Fat Dog live at Project House review – barking mad dance-rock is a treat
15
Nov

The much-hyped band crowned a breakout year with a bangers-only 45 minute blitz in Leeds, packed with mammoth riffs and thunderous bass lines. Even the band’s photographer couldn’t resist the pull of a vintage mosh pit.

Twilight on a moody November evening by the canal in Leeds, and the leaking locks are hissing harshly behind a gloomy row of trees. At 8 p.m. it’s still just about bright enough to make out the passing clouds, oddly glowing with light pollution against navy skies. I’ve only just arrived, but I already feel exhausted – with the murky recent weather, a cold going round and a certain election result, I can’t have been the only one approaching Project House feeling weighed down by November blues. I walked towards the reassuring thud of live music – the muffled sounds of what turned out to be a rather dreadful support slot from Truthpaste – hopeful the music might provide some catharsis.

As it happened, few bands do reckless, enthralling catharsis quite like Fat Dog. Like Black Country, New Road and Black Midi, they were borne out of the fertile left-field music scene centred on the legendary Windmill venue in Brixton, making a name for themselves in recent years solely through notoriously wild live shows. Fat Dog’s unique sound is charged with an impulsive energy that makes it easy for audiences to be swept away by it all even without prior exposure. Remarkably, one scant album into their career, Fat Dog have already carved out a distinct stylistic niche – aggressive industrial dance music with thunderous unisons riffs, scuzzy saxophone and yelped, barely coherent vocals about impending doom. Think somewhere between Madness and Daft Punk, but with more lyrical references to slug invasions. It’s unlike anything I’ve heard before.

You could forgive Fat Dog for being exhausted themselves – they’ve essentially been on tour for their entire career so far, including a marathon four performances on various small stages at this year’s Glastonbury. Emerging onto stage to a volley of drums and a tremble of deep synth bass, frontman Joe Love was a wonderfully enigmatic figure, his eyes barely open beneath a canopy of curly locks and a white Stetson. Vocally, he made no sense either, producing a manic yelp of “It’s Fat Dog baby!” at the start of the concert, sounding more menacingly deranged than comical.

Such is the unique appeal of Fat Dog, a band who on paper sound jokey – drummer Johnny ‘Doghead’ Hutch has a penchant for performing in a German shepherd mask, sadly not donned in Leeds – but in reality sound like credible harbingers of the apocalypse. It didn’t take long for the audience to start colliding with each other to the sounds of Vigilante, an album opener which brilliantly pairs a mammoth hook with a haunting, vaguely Eastern European folk melody. Gone were the intricate details of the studio recording – most notably a melodramatic spoken word passage, and a gigantic-sounding string orchestra carrying the hook – but in Leeds an additional percussionist was let loose on an arsenal of bongos and cymbals, more than plugging the gap. The result was an intoxicatingly heavy three minutes that had an instant, drug-like effect on the audience, who duly threw their arms – and beers – up in the air.

Joe Love’s performance was intimate for those in the front row.

It was enthralling – but then again I’m bound to say that, since Love spent a majority of this brief gig right next to me, close enough I could have nicked his hat. He leaned against the barriers for song after song, singing directly to his devotees like a young Nick Cave, only with less heartfelt hand-holding and more woofing into the microphone. It was a thrill to be in the mix of bodies with their arms reaching up towards him, but I doubt the people a little further back from me – spending most of the gig looking at a largely empty stage – would have agreed.

From my fortunate vantage point amidst the mosh, the only possible downside of Fat Dog’s set was that each song was almost too exhaustingly compelling. Seven-minute opus King of the Slugs was a marathon of industrial beats, particularly in its propulsive second half where the tempo was ruthlessly dialled up a notch. Wither similarly took off like a rocket, Jacqui Wheeler’s restless bass riff and Love’s oddball intonations of “You better wither, baby, before you die” whipping up a frenzy in the crowd. The bedlam was so irresistible that, in one exquisite moment of rock ‘n’ roll, even the hired photographer camped out beside the stage in front of me felt compelled to down tools and leap into the crowd, practically landing on top of me. A few seconds later I watched her drift off to the dim recesses at the back of the venue as Morgan Wallace’s saxophone squealed like a wounded pig.

Even I Am the King, the unconvincing ballad lodged in the middle of the band’s debut album, sounded gripping in Leeds, the shimmering backing of strings given new urgency by Hutch’s rapid hit-hats ticking away like a time bomb. “I am the king… and it means nothing at all,” Love repeated again and again with rising desperation, the swirl of synths rising around him like floodwaters. Yes, Love has penned plenty of silly lyrics (his first words in his debut album are “Granny’s tights on my head”), but this was a moment of genuine artistry and the evening’s only opportunity for pause and reflection.

It all came to ahead with an electrifying rendition Running, a stupendous single and one of the very best songs from any band this year. It’s a masterclass in tension and release, evident in Leeds when it triggered not one but three mosh circles (where fans clear an area of the floor then rush into the space when the chorus hits). The lengthy bridge in particular was excruciatingly tense, and by the time the eventual payoff came – a panoply of winning hooks, all neatly foreshadowed earlier in the song – bodies were circulating in the crowd as if swept up in a fast-moving lazy river.

An encore of noughties rave classic Satisfaction – a perfect riff for Wallace to attack on her saxophone – wrapped things up before the clocks struck 10 p.m.. Too early to call it a night perhaps, but I’m not sure if I had the physical fitness for much more, and the revellers around me looked like they’d been worked to exhaustion too. In the end, the crowd simply barked in unison instead of asking for one more song – if Fat Dog had indeed imbued their strange music with some sort of magic potion, it had worked a charm.

Ezra Collective: Dance, No One’s Watching review – jazz champions play to their strengths
7
Oct

The jazz group that set the Mercury Prize alight last year return with an album that goes all in on infectious dance grooves. Their knack for melody seems to have been forgotten in the party, but this bloated record does conclude with the most moving track of this band’s career.

