27 Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob (6) Metacritic rating: 61

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/kaiserchiefs/yourstrulyangrymob/picture.jpg

 

With the BRIT award winning success comes the inevitable backlash though, and at some point last year, people became a bit sniffy about Kaiser Chiefs. Fellow Yorkshire tykes Arctic Monkeys dubbed them "a bit annoying", and they appeared to be adopted by a rather beery group of lads - ironically enough, the very same type of people so skilfully satirised in I Predict A Riot.

 

Yours Truly Angry Mob inevitably displeases those who remain immune to their charms - it's full of the same shiny pop tunes, with rather catchy choruses and Wilson's quirky lyrics which is fine if you are not aware of Blur's, XTC's, The Who's, The Kinks, Squeeze, The Boomtown Rats, you get the idea... back catalogues.

 

Comeback single Ruby is the Kaisers at their best - a big anthem, with a chorus that could fill a football stadium, and lyrics that. although slightly nonsensical, have a air of existential sadness (and I bet that's not a sentence you thought you'd ever read in a Kaiser Chiefs review). Lines such as "there is nothing I need, except the function to breath, but I'm not really fussed" hint at a mood of disillusionment and disappointment that runs throughout the album.

 

The (near) title track The Angry Mob is similarly terrific, a swipe at the 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' fratenity culminating in a chant of "we are the angry mob, we read the papers everyday" that became even more appropriate with the ludicrous coverage of the Madeleine McCann case and the ridiculous way the Great British Public made up their minds over the guilt or innocence/incompetence of the parents, Portuguese police, Robert Murat. Heat Dies Down really should have been a single, the infectious chorus offset by the song's protagonist waiting with glee for the demise of his relationship ("I doubt I could spend 20 years spending time at her, talking to that mother").

 

The disillusionment mentioned earlier is evident in several tracks, and it's the music industry that bears the brunt of the band's ire. While songs by successful bands about how c**p it is to be a successful band may be tiresome, tracks such as Thank You Very Much paint the daily grind of the media treadmill vividly. The closing track, Retirement, even sees Wilson fantasising about inventing some kind of gadget so he can retire and "get the man off my back".

 

In a similar way that debut album Employment felt like 'the singles and some other less memorable tracks', there's a fair amount of filler on Angry Mob as well. Highroyds is basically a lyrical sequel to I Predict A Riot, a portrait of a tread around the streets of Leeds complete with underage girls standing outside nightclubs in the snow. It doesn't have the charm of I Predict A Riot though, with a tune that's not half as memorable. Several songs in the second half of the album, such as Learnt My Lesson Well and Everything Is Average Nowadays (how was this ever a single??) have a rather 'phoned-in' feel about them, while the lumpen My Kind Of Guy just ends up being plain depressing.

 

Wilson's lyrics too, sometimes verge on the cringeworthy. Learnt My Lesson Well berates us that "life could be worse, you could be a nurse", while Retirement has the awesomely clumsy couplet of "there are many things that I would be proud of, if I'd only invented them such as the wheel".

 

Pleasingly though, there are moments of a change of direction on Angry Mob - notably the acoustic lament of Boxing Champ and the rather lovely I Can Do It Without You, which prove that the (admittedly fair) lampoon of them as the band who can only write a chorus with "wooaaaahhhh" in it could well be wrong.

 

Like its predecessor, the Kaisers' second album is patchy, but does have moments of brilliance. But sadly the ratio of brilliance to patchiness has decreased.

 

Best track (excluding Ruby):

 

Heat Dies Down

 

 

 

26 Travis - The Boy With No Name (6) Metacritic Rating: 57

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/travis/boywithnoname/picture.jpg

 

Travis' fifth studio album is their first in three and a half years, and while it can't exactly be described as a return to form (as they never deviated from it across their previous four offerings) it's certainly a return, serving up another twelve slices of the piano-tinged stadium indie they do best.

 

And remember, creating 'stadium indie' might be thought of a bad thing in retrospect, when they first came on the scene, no-one else was doing it so, love them or hate them, they deserve your attention even if they are to blame for Coldplay, Snow Patrol & Keane.

 

The time-gap between this album and the previous one, 12 Memories, is the result of the band deciding they needed a break from the events of the previous years, which saw sales jump from 40,000 on their debut album Good Feeling to multi-platinum for their second, The Man Who, in just two years.

