Issue 11

APRI L 2009

€ free / £ free / $ free / dkr free / ¥ free

State.ie

first birthday edition

I RELAN D’S MUSIC PAYLOAD

Under African Skies:

lake of stars power of dreams London Calling

BellX1 Telepathe Ladyhawke

Rebirth of the Geek Gods

incoming:

Those Darlins Rose Elinor Dougall Eurosonic Festival Guided By Voices and the best reviews in

albums, downloads, eps, games & dvds 1

Two Door Cinema Club Guided By Voices Heartless Bastards

Win a trip to Europavox Festival France Europavox takes place this year from the 28th to the 31st of May in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The festival’s first artists have just been announced and include Bloc Party, I’m From Barcelona, Ebony Bones, Vitalic, Charlie Winston, Get Well Soon, Olivia Ruiz, Emilie Loizeau, South Central with many more to be announced.

State is proud to be offering one reader a chance to be the Irish representative at this year’s EUROPAVOX with the pass, the trip and accomodation paid for. You will join a group of 54 young people from 27 European countries as an ambassador and reporter for your country.

The only stipulations are that you must be between 18 and 25 to enter and that you have a valid passport / ID to travel.

To enter

all you have to do is send an email to europavox@state.ie …with your name, date of birth, address and email along with a NO MORE THAN 50 WORDS description on why YOU should be chosen as the Europavox ambassador to your country.

Make it memorable.

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I S S U E 1 1 M I G H T W E L L CO N TA I N . . .

Regulars 2

8

25

Irregulars 20

INCOMING The best of old and new in one tidy package.

We think you’ll like Two Door Cinema Club, Those Darlins, Heartless Bastards and Rose Elinor Douglas; why Darragh McCausland loves Guided By Voices and why we don’t love Happy Mondays and The Good, The Bad & The Queen; what’s happening in New York and what happened at Eurosonic.

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MUSIC IS MY RADAR Alison Curtis on the music of Canada and Ireland, being part of the Justice League and why Lykke Li drove her round the bend.

T E L E PAT H E Brooklyn’s Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais have created the most dance-floor friendly album of 2009 so far that manages to remain interesting.

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POWER OF DREAMS Craig Walker tells Phil Udell how the Dublin band had it and then found that the world had changed around them.

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L A K E O F S TA R S Once a year the brightest and the best descend upon Malawi for one of the world’s most unique music festivals. DJ Kormac from Bodytonic offers his own personal take.

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE It’s taken them eight albums to get there, but Animal Collective look like becoming this year’s most lauded band. They tell Niall Byrne they’d just like to be seen as normal guys who make extraordinary music.

B LO G S TA N DA R D Clicking against the pixels.

26 T H E G I G S P L A C E Great new live photography 29

head

ALBUMS Bell X1 try to become a better band, The Things realise their vision, U2 struggle to maintain theirs, plus as many new albums as you can handle.

JOHN WALSHE

editor

PHIL UDELL

editor

SIMON ROCHE

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ROGER WOOLMAN NIALL BYRNE

AOIFE McDONNELL

GAMES Killzone 2 betters its predecessor in every possible way; Halo enters the realm of the Real Time Strategy; and State goes skating. eyes

ads@state.ie

contributing writers dan hegarty, tanya sweeney, john joe worrall, maia dunphy, saoirse patterson, dave donnelly, jennifer gannon, ciara o’brien, shane galvin, martin mciver, david o mahony, durell connor, ciarán ryan, jenna wolf, david mclaughlin, jeff weiss, warren jones, kara manning, sinéad gleeson, johnnie craig, bobby ahern, cian traynor, louise healy, paul byrne, joe crosby, chris russell, tia clarke, sean feeny, elaine o’neil, shane culloty, pamela halton, miles stewart, kate rothwell, hilary a. white, darragh mccausland, aoife mcdonnell, michael dwyer, patricia danaher, niall crumlish, olivia mai, aiden fortune, alexandra donald, jack higgins, anna forbes, paula shields, alan reilly photographers richard gilligan, lili forberg, marcelo biglia, scott ‘n’ goulden, zoran orlic, liam sweeney, loreana rushe, feargal ward illustrators

organs

ANGER MANAGEMENT What happens when an underdog becomes successful: we immediately start to dislike them.

Bucking the begrudgers, State style.

operations manager

hands

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publisher assistant editor & web editor

advertising and marketing enquiries to: heart

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DVDS Steve McQueen’s often horrific but compelling Hunger, Baz Luhrmann’s folly and The Fall, the most visually beautiful film you’ve never seen.

} editorial@state.ie

art director

State is published monthly by State Magazine Ltd,.

brenb, nathalie nysted, christian kirkegaard, wulff & morgenthaler

Tel: (01) 443 4025 / info@state.ie / www.state.ie issn 2009-0897 All materials © State Magazine 2009. All rights reserved.

Reproduction of any part of the magazine without the written permission of the publishers is strictly prohibited. Although State Magazine has endeavoured to ensure that all information is correct, prices and details may be subject to change. The opinions expressed are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of State Magazine Ltd.

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Incoming

Ease Yourself In

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB

It seems that Steve Lamacq must have some hidden Irish blood in him, such is his continued love of music from these shores. Currently receiving his love are Bangor’s sparky Two Door Cinema Club. Despite having as much use for a drummer as Fight Like Apes do a guitarist, the trio don’t let their use of processed beats drag them down some dull electronic route, instead dealing in joyous alternative pop music. They were all over the UK last month, including the NME Awards tour.

Listen: ‘Something Good Can Happen’ Click: www.myspace.com/twodoorcinemaclub

THE DEPARTED

100 ALBUMS TO AVOID BEFORE YOU DIE

No. 11 THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE QUEEN: THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE QUEEN

LUX INTERIOR Whatever you thought of The Cramps, it can’t be denied that Lux Interior stayed committed to their cause. For 35 years he and wife Poison Ivy (plus 22 other musicians) guided the band through a career that saw them as cult heroes and an influence on many, among them White Stripes, NIck Cave and Jon Spencer, without achieving any major success of their own.

He remained one of the great frontmen, performing into his 60s, before an existing heart condition claimed him last month. One of the most enduring stories in rock ‘n’ roll had finally come to an end.

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There’s an error here already of course. The band that recorded The Good, The Bad & The Queen never actually gave themselves a name, preferring to stay anonymous. As anonymous, that is, as it’s possible to be when your members are Damon Albarn, Paul Simonon, drummer extraordinaire Tony Allen and The Verve’s guitarist, Simon Tong. If that rather pretentious move set alarm

bells ringing, the prospect of such four innovative individuals (plus producer Danger Mouse) getting together whetted the appetite.

Shame then that the result was such a non-event, a meandering mish-mash of half baked ideas.

On paper they were extraordinary.

On record it was a waste of time.

Don’t download: ‘The Bunting Song’ If you hate this don’t listen to: The Veils, The Power Station

Incoming

FUELLING THE STATE ENGINE FROM THE PRESENT…

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

THOSE DARLINS

Empire Of The Sun: Swordfish Hotkiss Night Why doesn’t the rest of the album sound like this?

Panama Kings W: Golden Recruit Electro meets the rock of the North, impressive as hell..

BellX1: The Curtains Are Twitching Stunning songwriting, gorgeous tune... and a New Orleans brass band. Bliss..

Doves: Kingdom Of Rust If you see the video with your headphones on you’ll never forget this north-of-England-spaghetti-western.

Asobi Seksu: Sing Tomorrow’s Praise Like a Cocteau Twins that go out and party a bit more.

Backwards is the new forwards.

& FROM THE PAST… Chapterhouse: Pearl As heard on Rob Da Bank’s new compilation and including Rachel Slowdive on backing vocals: a shoegazing tour de force but sadly their only decent tune.

Nigeria Special 1970-76 LP How can you not love a band that was founded at an event called The Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp? Based in the college town of Murfreesboro, located just outside of Nashville, the trio of Kelly Darlin, Jessie Darlin and, you guessed it, baritone ukulele player Nikki Darlin - sisters in the sense that the Ramones were brothers are far from your standard American roots act.

Recording in New York, they talk more about

female empowerment, music history and egalitarian ideals of performance and business then being so lonesome they could cry. Not to say that a little of those old influences don’t creep in, but Those Darlins are a little bit country, a lot rock ‘n’ roll.

Listen: ‘Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin’ Click: www.thosedarlins.com See: SxSW, March 18-22

WULFFMORGENTHALER: by Wulff & Morgenthaler

Perfect compilation of Modern highlife, Afro-sounds and African blues.

Grant Lee Buffalo: Fuzzy Still as warm and, well, fuzzy after all these years.

Bloc Party: Two More Years Sadly, two years after this non-album masterpiece, they dropped their worst, most self-indulgent album yet.

Madonna: Live To Tell This slow-dance special is still a stunning, widescreen lament on buried secrets and lying men.

WWW.WULFFMORGENTHALER.COM

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Incoming MY ROOTS ARE SHOWING: DARRAGH MCCAUSLAND

GUIDED BY VOICES Before I heard Guided by Voices, I knew what it meant to like a band. As a scruffy 17-year-old, I liked many bands: Blur, Nirvana, The Stone Roses and The Smiths, all the usual indie fodder. After I heard Guided by Voices, I knew what it meant to be obsessed, and I don’t use the word lightly. I am talking about an all-consuming, frightening obsession that took hold of me the second I first heard them and still has me in its unholy grip today. Such is their hold over me, that they turn me into a drooling, head-wrecking idiot at house parties, hogging someone else’s stereo and playing song after shittily produced song by this glorious group of middle aged jocks from Ohio.

My love affair began in the second hand section of a Canadian record store (I know, it’s excruciatingly indie isn’t it? Like a scene from High Fidelity).

Rifling through the ‘G’ section (looking for a Grandaddy album) I noticed an album with a bizarre and arresting cover, a sort of collage of a man with a flaming sun instead of a head. I checked out the track listing. It seemed to have a million songs. Even better, they had the most amazing titles, things like ‘Portable Men’s Society’ and ‘Choking Tara’. These were the mere tip of what I would later find out was a colossal iceberg of songwriter Robert Pollard’s puzzling lyrics that read on the page like The Irish Times cryptic crossword as set by a precocious 11-year-old on LSD. The icing on the cake was the band’s name, Guided by Voices. “Guided by Voices,” I thought. “That has to be the coolest fucking band name I ever heard.” So I bought it. Without hearing a single note, too. For all I knew, the album could have been a collection of Ukrainian folk ditties. As it turns out, it wasn’t. It was a rickety collection of the most beguilingly understated yet stunning pop songs I ever heard. It was

The Beatles gone to seed, guzzling beer and recording on banjaxed equipment. It was what The Who, Wire, and The Kinks might have sounded like if they grew up in a one horse town in the States and never made it big. It was love at first listen. It was the start of the most enduring love affair of my adult life. Ten years, 23 albums and 967 songs later, it still endures. For better or worse, my ears are married to Guided by Voices and they are the standard by which I judge all other bands.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

NOW WE KNOW THAT…

HEARTLESS BASTARDS

The world has gone Twitter mad - follow us @ statemagazine Blur are headlining Oxegen. Woo, and indeed, woo.

So are Kings Of Leon. What, again?

BBC3’s ‘Being Human’ is very good, a sort of low budget ‘Heroes’. RTE take note.

We also love Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. It took us three years but we got there. Tina rocks.

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The Mountain (released on Fat Possum, also home to Wavves) is already reaching critical and fanatical mass. In early February, the band made a Letterman appearance and we don’t expect it to be their last.

Listen: ‘The Mountain’ Click: myspace.com/heartlessbastards

A new album is forthcoming from Green Day in May entitled 21st Century Breakdown.

Blink 182 are back too. Did someone say ’90s rock revival?

GBV BY DANIEL COSTONS

You’d be forgiven for thinking Heartless Bastards are some twisted punk band trampling around the dank clubs of the global scuzzy underground.

In fact, this trio from Dayton, Ohio, are decidedly lighter, trading in a line of muddy blues-rock sounds. Anchored by the gravitating unique voice of Erika Wennerstrom, their third album

Radiohead played the Grammys for the first time ever, and it was great. As was Justin Timberlake and Al Green. Not so for Katy Perry though.

Incoming AVERAGE WHITE BAND:

HAPPY MONDAYS There’s an old saying in sound engineering circles: you can’t polish a turd.

The promotion of the Happy Mondays to their position of exalted icons of British music, however, is proof that the best producers can work their magic on even the ropiest of source material. Consider the evidence. Put into the studio with John Cale, they produced the fairly unlistenable ‘Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out’)’. Martin Hannet’s efforts on ‘Bummed’ were a little more palatable but it wasn’t until Vince Clark (of all people) got hold of ‘WFL’ and turned it into a dance floor monster that people started to take notice. And it was a great tune, or at least a great groove welded onto an alright tune.

They repeated the trick again and more so with ‘Hallelujah’, transformed from a shuddering mess into one the great records of the era, the sound of Manchester (or, if you must, Madchester) meets Detroit. It’s these two singles that have perhaps boosted the Mondays’ reputation way beyond its worth. Consider what was to follow – another so-so album that sounded great thanks to Steve Osborne and Paul Oakenfold and singles that offered diminishing returns on the same formula. As for Tony Wilson’s claim that Shaun Ryder was a better poet than William Butler Yeats, and that in the fullness of time, he’d come to be regarded every much as talented a genius as Mozart, well you just have to hope that the old boy had more than a hint of irony in his voice.

If they’d left it at that, then maybe we could be kinder on their legacy.

But no. There was the unmitigated disaster of the Yes Please! sessions (prompting the classic Melody Maker review “No thanks”), the drugs and the band’s descent into further anarchy and chaos. All of which made great material for a film but not a lot of good music. Then they insisted on coming back – not once but twice, resulting in some truly abysmal live shows and the shoddy Uncle Dysfunktional album.

What then is the legacy of the Happy Mondays? If we were to be cruel (and hey, why not), we might say it was The Farm, The Soup Dragons and the rest of the chancers who jumped on the baggy bandwagon. It was an exciting time, for sure, but once you remove your rose tinted specs, it becomes clear that Inspiral Carpets had the better tunes, James the better T-shirts and The Stone Roses the better everything. Which just leaves Happy Mondays as a particularly well polished something else.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

ROSE ELINOR DOUGALL

We touched on the bizarre revolving door policy of The Pippettes last issue, so it’s fitting that this month we should celebrate one former member who is doing her own thing. As a solo entity, Rose Elinor Dougall is a million miles away from her former incarnation - debut single ‘Another Version Of Pop Song’ is a catchy melody given a darkly experimental feel, full of swirling noises and effects. Look out for an album in the summer.

Listen: ‘Another Version Of Pop Song’ Click: www.myspace.com/roseelinordougallmusic

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Incoming FROM OUR FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT: KARA MANNING IN

NEW YORK

While President Barack Obama and heroic US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully�

Sullenberger warmed our frosty New York hearts in January, the frigid tundra of February felt especially bleak, thanks to the double punch of morbid economic woes and our ďŹ rst “real winterâ€? in years. Trust us, it really feels like Moscow on the Hudson here, especially as brutal wind chills keep us holed up in our little ats, cocooning with Netix rentals, frugally-minded borscht and tea.

Despite our whinging about wintery discontent, we are comforted by the promise of what’s stirring in the borough of Brooklyn. There is sunny anticipation for the third album from the partly-nu-mostly-shoe gazing duo Asobi Seksu (above), who unleash their beguiling, pop-sweetened confection Hush in mid-February in the States and Europe (including a Dublin stopoff ). The band now consists solely of vocalist/keyboardist Yuki Chikudate and guitarist James Hanna, but unlike 2006’s darker Citrus, there’s a warm, melodic sparkle to Hush. Blissful tracks like ‘Sunshower’, ‘Mehnomae’ and ‘In the Sky’ sound as spring-like and pastoral as a Vivaldi concerto.

