3mins30secs

A track-by-track first listen preview thing of Justin Timberlake's album (which has been online for a week)

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:08:00 +0000

First listen: Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience

LOL. I went to hear the album The 20/20 Experience by former be-permed *NSYNC frontman Justin ‘Trousersnake’ Timberlake about sixteen months ago in a (s)wanky club in London. ‘JT’ was there for a bit. He seemed a bit bored, which was appropriate. A man from the record label told us we were privileged to be hearing the album and that we couldn’t tweet about it etc etc and so on. There was a date when we would be able to post our ‘thoughts’ online (March 4), which came and went and was then changed to today (THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE ALBUM IS RELEASED. LIKE, ‘HELLO’). Anyway, while that in itself is ‘quite annoying’ it wasn’t really helped by the fact that the whole album was dumped on iTunes for the entire world to hear on Monday and yet we still weren’t allowed to say ‘it’s a bit long, isn’t it’ in a public forum. Well, the day has come. Finally, humanity will get to read my musings on the whole thing. What a day.

Pusher Love Girl

Sporting a massive coat, scarf and wooly hat, and looking like he’s about to leave as soon as he’s arrived, Justin Timberlake’s ushered into a swanky club in central London to have a very quick chat about his first album since 2006. He jokingly refers to it as “mediocre” (or at least we thought he was joking) before ending the speech with “I’ll just shut the fuck up now”. With that, he’s off and the album starts with a dramatic string flourish that heralds the classy Pusher Love Girl (debuted at the Grammys last month), which slinks along over a bed of sampled vocal tics, warm bursts of organ and a smattering of funk guitar. Having previously warned everyone that the average song length on the album is about seven minutes, the song sort of just plods along nicely but aimlessly, Justin utilising that falsetto of his to deliver lines like “won’t you be my dealer, babe” and “junkie for your love”. Two-thirds of the way through the song morphs into something that sounds a little more modern, with big drum claps erupting around some of Justin’s trademark beatboxing. It’s a fairly low-key opening, but hopes are high that there’s a SexyBack-style banger coming soon enough.

Suit & Tie

Unfortunately first single Suit & Tie doesn’t quite fulfil that brief, although in the context of the album its measured, classily old school feel makes more sense. Nothing, however, can save Jay-Z’s woeful cameo, which still sounds like he wandered in from a different song altogether. Still, as with most songs on the album, the final coda is really very good.

Don’t Hold The Wall

Right, lyrically we’re in a club setting, this must be the banger. Unfortunately, despite a promising start, which features an incessant, industrial-style beat, the BPM remains frustratingly low. Justin’s vocals are oddly buried deep in the mix for the verses, and the chorus (“dance, don’t hold the wall”) is intoned robotically by producer Timbaland (whose work on the album, incidentally, is his best in years, which unfortunately isn’t saying much). The main issue with the album so far is that it finds an interesting idea – a drum loop, a beat, a vocal tic – and just repeats it over and over, teasing the listener into thinking something is about to happen but rarely fulfilling that promise. Once again, however, the song shifts midway through, with the beats getting heavier and murkier with a low-end bassline rattling the champagne glasses.

Strawberry Bubblegum

Justin obviously wants The 20/20 Experience to be enjoyed as an album and not cherry-picked for singles, which is sort of fair enough, but as the languid, ’60s soul-influenced Strawberry Bubblegum sashays out of the speakers there’s a definite sense that the whole thing could really do with a change in tempo. Mind you, there’s still time. It’s also clear that Justin’s really very happy being married and loves his new wife very very much, which again is lovely, but part of me wants him to be bitter about Britney still. The most interesting thing about this one – and at about ten minutes long, you have to take what you can get – is when Timbaland does a fairly comical Barry White impression, while Justin talks about how Jessica Biel’s vagina is like bubblegum.

Tunnel Vision

A possible third single. Once again, this one’s a bit more groove lead and deals with the complex issue of loving a beautiful woman so much that you can’t take your eyes off her (the chorus is “I got that tunnel vision for you”), which perhaps explains the huge optometric headgear on the album cover. It’s one of the catchier songs on the album, not least because it seems to have a discernible chorus and some sort of dynamic to it, with the strings giving it a nice melodic lift. Again, it all shifts into gear in the final third as Justin sings “zoom zoom” over a strange tapestry of beats that sound like they’re going in reverse. But that section then goes on for about four more minutes, which makes the novelty of the sudden change up ebb away faster than you can say ‘please let there be a song as good as Cry Me A River’.