 

You'll be pleased/disappointed then (delete as appropriate) to hear that they've resisted any temptation which may have arisen to reinvent themselves as a hardcore-metal-techno outfit and have returned sounding pretty much exactly the same as they did three and a half years ago. From the gentle pop ballad of opener 3 Times And You Lose, they're as inoffensive but irritating catchy as they've always been. Selfish Jean is a good pun topping Lust for Life type track and an equally good little pop tune, Big Chair is epic and insanely relaxing.

 

Comeback single Closer is catchily familiar, already having wormed its way under the skin and Battleships also jumps out as a track that could easily hold its own as a single. My Eyes and album closer New Amsterdam are the kind of McCartney-esque tracks any true indie snob should wash their ears out with Sonic Youth for liking (but you do anyway).

 

Unfortunately, with the advent of downloads there's an argument that every single track has to be able to stand on its own two feet, and the remaining tracks are not worth 79p. Most of the second half of this album goes by in a coma inducing blur.

 

Best track:

 

My Eyes (live)

I don't own any of the albums so far. Your reviews remind me why (though I love '2 Hearts :( )

27 Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob (6) Metacritic rating: 61

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/kaiserchiefs/yourstrulyangrymob/picture.jpg

 

With the BRIT award winning success comes the inevitable backlash though, and at some point last year, people became a bit sniffy about Kaiser Chiefs. Fellow Yorkshire tykes Arctic Monkeys dubbed them "a bit annoying", and they appeared to be adopted by a rather beery group of lads - ironically enough, the very same type of people so skilfully satirised in I Predict A Riot.

 

Yours Truly Angry Mob inevitably displeases those who remain immune to their charms - it's full of the same shiny pop tunes, with rather catchy choruses and Wilson's quirky lyrics which is fine if you are not aware of Blur's, XTC's, The Who's, The Kinks, Squeeze, The Boomtown Rats, you get the idea... back catalogues.

 

Comeback single Ruby is the Kaisers at their best - a big anthem, with a chorus that could fill a football stadium, and lyrics that. although slightly nonsensical, have a air of existential sadness (and I bet that's not a sentence you thought you'd ever read in a Kaiser Chiefs review). Lines such as "there is nothing I need, except the function to breath, but I'm not really fussed" hint at a mood of disillusionment and disappointment that runs throughout the album.

 

The (near) title track The Angry Mob is similarly terrific, a swipe at the 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' fratenity culminating in a chant of "we are the angry mob, we read the papers everyday" that became even more appropriate with the ludicrous coverage of the Madeleine McCann case and the ridiculous way the Great British Public made up their minds over the guilt or innocence/incompetence of the parents, Portuguese police, Robert Murat. Heat Dies Down really should have been a single, the infectious chorus offset by the song's protagonist waiting with glee for the demise of his relationship ("I doubt I could spend 20 years spending time at her, talking to that mother").

 

The disillusionment mentioned earlier is evident in several tracks, and it's the music industry that bears the brunt of the band's ire. While songs by successful bands about how c**p it is to be a successful band may be tiresome, tracks such as Thank You Very Much paint the daily grind of the media treadmill vividly. The closing track, Retirement, even sees Wilson fantasising about inventing some kind of gadget so he can retire and "get the man off my back".

 

In a similar way that debut album Employment felt like 'the singles and some other less memorable tracks', there's a fair amount of filler on Angry Mob as well. Highroyds is basically a lyrical sequel to I Predict A Riot, a portrait of a tread around the streets of Leeds complete with underage girls standing outside nightclubs in the snow. It doesn't have the charm of I Predict A Riot though, with a tune that's not half as memorable. Several songs in the second half of the album, such as Learnt My Lesson Well and Everything Is Average Nowadays (how was this ever a single??) have a rather 'phoned-in' feel about them, while the lumpen My Kind Of Guy just ends up being plain depressing.

 

Wilson's lyrics too, sometimes verge on the cringeworthy. Learnt My Lesson Well berates us that "life could be worse, you could be a nurse", while Retirement has the awesomely clumsy couplet of "there are many things that I would be proud of, if I'd only invented them such as the wheel".

 

Pleasingly though, there are moments of a change of direction on Angry Mob - notably the acoustic lament of Boxing Champ and the rather lovely I Can Do It Without You, which prove that the (admittedly fair) lampoon of them as the band who can only write a chorus with "wooaaaahhhh" in it could well be wrong.

 

Like its predecessor, the Kaisers' second album is patchy, but does have moments of brilliance. But sadly the ratio of brilliance to patchiness has decreased.

 

Best track (excluding Ruby):

 

Heat Dies Down

It's the disillusionment that puts me off them tbh. They seem to have taken up (somewhat forcibly) this position as a 'critique' of British society, it makes me cringed because it's so forced. The negativity is too much, I like somber/strikings songs of deep sadness but this just comes across as some very well off people complaining about the world and expecting us all to buy their music!