Matt and Kim, another Brooklyn duo, released their sophomore album Grand on the very day our new President was sworn into ofďŹ ce. The album mirrors the celebratory, but still-cautious sentiment of these early Obama days; it’s a thumping mĂŠlange of childlike, percussive glee, shadowed by angular, not-so-merry lyrics. But pogoing between the vaudevillian shufe of the single ‘Daylight’ and the we-got-the-beat bray of ‘Lessons Learned’, singer/keyboardist Matt Johnson and drummer/ vocalist Kim SchiďŹ no keep things DIY simple, summer-kissed and as airy as Coney Island cotton candy.

And on a practical note, jumping around the apartment to ‘Good Ol Fashion Nightmare’ keeps us warm on –11C days.

But it’s the overcast albums that sometimes work best when sequestered inside. Georgia-born, New York-based singer and songwriter Matthew Houck, who works under the moniker Phosphorescent (with a live band of ever-changing musicians), has given Willie Nelson’s catalogue a BK burnishing on To Willie, which dropped in early February in the States and Europe on the Dead Oceans label. The album’s title and artwork acknowledges Nelson’s own mid-’70s tribute to late honky tonk legend Lefty Frizzell, To Lefty from Willie. It might seem a somewhat surprising tangent from Phosphorescent’s 2007 album Wolves, but Houck hasn’t simply covered Nelson nuggets here: he’s infused them with a mournful, urban cowboy twist. Tracks like the loping, alcoholic’s mantra ‘Reasons To Quit’, the stark, harmonic keen of ‘Can I Sleep In Your Arms’ and the credit-crunch timely ‘The Party’s Over’

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aren’t presented as mere tributes to the braided master’s brand of country lamentations, but as contemporary New York reveries. Like Bon Iver’s To Emma, Forever Ago, To Willie is a moonlit, hushed, snow-covered ďŹ eld of an album that feels just right on a bone-chilling night.

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Incoming MY HEADPHONES WHAT REAL FOLK ARE LISTENING TO

DAN HEGARTY

TRANS EUROPEAN EXPRESS

MARK O’TOOLE FROM CARLOW, LIVES IN DUBLIN What are you listening to right now?

The Gogol Bordello album – they’re based in New York but it’s all kind of Eastern European music fused with punk. It’s very satisfying.

How is it?

It’s very good: it reminds me that the gig is on so I have to get tickets for it.

It’s the festival that introduced acts like Franz Ferdinand, Jose Gonzalez, Soundtrack Of Our Lives and The Ting Tings to a larger worldwide audience, and last January it celebrated its 10th birthday. The Eurosonic Festival has often been described as the perfect antidote to eradicate those January blues, and this year I had the pleasure if finding out that this claim holds a lot of truth!

Like South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, the Eurosonic Festival (in Groningen, Holland) has had a knack of uncovering some excellent acts over the years. Not all have gone on to the have the success of the aforementioned names, but that’s something that I’ll more than likely get into in one form or another in another column, in another issue.

This year I had my usual festival strategy of how I’d get to see everything that I wanted, even if acts were on at the same time. It’s never worked before, and predictably it didn’t work here either. That didn’t really matter as the artists that I did see were worth it.

Dinosaur Pile-Up were one of the ‘names’ to watch at this year’s event, and they were pretty impressive, but the highlights for me were Norway’s wonderful Katzenjammer, our own Fight Like Apes and James Yuill. Fight Like Apes had a full house at the Vera venue (where 2fm were broadcasting from), and breezed through their

Katzenjammer take in Norway’s two minutes of sunlight during winter

set with their usual quirky energy.

One of the true crimes of 2008 was the way James Yuill’s album Turning Down Water For Air was criminally overlooked by so many (me included). His stage presence isn’t all encompassing, but the quality of his songs make up for any shortcomings you could highlight.

General Fiasco (from Belfast) and Ghinzu (from Belgium) both played good sets, but the Friday night belonged to Katzenjammer. The all-girl quartet made things look easy, and their enthusiasm and on-stage banter made it even better. It’s hard to say what genre you’d file them under, but I think that’s one of the reasons I liked them so much.

Groningen was the perfect place for a festival like this, and the Dutch really know how to run a festival to precision. The above, alongside many other acts who played at Eurosonic, will no doubt grace stages of festivals all over Europe this year.

Here are some of the other names of note: First Aid Kit, WWW, Fake Blood, Esser, Baddies, and Rita Redshoes.

It seems so far away, but bring on Oxegen, The Electric Picnic, and Hardworking Class Heroes!

Who are your favourite artists of all time?

Oh Jesus, God... uhh... there’s millions of them... give me two secs... The Smiths, Weezer, Nine Inch Nails, Christy Moore and The Specials.

What are your favourite music websites?

NME.com for the news, it’s the most up to date. I don’t read the magazine but the website is really good for music news, it’s like the BBC of music websites. And MCD.ie for gigs.

Do you have any Irish artists on your mp3 player?

Kerbdog, Luka Bloom and Christy Moore. Kerbdog would be the one I’d listen to the most.

What would you do if you were on a very, very long bus journey and your mp3 player died?

Read a book!

What’s the best gig you’ve been to in the last year?

Can I give you a top 3?

Sure.

Ok... Rage Against The Machine at Oxegen, Melt Banana in Crawdaddy, and Weezer in Vicar Street.

Anything you’d like to say to your fans?

Keep on truckin’!

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Music is my Radar

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ALISON CURTIS Today FM’s night-time presenter on playing the drums, trading monosyllables with Lykke Li and that Future Kings Of Spain obsession.

As told to

PHIL UDELL

My parents played everything off of vinyl. We had a turntable set into this massive wooden cabinet with builtin speakers. Their favourites were Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley, Glenn Miller and the Mini Pops (for my sister and I).

The first band I really got into were INXS: if the band got engraved on your pencil case, you were serious about them. I still love Listen Like Thieves.

When I moved to Toronto, the first concert I went to was Radiohead (‘Creep’ was just released). People I had only just met brought me to the gig for my birthday present. After that, it was Brit Pop and Select Magazine all the way!

The first band I was in was with two girls from high school and we formed because we wanted to be the only all-girl band in our city. I had only been playing the drums for six weeks when we played our first gig, but it didn’t matter: just the excitement was enough to get us through. I then went on to play in three more bands; the last one was the best.

It was two guy friends and myself, and we called ourselves The Justice League and wrote songs inspired by The Clash, Johnny Cash, Pixies and everyone in between. I would love to go back playing in a band again. But is it a dream I will never turn into reality…

Before I moved here, like everyone else, U2 and Enya were about the sum of my knowledge… I am ashamed to say. I should really keep a diary, I don’t know what my first gig in Ireland was, but I remember like it was yesterday, the first Witnness, which was not that long after I moved here. It was like being in a candy shop: the buzz of being able to see so many bands across the two days was amazing. BellX1 played that year and it was the first time I had seen them: I was hooked thereafter.

My best interview,

in so much that it surprised me ‘cos they were so friendly, unassuming and chatty was New Order’s Bernard and Stephen. At the end of the interview, when I said I had better wrap things up, they said “So soon, where you going?” For the worst interview, there is a tie: Adam Green (it was live and I just had to cut him off) and Lykke Li – she either answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to everything I said, so I said, ‘good luck and goodbye!’

Alison Curtis in on Today FM from Monday to Thursday, 10pm to midnight, and The Last Splash on Sundays, 8-10pm.

When it comes to albums, there are so many favourites but on the Canadian front, I always go back to the Arcade Fire Albums, Broken Social Scene and Kara Keith is a very talented woman.

I think it’s even harder to choose my Irish loves. I have always had a soft spot for Whipping Boy, love Villagers at the moment and of course, Future Kings of Spain!

I can’t remember the first record I played on Irish radio: it was so long ago in a shed in Sandyford! But the first record I played on The Last Splash was ‘Gigantic’ (Pixies). It had to be.

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State

X

WHE RE ’S ~ YO UR HEAD AT ?

Telepathe.

Words by

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NIALL BYRNE & JOHN WALSHE

State

mixing elements of dancefloor friendly electronica, funk, hip-hop, pristine pop and even shoegazing, Brooklyn’s Telepathe, Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais, limbo dance around genres with willful abandon. They’ve also created what’s arguably the crossover album of 2009, in the shape of Dance Mother.

Having met through a mutual friend, the then-trio formed a band with some like-minded souls, called Wikkid, before setting out on their own musical adventure as Telepathe. So what was different second time around?

“The music making process is completely different and therefore the sound,” Busy explains. “Wikkid songs were made in a more traditional band set up, three guitars and drums. All of us jammed out the songs together in our practice space. In Telepathe, we write much differently in that we sit down and use Logic Audio to map out all of our beats, melodies, arrangements taking turns to layer our ideas for each song.”

She later admits that “We feel that jamming is limiting. We couldn’t have made our music from jamming.”

Initially influenced by “guitar and drums based music”, subsequent years have seen the duo’s musical tastes change: “Now we are into a lot more electronic music, dubstep, house, hip-hop.”

The latter genre has been mentioned a lot in reviews of the band, something they don’t necessarily disagree with: “We have both shared a love of hip hop for a long time. We love the anything goes attitude to making songs, and the syncopated rhythms.”

Fellow New Yorker, Mirror Mirror’s Ryan Lucero has contributed a lot to Telepathe’s sound (“We love Ryan’s guitar style. He’s written some killer guitar melodies for some of our songs”), but now it’s just the two of them.

That said, they have plenty of contemporaries to bounce ideas off, if the mood should take them. All the talk on this side of the Atlantic is about a Brooklyn avant-garde scene. Is it as palpable as it seems and who are their favourite Brooklyn bands?

“Yes definitely, there are a lot of bands, venues, audiences here,” Busy admits. “Chairlift, Salem, Bunny Rabbit, Stay High.”

It’s not just Telepathe’s line-up that has changed so much over the years. The music they make is also seemingly in a state of constant flux. Their early releases were far more experimental than the (by comparison) conventional melodies of Dance Mother, if you can describe something like the electric staccato of ‘Lights Go Down’, the soaring metronomic pop of ‘Michael’ or the epic genre-defying ‘Trilogy’ as conventional. Was the shift towards pop melodies and other sounds deliberate or a happy accident?

“It was a deliberate shift,” she notes. “We felt like we needed a new challenge in song writing, and decided to work a lot more with structure and writing repeated beats and hooks. Yet I feel

TELEPATHE

like we still stay true to this ‘experimental’ attitude in trying to create our own brand of pop songs.”

So just how difficult is it to make pop music compared to drone-based compositions?

“It’s about 50 times more difficult,” confesses Busy. “There’s a lot more planning, arranging, composing, tweaking of sounds involved.”

Some of that tweaking was handled by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, who produced Dance Mother. So what did they learn from the highly experienced Sitek, and what did he bring to the party?

“We learned a lot about production from Dave. When we went into his studio, we brought in our songs that we had mapped out using Logic Audio. Then we, song by song, replaced or overdubbed each soft synth line with an analogue synth from his collection. He has a huge collection of synths and drum machines.

We then all started layering more ideas onto each song until we had 100 tracks per song!”

If they hadn’t worked with Sitek, Busy feels, Dance Mother “might not have sounded as expansive as it sounds. That’s Dave’s thing, expansive.”

Gangnes and Livaudais collaborate on lyric-writing duties. “We often play a game of ‘exquisite corpse’ when writing them,” she laughs. “Sometimes we ‘borrow’ from our favourite books. The themes in our songs usually relate to death, love, everyday life, the apocalypse.”

There’s certainly a menacing, dystopian feel to Dance Mother’s lyrics. State wonders what informs that kind of writing?

“Hmm... our subconscious.”

The album’s title is, according to Busy, “short for Dance Motherfucker. A couple of years ago, we played a Halloween show and we made these scary fake blood covered t-shirts to wear. We wrote ‘Dance Motherfucker’ on them with a sharpie. It has many meanings....”

Translating the multi-layered sound of Dance Mother into the live arena can’t be easy. “It takes a lot of preparation to sequence our music,” she admits. “It translates best when coming out of a powerful PA.” Telepathe were recently in Ireland for a show organised by Skinny Wolves (“the SW guys are awesome”) and there are plans for a split 12-inch later this year, featuring the Telepathe remix of Effi Briest’s ‘Mirror Rim’, with Briest twiddling knobs on a mix of Telepathe’s ‘Chrome’s On It’. They’re also planning an Irish return in late April/early May (“Can’t wait!”). Other than that, what’s on the agenda for 2009?

“Touring, touring, touring. writing more songs...world domination.” We wouldn’t bet against them.

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For a time back in 1990, it looked like Power Of Dreams were going to become the biggest indie band in the world. Then, it all imploded. Singer Craig Walker tells their story.

I M M I G R A N TS, E M I G R A N TS THEM ~

AN D Words by

PHIL UDELL

he’d been away a long time but, three quarters of the way through last year, craig walker came home. supports at The Baggot Inn as well, but I Much had changed since he first left Dublin for London some 20 years ago.

The cause of his departure was Power Of Dreams, the band he formed at school with his drummer brother Keith and Mick Lennox, a local lad who played bass and whose parents had an empty gym that proved a handy rehearsal space.

Pouring tea in his Dublin apartment, Craig remembers how the fledgling band made it out of the rehearsal room to play gigs and one venue in particular. “The Underground, which is now a lap dancing club on Dame Street: that used to be brilliant. All the bands of that era used to play there: Something Happens!, A House etc. It was a dingy cellar and the owner didn’t seem to give a shit about underage drinking. We’d play Saturday afternoon gigs in there. We would have been 15 or 16. It used to be us and other bands from school so the place was full of drunk 16year-old kids who’d pile out onto the street afterwards at six o’clock. We used to do

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think because we were so young and had pretty decent songs, that we picked up a following pretty quickly.”

Not wanting to lose ground, the band made sure that they got their songs down on tape as quickly as possible. “Our first demo was produced by a guy called Stano,” says Craig, “who was around at the same time as The Virgin Prunes and ended up working with Colm from My Bloody Valentine. He sent it over to Keith Cullen because he knew he’d just started Setanta Records by putting out an Into Paradise single, another Dublin band. He came to a show, said he wanted to put a record out and invited us over to London.”

If that all sounds suspiciously easy, the band were thinking that way as well. “We didn’t really think much of it but we went over and he put is in a studio in Elephant & Castle. We’d never really been to London before and ended up staying in Keith’s squat. The whole experience was fantastic.

We recorded the single, went away and

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POWER OF DREAMS

~ Everyone has a gung ho attitude when you’re with a record company – the big hit is just around the corner and that’s going to save everything. You’re young and naive. But I look back at that time fondly. In the first year in London, I never went on The Tube: it was taxis all the way, even to the shops. I’m glad I experienced that.” ~

didn’t expect anything more. Then I got a call from Keith that we were single of the week in Music Week and Melody Maker. It all went crazy then.”

Power Of Dreams weren’t the only band who had to leave Ireland to get noticed at this time, although as Craig admits, “there were ways of doing it. The Stunning had built up a great following for themselves but that required constant work and playing everywhere. That was the only route. Hot Press was all there was for magazines, although The Event Guide had started and was really fresh. There was a little scene but there weren’t any labels: I can’t even think of any. It just fell into our lap with Setanta and from that it moved on.”

And it moved on apace. Following that debut EP, the band found themselves at the centre of a record company bidding war. Craig laughs at the memory of it.

“My parents’ address was on the back of the sleeve so I was getting letters and postcards from all the top boys, people like Geoff Travis at Rough Trade. I was in Ballyfermot College at the time and every second week I was flying out to England with our manager to meet various people.

It was quite amazing, like Jim’ll Fix It. I was getting loads of free records and everyone was really nice to us.”

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They weren’t the only ones. “It was still all about the post-U2 thing, a lot of bands here got signed – An Emotional Fish, Into Paradise, Blue In Heaven. There was a period in the late ’80s / early ’90s when a lot of bands were signed to major labels but in general there was a lot less money in Dublin, people couldn’t afford to go out and see gigs. There weren’t really that many options as a band: you could go down the route of playing universities but we wanted to play tours, we wanted to make records and we wanted to make money as well.”

