But you need peaks and troughs, and the trouble is that way too much music at the moment is on full, all the time, and everything that isn’t on full is so massively contrived to make you ready for the next “it’s full” that I find it kind of wearing.

But as well as peaks and troughs, a great album should be one I don’t understand straight away. In fact it’s not essential I ever really understand it.

If I can understand it straight away, I just lose interest. If by the end of the second verse you can tell what the rhymes are going to be on the third and fourth line, I’m bored by that.

“I have a huge emotional attachment to my parents’ record collection of the mid and late eighties.”

“I don’t think about money when I’m making records, other than that I’m not going to spend any.”

That’s the first music that I had interest in whatsoever, just the most popular music of the day. I think my mam had ‘Popped In Souled Out’ by Wet Wet Wet, and I still have a weird fondness for it.

It’s not a good record, but I have a weird fondness for it. It’s an associative, sociological fondness, but I think that all music is heavily dependent on that anyway: like, weirdly, listening to something like ‘Back In The High Life Again’ by Steve Winwood, I can hear that all over ‘Old Fears’! And while I was writing the album, I had a huge obsession with the Shalamaar song ‘Night To Remember’, which is a fantastic record, for its use of space and how none of the individual parts takes over at any point.

A lot of these ’80s records were when people were really discovering drum machines and sticking these really complicated rhythms over everything, but it was so precise that it didn’t get in the way, and worked okay.

Like on Chaka Khan’s ‘I Feel For You’, there are two electronic drum kits going on all the time, blasting away, but it’s done so you almost feel that it makes more space. So there was definitely a sense that that was the kind of sound I’d like to have.

Everything that we’ve done with regard to how we work in a business sense is done in order that we don’t have to think about it when it comes to making music.We’re not that organised with money – we just don’t spend money we don’t have. The music industry doesn’t really work on that basis, though. The music industry works on who’s going to lend you whatever money to tour or to make a record, and we just try and avoid that.

It means that we can get by and have our own studio, and if we want outside influence we can have it – and if we don’t, we don’t.

How we go about our finances is reflective of our personalities, in that we’re our dad’s sons, essentially. He’s an incredibly sensible guy, and I think we’re incredibly sensible about most things too. That does seem to be something that we’re often characterised as, but it doesn’t really annoy me because I know that I can go home and put on silly voices to amuse my wife, and be excessively cute with the cat. I’m a fairly silly person a lot of time. I take certain things very seriously – music, maybe money – and the rest not seriously at all. So when I get characterised as being overly sensible, it’s always just that they don’t know about the silly side, and I can cope with that.

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Record Heads

Daniel Miller Having formed Mute Records in 1978 purely to release his own single as The Normal, no other label boss has done more for electronic music than Daniel Miller If you’re going to have dinner with Daniel Miller, do your research first. “I refuse to go to a restaurant with music - what the fuck, you know? A restaurant forcing me to listen to music is like me forcing a chef to eat my food.” Thank God Mute Records invited me to their pretty inhouse studio to talk face to face with their founder, and that we are sitting in silence. Behind me are four of the finest synthesisers in the UK; one was Gary Numan’s another Depeche Mode’s. In front of me sits Miller, a fine sartorial sight, spectacled and smart with his welcoming baritone voice echoing around the sound proof room. “It is important to me to always have a studio close or in

the building for a number of reasons,” he says. “One, it brings the artist and the label closer together, which I think is important, and I think just from a convenience point of view, we are working upstairs rather than across town, so it’s easier for me to have a listen, but I also want a creative space.”

Miller smiles warmly as we turn to take it all in. “It has always been a part of Mute, this is the way we work.”

Daniel and Mute have a clear methodology, which is no surprise for a label formed in 1978. And yet Mute remains relevant in 2014, risky, even. “I didn’t know anything about the industry back then and I didn’t know how to do things, I just knew what I

thought was right and so it’s quite important to try and keep that sort of naivety or innocence as much as possible…” Miller tells me, who’s thoughtful in conversation, with an enduring enthusiasm for what he does.

“I know a lot more now, but I am trying to preserve some of that innocence or amateurism, if you want to call it that, really. Not cynical industry, you know. I am learning all the time, but I am trying not to learn too much.”

36 years ago Miller knew very little, and with a single he recorded himself as The Normal he strolled into Rough Trade Records. “The idea was to try and sell them a box of singles or something,” he says. “I didn’t have a

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concept of distribution and I played it to Geoff (Travis) in the backroom where the warehouse was and I really couldn’t tell if they liked it or not and then afterwards they were sort of muttering to each other and they said we would like to distribute it for you… so I said what does that mean?’ Miller chuckles at the memory. “Then they asked how many I was going to press, I said 500 as that was the minimum you could do, but they said we think you can sell 2,000 so go and press 2,000 and they gave me a little bit of an advance on the distribution so that was it really.”

Just like that, Mute was born, a label that in today’s market is often

photographer: SONNY MCCARTNEY / writer: IAN ROEBUCK

credited as being the first indie. If it wasn’t quite so dark in the studio I could swear Daniel was blushing. “I don’t think we were, sorry; we were part of a group of labels who started at roughly the same time, like Factory, 4AD, Beggars and Rough Trade.

Actually Rough Trade records had just started and I bought the first single that came out on Rough Trade, which was Paris Maquis by Metal Urbaine, which I loved, a French electro punk band, and I used the label. I thought, well, it’s Rough Trade so they must know what they are doing, so I looked at their label and their sleeve and I just copied some of the information.”

So RT001 may have been the technical template but Miller has always been an innovator and Mute Records is his creative mirror. The sonic experimentation of his first release polarized those who heard it.

He explains: “The first person who heard my single was the cutting engineer. I won’t say who it was but he said don’t give up your day job, which is fine because he was an old hippy, so if he thought that, then I knew I was on the right track. Then I remember a big moment for me was the women at the pressing plant listening to the record, they were middle aged ladies who were listening to endless records, one day it was a punk rock then next it could be a pop record, they were just listening for crackles and pops, you know, and she said to me, ‘that was interesting, we haven’t heard anything like that before,’ so that was nice.”

In the first five years of Mute, I didn’t speak to one lawyer or manager In 1978, Miller was taking his first steps as a pioneer in electronic music, and everyone, including those at Rough Trade, thought he would and should continue with Mute. Miller himself wasn’t too sure, and tells me: “My intention was not to start a record label. I was going to put out one record and that was going to be it, so I spent quite a lot of time thinking what’s next.” What came next was a likeminded artist called Fad Gadget, a project named Silicon Teens and US noisemaker NON, all of who were precursors to the labels turning point in 1980, with the arrival of Depeche Mode. “I saw Depeche for the first time play at the Bridge House, towards the end of 1980 in Canning Town, and then we decided to work together, to put out a single, nothing more than that.” Daniel’s excitement and

demeanour subtly changes when I ask if he knew what he was onto – if he saw the commercial potential.

“I definitely didn’t think I could boost my label to the next level no, that wasn’t really part of my agenda at all,” he says. “The bigger decision at the time for the label was when we decided to release albums, as with Fad Gadget.

I just thought, wow, this is an amazing band. I was a pop fan though and I understood that Depeche made great pop music, in an unusual way perhaps for the time and they were very young but I couldn’t believe what I heard when I first saw them in terms of the songs, the way they were arranged.”

And how does an intuitive independent label deal with the acceleration a band like Depeche Mode gives you in business terms?

“It’s a big jump and you suddenly realise you are responsible for other peoples careers and you have to be more serious about it. Well, I was always serious about it but you had to make sure that things got done. Also, none of these people had contracts so they were in a position that they could leave at any time, but they put their trust in me and I wanted to make sure that I did the best job possible with them whoever it was. That was very much the case with Depeche.”

Hang about, no contracts? Mute Records were one of the first labels to work on a 50/50 split, a model still used today by self starters and true indies and Miller’s rightly proud of this artist friendly set up. “Literally, in the first five years of Mute I didn’t speak to one lawyer or one manager,” he says. “The bands came in and we didn’t do contracts, we did profit share deals. The first contract coincided with the first time we worked with a manager. It was just a new experience, that was all, and I realised that that was where it was going.”

So things got big quick but Daniel Miller’s roots remained. After producing his first single on a 4 track tape recorder and working closely with Frank Tovey of Fad Gadget, the Mute boss slowly became proficient in the studio and his artists harnessed that know how. “When Depeche came along it was the same thing again,” he remembers. “I was getting better at programming synthesizers so we just learnt together; I helped them along with that and I ended up co-producing their first 5 albums, but nowadays I am not really into record production.What I like is intervening at certain points in more an A&R role which is usually the beginning the middle and the end leaving out everything in between. I don’t force myself on the situation but hopefully people welcome me in to that part of the process.”

Britpop was everything that I didn’t get into the music business for.

To me it was like moving backwards and all I wanted to do was move forwards Throughout the ’80s, Mute effortlessly surfed between success (with bands like Depeche Mode,Yazoo and Erasure) and working with such prophetic, cutting edge labels as Blast First (home to Sonic Youth, Big Black and Dinosaur Jr). It was these joint ventures that allowed Miller to explore his broad musical tastes and working with a fresh new label called Rhythm King would give him his first number one single. “I realised there was a whole new world of music that I hadn’t really been paying attention to through all my time with Depeche. Rhythm King was run by two guys at that time – James Horrocks and Martin Heath. I liked the music but they were the experts – there is a real difference. I can tell when it’s good but somebody needs to tell me that one is slightly better than that one, so we started the label, which ended up with Bomb the Bass, S’Express, which went to number 1, and Betty Boo. I mean, it became a pop label; it became a pop label because dance became pop at the time.”

Then came Britpop and a challenging time for a left-field label like Mute.

“That was totally alien to my sensibilities,” says Miller. “It was everything that I didn’t get into the music business for, do you know what I mean? To me it was like moving backwards and all I wanted to do was move forwards. The music media and mainstream media, there was just no room for any other music. New Labour, Britpop, I just hated all of it, you know, and it was a tricky time for us, partly because I didn’t sign very much and partly because of the bands we had signed didn’t fit into that space towards the end of the ’90s. Apart from Depeche, who kept going, we didn’t have a lot.”

The cavalry arrived in the form of an artist that Daniel stuck by through thick and thin, despite having just released a punk album that had alienated his dance audience. “Moby happened and ‘Play’ sold 10 million records. That turned things around for me and for the label… and for Moby.

We just stuck to our guns really and I didn’t want to get caught up in that, because I thought it was pretty awful… listen there was some good songs in

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the ’90s, no question about that, and there were some pretty good bands, but generally, as a whole movement, I thought Britpop was terrible and I wasn’t interested.”

I realised I was censoring myself and that is one of the worst feelings you can have A huge seller, ‘Play’ was an LP that opened up doors for Mute and Miller entertained working with a major for the first time. His longstanding relationship with the president of EMI Continental Europe, Emmanuel de Buretel, led to a controversial takeover.

“He saw Mute as being part of EMI but working outside,” Daniel tells me.

“I cant remember if he used this word or not but he didn’t want our label to be infected by EMI. He wanted us to learn from EMI and for him to learn from Mute and we could just carry on doing what we do so it was a really good deal.”

Miller insisted, as ever, that his label would have their own studio at EMI, but what happened wasn’t part of the plan. “I think the space that we were allotted was the post room or something, so a friend of ours who has a fleet of live trucks had a spare one.

Fuck knows how that happens but we rented it off him and we parked it in the car park in EMI and we just worked in the corner for a couple of years. It was great and EMI used it too so it worked for everyone, although a lot of people didn’t know what it was and when they heard it was a studio they couldn’t quite believe it!”

Mute has been independent once again since 2010, and the company seems to be untainted by the experience. “We are much better off now,” Miller nods. “I realised when I left that it was very hard to get things done there that were slightly out of the ordinary. I always wanted to try new ways of doing things and there was a huge amount of bureaucracy to get a decision made for anything [at EMI] and I kind of got worn down a bit by that to be honest. When I left and I had the freedom to do what I wanted, I realised I was censoring myself and that is one of the worst feelings you can have.”

We rise, shake hands and part but not before Daniel tells me he’s got plenty more to say. For a man whose label retains such celestial artists as Nick Cave whilst pushing forward with the likes of Liars, I’m not surprised to hear that.

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Spiderland’s End In 1991, Kentucky band Slint released an album that many now consider year zero for post rock. The fact that they’d split up a year earlier did the record’s legend no harm, but as ‘Spiderland’’s myth and appeal reaches boxset reissue status this month, guitarist David Pajo discusses how none of this was planned, and how he’s ready to finally draw a line under this seminal cult album writer: DANIEL DYLAN WRAY

The idea of Slint being some kind of mythical beast rising from the eerie black depths of musical obscurity seems a ludicrous concept in 2014, as they enter their ninth year of reformation. However, there was a period during the ‘90s in which the black and white image of four bobbing heads poking out of some Kentucky quarry water – as found on the cover of Slint’s second album ‘Spiderland’, photographed by Will Oldham – was all people had to go on in terms of getting to know the band. The motionless presence of the photographed four submerged in water also represented the motion and status of their musical activity, as Slint, at the time. Released in March 1991 and put out by Touch and Go, ‘Spiderland’ was a release that had no band around to play or to promote it.

The group had already disbanded in December 1990.

As kids they grew up in Louisville, Kentucky on an untypical diet of punk-rock and U.S hardcore, all members playing in teenage bands (primarily Squirrel Bait and Maurice, amongst others). Slint formed in 1986 with the line-up of Brian McMahan, Ethan Buckler, Britt Walford and David Pajo and in 1987 began recording their debut album, ‘Tweez’, with Steve Albini in Chicago. Entirely funded by friend Jennifer Hartman, it was put out on her own label (Jennifer Hartman Records) some two years later in 1989 and fizzled into the murky, obscurity-shaped hole it was destined to head into. Bassist Ethan Buckler disliked what Steve Albini had done with the record so much that he left the band as a result, soon to be replaced by Todd Brashear.

‘Tweez’ is a metallic, buckling crunch of an album; a cut-up-esque

stitch job that resembles something mutant-like being formed and welded together in a studio with Dr Frankenstein Albini laughing manically as he turns something that once showed signs of form, structure and coherence into a seething, raging, brilliant mess.

It’s an album that simultaneously captures the energy, range of ideas and the naivety of young men making their first album proper together with a producer who’s also in possession of all those characteristics.While ‘Spiderland’ is often held-up as the magnum opus of Slint’s short-lived career, the aggressively experimental, obnoxious thrust of ‘Tweez’ is perhaps greatly overlooked. It is ‘Spiderland’’s bastard offspring: troublesome, exhausting and occasionally difficult (rumours are neither confirmed nor denied that the album contains recordings of members defecating, which were then used as atmospheric interludes) but there’s still a lot to love – Touch and Go’s Corey Rusk certainly felt so anyway as he then signed the band.

The upcoming documentary on Slint, Breadcrumb Trail, opens with the Hunter S. Thompson quote, “Just keep in mind for the next few days that we’re in Louisville, Kentucky. Not London. Not even New York. This is a weird place.” It sets the tone for a documentary and back-story that seems to place a lot of emphasis on the strange place the group comes from. I speak with David Pajo, who sets the scene. “One of the quotes that I found interesting [in the documentary] was when Ian McKaye (of Minor Threat, Fugazi) said that Louisville has this reputation that everyone there is just totally crazy and that is a wide-spread view that I wasn’t aware of until I moved to Chicago in the mid ‘90s.