The level of study I devote to albums reviewed on this blog varies, but sometimes, like with this latest Ezra Collective album, I take my journalistic duties to give the entire record a fair hearing seriously: I sit down in a darkened room save for a dim desk lamp, scribbling details of every track in a notepad and staring blankly at Spotify as the highlighted song title gradually works its way down the track list. It took about 20 minutes of listening to Dance, No One’s Watching before I properly read the album title writ large across the top of the screen. Alone on a rainy night in my bedroom, it felt like an instruction addressed directly to me. In fact, cowering over a desk is the exact opposite effect of Ezra Collective’s third album which is, unsurprisingly, a heartfelt ode to the power of dancing.

Ezra are labelled a jazz act – and are the most commercially successful act in the nebulous genre of UK jazz by some margin – but anyone who’s seen the five Londoners take to a stage since their emergence five years ago will know compulsive dance grooves have always been an essential part of this band’s appeal. Their performance at last year’s Mercury Prize (fittingly of a song called Victory Dance) had the attendees in the cabaret seating setting aside their glasses of champagne to clap and frug along to the infectious Latin groove like the band members themselves. It was a joyful musical fireworks show that seemed to render the competition a forgone conclusion. Ezra Collective were destined to be the Mercury Prize’s first jazz champions, and they showed up ready to claim the trophy.

Unfortunately their follow-up album, Dance, No One’s Watching lacks a track quite as thrilling as Victory Dance, but there’s no shortage of peppy Afrobeat grooves to move your hips to. The standout is Ajala, named after a legendary Nigerian journalist who was so busy with his travels his name became Yoruba slang for someone who can’t sit still. It is a fittingly up-tempo, restless number, with Ife Ogunjobi and James Mollison’s skipping melodies played in blunt unison – Ezra Collective are a band far more concerned with delivering a straightforward good time than trying any fiddly counterpoint or melodic harmonies. Ajala has groove in buckets, but what it’s lacking is everything else that makes for a good jazz composition, namely an interesting B section (here the melody simply drops out for 16 bars) and a wild solo.

Ajala is far from the only track where Ezra Collective’s tunnel vision on producing a danceable groove leaves the melodies feeling underwritten. N29 is essentially just one (admittedly very funky) bass riff lacking in hardly any musical development at all, let alone a melody to hold on to. Opener The Herald starts promisingly enough, but again it’s as if they’ve forgotten to write half of the chorus, and Ogunjobi’s trumpet solo is given no room to grow. The devotion to a rock solid groove is admirable – and brothers Femi and TJ Koleoso are without a doubt one of the tightest drum and bass duos in the business – but it should be possible for a funky, repetitive groove and interesting harmonic shifts to exist in the same song.

Intriguingly, Yazmin Lacey and Olivia Dean’s featured tracks – two of the very finest voices on the UK jazz scene – offer a relatively restrained take on the dance-focused thesis. Lacey’s smoky tones are a fine match for the tender horn lines on God Gave Me Feet For Dancing, but with no-nonsense lyrics like “Give me bass line / Give me dollar wine” it’s odd the band don’t rise above a muted throb all song. Dean’s track, No One’s Watching Me is slinkier and sexier and features Ogunjobi’s best solo on the record – each note placed with unusual restraint and care – although Dean’s chorus is scant.

Further down a bloated track list, Shaking Body and Expensive offer a purple patch. The former is pure Ezra Collective joy and a natural successor to Victory Dance, with a Latin hook bubbly enough to justify its many repeats. Mastermind of the keyboard Joe Armon-Jones offers luscious jazz voicings typical of his brand of frantic genius, and Femi Koleoso’s hammering of the ride cymbal in the chorus is a joy to behold. Expensive improves on the light-footed Afrobeat of the record’s first half with intelligent, patient sax and trumpet solos that prove Ogunjobi and Mollison have done their jazz homework, moving beyond the crowd-pleasing screeches found on their most raucous party starters.

The penultimate track appears at first to be some surplus jazz musings from Armon-Jones on piano, but the song is called Have Patience for a reason – Everybody immediately follows, a magnificent album closer and one of the most beautiful tunes the band have ever penned. In an album lacking in strong melodies, here is a beauty: an elegant, sighing rise and fall, shimmering within Armon-Jones’ textured piano chords before emerging in a solemn trumpet line and, rousingly, a distant choir. Before long, Obunjobi and Mollison are up to what they do best – rapturous, euphoric improvisations that come together and fall apart again like two birds in flight. It’s a piece ripe for crowd participation and a poignant marker of how far they’ve come: a band with collective in the name, experts at uniting audiences from summer festivals to glamorous awards shows through dance and crowd participation. Dance, No One’s Watching may not go down as their finest record, but that precious Ezra Collective spirit remains alive and well.

Cobra Spell: 666 review – kick-ass hair metal runs wild
16
Aug

An outrageously eye-catching album artwork marks the debut the of the brand new, all female lineup of Sonia Anubis’ Cobra Spell. Alex Walden checks out to their latest album to see if they could produce that rare magic: genuinely fresh-feeling music inspired by the 80s.

If turning 20 taught me one thing, it’s that all the stuff that you gave up as a teenager to “fit in” suddenly becomes really cool again. For me, it all hit after three months spent in New York to which I returned with the urge to swap my skateboard for a guitar. It was while browsing for a new axe that I came across an advertisement from Jackson Guitars which showed Cobra Spell founder and lead guitarist Sonia Anubis absolutely shredding her custom made “Warrior from Hell” to Cobra Spell’s leading single, The Devil Inside of Me.

Now I was impressed, but it was the next day when the magic hit as I found myself still thinking about that video over and over again. I couldn’t remember how the solo went, hell I couldn’t even remember Sonia Anubis’ name, but something about the brief build up to the solo before it all came crashing down in such a spectacular fashion was stuck in my head. After a few hours of not being able to shake it, I decided to bite the bullet and download Cobra Spell’s 666 to see if I could shake the brainworm from within my head. Yet as I delved deeper, I found myself feeling this sense of joy and excitement that I haven’t felt in a long time.