The band eventually signed to Polydor and very quickly found themselves having to become accustomed to the realities of the music business, as Craig recalls. “That was the beginning of it. I remember the first time that mid-week chart positions were mentioned, I had no idea what that meant.

Immediately we were into this world where we had to sell records. It would be very rare for a young band to go straight into a major deal these days.”

Where they given an indication of what lay ahead?

“Not entirely, no,” he admits. “They don’t tell you that they’re going to stick you on tour for 18 months after you’ve written the story of your life on an album.

You get into various vices on a level that

you’ve never experienced before and it’s all free. It’s very difficult not to come out of a bit wrecked.”

The record that the band produced was a remarkably mature work for ones so young, especially the songwriter Walker.

The year was 1990 and their timing was perfect. Immigrants, Emigrants And Me was everywhere, Power Of Dreams were everywhere and their singles especially were all over the radio.

“That was weird,” laughs Craig, “but it was the biggest buzz. We’d done a lot of sessions for Dave Fanning, so we’d had a taste of it. He was always a great champion of the band and hammered Immigrants, Emigrants And Me. Then we’d be on a motorway on the M1 in the van on the way to a gig and hear ourselves on Radio 1, which was amazing. The first single got a lot of play and we almost scraped into the Top 40. In those days it meant something.”

How was the reaction at home?

“We had a good fanbase here, even if it did peak with the first album. We played the SFX and the album went Top 5. If you’re not here, though, it’s difficult to keep things going and we didn’t play as much as we should have.”

One of the reasons for that neglect was that the band were just so damn busy.

UK tour followed UK tour (including a memorable jaunt with The Mission), as

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well as the rest of the world taking notice.

“Things started happening in other places, Japan really kicked off as well as Europe. I got to go around the world with my mates at the age of 18, doing what I loved doing. It was an absolute blast. I’d recommend it to anybody.”

There was a darker side to it all though, as the teenagers were thrown into a very adult world. “Early on, it was just drink.

I’m glad it wasn’t happening now because the harder drugs are more accessible. I remember in the early ’90s, to buy a gram of coke in Ireland was a big event, it was so hard to get – even in the music industry. I remember coming back here from London and there was no ecstasy, although it kicked in pretty quick.”

After the success of their debut, spirits in the camp were high. “The whole band moved to London,” he says, “and we lived liked The Monkees in a house in Finsbury Park, while we were recording the second album. They were crazy times.

I was living next door to an ecstasy dealer and it was the beginning of the whole warehouse scene in the early ’90s. It was a good time to be in London but a strange time for music: it suddenly became really unfashionable to play guitars.”

There was a sea change coming.

“Everything in music was really unsteady at that time,” admits Craig. “It was all led by computers and electronics. For the first time, you could make music in your bedroom. What we were doing became very unfashionable.”

~ “I’m glad it wasn’t happening now because the harder drugs are more accessible. I remember in the early ’90s, to buy a gram of coke in Ireland was a big event, it was so hard to get – even in the music industry.”

~

For Power Of Dreams, the clouds were gathering. “To be honest,” admits Craig, “we should have taken more time with (second album) 2 Hell With Common Sense.

We finished touring, I’d forgotten how to write songs and we were told that we had five or six weeks before we were due to start recording. I started writing but you can’t write songs to order. Some of it I’m still pleased with but I wish I’d had more time.”

Craig is fairly forthright about how the record went down. “It bombed. It did alright in Ireland but in the UK it got deleted the day it was released, which was a trick that they had. The guy that had signed us – and you’ll hear this a million times – wasn’t with the company

anymore. We were one of those bands that owed quite a bit of money and they decided to cut their losses. Unless you sell an immense amount of records, politics will always come into play.”

On reflection, it was easy to see where the money went. “There were six versions of each single, stuff like that. At the time, we didn’t realise that it was coming out of our pockets. Everyone has a gung ho attitude when you’re with a record company – the big hit is just around the corner and that’s going to save everything.

You’re young and naive. But I look back at that time fondly. In the first year in London, I never went on the tube: it was taxis all the way, even to the shops. I’m glad I experienced that.”

Compared to the happy days of just two years before, the process became a grind. “We knew that they weren’t interested and we weren’t entirely happy with it. There was a negative vibe around the whole thing: we weren’t the darlings anymore. It was a big change in a very short space of time. You start having to chase after the record company to do things. They lose interest if you don’t have hits. We had meeting after meeting but no-one knew how to take it to the next step, ourselves included. Everything had changed. Altern 8 were on the cover of NME, smashing guitars.”

This wasn’t the end of the story, although it was the beginning of the end. The band would continue through two more albums on independent labels before finally calling a halt in 1994.

“My heart wasn’t in it,” says Craig now. “It was hard getting into the van and going to these gigs that would have been packed once but weren’t any more.”

All involved wasted no time in moving forward. Craig Walker formed Pharmacy with Ian Olney, who had joined after the first album, and Morty McCarthy from Sultans Of Ping, before becoming part of trip-hop outfit Archive.

Now settled back in Dublin, he has a solo album ready to go. Talk of a Power of Dreams reunion continues and with this year marking the twentieth anniversary of their first release, stranger things have happened. As for the past, he remains sanguine about the band’s history. “It’s a common story,” he smiles. “You get your shot and then...boom!”

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Guns, rum and money: DJ Kormac on his debut at Malawi’s premier (only?) international music festival, the incredible Lake Of Stars.

H E A RT O F BRIGHTNES S ~ Words by

DJ KORMAC

ALEXANDER JE & C H L O É B I L L E B A U LT

Photography by

in 1998, will jameson, a student at liverpool’s john moores university, went to southern africa to work as a volunteer with the Wildlife Society. He arrived you don’t consider it for very long. It was back to Liverpool with an idea and an empty ‘Chibuku Shake Shake’ drinks carton as a souvenir. Soon after, Will founded the award-winning Liverpool club night of the same name, which is still running today and has hosted, well, everyone. That same year, Will ran the first Lake of Stars music festival in Senga Bay, Malawi.

The festival combined African music with contemporary UK and international sounds and attracted people from the UK, Malawi and all over Southern Africa. It won the Malawi Tourism Award in its first year and led to Will being named as one of the Observer and Courvoisier Future 500.

The festival is held on a stunning beach beside the blue waters of Lake Malawi and aims to generate exposure and revenue for the area’s charitable projects.

Since its inception, the festival seems to have grown steadily and 2008’s line up included Scratch Perverts, Seth Lakeman, BBC Radio 1’s Marie Anne Hobbs, Skitz, Ali B, Boom Monk Ben and me! Also representing the Irish contingent were Bodytonic DJs Tayor and JP and the Big Dish Go DJs. When asked to go and play at a festival in this amazing part of the world,

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decided we’d do the live show on the Friday night right before Ali B and Skitz.

This was an added bonus as I’m a fan of both those guys. We got our shots, an assortment of preventative tablets and boarded planes for an 11-hour journey to Southern Africa. Our plan was to travel through Mozambique and enter Malawi the day before the festival, allowing us plenty of time to get to the site for our Friday night set.

When travelling through this part of the world, you realise several things very quickly. The first, which can’t be overstated, is the astounding level of poverty that exists. I know this has been said and probably sounds clichéd but I frankly don’t mind repeating it: seeing the way the people live there first hand literally changed the way I view the world.

The second is the difference in attitude and pace of life. Everything happens at its own (typically slower) pace over there and my rule of thumb was to generally double the amount of time you allow for everything. I say this like it’s a bad thing but it’s actually quite cool; you arrive, adjust and go with it. I found it

quite relaxing, to be honest.

Our drivers had assured us that if we were up at the crack of dawn the day before the festival, we may even make the site in Malawi that night, a full 12 hours ahead of schedule. We deemed this a wonderful idea as it would allow us plenty of time to settle in, get everything sorted and be able to relax into the gig.

It soon emerged that this was a bit of a pipe dream. Several elongated stops en route didn’t help and it was around 6pm before we were even approaching the Mozambique border. About an hour later, following a heated conversation with a heavily armed security guard, our driver returned with the news that he had successfully managed to bribe our way out of Mozambique as the border had closed for the evening.

Travelling through Africa teaches you very quickly that most people in positions of authority play the bribe game professionally. You wouldn’t believe how many times I saw one of our drivers pay uniformed men with guns.

I assumed that when you went through the border of one country, you were automatically in the adjoining country.

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LAKE OF STARS

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LAKE OF STARS

~

“As soon as we reached the Malawian border, we discovered the ‘man in charge’ had retired for the evening. He was contacted and in keeping with tradition, offered a bribe to come back, stamp a few passports and send us on our merry way.” ~ Call me naive, but I just did. Turns out, there’s a good 20 kilometres between the borders of Mozambique and Malawi. As soon as we reached the Malawian border, we discovered the ‘man in charge’ had retired for the evening. He was contacted and in keeping with tradition, offered a bribe to come back, stamp a few passports and send us on our merry way.

After a while, it didn’t look like he was going to show and this spawned much chat between security guards and various passengers from another bus. A little later, a quite boisterous, drunken English girl steamed in to “sor’ it oll aouhhhh”. We were going nowhere.....

This series of events meant we were, technically speaking, refugees and forced to camp there for the night. Garland, one of our drivers (and thoroughly nice fella) decided not to sleep, as someone had to keep watch over the bags/equipment etc.

I have to say it wasn’t the best evening of the trip. At around 7am the next morning, a well-rested border guard appeared, stamped our passports and we were on the road in Malawi.

This setback had left us seriously delayed and we proceeded to drive at highspeed over mountainous regions. I must mention at this point the overwhelming endurance and understanding of my travelling companions. There were a bunch of us on a bus, many of whom were artists performing at the festival, and every single one of them journeyed without stopping for 14 hours in the searing heat with very little food and water and never once complained. They did all this as it was made clear we’d be doing very well to make it in time for our set and I can’t thank them enough for it.

To cut a long story short, we ended up making it to the festival site five

minutes after we were due on-stage in the most stressed state imaginable. The stage manager was just about to reschedule us until she saw our exasperated faces scampering to the stage! The stage was set up in what felt like about 90 seconds and the gig ended up going pretty well. We played to a warm, enthusiastic crowd who were up for a good time and thankfully filled the main stage area.

Afterwards, it turned out Marie Anne Hobs played directly after us, while we were showering and having some well earned ales! This was instead of her scheduled Saturday night slot as Ali B had missed his flight. I was rather disappointed when I found out, as I really wanted to hear her bass-heavy set. By all accounts, it went down a storm.

Saturday was spent on a stunning beach with my friends, drinking cold beers and eating gorgeous kebabs barbecued then and there. If there’s a better way to spend an afternoon, I’d love to know. Day turns to night in Africa in about 10 seconds. The sun rapidly falls from the sky and you’re into night mode, which at Lake Of Stars involves ‘sand navigation,’ great music and the incredibly tasty (and dangerous) Tipo Tinto rum.

I caught a good few acts on the Saturday night including Big Dish Go (rocked it during Saturday evening’s sunset) London’s MC Prophet (really good,) Liverpool’s DJ Buddah (always good,) and an excellent Malawian reggae act called The Black Missionaries. I was disappointed to miss the Malawian minister for tourism, who opened the main stage with a speech and a performance!

Unfortunately, I didn’t miss the Scratch Perverts’ closing set on the same

stage later that night. Admittedly, the wind was blowing a gale, which didn’t help needle stability, and the sound system was starting to give out a bit. That said, I’d seen Tony Vegas and Co. several times before and I’m getting tired of hearing, more or less, the same set over and over again. It just reeks of complacency. After this, we decided to listen to the DJs at the beach bar until sunrise, which cheered us all up no-end.

For my money, Sunday’s musical highlights were UK soul singer Neech, Guy Ninja and The Shooting Stars and Boom Monk Ben’s DJ set. I finished my Lake Of Stars experience DJing at the beach bar until sunrise, alongside Bodytonic’s Tayor and JP, Buddah and Geoff from Liverpool, Big Dish Go’s Conor and Robbie and Manchester’s DJ Seismic and it was arguably the high point of my whole weekend. After that, we drank Tipo Tinto, played in the sand and generally had a ball until well into the next morning.

Lake Of Stars is more like a huge beach party than it is a “festival” and I mean this as a compliment. The organisers have provided an atmosphere, setting and mix of cultures and music that’s truly amazing. While the festival is still growing and maybe could do with an increased budget, it’s definitely worth making the trip and I am really glad I got to perform and have a great time in this amazing part of the world. If fact, maybe now is the best time to go, just in case it changes...

For more information on Lake Of Stars visit: www.lakeofstars.org. Kormac would like to thank Culture Ireland for their support during this tour. For more information on Kormac visit: www.myspace.com/djkormac

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~ Words by

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NIALL BYRNE

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Cult heroes, critical darlings, folk freaks, indie pop superstars, and reclusive revivalists with rabid fan bases.

the last decade for david portner, noah lennox, brian weitz and josh dibb has seen a fascinating transformation from next 21

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obscure oddball freak-folk to zeitgeist-capturing electronic wizardry, critical acclaim and cult status gone stratospheric. This sea change has reached its apex largely thanks to their band, Animal Collective’s eight studio album Merriweather Post-Pavilion, in many ways an album of classic proportions. How did that happen?

Calling your band Animal Collective probably means you have some affinity to the feral, to wildlife and the natural state of the world, so you might want to represent that in your sobriquet.

This goes some way to explaining why State is talking to Avey Tare (Portner) on the phone from London about his band-mates Panda Bear (Lennox), Geologist (Weitz), Deakin (Dibb) and the atmospheric music they make together.

When details were announced of the release of Merriweather Post-Pavilion, there were frenzied fan forum posts, re-imagined versions of the album tracks using live versions as a starting point, all before the actual recorded songs had funnelled into ears, leakage scandals, listening parties resembling stoner bedroom get-togethers and more hype and expectation than State cares to remember about an album for a long time. The album would want to be good for all this noise it was generating. It was, and then some. Not that Avey and Co. were too bothered.

“It feels good as long as it’s positive,” he says. “Even when we started tracklisting this record, we felt we were onto something pretty special, in terms of our enthusiasm: we immediately were loving the way it sounded, so we were really excited to play it first for our friends and then to get it out there.”

They had nothing to worry about and they knew it.

Merriweather Post-Pavilion is 2009’s first great record, a document of a band at the height of their creative and experimental powers.

As State’s review last month explained it “occupies a magical place where beautiful electronic noise collides with idiosyncratic timbres and comes out beaming.” To understand how and why the band sound like they do, it’s necessary to look back.

At the turn of the century, Animal Collective specialised in strange, ethereal hard to digest music. The sound on earlier albums Danse Manatee, Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished and Here Comes The Indian could simultaneously be described as primitive and annoying. Much of the material comes from an experimental, uninhibited primal side of the brain, which favours yelping, jarring, abstract child-like noises over rhythm, cadence and musical standards.

In 2004, the band took a turn towards the latter characteristics with Sung Tong, an acoustic-based album which manages to straddle both worlds, from unnerving passages of mallard-like sounds (‘Whaddit I Done’) to rather superb folk compositions (‘Who Could Win A Rabbit?’). It was still weird but noticeably more listenable. Avey still has time for the band’s early catalogue, however.

“I see it representing very specific times in our lives,” he muses. “I feel like when I look at that kind of music, it does represent what was happening, how we were living, what we were doing. They’re all special to me. They are products of their environment.”

The year before, the American music cognoscenti represented

by Pitchfork began taking an interest in the band, which spiralled

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ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

with the two subsequent albums 2005’s Feels and 2007’s Strawberry Jam showcasing a migration to a more spirited and psychedelic pop sound. Fans of alternative music finally had a band to hold dear to their hearts, to cherish and hold up as a beacon for the idiosyncratic minority. The Panda Bear solo album Person Pitch in 2007 helped cement the band as purveyors of unique and original music, something which has manifested itself ten-fold on Merriweather.

The songwriting for the album began with some initial melodies while the band were mixing Strawberry Jam. In May 2008, between touring, Animal Collective reconvened and managed to orchestrate the structure of eight of the songs which would make up the final 11.