Then from touring, I then realised that

Louisville has this reputation of being filled with people who are out of their minds and I think that’s fairly accurate to be honest, and growing up I just assumed everyone was crazy. Like the singer from Maurice, the band that was a precursor to Slint, like even when we were young he was getting checks from the government for being mentally insane and he wasn’t the only one. I had so many friends that had them – we call them ‘crazy checks’ – and I knew so many people that were getting them and even some of the people in the documentary are considered… like… have been in and out of institutions, and some of them have even passed away since the documentary. So, I didn’t have any objective view, I just thought that was the way it was, but when I left Louisville I realised that this isn’t a normal way of growing up.”

The group, while often given the ‘mysterious’ tag, were in fact like most young men in a band – they were daft, told jokes and pulled a lot of pranks.

“It’s always been encouraged in Louisville, like the weirder the better,” Pajo tells me. “That’s not to say the entire city is like that, just in this music subculture it was almost like a badge of honour.”

The documentary – which is being released alongside a mammoth ‘Spiderland’ vinyl and CD boxset this month, complete with 100+ page photo booklet with a written introduction from friend and collaborator Will Oldham – is filled with such jokes and pranks that vary from the terrifying to the disgusting: turning up at Steve Albini’s house (having never met him) with a shotgun pointed at his face when he opened the door, to taking a revenge shit into Jesus Lizard singer David Yow’s drink.

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Before embarking on ‘Spiderland’, this time with producer Brian Paulson, Slint would record a two-song E.P, again with Albini as someone pulled out of a booked studio session last minute, but this was not released until 1994. Did this irk Albini, who was/is a big fan of the band, not to be asked back? “I did think about that when we were recording it, but we had already chosen Brian Paulson,” says Pajo. “I think Jesus Lizard were recording ‘Goat’ almost at exactly the same time as ‘Spiderland’ and they all showed up at the studio to see if we wanted to get dinner with them and I remember Steve walking around checking out the microphone placement and the studio and I got the feeling back then that he was a little bit pissed off at us, and we didn’t go to dinner with them because we were busy! But it wasn’t out of any lack of respect for Steve’s abilities or anything, we just wanted to work with someone else. Brian Paulson had done the Bastro record and Brian [McMahan] really liked some of the sounds he was getting for that. So, yeah I did get the impression Steve was off with us but we did record the 10” with him.”

The band broke up before releasing ‘Spiderland’ under a set of circumstances still unclear. Temporary admissions to psychiatric hospitals, poor time management, commitment issues are all said to be somewhat contributing factors, but there was no real drama, no real story and scandal to be unearthed from the split, and in fact the group all remained active together, just in different incarnations. “We still continued to play with the same group of people but it was in Will Oldham’s band or with King Kong,” says Pajo, who feels the break from Slint has perhaps aided the band’s reputation in the long-run. “For us, we were still

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retold

doing our thing but I think the fact that there was so little information and so little promotion – no tour, no marketing, the record just existed by word of mouth – I think it did benefit us in the long-run because it created a mystique that we didn’t intend; we weren’t trying to be a mysterious band but we became that by default.”

The spreading reputation was understandable; the results of ‘Spiderland’ were unique. It’s a release that is equally as unsettling and vicious as it is pastoral and pensive. It’s a record that many attribute to moulding the Post-Rock template, the slow/fast, quiet/loud, moody/explosive dynamic, but there was much more than teasing anticipation and rocketing paroxysms to the record. ‘Spiderland’ shifts in floating waves. It shuffles and shatters in syncopated cadences and the sound of malfunctioning guitars screech, wail and howl in agonised union and discordance. The vocals introduce a narrative and fleeting sense of comfort and structure amidst all the rupturing chaos. It’s a record that takes on the image of sitting on a back porch on a rocking chair in the quiet night of Kentucky while crickets paint the breeze with a hypnotic and calming chirp, only for a chainsawwielding madman to burst through your garden fence with a murderous glint in his eyes and primal roar tearing his vocal cords to shreds. It’s a mere six-songs long but now, even in 2014 after it’s reached the status and exposure it has, it sounds timeless, taut and punchy. Pajo concurs: “I always feel like Slint was thought of as a band of the ‘90s but we broke up at the beginning of the 90’s and most of the songs were written in 1989 and early ‘90, so I kind of feel like more of an ‘80s band but I’m glad that we chose to do the production in a way that was a more purist, documentary approach, just a band in a room. I think that lends itself to not becoming dated, it doesn’t sound like an ‘80s production or even a ‘90s mainstream grunge production.

It’s more natural.”

W

hile ‘Spiderland’ grew in mystery, word-of-mouth, steady sales and reputation through the early years of the ‘90s after its release, so too did Slint’s mailbag. The reverse of the album cover printed an address and a public call for female singers for the group – a snapshot of what future Slint may have sounded like should they

have continued – and they received many responses. One letter allegedly came from PJ Harvey, a rumour that turns out to be entirely true. “We didn’t really go into it too much in the documentary,” says Pajo. “We were going to re-print the letter she sent us in the photo book as it was really cool but we asked her first if it was okay and she said it was a personal letter and she would prefer it if we didn’t, so out of respect for her we didn’t want to talk about that too much.

“After we broke up, because Britt’s address was on the record, he started getting a lot of mail and it all just went into a cardboard box that we never looked at for years, and one time I went over to his house and we started going through these letters and we started opening them and some people had sent money for ‘Tweez’ from, like, Poland or somewhere, but it was three years old at the time or something, and then we found this letter from PJ Harvey and I don’t think she had put out any records yet but there was a big poster of a picture she had taken with her guitar and she wrote in there that she’d had some difficult times in her life and all she could listen to for a long time was Howlin’Wolf and ‘Spiderland’ and she asked if she could be our singer, but we didn’t see this until much later, but we wrote her and

thanked her for that letter.”

In the years in-between breakingup and getting back together, Slint’s band members have all been involved in multiple projects. Pajo has recorded extensively as a solo artist and also been in Tortoise, Interpol, Royal Trux, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Zwan and many others. Britt Walford played a pivotal role in shaping the sound of the Breeders’‘Pod’ album as well as various other, often mysterious or un-credited roles in other bands and projects. He was also in bandmate Brian McMahan’s project, The For Carnation (whose eponymous record is an often overlooked gem) and Todd Brashear has been a long-time Bonnie Prince Billy contributor.

While the group didn’t reform until 2005, it was as early as 1993 that they began to get a feeling that their reputation and music was growing. “I was working a day-job and hating it, all I really wanted to do was play music,” says Pajo. “I realised that I was making more money from record royalties than I was from my shitty day job, so I just thought if this is what I want to do then I should do this all the time. It wasn’t that I made a career choice, it was by default, it just made sense. I thought it [‘Spiderland’] would taper off and disappear into the void for a while but it was pretty

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interesting to see the events that came afterwards. Unlikely sources where starting to reference Slint – I remember Mogwai did a David Holmes remix using the ‘Good Morning, Captain’ riff and Harmony Karine picked out the same song for the Kids soundtrack; it was really surprising that that record didn’t get lost in the shuffle.”

The mushrooming reputation and classic status that ‘Spiderland’ has attained has in fact changed Pajo’s own feelings towards the record. He says: “It’s definitely changed my perception of ‘Spiderland’.

Pretty much throughout all of the ‘90s I could barely even listen to the record, not that I hated it so much, it’s just all I ever heard were mistakes and things I wanted to change and how I wish we had more time in the studio and a better budget to make the album. Now I can appreciate it for what it is and look back in hindsight and think for a group of young kids from out in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t do too bad of a job. I can appreciate it now.”

One question this boxset does raise, along with the near decade-long reformed status of Slint, is that perhaps ‘Spiderland’ is now ready to be put to bed and left to rest. “I have a feeling that by the end of this year we will have closed that chapter, which I’m happy to do. I have felt that musically I’ve lived in the shadow of Slint, and that’s not a bad place to be, but I would like to move on from the songs on ‘Spiderland’.” says Pajo ahead of the group’s 2014 dates, including Primavera Sound.

“We have talked about new material,” says Pajo. “I think there is no shortage of song ideas; I think we just want to get through this year and see where we are afterwards. There has been no commitment to start working on a new record or release new songs.”

I ask Pajo if the success and reputation of ‘Spiderland’ has, in some sense, become too big to control? Too much of a monster that makes it a difficult, even fearful, record to move on from? “I’ve definitely brought it up with the other guys,” he says. “I know that we will never make another ‘Spiderland’ and I don’t think that we should – we did that when we were younger and in a different emotional state. Brian particularly, lyrically, his contribution to the record, he made himself really vulnerable in a way that I don’t know if he would want to again and I would never ask him. I think we would make a cool record and it would be compelling but it wouldn’t be– and I hope no one expects it to be – ‘Spiderland’.

Destiny’s child Minneapolis based rapper Lizzo once refused to speak for three months, except for when she was walking the streets singing Beyonce songs at the top of her lungs photographer: J ENN A F O XTO N / writer: D. K. GO LDS TEI N

“I would marry the Doughboy. Just imagine that!” Lizzo is currently explaining the exploits of a drunken drive from Brighton to London. Just to be clear, she wasn’t driving. She was in the back playing ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill’.

“And what if Godzilla has a spiky little member? I don’t wanna deal with that. So I would kill Godzilla for humanity, have sex with Mr Clean because he has a real nice body, and marry the Doughboy because it would smell like cookies all the time and I love cuddling. I will cuddle with

dogs, humans, pillows…”

Raised in Texas and matured in Minneapolis, Lizzo has been blessed with the gift of the gab. That’s probably why she became a rapper. Seated in an east London pub, I quickly deduce that she can run with any subject and take it in unexpected directions. Much like her slick, quick-fire rhymes, which can go from tackling boobies and doobies to tax evasion in less than two minutes (as in her debut single ‘Batches and Cookies’). So you won’t be surprised to hear that the young MC is now

discussing “Mr Smelly Nose”, a bear with a scratch-and-sniff schnozz that she cuddles when she’s at her mum’s house in Denver. “It would remind me of Christmas and good times,” she swoons, “but you can’t really smell his nose anymore because everything’s scratched off. I don’t sleep with anything, but I’d like to find a human teddy bear to cuddle with.” At this last remark she emits an infectious, heartwarming laugh and you can’t help but join her.This big, bubbly personality of Lizzo’s has had folk lining up alongside

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her throughout her life to be a part of whatever madcap girl group she happened to be conjuring up at the time.

Back in third grade, when Lizzo was nine years old and people still called her by her birth name, Melissa, the songstress enlisted her first cohorts in a pop outfit called Peace, Love & Joy (she was Joy). But she soon realised that while she took the music deadly serious, the others were just playing around. “All we did was draw and write happy little pop songs like the Spice Girls,” she elaborates, “but move

forward a couple of years to fifth grade, when I saw Destiny’s Child, then I started actually writing songs in my room and forming these groups – motley crews of girls. I remember auditioning girls over the phone.

“Then cut to Cornrow Clique in eighth grade, which was my group of best friends at the time, and that’s where I got my nickname Lizzo because everyone was dropping the last part of their name and replacing it with an ‘o’. We were hanging out at the YMCA and heard Diamond’s verse on Crime Mob’s ‘Knuck if You Buck’ – ‘I come in da club, shakin’ my dreads, throwin’ dem bows, and bussin’ dez heads’ – and we all wanted to be like this!”

It was also around this time that Lizzo became obsessed with the flute.

Learning this instrument played a big part in her cadence, which is now a melting pot of all the greats – Missy Elliott, Andre 3000, Busta Rhymes – but that took time to refine. “The way my flute teacher described me, is that I would start off too big. I was wild. I was playing everything really fast and efficiently, but I wasn’t doing the right fingering. It’s like when I started singing, I would close my eyes and scream and roll around. I just had this big energy, this big style that I had to learn how to refine because it’s raw and gross sometimes. If you’ve heard some old stuff I’ve done, it’s horrible.”

Before little Lizzo even began screaming, however, she stopped using her voice altogether. “When I dropped out of college and moved to Denver with my family I got really depressed and stopped talking for three months.

My mum got really frustrated and I didn’t talk to my brother either. But every night I would go out, listen to Beyoncé – at the time her latest album was ‘B’Day’ – and that was the only time I used my voice, to sing Beyoncé songs whilst walking. I wanted to sing but I had a terrible voice, so I started to sing every night and in three months I felt like I was a better singer. Finally I felt vindicated. Now my friends tell me that was a vow of silence, like a monk.”

With her voice firmly found, Lizzo joined Jonny Lewis in trip-hop duo Lizzo & The Larva Ink in 2011. The two soon moved to Minneapolis to make it

big, but the band soon broke up and by 2012 our protagonist formed R&B trio The Chalice with Claire de Lune and Sophia Eris – the latter of whom has stuck by Lizzo’s side in their all-gal hip hop troupe Grrrl Prty and in Lizzo’s solo crew. “It’s been a journey,” admits Lizzo. “I feel like I’ve been in love with music for so long. Like if you were in love with your best friend, but you never realised until now and then you get married – that’s how I feel with music. We just got married, but we’ve been best friends forever.”

Now Lizzo is 25 going on 26, she’s toured extensively with extroverted funkateer Har Mar Superstar,

“Missy visually and stylistically influenced me, plus her confidence in who she is as a person. Ludacris is definitely an influence – his precision.

When he raps fast, you can hear it, it’s so amazing. Destiny’s Child too and Gospel music in general.” But what about lyrical inspiration? Lizzo assures me this is a whole other ball game.

“When I’m inspired to write a song it’s normally because a.) I’ve got a great track, or b.) I wanted to express myself because I was very sad or very happy. Sometimes I’ll think: ‘Has someone ever made a dolphin sound while rapping?’ and I’ll make a weird sound, or I’ll imagine something

‘Has someone ever made a dolphin sound while rapping?’ befriended Macaulay Culkin (catch his cameo in the video for her new single ‘Faded’), laid down guest vocals on Clean Bandit’s forthcoming record ‘New Eyes’, and is about to celebrate the re-release of her Laserbeak- and Ryan Olson-produced debut album on Totally Gross National Product, the label co-owned by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The LP, ‘Lizzobangers’, is 13 tracks of punchy, crunk-laced hip hop with soulful vocal licks and fireball bars that ape Missy and Andre.

You may have noticed I namedropped those two hip-hop juggernauts earlier – that’s because their influence on Lizzo’s sound is undeniable. “Yeah, oh God, so influenced,” she agrees before justifying that although she admires these artists, she never tries to duplicate them. “I refined my style to this nice laser point and that is what makes me – no one can have that laser point. If I did listen to Missy and try to write like her, then there’d be no separating me from her because if you’re trying to be Missy Elliott then you’ll never be yourself.

wacky like a big heart appearing over my head or teardrops coming out of my eyes like in Japanese animation.”

As well as her nutty imagination, Lizzo will also pull lyrical content from everyday life. “Like ‘Batches and Cookies’,” she explains. “I was walking down the street with Sophia and I said that I had a book idea – ‘Get it, Batch’ – and I was like, ‘I got my batches and cookies, girl’. And I was in a bar with my old publicist, who told me: ‘Sucky people marry suckers and they suck’, and I wrote that down! There are lines people say that are amazing and they don’t even realise that could be a song.

“No one just sits and writes a song and says: ‘This is my song about beaver rights’, and then they write a song about beaver rights. That’s contrived. I think that’s the most interesting part of a song – what influences it.”

To gather new experiences and stories for her follow-up record, Lizzo tells me she’ll be moving around a lot and trying “different styles in different environments”. The hardworking woman already spent time in a cabin

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with Olson and ’Beak in January this year getting creative in one extended freestyle session with fellow Minneapolis musicians and label mates Jeremy Nutzman and Isaac Gale. In addition to her solo shtick, Lizzo is still working on Grrrl Prty material, is seeking new collaborations and isn’t showing any sign of letting a single project drop. “Luckily I have an extensive team of people who are making the right decisions,” she grins.