The 80’s are back! (sort of)

Ok so let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. This album reeks of 80’s glam metal. Anytime I write about anything to do with classic or hard rock, I find myself always saying the same thing about how rock is well past it’s best by date and unfortunately the glory days of the genre are well and truly behind us. That being said, you can imagine the feeling of dread as I read “Heavy rock band stuck in the 80s” in Cobra Spell’s Instagram bio as any rock fan knows that if a band describes themselves as being “stuck in the 80s” then it’s highly likely that they’re extremely mediocre. But man did I eat my words… and man was I happy about it.

Cobra Spell have managed to capture that epic, badass, bedroom poster, no fucks given aspect of 80s glam metal that we all secretly love, even if we don’t acknowledge it yet. With brash song titles like S.E.X, Satan is a Woman and The Devil Inside of Me, you can’t help but feel the rawness behind the album purely from the titles alone. Yeah we all know someone who is going to question us for listening to songs with such vulgar titles, but that’s what makes it so good; It’s excitingly rebellious while also shamelessly fun.

It’s fast, it’s fun, but most importantly, it’s freeing

Despite it’s heavy metal lyrical roots, this project is not all about Devil worshipping and Satan, for it’s when you look into the lyrics of the album that you realise how the devilish themes are merely a front for the messages of female empowerment, as quoted by Sonia Anubis herself in an interview for Metal Remains.

“The album is about rebellion, it’s about women in power… it’s some kind of liberation of expression for women, liberation of sexuality and also a celebration as an all-female formation.”

And it’s that exact feeling that passes on through the music. Just from looking at lyrics such as “I am your drug, you’re addicted” ,“Don’t want to give you expectation, don’t be a fool to my sensations” from S.E.X. and “Why do you try on her, if you know, you know that she’s too much for you” from Bad Girl Crew we get this sense of empowerment for women. These songs aren’t about sex and Satan so it can annoy your grandparents, these are songs about women finally feeling liek the sexy queens that they are. In a music space where the stereotype is men touring the world bagging any groupie they want, Cobra Spell are flipping that narrative in a positive way.

An audial Pack-a-Punch

While it’s obvious from the first listen that 666 sounds fresh out of the 80s, I must admit that the quality of this album is far from anything to come out of that era. Even I am partial to dusting off the old Ratt, Metallica and Van Halen records from time to time but what bugs me most about them is how I’m instantly reminded that the remastered versions on my phone sound so much better; It makes you wonder why people obsess so much over original pressings of records in the first place.

While yes it’s obvious that due to 40 years of technological advancements it will obviously sound better, you can’t deny how rich this album sounds. From the soft synth backing, to the iconic chug from a down picked guitar string to the fierce nature of Kris Vega’s vocals – with 666, the crisp audio quality goes hand in hand with the clear talent of each member. Normally I love when an album sounds like they’ve just turned everything up to the max so it can wallop your eardrums, but this album sounds as if every specific instrument has been precisely refined so that it compliments everything else. Between the thud of the drums, the rumble of the bass, the squeals of the guitar and the ferocity of the vocals, your brain is left almost scrambled as you’re thrown around between such talented members.

We’ve reached a point in rock music where the kids inspired by the golden era of rock have collided with the technological prowess of the 21st century music industry, and it sounds thick and beautiful.

While I do love the fast-paced tracks within the album, it’s not all kick-ass and take names for the quintet. Songs like Love = Love and one of my personal favourites Fly Away pose as emotional ballads for when you’re not in the mood for rocking the house but still want to listen to something impactful. While the bread-and-butter elements of a rock ballad, such as a prominent singing voice and a slow but moving guitar solo, reign high on these songs. Their prominence is challenged by various hard-hitting backers such as synthesisers, vocal harmonies and even a saxophone solo. I mean come on, when was the last time you heard someone kill a sax solo on a rock ballad?

Cobra Spell has gone through a few lineup changes before, but it really feels like with this one Sonia’s got it right. This album is hot fresh glam metal and there’s no messing with it. It sounds as if this album was born to perform, to blow kids’ and adults’ minds all over the world. With an album this good, it’s a shame that they weren’t around in the 80s as I’m sure that they would’ve done huge numbers. What is certain though is that I know for a fact next time Cobra Spell play in England, I will be there.

SOFT PLAY: HEAVY JELLY review – redemptive riot delivers on all fronts
9
Aug

The Kent punk duo SOFT PLAY hold nothing back on their deafening fifth album. There are ample pulse-quickening riffs to whip up the mosh pit, but also plenty of nuance and introspection to reward repeat listens, not least a tender surprise at its climax.

It’s an unfair cliché that punk music—and loud rock music in general—is all about anger and hatred. Enter a mosh pit at some loud and sweaty bunker-like venue, as I did a few weeks ago in Leeds’ grungy Key Club, and the first thing you’ll notice is apparent violence: limbs flying, bodies separating and then converging at high speed, the occasional boot to the head from a crowd surfer. But the second thing will be the compassion lying just under the surface: the way the chaos stopped for a few seconds when my mosh-loving companion Ewan picked up a reveller who had dangerously ended up on the floor, the way the performers speak of gratitude and love, albeit so passionately they sound enraged. Ultimately, that’s what punk is about: not anger, but straightforward, extreme passion. Indeed, there’s often more camaraderie and mutual respect to be found at a heavy metal gig than at a pretentious jazz concert or your average pop gig where drunken fans bay for the hits. It’s in the lyrics too. IDLES, perhaps the biggest punk group in the country at the moment, recently released an album featuring choruses with savage lyrics like “I really, really love my brother,” and “the gratitude runs through my veins.” Listen too closely, and suddenly punk sounds like a rather schmaltzy love fest.