25 Hoosiers - The Trick Of Life (6) Metacritic Rating: N/A

 

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To be honest I was expecting more after Worried about Ray and Goodbye Mr A. However it is clear that these two are by far the best tracks on the album and the rest are struggling to be better than average despite its soundtrack bouncing along effervescently in the background. I certainly can't see any of the others being Top 10 hits especially Run Rabbit Run which is over wrought and pointless and Cops and Robbers which is annoying with the stuttering beat and Sparkes high voice goes the wrong side of irritating.

 

It feels like a quickly put together album after Worried About Ray hit the ground running. If it was not then on this evidence they probably wont be around in 5 years time releasing their fourth album, which is evident from the quality of the other tracks. Hopefully I'll be proved wrong because when their Ben Folds meets Sparks meets McCartney influences hits the mark then it is worth the effort.

 

Best track excluding the first two single:

 

Killer

24 Kate Nash - Made Of Bricks (6) Metacritic Rating: 62

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/nashkate/madeofbricks/picture.jpg

 

Made of Bricks, underneath the colloquialisms, quirks, and electro glitches, is an album cut from the classic singer-songwriter tradition. The surprise and wonderful UK #2 "Foundations" is proof enough of that - the pain of disintegrating relationships is well-trodden territory for the genre. What sets Nash apart is her bitter sense of humour in the face of everything, her description of taunting her boyfriend with the line 'Yeah, I'd rather be with your friends mate, because they're all much fitter' raising a smile even as the chorus sneaks its way into your psyche. It's easy to miss just how touching this song is the first few times you hear it, but eventually it gets it claws in and won't let go. That's also the case with the album's second best song, "Birds", which is both an undoubtedly sincere, beautiful love song, and a moment of unbridled hilarity. Just check the chorus, as Nash's love interest tries to explain his feelings.

 

 

Quote:

Right, birds can fly so high

And they can *** on your head

Yeah they can almost fly into your eye

And make you feel well scared

But when you look at them

And you see that they're beautiful

That's how I feel about you

Yeah, that's how i feel about you

 

Nash's character, naturally, responds with an incredulous 'What are you talking about?' If anybody comes up with anything more genius/retarded than this song in 2007, it'll have been the best year ever for slapstick.

 

After the rather good "We Get On", we get "Mariella", which makes it three great songs on Made of Bricks. Like a lot of the songs here, it displays Nash's willingness to play about with the structure of her songs. The storytelling here turns away from typical subject matter to tell the story of an antisocial, possibly autistic child - the material here makes it the only point where Nash's reported infatuation with Regina Spektor bears fruit (with the arguable exception of the novelty "Skeleton Song"). And yet, she weaves Spektor's quirky beauty into her own style, dropping into one and out of the other with ease as the song constantly builds and builds to its frenetic conclusion. It's excellent.

 

Still, for all its strengths, this album smacks of amateurism throughout, as if it was knocked together in a rush by a team of people who were more interested in the deadline than the product. The album would be much better served by jumping straight into "Foundations" than wasting time with "Play", a lazy track containing absolutely nothing of note. Tracks like "Mouthwash", while certainly not bad, feel like they weren't properly thought out, with the cultural references feeling less natural than they should. The lighty soulful "d!*kh**d" and the electropop styled "*** Song" both could have been highlights, but it feels like there's no substance to them, with Nash clearly resorting to swearing for humour. And why were "Nicest Thing" and "Merry Happy", both very good songs, buried at the end of the album? The amatuerism even feeds into the song titles - is there really any need to have three songs back to back bearing the titles "*** Song", "Pumpkin Song", and "Skeleton Song"? It's slightly jarring, and sad when you consider that apart from "Play", there actually aren't any bad songs here, just decent songs lacking the execution and attention they deserve.

 

This could well have been a much better album than it is. Still, there's enough here to indicate that Nash's obvious Victoria Wood meets Ian Dury natural flair for songwriting will blossom, and that her fearless voice will only get better with experience. I'm completely confident in predicting that her next album will be a big step forward from this (but two years ago I said similar things about The Editors.... :rolleyes:)

 

Best track (excluding Foundations:)

 

Birds

23 New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom (6) Metacritic Rating: N/A

 

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With spindly new-wave and electropop stylings and unashamedly candid sexual come-ons, New Young Pony Club resemble an enticing cross between Talking Heads, New Order, Duran Duran's debut album and CSS, their infectious, ramshackle enthusiasm particularly redolent of the latter as singer Tahita Bulmer hymns the delights of "chocolate-flavoured love theme, treat that treats you so mean" with an album that sounds as if it was recorded in 1981.