“Like when there should be a Lizzo gig and when there should be a collaborative Grrrl Prty gig. It’s great because Grrrl Prty does have a chance of going massive, but it’s impossible to balance things if you don’t do it with a great team and luckily we have that.”

If it wasn’t for this team of experts Lizzo never would have had time to record the two new tracks that have been added to the re-release of ‘Lizzobangers’ – ‘Love in Maine’ and ‘Paris’. The latter – a gritty number with a raw beat – has been released as a single and aired on an episode of hit HBO series Girls in February. It was an exciting moment for Lizzo, who celebrated with an 18-hour Girls marathon with Sophia. “I fell in love with the show all over again,” she gushes. “I remember the first time I watched it, I was like, ‘oh my God’.

Everyone is relatable and all of your girlfriends act like at least one of them.

It’s amazing. So real!”

While we’re on the topic, I can’t resist another game of ‘Fuck, Marry, Kill’… “Uh oh!” Cries Lizzo before erupting with laughter. “Well, you’ve gotta kill Marnie, God bless her. I would marry Jessa, although I saw what happens when Jessa gets married – she just left. But I’m not that guy and we’d have a lot of fun because we’d travel a lot and not do drugs. Then I would definitely have sex with Hannah, because she obviously gets down.”

It’s been a bizarre journey that I’ve taken with this 20-something rapper from Minneapolis. I’m not quite sure how we got from snuggling up with the Pillsbury Doughboy to getting freaky with Lena Dunham, but that’s just the sort of wild way Lizzo’s eccentric character can end up leading you if you give her time.

Psych Lore Mexican duo Lorelle Meets The Obsolete are contesting the myths of psychedelic rock’n’roll

photographer: fernando nuti / writer: THO M AS M AY

“If music is transcendent, at some point it depends completely on the listener, not on the artist.” These words of Alberto González might seem somewhat at odds with his band’s status within the burgeoning movement of New Psych, for psychedelic music’s utopian vision of escape from the physical has always seemed paramount to its unity as a genre; an ideology as central to its definition as the layers of reverb, drones or the requisite hallucinogens.

That said, it’s a point on which Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s members are in agreement, with the group’s other half, Lorena Quintanilla, elaborating: “I think an artist shouldn’t attempt for transcendence. We as musicians don’t when we write music because we are not trying to change anything. We’re just trying to communicate.”

These sentiments are relayed via email a couple of days after I speak to Alberto on the phone ahead of the group’s European tour in support of their third full-length record, ‘Chambers’. We had been discussing Albert Camus’ essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, a work cited by Lorena as an important touchstone for the group’s music. “I’d say its influence might be all over the record,” she told me, “I always keep coming back to his books on a regular basis, so I think he has influenced us not only in the music but also in how we work as a band.”

Central to Camus’ thesis is the

contention that art should refrain from offering any false sense of unity, clarity, or indeed transcendence. Instead an artist should aim simply to describe the irreconcilable meeting of the human mind, which above all desires rational explanation, and an irrational and chaotic world: that which Camus refers to as ‘the absurd’.

“Our records fit that description in a very precise way,” Lorena explains. “I also really like when Camus describes ‘the absurd’ as ‘this discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are…’” It’s an especially ambiguous description, but one which seems to capture something intangible, some ineffable feeling, in Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s evocative, yet somehow aloof, music. Hailing from Mexico, the group’s music is a heady fusion of expansive psych jams, kosmische repetition, and the ragged bubblegum of garage pop.This is art that continually fragments and distorts known forms only to reconstruct them into something that simultaneously conjures both nostalgia and surreal unease.

And the interaction between these two affects is particularly prominent on ‘Chambers’, the first of the group’s albums to be distributed widely in Europe thanks to London-based label Sonic Cathedral. Towards the end of second track ‘The Myth of the Wise’, for example, the claustrophobic fug of noise recedes to reveal Alberto’s drums,

quoting the instantly recognisable beat first used in The Ronettes’ classic ‘Be My Baby’, only to be subsumed once more by Lorena’s vocals and phasered guitars. “That’s what is very interesting about the first Jesus and Mary Chain album,” Alberto tells me, citing another album which, incidentally, employs this very drum beat, “because it could be a record from the sixties – actually from The Ronettes – but with a lot of noise on the top.That’s very interesting.”

It’s this nuanced approach to past music that should preclude any categorisation of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete as lazy pastiche: rather than simply providing comfort, the halcyon strains of the familiar are made strange through continual processes of recontextualisation and obfuscation. It might seem unfair, then, that the duo have often been placed so neatly into the psych revival movement, a classification encouraged by their performance at last year’s Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia and their contribution to Sonic Cathedral’s influential ‘Psych For Sore Eyes’ compilation. Perhaps surprisingly, however, the duo is decidedly enthusiastic about their place within this community of contemporary psychedelic music. “Last year when we were playing at the Liverpool Psych Fest, I remember Nat from Sonic Cathedral was spinning some records between the bands... It felt like suddenly as if you share a lot of

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background with all these people gathered in this huge festival,” Alberto recalls, marvelling at music’s uncanny ability to draw together otherwise disparate, unconnected lives.

Yet, he is sure to distance New Psych from accusations of retromania or obsolescence: “For me, it’s like every individual has something to offer. If, let’s say, you listened to 13th Floor Elevators and I listened to them as well and both of us make a band, we will have different interpretations of those influences. It’s like every individual is a different filter. So I don’t agree with people who say: ‘I already listened to that band, I liked them more when they were called The Doors, or Pink Floyd’. For me, it always has something new to bring.”

This emphasis on reinvention, over and above invention itself and distinct from simple re-creation, seems central to this duo’s ambitions as artists in the contemporary moment. After all, it’s through this process of deforming and misremembering the past that tracks like ‘The Myth of the Wise’ are able to evoke such complex interactions of construction and destruction, memory and amnesia. Certainly, as both Alberto and Lorena contest, this music isn’t transcendent; rather, the seductive mystique of Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s work arises directly from its very failure to transcend those spectres of the musical past that continue to haunt and define its entire fabric.

3650 Days of Static…

A decade in music, the hard way photographer: D ANNY PA YN E / writer: REE F Y O UN I S

Less a debut and more a salvo of barracking guitar noise, glitching electronics and foundation-shaking percussion, it’s almost a decade since 65daysofstatic emerged with the ‘The Fall of Math’. It quickly became their calling card, and a relentless trinity of sound that’s doggedly endured over the last ten years. Set to enjoy a second life in the form of a long-demanded vinyl release, and a handful of commemorative March live shows that’ll see ‘The Fall of Math’ performed in its entirety alongside a mirror set of more contemporary material, it’s a celebratory bookend for the partisan fans that have backed the band through the good and the bad.

See, 65days have forged their reputation by doing it the hard way.

There’ve been no hypemachines, no handouts and no shortage of harsh lessons over the course of the band’s chastening history. From navigating the myriad of industry pitfalls to apathetic label troubles, they’ve made a career out of slipping through the cracks. “We know how lucky we are just to be hanging on with the current state of everything,” founder member, guitarist, keyboardist and sort-of frontman, Paul Wolinski half-laughs, “but there’s something about being in a band when you start out and that forced naivety of brainwashing yourself. We wanted to be the biggest band in the world even though we were playing this weird instrumental music. I’d still love for that to happen but it’s been tempered by a decade of being in 65days and the realities of that. We’ve played some huge arenas, big festivals and, on occasion, had 20,000 people in front of us, so it’s good to know we’re capable of pulling off shows like that.You do lose a lack of intimacy but it also makes you appreciate just how good shows to a few hundred people can be.”

It’s no doubt a familiar story for swathes of young musicians plotting their bold mission statements and dreaming of what they’ll splurge their

first advance on. For the majority, it’s a pipedream, and the grim realities and the grind of gruelling touring schedules faces those not given a fasttrack past the toilet venues.

“We’ve never really had that choice,” says Wolinski, “but a lot of bands that started out the same time as us have fallen by the wayside because they just can’t keep it going at the notquite-breakthrough level. It takes a lot out of you and it is frustrating when bands who start a few years later sail past you and climb up festival bills, but we remember that we have this dedicated following of people who’ve never really cared what we’re classed as, and that we’re still here. That feels like a much sturdier foundation.

Someone else might have a house because they got a big publishing advance but no one remembers they even existed. We’ve never had the chance to give in to that temptation.”

We move onto the subject of the glut of tags that have tracked the band since that debut storm of post-rock instrumentation, heavy guitars, and jagged, slashing electronica. Carrying the weight of post-rock, math-rock, experimental rock, electronic (sic), for a band more focused on driving in a different direction with each release, there was always a sense that these Post-its were as reductive as they were referential.

“It is frustrating and we probably did ourselves no favours having this multi-syllable name when we started out,” admits Wolinski. “There are a lot of bands under the shadow of Mogwai and what they did with ‘Young Team’

and ‘Come on Die Young’ but we always felt we were chasing At the Drive In, or And You Will Know us By the Trail of Dead… but doing something electronic too. It was always a surprise when we got called post-rock but then we don’t have any lyrics, and we’ve got a really long idiosyncratic name.

“We used to spend a lot of time trying to escape that whole scene because we didn’t want to get pigeonholed but now I don’t really care. I’d just like them to check in with the new record. It’s like, I didn’t hear Trail of Dead’s last record and I loved that band for years, but I sort of assume I know what it’ll sound like, and that’s kind of hypocritical of me, because people could easily do the same with our music without taking the time to listen and hear it’s moved on. If you listen to someone like Tim Hecker and Haxan Cloak, there are people doing noisier, stranger stuff but I guess we’re a more user-friendly version of that… our own little party that not many people come to.”

It’s a party that felt like it was gaining momentum with last year’s release of ‘Wild Light’, though – an album that gloriously delivered on 65daysofstatic’s longstanding ability to create music of heft and depth.

Energised by the band’s characteristic ferocity, it was a record continuously re-charging and threatening collapse at any moment but it also displayed a complexity and subtlety that allowed the album narrative to emerge. “I’m glad you said that because that was definitely one of the aims,” Wolinski

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smiles. “The big difference this time was that although we wrote upwards of 50 songs in various states of completion before we went to the studio, we ditched everything apart from the eight songs that ended up on the record and decided that for better or worse, they would be it. At that point we knew that ‘Heat Death Infinity Splitter’ had to be at the beginning and ‘Safe Passage’ had to be at the end.

Although a few tracks got switched around during the mixing process, it was basically the record we’d thought it was going to be and it was really exciting to force ourselves to do it this way. I’m as bad as anyone else for skipping tracks but I think it’s an art form, and a great idea to have a collage of songs hinged around an idea. It doesn’t have to be a concept record, just broad strokes, and I think that helped focus the album in terms of making it a complete thing.”

Rewind to 2010 and the band weren’t feeling so content. In an intense seven-day blitz, they recorded their fourth album,‘WeWere Exploding Anyway’, and although it marked a more overt step towards the electronic side of the group’s split dynamic, record label troubles set them back in more ways than one. Wolinski explains: “The last proper record we did before ‘Wild Light’ was ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ and we didn’t have the greatest relationship with the label [Hassle] because it felt like they dropped the ball quite a lot. It also felt like we had to work really hard just to maintain the ground we’d already made instead of taking advantage of the exposure of moving to a new label.

It was a bad experience and we happily avoided the music industry for a few years. Then in those few years everything got harder and things like touring have become more expensive so we were very apprehensive about re-entering the industry.

“And then I suppose ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ was uncomfortable because maybe we were prototyping

the idea of getting off our traditional instruments. I came from the programming side first but the other three came from drums, bass and guitar so, as a band, it was a difficult thing to force ourselves to do. The album definitely had more of a programming aesthetic but it also helped us break down barriers because we became more comfortable using more instruments.

“It was definitely more of a production change as opposed to the actual writing, and also the record before that [‘The Destruction of Small Ideas’] was made without thinking about the live show. We couldn’t play half of it, which made it really unsatisfying trying to make it work so, ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’, that whole record, was written to make a great live show.”

It brings us back to the ‘The Fall of Math’ shows and the reasoning behind the decision to track back to their debut at a time when ‘Wild Light’ is still resonating with fans. “The four of us were immediately sceptical about the idea and of lapsing into nostalgia,” says Wolinski. “Just doing ‘The Fall of Math’ from start to finish felt a bit too

specialised and this idea was suggested to us around the time ‘Wild Light’ was getting released and we were really excited about it and we just didn’t want it to feel like stepping back. There was a lot of internal indecision and we agonised over it but we decided we could do it as long as there was a second set. The idea then became that everyone could listen to ‘The Fall of Math’ and enjoy it but then the second set will remind everyone of what we’re about now.

“I think there’s also that thing that if bands that I love had announced something like this, I’d be dead excited, so I understand it on some abstract level but we find it very hard to see ourselves like that.We wrote that record not knowing what we were doing, like all bands who write their first records, so it’s flattering that people hear in that record what I hear in the debut albums of all the bands I love.”

It’s an offhand comment but one that seems to underline 65daysofstatic’s overriding attitude to the decade since ‘The Fall of Math’s initial release, and the l3 years the band has been active.

There’s pride in what they’ve accomplished and a sufficiency in the

way they’ve done it but nostalgia doesn’t have a natural place. “No, it doesn’t really,” Wolinski laughs. “I’m really proud of everything we’ve done, even ‘The Destruction of Small Ideas’, because that’s the one I’ve got the biggest problem with. Although I’m proud of the songs we wrote on that, I think the way we went about making that record was questionable. As a bunch of records, and as a band, I really like how [the last ten years] shows an evolution, but hopefully a lot of sidesteps as well as forward steps.

We realised quite early on we wanted to be one of those bands that genuinely tries something different with each record instead of refining the same sound over and over again.

“I don’t mean that to sound derogatory but take Godspeed You! Black Emperor, for example. I love that band and think the last record is as good as some of their other stuff but they’re just refining that one big idea they’ve got to this razor sharp point. I don’t think we found what we we’re looking for soon enough in our history to become that kind of band because we were too restless.”

On 20 September 2004,

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65daysofstatic arrived with the message: ‘How shall we leave this dead-dog town? With the volume up and the windows down?’. Ten years on, they haven’t taken over the world but theirs is still a legacy of Richter scale ambition. “We’ve only ever played ATP once because I don’t think we’re that cool but the one time we did play was when they opened it up to the fans to choose and we were number one in the poll. There’s been lots of little moments like that where there’s all these cliques and boundaries that have been put in place, not out of malice, just in the way the industry works. It’s been quite hard over the last decade to move between them but it’s also great we’ve been able to do that for so long. There was one period where we ended up playing Sonisphere and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in the same week,” Wolinski laughs. “One day we we’re surrounded by metal bands and winning over that crowd then a few days later, we’re in Edinburgh soundtracking some contemporary dance from behind a curtain. There’s something oddly satisfying about doing two things so at odds.”

Touching

Following her introspective debut album of 2011, EMA takes on the Internet and a disconcerting level of fame photogr a ph e r: Ga bri e l gr ee n / writ e r: S am walton

The far corner of the back room in the Sebright Arms is the place EMA – or Erika Michelle Anderson to the State Legislature of South Dakota – decides it would be best to talk. Its sole advantage: at 6:30pm on a brisk Tuesday evening the room, its yellowing walls overcrowded with anonymous jumble-sale photographs in gilt-edge frames, is dimly lit and totally empty. One gets the impression that’s just the way Anderson likes it.

For while she acknowledges that she isn’t famous in the eyes of the general public – “I don’t want to say famous,” she winces even as she says the f-word, “so let’s say ‘more known’” – Anderson has already felt the need to retreat: in the three years that have

passed since she released her remarkably candid debut, ‘Past Life Martyred Saints’, she has felt unexpectedly exposed. “Initially, it wasn’t as if I was planning for anyone to hear those songs,” she explains of her first solo record, which took in themes of domestic abuse, self-harm and premature death over alternating blasts of strategically catastrophic guitar and quiet resignation. “And all the subsequent discussion of them left me feeling very ambivalent about being known, about having people know what I look like and having people read about me. I started feeling very dissociated.”