And yet, sometimes there are songs like the third track on SOFT PLAY’s superb new album, a song tellingly titled Act Violently. It’s a bruising three minutes squarely about vocalist Isaac Holman’s hatred towards reckless e-scooter riders, and he doesn’t hold back. “If I wasn’t such a loving bloke I’d kick your fucking head into the road, cunt,” he rages in the first verse over a tumult of scratchy guitars and swaggering drums. Perhaps Act Violently could be spun as a harmless outlet for rage, a way of safely transposing actual violence into song, but really this is a track all about unadulterated hatred. It’s also a fantastic piece of music. Laurie Vincent’s booming drums splash around the perfectly synced vocals and guitars in the verses, and Holman’s chant of “you make me wanna act violently” makes for one of the catchiest choruses of the year. It helps that Holman isn’t entirely serious in his message, allowing for some humor when a bandmate offers him a cup of tea mid-rant, before eventually getting his sweet revenge and sending that e-scooter rider flying over an uncovered drain hole in the middle eight. It’s a track indicative of HEAVY JELLY as a whole: propulsive and compelling on first listen, but not without its clever nuances and shrewd self-awareness.

The album’s flagship track is undoubtedly Punk’s Dead, a sure-footed lead single about the backlash the band received when they changed their name from Slaves to the ostensibly tame SOFT PLAY in 2022. It was a public response colored by today’s ‘culture wars’, the band being accused of over-the-top political correctness enforced by an apparent army of “liberal lefties.” Rather than simply defending their choice, Holman opts to simply present his opponents’ arguments back at them. “Are there any real men in Britain?” he bellows ironically, before a chorus that reads “I don’t like change / Why can’t you just stay the same?” Those might sound like unexciting lyrics, but a chorus about wanting to stay the same is sacrilege in the world of punk, a genre built on the relentless demand for social and political change. Rather than make his own argument, Holman lets his opponents join up the dots. If the spirit of punk is dead, as they claim, then could they be the ones that killed it? It works as a genius, comprehensive takedown of those who attacked the band for their name change, and what’s more, it’s the biggest hit of their career. For SOFT PLAY, surely Punk’s Dead feels like a perfect victory over their haters.

Holman employs a similar lyrical trick on Mirror Muscles, this time presenting the dangerous body-obsessed world of ‘gym lads’ with little direct criticism, although this time it’s harder to tell whether the band is commenting on the risks of tying your self-worth to your muscle mass, or whether, as they said in a recent interview with Rock Sound, they just really like to work out. Either way, the riffs are nothing short of titanic, and the oppressive world of the sweaty gym with its testosterone-pumped hulks is effectively conveyed.

It’s not the only moment on the album that seems to touch on masculinity in the modern world. Isaac Is Typing… is about Holman’s OCD but, as all male mental health struggles must be these days, the vulnerability is hidden under many layers of self-defense. The guitars almost drown out Holman’s confessions, and his screamed vocals make it easy to overlook the vulnerability that comes with admitting to going to therapy, or lines like “my brain is a battlefield, I’m struggling to hold.” It’s an honest, telling indication of how it feels to struggle with the supposedly fluffy, emasculating problem of ‘mental health’ as a man today. Give us some boyish heavy rock music and a heavy layer of vocal distortion and maybe, just maybe, we might be able to admit our vulnerabilities amidst the blanket of noise.

If it’s starting to sound like HEAVY JELLY is a cerebral commentary on modern society, it’s not. Isaac Is Typing… is swiftly followed by the up-tempo party starter Bin Juice Disaster, which is simply about the habit of pushing down rubbish into the bin instead of taking it out, albeit with its own connotations of self-destruction and neglect. There’s more obvious fun in John Wick (chorus: “I’m John Wick, bitch”) and the rapid, post-therapy rant The Mushroom and the Swan, which sports a relentless drum groove destined to ignite dozens of mosh pits when the duo goes on tour in October.

By far the boldest risk of the album comes with the closing track, Everything and Nothing, which starts, jarringly, with a mandolin, and later features a violin solo. Here, at last, Holman’s lyrics are given space to become their most heartfelt. “I see your smile in other people’s faces / Memories and traces / I wish you could’ve stayed,” Holman sings heartbreakingly. It’s not the catchiest song on the album, but it’s easily the most lyrically devastating, and a shockingly brave closer after such a loud and rowdy album. Aggression is easy, comfortable even, and SOFT PLAY are very good at writing aggressive music, but to close their album with a song about raw grief, with no gritty riffs or self-deprecating jokes to hide behind, takes real guts. “Setting sun and a starling murmuration / Amongst the devastation / I feel love,” Holman concludes beautifully at the end of this supposedly angry punk album. It makes you wonder: perhaps it really was about love all along.

Shannon & the Clams: The Moon Is In The Wrong Place review – wildly entertaining dive into the abyss
21
Jun

Raucous 60s rockabilly might sound like an unlikely match for an album unequivocally about grief, but Shannon & the Clams pull it off miraculously in this deeply personal record, which shifts from joy to despair – and often a complex mix of the two – with astonishing ease.

To the casual listener, the seventh album from Californian indie stalwarts Shannon and the Clams is a riot. The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an endearingly fuzzy trip back to the wilder side of 60s pop: there’s sashaying doo-wop grooves, gloriously melodramatic vocals, a dollop of rockabilly barnstormers. Take the opening track, for instance, which ends theatrically with a flamenco-style coda over a long held note in the vocals, landing with an almighty stomp that’s only lacking a few castanets to bring the point home. It’s a sign of the up-tempo joys to come: The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an album plenty interesting enough to entertain even before the lyrics can be fully understood.

It’s only by the closing song, Life Is Unfair, that the tight subject matter of The Moon becomes impossible to ignore. “How do you expect me to understand that the love of my life was taken away from me?” Shannon Shaw asks, an opening lyric so stark that even the chugging drums and cheery strummed guitar can’t hide its pain. It turns out The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is an album squarely about grief. The whole project is a result of Shaw’s personal tragedy, namely when Shaw’s fiancé died in a car accident just weeks before their wedding.