 

Her nonchalant delivery, in which semi-spoken, seemingly random phrases are declaimed in a manner that seems to stamp an exclamation mark after each line, has something of Mark E Smith's (The Fall) baffling way with wordplay, but far less threatening. "It's the sound of revolution in the bedroom," she claims in "Hiding On the Staircase", which makes sense until she adds, unhelpfully, "It's the sound of confusionianity". But there's a winning naivety to their music, especially the way the striding basslines, itchy guitars and synth-pop keyboards are peppered with frisky percussion, bringing a provocatively risqué edge to their accounts of sexual discovery.

 

Whilst musically and stylistically it sounds great, the one thing this album is lacking is consistent quality songwriting and ultimately that is the one thing that stops this album well short of greatness.

 

Best track:

 

Ice Cream

 

 

22 Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures (7) Metacritic Rating: 67

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/maximopark/ourearthlypleasures/picture.jpg

 

Slipping into the Paul Epworth-produced post-wave sweepstakes after the Futureheads and Bloc Party, Maxïmo Park were underdogs from the get go. But instead of being spit out by a populace growing bored with gung-ho rhythms and the word "angular," (tigerboy are you reading :lol:) the Newcastle quintet more than held their own with 2005's A Certain Trigger, a burst of treble-rock so taut it made Franz Ferdinand sound Funkadelic. Now, with their competition slumping slightly, there's an opportunity for Maxïmo Park to start setting trends themselves. Did they take advantage? Well...no. Much like their cohorts, the group strives for grander statements with their sophomore album by enlisting a mainstream producer and offering-up more midtempo fare. In comparison, it makes their debut LP come off like a youthful demo. And-- much like their cohorts-- some of the band's winsome scrappiness is lost in transition albeit with less of a slip in songwriting standards than most of their contempories.

 

Compressed into a rumbling guitar-rock fastball, A Certain Trigger was marked by Epworth's zoomed-in production. Along with its hairpin songwriting, that record captured a one-take candidness-- you could hear bug-eyed lead singer Paul Smith deliberately inhale before rattling off a manic melody at the top of "Now I'm All Over the Shop". Our Earthly Pleasures' sound is more calculating and broad-- and it clashes with the band's spitfire inclinations.

 

A catalyst behind this change is producer Gil Norton, who worked the boards on the Pixies' 1989 classic Doolittle and, more recently, worked with the Foo Fighters & Supergrass. Although Smith claims, "The gaps between words are the things that really intrigue me/ It's the gasps and the sighs that say more about what's inside you," on opener "Girls Who Play Guitars," such incidental sonic perks are largely excised in favor of a more commercial, gap-less sheen. Whereas lesser tracks on A Certain Trigger were rendered passable partially thanks to Epworth's condensed attack, Our Earth Pleasures duds like "Your Urge" (which introduces itself with Billy Joel-style piano flourishes) and normalized modern rocker "Sandblasted and Set Free" are done-in by the record's spic-and-span treatment. Even when the new style seems to work, as on the Devo-meets-Nirvana first single "Our Velocity", recent live versions of the song-- including one on "Top of the Pops"-- blow away the recorded take. Questionable studio decisions aside, Maxïmo Park have at least one distinct advantage over their Brit brethren: the desperate intensity of howler Paul Smith.

 

His guileless Geordie accent intact (a big plus in my book), Smith may be the most likeable frontman among his immediate contemporaries (sorry, Kele). He's traded-in the signature comb-over for a sharp bowler hat, but the spastic singer is still neurotically consumed by unfulfilling relationships. On early single "Apply More Pressure", he sang, "I hope that I will live to see you undress," to a potential partner. But now that he's seen her naked, it seems, she's gone away.

 

From the ominous unpacking tale "Books From Boxes" ("You have to leave, I appreciate that/ But I hate when conversation slips out of our grasp") to the anxious aftermath of "By the Monument" ("Posterity has hold of us now/ Am I just waiting for the next chapter?") to the Before Sunset nostalgia of "Parisian Skies" ("I don't think she knew how much I loved her"), Smith chronicles a particularly harsh long-distance split in a style that's part Michael Stipe-ian oblique and part emo confessional.