That’s not to say she’s the withdrawing type at all – in our hour

together, plenty of topics and tangents are cheerfully examined and discussed with heartfelt candour – but simply that she’s learned not to overshare: several times during the interview she halts mid-sentence and begins an entirely new train of thought without missing a beat, as if her brain is thirty seconds ahead of her mouth and has already encountered a fenced-off area.

She gracefully evades questions about any specifics of her life, preferring to talk more about ideas and hypotheticals.

The most she gives away is an admission of regret about the ‘Past Life Martyred Saints’ tour: “If I’d have had more ability to express myself while things were happening, rather than just keep going and be strong, things

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might’ve been different,” she says.

“There were moments on that tour where if I’d said, ‘hang on, I need a minute, this is fucking with me’ it might have been better for me than trying to be all stiff-upper-lip.” Within five seconds of this, though, Anderson has changed the subject.

But the conversational wariness doesn’t come across as diva-ish. It feels more a symptom of an overwhelming desire on Anderson’s part not to make a fuss or become self-indulgent, an innate stoicism derived from growing up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, geographically dead centre of the US and cheerfully referred to by locals as The Great Empty Heart of America.

There, in the belly of the mid-west,

The Void says Anderson, “wanting certain things – wanting money, wanting power – is really frowned upon. Individuality is frowned upon, standing out from the crowd or ambition is frowned upon, and you’ve got to just be happy with the simple things in life.” And despite, on the face of it, appearing to be a fairly non-conformist citizen of Sioux Falls – rock singer, independently minded, excitingly mouthy, escaped to LA and latterly to Portland, Oregon – Anderson’s hard-wired instinct for Doing What People Think She Should has deep roots. “All I know is that becoming better known made me uncomfortable, and I didn’t feel like I could express that at the time,” she says, running her index finger around the bass of her glass, “because everything was going great – this is what people want, isn’t it? They want to be known!”

Of course, just because it’s what people want, it’s not necessarily what Anderson wants. “Well, y’know, I’m just figuring that out now!” she smiles, warmly. “And that’s probably in some ways why the sound on this new record is a little bit more aggressive: it’s a little bit fuck-you, a little bit like leave-me-alone.”

That new record is ‘The Future’s Void’, deliberately ambiguous in title (“the sort of thing you’d say if you wanted to sound cool,” explains Anderson playfully, “or you could spray-paint on the side of a wall”) but otherwise admirably direct: a sense of fractured, apocalyptic fragility hangs over its ten tracks via overdriven guitar, squally electronics and quietly desperate torch songs, all united by Anderson’s vocals, which alternate between uncomfortably unadorned addresses and blown-out guttural purges. Lyrically, too, the record pulls few punches. Anderson’s new-found pre-occupation with what people know about her spills into meditations on the internet and how its tentacles are encroaching ever further into our lives, and angry-sad think-pieces on the ever-more-digital future and how the media deals with celebrity deaths.

Particularly noticeable is ‘The Future’s Void’’s sense of communality, compared to Anderson’s debut. Where ‘Past Life Martyred Saints’’s introspective confessionals occasionally made for uncomfortable listening (“I wish that every time he

touched me left a mark,” went that record’s most coruscating line), Anderson is now in full rabble-rousing mode: the darker recesses of her psyche have been reined back to occasional spatters rather than broad strokes, and state-of-the-nation style manifestos are front and centre. “‘Past Life…’ was very much ‘I-I-I, you-youyou,’ and with this one, it’s ‘we’ and ‘us’,” explains Anderson when it’s suggested that there’s less of herself in the new album. “So I’m not totally writing about myself directly, sure, but I’m still there. If you listen to ‘Past Life…’, though, I’m saying whatever the fuck I like because I’m totally anonymous. But the more well known you are,” she reiterates, “the less free you can be.”

The one thing that is consistent across the two records, though, is Anderson’s unfaltering ear for a simple, almost folky melody. No matter how ravaged the production becomes on ‘The Future’s Void’ – and at points, where percussion is provided by the scraping of metal on metal and rattling of chains, it’s an intense listen – Anderson is always on hand with an earworm to soften the assault.

Alongside the stoicism, it’s another element of her music forged in Sioux Falls: “In South Dakota, when I was growing up, there was constant classicrock radio and oldies radio, so that’s where my thing for total melody comes in,” she confesses. “I’m sure I could name obscurer or cooler or punker things, which all did come, but really, one of my favourite things is just to turn on the radio and drive my car along these long, straight gravel roads.”

For all its underlying classicism, though, EMA’s new record is a brazenly and rather confrontationally modern album, with lines directly about computer usage cropping up in several songs, deliberately to disconcert. “It’s completely common language now, sure, but ‘click on a link’ or whatever still feels slightly taboo to put into a rock song,” Anderson reflects with a grin. “I’ve always been interested in rules and boundaries that people push up against – like, that shouldn’t be in a song, wait!” It’s a technique that adds to the uneasiness of the record, a sense that’s further augmented by the album’s general theme of runaway digital surveillance and social web mistrust. And although Anderson

wrote the bulk of the songs before any revelations about the National Security Agency surfaced last summer, she acknowledges the eerie timing. “I didn’t start out trying to write a topical record about the Internet or whatever – that was just what I was thinking about at the time,” she explains of her initial writing sessions. “I had this feeling that there are all these photos of me and articles about me online.

There was an exorbitant amount of data that anyone could have access to and all these things computers can do to parse your data that we can’t, and I just wanted to address that feeling.”

Again, Anderson stops and checks herself, as if worried that all of sudden she’s going to paint herself into some hermit Luddite corner. “But I’m not trying to have some sort of didactic thing where I’m like ‘ooh, the Internet is bad’ or ‘technology is bad’,” she insists. “I’m just trying to remind myself and other people that there’s a choice of how much you engage with it. When I first read about the whole NSA thing, the main thing that got me is that people don’t realise how it’s going to affect them until after it does.”

That idea of not knowing the reality of something until you’re experiencing it first hand is a recurring trend for Anderson, and lends a strong flavour to her music: for all the meaty, carefully planned production on ‘The Future’s Void’, there’s also a frequent and often disarmingly intimate sense of the present. Anderson again puts that down to her no-nonsense upbringing: “Because I have this whole mid-western stoic thing, I don’t always know how I’m feeling until the moment I’m over my limit,” she admits. “And with songwriting, I won’t know how I’m feeling until I write or even sing a song. I try and preserve as many improvised lyrics as possible and do it in one take – if you can have it be coherent, I think that’s really beautiful. You can hear an immediacy in the tone of the voice, someone really telling you something rather than acting or performing,” she says, ever the honest realist, prospontaneity, anti-artifice. “It’s just me telling you how I’m feeling.”

The potential drawback to this approach is that it can be frustrating for Anderson to have to wait to see if she’s in the zone. “There are just some days when I feel like I can do it, and others

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where I just want to hide, but that’s how it is,” she says, pragmatically.

“Some days I’ll be like ‘yeah, fuck yeah, bring it on, I’m gonna do this!’, and then some days where it’s like, ‘oh my god I’m going to cry’. But overcoming that anxiety was one of the reasons I moved Portland: because nobody knew me. When I was in LA and Oakland, I went to shows all the time and was part of a scene, but now I feel like there’s a freedom in obscurity.”

There’s that thought again: the desire to disappear, or at least retreat, to maintain a distance and be alone. It feels totally interwoven not just in Anderson’s music, but also in her mind. Her ingrained stoicism stops her from stopping herself, and so she compensates by taking occasional but decisive steps out of the arena. Is she okay with that, as a personality trait, given that she’s also trying to be a performer and a public voice? As the room starts to fill up with post-work drinkers she visibly appears more aware of her own speech, hunching into the tape recorder to talk more quietly. “I’m just trying to emotionally process it all, I guess,” she says, tentatively. “Here’s an example: I tweet less the more followers I get. I just like the idea of being cult, keeping things cult. I don’t want world domination. I just want to be an artist.”

And therein lies the paradox of being EMA: the instinct for solitude and creative purity increases in direct correlation with her popularity. Then again, muses Anderson with a chuckle, this could just be a dark patch. “At the moment, I’m thinking about the albums more like a trilogy – the third one hasn’t been written yet – and this current one’s the dark sequel. It’s like The Empire Strikes Back, or The Godfather II.” She pauses, enjoying the conceit. “The dark one. This is the one where all the shit goes down.” By extension, then, does that mean the next EMA album will suffer from an overlong gestation period and feature a disappointingly half-arsed blast at populism? “Who knows?” Anderson laughs, although there’s a feeling that she’s telling the truth: given her current feeling towards wider recognition, perhaps a third EMA album of any flavour will be an achievement. Anderson, of all people, seems least likely to know what’s about to emerge from her own void.

Sealed with a twist As Metronomy release their 4th album, ‘Love Letters’, Joe Mount considers his career so far, from hustling in Brighton to escaping to Paris, to his new record’s unconventional appropriation of the popular love song photographer: Phil sharp / writer: stuart stubbs

In November 2008, I travelled to Paris to interview Metronomy for what many probably consider to be issue 1 of Loud And Quiet. We spent most of the day in a television studio that resembled a nightclub named after an element (Fire, or Liquid, or, simply, Element), on the set of Ce soir ou Jamais – a sleek arts programme. Oliver Stone was there. Metronomy performed ‘Heart Rate Rapid’ on the late-night live broadcast. Stone walked off halfway through the song.

Everything has changed since then.

Paris is now home for Joe Mount, who last year became a father for the first time. The group of childhood friends that seemed so entrenched in ’08 (Mount, his cousin Oscar Cash and their friend Gabriel Stebbing) lasted just another 6 months when Stebbing announced his departure from the group to concentrate on his own music. The following month, Metronomy became a full band, with Gbenga Adelekan replacing Stebbing on bass guitar and Anna Prior becoming the project’s first live

drummer. The pound-shop lights glued to black T-shirts were phased out with the semaphore dancing.

Metronomy was no longer 3 blokes behind 3 keyboards. It’s probably exactly what the group needed before the charm turned in on itself.

In 2008, after years spent shaking off a record deal that produced Metronomy’s 2006 debut album ‘Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe)’, ‘Nights Out’ became the group’s breakthrough record, universally acclaimed and still, in my mind,

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Joe Mount’s masterpiece. It was the following ‘The English Riviera’ that would prove to be his biggest hit, though – a meticulously constructed record of electronic AOR, popular enough for the radio and smart enough to make the Mercury Award shortlist in 2011.

In February and March 2014, I travelled first to Brighton on the day of Metronomy’s first show in 2 years and then to Kingston-Upon-Thames, a week before the release of the band’s fourth album, ‘Love Letters’.

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“‘Nights Out’ was the last record I made that was trying to be cool” loudandquiet.com

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aris has always been good to Joe Mount, but Brighton put in the hard work first. It’s where he went to university and where he is once again based whenever he’s in the country. We meet in a café at the end of his street. He tells me he’s feeling nervous about the evening’s show.

“When I first moved here [from his childhood home in Totnes, Devon] I was much braver. I was really proactive. There was a nightclub they had here – and until I came to Brighton I’d never been to a nightclub – so I got this flyer and was like, ‘this is my kind of thing – I should go down there and try to get a DJ gig.’ So I went down there at 11pm, when the club opened, to say hello and give them a CDR, and that’s pretty brave. And I’d go into Rounder Records [the local, renowned record shop that closed in 2012] and give a CD to the guy who specialised in electronic music. Like, what the fuck is going to happen? You’ve given a CD to a guy in a record shop! But I was trying to get the name out there, and in the end, in that club [Sabbath], I ended up working on the door for beers and they’d have some pretty good people coming down – people on Skam [Records] and one of the guys from Autechre and Andrew Weatherall – and basically the peak of that was that this club released an EP and my track (‘The 3rd’, from ‘Pip Paine…’) was on it, and Andrew Weatherall started his set with my song! I was on the door, but I was allowed to go in to hear my track, and that was the first time I heard my music in a club, and it was Andrew Weatherall playing it.”

Mount – like most 18-year-olds do – was stalling for time at Brighton University. He’d bought himself 3 more years to hawk around his music and develop his fledgling solo project while masquerading as student of ‘Music and Visual Art’, a course title he hesitates to share with me. “The humiliating thing was that I didn’t even get on the course,” he says. “I got my art teacher to write a grovelling letter and then on the first day I was like, ‘okay, this class is full of fucking

idiots! Why have I had to go through the humiliation of getting my teacher to harangue the lecturer? Look! There’s a guy over there listening to drum’n’bass.’ I was surrounded by those kind of people where if you tried to do something genuinely artistic you had the feeling they were sniggering at you.”

Mount managed to make ‘Pip Paine…’ and leave Brighton for London, where he fell in with the right crowd. For a time he slept where he worked, at a recording studio in Milo Cordell’s garden. Cordell went on to form The Big Pink, but in 2006 his main concern was Merok Records and releasing singles for Klaxons, Crystal Castles and The Teenagers – “the glory days,” says Mount. “It’s kind of funny because ‘Nights Out’ was the record I made in London, when I was trying to be totally up to date with everything, trying to compete with people making music. So, I had the studio at Milo’s and Jamie from Klaxons was living there. Milo was putting out Crystal Castles, The Teenagers used to be there, and I, at that point, wasn’t cool.

Klaxons were getting loads of coverage, The Teenagers were the coolest band in the world, so they were around and that was the last record that I made that was trying to be cool. Since then, when I moved away, suddenly without that focus and competitive surroundings, I felt a lot more comfortable doing what took my fancy. I mean, I want to be relevant, but it’s been nice to leave London and not know what’s going on, and realise there’s a world outside of that. But if you want to make music, or do anything, move to London to get started. That’s where the competition is and where you’ll be spurred on to do stuff.

“I get the willies a bit if I go to London now, because it changes so quickly – if you live there you know exactly if it’s acceptable to go to, say, [Shoreditch bar] Jaguar Shoes: sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not.

And now I have no idea. That’s kind of refreshing but it also gives me the willies to not know what’s going on.

As soon as you step out of that it’s pretty intimidating.”

I understand where Joe is coming from, but it’s not as if he’s moved to the remote countryside, or even to a smaller town within the UK – he’s an Englishman in Paris. It’s a beautiful city, but one that torments the outsider with twisted glee, where you’ll cause more offence by attempting to speak the language than not. Musicians are so often solitary creatures, though, and as Mount reassures: “I’m not out trying to make friends or trying to get a job in a French shop.”

Metronomy are popular in France, to the same extent that they are here in the UK, by Mount’s reckoning. “But in France they don’t think that I spend a lot of time there,” he says, “so if people see me it’s a bit of a novelty. If I go and do something like sit on a bench on my own in the middle of Paris there’s a pretty high chance that someone might recognise me and think that it looks pathetic, and that in a way has made me feel a bit self-conscious.

Now I’ve got my baby, it’s fine; I can walk around. But there’s a few people in Paris, like Jarvis Cocker, who I think has a similar existence there. I know him now. I see him on the Eurostar and once I was getting off and going straight to a party and he arrived at the party a few minutes later.”

Followed by Pete Doherty.

Joe frowns. “My impression of the P-Doe – ha! do people call him that or have I just come up with a really good name for him? – is that he lives in Belleville [a suitably hip area of the city] or somewhere. Where I live, it’s a bit old for me. People are on their second child.”

