Sweet Nothings

Arcade Fire have been accused in some quarters of lacking levity, which maybe goes some way towards explaining the promotional bumph for their fourth record – the pseudonyms, the masks, the  bonkers long-form video , and so on. Clearly Reflekor is an attempt to push the boat out musically too, the hiring of James Murphy heralding extended track lengths and an emphasis on beats more than riffs. Win Butler has also talked a lot about how visiting Haiti inspired many of the songs, and how the locals respond to music in a more primal way rather than viewing everything through the Western prism of “rock”. Such comments are on a hiding to nothing really, as a multi-award winning, adored band will never be able to escape their pop-cultural baggage. The best they can do is to throw out some new shapes, mix things up a bit and hope not to lose the qualities that got them here in the first place. It must be said that all this makes far more sense live than on MP3, especially sin...

Yes hello, I’m not dead or anything. I was going to apologise for not posting for a while, but apparently us bloggers aren’t supposed to do that , so I suggest you accept what you’re given and be grateful that I can be arsed to write anything at all. (There’s a really good article somewhere that collates such “sorry, I was busy!” posts which I can’t find, but I’m not going to apologise for that either.) Anyway, we got to our seats in time to catch the end of Public Service Broadcasting .  Stock footage on a projector screen is accompanied by surprisingly direct and jaunty instrumental rock, as played by one man on guitar-slash-laptop dressed as Matt Smith from Doctor Who, and a drummer who seems to have gone for an IT Crowd-era Richard Ayoade vibe. They talk to the audience through a Stephen Hawking style voice machine. The carefully assembled blend of vintage and modern is all very now , or at least is trying awfully hard to be. This may be a crap photo, but at least it...

I didn’t know much about This Means War beforehand, beyond the fact it has Tom Hardy and Chris Pine as two spies fighting for the affections of Reese Witherspoon (understandably so tbf). So when, after a brain-numbing 90 minutes, the dread words “Directed by McG” appeared as the credits rolled, this explained an awful lot. In fairness to our preposterously-pseudonymed friend, the overriding impression here is of a film that’s been focus-grouped to death, with every last drop of originality wrung out of each ploddingly obvious scene, which isn’t all his fault. The horrible, hyperactive cartoon aesthetic though most definitely is. Why on earth do you need so many jump cuts, especially in scenes which are basically two blokes chatting? Why are some angles randomly shot on grainy film? Why does everything feel like it was shot by an ADD afflicted five year-old? Funnily enough, the camera tends to sit still during scenes with Witherspoon and Chelsea Handler, playing the standard romcom...

I know I go on about the Sound of... polls and how pernicious they are, but the 2011 edition has become a real tipping point for me. Consider first Jessie J (if that is indeed her real name): the video to demented debut single  Do It Like A Dude  succeeds in being simultaneously provocative and terrifying. The tired old chestnut of whether white middle-class kids should really be singing "do it like the mandem" like Yardies doesn't really concern me; that boat sailed long ago. But this tune, to borrow a phrase, is some next level shit. It seems designed to repel adults completely. Well that's fine, if this is what "the kids" are listening to nowadays then I'm happy to admit defeat - I hereby declare myself Old, and utterly baffled by a piece of popular music. It's actually something of a relief. (Having said that, the follow-up  Price Tag  is a harmless bit of R&B, so perhaps Jessie's not so hardcore and is - gasp - just another major labe...

I seem to listen to less and less music as the years go by. In 2010 I’ve watched loads of sport , and been to more movies and radio recordings (mostly free, coincidentally) than gigs. Even my iPod listening is increasingly dominated by podcasts. Nonetheless, here follows some brief musings on music from this year. Hopefully all these Sound Of... polls of “tastemakers” and Critics Choice awards won’t go on for too much longer. This year’s HOT TIP~! was Ellie Goulding , who’s only really made the cultural impact that all the breathless hyperbole suggested she would now she's done a seasonally-friendly cover and stuck it on an advert. The problem is that everything about her betrays her origins as a marketing project, artificially born out of target market analyses and box-checking exercises. Take her singing voice: with someone like Bjork, for example, you don't have trouble believing that it's her natural voice because she's such a bonkers character. Goulding seems li...