 

One of the greatest legacies of the original late 1970s post-punk-meets-new-wave bands were their stylistic diversity; groups like XTC, Talking Heads, and Devo were not only distinct from each other, but they thrived on pushing their respective sounds into unpredictable territory. So the fact that this 2000s era's apparent ancestors are largely repeating themselves or evolving in the same traditionally commercial, "serious" direction is slightly disheartening. Maxïmo Park's first album featured a hazy, spoken-word anomaly called "Acrobat" that sounded like nothing else on the LP. The song was ballsy and beautiful, and it hinted at an untapped adventurousness. There's nothing like "Acrobat" on Our Earthly Pleasures. With their new album, Maxïmo Park avoid both utter disaster and absolute success by playing it safe. Nice and safe.

 

Best Track:

 

Our Velocity (live at Glastonbury)

21 Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank (7) Metacritic Rating: 78

 

http://www3.hmv.co.uk/hmv/Large_Images/HMV/MODMOUPRECD.JPG

 

The Washington rockers' follow-up to 2004's bona fide USA breakthrough hit, "Good News for People Who Love Bad News," is such a dense, stylistically diverse affair that it's likely that favorite tracks will vary depending on the listener. Lovers of leader Isaac Brock's sometimes precise and cutting lyrics will revel in the stunning, carnival freak-out of an opener, "March Into the Sea." Fans of his more Captain Beefheart abstract musings will dig the gritty bounce of lyrical headscratcher "Fire it Up." Booty-shaking guitar nuts will be pleased by the riffs -- punk, pop, metal, and otherwise -- that anchor the proceedings, some courtesy of newest member Johnny Marr of the Smiths especially on The Smiths sounding lead single "Dashboard". And fans of Brock's David Byrne-esque swoops, shouts, and brays will be pleased with his unpredictable vocal twists. If "We Were Dead . . ." is a little much to take in all at once, the sheer mass of the tunes becomes easier to manage over repeated listens.

 

Best track excluding Dashboard:

 

Fire It Up

20 Alicia Keys - As I Am (7) Metacritic rating: 68

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/keysalicia/asiam/picture.jpg

 

Alicia Keys is for me the best RnB female singer around at the moment. She is a true and deep soul singer and a master of any keyboard put in front of her. When performing, she leaves it all on the stage with a fiery go-for-broke style that makes you think she is the secret love child of Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. And the New York native wisely chooses collaborators to craft sounds that straddle classic, gritty soul, without over doing the contemporary, urban rap that saw Mariah Carey come unstuck.

 

But after releasing two albums that have occasionally been astounding, she has yet to prove consistently revelatory. Her melodies have tended to meander into static vamps, and lyrically she has settled for the corny or cliched when her voice has cried out for something more substantial.

 

"As I Am," her third album is easily her most consistent. However it does not have as many highs as her benchmark debut album. This album delves further into the pop half of her soul-pop equation than the last album did, Keys's tunes sing as strongly as she does. Alas, she still relies too often on sloganeering.

 

For instance, the stirring closer, "Sure Looks Good to Me," has an instantly infectious melody and dramatic sense of uplift, especially in the gospel-informed backing vocals, but Keys conveys her optimism in boilerplate cheers. A lyric like "don't rain on my parade, life's too short to waste one day" is digestible only by the sheer force of her raspy testifying.

 

That theme of seizing the day threads its way through "As I Am" and has its best platform in "Tell You Something (Nana's Reprise)." Keys vows to share the sentiments we too often keep to ourselves until it's too late - with verve over a crisp tempo that wouldn't be out of place on a Beyoncé record.

 

Fresh aid comes from the unlikely duo of John Mayer and ubiquitous songwriter-producer Linda Perry. The former offers breezy back-up to "Lesson Learned," while Perry contributes the oddly compelling pop-Broadway-psychedelia hybrid "The Thing About Love" and "Superwoman," the more formulaic, churchy, ode to sister-power.

 

Hip-hop rhythms, scratchy LP samples, bright Southern soul horns, and slices of funk still factor into the overall mix on tracks like "No One" and the dynamite Stevie Wonder-inspired tune "Go Ahead," the angry but controlled get-to-stepping opener.

 

Keys could stand to get riled up a little more often. The empowerment anthems are admirable, but songs like "Go Ahead" give listeners a more personal glimpse into a legitimate side of who Keys is when she's not being a superwoman.

 

Fav Track:

 

Go Ahead

19 Maps - We Can Create (7) Metacritic Rating: NA

 

http://www.musicomh.com/albums/albums_images/maps.jpg

 

James Chapman, aka Maps, set up a 16-track recorder in his Northampton bedroom and plugged in some real instruments to make an album rooted in feelgood major chords and spectral, transient phrases that glide in and out of the listener's consciousness without ever lingering. Apeing Slowdive's blissed-out vocal style - carried on by front man Neil Halstead to his current outfit Mojave 3 - Maps at times get close to sounding like a shoegaze tribute band. Liquid Sugar sounds as though Halstead was wheeled into the studio for a spot of guest vocals.

