Sweet release

Today is the 27th of October 2008, and by coincidence it is the release day for two different albums worth celebrating, not for their music (though one and a half are excellent) but for how they were have been released.

First of all, the picture you see above is of the lovingly crafted package that is Los Campesinos!' We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. It comes with:

• Two badges
• An amusing DVD documenting the band's international summer adventures (which sadly doesn't get as far as Lowlands)
• A foldout of that robot attacking drawing
• A booklet with both the lyrics to pore over and decipher at length, and a whole set of poems, drawings and ruminations on such things as the fruitfly issues around kitchen compost collection.
• Oh yeah, the actual CD, sounding rather punchier than certain unmastered versions *cough*

The only downside there is how to fit the thing in a CD rack. They haven't quite gone as far as the Laura Marling route of including a gig ticket, but then that one did have the unfortunate effect of making a probably still worthwhile package look a lot less like good value for money if you were in the wrong town or just couldn't make it.

Anyway, one of the best things about this is that this is no expensive special edition, but the standard and only version that you get for your 9.99 or so. Assuming that they're still making a decent profit on it, you wonder why more bands can't make a bit of an effort to turn release day back into an event again and to build up a unique identity for themselves beyond the music.

Album number two of today is Bloc Party's Intimacy, which comes in much more practical packaging although also doesn't say its name on the spine anywhere. I say today, but then I actually got it in the post on Saturday. Plus of course, I got the high quality download of it back in August, not long after they'd finished recording it. Again, all for a just about standard price that I was more than willing to pay upfront.

Far more so than the 'Radiohead model' which rather relies on being Radiohead to work, this has got to be the best way forward for a lot of bands with any kind of following. The people who want to get the album as early as possible, and the people who want to actually own a physical product are often one and the same. Why not build some loyalty by giving them both at no extra cost bar a bit of infrastructure? I'm guessing someone will be able to point out that the download+later physical release has been done before, but this is the first mainstream example that I can think of.

The initial non-inclusion and later free release of "Talons" to anyone who had already bought the album was an interesting extra which helped keep attention on the album after initial reactions had already passed, although probably was responsible for its dismal chart showing as much as the song's comparitive unremarkableness. A far cry from "Flux" last year being done the old fashioned way with the album re-released so that early adopters paid more, too.

It remains to be seen whether the album goes the same way as "Talons", although frustratingly as with Radiohead the chart system is not a sufficient tool to really determine it. I very much hope that it has worked and will inspire others, anyway.

A few gigs

Apart from being kept away by trying to cope with way too much work, I've also attended three gigs in the past week and a bit.

First of all, The Indelicates at Metro. Now, four bands for £6 is great value and main support The Last Republic were actually really good in an overblown Boxer Rebellion style. However, when said support bands overrunning means the headliners get barely half an hour to show off their fantastic and rather lengthier album, it's not so great.

The Indelicates undoubtedly made the most of the situation but didn't seem to grab much of the audience beyond the front. They are a rather difficult proposition to explain, playing music that could almost pass as stadium Britpop but with a dark and cynical bite that's a long way from any such thing. Julia's apoplectic rage through a "Our Daughters Will Never Be Free" was quite something to behold. Actually the fact that her position seated at piano means that very few can properly behold may be part of the problem. Bigger stages may hopefully yet help.

Then Los Campesinos! at the Electric Ballroom, which looked like this:




Basically as a first chance to see much of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed live it was almost guarenteed to be great, although a surprising number seemed unenthused by the new songs (it is already out properly! On downloads at least). And yeah, they lived up, with bonus speaker stack climbing and double Kenickie references. Even the Aleksandra songs work properly this time! No "We Throw Parties" though, sigh.

Last, Africa Express at Koko. Only stayed for three hours out of the seven or so that it apparently went on for(!) but had a great time. It was a lot less patronising than I unkindly imagined, there was a party atmosphere throughout and the constantly changing musicians on stage, with no one staying for more than two songs kept things interesting where attention may eventually have strayed with some unfamiliar material.

Highlights were Hard-Fi's unexpectedly great cover of The Chemical Brothers' "Push The Button" and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (below), who played with fantastic energy and matched it with impeccably synchronised moves to boot.

Chartsengrafs 12/10/08 - You're a tool, so

This week I don't really have a chance to listen as I would like, and more exciting stuff is happening next week anyway. So I'm turning this item over to the fine people of SongMeanings to provide some great insight into what all these songs really mean.

Still at number 1 for a second week is P!nk. 'I think she has to realize she's so much more than just a rockstar, so much more than the things she does'. Kings of Leon are still at 2 with "Sex on Fire". 'lol it's about condoms'. Sugababes climb up to 3 behind them. The only one on that is 'The more i listen to this song the more i luv it', which is one fewer entry than your average Emmy the Great demo has. I think I may have stumbled upon a problem with this tactic. Damn. The top 5 is finished off by Rihanna ('i think that maybe this song was up against "rehab" the lyrics are kind of similar. could be why it didn't make the album?') and a downloads only Kaiser Chiefs - 'hes paying out the kids who dont go to school because they think that it's uncool. and that they get up to crazy shananigans.'