To add a degree of difficulty to the situation, each member of the band calls a different part of the world home. Panda Bear lives in Lisbon, Portugal, with his wife and daughter; Geologist resides in Washington DC; Avey Tare lives with his wife Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir (formerly of the Icelandic band Múm) in New York City; and guitarist Deakin, who was not involved in the process of making Merriweather Post-Pavilion (after all, the band is a loose collective) lives, well, elsewhere.

The recording of Merriweather lasted for four to five weeks at Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, Mississippi, after seven months of playing the majority of the songs live in front of audiences. The band hooked up with producer Ben Allen, who had worked in the past with Gnarls Barkley and engineered Puff Daddy LPs, choosing him for some a specific quality: specifically, the desire to give their records some real bass.

“One thing we talked about after Strawberry Jam was doing tracks with more low-end in them,” Avey explains. “It was never a big part of Animal Collective. We’ve always been content with the instrumentation we had, which is primarily guitar-based. So we started thinking more about the frequency range and trying to get it a little more even. Being fans of dub, hip-hop and dance music, we wanted to let those influences shine on some tracks.”

MPP is distinctly the most danceable and sample-based collection of songs the band have ever recorded but their way of working left Allen confused at first. “From his background, when you make electronic music, you put everything on a grid in a computer and arrange it that way, but we’re pretty insistent on trying to arrive at that point organically,” Avey recounts.

“Thankfully, he understood!”

As the album was largely recorded with samplers, the band set up in Sweet Tea’s large control room so that they could record in the same space as Allen. Avey attributes the album’s core sound to the studio. “Sweet Tea had these awesome rooms,” he remembers, “that they really started to take over the overall sound of the record and contribute to the reverb and the live room sound you hear.”

As Avey mentions, reggae and dub played an important part in influencing their modus operandi: “We’ve always really liked that crunchy reverby reggae drum sound. We used a lot of spring reverb on this album from the studio. I really love King Tubby a lot these days – the way he’s able to make a live-sounding form of music more electronic by post-production. In a similar way, that’s what we’re trying to do by manipulating basic instruments.”

The band were also inspired by the most modern form of dub

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“There was talk in the press of these guys who are shamanistic druggy recluse guys, so it was important to us to let people know actually we’re just normal guys” ~

in dubstep. “The bass sounds and atmosphere that Burial creates really inspired us,” notes Avey. “We’ve always been into otherworldy music: just the way he does it with dance music was really inspiring.”

‘Other-worldy’ is a suitable comparison for MPP, which possesses a supernatural quality throughout; from the carousel merry-goround of opener ‘In The Flowers’ to the sublime bass-reinforced oddysey of the familial ‘My Girls’ to the breath-taking tribal rhythm and harmony-laden closer ‘Brother Sport’. It’s just the latest pit-stop in a singular moreish musical journey that is becoming increasingly more magnetic to many music lovers. It’s also an album brimming with unabashed joy and wonder, which

Avey claims comes from the band’s interpersonal relationships.

“I’d say family is the overall theme. We often consider our close friends part of family too, so it stretches out to the love and responsibility you feel for your friends and family and how it’s affecting us,” he says without reserve.

“We really like hanging out with each other and playing music,” he says. “We live so far apart that playing music together is a really special time for us. I think we needed a reliever, a breath of fresh air after Strawberry Jam ‘cos that was really tense for us. We worked so long on that record, we lost perspective and needed to go somewhere totally different, so I think all of that combined and being a really easy going process made it so positive.”

Merriweather Post-Pavilion is named after an outdoor music venue in the band’s native state of Maryland. “To us, it represents

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~ “We’ve always viewed it as this project-to-project thing, and not necessarily this linear progression. It’s kinda natural that one of us might not be involved in something. It just seems normal” ~

the act of listening to music outside,” Avey explains. “When we were growing up, we always listened to music outside in our back yards with boomboxes and really attach that musical experience to getting super into the music. When we were listening back to a lot of demos, we felt it was attached to that super-environmental idea.”

The artwork features an optical illusion, based on the works of Japanese psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka, which Avey found in a magazine. “I discovered it in Scientific American magazine on my way down to Athens, where we were mixing the record,” he recalls. “It had an article about perception and optical illusions and that image was in the article. We tossed it around and looked it a lot while we were mixing. It has a very aquatic, shimmering watery quality to it and so does the music. It’s vague and Noah calls it iconic. It doesn’t suggest too much but it has this almost magical, watery quality.”

A history sprung up around Animal Collective as these mythical creatures who lived in high places and bleated out strange music, sporadically. As time passed, that myth was picked up by a notoriously fervent fanbase and a forum called Collected Animals sprung up. The band became actively involved in the forum, answering questions and responding to comments. Of late, they’ve needed to step away from it.

“Personally, I thought we started with the intention of keeping a lot of mystery in what we were doing and not saying so much about the music. It was cool to suddenly have this message board and this community and to be a part of that,” Avey says.

“There was talk in the press of these guys who are shamanistic druggy recluse guys, so it was important to us around Feels to let people know actually we’re just normal guys,” he continues. “We want to relate to people but then we thought we talked about things a little too much, were a little too open with people, getting involved in discussions we shouldn’t be a part of.

So we stepped away from it. It is cool to have an intense fan base though.”

State wonders whether Avey can put his finger on why that relationship is so intense.

“I just think it’s the idea of a cult band, a band who are doing

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something a little bit different. People feel very close to the band and make it very personal to themselves as something they can use to define their personality.”

In a band where the roles and lines are blurred to the point that you can never be sure who plays what instrument, the absence of Deakin suggests some kind of rift in the band’s makeup, but Avey is quick to refute any bad blood between them.

“He’s a great guitar player, primarily, and since we were looking to move away from the guitars anyway, it was a push more in that direction and how as a three-piece can we do something that is as complex or elaborate as a four-piece,” he explains calmly.

“Electronic music, samplers and performing music in that way has always been something that we’ve inspired by, which we’ve done in our side projects, like Noah obviously with his record Person Pitch: just how he used samples to make a more-pop sounding record. We thought we could go in more that direction as a three-piece. It was the right time to do it.”

Deakin will return to Animal Collective in its next guise, which is to be a visual DVD release the band hope to release and to show on the road too. In fact, Deakin has already started working on the project and will be joined in the recording process by the band over the summer, once the current tour is over.

“We’ve always viewed it as this project-to-project thing, and not necessarily this linear progression. It’s kinda natural that one of us might not be involved in something. It just seems normal,” Avey avows.

He also mentions that a new Panda Bear album is in the works too but not to hold your breath for that one. “He’s enthusiastic about doing stuff. He wants to tour as Panda Bear too but he usually takes his time. He worked on Person Pitch for years before it came out, so I think he plans on taking time to do it. He might tour towards the end of the year.”

With the band at the forefront of the alternative pop music zeitgeist at the moment, Avey is positive about what the future holds. “I’m waiting for the surprises. There’s always some sweet ones.”

Animal Collective play Tripod on March 27.

Blog Standard The tracks and artists being noticed online this month

by Niall Byrne

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MARINA AND THE DIAMONDS: ‘OBSESSIONS’ The second 7” release from London’s Neon Gold Records after Passion Pit’s ‘Sleepyhead’ is the equally toxic ‘Obsessions’ b/w ‘Mowgli’s Road’ from Marina And The Diamonds. This similarlytitled Welsh girl gives Florence & The Machine a run for her money in the tunes department. It’s early days yet but we’re smitten. myspace.com/marinaandthediamonds

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THE DØ: DOING THE DØ Bonkers music from French and Finnish couple who recently became the first English-singing act to reach number one in the French album charts. Their music is an odd mix of pop and a jazz ethos – that sounds horrible but it’s really just textured. Olivia Bouyssou Merilahti is the singer and flits from sounding like Eminem to a Disney singing clock. Weird and intriguing.

myspace.com/thedoband

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THECOCKANDBULLKID: ‘I’M NOT SORRY’ W Following up last year’s ‘On My Own Again’ single with her first material of 2009 is Anita Blay and this cracking electro-pop tune. Blay was largely ignored in the annual hype lists at the turn of the new year, perhaps because her stock rose prematurely, before she had any releases ready for us. Well, this is a pretty good start to her year, in our estimation.

http://url.ie/1784

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ZOMBI: PROG STANDARD Not to be confused with Zomby, the dubstep/electronic producer from London, Zombi combine the histrionics of metal and prog-rock to the gliding soundtrack electronica of Goblin. It’s definitely the sound of hammy in 2009 but y’know what, it’s fun to listen to late at night when you need a driving atmospheric rhythm to help you get things done. myspace.com/zombi

2

AEROPLANE: REMIXES A good remix can take any song and subtly morph it into something else entirely. Aeroplane, the Belgian cosmic-dance duo, are the most exciting remixers out there right now. Their reworkings of Grace Jones, The Shortwave Set, Sebastian Tellier, David Rubato, Friendly Fires and MGMT have floored us and they will you too.

http://url.ie/1781

blog of the month ASLEEP ON THE COMPOST HEAP http://onavery.blogspot.com

An Irish music blogger from Kells who wanted to start a food blog and ended up with one of the best music blogs in the country.

on videotape Tom Jones La Blogotheque Proving the old-timer has real talent away from the lights of the stage, this intimate performance in a hotel room in NYC captures his “velvety punch”. http://url.ie/1788

A history of pop (in four chords) Sydney-based comedians The Axis of Awesome prove that most popular music is built on the same four chords. http://url.ie/153a

Freaxx is right...

All kind of musical wrongs collide in the video for Brokencyde’s ‘Freaxx’ which mixes autotune, Crystal Castles-esque electronica, emo screams and crunk into a day-glo dystopia. http://url.ie/1452

Sometime State reviewer and this month’s My Roots Are Showing correspondent Darragh McCausland has an active imagination. Using his taste for alternative and electronic music as a starting point, his posts often turn into mini vignettes, taking in the act of building a snowman, rural town binge drinking, pugillas (pugg/gorilla hybrids obviously), feral cats, lost dogs and many other random topics.

The music is pretty good too, of course, taking in tracks from Lotus Plaza (Locke from Deerhunter’s side-project), a look at The KLF’s chillout album, Fennesz, Times New Viking, Fuck Buttons and Vivian Girls. It’s a pretty blissful collection. How blissful? To quote the blog directly: “How about as blissful as when you were 10 years old and turned the outside tap onto your bare toes on a sweltering July afternoon? Or as blissful as that first time you shot a speedball into your cock backstage at a Grateful Dead gig?”

Yeah, like that.

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State

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State

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The Gigs Place

A new feature showcasing some great live photographers out there, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ladyhawke. at the Academy, Dublin shot by Claire Weir

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Where bands, festivals, venues and fans broadcast their Music TV on the web

WWW.MUZU.TV Check out State Magazine's Channel www.muzu.tv/state

Albums

BellX1

illustration by shauna mcgowan / www.shaunamcgowan.com

Blue Lights On The Runway

(belly up records)

Perhaps more than any other Irish band of the last decade, BellX1 have managed to walk the tightrope between commercial success and critical acclaim. That fact alone is surprising.

Their brand of, for want of a better word, art-pop would normally be anathema to this country’s uber-conservative radio programmers (apart from the obvious music fans who dictate their own playlists), but their unerring ability to weld thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to toe-tappingly catchy hooks and melodies has ensured that at least some of our airwaves are free of anodyne, saccharine-soaked sentiment. With their fourth album, Blue Lights On The Runway, they have added some electronic bells and whistles into the mix, and yet the beating heart of their music remains unerringly human.

Album opener, ‘The Ribs Of A Broken Umbrella’ kicks in with a metronomic drum-beat, before some gorgeous ‘la-la-la’ backing vocals underpin what is essentially a tale of unrequited love, but this is no tear-jerker. Instead, it’s a wonderfully upbeat, almost giddy pop song, driven by a frenetic energy and a melody so infectious, it could come with its own vaccination.

‘How Your Heart’, premiered at last year’s Ox-

egen festival, encapsulates the band’s newfound love of all things electronic: staccato beats and digital whirs and bleeps form the bedrock, but Paul Noonan’s lyrics and sweet delivery ensure the structure is constructed from warm, fuzzy soul.

Lead single, ‘The Great Defector’ is disarmingly catchy, showcasing Noonan’s unique lyric-writing style, switching from raw emotion to tongue-in-cheek pop culture reference in the course of the same verse, veering from the unflagging rise of corporate culture (“The accountants have taken the movies/ Yeah, they’re all set/ And the people from the mobile phone company/ Say who gets to play and who gets to not”) to the minutiae of love (“You’re the chocolate at the end of my Cornetto”).

The singer’s ability to subtly capture the essence of his message in one memorable line is as sharp as ever. Indeed, nowhere is Noonan’s strengthening craft more apparent than the album’s penultimate, ‘One Stringed Harp’, a oneman tirade against the stranglehold of political correctness and the power of the media. In other hands, this could descend into the realms of the comedy song (and it is frequently hilarious), but there’s a serious rant to be made, and one worth listening to, but we’re not going to spoil the surprise.

Elsewhere, there’s the delicate beauty of ‘Light Catches Your Face’, the haunting ‘Blow Ins’ and the fantastical ‘Amelia’, as Noonan imagines the last journey of female aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared over the Pacific on the final leg of a round-the-world flight in 1937. Meanwhile, album closer, ‘The Curtains Are Twitching’ is one of the finest songs BellX1 have given us over the course of their four albums: essentially a pianoballad, it features Noonan’s most naked vocal performance yet (he almost seems to be whispering in your ear), augmented by a deliciously dishevelled New Orleans brass band.

Themes range from transience (‘Blow Ins’) to an ironic nudge at the trials and tribulations of making music (‘A Better Band’, complete with prog rock wig-out), from love to, eh, underwear, with underwire bras and thong-style knickers making guest appearances throughout.

One of the signs that an album is truly great, as opposed to just good, is when your favourite song changes all the time. While we’ve only lived with Blue Lights.. for a couple of weeks, State’s allegiances have already switched several times, depending on our mood. The good news is that this is an argument that’s set to run and run, as BellX1 have delivered arguably their most fully rounded album to date. ~ John Walshe

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Albums U2 No Line On The Horizon

(Interscope)

The commentators are saying that Ireland needs an Obama-like icon to lift us out of our current economic and social gloom; a figurehead to inspire celebration, to provide a pointer to a new and promising horizon. Well, wherever there’s a cause, there’s usually Bono and Co. providing the timely, rousing, crowd-pleasing soundtrack.

They’ve got the whole world in their hands, after all. Could U2’s 12th studio album be that flagship of hope, sailing us bravely away from these troubled waters?

Sadly, it just doesn’t sound that way. If anything, it’s as hesitant and directionless as the rest of us; in that sense, they’ve hit Zeitgeist square on the head. But, as an entity, No Line On The Horizon may be U2’s most disjointed album yet.

Perhaps too many songwriters and producers spoiled the broth (Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois have their hands in practically everything here); maybe jumping from studio to far-flung studio got in the way of continuity; or it could be that the world and all its woes provided Bono with too many distractions from the day job. Whatever the reason, this plays like a record without a real master plan.

It certainly begins positively enough. The title track cries “we are back” from the rooftops with its cinematic bravura, kitsch ’60s piano, rumbling bassline and its shoulder-shimmying, air-punching rhythm, which distantly recalls ‘The Fly’; if only this had been the last Bond theme. Better still is track two, ‘Magnificent’, an archetypal U2 thriller/stomper with one of the best riffs The Edge has produced in aeons, complete with Chris Rea-like guitar solo. It’s a mighty opening brace, but it’s also the point at which the plot starts to lose its way.

The effortful ‘Moment Of Surrender’, at over seven minutes long, is a strained ballad with gospel aspirations that suffers badly from delusions of grandeur and cod-religious preaching. The similarly grandiose ‘Unknown Caller’ also thuds along under swathes of worthy lyrical emptiness: “On the edge of the known universe where I wanted to be/ I had driven to the scene of the accident / And I sat there waiting for me”. Quite.