Spaceship Coupé

Recalling the FutureSex/LoveSounds ballad Until The End Of Time, Spaceship Coupé slows things down even more and utilises a pretty laboured lyrical metaphor about his lady friend being from outer space: “She’s so amazing, she’s out of space”, he croons throughout. He also states that he’d like to “make love on the moon”, which seems dangerous but what do I know. Brilliantly, when everyone’s about to slip into a red wine-induced coma there’s a comically amazing guitar solo that erupts from nowhere and sounds like something Slash would have thought too OTT in the early 90s. There’s also a moment late on where Timbaland opens his box of vocal-tics-as-beats – the one that gave us the baby cries that pepper Aaliyah’s Are You That Somebody? - to create what sounds like robots crying during sex, which is quite the image.

That Girl

Early rumours suggested this was due to be the next single and featured Drake and was, apparently, a bit of a banger. It really isn’t. It opens with a short skit introducing “JT and the Tennesse Kids” before unfurling into a sort of 60s soul throwback, complete with horn section and a light, percussive beat. If there were a video he would be wearing spats. The song does at least have a catchy chorus of “I’m in love with that girl, so don’t be mad at me”, which Justin delivers with a cheeky shrug.

Let The Groove Get In

Right, here we go. It’s a song with the word groove in the title and Justin loves to dance so this must be the balls out banger, surely? It starts with a distorted Justin asking: “Are you comfortable, let the groove get in”. Exciting. From there a Samba-esque beat kicks in and there are some head nods from the assorted guests. Someone taps their toe for a bit. Unfortunately, as with most of the album, the song never delivers on its early promise, the drum loop just hanging there monotonously. Midway through, the song opens out a bit and feels more relaxed, Justin settling into a nice falsetto groove and, you imagine, having a bit of a dance in the recording booth. Again, it could have done with an edit given that it just sort of drifts along like one long fade-out.

Mirrors

Initially given away free to anyone that pre-ordered the album on iTunes, and currently sitting pretty at Number One, Mirrors is by far and away the best song on the album, so much so that it’s presence so low down on the tracklisting feels like some sort of test of endurance. Utilising a similar percussive beat he and Timbaland have used on Cry Me A River and What Goes Around…, it manages to look at the subject of love in a more interesting way, with Justin imagining he and his wife as two sides of the same person. There’s a great bit during the middle eight where Justin sings “yesterday was history, tomorrow’s a mystery” with a passion that’s sort of been missing from the rest of the album. Even the coda seems to work, with the song shifting from an almost boyband-esque mid-paced ballad, to an oddly compelling, futuristic-sounding funk workout, Justin intoning “you are the love of my life” to hammer home how happy he is.

Blue Ocean Floor

It’s hard to shake the sense that Justin’s record label were so excited to hear he was coming back that no one actually bothered to have a listen to what he was up to or perhaps tell him that nine-minute long songs aren’t necessarily what people want from a Justin Timberlake album. Blue Ocean Floor, which weirdly recalls Radiohead circa-In Rainbows, just sort of drifts along pleasantly over some more reverse beats and expensive-sounding strings. It seems to be about escaping to a nice private island with your actress wife and gazing blissfully into the clear blue sea, which is something I think we can all relate to.

A slightly belated blog about the best videos of 2012

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 22:52:00 +0000

Before Christmas I was asked by The Guardian to write a blog about the best music videos of 2012. So I did. Then they remembered they’d already commissioned someone else to do something similar so the blog was scrapped. It took me quite a while to write to be honest, so I thought I’d plonk it here so the whole world could finally get to read my thoughts on the Gangnam Style video. HURRAH.

MIA - Bad Girls (Dir: Romain Gavras)

Like the second series of Homeland, MIA often aims loftily for the intellectual and political but tends to be best enjoyed as surface level entertainment. On the incredible Bad Girls video – directed by the never-knowingly subtle Romain Gavras – we find her at one point nonchalantly filing her nails on the side of a white BMW as it drifts along perilously on two wheels. Filmed in the deserts of Ouarzazate in Morocco, its power comes from the strange juxtaposition of the barren landscapes and traditional Saudi Arabian dress with the big ostentatious set pieces that seem to have been plucked from a more traditional hip-hop video (MIA had the see-through, glow-in-the-dark car custom made don’t you know). Whether it’s read as a comment on women’s rights in Saudia Arabia, where women aren’t even allowed to drive let alone perform stunts, or a brilliantly OTT visual representation of the song’s central lyric - “live fast die young, bad girls do it well” - is sort of irrelevant when the whole thing is this entertaining.

Psy - Gangnam Style (Dir: Psy)

If the sight of a 34-year-old South Korean man pretending to ride an invisible horse around a stable while a skip-load of rubbish and fake snow is blown into his permanently ecstatic-looking face doesn’t raise a smile on your own, then, well, there’s no hope for you. 2012’s biggest meme/song/dance routine has been parodied to death but there’s something infectiously carefree about the original video - it’s disregard for logic and anything approaching a narrative thread (K-pop videos don’t really do realism) all part of its charm. Highlights are too many to mention individually, but there’s something oddly amazing about the bit where, apropos of nothing, he snuggles up to a topless man in a sauna, his own towel prudishly pulled up to cover his nipples. As Joseyirl mused in the YouTube comments: “I love this! No pretence, no bullshit, just entertaining. So much better than all the egotisticalcrap on the radio today.”