I ask Joe if it was a bummer when Stebbing told him he was leaving the band. For all the to and fro about whether Metronomy are a group or a solo project (something that is still going on today, with Mount no closer to an definitive answer himself), they seemed so tight as trio of old friends in 2008.

“He’s a bummer!” says Mount with mock petulance. “I knew the day would come, because he’s a musician

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and a songwriter, so I knew he’d want to do his own thing, and he was only doing my thing as a favour to me, and then it got picked up so it became a way to make a bit of money. But when he told me it was sad, because I never wanted to be in a band with lineup changes, but I guess you can’t help that. So me and Oscar thought instead of fumbling on and getting in someone else, it’d be a much more confident, proactive move to scrap the way of doing things and do something new.

The most annoying thing was that we had such a short amount of time to sort it all out, but we’d already felt that the three of us standing there with keyboards wasn’t going to cut it for much longer.”

S

tebbing went on to form easy listening band Your Twenties, and later the solo project Night Works; Mount moved to Paris and made ‘The English Riviera’.

If ‘Nights Out’ had been his attempt at cool, his follow up was him buffeting again the preconceived notion that he was a fad. He tells me: “There are a lot of people who are quite cynical in England, and I’m one of these people, and if you make music like I do… I get preoccupied sometimes thinking that people have misunderstood me, and that they don’t think I have any inherent skill in what I do – a ‘bedroom producer’, anyone can do that. I’ve always felt offended by the idea that there’s nothing in what I do that’s unique or special. That’s never been the general opinion, but when I was making ‘The English Riviera’, part of me was trying to show people that I could make a really good sounding record and a record that could connect with people in a bigger way than ‘Nights Out’. Obviously it would be horrible for that to be the idea behind making the record, but all I mean is that the kind of success that that record

had, I always imagined that would happen with ‘Nights Out’ and with ‘Pip Paine…’.”

Mount says that while ‘The English Riviera’’s recognition from the Mercury Prize in 2011 was welcome, he’d expected both of his preceding albums to win the award in their respective years. Oscar Cash was certain ‘The English Riviera’ would win once it had made the shortlist; Joe says he knew it would go to PJ Harvey.

I read him highlights from an email I’d been forwarded by his Press Officer from BBC Radio 6 Music DJ Marc Riley. In it, Riley declares his love and respect for Mount by mapping out Metronomy’s career so far with all the enthusiasm of a fan’s first mega crush.

‘From the first album – and in particular ‘Trick or Treatz’ – Joe’s natural pop genius was apparent.

In Pip Paine he made one of the greatest ever wonky bedroom albums. A bedroom album that makes sitting still impossible… ‘Nights Out’ was like nothing else. In literary terms – if ‘Pip Paine...’ was Joe’s first well received short story then ‘Nights Out’ was his extraordinary first novel. Full of hit records that would have been hit

records if only radio stations didn’t have cloth ears. ‘Heartbreaker’ is one of the greatest pop songs of all time… ‘The English Riviera’ is Joe’s blockbuster. It’s the perfect modern pop record.

When people hear ‘The Look’ in years to come they’ll know exactly what they were doing when they heard it first… Joe is the most talented pop music writer of his generation. I think each of his albums are joined only by one thing…his genius. I honestly think Joe is a genius… It’s already Joseph Mount 1 – everybody else 0.’

Joe laughs, but not as awkwardly as I feared he would. I suspect he might agree with the sentiment, if not the hyperbole. But where does this leave ‘Love Letters’?

“In the scheme of the other records, this one is me trying to distil what makes a song down to its purest form. It’s more minimal and lyrically I’m getting more comfortable with lyrics and I’m beginning to see the value of them and the fun you can have with them. I think some people who liked ‘Nights Out’ might have liked the last record but maybe they thought it was a concession to the mainstream.

With each record I’m trying to build up this knowledge that can inform the next record.”

J

oe Mount is a chatty guy, and I easily digress, so in Brighton we run out of time. Joe had told me that he was nervous to be playing “a few new songs”. The band ends up playing everything from ‘Love Letters’, save for one track. It was an impressive first show in two years, with the hits reminding everyone exactly why they fell in love with Metronomy whenever they did. ‘Heartbreaker’ sounds like it might actually be the best pop song of all time. ‘Side Two’ from ‘Nights Out’, and ‘Black Eye/Burnt Thumb’ from ‘Pip Paine…’ declare that the group still revels in the skewed as much as the straight-up pop of ‘The Bay’ and ‘The Look’.

The pound-shop lights would look strange now, Gbenga Adelekan and Anna Prior missed if it were anyone else up there. Michael Lovett has been added to the live group also – a man known as NZCA/Lines and the brother of Gabriel Stebbing. The five of them wear impeccable matching burgundy suits, by London tailors Beggars Run. “So much of personality is carried through clothes,” Mount told me in Brighton. “It’s nice to have a uniform to make everyone equal.” He likens it to a school uniform, and notes that it unifies the group, making them an inclusive band, not Joseph Mount and bunch of other musicians.

Five weeks after Brighton, I meet Joe in Kingston-Upon-Thames where Metronomy are playing two shows in the evening, for all ages at 6pm and for +18s afterwards. ‘Love Letters’ is out in a week, which means that a majority of its reviews have already been published. Joe has read them all. He tells me that ‘retro futurist’ is a term that keeps coming up, incorrectly, as far as he’s concerned. A French journalist first came up with it in relation to how ‘Love Letters’ takes Mount’s electronics and adds elements of Motown in favour of ‘The English Riviera’’s nods to Fleetwood Mac and yacht rock. “To which I replied, ‘no, if anything it’s retro present-ist,’” says Mount. “It’s not that crazy.”

“I’ve been trying so fucking hard to control the image,” he says as we sit on the Thames bank. “Since I last saw you it’s been a battle. Like, if you reach this point, it’s like, ‘right, now I’ve got

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no excuses, I’ve been in the game long enough to know that when someone tells me something has to happen that, no, it doesn’t. I’ve been trying to be a lot more dogged at approving stuff and if we’re not happy saying we’re not happy. The suits have helped with that, because last night me and Oscar were doing this radio session at half 10 and these radio stations, I don’t know why, but they always want to film you now. Like, what the fuck, you’re the radio, what’s happened? But last night I realised that our suits had gone back to the hotel, and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, but the suits have gone; it’s our fault but you can’t film it’, and they were like, ‘oh, really?’, and there’s the camera man there, and I was like, ‘no, sorry’, and I’ve never done that before.

But it makes you realise that of course you can say that. If they have the hump it’s only because they’re trying to broaden their social network bullshit.

It’s not the end of the world.”

Joe has also spent the last 5 weeks giving interviews, and has found that most people want to discuss one thing – how ‘Love Letters’ was recorded (analogue rather than with computers). In Brighton he’d told me that he’d done so to make it an album completely produced in the studio, and because for a lot of people his age computers are still cheating. It had been the plan for ‘The English Riviera’ but he’d ended up finishing a lot off in the mixing room, as he had when recording at home. “The whole way it was recorded is very important to how the record sounds, but it’s not necessarily something I care enough about to make a big deal about,” he says in Kingston. “But if people want to talk about it, that’s fine with me.”

I want to talk about how melancholic ‘Love Letters’ is, at a time when I imagine Joe, a new father, to be at his most fulfilled. The title track thumps four-to-the-floor, preachy, joyous Tamla Motown and ‘Month of Sundays’ recalls sun-pissed Arthur Lee & Love, but even on these more upbeat spots Mount’s vocals quiver as if there’s something in his eye. The snakecharming organ of ‘Monstrous’ recreates that ominous feeling of video games in the dark; ‘The Most Immaculate Haircut’ (a slow waltz about Connan Mockasin’s hair, and originally intended as a Mount/ Mockasin duet) feels all the more obsessive for its muted middle section scored by crickets and a swimming pool; the opening track is called ‘The Upsetter’. But, then, Metronomy’s music has always carried with it an underlying discontent and ennui. For ‘Nights Out’, Mount was sleeping at the studio because he’d recently split

up with his girlfriend. ‘The English Riviera’ was largely misunderstood as a love letter of its own, to Mount’s childhood home on the Devon coast, when, really, it was the work of a man trying to reimagine where he grew up as somewhere far more interesting.

“Listen to [‘Love Letters’] at the height of summer and you’ll have a different view of it,” he says. “The last record that I really got into was the Kendrick Lamar album, and the feel of that record is quite sombre and intense and murky, but if you listen to it on a beautiful day it sounds amazing and very different. But I think the feel of melancholy is actually quite nice. It’s not depression, it’s whimsical and it’s quite an easy emotion for everyone to relate to.

“Of course bits of the record are autobiographical,” he says, “but the bits that’s you probably think are sad bits, that’s like taking an idea and running with it. ‘Never Wanted’ is pretty based in reality; the rest are based on ideas and feelings. If you take the experience of being away from a girlfriend or a loved one, travelling around, which is basically what you do in a band, you decide that instead of writing a song about some wicked after party in Brazil that there’s more material in the sadder stuff. Just ask LMFAO… although they did do pretty well from the good times. But you take the more meaty stuff and run with it.”

‘Love Letters’ has a theme (essentially homesickness) rather than a concept that competes with ‘The English Riviera’ and ‘Nights Out’.

“When I started to make the record I decided that I didn’t want the same thing as before, where you end up getting distracted talking about Devon,” says Mount. “I enjoy talking about Devon, but it shifted the focus too much. I knew that I wanted a theme of travelling and feeling dislocated from friends and family, but I didn’t want to write a concept record about touring.

“Part of my shtick is to try and keep albums relevant and important, because that’s the reason I got into music and albums. I find it very lazy when people say that the album is dead as a format, because, well, you’re not making or listening to good enough albums then. There’s something that you can do in a 45-minute/hour long record that you can only do in that format. I feel like it’s important to do something within that space of time, and if what you choose to do is bung a collection of songs together without any context, it could just be on shuffle. To keep records relevant and interesting you have to have something – the new

Wild Beasts record [‘Present Tense’] has a production and sound and atmosphere that gives it the purpose of being a record, where if you listen to a pop record that has several producers involved, it won’t have that.”

Joe grew up in a literary household, where his father was a writer and his sister was good with words also. In spite of that, and to some degree because of it, writing lyrics was always his chore. Only one track on ‘Pip Paine…’ (‘Trick or Treatz’) features vocals, and even then they’re swathed in black static. For the following ‘Nights Out’, Mount was cajoled by his label into writing a few more songs with words. By ‘The English Riviera’, though, there wasn’t a single twisted instrumental to be seen, and there’s just the one (‘Boy Racer’) on ‘Love Letters’. “The one thing I really wanted to do [on this record] was write lyrics where attention had been paid to them,” says Mount. For a while says he considered collaborating with a Van Dyke Parks figure (the 1960s composer and singer-songwriters who’s worked with Brian Wilson, Rufus Wainwright and Grizzly Bear), “to try to get someone who had this confidence with writing, so I could feel comfortable singing someone else’s

words.” But I find it hard to believe that Joe would be able to relinquish such a large part of a Metronomy album to someone else.

“After ‘The English Riviera’ there were some songs that I thought had good lyrics and some that I thought had bad lyrics,” he says, “and the ones that were bad, it was only because I hadn’t tried hard enough. A song like ‘The Bay’ could have had more going on. When I was writing that song, I was thinking of things that were more interesting than how it ended up being. I realised that I’d been dumbing myself down a bit.”

The Van Dyke Parks idea, Mount insists, is still good for Metronomy’s next record. And working with a producer. That I find even more unbelievable, and when I ask him why now he laughs, “Because I’ve run out of ideas.”

“No, it’s because there were a number of things that have made me make the different records I’ve made, like little self-satisfying achievements like using a studio and then making an album onto tape, and I feel like whatever it was that I wanted to prove to myself, or Mojo magazine, I’ve done.

Whatever that was, I feel really happy that on my own steam I’ve got to four

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albums and none of them have been shit – they’ve all been interesting for different reasons. I’ve achieved something now and whatever happens on the next record there will be a load taken off because people will be interested. And also it’s crazy to think that other people can’t enhance what you do.

“Unless I’m totally wrong, I think this one is going to do better than the last one,” he ventures. “For me, that’s perfect and sums up how crazy careers in music can be, because this one has a lot in common with ‘Pip Paine…’ and if this record is the one that goes furthest it’ll give me faith in what’s still possible in music. It’s my ‘In Utero’, and everyone knows that ‘In Utero’ is better than ‘Nevermind’.”

Reviews / Albums

08/10

Damon Albarn Everyday Robots Par l o p h on e / EMI By s t uart s tu bb s. In store s Apri l 28

Taking Blur’s ‘Leisure’ as a starting point, it’s taken Damon Albarn 22 years and a couple of false starts to reach his hands-down debut solo album. In 2003, he released ‘Democrazy’, a collection of 14 songs in various states of completion, recorded in isolated hotel rooms as Blur toured ‘Think Tank’. But ‘Democrazy’ didn’t count – it was exclusively released on 10-inch picture vinyl, Gorillaz nabbed the best tracks for ‘Demon Days’ and Pitchfork gave it a 3.2. ‘Dr Dee’ faired slightly better in 2012, at least in the eyes of the people who admired the balls of a record so selfinterested as to be based on the life of Queen Elizabeth I’s medical adviser. ‘Dr Dee’ was a shit sandwich to swallow, though; a frustratingly fractured pastoral accompaniment of hey-nonny-nonny to an original opera of the same name that meant it

didn’t count as a debut solo album either. ‘Everyday Robots’ is without a get-out-of-jail-free card, not that it needs one.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a record pitched as Albarn’s most personal yet, and as a 45-year-old dad, the days of covertly singing about heroin are long gone as ‘Everyday Robots’ takes its lead from ‘Under The Westway’ and ‘Fool’s Day’ rather than ‘Beetlebum’, stylistically and in the literal natural of its lyrics. Albarn rarely dresses anything up, and where no-need-to-crack codes like “We’re everyday robots on our phones” would damn Chris Martin, say, there’s a sense that we’ll happily be spoon-fed a little by Albarn – it’s innocent and sweet rather than trite and patronising. Occasionally we get something metaphorical (the piano-led, Natasha Khan-backed ‘The Selfish Giant’, which crackles

with a dusty sample that surfaces throughout this predominantly acoustic affair, is not about a loved one but a nuclear submarine), but on a record that is so indebted to its words, it’s when Albarn pushes literal storytelling to a childlike extreme that ‘Everyday Robots’ basks in no nonsense intimacy – sometimes, it seems, the best way to get personal is to get simple, and then make that a little less complicated. And so where the mistakenly enjoyable ukulele jam of ‘Mr Tembo’ transpires to be about an elephant rather than the Cbeebies character its toy-box of twinkling World Music instruments suggests, it’s the initially trudging ‘Hollow Ponds’ that turns out to be the album’s star-turn – a matter-of-fact tour of Albarn’s life that takes in the drought of ’76, the destruction of his childhood surroundings in Essex and

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the graffiti that inspired ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’.

‘Hollow Ponds’ slowly clips on in the form of one continual verse, presumably like life itself. Here Albarn sounds more plaintive than anything else, and ‘Everyday Robots’, which also repeatedly tackles the theme of nature versus machines (“It’s hard to be a lover with the TV on,” laments ‘The Selfish Giant’) is precisely so effective because of its overarching sober tone.

It’s not all been glib by the time we reach ‘Heavy Seas of Love’ – a celebratory, hymnal closer (and highlight) that features Brian Eno’s hidden, rich vocals, and a gospel choir to make it the album’s ‘Tender’ – but on ‘Everyday Robots’ Albarn is dealing with nostalgia, technological Armageddon and, most seriously of all, himself. Its heartfelt realism and simplicity is perfectly judged.