There’s momentary respite on the Steve Lillywhite-produced ‘I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight’, a Joshua Tree-era standard where, despite his cringe-inducing falsetto, Bono gets almost charmingly self-deprecating: “The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear”. He repeats the trick on the otherwise banal ‘Stand Up Comedy’, with the line “Napoleon is in high heels/ Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas”.

But it’s the album’s latter half where the big ideas fail to reach constructive conclusions, and where production appears to plug the staggering dearth of melody. First off, the clumsy and hasty lead single ‘Get On Your Boots’ is easily amongst U2’s most forgettable moments. However, far

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more aggravating is the presumed notion that the wearisome, Eno-centric filler ‘FEZ – Being Born’ is somehow overtly experimental. It’s certainly spacey and dreamy but it’s completely without context on this album. And, with Bono’s relentless “oh”s becoming more emphatic and, as a consequence, less meaningful, it raises more awkward questions than it wants to ask. ‘White As Snow’ takes a traditional melody into pleasantly explorative territory, with some success; but ‘Breathe’, the other Lillywhite production on here, is a messy piece of stadium-rock melodrama, which only menaces the listener into indifference.

Finally, ‘Cedars Of Lebanon’, a semi-spoken, Lanois-produced mood piece with obliquely political aspirations, falls prey to some woeful rhyming-dictionary couplets: who will fail to wince each time they hear “Now I’ve got a head like a lit cigarette/ Unholy clouds reflecting in a minaret”? As an album closer, it leaves something of a sour taste.

There’s no doubting that U2 devotees will still lap this album up and that it’ll fly off supermarket shelves like freshly baked doughnuts. But after a four-year wait, is this really the best record the world’s biggest band can make? If No Line On The Horizon had been the ‘difficult’ follow-up to an NME-hyped band’s over-achieving debut, we’d be gleefully dismantling their atomic career and waiting for them to bomb. The truth is (and ‘Magnificent’ proves the will is still there), U2 need to take a ‘never mind the bollocks’ approach and rediscover their knack for memorable, timeless classics. At least until then, there’s no end of filled stadiums on the horizon.

first album had a key ingredient missing from this one: Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, near the late’90s top of his game. There was something about the mix of Nina Persson’s smooth, controlled, imperturbable voice and Mark Linkous’ fucking about – his Daniel Johnston-inspired tinkering and tweaking – that really worked. Without Linkous (he’s on just one song), little is left. Just the imperturbability.

In fact, all that’s left is West Coast soft rock and power ballads. It’s all well-meaning and professional, and dull as hell. It’s not well-written, though it thinks it is; Persson loves lines that could be clever, lines that were over-worked on, but can’t bear a repeat listen, like Neil Hannon on his worst days: “Don’t you know love is stronger than Jesus / Don’t you know love can kill anyone / Bring it on, wars and diseases / You know that love can do you like a shotgun” (‘Stronger than Jesus’). It’s not quite ‘Get On Your Boots’, but Jesus, it’s not great.

There is a nadir: ‘Golden Teeth And Silver Medals’ is a duet with Nicolai Dunger, with wordplay and yearning that aims for Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris but hits closer to Shania Twain and the guy from Nickelback. It has some of the worst words I can remember in a song, and I had to triple-check that Dunger was the guy I remembered from 2003’s not-bad Tranquil Isolation; even, that he was from Sweden. He sings “sawwnnng” when he means “song”. If C+W night in the Red Cow is your thing, knock yourself out. ~ Niall Crumlish

Empire Of The Sun

~ Johnnie Craig

Walking On A Dream

A Camp Colonia

(Reveal)

A few words on the nature of second-album disappointment. When a band you were amazed you liked in the first place puts out a long-awaited follow-up that you can’t imagine ever wanting to listen to after you’ve finally forced yourself to review it, can that be called a disappointment?

You’re just back where you started, right? Yes. And yet.

A Camp is the side project of Nina Persson from the Cardigans: Colonia is her plus sidemen plus, for Guided By Voices completists, the guy who drummed on Half Smiles Of The Decomposed. Now, I am as likely to put on a Cardigans album as to rub onions in my eyes, but A Camp’s

(Virgin)

Let’s get down to it. Walking on A Dream is the singularly most frustrating album State has heard in months. The Aussie collaboration between Pnau’s Nick Littlemore and Luke Steele of The Sleepy Jackson promises much but with each passing minute makes the wrong moves; like watching a sleepwalker walk repeatedly into a wall in the dark. It’s horribly incoherent, jarringly switching from one unrelated style to another, favours high-art over substance and when you do think the groove has become stuck on something great, it abruptly changes course once again, prompting existential quizzical expressions and boiling anger.

Of course, the warning signs were there already; the outlandish space-age indulgent cover art, Steele’s pretentious leanings (he’s no stranger to OTT cover art either) in his previous band. Sadly, the hollow fantasist side of this musical marriage has won out.

It starts out brilliantly, with the driving funk of ‘Standing On The Shore’ showcasing the album’s core subtle electro-pop leanings. Singles ‘Walking On A Dream’ and ‘We Are The People’ are great pop songs with stick-in-the-brain falsetto choruses, while ‘Half Mast’ flaunts some genuine ’80s synth sounds. The wheels start to come off

Albums

[

She’s a fever: The Knife’s leading light goes solo.

]

Fever Ray Fever Ray

(V2)

Fever Ray is the solo project from Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife, one of the most reputable electronic outfits of our time. In much the same way that Thom Yorke’s The Eraser sounds like Radiohead, Fever Ray sounds very much like an extension of The Knife, with Andersson exploring and perhaps indulging in her own style, a more organic sound. Essentially, this is Silent Shout gone primal.

Opening with ‘If I Had A Heart’, a dark drum-less piece of pulsating electronic didgeridoo, Karin’s dark angel vocal style sets the tone for a new level of creepy. ‘When I Grow Up’ is a strange confessional: though the lyrics may be phonetically clear, their overall connotation is anything but. Apparently an uncharacteristic insight to her personal life, attempts to understand the meaning will only further heighten the mystery shrouding the Swedish songstress, particularly when she sings “Waiting for a sea shell to embrace me”. On the ominous, pop gem ‘Seven’, Andersson discusses love and dishwasher tablets with a voice in her head: endearingly, she pronounces words such as “seven” and “rest” like a Mancunian with a Scottish accent.

The albums production has an ’80s aesthetic, most apparent on the sharp synth sounds of ‘Triangle Walks’, an anxious ballad of abandonment. Adding to the anxiety, ‘Concrete Walls’ is a claustrophobic tale of loneliness and lack of sleep.

The tempo is increased for the eerie euro-pop ‘Now’s The Only Time I Know’, where there are definite borrowings from her back catalogue. However, ‘I’m Not Done’ finds Fever Ray at its most Knife-like, and would have sat well on either of their last two albums.

The album manages to incorporate a host of unique sounds, with some beats coming across like an iron monger clanging his anvil. As The Knife did with the steel drum, Fever Ray use the most offensive of wind blowing

with track five, ‘Delta Bay’ with its hideously cartoon vocoder voice. The door is ajar already, yet after listening to the next two tracks, ‘Country’, a Balearic sunshine instrumental, and ‘The World’, with its wailing cat outro, the horse bolts from the stable.

Focus is temporarily restored with the brilliant future funk of ‘Swordfish Hotkiss Night’ but ultimately pomp and ceremony win out as the last song features a synth that was last heard soundtracking really, really bad sci-fi movies of the ’80s. Walking On A Dream is a half cooked, half brilliant album that could have been so much more. ~ Niall Byrne

Sholi Sholi

(Quarterstick)

A listener first stumbling upon Sholi looking to grasp for similar artists in an attempt to contextualise their elusive sound might mistake the band for their California neighbours Deerhoof. This comparison is not too far off the mark; perhaps as Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier recorded this Bay Area band’s debut. The album opens with a

instruments, the panpipe, in a contemporary manner to notable affect. With not a scented candle or self help book in sight, surely this is the highest achievement of any recording artist this year. Fever Ray could well be the hauntingly beautiful soundtrack to our spring, albeit highlighting the darker side of things. ~ Alan Reilly

striking statement of intent: the six minute long ‘All That We Can See’ begins with a flurry of improv drum patterns and out of sync guitar notes that bluntly declare this group’s artful approach to indie rock and forewarns the listener of Sholi’s unique sound.

For almost 44 minutes, the trio fill their debut LP with eight impressively expansive tracks featuring fluttering drumming and strippedbare guitar chords that propel into percussive outbursts over which Payam Bavafa’s delivers excitingly droll vocals. The singing at times escalates to shouting but somehow the tone always feels sturdy enough to keep Sholi’s songs from derailing.

Saunier’s clear and dry production of the record gives prominence to each individual element, so the complex rhythm patterns and frantic drumming act as a complement to the atmospheric vocals and precise guitar lines. ‘Any Other God’, perhaps the album’s catchiest track, includes all the elements that make Sholi unique: punchy drums, bouncy bass lines and the distinctively soft quality of Bavafa’s vocals. The debut’s eight tracks are surprisingly long, with only one song clocking in at less than four minutes, but bear with it and you will experience unique

songs that incorporate twists and melodic turns throughout, until this clever debut fizzles out in a smooth ambient fade. ~ Shane Lyons

The Bronx The Bronx

(III)

LA punks The Bronx have turned the distortion up with this their third (yes, third!) eponymously titled record. Knuckleduster production from David Schiffer (System Of A Down, Rage Against Machine) brings this latest collection into the rock mainstream without compromising the sound with vapid overlaying. The production ethos strips the songs to a raw core, releasing a car crash impact.

The instant gratification of ‘Young Bloods’ and ‘Past Lives’ highlights a very capable melodic capacity, while a veritable herd of angry riffs rampage over thunderous drums, punctuated occasionally by the true potential of a great rock vocalist in the making. Singer Matt Caughthran has performed ‘guest shout boy’ duties with the likes of Biffy Clyro and Oppenheimer, which tells a story in itself, but here lies a voice yet to reach

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Albums

[

No ‘Second Album Syndrome’ from the Mockney queen.

]

Lily Allen It’s Not Me, It’s You

(Regal)

Lily Allen is a musician. We point this out in case you may have got her confused with Lily Allen the TV host, tabloid fixture, celebrity feuder, victim of personal tragedy, drinker and fan of the old drugs. There have been many moments when any or all of the latter have threatened to overshadow the former to the point that many wondered if a second album would ever see the light of day. Yet following helpful advice from the likes of her father (“she needs to know when to fucking shut up”) new tracks started to appear on, what else, her Myspace page and now, finally, It’s Not Me, It’s You is here.

In many ways, it’s business as usual. The lyrics to opener ‘Everyone’s At It’ (“So your daughter’s depressed / We’ll get her straight on the prozac / But little do you know, she already takes crack”) may seem designed to outrage the moral majority but somewhere in there, Allen has a point to make, both about society at large and her own experiences in particular. It’s a point that she keeps on making. ‘The Fear’ offers her mixed-up feelings on celebrity life in the spotlight, damning and desiring it at the same time, while ‘22’ examines the pressures on young women.

Sexual politics and relationship issues abound, sometimes handled with a lightness of touch (‘Back To The Start’), at other times a little too crass for its own good - ‘Not Fair’ and its talk of wet patches and giving head. The much vaunted George Bush / BNP attack ‘Fuck You’ is well meaning but ends up as nothing more than some sort of school yard taunting. That a pop star wants to take on these kind of subjects is only to be applauded but the results need to be a little more thought out.

It’s on the musical front that the most developments have taken place.

The ragged charm of Alright, Still is largely missing, replaced by the sleek sound of electronics. Producer Greg Kurstin has fashioned a record that counters the ragged edges of Allen’s lyrics with a mainstream pop feel, allowing those issues and opinions to sneak their way onto the mass airwaves.

There are overtones of New Order and the Pet Shop Boys throughout, especially on ‘I Could Say’, but after a while you begin to yearn for a more human touch, for a hint of imperfection to creep through.

the potential of its underlying strength and range.

The Bronx are seemingly not concerned with the subtle nuances of fragility and vocal inflection, instead opting for unapologetic, in your face, balls out rock and roll. While this album is brimming with effort and feels like the protagonists collapsed with exhaustion when the final song was recorded, the energy-laden vitriol in this boiling cauldron is maybe ‘second album material’ in terms of musical progression. Still, great rock records only have to tick a few boxes and The Bronx do: plenty of well constructed songs, rocking riffs, vocals with range and substance. ~ Martin McIver

1990s Kick

(Rough Trade Records)

Glasgow’s 1990s signed for the iconic Rough Trade Records after only six gigs, and second album Kick quickly shows us why. An infectious feel-good summer record, Kick sounds how The Feeling probably did before the producer came

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Ultimately, It’s Not Me, It’s You is a far from perfect record, although it has perfect moments. It is, however, what Lily Allen needed to do, to avoid slipping into cliché and simply making a carbon copy of her debut. The result is a pop record that is at turns enchanting, inspiring, frustrating and confusing.

What is never, though, is dull. ~ Phil Udell

along: full of catchy melodies, gentle indie-rock rhythms and even the occasional playful social rant. It’s guaranteed to sell.

Opening track ‘Vondel Park’ is comfortably the albums strongest: a raw, vibrant indie-pop singalong that wouldn’t be out of place on an NME compilation. ‘59’ embraces quirky variations of pitch with Mika-like vocals, adding a new element to the impressively powerful dual-voice choruses.

‘Kickstrasse’ leans more in the direction of a popped-up White Stripes, feedback and all.

Kick does have one serious flaw, though: lyrics. ‘Vondel Park’ aside, Kick’s vocals are almost trite to the point of irritating. In fact, the album succeeds in saying pretty much nothing of any interest for its entire duration. As compelling as the tight musicianship can be, it’s difficult to see too many singing along to opening single ‘The Box’ without cringing: “I think I’m going to have to put you back in your box, that’s the place I keep my purse and socks”. Right.

1990s aren’t going to win any awards for originality. In fact, the name is very apt, but in Kick they have a passably compelling pop record.

At times it sounds like a 40-minute Fountains of Wayne b-side, but, if you can put the lyrical inadequacies aside, it’s surprisingly listenable. ~ James Hendicott

The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

(Fortuna Pop)

New York-based indie quartet The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart evidently wear their influences on their collective sleeve. Despite the 2009 release date, this record could double as an epitaph for shoegazing. Made up of guitar-reliant pop numbers, girl-boy vocals and lyrics that speak of youthful immaturity, you will be forgiven for thinking you’ve been here before. The Pains of Being Pure At Heart sound like a hundred other bands you’ve heard along the way, yet their irresistibly catchy pop has echoes of everything memorable that has emerged from the indie genre in the last 20 years. With influences ranging from The Cure, My Bloody Valentine and The Pastels, the question remains if there is any

Albums substance to the Pains or are they just a poor substitute for their heroes?

From the opening chords of ‘Contender’, the scene is set: cheery melodies and blistering drums dominate, all adding up to a buzzing nod to the champions of shoegazing and the best of British indie. The band successfully marry the harshness of My Bloody Valentine with the twee melodies of Belle & Sebastian. ‘A Teenager In Love’ is one of the stronger tracks, shameless in its musical ancestry, unavoidably catchy and with vocals reminiscent of Stuart Murdoch circa Arab Strap. ‘This Love is Fucking Right!’, on the other hand, brings the lush sound of the criminally underrated Vaselines to mind.

The sound is almost sickly sweet throughout, yet the Pains sometimes manage to muster enough youthful sneer despite quite frail vocals to remain credible. ‘Hey Paul’ is about the most raucous they reach, which is a shame as it saves the record from becoming lodged in a mid-tempo limbo, where it lingers for most of its second half.