Fiona Apple - Every Single Night (Dir: Joseph Cahill)

There’s a moment two minutes in to the disturbing nightmare that is Fiona Apple’s Every Single Night video where our protagonist is shot sat on some soil in a barely-there night dress looking forlornly at the camera. Perched on her head is a large octopus. Earlier in the video Apple lays prostate as hundreds of snails and slugs crawl over her. Throughout she somehow manages to maintain a level of unnerving intensity that makes you forget the octopus headgear and actually listen to the words of the song, which hinges delicately on the line: “I just want to feel everything”. It’s beautifully nonsensical, merging Dali-esque imagery to create an unremitting melange of visual metaphors that long to be decoded simply because Apple plays them all out with such conviction.

Grimes – Oblivion (Dir: Emily Kai Bock)

Directed by Emily Kai Bock, who also helmed Grizzly Bear’s excellent Yet Again video, Oblivion wasn’t Grimes’ showiest video of 2012. That honour goes to the Xena-Warrior-Princess-goes-to-LA treatment for album highlight Genesis. Instead, Bock highlights Grimes’ other-worldliness simply by setting her in a number of fairly ordinary, mostly male-dominated environments. So she has a bit of dance in a hyper-stylised locker room as topless athletes wander about and mimes along to her stereo in front of intoxicated sports fans in soulless stadiums. Throughout she looks completely out of place but the video never casts judgement on anyone or anything – she’s not there to sneer or position herself as some hipster too cool to break into a sweat, she just sort of drifts around the periphery, like a slightly lost newcomer looking to make friends.

Solange - Losing You (Dir: Melina Matsoukas)

When Solange, director Melina Matsoukas and a bunch of Solange’s friends flew to South Africa to shoot the video for Losing You they had no specific idea of what they wanted to do. Solange had recently become obsessed with the book The Gentleman of Bocongo which documented a sartorially superior breed of men in the Republic of the Congo known as the Le Sape Society. There to shoot a cover for Elle, she discovered a group of Congolese Sapeurs living in Cape Town, allowing Matsoukas to create a documentary-style account of what looked like the world’s most stylish holiday. As with the song itself, the video feels refreshingly out of step with everything else that’s happening at the moment – shots are held for longer than MTV regulations seem to allow these days, the dance moves slow and purposeful (apart from at 3:14 when she busts out her finest wobbly leg moves), while the whole thing feels refreshingly laid-back and off the cuff (there are a number of cute moments where Solange seems to be in the way of the extras who, rather than wait for the next take, nudge past her or close doorways she’s stood in).

Antony & The Johnsons - Cut The World (Dir: Nabil)

“But when will I turn and cut the world?” sighs Antony Hegarty on the mournful Cut The World, a song written for his collaboration with artist Marina Abramović and actor Willem Defoe. This question seems to linger over the first two minutes of the Nabil-directed video, which manages to slowly build tension through its office-environment mundanity and the supposed importance of something happening outside the grey office building. In the brief moments we have with Defoe’s character he seems like a nice enough chap and his co-worker, played by Carice van Houten, appears to get along with him until, seemingly without warning, she reaches for a knife and violently hacks at Defoe’s throat. Remorseful and emotionally distressed by her actions she cries a single tear that drops into Defoe’s eye and calmly walks out into the fresh air, only to be joined by hundreds of other women who all seem to have violently killed their male co-workers (one of them is Abramović herself). Probably best not to watch this one if you’re feeling a bit depressed.

Woodkid - Run Boy Run (Dir: Yoann Lemoine)

Yoann Lemoine, aka Woodkid, knows a thing or two about music videos having helmed Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream video as well as the lavishly epic Born To Die for Lana Del Rey. Having remixed the latter, Lemoine started making waves in late 2011as a musician with his intricate mini-symphonies, of which the string-laden Run Boy Run is a fine example. For the monochrome video Lemoine drops the viewer into an austere world of towering mountain peaks and post-apocalyptic architecture, slowly focusing on a boy sprinting furiously to escape some unseen foe. It soon transpires that the Yeti-esque creatures doing the chasing are actually only trying to help as they quickly multiply and form some kind of army with the boy at the helm. Breathtakingly beautiful and painstakingly auteured (Lemoine does everything himself), it’s one of the year’s most impressive mini-movies.