Reviews 05/10

Ratking So It Goes H o t Ch ar i t y

By Davi d Zammi tt. In st o re s A p ril 7

On ‘So It Goes’, Harlems Ratking arrive with their debut full-length album, bolstering a nascent XL hip hop roster that is already home to Tyler,The Creator. Led by 20-year-old Patrick “Wiki” Morales, a proudly self-proclaimed “upper middleclass” boy from New York’s Upper West Side, with a nasal flow that has elicited obvious comparisons to Eminem, the group also includes MC Hak and producers Sporting Life and Ramon to complete a barely postteenage line-up who, despite the hype, have only 2012’s patchy-at-best EP ‘Wiki93’ to show for their efforts.

The breakout hit on that collection was Morales’s personal showcase, ‘Wikispeaks’. Closing with the

unconvincingly snarled couplet, “It’s about time time Wiki speaks / It’s about time Wiki freaks,” he announced his entrance by doing little to dispel the notion that teen angst accounted for the bulk of Ratking’s collective worldview.

While their physical appearance has led to comparisons with indie crossover darlings Odd Future, the link doesn’t appear to extend beyond hoodies and adolescence. If the Wolf Gang burst on to the scene with a slightly juvenile manifesto (fuck everything), at least it was firm.

Ratking, on the other hand, don’t seem quite sure what they want to speak about.

The indubitable technical quality

of Wiki and Hak’s rhymes simply isn’t enough to carry Ratking, and the issues voiced and the scenes painted over these 11 tracks seem either insignificant or disingenuous. It’s hard to imagine that the murders, drugs and gangs on the somber ‘Snow Beach’ were felt too keenly by the son of a banker, while the repeated cop references are straight out of Hip Hop For Dummies. That’s not to say that the ad nauseum should be the preserve of the working class, of course, but an attempt to address Ratking’s own world would surely come off as more authentic.

In fairness, ‘So It Goes’ does point to potential in places. ‘So Sick Stories’, with its King Krule cameo

chorus, is a superb slice of urban poetry. The rare foregrounding of Hak’s laidback flow actually strengthens Ratking’s hand, something they seem reticent to do.

The title track, winding itself around early ‘90s vocal hooks, is also a standout. The gunshot snares and 808 bass stabs that punctuate much of the record recall the quirky, space age production of Shabazz Palaces (‘Remove Ya’, ‘Bug Fights’), while Death Grips are evoked when the aggression is really jacked up (‘Canal’, ‘Protein’). But that’s also partly the issue; it feels like a series of experiments or a cut’n’shut job on three or four EPs rather than an album as a whole.

In accentuating both the latent Antony Hegarty and Nick Cave in his music, Taylor Kirk’s folksy-noir has come over all cabaret-noir on his latest album as Timber Timbre. A small shift, perhaps, but a significant one from an artist for whom the devil has always lurked in the details of tone and atmosphere.

And atmosphere is something ‘Hot Dreams’ has in abundance: sepiatoned and weighty, this album is shrouded in a near-Lynchian veil of dark eroticism, haunted by an alien

sexuality emerging from the depths of the subconscious. Sultry keys and strings lend a sense of faded grandeur to Kirk’s bluesy ballads, undercut only by the motel seediness of Colin Stetson’s unusually mellow saxophone. But for all their seductive gravitas both Cave’s majestic ‘Push The Sky Away’ and Hegarty’s ‘I Am A Bird Now’ also had quirk, a more generous helping of which could have considerably invigorated ‘Hot Dreams’. Kirk’s lyrics mine a mostly uninteresting abstraction, as do the

melodies, which rarely break from their pedestrian meandering. That’s not to say the album’s languor doesn’t produce moments of evocative ambiguity, the dreamlike slink of the title track being a particularly convincing illustration: “I wanna dance, I wanna dance, I wanna dance with a black woman,” goes the disarming opening line. But too often ‘Hot Dreams’ feels laboured, its finely rendered, musty arrangements barely mitigating its compositional inertia.

06/10

Timbre Timbre Hot Dreams F u l l Ti me H obby

By T homas May . In sto re s M a rch 31

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Albums 08/10

0 5 /10

08 /10

05/ 10

Chad VanGaalen Shrink Dust

Chet Faker Built on Glass

Protomartyr Under Color of Official Right

Heterotic Weird Drift

Su b P op

Future C l as s i c

By James Wes t. In sto re s Ap ri l 28

B y R e e f YO uni s . I n s to re s A pri l 2 1

Pl a n et M u B y S a m Wal t o n . I n s t o r es A p r il 2 1

H ar dl y art

By J ack D o he rty. In s to re s Ap r il 7

On this, his fifth full-length, Chad VanGaalen once again proves to be a curious, gripping songwriter. Not one to stagnate, the rickety walls of his house and home studio (dubbed ‘Yoko Eno’), have this time played host to Chad the woozy country artist, who sporadically clambers atop the usual light stack of esoteric instruments brandishing a newlyacquired pedal steel. Don’t be fooled by that genre’s soft emotional burden and faux sincerity though, because thankfully he hasn’t ironed out any of his quirks or his freewheeling streak.

On the opener he intimately whimpers: “Cut off both my hands and threw them in the sand/Watch them swim away from me like a pair of bloody crabs”, before a whirl of noise that sounds like the spontaneous combustion of a fairground. Frankly, it’s eccentrically charming and something that he proves elsewhere time and again, with the cooed loveliness of the ominously titled ‘Evil’, as well as the swirling refrain and sprawling, gossamer of influences found on ‘Cosmic Destroyer’, making for wondrously floaty highpoints.

Take Chet Faker (Nicholas Murphy) at faceless, voice-only value, and his sultry, smouldering R&B-rooted easy listening sits comfortably enough.

After a promising collaboration with electronic producer Flume, and a husky, Hype Machine-conquering cover of the Blackstreet classic ‘No Diggity’, the Melbourne musician seemed well equipped to step out of the collaborative and into the solo, but unfortunately ‘Built on Glass’ is about as lightweight as the title suggests. Music to kickback and unwind to, down-tempo melodies and understated pop hooks give this set a soulful charm without ever offering much else beyond the imploring vocals and sax backing of ‘Talk is Cheap’. Where ‘Lesson in Patience’ combines a mix of clumsy beats, hums, chants, interludes and guttural saxophone, and ‘Dead Body’ channels the spirit of R.Kelly, ‘Built on Glass’ only serves to pull CF’s previous work into sharper focus. It’s frustrating because given the right context, Murphy’s vocals add depth and sincerity, but left to wander, unabated, as they are here, is a less than flattering reflection.

You don’t really see tin sheds anymore, not in the flesh anyway.

They’re confined to a history that most of us youthful types can only dream of whilst flicking through the pages of discarded Dorling Kindersley annuals. I can’t say with any real authority, but I’m fairly sure Protomartyr, a decidedly grey punk band, are in the same boat as the rest of us, tin shed-wise. You could never tell though. ‘Under Colour of Official Right’, the group’s second record, sounds like it was recorded by tin shed masters, so much so that you can almost smell the rusty corners.

Everything echoes. Everything is cold. Everything is short. Everything is as austere as the forgotten city that Protomartyr are from – Detroit, where people don’t muddle through so much as trudge on. It’s the type of record The Vaccines would have made if they dug common metals rather than Real Estate EPs. It’s clear more bands need to get into the tin shed scene. Cut your hair short.

Get some tin sheets. Build a shed.

Put down the DK annual and start something.

Heterotic are husband and wife, electronic tinkerers Mike Paradinas and Lara Rix-Martin, the former of whom ploughs a better-known furrow as electronic tinkerer μ-Ziq. Accordingly, ‘Weird Drift’ is defined mainly by electronic tinkering, most of which veers toward either the neon-lit Bladerunner drama of foreboding analogue synths, or gauzy chillwave laced with breathy vocals and psychedelic diversion.

Uniting these two ends is a general hypnagogic fug that lies over the whole album, adding cohesion but also distraction with its forced sense of faux-nostalgia: ‘Rain’, for example, is a perfectly amiable pop ballad, but hearing it through a mock-Balearic haze does it no favours. Occasionally, as on ‘Liverpool’, the atmosphere lifts to reveal a rather charming, breezy take on instrumental electronica, and ‘Empires’ makes for a satisfying finale. Unfortunately, though, these peaks don’t offer quite enough heft to overcome the wispiness elsewhere, leaving the impression of a record just a little too caught up in its own distinct but not particularly inviting little world.

Brighton’s Fear of Men have been threatening to make a significantly good debut album for about twelve months now; snippets of deft, dark indie-pop like ‘Green Sea’ (included here) have surfaced briefly, shone brightly and offered up a narrow glimpse of what might, in time, be something special. ‘Loom’ builds on those promising flashes with something substantial and reasonably impressive. On first impressions though, theirs is not a radically new sound; think Howling

Bells meets Esben & The Witch, cold production married to dark, arty lyricism. Oddly, ‘Waterfall’ is more resonant of nineties Britpoppers Echobelly, with Jessica Weiss’ simple, childlike vocals tiptoeing over a shimmering guitar backdrop.

‘America’, meanwhile, is meandering and woozy, one of the more uncomfortable moments on the record. What makes this album interesting is the contrast between Weiss’ light, pure vocals and the dark lyrical tone (“You will never leave

me, as long as I enter you with my bones”), and the band’s repeated descent into skewed, discordant noise.

This departure from straightforward melody is repeated throughout; the band skillfully weave short blasts of acidic, layered, dissonant guitar into songs suffused with lightness and melody. On the face of it, ‘Loom’ is just another intelligent, guitar-based indie album, but its cold resonance and detached emotional feel make it an absorbing and oddly beautiful thing.

0 7/ 1 0

Fear of Men Loom Kan i n e

By C h r i s Watk eys. I n sto re s Ap ril 21

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Reviews 08/10

0 8/10

05/10

08/ 10

Woods With Light & With Love

Brolin Flags Mixtape

Full Ugly Spent The Afternoon

Wye Oak Shriek

Woods is t

M e g a St o m o

F ir e

C it y Sl a n g

By Harry F letc he r. In stor e s April 17

B y D ai s y J o ne s . I n s t o r e s April 7

By Thom as May. I n s t or e s April 7

B y T om F en wic k . In s to r es April 2 8

To some extent, scenes don’t really exist in music anymore. Even though we might cobble together a few similar artists and give it a name, it’s an increasingly atomised creative landscape. That being said, there does seem to be a growing affinity for the avant-garde; a psych revival if you will, and while they’ve been making the same music since ‘before it was cool’, it’s inevitable thatWoods are lumped in with groups like Temples. These prolific Brooklyners shouldn’t fear comparison, though, as they’ve been perfecting their Dead-esque sound for years, and it shows. ‘With Light and With Love’ is an immensely well-balanced record.

It all builds around the title track; nine minutes of amorphous grazedknuckle thrash, neatly contrasting with refined, emollient songs like ‘New Light’ and ‘Leaves Like Glass’, which showcase imaginative writing with the sturdiest melodic clarity.

Although they may fall within 2014’s genre du jour, Woods have, once again, put together an absorbing psychedelic folk-rock record that’s more timeless than trendy. They’ll be here when Temples aren’t.

Self-taught bedroom producer Brolin hasn’t left the bedroom for quite some time it seems. He rarely plays live, never gives interviews and if he has to show his face, he keeps it obscured behind a zorro-style mask. However, all this mysterious (some would say tired) behaviour is not in vein. He’s been busy compiling tracks for his mix tape ‘Flags’, a collection of glitteringly beat-ridden, R&B-tinged electronica. It’s packed with a steady stream of collaborators (Hannes Rasmus, FTSE, Dam Mantle, Casually Here, Raffertie) and is beautifully fused together with the honey of his own silky Alexis Taylor-like vocal gems. In the third track a cockney voice rises over dark synth like a creepy geezer in a warehouse toilet queue and asks “If you’re holding onto a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision: Let go before it’s too late? Or hang on and keep getting higher?” One can’t help but wonder if the shy producer is asking himself the same question. But one thing’s for sure, ‘Flags’ marks a brilliant creation from somebody who has lived up to so much word-ofmouth hype.

It’d probably be fair to call ‘SpentThe Afternoon’ a “summer record”, laden as it is with all the bounce and melodic immediacy, not to mention vacuity, implied by such a label. Not that the latter is necessarily a bad thing. Same as all self-respecting twee-inclined songwriters, Full Ugly’s Nathan Burgess treats shallowness as something of a virtue. Accordingly, the record’s shabby indie pop locates profundity in the meek and mundane: going to town to run some errands is deemed suitable subject matter for a chorus.

And that’s fine in its way, just don’t get him started on watering the plants or opening the fridge, or you’ll probably find all this hypersensitivity becoming tiresome. ‘Spent The Afternoon’’s cutesiness can be traced back to the likes of Beat Happening, even if the chiming guitars and youthful straining of Burgess’ vocals owe as much to ‘Lies’-era New Order. And whilst the prevalence of such reference points shouldn’t be taken to be a deficiency in itself, the fact that none of these comparisons are particularly favourable probably should.

Baltimore duo Wye Oak’s restrained yet expansive sound has seen Jenn Wassner and Andy Stack combine folk, shoegaze and alt-rock to great acclaim in the past. But in a move that may polarise established fans, their fifth release does away with the guitars in favour of shimmering, fullbodied synth-pop; their intimate lyrical core now wrapped in a sound that is closer in style to Wassner’s side-project Dungeonesse. ‘Shriek’ sees the duo revel in a refurbished sonic palette, one which takes them to far more mainstream reaches than before: as piano hooks undulate across the dreamy flutter of Stack’s organic synths (‘Shriek’), dense recursive beats wash overWassner’s melodic bass (‘School Of Eyes’) and haunting vocals (‘The Tower’, ‘Sick Talk’, ‘Glory’) are tempered by effervescent and experimental pop.

Admittedly, the album blurs a little towards the end, but regardless, what remains is a convincing sea change that adds new layers of texture and warmth to Wye Oak’s inherently rich tone; as though a different band had been hiding in plain sight all along.

For my money, the defining punk record of the nineties wasn’t Refused’s ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’, nor anything by Fugazi or out of the riot grrl scene; it was The Nation of Ulysses’ ‘Plays Pretty for Baby’, an utterly furious fifty minutes that packed diverse instrumental choices, clever thematic approaches and – most crucially – palpable anger onto one disc. It’s with some interest, then, that I’ve followed the career of the Nation’s frontman, Ian Svenonius. Chain and the Gang sees

him in territory that, sonically at least, is considerably more mellow; sure, the guitars on opener ‘Devitalize’ both screech and crunch in aggressive fashion, but much of the rest of ‘Minimum Rock n Roll’ has its roots in garage. ‘Got to Have It Every Day’ is almost bluesy, a strutting riff paired with a largely conversational turn from Svenonius, whilst ‘Stuck in a Box’ and ‘Fairy Dust’ are groove-driven, hurried along by wandering basslines. Vocal contributions from Katie Alice on a

number of tracks sometimes work well (the cocksure ‘Crime Don’t Pay’) and sometimes don’t (a distorted performance on the turgid ‘Curtain Pull’). Lyrically, most of the boxes you’d expect are ticked, from ruminations on global surveillance to decrying posers. Such a back-tobasics rock approach seems a strange vehicle for Svenonius’ world views but he wears it surprisingly well; there’s plenty of energy and anger here, even if one’s more obvious than the other.

0 7/ 1 0

Chain & The Gang Minimum Rock’n’Roll F o rtun a Po p

By Th o mas May . In stor e s Jo e G oggins

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Albums 0 7/ 1 0

0 7/10

07 /10

06/ 10

Eels The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett

Colourmusic May You Marry Rich

Chuck Inglish Convertables

Lucius Wildewoman

E Wor k s

Me m p hi s In d ust ri e s

F e d e r a l Pri sm

PIAS

B y S a m C o rnfo r t h. In sto re s no w

By Da is y J o ne s . I n sto re s A pr il 7

B y Sa m C o r n f o rt h . I n sto r es Ma r c h 3 1

Very occasionally music wriggles its way through your clutches and is almost impossible to define.