It doesn’t take much digging to find the emotional devastation left behind by that fateful day throughout this record. The Vow shuffles its way through an image of the wedding that never was, Shaw begging for the vows she’ll never hear. “First time in my life things fall into place,” she laments. It should sound dour and heavy, but the miracle of this album is Shaw’s knack of finding the light in the darkest of times. “It seems like it’s over, but forever you’re mine,” she concludes optimistically in that same song, letting all sorrow be forgotten with that raucous flamenco finale. It’s not just a satisfying surprise, but surely an act of Herculean bravery from Shaw, who seems willing to tease out whatever drops of hope she can find in such serious and personal subject matter.

Indeed, The Vow is just a taste of the twin themes of delight and misery weaving through Wrong Place. Big Wheel, for instance, is an electrifying piece of garage rock that I’m certain would have achieved world domination – probably alongside a wheel-themed dance move – had it been released sixty years ago. The chorus in particular, with its hulking bass riff and belted vocals, is an impulsive finger-snapper. Bean Fields provides the album’s sunniest moment, graced with almost irritatingly merry plonked piano and lyrics about a wild romance in the fields “where the bugs sing” – the fact that one of the lovers in question is no longer living is only the subtlest of dark undertones, easily lost in the uninhibited slide guitar solo and atmospheric hum of cicadas.

That’s not to say Wrong Place attempts to ignore the darker sides of grief. Oh So Close, Yet So Far is a deeply poignant doo-wop number that sets out Shaw’s conciliatory vision of her finance not being completely lost, but instead poetically subsumed into nature. “No I can’t touch you / Cause you are every star at night,” she rasps, reaching for a part of her lover – his soul, or perhaps literally his atoms – that will exist for eternity. She’s less certain on Real of Magic, a deceptively simple ballad about hallucination, complete with haunting call-and-response backing vocals that seems to mirror the conflicting voices in Shaw’s head.

The album’s title track and central triumph follows, a grippingly distorted descent into genuine terror. Guitars mimic an ‘SOS’ morse code call as Shaw jabs out a closely harmonised one-note melody to the words “The sun burned down when you left this world / Now there is some imposter in the sky”, surely about as epic as opening lyrics get. A furious pair of congas propel the ensuing torrent, evoking the deep-seated sense of cosmic ‘wrongness’ that comes with suddenly losing someone you had assumed would be around for your whole life. It’s the most exciting, darkly compelling piece of indie rock you’re likely to hear all year.

Perhaps inevitably, the less attention-grabbing corners of the album feel superfluous by comparison. The sharply focussed subject matter is briefly lost in the portion of the record where Cody Blanchard takes over vocals, and UFO’s psychedelic account of alien abduction feels slightly clichéd and melodically takes perhaps a little bit too much inspiration from House of the Rising Sun. Blanchard’s best contribution comes with In the Grass, a gentle acoustic guitar number which finds a pretty melody to match his country rasp.

Wrong Place is, undoubtedly, Shannon Shaw’s record, and it’s she who neatly wraps up proceedings with Life Is Unfair. It’s a short track that epitomises the album’s remarkable strength – the delicate balancing act between sorrow and optimism. The final words come in the form of a typically bouncy singalong hook in the major key which masks deep layers of a sadness that only feels partly quashed. “Life is unfair yet beautiful,” Shaw concludes, “only because you were here.”

Charli xcx: BRAT review – queen of the club reveals her softer side
18
Jun

BRAT may offer some of the nastiest club floor-fillers of Charli xcx’s lauded career, but there’s also vulnerable reflections on loss and the daunting prospect of becoming a mother. The result is a rollercoaster of an album that makes a point of its dramatic shifts in tone.

Charli xcx is an artist most at home in the frenetic, sweaty confines of a busy London nightclub, her music bursting with punchy drum machines and oddball electronic samples that no doubt come into their own when accompanied by strobes and a packed crowd of revelers. She’s gained so much notoriety as a dance music-adjacent singer that her 2022 album, CRASH, had some critics lamenting that she’d finally succumbed to the alluring pull of Top 40 pop (actual guitars! verses and choruses!). In reality, that album’s stellar highlights – zinging 80s throwback Lightning, honeyed funk hit Yuck – hinted at a songwriting knack that Charli would always have up her sleeve, no matter the genre.

Alas, as BRAT emphatically proves, Charli xcx’s ability to produce some our time’s finest nightclub anthems remains alive and well. As if to prove a point, she puts a song called Club classics at track two, a pulsating, shapeshifting electronic track that sounds all the more dynamic after the curiously static and unexciting opener 360. “I wanna be blinded by the lights” and “I’m gonna dance all night,” come the chanted lyrics. They’re the sort of words we’ve heard in endless dance and disco songs ever since the genre’s genesis, but Charli knows there’s hidden depths behind that urge to blind and deafen ourselves on a night out. Why do we not only want to dance, but need it? What are we escaping from?

She spends the rest of the album offering her own, very personal answer to that question. BRAT turns out to be a strikingly intimate listen. She confesses she wants to “go back in time to when I wasn’t insecure,” on Rewind, a track which uses a fuzzy mix to acutely convey Charli’s gnawing anxiety, plus some clever tape rewind samples. “I don’t know if I belong here anymore,” comes the final line of I might say something stupid, a quiet confessional amidst the chaos, in which Charli’s typical heavy autotune becomes a knowingly imperfect mask – a desperate attempt to hide her own frailties. I think about it all the time goes a step further, seeing Charli reflect on her friend becoming a mother and whether “a baby might be mine.” It’s such a vulnerable, thoughtful set of lyrics that the music ends up feeling like an afterthought. Perhaps the same is true for So I, a touching ode to late fellow artist Sophie with a pretty chorus but a long buildup that promises a payoff which never quite arrives.

And yet, there are just as many examples of Charli portraying herself as an unassailable queen of the dancefloor, with no insecurities to unpick. Lead single and BRAT‘s central banger, Von dutch, is an infectious take down of all Charli’s jealous contemporaries. “It’s so obvious I’m your number one,” she boasts as siren-like synths wail and a snare drum – mixed loud and in-your-face – smashes through the mix. Mean girls reads as a modern, lightly tongue-in-cheek feminist anthem, and sports a wild piano breakdown which Charli skillfully works into one of this album’s most irresistible beat drops. The biggest flex of Charli’s producer muscles, however, comes with B2b, an oppressively heavy masterclass in infectious synth loops and expertly crafted hooks.