Lana Del Rey - National Anthem (Dir: Anthony Mandler)

Video Games positioned Lana Del Rey as a torch-ballad singer for the Tumblr generation, while Born To Die showed her off as some sort of modern-day goddess luxuriating on a throne surrounded by tigers. For the near eight minutes of the National Anthem video, however, Del Rey went one giant leap further and became Jackie Kennedy to A$AP Rocky’s JFK. Audacious, wonderfully OTT and – with the recreation of the Kennedy assassination intercut with Del Rey looking forlorn in a field of pink roses – strangely moving, it proves that despite an influx of plucky DIY videos made on a shoestring, Epic can still be brilliant if handled correctly.

Bjork - Mutual Core (Dir: Andrew Thomas Huang)

Directed by artist Andrew Thomas Huang in association with the Museum of Contemporary Arts, the video for the pagan-techno blitzkrieg Mutual Core continues Bjork’s fascination with the natural world as detailed on 2011’s app album, Biophilia. Submerged in sand up to her waist, Bjork initially acts as a sort of benevolent mother nature figure, gracefully moving Tectonic plates around and summoning up strange rock formations that soon start beautiful-looking fights. Ultimately though, the constant messing about results in the creation of huge lava spewing volcanos that look like something out of Lord of The Rings. Like the song and indeed nature itself, the whole thing is simultaneously beautiful, unremittingly violent and utterly awe-inspiring.

Perfume Genius – Hood (Dir: Winston H. Case)

The first twenty seconds of Mike Hadreas aka Perfume Genius’ Hood video are taken up by a close-up of him miming along to the sparse piano-ballad, his eyes gazing off camera. He looks incredibly young and incredibly lost. Slowly he’s revealed to be curled up in the not inconsiderable arms of porn star Arpad Miklos, whose gaze is fixed protectively on Hadreas’ face. It’s an incredibly strong yet tender image that deals with masculinity in a way that’s not often touched upon in music videos. Throughout, the pair play around with the parameters of their relationship, swapping costumes and gender roles with Miklos often appearing as the more subservient of the two. An advert for the accompanying album, which featured footage from the video, was initially banned from YouTube for not being “family safe”, but Hood only seems intent to communicate a fairly base human need to feel protected.

Chairlift - Met Before (Dir: Jordan Fish and Ari Kuschnir)

It’s all very well passively sitting back and enjoying a new pop video, but wouldn’t it be nice to get involved in some way? Well, yes it would and luckily with Chairlift’s Met Before video everybody could. Basically, like those Famous Five books where the reader gets to decide the plot when prompted to do so, this unique video gave the viewer the option of sending the video down a number of different narrative paths, all of them centred around Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and her unlikely tenure as a geeky science student. Luckily it isn’t just a good idea waiting for a good video, with each different permutation throwing up something new (Polachek shaving her legs in the university bathroom, for example), as the song’s central theme of the power of deja vu coalesces nicely with the video’s looped narrative.

Jack White - Sixteen Saltines (Dir: AG Rojas)

Directed by AG Rojas – who also created the distinctly NSFW video for Hey Jane by Spiritualized – Sixteen Saltines is an unsettling glimpse into a world run by neanderthal children (some painted blue), that splices shaky, documentary-style handheld camera footage with a movie-like sheen. There’s a brief attempt at plot when we see a glimpse of White in the opening minute tied to a radiator and again at the end when he’s locked in a car being covered in gasoline. In between however there are disparate shots of pale kids playing hopscotch using a finger instead of a stone, while another scene finds a shop worker swallowing a gloopy blue liquid before spitting it into a co-workers face. Realism and the mundane are constantly flipped on their heads to create a strange world with no rules. Perhaps the best scene comes when a group of kids start free-styling in the street only for one of them to suddenly rise about forty feet in the air and just hang there, completely motionless.

Le1f – Wut (Dir: Sam Jones)

If Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video taught us anything – and, on a personal level, it taught me A LOT – then it’s that videos don’t need a lot going on when the central performer is ridiculously captivating. It’s this truth that makes New York rapper Le1f’s cheap and cheerful video for the clap-heavy Wut so spell-binding. Videos are meant to be visual representations of the artist’s personalities and in Wut – all gif-friendly dance moves, Pokemon masks and lashings of undeniable sass – you get a crash course on what makes Le1f tick without having to read a single interview.

Plan B - Ill Manors (Dir: Yann Demange)

There was no better video in 2012 for pure visceral aggression than Plan B’s Ill Manors. Opening with Ben Drew looking out over a London landscape with fires raging in the distance, its almost depressive power lay in the fact that the fictional scenes are able to merge seamlessly with real footage of the destruction caused by last year’s London riots. Sometimes it’s not clear which bits have been staged and which bits are snatches of news footage or scenes caught on a mobile phone camera. It’s a brutal, unrelenting four minutes that feels almost uncomfortably in your face (at one point a brick cracks the camera lens as it’s hurled towards the viewer), going beyond the realms of entertainment into something close to a vital reminder.

Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Dir: Declan Whitebloom)

For Taylor Swift’s big Max Martin-produced pop breakthrough she needed a video that simultaneously announced her as a bonafide pop star but didn’t alienate her country fans who still want her to be homely and down to earth. For the opening scene of We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together we find Taylor sat on a window sill in her pyjamas gazing out at a knitted bird. She looks like a 12-year-old at a slumber party. Shot in one take – it’s essentially a Michel Gondry video in all but name – it creates a strange, almost cartoon world for Taylor to live in, as if to say ‘I’m only here for a bit, this isn’t the real me’. But clowning about with her mates and mugging to the camera suits her and as each scene seamlessly glides into the next you suddenly notice what may have been missed before; Taylor Swift is a properly amazing pop star.

How do you solve a problem like Leona?

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:06:00 +0000

Well, if you’re Syco you make her release a hastily cobbled together covers EP. This weekend it was announced that I Got You hitmaker and all round global singing sensation Leona Lewis will release a new EP next Sunday, the same day she performs on the fourteen hour long X Factor final. This should have been the pinnacle of a great second half of 2011 for Leona, her third album riding high in the charts off the back of a moody yet amazing goth-pop tinged ballad. Instead, the third album is now due out in either March or May 2012 and the second single - that a few people had heard and loved - is now on hold. One imagines that a lot of the material due to be on this third album, Glassheart, has now been put on hold, specifically the stuff that saw her trying to expand on her sound, i.e. anything faster than 120 bpm. Following the relative failure of Collide and the whole Aviici-gave-me-the-song-oh-actually-he-didn’t court case debacle, Syco have obviously panicked and gone back down the make-the-song-your-own route. Of course Leona’s pretty good at that, but is that enough in 2011/2012? Should a woman whose first single was Bleeding Love still be churning out covers? In fact, should a woman whose first single was number 1 in nearly every country on the planet and whose debut album has sold close to 10 millions copies be shuffling around a horse sanctuary in Essex on a bill that also features Stavros Flatley? Should someone who was once referred to as the next Whitney Houston perhaps be a bit more selective with the things she gets up to? As much as we all love Natasha Begingfield, duetting with her and that bloke off Glee to help save some horses is just not the best look for someone who wants to be a megastar. Mind you, perhaps that’s not on her agenda. We’d have a better idea if she were perhaps able to express some of her thoughts and opinions in a way that isn’t “it’s amazing” or “I’m so happy to be here”. Leona just isn’t an interesting popstar, which means that the music she makes has to be so much bigger than she is. Bleeding Love is one of the best singles of the last twenty years and she has so much to do with it being that amazing, it’s just that when the songs sneak below ‘very good’ there’s not enough there to lift it.

Anyway, the covers. It’s clever and cynical from Syco. By giving contestants on The X Factor Run to sing in whichever year it was, we were primed for her cover which then propelled Spirit back to the number 1 slot across Europe (America had kind of given up by this point). Then before Echo came out I suddenly noticed a lot of contestants singing Oasis’ Stop Crying Your Heart Out and lo and behold there she is covering it on the show (the ploy was less successful to be honest). Now, in 2011, it feels that the sudden success of Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris (which has already been propelled back into the charts thanks to numerous contestants warbling all over it) has moved Syco to think “right Leona, that whole Collide shit didn’t work so you can cover this song on the night, we’ll swamp you in dry ice, show a montage of the contestants’ journeys and job’s a good ‘un”. Fine for the ratings and it will no doubt sound lovely, but where does it leave Leona? It leaves Leona tethered to a show that she should have left behind by now. Three albums in and she’s still their own version of Susan Boyle and that’s not helping anyone to be honest.

Blimey. I haven’t written anything on here for such a long...

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:50:33 +0100

Blimey. I haven’t written anything on here for such a long time. Apologies.

I felt propelled to write a little something something about this here song by the excellent Ruby Goe, not least because it mentions the 149 bus, which, as anyone who lives in North-east London or has ever had to get from London Bridge to the Shoreditch area of a night time will testify, is quite the experience. I tweeted Ruby to confirm it was the bus route she was referring to and she confirmed it all, summing up the 149 thusly; “Its the unpredictable kingsland road sat4am armageddonesque shitfest i have trouble with.” Amazing.

No, but seriously, Get On It is amazing, all chunky, clattering beats and shedloads of personality. Like all good pop, it’s a little bit racy, a little bit sassy (“he gonna leave me walking like Bambi” isn’t just a cute Disney reference) and manages to contain all the excitement of one of those blog-friendly pop rackets without forsaking an actual tune.