 

But Chapman's take on the shoegaze subgenre is to give it an electronic spin. In tracks like Lost My Soul he evokes Moby's fragile multi-tracked vocals over electronic backing, resolutely avoiding computers where possible in favour of a selection of processed guitars and battered synths. His fragile vocals will either sound irritatingly samey or soothing, depending on your point of view. And there are parts of this record where the vocals interrupt what are interesting instrumental textures. But it's Chapman's music, and if he wants to whisper all over it, that's his business.

 

After a few listens, by which time it becomes possible to discern one song from another, clear highlights emerge. It Will Find You is foremost amongst these, a track that should be respun by Paul van Dyk into a trance anthem. Breathy vocals overlay a beat that never bothers kicking in a bass section adequate to dance to but which is instead content to languish in the aural soundscape it creates. It is a thing of beauty.

 

In short, this is an album that if you like, you will happily play the entire album so it is well worth a spin. The only problem is even after repeated plays it is not easy to highlight one track from the other.

 

Best Track:

 

It Will Find You

18 Feist - Reminder (7) Metacritic Rating: 79

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/feist/reminder/picture.jpg

 

Leslie Feist's third solo album (although I'd never heard of her before this year) her collaborators on other records pretty well amount to a who's who of the Canadian underground could be the one that launches her to dinner-party ubiquity, given a fair wind from Radio 2.

 

Obviously the Apple iTunes promoted poppy 1234 is the track that brought her to the public's attention, but there is more to her than that one track. Standout ballad Limit to Your Love has all the necessary ingredients to be a Wogan favourite, but it's the details that make Feist more than another warbelstress. The Reminder barely stands still, flitting from genre to genre without ever departing from a core orchestration of guitar and piano, lightly shaded with strings and horns.

 

The result is that no matter which genre she essays - country-rock, jazzy shuffles, and even a muted take on 60s-style garage R&B all crop up - she always sounds like herself, rather than a copyist. There's a sense, too, that The Reminder is more than the sum of its parts: while nothing here is wholly original, it is a pleasure for as long as it plays even though the songwriting quality seems to lapse in the last third of the album.

 

Fav Track:

 

Limit To Your Love (live)

17 Duran Duran - Red Carpet Massacre (7) Metacritic Rating: 64

 

http://www.metacritic.com/media/music/artists/duranduran/redcarpetmassacre/picture.jpg

 

Having cross-wired disco, art-rock and pop for almost 30 years, the various incarnations of Duran Duran have increasingly smoothed out the junctures of their incongruous components. Their 12th album does the opposite. Just as they yielded to Chic’s Nile Rodgers for the fractured funk of 1986’s Notorious, the original members (minus guitarist Andy Taylor) here similarly submit to the scalpels of Justin Timberlake, producer Timbaland and his protégé Nate “Danjahandz” Hills. Aware that a hip-hop face-lift could look ridiculous, they fortify themselves with their most sustained set of songs since the Notorious album. With Simon LeBon sharpening his typically abstract lyrics and everyone bolstering the contrasting, constant hooks, Timbaland perfects the rock-techno fusion his solo album failed to achieve, while Duran emphasize their willfully plastic extremes. They’ve never sounded this pretty and severe. In stark contrast to their over produced, last album Astronaut.

 

Sadly, this album looks set to sell nothing like the quantities the last album sold, due to the disastrous decision to go with the song they wrote with Justin Timberlake for (and was rejected by) Britney Spears as lead single. Even though the lyrics are unnervingly eerily appropriate: "Why has the sky turned grey/ Hard to my face and cold on my shoulder/ And why has my life gone astray/ Scarred by disgrace, I know that its over // Because I'm falling down/ With people standing round/ But before I hit the ground/ Is there time/ Could I find someone out there to help me?" It sounded like Duran Duran performing a Britney Spears ballad (the vocals were too high for Simon, especially live) with the dinky piano motif.

 

If only they'd gone with the 21st century sounding Nite Runner (imagine Maroon 5's Makes Me Wonder turned into a much better song), or the blatantly commercial Skin Divers (imagine Depeche Mode meets the Pet Shop Boys produced by Timbaland), Tempted or Zoom In as the lead single things could have been so different.