The result is a two-sided album that switches from intimate confessions to festival-ready anthems, sometimes chaotically – the tender orchestral intro of Everything is romantic sounds odd immediately after the boisterous Von dutch. Only a few songs – Sympathy is a knife, Rewind – attempt to marry Charli’s chagrin to singalong party choruses, and as a result listening to BRAT can feeling about listening to two albums at once, switching from one to the other at random intervals.

On the other hand, BRAT‘s huge emotional range makes for a dance album that unusually probes for some sensitivity behind the hedonism. The latter emotion seems to win out in the end. Closing number 365 is a reprise of the opening track, although this time with a full-throttle dance drop and deafeningly scratchy synth hook. It’s gloriously odd moments of pop excess like these that are ultimately BRAT‘s biggest strengths, but this album also succeeds in showing us the hidden depths lurking amidst all the stage smoke and flashing lights of the club.

Home Counties: Exactly As It Seems review – a masterpiece in diverse post-punk
4
Jun

After the addition of a new member, upgrading Home Counties from a 5-piece to a 6-piece, the band has truly found their sound and developed it perfectly to cover and tackle many problems in a war against the mundane. Matthew Rowe explains all.

Formerly Buckinghamshire-based band Home Counties have been on the scene for a while, but have unfortunately stayed under my radar until recently. Whilst I was shuffling on Spotify, I was lucky enough to hear one of their earlier songs, Back to the 70s, which instantly struck me. In their earlier days, they adopted a much more post-punk central sound while attempting to maintain upbeat instrumental tracks to accompany them. This was a nice change to the genre’s status quo, especially as it appeases my love for funk and post-punk, forming the new genre of post-funk.

Before making their debut album, Home Counties picked up pianist and
second vocalist Lois Kelly, who I believe was the key to fully fleshing out their songs. The combination of Kelly, as well as already established
vocalist Will Harrison, is executed to perfection, with both voices able
to deliver loud, cutting lines as well as much more melodic background vocals
that work in harmony with one another. The introduction of Kelly also changed
the band’s sound, tackling their funky, disco-inspired instrumentals head-on.
This leads to a set of much stronger-sounding tracks and keeps a consistent
theme that varies just enough to avoid too many repetitive singles.

Picking up a second vocalist was the best thing Home Counties could have done

Home Counties have managed to stay completely balanced on a scale from having either the instrumentals or the vocals drowning out the other, both in their mixing but also in the musical intricacy and the importance of the lyrics. One great example of this is Cradle, Coffin, which boasts a very punchy 4/4 beat, but the band alongside both Harrison’s and Kelly’s lyrics work perfectly, allowing enough focus to lay off the beat while they get their point across to us. This balance allows for a particularly enjoyable listening experience. I have found that it’s great background music if you are working, but also a great album to sit down and listen to in its entirety.

A lot of hard-hitting and relatable themes are explored in this project.
This was inspired by the band moving to the big city of London from their
previously calm, out-of-city lives, which is a big change for anyone. The first
single from this album to be released was Bethnal Green, a song tackling the topic of gentrification and how it can lead to the feeling of not belonging to where you came from. “Just say you don’t contest me, just say you won’t forget me” is a particularly poignant example of the two. Another song, You Break It, You Bought It directly attacks the general public’s, and specifically my least favourite kind of collector, landlords (M3 Lettings and Fit Property; if you are reading this, I do not like you). This track nails it when it comes to the state of renting as well as providing a brilliant, funky instrumental including my favourite bassline on the project from Bill Griffin. The vocals provide both an insight as to how predatory these companies are as well as their rather personal thoughts, “Lynching landlords in my dreams” being rather extreme, but getting the point across.

In some of their songs, they have also adapted a newer, more electronic style of music, my favourite example being the title track, Exactly As It Seems. This kicks off with an instrumental that is akin to the intro music to ITV’s The Job Lot. This results in an 8-bit-sounding backing track, which you wouldn’t think would work, yet it does almost seamlessly with the dynamic duo of vocalists I have grown to love over this album. This is also apparent in Funk U Up, which boasts a very impressive electronic keyboard track straight out of a futuristic soundscape to accompany a song about constantly falling behind and messing up.

One thing Home Counties does to a very high standard is build songs up to a huge crescendo, often releasing the anger built up throughout the song in a blaze of funk glory. This is done best in Wild Guess, which is the single that made me most excited for the album. This starts nice and slowly but builds up from stripped-back instrumentals, setting a calm tone for most of the song while solemnly putting across a message about the cost of living crisis before hitting the final chorus, which elevates the instrumental into a catchy, ride cymbal driven melody composed of all the previous parts.

As well as developing their general sound, they have done an incredible job of developing their structuring and variety

Their final track in this album puts together all of these factors of individual greatness in previous tracks into one brilliant finale, Posthumous Spreadsheets. It starts off with a very Beatles-esque Come Together inspired drum track and much like Wild Guess, continues on relatively calmly at the beginning, demonstrating their ability to deliver strong monologues above an electronic beat, before kicking in halfway through. This song wraps up the themes covered elegantly, with the final song being about how awful the pressures and stress of a modern office is through a combination of satire and much more serious lyrics about how difficult it is to enjoy yourself whilst working at the bottom.

To summarise this project, I was blown away both during the release of the singles and the grand release of the album. They have blended two of my favourite genres perfectly and have given me a new view of what post-punk truly means. Home Counties are a very underrated band, and I hope they gain more traction soon, so if you’re reading this, please go and listen to them.

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft review – more soft than hard
22
May

A compelling tale of love and loss, Hit Me Hard and Soft sees Eilish embrace her sexuality on her own terms via knotty and unpredictable pop. The love songs are delectable and the showpiece moments titanic, although not every sonic experiment comes off.