You can hear some more songs here.

brilliantlydifferent: ‘Compass Points’ is the first single to...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 14:10:19 +0100

brilliantlydifferent:

‘Compass Points’ is the first single to be taken from the forthcoming album by Nazca Lines. A beautiful electronic ode to dislocation. Produced by Lo Recording’s own Charlie Alex March and mixed by Ash Workman (Simian Mobile Disco, Metronomy, etc) the single is an ideal entry point into the world of Nazca Lines, a world where crisp R ‘n’ B beats merge seamlessly with pop melodies.

In some way a more succinct version of Junior Boys’ 21st Century soul and sharing their love of 80s Scritti Politti, place ‘Compass Points’ in your BMW Z4 before coasting into the evening desert.

We met Charlie Alex March a brilliant young producer who released an under appreciated album on Lo Recordings in 2009 over a year ago. A few months later we ran into him again and he mentioned he was working on an album by Michael Lovett ”It’s POP’ he said. Fast forward 6 months and Michael got in contact with his us and so did Lo Recordings (who are also releasing this) and today we see the first fruits, the brilliant ‘Compass Lines’. It is pop, but it’s different and it’s fantastic. The PR touches on it’s influences very well, that there you can read below. Thank you to the Guardian for writing about the video today.

The first single to be taken from the forthcoming album, also called Nazca Lines, is testament to that with Lovett’s voice layered to create a dense sound that sucks you in further on each listen. Beneath the vocals is a joyously 80s electro-pop melange of pogoing beats, synchopated hiccups and weird synth sounds that seem to engulf and then snap shut in an instant Thank you Michael at The Guardian.

While doing some research stuff for work I watched the Spice...

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 23:54:39 +0100

While doing some research stuff for work I watched the Spice Girls ‘Stop’ video. The song is amazing but what’s more amazing is the fact that Victoria points NINE times in less than twenty seconds (from 44 seconds in). NINE TIMES. It’s ludicrous. Fair enough, she’s not a confident singer, her dancing is perhaps a little stilted, but it’s some kind of physical tourettes to just point randomly. Yes yes, it was ‘her thing’, but Mel C’s ‘thing’ was back flips and you don’t see her doing them every other second (as an aside, if Geri’s thing was ‘being a bit of a nightmare’ then she does that throughout).

This is kind of incredible. Lana Del Rey is actually New York...

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 23:39:45 +0100

This is kind of incredible.

Lana Del Rey is actually New York resident, Lizzy Grant and ‘Video Games’ is her first single, due out in October. It’s basically just some harp, piano and the odd disjointed sound effect but the results are strangely mesmeric. Her voice has a weird detached quality to it, so that when she sings the (clearly amazing) line ”I heard that you liked the bad girls/ Honey, is that true?” it’s done so with a hint of resignation, like, “of course it’s true, you low life good for nothing scumbag who is more obsessed with Mario Kart then he is by my frankly incredible lips.”

Not everyone’s a fan. Here’s a comment left on YouTube:

“Typical women and their first world problems.”

Typical.

I’ve been listening to Aaliyah a lot of late (it’s...

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:38:50 +0100

I’ve been listening to Aaliyah a lot of late (it’s nearly ten years since she passed away), especially her second album, One In A Million. It features a number of collaborations with Timbaland and Missy Elliott, most notably the brilliant ‘4 Page Letter’. It’s got that loping, laidback beat that defined mid-nineties R&B, Aaliyah sounds perfect and Missy provides some lovely harmonies.

I also like the idea of Aaliyah posting off this letter and thinking “he better get it in time” or else she’ll write a stern letter to the US equivalent of the Royal Mail.

disconaivete: Björk is unleashing her Biophilia upon the world:...

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:30:06 +0100

disconaivete:

Björk is unleashing her Biophilia upon the world: track by track, app by app. We’ve heard Crystalline and Cosmogony, today we get to hear another new track titled Virus. Biophilia is out September 26; by the sound of the songs we’ve already heard it’s set to be a very fine record.

I didn’t write anything about the passing of Amy Winehouse...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:59:17 +0100

I didn’t write anything about the passing of Amy Winehouse for two reasons. 1). Tumblr wasn’t working and 2). I didn’t have anything to say. Instead, I downloaded every song of hers I didn’t already own and then listened to them.

Like all amazing singers she was able to inhabit other people’s songs completely and sing them in such a way that you assumed they’d been written for her. This is such a beautiful song, sung with an almost nonchalant ease and the lyrics just seem to resonate more coming from her.

It should always be the music we remember.

This is amazing. iamqueenofhearts: Any of you that have been...

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:51:26 +0100

This is amazing.

iamqueenofhearts:

Any of you that have been following me over the last few months will know that I did some work in the studio earlier this summer with the brilliant Monarchy.

I haven’t shared any new music for a while, so thought I’d give you a sneak peek of one of the fruits of our labour - Perfect Mistake. It’s one of my favourite songs that I’ve ever written, and one that I think sits very nicely between the intensity of Freestyle and the wistfulness of Where Are You Now. I hope you enjoy!