Undoubtedly one of the most straight-forward and accessible pop records likely to emerge this year, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart showcases a band with the potential to create some excellent lovelorn songs of youthful endeavour, but they’re not quite there yet. That said, their

Digital & EPs

off-centre, shameless pop is well worth checking out: just don’t take them too seriously. With such flawless taste in music history, it’s a shame they didn’t inject some much needed personality and charisma to come out from under the shadow of their influences. ~ Lisa Hughes

NLF3 Ride On A Brand New Time

(Prohibited Records)

Blasting through your ears like a well-aimed sparkler, France’s NLF3’s new album is choc full of crackling, intergalactic melodies. Ride On A Brand New Time is a mind-exhausting musical space odyssey, encompassing everything from Can and Animal Collective to Sonic Youth: they even manage to add a dash of Joe Meek-style reverb for good cosmos-themed measure.

Their layered instrumental sound is unfortunately and rather unfairly bound to draw obvious comparisons to their touring partners and gods-of–the-awkward-noise, Battles. However, whereas Battles are all muscular rhythmic force, administering their robotic chrome-rock sound with razor sharp precision, the Parisians prefer an altogether more warm, playful sound, made up of

lazy grooves, hypnotic fuzzy loops and DFA style bass-lines, making them at once instantly familiar but utterly distinctive and endlessly captivating.

As the spell-binding whirl of the addictive ‘Fuses Apes And Doppler’ gives way to the gurgling bleep of ‘Hurricane’ and the spikier, kinetic ‘Birds No Birds’, the band constantly shape-shift: at once, they are psychedelic krautrock, they are M83 without the shoe-gazey gloom laden melodrama, Stereolab without the drone, This Heat minus the pretension. They are all this but with brevity, a sense of style and more importantly, fun. This is not the po-faced, over-earnest “sound of dying galaxies” as the much missed John Peel once excitedly described Pink Floyd but the electrifying fizz of modern sussed pop. Yes, sometimes it still can sound like a keyboard falling down a lift-shaft but this keyboard is crashing to its demise with love. ~ Jennifer Gannon.

Here We Go Magic Here We Go Magic

(Western Vinyl)

Luke Temple, a singer-songwriter from Salem, Massachusetts, has had marginal success with two full length records in the past, managing to

~ Niall Byrne

Hudson Mohawke

drum and bass, particularly the last two tracks, which are suitably titled ‘Arterial Fantasy’ and ‘Illegal Dustbin’. It’ll be interesting to see what he has in store for a rare live visit to Dublin on April 25, thanks to U:mack.

Polyfolk Dance (Warp)

The latest electronic producer on Warp to showcase his wares is an unnamed Glasgow producer with this mini-LP. It’s a nice introduction to what could be a unique talent but right now, this guy is miles behind his label mate Flying Lotus, favouring choppy samples and beats over atmosphere and any kind of dancefloor aesthetic. Head music but not quite cerebral just yet.

Heritage Centre The City, The Tree, The Fox (Self-released)

Tenaka EPonomously Titled (Self-released)

Superb opening salvo from Ronan Carroll, a Limerick man based in Galway, whose bedroom-recorded four-track EP of electronic pop pushes all the right buttons, filling the spaces with atmosphere, groove and bass.

There’s a bit of a Four Tet vibe to this. Best of all, it’s a free download from myspace.com/ tenakadrifting.

The Ambience Affair Fragile Things (Self-released)

One of our choices for new Irish bands to watch last month, Meath’s The Ambience Affair’s first release also has four tracks to show

off and what a pleasant acoustic and drum racket it is. This is no torch-bearing soul search but there is real fire to the songs, thanks to Jamie Clarke’s agitated vocal delivery and looping pedal. A promising start.

Squarepusher Numbers Lucent (Warp)

The mini follow-up to the woeful Just a Souvenir sees Tom Jenkinson fare better, reigning in the jazz-wank grooves and pretend rock band “playing an ultra-gig” pretensions just enough to convince us he’s not about to dive off into the deep end just yet. It helps that this is squarely (naturally) aimed at providing spazzy

While the UK’s most exciting acts have turned to electro-pop and a bit of glamour, Ireland is still well represented by a glut of indie boys with guitars and that is what Dublin’s Heritage Centre appear to be at first. With the news that the Delorentos are to split after their second forthcoming album, Heritage Centre are the type of band that might fill their boots. And they’ve got more than one singer too. Opener ‘You Are Something’ is a polite catchy band ballad with its refrain of “Get over yourself ” repeating elsewhere on the EP, while two standout tracks, the rock of ‘Stars’ and ‘Somehow I Feel Cheated’, seem to best represent the natural state of the band. There may be something in the Heritage Centre but first they need to get out there and break their balls like Delorentos to find their true sound. In the meantime, we want to hear what some Irish electro-pop sounds like.

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Albums earn a slot on Grey’s Anatomy, a career high for many acts. With his latest project, Temple makes a dramatic change of course from his signature folk pop. Like many Brooklyn exports this year, the eponymous album from Here We Go Magic is predominately psychedelic and ethnically shaded.

Essentially a bedroom album, Temple reportedly recorded the album at home using analog synths, a cassette 4-track, and a mic, creating an album that may not be burnished with high-end production but remains a warm, textured and cosmic-sounding release. Opening track ‘Only Pieces’ is evocative of Paul Simon. Immediately entrancing, Temple’s hushed vocal is looped over tribal beats, posing the question, “What’s the use in dying if I don’t know when?” with some danceable poignancy. ‘Fangala’ is a jovial blissed-out number, incorporating eerie synths over Afropop beats, where ‘Ahab’ is more paranoid, with swooping vocal and organ harmonies.

‘Ghost List’ and ‘Nat’s Alien’ are pulsating, peculiar ambient pieces. If you listen to ‘Babyohbabyijustcantstanditanymore’ enough times, you too will have a lucid dialogue with the Smash Robots.

On the sensational ‘Tunnelvision’, Temple takes on a wondrous gender neutral falsetto, reminiscent of The Delays or The Sleepy Jackson, along with repetitive, cyclical, acoustic guitars, creating a kaleidoscopic, floating composition that really should never end. A tremendous sound-byte that is sure to be heard over some playbacks of sporting highlights. The mood changes with album closer ‘Everything’s Big’, a drugged out Patsy Kline-esque waltz, tarnishing the album’s ebullient vibe.

Clever marketing would see Here We Go Magic packaged with festival tickets, sunshine, a hacky sack and a baggy of dried psilocybin. ~ Alan Reilly

Parts & Labor Receivers

(Jagjaguwar)

For an outfit who probably got their name after a disgruntled trip to their local car garage, it’s not startling that there is an almost mechanical sound to Parts & Labor’s fourth album Receivers. From the bagpipe-esque opening keyboard strains of ‘Satellites’, manipulation of equipment and sound is the name of the game as this Brooklyn four-piece weld their succulent brand of

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experimental noise-rock with a chastening flood of pop flashes.

Since predecessor Mapmaker, there have been changes aplenty in the P&L camp; rambunctious sticksman Christopher Weingarten left the fold, with the more restrained Joe Wong coming in, while Sarah Lipstate is now officially on the team-sheet on guitar duties, joining founders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw, who tag-team vocal duties throughout.

The personnel switches have had an effect. Receivers is the sound of a band immersed in wildly focused synchronicity. Nothing is getting left on the floor here: from the bubbling tension of early post-punk in the wailing of ‘Mount Misery’ to the Dan Deacon-if-he-was-an-artrocker spurt that is ‘Nowhere’s Nigh’, all the bells and whistles are fully intact.

Equal parts catchy and experimental, Receivers is a twisty affair that keeps you gripped by its unpredictability. Heck, it even sounds anthemic at times, and in the likes of ‘Little Ones’, they may have just recorded the tracks that will not just earn them the critical clams of peers like TVOTR, but open up the wider public to them too. ~ Ciarán Ryan

Telefon Tel Aviv Immolate Yourself

(Bpitch Control)

The dark cloud hanging over Immolate Yourself, the third release by electronic duo Telefon Tel Aviv was the death of founding member Charles Cooper just days after the album’s release in January of this year. It’s chilling to open the band’s website, only to find a black screen with Cooper’s name and the dates his life began and ended underneath, no album mention, no links, nothing. Heartbreaking testimonies can be read by fans and friends on their Myspace page and it’s unsure whether remaining founding member Joshua Eustis will continue the band alone. As for the music, there’s little point in trying to decode songs on this album to search for references to Cooper’s death as the vocals are mostly quiet, muffled and used more as an instrument in the soundscape to good effect.

Nonetheless, you feel a cold dying starkness throughout this album and the sad thing is that it overpowers any attempt at warmth, which leaves it musically, a difficult listen at times.

There’s no denying the inventiveness and studio talent of this group, but whereas other experimental electronic groups reward you during the second half of a stuttering tune when the loose beats come together or with prolonged listens, Immolate... falls short for simply not letting go of the stutters and robotic feeling. That said, there are some nice moments when the vocals take over and it starts to sound somewhat pleasant.

Unfortunately, it seems that this record will only serve to satisfy connoisseurs of the genre. ~ John Butt

Titus Andronicus The Airing Of Grievances

(Troubleman Unlimited)

Titus Andronicus have been championing the resurgence of a certain division of indie rock not heard since a few young New Yorkers calling themselves The Strokes blew everybody away with their own brand of atmospheric, unpolished tunes.

The Airing Of Grievances aptly demonstrates that good ol’ fashioned meat and potatoes indie rock and with its rough-edged live feel smacks of authenticity. ‘Arms Against Atrophy’, one of the album’s most notable tunes, even makes space for a get-up-and-dance guitar solo. This is the kind of music made for muddy festivals and smoky little American bars, not international stadium tours.

Every song displays the band’s penchant for dynamics, from slow and soulful build-ups to punky, defiant choruses and back again, accompanied all the while by scratchy, screechy feedback. All this ambient racket may strike a little controversy but it’s part of the contour, adding to the overall tumultuous atmosphere and modulating to perfection in self-titled track ‘Titus Andronicus’, a trademark tune that truly merits a good sing along.

Lyrically too, there’s a whole spectrum of variation, from serious and vulnerable in ‘Albert Camus’ to shrewd and witty in the sardonic commentary of ‘My Time Outside The Womb’.

The band’s music, like their influences, is all-encompassing and although nine songs may seem a little meagre, all of them have a hell of a lot to offer and manage to explore every nook and cranny of their immense creative repertoire.

Overall The Airing Of Grievances, in 45 uproarious, piano-bashing, cymbal-crashing minutes of pure, rough-and-tumble, indie rock, reasserts the true value of a genre that we’d nearly forgotten how much we really love. ~ Jack Higgins

Secret Machines Secret Machines

(Co-Op)

The third album from New York-based Texans Secret Machines is also their first without guitarist Benjamin Curtis, who was credited with creating the tumultuous crashing guitar sound of their stunning debut, 2004’s Now Here Is Nowhere.

However, Curtis’ departure (to form School Of Seven Bells) doesn’t seem to have affected the remaining duo of Brandon Curtis (Ben’s brother) and Josh Garza, alongside new member Phil Karnats. This is primarily down to Garza’s pummelling drumming style: when they’re at their best, it propels them forward with the same intensity and energy it always has.

‘Atomic Heels’ opens proceedings with a typically goth-rock clamour, reminiscent of Faith And Devotion era Depeche Mode. ‘Last Believer, Drop Dead’ follows the classic Secret Machines

Albums

[

Folk-punk, sea shanties and murder ballads, Dublin style.

]

The Mighty Stef 100 Midnights

(Firstborn Is Dead Recordings)

Nick Cave is obsessed by it. Shane MacGowan appears immune to it. Johnny Cash’s fascination with death and mortality came to define his legend and followed him, fittingly, all the way to the grave. Death, too, is a lingering theme through 100 Midnights, the second full-length record from Dubliner, The Mighty Stef (otherwise known as Stefan Murphy).

Keeping with a macabre theme, 100 Midnights follows the release last May of the Death Threats EP, a mostly acoustic effort. That EP marked the last ever recorded performance of Ronnie Drew, on a cover of Pete St John’s lesser-known classic ‘The Mero,’ before he too succumbed to the allure of the grave. The Irish folk tradition is not as pronounced here as on the EP, with the full-band arrangements tending to take it closer to his Cash and proto-punk influences than anything, but Stef’s meaty Dublin brogue is unmistakable. Like an Irish Iggy Pop: loud, brash but ultimately far more subtle than you’ll ever realise.

Opening track ‘Downtown’ is an obvious choice for a lead single, an energetic rocker in the Springsteen mould, but it’s merely a springboard for the rest of the album. ‘Safe At Home’ is a duet with former Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan and wears the influence of that band proudly, shifting seamlessly between a sparse, mournful verse (sung by O’Riordan) and Stef’s thunderous, organ-assisted garage rock chorus. The title track and ‘I Swear I Have No Feelings For That Girl,’ sea shanties both, see Stef adopt a smoky tone that’s eerily reminiscent of the late Drew, while ‘Golden Gloves’ is the most unlikely love song imaginable, as Stef howls out blue lines on top of fuzzy 12-bar riffs and boogie woogie piano: “Come rain down fire on me baby / Hit me with your golden gloves.”

blueprint, treading a fine line between raw power and melody: it begins slowly with slabs of bass, before layers of serrated guitar up the tension and eventually, Curtis’ vocals enter the fray, waxing metaphysical about the book of Saint Thomas.

The slow-burning ‘Have I Run Out’ is all apocalyptic imagery, meaty rhythms and guitars that slice into the mix like mini air-raid sirens, bleeding straight into the frantic (by their standards) ‘Underneath The Concrete’. Think the brooding majesty of Interpol, with the amps turned up full.

Sadly, this is the last time the three-piece really let down their hair. Unfortunately, the album’s second half is a little too uniformly funereal in terms of pacing to really excite, when even one full-on wig-out would have lifted the mood.

OK, so there’s the gorgeous heartbreak of ‘Now You’re Gone’, two parts Joy Division, one part Take That (and we mean that as a compliment): worth it for the shiver-inducing moment when the guitars whoosh in pre-crescendo.

However, the melancholy is laid on a little thick on ‘The Walls Are Starting To Crack’, which sadly descends into experimental noise for its middle-eight, while ‘I Never Thought To Ask’ is a little melancholy-by-numbers for this band. The closing ‘The Fire Is Waiting’ ups the ante, with huge swathes of cascading guitars, chunky bass and sub-neanderthal drums forming the bedrock for an 11-minute epic – Led Zeppelin’s ‘No Quarter’

‘Sunshine Serenade’ is a deceptive title for a cautionary tale about drugtaking and child mortality, and the upbeat, Memphis-country arrangement is just as misleading, but it turns out to be the most moving track on the album, hinging on the chorus line: “You will not leave this hospital until you give me your word/ Don’t let it steal the sunshine from your eyes.” ‘Russian Roulette’ is a dreamy tribute to Johnny Ace, the original rock n’ roll suicide case, but the duet with Shane MacGowan, a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Waiting Round To Die,’ is just downright discomforting, considering the parallels between the lives of MacGowan and its authors. Well, nobody said it would be easy to digest. ~ Dave Donnelly

crossed with Interpol’s ‘NYC’ - of beautiful noise.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to fully rescue the album. While Secret Machines is initially thrilling, it falls a little short of their high standards thanks to the general slothfulness of its second half. ~ John Walshe

Nickel Eye The Time Of The Assassins

(Ryko)

Another month, another Strokes off-shoot.

Following the two solo albums from Albert Hammond Jnr and Fab Moretti’s Little Joy, it’s the turn of bassist Nikolai Fraiture’s Nickel Eye (see what he did there) to kill time until the NY supergroup reconvene. The band is basically made up of Fraiture alongside UK indie outfit, South, although a couple of famous friends make guest appearances. Quoting influences of the calibre of Neil Young, Ray Davies, Frank Black and Leonard Cohen could be seen as giving reviewers a rope to hang you with, and truth be told, Fraiture’s lyrics don’t hit anything like the heights of his heroes (a fact reinforced by his cover of Cohen’s classic ‘Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye’). Indeed, it is only Regina Spektor’s stellar piano that rescues ‘Where The Cold Wind Blows’ from cliché hell.