 

Fav Track:

 

Skin Divers

16 The Good The Bad & The Queen - The Good The Bad & The Queen (7) Metacritic Rating: 76

 

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Danger Mouse produced this first album for the new collaboration between Damon Albarn (Blur,Gorillaz), Paul Simonon (The Clash), Tony Allen (Africa 70 / Fela Kuti) and Simon Tong (The Verve).

 

TGTB&TQ stalks into life with the sort of song that respects and learns to revel in the martyrdom of grey days, moored tugboats, muddied puddles. Leaving its creators fiddling through frets and puffing on a Hammond, 'History Song' creeps like you're walking home half-alive through the early hours, a rat back from the lash. It's one of the most direct tracks on the record, before any discernible purpose and narrative is submerged and half-lost in the fumes leaking out from the speakers. Crooked rhythms creak under Albarn's ominous premonition that "If you don't know it now, then you will do" and rim-shots stack up and stagger; 'History Song' sets the band up from the outset as cold voyeurs, detached from the hurried masses.

 

Throughout the record, lyrics pitch the songs in view of situations that are empty and actions that are isolated and mundane - at the banks of abandoned estuaries, "tide end towns", "the old canal by the gas works", the 1980s. There are more - other tracks find the narrator 'Behind the Sun', "away in the hills", in submarines, "on the scrubs in the night". Every track on the album, in fact, has a reference to one of those places in quotation marks up there, and in every one it sounds like the band is lurking in the shadows that their music casts.

 

Some shadows are thrown taller than others. The glorious 'Kingdom of Doom' joins 'History Song' in intoxicating like petrol fumes. The way 'Three Changes' rattles along, driven by Tony Allen's drumming, is one of the few moments where the band seem to cut loose from the tight alleys and backstreets they skulk in, while the album's/band's/project's/whatever's title track brings the whole thing to a furious, clattering, ecstatic crescendo. 'Herculean' is still my favourite TGTB&TQ song.

 

Occasionally though, Albarn's alley cat howl starts to grate as it washes over the music like a lukewarm bath. There are times when the tempo starts to lag and sag, too - most notably in the couple of minutes stretched between the closing moments of '80's Life' and the start of 'Northern Whale'. It is in some ways necessary, I suppose, that these songs should suffocate slightly as the quartet toil to faithfully recreate that atmosphere of grey weight.

 

But for all its momentary highlights, this is a record that doesn't tend to grow on you as much as sink and seep into your skin: and it does this slowly. That said, there are hooks and words that immediately jut out from the fugue - any song whose opening gambit is "Friday night in the Kingdom of Doom/ Ravens fly across the moon," has my ears won, straight up. This song ('Kingdom of Doom') is especially impressive, a jarring knees-up as performed by the cast of Funnybones, interrupted by haunting swirls of white noise and the tinkling of chimes and bells.

 

Looking back now in 2008, one time comparisons between Albarn & Liam Gallagher seem about as ludicrous as Louis Walsh's claim The Beatles were a boy band like Westlife.

 

Fav track:

 

Herculean

15 Rufus Wainwright - Release The Stars (7) Metacritic Rating: 72

 

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Rufus Wainwright seems to have as many haters as he has adoring lovers. The critical community is just as split down the middle as regular listeners, which makes you wonder, as he continues to pound out bombastic but transcendent orchestral (Mika for grown ups) pop, how much point there is to a conventional review. His baroque style of pop is never going to be for everyone, but that’s hardly cause to lambaste the singer for a lack of talent. In fact, there’s more raw musical ability from the lush orchestral arrangements to the tightly constructed pop forms on Release the Stars than on all those attitude-filled, buzz-fueled indie/rock debuts we get each year. And in general, Wainwright’s getting more ambitious as he goes along. Ten years in, you get the sense the best is yet to come (baby).

 

The over-indulgence of Wainwright’s music is a given, something that follows from his frankly dramatic personal exploits (if there is a more camp man in popular music today then I don't him) and that tracks so closely from his backwards-looking sensibility. Wainwright’s liberal discussion of his personal life annoys as much as it enlightens or is a cause for slack-jawed sympathy. That one of the songs on his new album is about his alleged one night stand with the lead singer of the Killers, Brandon Flowers, is typical: it means nothing for the quality of the music itself but is a perfect indicator of the sensationalist drama that Wainwright can’t avoid if he tried. And his fascination with things of the past is on display everywhere on Release the Stars. It comes through on the lush orchestral arrangements, the aristocratic 19th century recreation “Sanssouci”, and the singers Broadway musical-style vocal stylings.