♥

The loveliness of this song makes me a bit breathless. The app...

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:28:11 +0100

The loveliness of this song makes me a bit breathless.

The app thingy is out today and it’s free to download (the additional songs won’t be free, obvs). There’s going to be a super special deluxe version of the album that only three people can afford and rumours are it includes a customised iPad or something. Ridiculous.

midnightagogolondon: For the next Midnight A Go-Go our friend...

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 20:01:57 +0100

midnightagogolondon:

For the next Midnight A Go-Go our friend & music writer, Michael Cragg, has created this playlist to give you a flavour of the sort tunes he will be playing on Saturday 30 July. Its pretty hot stuff. We’ll be announcing timings soon so keep your eyes peeled for further info.

I can’t shake the fact that Natalia Kills was once in a...

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 01:18:56 +0100

I can’t shake the fact that Natalia Kills was once in a Jasper Carrott sitcom. I just can’t. Nor can I come to terms with the will.i.am ‘rap’ that’s been shoe-horned into this actually-quite-good song about the pleasures of spending money you don’t have (she’d know all about that, right? Unnecessary and I apologise). Once again, the video is loaded with REALLY IMPORTANT SLOGANS and the imagery is typically subtle (the bit where they super-impose her head onto a male body builder is both terribly done and pretty baffling in terms of representation).

I’ve watched the video from start to finish - and I’ve seen most of the others - and I still have no idea who Natalia Kills really is, or what she actually looks like or what the point of her is. That might sound needlessly harsh, but it’s important these days to have something for people to latch onto and if it’s the image-obsessed, power-hungry, intelligent and aggressive pop star thing then Lady Gaga has that sewn up. Even Jessie J has her earnestness to hold onto like a silk pillow stuffed with empowerment. This seems like posturing and little else and by having will.i.am honking on about wanting to buy a new TV, she’s ruined a fairly carefree ditty and ballsed up the imagery along the way.

OK, so on Thursday I travelled up to Manchester to a). see Bjork...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:45:10 +0100

OK, so on Thursday I travelled up to Manchester to a). see Bjork live and b). go to a press conference thingy about Biophilia, Bjork’s seventh and most elaborate album yet. Basically, the album will eventually be released (in September I believe) as a standard album (i.e. digitally and on CD), but before that (I think this month), it will also be released as an app, available on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. The aim of the app is to bring together music, nature and technology in a way that hasn’t been done before. The app will house all ten of the album’s songs, with each song having it’s own individual app with some kind of graphic, some educational text, lyrics and the option to listen to the song just as it is. We were played one new song - Cosmogony - and shown the intro sequence which the song soundtracks. We were also shown the app for the first single, Crystalline, which involves racing down a long computerised tube, collecting crystals to enhance the song, before bursting out of the tube in order to hear the chorus (apparently, the visuals represent the way in which Bjork envisions writing songs, with the tube representing the verses and the ‘break out’ being the rush you get when you arrive at the chorus). The graphics for Crystalline were a little disappointing I have to say, but we didn’t get to interact with it so I think the aim with that one is for it to be slightly more interactive then just visually stimulating.

We were told that that mother app would be free and that the songs would cost. There’s scope for Bjork to add to the app as and when she likes, either putting in new songs or remixes. It’s meant to be an evolving alternative to the static album, as well as being something fun, educational and interactive. One of the great things you can do is remix the tracks yourself and use the instrumentation to create your own songs (all the apps Bjork used to create the music have been made compatible for the app so people can literally create songs using the instruments she’s used - amazing).

We were the shown around the venue and got to have a close look at the stage and the instruments she’s had made (the picture at the top is the stage lay-out. We couldn’t take pics of the actual performance unfortunately). The instruments range from the Reactable, which she used on her last tour, to some midi-controlled ‘gamelasts’ (they make a lovely, almost harpsichord sound and recall the delicacy of Vespertine), to this swinging pendulum thing that makes the sound of a harp and is controlled by the earth’s gravitational pull. Perhaps best of all is this lightening conductor thing which lowered from the ceiling in a cage, with two sparks of lightening clashing in the middle to create the beat for a new song, Thunder Bolt. It was like being at some kind of Tomorrow’s World roadshow, with each instrument presented to us by pale-faced men with too much time on their hands.