It all begins harmlessly enough, with the funky ‘Intro (Every Time)’, ostensibly a mini title track,

which doesn’t exactly set pulses racing, while ‘You And Everyone Else’ comes across like Evan Dando leading The Strokes through an acoustic workout. It isn’t until the Dylan-esque narrative of ‘Back From Exile’ that Fraiture really starts to cut his teeth, delivering acoustic spittle and spite in a manner that’s rarely been heard in recent years.

Respect where it’s deserved. Similarly, ‘This Is The End’ and ‘Another Sunny Afternoon’ bounce along with decent guitar licks and toe-tapping melodies (the latter bearing a more-than-passing resemblance to The Only Ones’ ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’), while ‘Providence RI’ is a worthy paean to home.

Elsewhere, however, ‘Fountain Avenue’ is like an Adam Green cast-off (and that’s saying something, considering some of the shite Green leaves on his albums), while the faux-calypso ‘Brandy Of The Damned’ is nothing short of cringe-inducingly embarrassing. Fraiture’s vocals are, at best, limited, more suited to lo-fi ‘Dying Star’ (featuring Yeah Yeah Yeah Nick Zinner’s Edge-like axe-work) than the closing Cohen cover.

There’s a long-running joke that the least musical of a bunch of mates ends up playing the bass and Nickel Eye’s debut would seem to suggest that like most clichés, it’s only funny ‘cos it’s true.

For Strokes completists only. ~ Miles Stuart

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Albums The Phantom Band Checkmate Savage

(Chemikal Underground)

The Phantom Band are apparently named because they couldn’t decide on a name. The group cycled through handles of such varying crappiness as Robert Redford, Son Of and Wooden Trees before settling on their current insubstantial moniker. And this chronic indecisiveness seems to extend to their music, too. They describe their chosen genre as ‘Proto-Robofolk’, which is not very useful.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, critics writing about the group have tended to become hopelessly embroiled in games of spot-the-influence. Krautrock, Scottish folk and the American southwest are, not unreasonably, among the most-cited presences in the band’s sound. But really the reviewer’s problem here is That Phantom Band tracks tend to sound like three totally different songs tied into a sack, and fighting to get out, which is no bad thing.

Album opener ‘The Howling’ marries a fuzzy bassline – rather like something from a high-end ’80s cop show – to a hooky vocal melody, falsetto backing and guitar breakdowns pleasingly reminiscent of Scottish forebears The Beta Band.

‘Crocodile’ is the only piece of music (the band are far from averse to the odd eight-minute instrumental) we can remember to actually feature that ridged wooden scraper thing usually restricted to the percussion box of school music rooms. And ‘The Island’ is a lovely guitar-andvocal ballad, gradually overtaken by proggy – but still pleasant! – sampled meanderings.

There is the odd less successful track, too.

But if the Phantom Band’s dogged eclecticism sometimes gets in the way of a good tune, maybe we shouldn’t hold that against them – it’s nice to hear a group that can write serious songs without taking themselves too seriously. ~ Michael Freeman

Sky Larkin The Golden Spike

(Wichita)

There are those among us who claim the ability to distinguish between a half-decent wine and a €200 bottle of the finest vintage or, in the same way, spot the difference between every indie band which happens to be led by a female vocalist. We’re not talking distasteful plonk versus Dom Perignon, merely separating the good from the best; which can be especially difficult in such a saturated market.

The Golden Spike however, immediately sets Sky Larkin apart from their contemporaries: as rocky drumbeats and plucky riffs rush in to meet the powerful vocals of lead singer Katie Harkin on ‘Fossil, I’, those Ida Maria comparisons become less and less appropriate.

As simple as it may sound, the fact that they are a band is what really sets them apart. Each

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tune, from the spirited, catchy ‘Molten’ to the heavier ‘Octopus’ and ‘Somersault’, truly displays the importance of the rock band aesthetic to Sky Larkin. Every hollow of disappointment left by the occasionally tiresome lyrics is filled in by one head-bopper of a drum line.

Sadly though, the album itself is likely to be eclipsed by the forthcoming release from another leading lady with pipes sonorous enough to match even those of Ms Harkin, Florence And The Machine. In its own right though, The Golden Spike is a sweet yet full bodied record, vocally vibrant and musically crisp: it should go well with any occasion. Enjoy now or shelve for up to six months. ~ Jack Higgins

Lady GaGa The Fame

(Polydor)

The Things Some Kind Of Kick

(Nicotine Records)

Mention the name The Things and one of two visions spring to mind. One, a band who have always found themselves on the margins, besieged by unfortunate luck and lumped in with the likes of the awful Humanzi and Mainline, part of a Dublin scene that never really amounted to much.

The other is of a band who got off their arses right from the start and did things their own way while others were sitting around waiting to get signed; building bridges across the world, running their own club nights, releasing a series of singles on various labels, developing a fine live reputation, just keeping going.

The truth, as it often is, is somewhere in the middle. Whatever the case, The Things’ debut album has been a long time coming, maybe too long. You sense that, for a first full length release, Some Kind Of Kick, has an awful lot resting on it – not least for the band themselves.

What’s not surprising about the record is that it sounds like a concoction of The Cramps and The Stooges, plus a whole host of obscure garage, punk and psychobilly bands. What is surprising is how fired up, how alive and how downright vital the whole thing sounds. Unlike previous attempts, this finds them getting the studio balance between down and dirty and achieving a clarity that allows the songs to shine through.

And it’s those songs that really make Some Kind Of Kick the piece of work that it is. You can see that five years plus of writing went into the making of the record, but also that they’re also finally hitting their stride. Sure the likes of ‘Pyscho Lover’ and ‘Demon Stomp’ sound exactly like you might expect, but they are delivered with such conviction that any cracks are easy to ignore. On the title track, the Elvis-tinged ‘Make Her Cry’ and the glorious ‘Set Me Free’ (complete with ’60s Hammond organ), they manage to transcend those influences, actually sounding like their own band. For an outfit so enthralled with what has gone before, this is no mean feat. It’s been a long time coming, but just maybe The Things are going to have their moment. They’ve earned it. ~ Phil Udell

Hearing New York’s own Lady GaGa’s opening track ‘Just Dance’ played back-to-back with a recent Madonna track on the radio this week, you really do believe this Princess Of Pop™ hype that we’ve been subjected to recently. The pure and polished opener sails miles higher in the pop skies than Maddy could hope for these days. And as health board statistics show us, all the kids are doing now is being so drunk that they lose their keys, phones and forget the name of the club/one-nighter they end up in/with. Now they have an anthem.

We all know that great pop stars are built upon singles, but within the first seven seconds of track two comes a lyric so appalling it prompts your reviewer to fire a shoe across the room, aiming for the fast-forward but actually knocking over a three day old cup of tea. It actually sounds like your auntie trying to be young and outrageous. And thus are the highs and lows of the album, all within five minutes. Sadly, the edge is polished off the rest of the album save for the superb ‘Poker Face’, currently bothering daytime radio near you.

The rest of The Fame is filled with songs, some of which lean towards Gwen, some towards Christina, but all without the punch of the opening song. In fact some lean so far towards the centre of radio-friendly mediocrity (’Eh, Eh’, ‘Beautiful, Dirty, Rich’) they’re like cast-offs from some Stock Aiken Waterman project.

The last third of the album tries out the ballad songs (though ‘Again, Again’ has an air of Britpop about it). ‘Boys, Boys, Boys’ is not half as much fun as it thinks it is but ‘Summerboy’ is somewhat a return to form, and is a little reminiscent of early Cardigans in its summery cheer.

Lady GaGa sings with utter confidence and when the material is there it’s all you want to party to, but the weak writing and obvious aping of other artists’ styles leave all but three songs feeling like padding. She’s set her own high benchmark but if Madonna is to be left in her jet trails, she’ll need to do a lot better than “Let’s have some fun, this beat is sick/ I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”. ~ Simon Roche

Albums

[

One giant leap for Franz Ferdinand, one small step for everyone else.

]

Franz Ferdinand Tonight

(Domino)

Has it really been just over three years since the Glaswegians released their lacklustre second album You Could Have It so Much Better? While Franz were off looking for their mojo, they collaborated with rapper Kano during an African Express event organised by Damon Albarn, they scrapped sessions with pop producers Xenomania (State would love to hear the results of that one) and hinted at new directions on the horizon with short looping snippets of Kraut-grooves and African rhythms on their website. Anyone expecting changes of those kind of suggested proportions, will be, on the face of it, disappointed.

The courting of new sounds at first seems to be an exercise in “getting it out of our system” as Tonight finds Franz Ferdinand settling into sounding like Franz Ferdinand once again, albeit it with added synth and a nod towards something a little different. But not too different. The opening triptych of ‘Ulysses’, ‘Turn It On’ and ‘No You Girls’ feature the same wink-wink, nudge-nudge, standard-issue promise of before but scratch a little deeper and these songs become something a bit more substantial. The disco-orientated production makes the songs swagger at high volume, perfect for the dance-floor of an indie club.

If Tonight is intended to chart a night of excess, then it is a delight to welcome the album version of ‘Lucid Dreams’. Where the radio version was a carbon clone of previous singles, the extended eight-minute album version is flourished with a looser arrangement and a three-minute electro wig-out at the end. Quite a turn. As is gentle guitar of ‘Send Him Away’, which is the only African touch present here. There are suggestions that some of the abandoned experiments the band worked on leading up to the release of this album have given them the confidence to avoid a complete creative cul-de-sac and they are back to their modus operandi of “making music that

Telepathe Dance Mother

(Co-op/V2)

The latest release drawn from the Brooklyn peripheral music scene, which includes the likes of Effie Briest and Gang Gang Dance, is the infinitely more accessible Telepathe. Consisting of Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais, the duo used to specialise in experimental drone pop but have now married those clear-cut sounds to a poppy affair, albeit one with obscure musings on death, crime, love and killing, on their debut album.

With the help of producer Dave Sitek of another eminent New York group, TV On The Radio, they have crafted an experimental electronic album infused with melodious pop hooks that is entirely danceable at all the right indie hipster parties. The most fascinating aspect of Dance Mother is the dystopian world the duo create in the album’s nine songs and 41 minutes while Sitek adds a cohesive sheen to the mix of synths, harmonies and off-kilter rhythms.

‘So Fine’ is an exhilarating opening gambit of swirling synthesizers and electro percussive hits.

The previously released ‘Chrome’s On IT’ with its syncopated original beat, apes hip-hop’s penchant for 808s, while the experimental dramatic side only really comes out to play during ‘Trilogy:

girls can dance to”.

In a recent interview, singer Alex Kapranos admitted that no matter what sounds they tried, they still ended up sounding like Franz Ferdinand. Maybe as a result, Tonight is a more textured/advanced version of the Franz sound, while simultaneously refusing to shut the door on the blustery choruses of their debut. However, we’re left with an uneasy feeling that they teased us with expectation a little too much, as it’s harder to fall in love the third time around. ~ Niall Byrne

Breath Of Life, Crimes And Killings, Threads And Knives’, the story of a seduction of a boy backed by a unnerving beat and heavy low-end.

Dance Mother is a fascinating record, one which starts with the solid foundation of playing to Telepathe’s strengths – creating memorable pop hooks coloured with bewitching sonic synths, and an ambience of shadow and peril. ~ Niall Byrne

The Qemists Join The Q

(Ninja tune)

The Qemists got started, their record-label bio explains, when their three members “were playing in a rock band by day, and producing and DJing Drum ‘n’ Bass by night, which led to an inevitable conclusion: why not do both at the same time?”

Well, to be honest, there are lots of reasons. But most of them, for convenience sake, have been neatly packaged into this album.

Subtlety is not something that The Qemists excel at. The lead single from the album was ‘Lost Weekend’, a turn-of-the-millennium numetal workout with lyrics seemingly transcribed straight from the schoolbag of a nearby adolescent. ‘Got One Life’ is a drum-and-bass horror

that not only samples a terrifically-hackneyed piece of classical music but also, mysteriously, namechecks affluent London suburb Stoke Newington, home to many an up-and-coming young marketing executive.

But The Qemists’ woes do not end there. ‘On The Run’, featuring the suspiciously genericsounding Jenna G., is more ringtone than song and ‘When Ur Lonely’ is exactly as bad as it sounds; although if you needed a soundtrack to a computer game about snowboarding, several years ago, it would be ideal.

In the end, the best reason not to combine rock and drum-and-bass is probably that people already tried it, back around 1998. This album sounds about that old, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the heap of modish, dubsteppy remixes which accompanied recent Wileyvocalled single ‘Dem Na Like Me’ were commissioned by Ninja Tune mainly to lend the whole enterprise a veneer of relevance, in the hope that nobody would notice. ~ Michael Freeman

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Reissues & Compilations Charity compilation of 31 songs from the cream of the new North American crop (and Stuard Murdoch).

Various Artists Dark Was The Night

(4AD)

The National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner are responsible for Dark Was The Night, a 31-track double album featuring exclusive tracks from a collection of the finest artists from (mostly) the other side of the Atlantic (Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch is the sole European), and all proceeds go to the Red Hot Organisation, an international charity dedicated to raising funds and awareness for HIV and AIDS. And what an album it is.

There are some stellar cover versions: The Books and José Gonzalez’ flawless version of Nick Drake’s ‘Cello Song’, Andrew Bird’s take on The Handsome Family’s gorgeous ‘The Giant Of Illinois’ and My Brightest Diamond’s brave call to tackle ‘Feeling Good’. There are also a few incredible collaborations: Feist with Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard; Feist (again) with Grizzly Bear; Antony Hegarty with Bryce Dessner (on Dylan’s ‘I Was Young When I Left Home’); Conor Oberst and Gillian Welch. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s great new music from the likes of Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Yeasayer and Sufjan Stevens, whose ‘You Are The Blood’ is hair-quiveringly good.

Indeed, the track listing reads like a who’s who of modern American and Canadian alternative music, from The National’s countrified ‘So Far Around The Bend’ to Cat Power’s late night bluesy take on ‘Amazing Grace’, Dave Sitek’s (TV On The Radio) Magnetic Fields-like version of The Troggs’ ‘With A Girl Like You’ to Beiruit’s waltz-on-speed ‘Mimizan’. Then there’s the deliciously warm, old school soul of Sharon Jones And The Dap-Kings ‘Inspiration Information’, the lo-fi melancholy of Clap Your Hands’ Kevin Drew’s ‘Love

Rob Da Bank Sci Fi Lo Fi Volume Three: Shoegazing 1985 - 2009

Bryce and Aaron Dessner with Red Hot’s founder John Carlin

Vs Porn’, or Grizzly Bear’s swoonsome ‘Deep Blue Sea’ There are also some welcome surprises: The New Pornographer’s sublime Destroyers’ cover, ‘Hey Snow White’, which sounds like the best Mercury Rev song you never heard, My Morning Jacket’s lazy, sun-soaked ‘El Caporal’ and Spoon’s electro-rockabilly ‘Well Alright’.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that there isn’t a duff track here: nobody has seen fit to donate their cast-offs. Instead, this is bona fide indie gold. Indeed, no single review could do justice to this double-CD/triple vinyl collection, which is literally bursting at the seams with a fair proportion of the most talented musicians on the planet today. We would describe it as peerless, but all its peers are present and correct. ~ John Walshe

tion. A few minor quibbles aside – the choice of Ride song, the omission of My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver – Rob da Bank has compiled a terrific snapshot of an over-looked genre. ~ Shane Galvin

The early ’90s was an era in which a new music genre was created every couple of months by bored journalists, lacking a story. Three bands with some sort of shared audible influences, a ‘clever’ name for the collective sound and, hey presto, you had yourself a genre. Hence, the likes of Romo, Grebo, New Wave of New Wave, Baggy, Yob Rock and countless others. Shoegazing was used to a tag a few bands with floppy fringes and walls of spaced-out, dreamy guitars. The genre’s name referred to the fact that these bands tended to stare at their feet rather than the audience.

The implication of this could be taken to mean that either the bands were too lost in their own music and were unpretentious or that they were shy, scared indie boys that were totally up their own arse.