One of the more pernicious music industry inventions has to be the annual BBC Sound of... survey of music critics and industry figures, which presents us with a helpful list of all the acts with the biggest marketing budgets for the coming year and whose records we are therefore expected to buy. Let’s see who was in the 2009 top ten (in ranking order): Little Boots (disappointing considering the amount of time and money that must have been invested) White Lies (hilariously death-obsessed, yet more Joy Division-reduced-to-mainstream-glum fodder although the one guitar band to break through this year) Florence and the Machine (critical and commercial success - hurrah) Empire of the Sun (good tunes but too wilfully weird to cross over) La Roux (see below) Lady GaGa (see below) VV Brown (seems like you can have too many electro girls. Brown got literally nowhere) Kid Cudi (quite big in hip-hop circles by all accounts) Passion Pit (haven’t really broken through) Dan Black (I saw him do a fe...

Some (late) reflections after the Flaming Lips' gig on Wednesday night. Firstly, the venue: the Troxy is in a cruddy part of East London, has a stupid name and is basically a bloody bingo hall - complete with dodgy carpet and weird side-on tables on the upper level. There was no bitter on sale, the wine was awful and the over-zealous security bods operate a one-in-one-out policy at the very front, which isn't ideal if you need to go for a piss or to the bar and get back to your mates in a hurry. And the Lips themselves? Well, this gig showed them to be a solid band overly fond of formless jams, capable of crafting the odd great tune when the mood takes them and canny enough to furnish their shows with enough gimmickry (dancers in animal suits, balloons, rolling around in a huge hamster ball, etc) to compensate for their musical eccentricities. Wayne Coyne is a wonderful showman, although it has been noted elsewhere that some of his onstage pronouncements ("aw shucks, you g...

So I was thinking about writing what looks like being an annual piece about the last 12 months in music - blah blah female electro LadyLaRouxMachine yadda yadda - when the thought struck me that we’re near the end of the decade and I’ve not seen any definitive musical recaps of the noughties yet (which will be the last time I use that word, you’ll be pleased to know). So, written mostly from hazy memories and with very little in the way of research (which let’s be honest is no different to what the majority of these pieces will be like when they hit the newsstands), here are my brief reflections on popular music over the last decade. The 2000s seem like a slippery bugger to pin down. Now we’re at a safe distance from the 90s, a convenient middle-class rock journo shorthand has been developed - they started with NIRVANA! (with SUEDE! holding the flag for Brit guitars) then came OASIS!/BLUR!/RADIOHEAD!, then the latter two went weird, Oasis went down the drug dealer’s, The Verve died, Pu...

The first I heard about Florence and the Machine was an article in the Guardian Guide last year by Sylvia Patterson, who is very good at puff pieces which don't sound like puff pieces. It portrayed Florence Welch as the sort of flighty, bohemian, behold-my-quirkiness type who would completely get on my tits within five minutes of meeting them. This coupled with hearty endorsements from Johnny Borrell and her rather wanky nom de plume did not leave me awaiting her album with drooling anticipation. Lo and behold, it turns out that Lungs is a rather fine piece of work. Although she's been lumped in with the current crop of 80s-worshipping Next Big Things and covers You've GotThe Love, Florence makes a far more progressive, soul-influenced sound that doesn't slavishly ape the past like, say, La Roux. Welch also has a voice that just when you think it's in danger of becoming one-dimensional will veer off in pleasing new directions. Subjects tackled in the lyrics include...

It wouldn’t be terribly fair to do a musical “best of” list for 2008, considering I’ve only heard a small percentage of everything that’s been released this year. So anyway, here are my top 5 albums of 2008, plus a general round-up of what else has or indeed hasn’t floated my boat over the last 12 months. From the beginning, 2008 looked set to be the year of the somewhat soul-influenced white female solo artist, with Adele and Duffy in particular the focus of sustained marketing pushes. If you were being charitable, you could argue that both girls were talented performers who deserved their breaks, on the other hand it would be hard to disagree with the assertion that neither girl would have got anywhere if the record companies weren’t desperately jumping onto the Winehouse bandwagon. The Adele marketing blitzkrieg was particuarly crass, especially the ultimate PR stunt of giving her a Brit award purely for her “potential” (i.e. marketing budget), and perhaps this contributed to her be...

I hold no truck with people who don't take pub quizzes seriously. Even if you're thick as mince and only competing "for a laugh", you are presumably still there to enjoy yourself, and would therefore be somewhat pissed off to sit through a badly-organised shambles like the one I went to last night. First thing to note: it started after work at 6:30pm. By 10:45 most of the pub, including the rest of my team, had left with the final results still a mystery, and I simply couldn't be bothered waiting any longer. We had already marked each others' answer papers, so you would think that collating the final scores would be a simple case of totting up the already-written round totals. Apparently not. There were two guys from another department organising and hosting - I play football with the one, who is basically sound, and was actually billed as the sole host. Sadly most of the talking (and I do mean a lot of talking) was done by his colleague and mate. Floppy-haire...