The show itself was just mind-blowing. Bjork - dressed in a purple sequined dress with matching shoes and a giant ginger wig - was joined by a 24-piece all-female choir, who would constantly switch sides of the square stage so that everyone got a chance to look at something other than the eight giant screens hanging above them and showing a mixture of graphics from the app and footage from National Geographic. The new album was played in full and sounds, to these ears, like a mixture of Vespertine and Homogenic, with lots of delicate moments mixed with crunchy beats and a few moments of near-rave (especially on the excellent Mutual Core). Thunderbolt was noisy and brash, while Virus was lovely, a kind of love song between a cell and a virus and the complexities therein. The best of the bunch for me was Cosmogony, which has a lovely lift into the chorus and is as swooning and heart-bursting as Hyperballad or All Is Full Of Love. The older material was re-worked beautifully and the songs were chosen to fit in with the themes of nature and the interaction between that and humankind. So, we got Isobel, Nattura, Hidden Place, One Day (!), Declare Independence, It’s Not Up To You and Mouth’s Cradle.

The only real problem I had with it was the fact that it was in the round. There were times when you felt slightly disconnected from what was going on because you were looking at their backs or watching computer screens, but at the same time, it felt like a necessity given the display of instruments. One minor grumble, also, was the fact that her band only consisted of two people, one drummer and one guy manning the electronics. So much of Bjork’s music is intricate and multi-faceted and there were times when certain elements seemed lost and the big crescendos didn’t quite hit hard enough (this may have had something to do with the sound levels or something, but on Crystalline, the big climax just didn’t quite hit as hard as I would have hoped).

But this is all minor stuff. Bjork’s amazing, the new album sounds amazing and having something good to do on an iPad is amazing too. Hurrah.

Beyonce at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night. Is she...

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 11:43:38 +0100

Beyonce at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night.

Is she looking right at me? Probably. This might capture the moment I drunkenly shouted out “sing Countdown”. She didn’t sing Countdown.

Here it is. I may well listen to this all night now.

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:36:40 +0100

Here it is. I may well listen to this all night now.

Bjork - Crystalline

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 20:29:00 +0100

The amazing Disco Naivete is hosting a stream of the new Bjork single, Crystalline.

I’ve written a few things about the forthcoming seventh Bjork album, Biophilia, without actually hearing a note. In fact, I reviewed the single for the NME based on a thirty second snippet she released of it playing on her car stereo.

Appropriately enough, this being Bjork, the whole thing was a bit of a ruse as the clip she played has now morphed into the thumping, drum ‘n bass cacophony that now closes the song, causing this Bjork fan to beam a smile so broad it felt like my face was about to explode. It’s so unexpected, considering the song kind of simmers nicely for three or so minutes, all delicate, almost icy keyboard sounds and Bjork barking on about crystals and the earth’s core, before the whole thing erupts. Let’s face it, she’s never going to make a ‘proper’ pop song again, but there’s just something magic about what she does. It’s amazing.

mikeinamelody: SCREAMS This sounds AMAZING. The second teaser...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 11:53:07 +0100

mikeinamelody:

*SCREAMS*

This sounds AMAZING. The second teaser has been deleted but people have been describing it as “industrial” and “drum and bass” *faints*

Some things about this video that are good: - Britney’s...

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 11:19:27 +0100

Some things about this video that are good:

- Britney’s comic timing

- Britney’s swearing

- The reference to ‘Crossroads 2’ on the cinema building

- The references to Terminator and Thriller

- The dogs looking bemused

- She looks comfortable and happy being a pop star

Things that aren’t that good:

- The Avril Lavigne circa Girlfriend styling

- What is that baby meant to be doing? Wolf-whistling? At a 29-year-old mother of two? Also, don’t flash at young boys Britney, it’s not a good look.

- It’s already getting these kind of responses on YouTube:

and in ending it seems robot got Britney does it means “illuminati” have robots and he got Britney then he will program her or bring her to hell xD

Actually, maybe that’s a good thing…

3mins30secs

A track-by-track first listen preview thing of Justin Timberlake's album (which has been online for a week)

A slightly belated blog about the best videos of 2012

How do you solve a problem like Leona?

Blimey. I haven’t written anything on here for such a long...

brilliantlydifferent: ‘Compass Points’ is the first single to...

While doing some research stuff for work I watched the Spice...

This is kind of incredible. Lana Del Rey is actually New York...

I’ve been listening to Aaliyah a lot of late (it’s...

disconaivete: Björk is unleashing her Biophilia upon the world:...

I didn’t write anything about the passing of Amy Winehouse...

This is amazing. iamqueenofhearts: Any of you that have been...

♥

The loveliness of this song makes me a bit breathless. The app...

midnightagogolondon: For the next Midnight A Go-Go our friend...

I can’t shake the fact that Natalia Kills was once in a...

OK, so on Thursday I travelled up to Manchester to a). see Bjork...

Beyonce at Shepherd’s Bush Empire last night. Is she...

Here it is. I may well listen to this all night now.

Bjork - Crystalline

mikeinamelody: *SCREAMS* This sounds AMAZING. The second teaser...

Some things about this video that are good: - Britney’s...

mikeinamelody: SCREAMS This sounds AMAZING. The second teaser...