There’s something admirable in the way Eilish casts aside any hint of lyrical subtlety in Lunch, the second track of her hotly anticipated third studio album, Hit Me Hard And Soft. “You need a seat, I’ll volunteer,” is one of the song’s many innuendos that will have no doubt raised an eyebrow when Eilish first presented it to her long-time producer and brother Finneas O’Connell. Eilish has long been known for resisting the sexualisation of young female pop stars that music executives seem to demand, gaining fame for her concealingly baggy oversized outfits. Her song Not My Responsibility, one of many Eilish tracks discussing body image, was an eerie spoken word piece about the demands of ogling magazines and relentless commentators. She was furious last year when Variety outed her as bisexual in a cover story, disappointingly still deemed a newsworthy reveal even in 2024. In Eilish’s words: “I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.”

For that reason, Lunch is a triumphant reclaiming of the narrative – Eilish’s first song explicitly about sex, and one not coy about mentioning the lover in question happens to be a girl. But beneath all the titillating euphemisms (“I could eat that girl for lunch”), there’s plenty of the singer’s trademark lyrical depth. The metaphor of eating has deep, dark connotations for Eilish and many of her young female fans, many of whom will have grappled with body dysmorphia and anorexia in today’s world of impossibly perfect Instagram models. Eilish’s sexual liberation nourishes her in the same way the unwarranted opinions of mass media starve her. “People say I look happy just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me […] and I think she’s pretty,” Eilish reflects movingly on Skinny, this album’s tender tone setter, a song which sounds like stepping into a warm bath after a long day.

Much of Hit Me Hard And Soft’s brilliance lies in Eilish’s uncanny ability to transform the complex feelings of young love and newly explored sexuality with a judicious synth choice or telling melodic turn. Album highlight Birds of a Feather, for instance, sounds every bit as unsustainably beautiful as a young love affair, Eilish singing with an unrestrained belt that sounds a far cry from the close-up whispers that made her famous. The washed out chords and sickly sweet melodies sound straight out of a Wham! classic, complete with a shimmering bassline and reverb-soaked vocals. For a singer who gained fame through tracks with names like You Should See Me In a Crown and All the Good Girls Go to Hell, Birds of a Feather is a shockingly lovely song that heralds an impressive sonic reinvention for Eilish.

Elsewhere, it’s not the complexities of fresh love that Eilish summons, but revenge. The Diner recalls an operation to break into her enemy’s kitchen via a plodding synth bass and distorted layered vocals that recall the Bad Guy days, albeit without any of the world-dominating hooks. A more compelling wander to the dark side comes on Chihiro, a track propelled by a disgustingly funky bass line that provides a muscular match to Eilish’s intimate vocal delivery. “Did you take my love away from me?” she demands as a swirl of synths begin to envelop her, successfully finding beauty amidst pained lovesickness. The track culminates in a compelling plot twist (“it’s all been a trap”) and a subsequent wall of electronic sound, although the payoff compares unfavourably to the same trick Parcels pulled off in their deeply underrated opus Everyroad.

Unusually for an A-league pop star, Eilish released no singles in the lead up to Hit Me Hard and Soft’s release, and her uninterrupted playing of the album in a listening party at New York’s Barclay Center last week suggested she sees this album as a single work, rather than a collection of potential chart hits. Indeed, Hit Me Hard and Soft is Eilish’s most narratively cohesive album to date, beginning with an ecstatic love affair and ending just as the heartbreak is beginning to numb. The cinematic turning point comes with The Greatest, a remarkable five-minuter in which Eilish’s pent up rage eventually erupts over arena-filling rock. “All the times I’ve waited / For you to want me naked,” she laments, but there’s a hint of self-deprecating irony in the conclusion that “man, am I the greatest”.

The self-deception continues in L’amour de ma vie, in which Eilish attempts to convince herself it was never love in the first place over a catchy pop hook. Again, Eilish’s anger bubbles to the surface in the song’s second half, although this time it’s via Hit Me Hard and Soft’s most contentious left turn: a pummelling four-to-the-floor kickdrum and, improbably, the sort of heavily autotuned Eurodance groove Finland might consider sending to Eurovision next year. Eilish has to be given points for her vagrant disregard for the pop rulebook, but her defeatist wails of “it’s over now” inevitably get lost in the silliness of it all.

A trendier synthy confection leads into the closing track, Blue, which features the sort of devastatingly catchy earworm a lesser artist could have quite happily used as the linchpin for a straightforwardly appealing three minute pop song. Instead, Eilish gives us a final creative flourish by turning the tempo right down and reflecting on how we tend to feel attraction to those who share our flaws. In the process, she deftly ties up many of the album’s lyrical loose threads, throwing in the beautiful strings melody that opened the album for good measure.

That said, for all Hit Me Hard and Soft’s thoughtful narrative and restless creativity, the 43 minutes do leave a lingering feeling that the most exciting elements of Eilish’s previous compositions – the body horror and masterful production of Bury a Friend or the apocalyptic finale of Happier Than Ever – are left largely unexplored in this introspective album, and bursts of experimentation are only pursued for a few wild minutes before a return to Eilish’s default spacey electropop. With its unapologetic queer love songs and impeccably nuanced lyricism, Hit Me Hard and Soft is a significant development in Eilish’s albumcraft, but there’s still a sense her best album is yet to come.

Maggie Rogers: Don’t Forget Me review – assured third album brims with singalong choruses
24
Apr

The ballads are few and far between on Maggie Rogers’ brilliantly written third record, which delivers one singalong belter after another. Don’t Forget Me doesn’t reinvent the singer-songwriter wheel, but what a fabulous wheel this particular album is.

The origin story of Maryland singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers’ career is the stuff of pop legend these days. Rogers was 22 when she took a music production masterclass at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts, which involved the no doubt intimidating task of playing an original song to one of the most famous producers in the world, Pharrell Williams. The song, Alaska, floored Williams, who’s first response was “I have zero, zero notes for that.” The resulting clip went viral (a remarkable watch still available on YouTube), and the rest is history.