Colourmusic have successfully achieved this feat with their confusing sound, which is better compared to colours than genres.

This – their third album – has been described as their ‘purple album’ and is their most potent yet as all their ideas merge into a more cohesive and dynamic beast. As well as packing a bigger punch, it is also their darkest output to date with freaky synths, off-kilter guitar injections and kraut-like rhythms colliding to sound like the sonic equivalent of a dystopian parallel world. ‘Overture’ is like being tortured with industrial throbs, whilst ‘Audacity of Hope’ is positively haunting and ‘Rendezvous with Destiny’ is like creeping around some abandoned warehouse. That is not to say that the weird universe these songs replicate is undesirable, instead it is strangely compelling and appealing. True to the bands nature, this eclectic album may be hard to digest but once you manage to it is invigorating.

Back in the heady days of MySpace, Chuck Inglish climbed to prominence as one half of old-skool, 808-thudding, hip-hop formation The Cool Kids.

The Chicago/Detroit-based duo released their retro-rap mp3s on the social network whenever they felt like it, and quickly built a platoon of fans as a result. Nearly a decade (feel old?), two albums and a bucketful of mix-tapes later and Chuck Inglish is releasing his first album as a solo artist. The energy that has gone into Inglish’s debut is boldly patent. It’s skilfully produced, lyrically on-the-mark and is full to the brim with names (Chance the Rapper, Mac Miller, Chromeo). Is it a huge departure from previous projects? Not exactly.The album still bleeds mid-1980s rap and funk, the lyrics still wry and effortless (“But this ain’t no ball game/and I ain’t got no bat”). But it’s brighter and sunnier, (possibly a result of Inglish spending so much time in Los Angeles) and it occasionally dips into more poppy territory. Whilst ‘Convertibles’ might not be groundbreaking, it’s typically stylish and confirms that Inglish will always be a cool kid.

Across the country glimmers of spring sunshine are beginning to flicker through windows. Laced in this glowing light is the feeling of optimism and joy, something that Lucius’ debut album tries to embody.

Although it is far from pioneering stuff, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig’s patchwork quilt of soulful ’60s, indie pop and country rock songs has been weaved using a new pattern.The real appeal is the duo’s dazzling voices that interlink on the album-titled opener and become one big tour de force for the remainder, as infectious harmony after infectious harmony follows. Aside from a glistening vocal performance that would see Tom Jones reaching for his buzzer faster than his fake tan, the instrumentation pristinely waltzes along inoffensively and a little boringly, and yet it is the gentler meandering moments that are much more enjoyable than the stomping and irritating likes of ‘Turn It Around’, ‘Nothing Ordinary’ and ‘Hey, Doreen’. Unfortunately, more often than not, ‘Wildewoman’’s flawless singing isn’t enough to conjure warm rays of jubilation by themselves.

Their first album in 16 years, and having sworn never to reform after their 2001 split, ‘Do to the Beast’ is an unexpected bonus for fans of The Afghan Whigs. There are plenty of them out there, after all.

Having come to the fore during the grunge era, the group went on to achieve mainstream success on Sony/Columbia in the mid-90s and it’s that kaleidoscopic alternative rock sound that dominates on this record. ‘Matamoros’, for example, welds Red Hot Chili Peppers-funk to

Battles-esque math rock with surprisingly positive results, while ‘It Kills’ is an exercise in bombast that might be categorised as something approaching rock opera.

Elsewhere, ‘Parked Outside’ and ‘The Lottery’ could have been plucked straight from the original, grungiest incarnation of the group that emerged with such raw energy in the late ’80s. The themes (depression, substance abuse, sex) are the same as always and Greg Dulli’s theatrical, Meatloaf-

esque delivery, overwrought throughout, is a constant reminder that this is very much a throwback to rock’s more extravagant excesses.

It means that the album isn’t for everyone but the Whigs never pretended to build their modus operandi on refinement. And so if you want big choruses, arena-scale drums and screaming guitars then ‘Do to the Beast’ is for you.

For devotees of thos Cincinnati group it’ll feel like the last 13 years was just a dream.

By Dan i el Dy l an Wray. I n sto re s April 21

All of Eels’ last four albums have been given something of a ‘return to form’ tag; the subtextual inference being, of course, that form has been lost. Mark Oliver Everett has moulded his own idiosyncratic sonic template and you can spot an Eels song structure a mile-off: the piano ballad, the string-aided acoustic strum and the grizzly flat-out guitar rocker have long been staples but as Eels near the 20-year mark of existence, moments of true, varied, sonic experimentation found on earlier work (such as ‘Electro-Shock Blues’) seem a distant, foggy memory. That said, Eels’ latest could indeed be a ‘return to form’ in a more rudimentary sense. It’s E’s most stylistically consistent in years; a largely acoustic, plaintive album laced with tip-tap country shuffles and pouryour-heart-out-propping-up-the-bar reflective lyrical melancholy. It’s a stripped-back, stark record – standout ‘Dead Reckoning’ even possesses an icy, bleak organ gloom akin to Nico – but the xylophone tinkles and the familiar chord progressions soon return.

06/10

The Afghan Whigs Do to the Beast S u b Po p

By Davi d Zammi tt. In sto re s April 17

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Reviews 09/10

0 8/10

06 /10

03/ 10

School of Language Old Fears

Sohn Tremors

Cloud Nothings Here And Nowhere Else

Malachai Beyond Ugly

Me m ph i s In du s trie s

4a d

Wi c hi ta

Do ubl e S ix

By S am Walt on . In store s Ap ri l 7

B y Chri s Watk e ys . I n s to re s apri l 7

By H arry F l e tc he r. In s to r e s M a r ch 3 1

B y J am es F . T h omp so n . I n s t o r es M a r c h 3 1

Broadly telling his life story up to the night in 2001 that he met his wife, David Brewis’ second album away from his parent band Field Music wends its way through unapologetic teenage hubris (‘A Smile Cracks’), crises of confidence (‘Moment of Doubt’) and finally ecstatic love (‘You Kept Yourself’) with a humility that is consistently charming and a lyrical deftness that perfectly complements the accompanying knotty, coiled-spring funk beneath: the right-angles of Field Music are audible throughout, but save for a delicious blast of saxophone at the very end, Brewis opts for minimalist arrangements, skilfully reflecting the record’s more introspective mood.

It’s easy to imagine how a record like this could dissolve into solipsistic cobblers, so it’s a testament to Brewis’ self-awareness that when he sings “everything left to learn is best learned together” on the album finale, the romance feels so elevating and pleasingly believable. Both confessional and stoic, ‘Old Fears’ is that rare, perfectly compact record whose very idiosyncrasies provide its broadest appeal.

There appears to have been an excess, recently, of solo males melding beautifully pitched vocals to poised and crafted electronica, and joining this muted party is London’s SOHN. ‘Tremors’ was recorded in Vienna, apparently only at night, but there’s a brightness here that belies that notion. First track ‘Tempest’ is an instant hook-in to the record; incredibly beautiful falsetto vocals floating over a tribal sci-fi backdrop.

It’s an astonishingly good opening.

On the single ‘Bloodflows’, calmness descends into a strangely warm urgency; listening to the track feels like watching a sunrise in stopmotion fast-forward.

‘Lights’, meanwhile, is a slow-building classic awash with minor synths, a truly statuesque mini-epic.

While admittedly there isn’t a great deal to distinguish SOHN stylistically from his contemporaries, the sheer strength of songwriting here, and the album’s ability to engage the emotions on a fundamental level, both mark him out as something of a luminary.This is a record that purges your soul of the mundane, and washes over you like oxygen.

While Cloud Nothings’ sound might recall thrashy, angsty guitar bands of the ’90s, their latest release comes across as divorce rock without the divorce – “I had nothing to be angry about really so the approach was more positive,” says lead singer and main songwriter Dylan Baldi about ‘Here and Nowhere Else’. While he does his upmost to inject fervour in his delivery, the album lacks edge, as finding a happy place seems to have cost the intensity of Baldi’s song writing. These eight tracks all feel a bit thrown together, too. This is the Ohio collective’s fourth LP since their formation just five years ago, and as such, it feels slightly rushed.

Although there are strong tunes in the form of the nihilistic ‘No Thoughts’ and lead single ‘I’m Not Part of Me’, these are fleeting moments of melodic clarity on an otherwise unrefined, and unfocused record. It’s true that it retains the appealingly louche lo-fi production and the spontaneity of their earlier work, but you can’t help but feel a more assiduous approach would have made for a record worth getting passionate about.

Psychedelic cut-and-paste merchants Malachai get uglier with every album.The Bristolian twosome started out with 2010’s ‘Ugly Side of Love’, released ‘Return to the Ugly Side’ the following year and now here we are with ‘Beyond Ugly’, the concluding panel of this aesthetically objectionable triptych. Sure enough, the pair’s second album was a mellower reworking of their excellent, sixties-infused debut, whereas here the aim is to break new ground. On that score, Malachai have unfortunately failed. Derivative throughout and oddly lacking in both melody and restraint, the resulting album is genuinely a chore to listen to. The standouts, such as they are, include punchy lead-off track ‘Sweet Flower’ and the Eastern-tinged ‘I Deserve to No’. The remainders are largely forgettable, although I wish I could purge ham-fisted Massive Attack pastiche ‘Dark Before the Dawn’ from my mind. The problem is focus. Malachai’s debut was brilliant precisely because of its indebtedness to British psychedelic blues. Here, there are debts to everyone but no pay-off.

Some old punk once said: “anger is an energy.” And it is, isn’t it. You can do anything with a wee bit of anger: Start a war, stop a war, paint a painting – the world’s your oyster.

And yet, The Amazing Snakeheads have strolled along from the heart of Glasgow to prove us all wrong. Their debut album, ‘Amphetamine Ballards’, is a bizarre bag of lethargic rage.

For a little while Dale Barclay’s Strepsil-craving vocals trick you into believing they’re the real deal. ‘I’m a

Vampire’ and ‘Swamp Song’ are both big balls of Begbie, all angry and exciting and whatnot. In fact, it’s not until the bassline on ‘Flatlining’ refuses to thrust that it becomes apparent. The group just don’t have that psycho sex appeal.The Amazing Snakeheads are Nick Cave’s celibate brother.

After this realisation the anger just doesn’t cut it. Every song is revealed to be nothing more than a standard blues ditty. It’s stuff that wouldn’t sound out of place on an

‘edgy’ John Mayer album, which is a frightening thought in itself.

I mean, I get what The Amazing Snake Heads have done – stripped baroom, bare-knuckle punk back to its bloody skeleton, purposefully avoided any sound that is remotely considered fashionable right now, got primal. But it’s not enough, not on it’s own.

So maybe that old punk was wrong, anger isn’t always an energy.

But my God, it’s a hell of a lot more fun when it is.

05/10

The Amazing Snakeheads Amphetamine Ballads Dom i n o

By Ja ck Doh er t y . In st ore s Ap ri l 21

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Albums 09/10

Mac DeMarco Salad Days C a p tur ed Tr ac k s

By Josh S un th . I n sto res A p ril 21

Mac DeMarco has always sounded considerably more chilled out than he really is. Take 2012’s debut LP proper ‘2’, for example: the Canadian minstrel testing his capacity for razor-sharp storytelling but still, on tracks like ‘Freaking Out The Neighbourhood’, tying those calypso-inspired guitar lines into knots just for the hell of it. Even when writing songs that were immensely true to life, DeMarco’s most apt observations never came across as actually observational – perhaps because of the gleeful musical distraction, perhaps because he sung with cheek that earned Ferris Bueller comparisons – and it’s a skill he’s transferred onto ‘Salad Days’.

DeMarco has long had a penchant for putting pictures of himself on his album sleeves – on mini album ‘Rock and Roll Nightclub’ he was smearing on lipstick, on ‘2’ making the peace sign – but ‘Salad Days’ sees the most naturalistic pose to date, for an album with songs that also seem more real than ever. If you’ve been to his live shows, you’ll know that conversation comes naturally to him, and rather than telling the stories, here he takes on characters as he has his own conversations.

There’s a whole load of brothers, boys, sisters, and honeys littered throughout this LP. Hooky choruses, slang and slogans are plentiful, and like all good slogans they aren’t hard

to spot: ‘Let Her Go’, ‘Treat Her Better’, ‘Let My Baby Stay’. DeMarco, like the Haim girls, has this ability to simultaneously create memorable lines and capture the very simplest relationship truths. ‘Treat Her Better’, for example, is never anything but a pop song whilst still managing surprising tenderness in its handling of love, DeMarco singing: “Treat her better boy/if having her at your side’s/something you enjoy”.

‘Chamber of Reflection’, one of the LP’s standout tracks, is a disco tune that’s been stripped bare and slowed down to an almost standstill.

The lyrics are outright pessimistic and its four minutes is otherwise

populated by flashes of synth reminiscent of Metronomy on a sad day. It’s the sort of track that should flummox an artist like DeMarco, but it doesn’t because he’s learnt to put more thought into every facet of his songwriting.

Joe Strummer once said, “Don’t write slogans, write truths.” If you need any proof that these two things don’t have to be exclusive then buy ‘Salad Days’. DeMarco was always an artist whose world struggled with simple binaries, but this is an LP combining the pop artist’s unashamed desire to occupy your head all day long and the storyteller’s authenticity, with astounding, electrifying skill.

It’s only March, but already I can’t imagine another record delivering an opening as as fabulously dramatic as ‘The Future’s Void’ this year; ‘Satellites’ is a perfect storm of erratic electronics and punishing beats, with Erika M Anderson on thrillingly aggressive vocal form. It sets the tone for an album that you know is bound to be experimental, but probably didn’t expect to tie its stylistic exploration together so neatly. ‘So Blonde’ is a modern update of the pop-rock posturing of

Hole’s ‘Celebrity Skin’, and the disconcertingly delicate ‘When She Comes’ provides a moment for breath-catching on an album that veers from one idea to the next at breakneck speed. Neither of those tracks really have any business sitting alongside, say, the theatrical stomp of ‘Cthulu’ or ‘Neuromancer’’s gloriously weird blend of pseudotribal percussion, layered vocal chants and thick walls of synth, but the energy that Anderson’s sheer force of character brings to

proceedings makes this a surprisingly cohesive effort. The plodding ‘3Jane’ is the one misstep, flirting lazily with political ideas, but the irrepressibly urgent ‘Solace’ and atmospheric simmer of ‘100 Years’ more than make up for it. It’d be strange indeed if ‘The Future’sVoid’’s brilliantly daring experimentation wasn’t subject to the same plaudits as, say, the new St. Vincent record. If Annie Clark’s the queen of off-kilter pop, EMA is wearing the corresponding crown for rock.

09/10

EMA The Future’s Void C i ty S l a n g

By J oe G oggi n s. I n sto res A p ril 7

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Reviews / Live

John Grant Roundhouse, Camden Town 0 9 / 0 3 / 20 14 writer S amu el B a llar d Ph oto graph er R oy J B aro N

Sitting in the eaves of Camden Roundhouse and watching John Grant command a packed out crowd is a brilliant thing to see. The former Czars man is so intimate with his fans it’s like they’re on first name terms, and the relationship, which is based on Grant himself giving his audience such unrivalled access to his private life, is paid back many, many times over.

From cathartic lyrics, to revealing he was HIV positive while onstage

with Hercules & Love Affair, it is impossible to decontextualise John Grant the man from Grant the performer. They are – or appear to be – one and the same thing, and while his life’s dramas are open to the world, it is his ability to hold himself together with such class that’s truly fascinating.