However one felt at the time, it’s fair to say the music has stood up really well. ‘Pearl’ by Chapterhouse, a band derided at the time, verges on euphoric nearly 20 years later. The songs here used to represent Lush, Slowdive and Ultra Vivid Scene prove that, as ridiculed as shoegazing was then, there were lots of great tunes being written. And, the legacy of these bands still lives on in the music of Boards Of Canada, M83 and Ulrich Schnaus (the sublime ‘On My Own’ is the best thing here), making this a wider-reaching, superior compila-

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Various Artists Warchild Heroes

(EMI)

Despite being the premier music charity of choice (as witnessed by this week’s Coldplay/Killers post-Brits gig), the War Child album franchise has not been without its misfires. The 1995 Help record may have captured the Britpop zeitgeist to perfection but since then there have been the patchy Hope, 1 Love and One Day In A Life – collections of odd covers and middling originals, interspersed with the occasionally inspiring moment.

Heroes, however, finds matters firmly back on track. The concept would seem to be bullet proof:

classic artists chose a classic song from their repertoire and pick one of today’s acts to cover it.

Given that this is designed to sell as many copies as possible, there are no huge curveballs here, with names such as Dylan, McCartney, Bowie and Springsteen doing the selection honours. All involved go down fairly obvious routes, both with song and artist choice, but still the results are up to the mark.

Three tracks stand head and shoulders above the rest. U2 could have tried too hard to prove their alternative credentials, instead wisely settling on a safe pair of hands in Elbow and the perfect song in ‘Running To Stand Still’. The combination of the two is exquisite, given a heartbreaking poignancy in this particular context.

The meeting of Lily Allen and The Clash too has a perfect symmetry to it, her bouncy version of ‘Straight To Hell’ belying its dark undertones. The Hold Steady (pictured) covering Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’ is a role they were born to play but they certainly make the most of it.

Nothing else can really match these tracks but several give it a good go – Yeah Yeah Yeahs doing the Ramones, Beck doing Dylan, even The Kooks having a crack at The Kinks. The only real failures are perhaps the least expected, TV On The Radio failing to get to grips with Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ (surely an open goal if ever there was one) and Hot Chip’s lightweight version of Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’. Quibbles are few though and this is one record featuring bloody Duffy that you can still own with a clear conscience. ~ Phil Udell

The Blue of the Night 0RESENTED BY #!2, #/2#/2!.

SUNDAY TO THURSDAY PM AM ,IKE TRIBUTARIES FEEDING THE RIVER OF SOUND JAZZ CLASSICAL

TRADITIONAL WORLD SECULAR AND SACRED ALL FEED INTO 4HE "LUE OF THE .IGHT *OIN US ON OUR JOURNEY ¯ A NIGHTLY EXCURSION DOWN THE CENTURIES OF MUSIC

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DVD

Words by

JOHN WALSHE

Burn After Reading Director: Joel and Ethan Coen.

Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand, John Malcovich, Tilda Swinton.

Running Time: 91 minutes.

Extras: Featurettes.

[

Northern Irish director Steve McQueen tackles the last weeks of Bobby Sands in a gut-twisting drama.

Hunger Director: Steve McQueen Starring: Michael Fassbender, Stuart Graham, Liam Cunningham.

Running Time: 90 minutes.

Extras: Making of documentary, interviews, trailer.

Taking on a subject as emotive as the 1981 hunger strikers is a tough ask for even hardened directors, but Northern Ireland’s McQueen has created a striking, compelling and viciously powerful tale from the horror of the Maze prison.

Surprisingly, it’s very light on dialogue – with the notable exception of a stunning scene between Sands (Fassbender) and Father Moran (Cunningham) – preferring to let the visuals tell the story. It’s the little details (checking under the car for bombs, the Union Jack keyring, the fact that the only chance the Republican prisoners have to converse is during mass) that subtly show the day-to-day realities of life for the prisoners and their guards. The bigger picture, however, is unsettling and extremely hard to watch at times, particularly the shite-encrusted walls of the ‘dirty’ protests or the ultra violent and degrading ‘inspections’. Powerful, harrowing stuff.

The Fall Director: Tarsem Singh Starring: Lee Pace, Catinca Untaru.

Running Time: 117 minutes.

Extras: Commentaries, Deleted Scenes, Behind the Scenes featurettes.

An extravagant fantasy adventure, shot in no fewer than 18 countries worldwide, from the magnificent palaces of India to the breath-taking landscapes of Bali and Fiji, The Fall is probably the most sumptuous visual feast State has ever set eyes on, thanks no doubt to Indian director Tarsem Singh, whose previous credits include REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’ video. Roy Walker (Pace) is unable to walk after a film stunt went

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]

badly wrong, and he’s languishing in a 1915 LA hospital, where he befriends five-year-old Alexandria, played superbly by first-time Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, and begins recounting an extraordinary tale of bandits, warriors, scientists and epic battles, while in return she steals morphine pills to unwittingly help him end his life. Unfortunately, its plot can’t keep up with the magnificence of its visuals and long before the end of its almost two-hour duration, you’ll find yourself marvelling at the settings but not really caring about the characters.

For fans of: The Princess Bride, Stardust.

Charlie Bartlett Director: Jon Poll Starring: Anton Yelchin, Robert Downey Jnr, Hope Davis, Kat Dennings.

Running Time: 93 minutes.

Extras: Commentary, Restroom Confessional, Music Video.

Owing a debt to some of the classic John Hughes films of the ’80s, yet without their inherent charm, Charley Bartlett is an American high school comedy/drama, albeit with a twist. The eponymous hero (the impressive Yelchin) is a rich kid who’s been kicked out of every private school in the locality and is forced to attend the local public educational facility, where, consumed by the need to be popular, he becomes unofficial therapist to the entire student body, diagnosing their psychiatric problems and dispensing prescription drugs on demand. He’s also dating Susan (Dennings), who happens to be the daughter of the alcoholic school principal (Downey Jnr).

What follows is a mildly entertaining, if clichéridden romp through the traditional US school system, complete with bullies, parties, fights, romance and the obligatory finale at the school play. Could have been so much better.

For fans of: Igby Goes Down, Rushmore.

Joel and Ethan Coen have always confounded expectations and they’re at it again, following the multi-award winning No Country For Old Men with this rather chaotic, ensemble farce set in Washington’s intelligence community. Osborne Cox (Malcovich) is relieved of his duties at the CIA and sets about writing his memoirs. Meanwhile, his wife Katie (Swinton) is having an affair with serial adulterer Harry Pfarrer (Clooney), who is also dating Linda Litske (McDormand). Got all that? Katie is planning to leave hapless Osborne to set up home with Pfarrer, which results directly in a CD containing details of his finances and part of his writing ending up on the floor of a gym where Litske works alongside the intellectually challenged Chad (Pitt). Desperate for a series of expensive cosmetic surgery treatments, Litske decides to try to blackmail Osborne, setting in motion a chain of ever-more ridiculous events. Phew. While it undoubtedly has its moments, Burn After Reading is a little too wry for its own good and is far from the Coens’ best work, more Intolerable Cruelty than Oh Brother Where Art Thou?

For fans of: The Coen Brothers

Australia Director: Baz Luhrmann.

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Bryan Brown.

Running Time: 158 minutes.

Extras: Deleted scenes.

Luhrmann’s epic got panned at the box office, mainly down to its mammoth running time, and while it’s true that the narrative is far too ponderous, and some judicious editing could have shaved at least half an hour off, it’s not nearly as bad as its critics would have you believe.

In the early years of World War II, Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) sets off Down Under to bring her cattle-obsessed husband back to Britain, only to find that he’s been murdered by the nefarious Neil Fletcher (Denham). With the help of the drover (Jackman), she sets out to revive the ailing fortunes of Faraway Downs, in the process stopping cattle baron Carney (Brown) from gaining a stranglehold on Australia’s beef industry. What begins as a jaunty comedy-romance (City Slickers in the outback), transforms into a would-be stirring epic, and this is what jars the most, feeling like two films welded together. While Luhrmann’s lush cinematography is flawless, his grasp on character development isn’t as impressive and his talented leads end up playing what are effectively cartoon characters. Still, it’s a visual feast and an enjoyable yarn in its own right, albeit one that takes itself a little too seriously.

For fans of: Legends Of The Fall, Heaven’s Gate, Titanic.

Words by

Games

JOHN WALSHE

Halo Wars X360

[

More frantic firefights with grisly enemies await the player in Killzone 2.

Killzone 2 PS3

(SCEE)

Rarely a month goes by without a new first person shooter hitting the shelves, purporting to be the best new title on the market, a new take on an old genre, yada yada, blah blah. The big surprise about Killzone 2 is that it actually succeeds in improving on its predecessor in every way and is definitely one of the best shooters to hit the PS3.

OK, it’s not going to rewrite any rulebooks and the plot won’t give Hollywood screen writers any sleepless nights, but in terms of action, it’ll keep your trigger finger happy for some time.

Set two years after the events of the original game, it’s really a case of ‘once more into the breach’, this time taking the action to the Helghan capital city, where your mission is to eliminate the enemy leader, Emperor Visari, thus cutting the head off the Helghan war machine. What this means is engaging in serious fire-fights with all manner of well trained enemies (from cover, mind you – you won’t survive long in the open), driving tanks, firing rockets, planting explosives and generally destroying an entire army and their home city, brick by bloody brick. You play as grizzled veteran Sev, who along with the other three members of Alpha Team, is at the cutting edge of the action, leading the charge against the vicious Helghan foes.

The graphics are top notch, the sound impressive and the action is sometimes dizzyingly frantic. Probably the most satisfying aspect of Killzone 2, however, is the enemy AI – these guys are

]

seriously hard to kill, ducking behind cover and keeping your troops pinned down whenever possible, making the challenge tougher but the sense of achievement all the sweeter. Recommended.

Lord Of The Rings Conquest X360, PS3, PC

(Microsoft)

Taking one of the most revered shooter series of all time into the realms of the Real Time Strategy could be a risky affair. Thankfully, the team at Ensemble Studios have endowed Halo Wars with the same classy look and feel of its bigger siblings, with the cracking cut-scenes and superb voice-acting recreating the look and feel of the original games. Set in 2531, two decades before the events of the original Halo, you take charge of Sergeant John Forge and his UNSC soldiers as they engage the forces of the Covenant on the planet of Harvest, where the enemy have discovered an important and powerful relic that could mark a breakthrough in the war against humanity.

There are two tutorials for those not familiar with the workings of the RTS genre, and the first few levels are extremely simple, helping you to familiarise yourself with the control system: from moving your units around the playing area to creating a base, building reactors, garnering supplies and training new combat units. However, it isn’t too long before the game starts to set down some real challenges, none moreso than your ability to multi-task. Hugely impressive and guaranteed to win Halo fans over to the RTS genre.

(EA)

Featuring some of the stunning locations from Tolkien’s book and Peter Jackson’s epic movie trilogy, Lord Of The Rings Conquest allows you to take part in some of the most decisive battles ever seen in Middle Earth, from both sides of the conflict. Playing as one of four character types (warrior, mage, archer and scout – each with their own advantages and flaws), you get to work your way through The War Of The Ring, from the epic encounter at Helm’s Deep to the Black Gate of Mordor, taking some detours from the book along the way (including clearing out the Mines of Moria). Then, the Rise Of Sauron campaign allows you to switch sides, playing as the bad guys, as you storm familiar locations like the rings of Minas Tirith. From time to time, you also get to play as one of the hero characters (Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli and the like). So far, so good, and while the graphics and sound are extremely good, and the game enjoys the high production values we have come to expect from anything LOR connected, the action does let it down somewhat, with most of the bigger battles descending into button mashing.

Skate 2 X360, PS3

(EA)

While freestyle skateboarding sims aren’t normally State’s style, EA’s free-rolling sequel bucks the trend somewhat, thanks to a control system that’s neither too finicky for novices nor too simple for experts. Your character is just back on the streets of New San Vanelona, after a spell in prison, and ready to regain his reputation as the king of the boarders. Once you’ve settled on your look, with fully customisable appearance and merchandise up for grabs, it’s a case of completing all manner of challenges to earn the respect of your peers (who all speak in a sub-slacker Californian drawl), with ollies, one-foots, grabs, flips, shuvits, handplants and hippy jumps the order of the day.

Good fun.

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Anger Management

S L AY I N G T H E FA M E G A M E JOHN WALSHE CHRISTIAN KIRKEGAARD

Words and Bile by Illustration by

Watching TV3’s recent countdown of Ireland’s Richest Celebrities reminded me of just how much Irish people hate success. Not for themselves, mind you – personal wealth and status are fine – just don’t let anyone else dare to become famous, rich or even popular. The various commentators on the show – a heady brew of journalists, models, comedians and gossip columnists – had hardly a good word to say about any of the actors, musicians and sports stars lucky enough to make the rich list. Instead, we had a slither of snide remarks about their talents, their money and their social graces, delivered with a sickening array of knowing grins and arched eyebrows.

Why is it that as a nation, we embrace the underdog so much, willing them on to succeed Billy Elliot-style, but as soon as they get to the top of their game or worse, they so much as hint that they’re worth the adulation they receive, we pride ourselves on knocking them off their pedestal before they’ve even had a chance to collect pigeon shit?

Whether it’s a footballer who we think has got too big for his boots or an actor regarded as not paying enough respect to the land of his birth, we love to describe them as arrogant, self-serving and certainly not as good as they think they are.

Our greatest ire, however, is reserved for our musicians.

It’s all well and good when they’re struggling, releasing EPs on their own labels to be sold from rickety tables at the back of tiny venues. When they enjoy even a smidgeon of success, however – maybe a few plays on the wireless or a decent review in a nonindie publication – we love nothing better than to eulogise about how they’ve sold out, how they’re not as good as the fledgling outfit playing support slots at the 50-capacity dingy minimalelectro club night organised by the dude you used to be in college with. There is no ire as great as the “indier than thou” brigade, perfectly encapsulated in the Eyebrowy “I heard Arcade Fire before you” sketch.

Snow Patrol are a case in point: they were fine when they were critically lauded but couldn’t get arrested commercially, but once they made the breakthrough internationally, suddenly they weren’t good enough for the self-appointed indie mafia who “preferred the early stuff”.

Blogs and message boards are often the biggest culprits when it comes to our national pastime, begrudgery. It’s so easy for the bitter and the disaffected to hide behind the anonymity of a user-name to shout their spite and spout their shite. This is the true home of the ‘super-indie’ fan or the ‘real’ football supporter,

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allowing them the freedom to dismiss anyone else as a muppet for having the temerity to disagree with them on who should be playing out wide for Liverpool, the exact shade of rouge of Fergie’s nose or how anybody who doesn’t recognise the godlike genius of – insert miserablist bedsit troubadour here – should just go back to their Now That’s What I Call Muzak albums and leave ‘real’ music to those who understand it.

Even a casual glimpse at some of the diatribes directed at the Choice Music Prize shortlist will showcase the righteous indignance of Ireland’s select music “fans”. Describing a list of albums, as chosen by a dozen random journalists, radio presenters etc as “outrageous”, “disrespectful”, or “pandering” is ridiculous: it’s like a pissing contest where the object is not to urinate further than your competitors but to prove that your urine comes from a purer, more independent source than everyone else’s: you could call it the fillet of wanker. And referring to the prize itself as the “Irish Indo Awards”, when it’s organised by one of the leading music writers from that newspaper’s biggest rival, merely adds stupidity to the reverie of resentfulness that resides therein.

In fairness, most of these indie-ratti seem to know each other, use their real names and presumably hang out at their mates’ venues, listening to obscure 12-inches and bemoaning the fact that their heroes will remain forever underappreciated. Come out of the bitter blog and play in the sunshine.

IREL AND’S MUSIC PAY L O A D A L S O H A S A R AT H E R F E T C H I N G ONLINE SISTER. AND THE SWOT EVEN WO N A N AWA R D !

IRISH WEB AWA R D S B EST MUSIC SIT E OF 2008

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