 

And so Wainwright shoots us to the stars with “Do I Disappoint You” and hardly backs off from there. That song is one of a quartet of very strong pieces at the disc’s opening that set the tone for the album, a standard that is sadly only intermittently matched over the remaining songs. “Going to a Town”, the first single, is indeed the strongest song, but it’s also the most obvious and commercial, a simple, building piano ballad, saturated in a now-familiar disillusion: “I’m so tired of America.” But Wainwright sometimes lets his romanticism get the best of him so that his heaping violins and trumpets and saxophones occasionally crowd out a song’s sense of itself. “Release the Stars” is romantic and large-sweep, but never really rises up out of the soupy arrangement. It’s a shortfall that’s understandable, and hopefully addressable with time and a ruthless producer.

 

So we’re back to: do you like Rufus or don’t you? (As Elton John once said "Robbie Williams King of Pop? He's not even the best male artist around at the moment with the initials R & W!") Release the Stars is a coherent, sophisticated exposition of the usual Wainwright themes, but it is not the shooting-into-mainstream pop-rock opus Wainwright was potentially hoping for. The tics of personality are still there, the anachronism’s still there. It’s fine, of course. Onward and sideways, Wainwright’s continuing to craft a musical legacy designed to last beyond his lifetime, he's more consistent with each project (this is his 5th proper studio album), but is he getting better?

 

Fav track (bar Going To A Town):

 

Between My Legs

14 Siouxsie Sioux - Mantaray (7) Metacritic Rating: 72

 

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Siouxsie Sioux's extensive musical career of 30 years is something that most singers would envy having; whether leading the Banshees or fronting the Creatures, her strong voice, sharp eye for detail, and embrace of any number of styles have remained touchstones for numerous performers since. Following on a couple of years from both a celebratory tour and her fine turn on Basement Jaxx's Kish Kash, her full solo debut, Mantaray, is a bit of a different effort for her, though with a couple of drawbacks. Working with producers Steve Evans and Charlie Jones (the latter having notably collaborated with one of Siouxsie's many descendants, Goldfrapp; there's definitely more than a slight hint of her compressed glam kick throughout), Siouxsie on Mantaray resembles nothing in her past so much as the 1991 Banshees album Superstition, a sometimes thrilling but at points compromised experimentation with already well-worn dance styles. Thankfully, the atmosphere of 2007 is far more chaotically all-embracing for a magpie-like approach especially with a vocalist whose delivery is as striking and unique as Siouxsie's, and at its best Mantaray embraces this lead single "Into a Swan" is a fierce bit of industrial glam-punk with more feedback than most bands could provide, "Here Comes That Day" is a vampish song that Shirley Bassey would kill for. Other highlights include "Loveless" — nothing to do with My Bloody Valentine, but with a strutting kick all its own, and the concluding "Heaven and Alchemy," a fine piano-led comedown. After a strong start, though, the album gets a bit flat, with some songs like "One Mile Below" sounding dramatic enough but also too reminiscent of past Banshees/Creatures highlights to truly stand out. This said, Siouxsie's voice remains as strong as ever before, and she enters her fourth decade of performing with style and grace perfectly intact.

 

Fav Track (bar Here Comes That Day):

 

Heaven and Alchemy

Is Britney in the top 13 then? :o Amazement if she is! Good album run down so far Rich.

Great critique so far.. I hugely disagree on Editors, though... it's a tremendous album, start to finish, every track superb - lyrically and musically - and the vocals are top-notch throughout.

 

I really don't see it as over-polished or over-produced and, to be honest, Smokers is the weakest track on the whole affair, I think - a bizarre first single on an album full of would-be hit singles if they'd been released before this one or the album.

 

And Mantaray, too - it's easily one of the best bodies of work this year - to put it so low down is criminal. But...it's all relative.

 

Rufus Wainwright... never understoof the hype.... he has the most annoying, monotone voice... totally flat.

 

And to see Mika even mentioned leaves me cold. Ugh.

 

Agree about all the others I've heard, though.

Great critique so far.. I hugely disagree on Editors, though... it's a tremendous album, start to finish, every track superb - lyrically and musically - and the vocals are top-notch throughout.

 

I really don't see it as over-polished or over-produced and, to be honest, Smokers is the weakest track on the whole affair, I think - a bizarre first single on an album full of would-be hit singles if they'd been released before this one or the album.

 

Really?

 

I've only heard the singles and whilst I don't like 'Smokers', I'd praise it for being different. The other two are just inferior versions of 'Back Room' tracks.

An End Has A Start is a real grower of an album - I'd say it's as good as, if not better than, Back Room.

 

Definitely one of my albums of 2007.