He may sing: “…remember when the tenderness stopped and the kindness turned to pity and disgust…” in set opener ‘You Don’t

Have To’ but in-between tracks he is a complete gentleman, verging on self-deprecation, with faultless almost Edwardian manners. Like someone who has just told you the details of a particularly nasty breakup but then apologises afterwards and buys you dinner.

As he sails through a set which is mostly comprised of tracks from his two solo albums, ‘Queen of Denmark’ and ‘Pale Green Ghosts’, he also treats fans to a couple of

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Czars’ gems including ‘Angel Eyes’ and ‘Drug’ – nodding to a body of work that now spans almost 20 years.

Overall, the night is a huge success. For an artist who gives his all, he’s paid back in dividends. It’s hard to remember from my high vantage point any band that holds court the way John Grant does.

It’s a lesson to any aspiring band.

Give everything and people will love you for it.

Reviews

Gentle Friendly Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

Angel Haze Gorilla, Manchester

14/ 0 3 / 20 14

08 / 03 / 2 01 4

wr i ter : JAme s F. Tho m pso n

w r it er : Da n iel Dy l a n W r a y P h o t og r a p h er : R o y J B a r o n

Angel Haze’s DJ whips up the crowd in anticipatory hype before she bounds onto the stage to a sea of applause. Opening with the R&Bsmothered ‘Sing About Me’, this is soon followed by the grizzly rapidfire assault of E.P breakthrough track, ‘Werkin’ Girls’. Backed by drums, guitar and live DJ, the show is surprisingly – and pleasantly – raw; far closer to a rock show, full of thundering drums and stage-shaking performances, far from the notably glossier, poppier sounds found shimmering throughout her debut album. Haze is a serious force. As a singer she is great, as a rapper she is exquisite – the speed, precision and fluidity with which words spew from her impassioned cry is staggering.

For anyone who misses the early days grit and menace of Angel Haze on her debut LP, it is brought blisteringly back to form on stage.

Attending a gig at the Shacklewell Arms is like taking part in a hipster circle jerk; waving mockingly at the musical zeitgeist with one hand and tossing yourself off with the other.

For the uninitiated, this Dalston institution is a sort of ground zero for breaking new bands and even newer haircuts. Tonight I’m here for the bimonthly mini-fest Repeater, with Gentle Friendly topping the bill. The duo have actually been on the go since 2007, releasing their debut LP ‘Ride Slow’ in 2009. On that basis it’s natural to wonder why they’re still putting in a shift at the Shacklewell Arms. The answer is that their music was and remains unabashedly impenetrable; a maelstrom of punk rhythms, suicide-style electronics and heavily treated vocals. On record everything has time to coalesce into some kind of form but live, it all just seems to collapse in on itself.

Eagulls Electrowerkz, Islington

The Notwist The Deaf Institute, Manchester

0 5/ 0 3 / 20 14

15/03/ 2 0 1 4

wr i ter : T h omas May

wri te r: Paddy K i ns e l l a Photo g r a phe r: E l i no r J o nes

Yet another band that’s gonna wrestle UK guitar music from its (supposedly) flaccid, apolitical malaise. Despite their media-conjured mantle as the noisy, pissed-off saviours of all things noisy and pissed-off, Eagulls’ live incarnation comes as much shrouded in a façade of studied detachment as it is invigorated with visceral immediacy. But that was probably to be expected. After all, it’s that sense of dead-eyed nihilism running through the group’s self-titled debut album that so starkly evokes the hopelessness of an already-defeated generation – raging, yes, but also jaded, almost elegiac.

Sure, ‘Possessed’ and ‘Nerve Endings’ thrashed with the requisite post-punk moodiness and aggression, but all too often the group’s bald cynicism could have been mistaken for mere muted indifference. It certainly could’ve been louder, in any case.

Expectations are diverse tonight, varying from those expecting skullcrashing drums often associated with German bands, to those expecting the glacial calm present on Notwist’s most recent album, ‘Close to The Glass’, and the lush, ‘You, The Devil & Me’.The night leans on both, as well as incorporating the electronica the band are renowned for – a mix of styles that sees the Deaf Institute’s giant disco ball go through a host of transformations; at times veiled in darkness, at times reflecting a serene moonlight, and at its most thrilling when showered in light as its full-motion rotations are reflected on the dance floor.The twists and turns of the evening are exhausting and the channelling of their earlier heavy metal days, ending most songs with an arena ‘rock out’, casts a nightmarish gloom over a night that otherwise shone.

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Live

If the departure of Tim Smith prior to 2013’s ‘Anitiphon’ made Midlake a more anodyne proposition on record, tonight’s show proves that live, the band are still the fiery, enveloping, organically musical experience they always have been. Early on, ‘Antiphon’ is suffused with Fleet Foxes-esque harmonies. Here are a bunch of nice, hairy blokes in plaid shirts, playing beautifully crafted if straightforward rock music in a fine venue; what more can we ask for?

Well, we could ask for Gaz Coombes actually, and tonight we get him, although I don’t think anyone was asking for or expecting that. As one of Britpop’s most venerated elder statesmen joins the band on stage for ‘Young Bride’, Midlake pour forth mature rock’n’roll at its most worthily accomplished. Then out comes the twelve-string for ‘We Gathered In Spring’, and the music rises and swells in crescendos, a flood of oceanic noise. Just before the inevitably psychedelic wigouts of the encore, ‘The Old And the Young’’s shuffling rhythm and haunting organ close out a show, which was as heartfelt and emotional for the band as it was for their audience.

Midlake Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London 26/ 0 2/ 20 14 wri ter: C hr is Wa tkeys Photo grapher: Ro y J B aro n

Richard Skelton & the Elysian Quartet Brinkburn Priory 23 / 0 3 / 20 14

Jon Hopkins Canal Mills, Leeds

Jungle Deaf Institute, Manchester

01/0 3/ 2 0 1 4

2 2 / 0 3/ 2 0 1 4

wri ter: S e an M c Ge ad y

w r i ter: Padd y K i nsel l a

wri ter: Dan i el D yla n Wra y

Walking down a pitch black path in the middle of nowhere under a sea of glistening stars and into a candlelight 12th century monastery fills tonight’s performance with an aura of wonderment before its even begun.

Yet as soon as his bow strokes the strings (of what looks to be a sort of extended, customised mandolin) an instant, permeating presence oozes forth. Broken into three separate pieces (the middle one sans Skelton) the first is a woozy, restrained yet gliding performance, with Skelton’s delicate, sustained emanations dipping, weaving and congealing with the Quartet. The final piece is a scratchy, dramatic, almost violent, very cinematic performance that takes Skelton hurtling into previously unexplored territory. The control of the finish is sublime and the last fading sound is the unmistakable, string wobble of Richard Skelton.

Fat White Family The Georgian Theatre, Stockton 2 0/ 02 / 2 01 4 w r it er: J a ck Do her t y

What’s he doing? It sounds like he’s building a portal.

Somehow seductive despite its dissonance, sound rises to a seemingly endless crescendo before suddenly being stripped to its skeletal parts. It happens again and again. He induces the trance then snaps the spell.

Pushing, pulling, pushing, pulling.

He’s building a portal. Shapes swarm behind him, coalescing into some vivid, jagged mass that expands and contracts with each perfect beat.

Lights strobe. Pupils dilate in the dark. Pushing, pulling. He’s building a portal. Do you feel that? It feels like he’s building a portal. More than this, it feels like we’re building our own private portals, immersed in uninterrupted sonic construction.

Sight and sound become one. Senses fuse in this space. Pushing. Pulling.

He’s building a portal. We’re building a portal.

It is clear the image we conjure up when we think of Jungle (a picture of two roller-skaters clad in green tracksuits) is not Jungle. That rouge has been laid to bed and we now know that Jungle are a 7-piece band capable of turning their disco hooks into a show-stopping live show. The last time Jungle toured, they hid in the darkness, only visible through the striking white light of camera flashes; tonight they shed this invisibility cloak allowing those who have and haven’t seen them to catch their first glimpse of the band. Their evolution is clear, new songs shine with star quality and seem fully formed standing aside – if not above – those songs that first drew us deep into the Jungle. This ever-growing armoury will see them dispel fears of being overhyped and establish themselves with a presence recentlyhyped bands have been incapable of.

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Michael Douglas is sat behind the wheel, but the car is going nowhere.

The traffic is bad. It’s a little too hot outside. Everyone’s moving in the same direction, and no one is getting anywhere. Michael Douglas is angry; you can see it in his eyes. He opens the door and walks away, abandoning the car, and his life. He is sick of it all and wants people to know it. For the next 90 minutes he demolishes the modern world, one white shirt at a time. The film is Falling Down, and tonight Fat White Family act it out.

Through dark, swirly, punk rock that’s dirty under the fingernails and only further’s this group’s Squat Punk tag. Clothes are lost and butter is melted, guitars ring and organs swirl. I’ve never seen hell through a kaleidoscope before. I did tonight, and it was glorious. Maybe I’ll schedule in one of those breakdowns sometime soon, they look like fun.

Cinema 09/ 10

Out of this world

by Ian Roebuck

Under The Skin di rect o r : J o nat h an G la z er Starr ing : S carlett J o h anss o n , P aul Brann igan , J ess ica M ance

Let’s face it; you’d get in Scarlett Johansson’s car in Under the Skin. Even if you knew what horrors were in store, the character of Laura is alluring enough to throw caution to the Glasgow wind. Whilst we’re not really in the hot 100 mindset here at Loud And Quiet, we couldn’t resist a countdown of the ten aliens that, like Laura, made our radar beep.

10.

Blade Runner’s Pris Running rings around Rick Deckard with her acrobatics and those thighs, Darryl Hannah’s scarily sexy character starts our rundown. OK she might be an android and not an alien, but semantics aside, we still dig her future face and the no shit attitude.

09.

Starman’s Starman Jeff Bridges and John Carpenter collide in this 1984 classic where our Starman spends most of the time naked in the woods and blowing people’s minds with stunted conversation and special powers.The thundering soundtrack and neon styling only add to Bridges appeal.

08.

Mars Attack’s Martian Girl Lisa Marie gives good gorm as the Martian seductress who dazzles Martin Short’s press guy and waltzes right into the White House. Danny Elfman’s score ‘Martian Spy Girl’ gently hypnotizes, as does that walk of course.

07.

Total Recall’s the Mutant Mary There was more to Lycia Naff’s (yes really) character than the extra mammary gland. Even the atrocious remake couldn’t let it pass without a nod to the now iconic flasher.

Originally meant to have four breasts but reverted back to three to look less bovine like apparently, remember less is more.

06.

The Fifth Element’s Leeloo Adding a touch of much needed class to our list is Milla Jovovich as Leeloo. Luc Besson obsessed over who should play this pivotal role, the Director sending out a casting call of 8,000 applicants and eventually choosing Jovovich from the 300 he met in person. If you’re going to cast a supreme being I suppose you’ve got to do it right.

05.

The Faculty’s Miss Elizabeth Burke A sultry script and a sharp cast meant the rather outrageous sci-fi premise of the Faculty held firm for its running time. Robert Rodriguez unleashed Famke Janssen’s suppressed side skillfully enabling her to transform from pent up teacher to parasite ridden sex stomper.

04.

Alien: Resurrection’s Ripley 8

culminates in a frankly bizarre encounter with Ripley 8 and a xenomorph; she felt what the aliens felt apparently.We just felt a bit weird.

03.

Earth Girls Are Easy’s Mac A role Jeff Goldblum was born to play, the dry wit, his withdrawn blue face, everything fell into place for Mac. Yes Julien Temple’s silly film was a sexist mess but watch it again and the bashful fun shines through.

Who can resist Goldblum on form like this.

02.

My Stepmother is an Alien’s Celeste Martin A year before Earth Girls are Easy in 1988, director Richard Benjamin brought together Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger to create another stereotype ridden sci-fi comedy that proved attraction was more than skin deep. Like Aykroyd’s nerdy Steven Mills we fell for Basinger’s Celeste, what can we say…we’re a sucker for a girl who can backflip.

01.

The Man who fell to Earth’s 1. Thomas Jerome Newton David Bowie is sexy enough already but Nicolas Roeg’s magical touch applied to the man’s already captivating mystique made for a maddening two hours. His terrific performance was central to a golden age of science fiction in the mid 70’s, brave in its nudity and experimental nature, what can be sexier than that?

Cloned from frozen samples of Ellen Ripley’s blood after her demise at the climax of David Fincher’s third instalment of Alien, Ripley 8 was a ruthless beast that revelled in the chaos caused by her co-species.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s oddity

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To paraphrase one of his ads, we wait. We wait a decade in fact for Jonathan Glazer, Director of the Guinness Surfer ads and subsequent films Sexy Beast and Birth, to come up with his third feature and boy was it worth the tick following the tock.

Under the Skin will polarise its audience, it will traumatise as many people as it emboldens and it is all the better for Glazer’s unwavering vision. The film’s stupefying opening frames instil nervousness in the viewer that never really leaves until the lights flicker back on. We’re in pitch black as an on screen white dot increases in size, soon enough intrigue turns to discomfort as the mystery light blinds. This is the first in an astonishing array of passages of psychedelica that define Under the Skin; Glazer’s visual investigation (on a par with Kubrick, Roeg or even Jodorowsky) driving the narrative and warping our pattern of thought with such brazen artistry that it takes your breath away.

After the dot, the plot, as Scarlett Johansson’s alien on earth takes human form and, with help from a perturbing mystery man on a motorbike, hits the A roads of Glasgow in her mission to consume white single males. Combining hidden cameras and genuine Scotsmen (sometimes to hilarious effect) with a flirty Johansson is a sleight of hand from Glazer that pays off over and over again. Scenes grounded in reality, reminiscent of Andrea Arnold’s Red Road or Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar, amuse and confront as Glazer’s bold use of colour and tricks of the mind gradually seep in, this remarkable clash of styles leaves you gasping.

The brassy filmmaking is tied together beautifully by Mica Levi’s defiant score, as bewitching as the pictures that accompany it and that’s quite a compliment.

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Party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

thought sport In the minds of baseball fans 2 3

4 5

Fozzie Bear

IDIOT

Bear Grylls

The ‘funny’ Muppet

FAME

The posh ‘explorer’

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“I’ve fried some wokka wokka in my own piss”

“I wish Kermit would grow a pair”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“I think I’ll just grow and eat a pear”

Fozzy needs to grow up

IDIOT POWER PLAY

“Wokka Wokka!”

Ditto

GAME, SET & MATCH This guy is actually real

crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place

1

1. Who’s touching my arse at a time like this?

2. That’s not really helping, mate 3. Well, I didn’t expect this today, but I’ll take it 4. Go on son, give it a good squeeze 5. Drop him!

Celebrity twitter

To the handsome lady who saw me fall down the escalator at Oxford Circus, so much blood, but worth it to see your ankles so close Shy guy covered in blood

Justin_Bieber @A$APBieb

7m

YESSS!! Sausages and beans for dinner! : Reply

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Justin_Bieber @A$APBieb

To the dishy guy who read my Metro after me, I’ve got today’s Sun at home. Tempted?

Inky fingers

45m

Shout out to all my boyz still in the pen. Much love €#100%trillgangsta : Reply

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Justin_Bieber @A$APBieb

To the single man at the station travelling to a job with a wage in excess of 40 grand. Drink?

Single girl

52m

About fucking time. Free at last. : Reply

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Justin_Bieber @A$APBieb

To the fit girl I gave up my seat for at Kentish Town, it was like that when I sat down Nervous Traveller

54m

I’m in prison. Lol : Reply

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook “The depressed world of Ian Beale”

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