History, because Williams really had discovered a US megastar in that small New York recording studio. Just four years later, Rogers would be at the Grammys. This year, that shy music student has a 30-date US stadium tour in her diary, followed by a tour of Europe in support of a little-known British band by the name of Coldplay. Whilst Alaska remains one of her biggest hits, Rogers’ music these days sounds much removed from the crowd pleasing yet safe pop confections of her 2019 debut, Heard It In a Past Life. Don’t Forget Me feels like the completion of the gradual artistic progression that Rogers launched on that fateful day back in 2016, developing from cautious experimentalism to self-assured pop and country hits. That’s not to say Don’t Forget Me tries anything especially distinctive or unusual, but the bulletproof vocal performances and a string of anthemic choruses don’t put a foot wrong.

Spacey, mature opener It Was Coming All Along is an effective tone-setter, but it’s the moody follow up where the instant classics begin: Drunk is a thrilling ride with bluesy rock guitars and a relentless chorus that recalls Fleetwood Mac at their most dynamic. Best of all is the extraordinary vocal performance, which rattles along with so much pent-up rage there are moments when Rogers’ sounds on the verge of losing control completely. And yet, like a cowboy clinging onto to a raging bull’s leash, she just about lands every adventurous adlib, and the result is one of the most compelling pop-rock recordings of the year so far.

Drunk is just the beginning of Don’t Forget Me’s delights. Deeply lovely So Sick of Dreaming is graced with sparkling layered guitars and a stunningly harmonised chorus that paints Rogers’ lovesickness with a beautiful elongated sigh of a melody. The spoken recount of a failed first date during the bridge may strike some as corny, but the payoff is perfectly executed final chorus that epitomises Rogers’ general fatigue whilst hinting at an underlying hope. The Kill maintains that appealing concoction of pain with a dash of optimism, the latter provided by an winning mellotron hook and galloping groove. It’s a straightforward and arguably unambitious track – a smattering of horns could have been a more daring creative decision to take The Kill even further from bland country music charts fodder – but it’s hard to knock the sheer quality of Rogers’ songcraft.

There are only two ballads in the ten tracks – I Still Do and All the Same – both of which are competently written and necessary moments of quiet reflection, but it’s the stadium-ready up-tempo numbers that will have fans returning to Don’t Forget Me over and over again. Earwormy On & On & On, for instance, pairs a wobbling synth bass with snappy funk drums, a hark back to noughties which might have outdated had Rogers’ hooks not been so punchy. Most of Don’t Forget Me’s choruses seem tailormade for road trip singalongs, particularly the anthemic Never Going Home, as well as the poignant lead single and title track, which closes the album with a pained demand to be remembered. If she’s in any way trying to send a message to listeners at the end of her album, Rogers need not worry – no listener is forgetting this excellent record in a hurry.

Jade Bird: Burn the Hard Drive EP review – restrained breakup songs lack punch
12
Apr

Jade Bird’s knack for an anthemic chorus and soaring vocals go largely unused on this mixed EP, which opts for introspective healing over the roof-raising Americana of Bird’s first two albums.

Jade Bird was born in Croydon, but she has an American soul. Her folky songs and penetrating vocals have long had the biggest popularity in the country music-obsessed southern states of the US, and her career was forged on the awesome country rock choruses of her self-titled debut, a record which included, amongst other barnstormers, Love Has All Been Done Before, a song which saw Bird rightly indulge in two bridges and four choruses – each more explosive than the last. A move to Austin, Texas in 2021 was the inevitable next step, along with sophomore record Different Kinds of Light, which put a loved-up sheen on Bird’s earthy Americana and offered more signs of songwriting maturity and nuance, not least in the glorious, sun-kissed melodies of Now is the Time, one of the very best songs of that year.

The years since has seen another significant change in Bird’s circumstances with the end of the long-term relationship behind many of Different Kinds of Light’s sweetest moments. The result is a long-teased EP which sees Bird mellower, more pensive and less inclined to throw in a straightforwardly anthemic chorus just for the hell of it. The unlikely production credit of Guernsey electronic music artist Mura Masa signifies the shift away from gunslinging country bangers, although (thankfully) his influence is most felt on the EP’s tasteful, muted bass riffs, rather than any drum machines and synths.

The trouble with Burn the Hard Drive is that heartbreak has not stoked the fire of Bird’s already fiery compositions, but rather extinguished it. The opening title track is pleasant and competently produced but sounds colourless compared to the unadorned passion of Bird’s early songs. There’s an interesting bass line and thoughtful one-note chorus, but for a voice of Bird’s calibre it’s like taking a Ferrari to work. C.O.M.P.L.E.X possesses the EP’s best earworm, but Bird’s admonishments of her ex’s “God complex” sound out of place amongst gentle guitars and weeping violins. There’s more intelligent composition and another alluring bass line in You’ve Fallen in Love Again, but it’s all washed in a spaced-out reverb that blunts the sharper edges in Bird’s melodies and vocals and renders the song as forgettable as a dream.

C’est La Vie is the first glimpse of Bird’s rasping vocals in their full glory and features a textbook Bird chorus that demands to be sung at full volume whilst driving towards the sunset on a long road trip. Again, Bird stops short of the full country rock treatment of wailing guitars and pounding drums, but a stripped-back, acoustic guitar driven rendition offers a round-the-campfire authenticity that spotlights Bird’s winning chorus. The song sets up Breaking the Grey, an optimistic finish with a somewhat obvious gospel-tinged piano progression. “You can’t wish the feelings away,” Bird admits, in a small but pleasing narrative arc after the desperation she felt to erase the past in the opening track. “I finally feel like I’m breaking the grey,” she assures us in the end. It seems Burn the Hard Drive has been a necessary, healing songwriting exercise for Bird – let’s hope for album three she’s ready to return to the full-blooded rock and roll she delivers best.