Snow Patrol's "Take Back the City" is also in at 15 ahead of full release next week. 'I think the city is metaphor for a relationship'. Of course. Jordin Sparks off American Idol gets back into the chart at 30 with "Tattoo", and attracts some scorn. 'This song is a bullshit song for them to leave guys. Okay, so she loves him, she wants him, she can never replace him, she wants to be with him, she needs him. But she leaves him because...of..."other things". Um...yeah, that's called a bullshit excuse'.

MGMT sneak their way up to 35 and 'Neeeeeeeed Treeeee's - subliminal message maby'. Oh and The Courteeners have got in just below them. 'liam said it's about campbell, cos he kissed a girl and he liked it and never saw her again'. Well, that didn't go so well.

In the album chart my anti-Oasis hopes don't really prove founded as Dig Your Own Up Your Soul hits the top with the usual 200,000+ sales. Bob Dylan is the other new entry in the top ten, Mercury-boosted Elbow continue to hold firm at 12, Chicane's best of is at 16 (possibly a triumph for not releasing their new single properly any other way?) and You Meat Six (well, that's how I read their album cover) and The Clash live are also in there somewhere.

Are we having the time of our lives?

Elbow at Camden Roundhouse, 11/10/08

Jesca Hoop initially gains a crowd silence almost unprecendented for an unknown acoustic support act, but it's probably mainly due to the singer of tonight's headliners putting in a (quiet) word before hand. Mr. Garvey also comes out to duet with her for a song, but it's not so easy to see what he sees in her as on record.

Her songs are fascinatingly snaking things, never repeating a melody or lyrical phrase when they can take a new twist instead. But they are also too abstract to really get a grip on when supported by only an acoustic guitar and gradually start to merge into one.



I have talked about seeing Elbow in a 'what more is there to say now?' type way the previous/10th time that I saw them.

Well forget that, because tonight is defintiely different, and produces something special and rare. The first of 3 (three!) sold out shows at the Roundhouse opens with the blinding romantic fanfare of "Starlings" and a beats-heavy "The Bones of You". And then Guy Garvey stops to ask if we are ok, and just can't wait to tell us how happy Elbow are. 'Some very good things have happened to us in the past few months. I won't say any more because I don't want to be smug'. Cheers and grins all round, and the beginning of an delightfully celebratory night.

He goes back on that intention numerous times, but the most notable is when he stops before "Mexican Standoff" to happily point out: 'It just occurred to me. This sold out before we won the Mercury prize'. Massive cheers. That's it. This feels like a turning point, a lenghty, heartfelt thank you to everyone who believed in them all along, from a band who now justifiably completely believe in themselves and are ready to embrace newcomers and the Wembley Arenas of this world. No one here begrudges them that, because it's how we've felt that things should be all along, and because they've made no compromises to get there and are in some ways better than ever. Certainly no one begrudges them playing eight out of eleven songs from The Seldom Seen Kid.

It's the first time I've seen them do "Some Riot", and it's breathtaking, pared down to deeply menacing strings and raw anger no less vital than "Coming Second" of years ago. Then there's "Weather to Fly", a warm little song about the potential of bands. It's begun acoustically with all five gathered in a huddle, hugging on the way. 'One little room and the biggest of plans' it says tonight, and look, look how those plans finally paid off! "One Day Like This" as the party finale completely makes sense after that cynicism destroying number, freed from highlights-reel soundtracking by force of singing, balloons and confetti everywhere.

For the encore? A rare and heartbreaking "Scattered Blacks and Whites", and before that "Station Approach", dedicated to their mums. It's that sort of night.

(thanks to A for bizarre cameraphone photo! Some more photos here)

I could just have first album syndrome

Given that I can’t find a video from The Research’s new album on YouTube at all, alongside its long gestation and their exit from EMI, I may be kicking a band while they’re down a little here.

I have to say, though, that I can’t remember the last time I was as nonplussed by a band’s new album as The Old Terminal. Plenty take their questionable turns (see Guillemots’ Red for a recent example) but none manage to so thoroughly and deliberately remove everything that previously made them stand out.

Breaking Up had songs, sure – no way it have could been so good without – but it was also a total triumph for a consistent, clever aesthetic that fitted exactly right. Its cheap keyboards, wobbly harmonies and miniature songs turned their weaknesses into strengths, lending an enormous immediacy that felt as if what Russell or Georgia were singing in their thin voices was too important to wait for anything more substantial. And when they sung of fragile relationships or lives that could fall apart at any moment you believed it because they sounded like they could, too.

So I go to listen to the new one and the first song goes from a familiar keyboard hum to a slowly strummed acoustic guitar, which over a drawn out build up is joined by a decently played electric and drums and strings. I presume that it’s a bit of a ‘look what we can do now’. No-one wants to be boxed into that small an identity after all. And it’s definitely The Research. Look at the references to Piney Gir and all. Except, of course, that it’s not a one off but a sign of what’s to come. Every song is just as competent and layered and sounds like it could be by any number of different bands. Russell is now the only singer for the vast majority. All bar two are longer than three minutes even!

Which is not even to say that they are bad as such, cos their songwriting ability has not deserted them and there’s some great touches in there, especially in “All My Love” which has the best sadly wheezing brass since early Badly Drawn Boy. Just that the spectre of individuality lost hangs over The Old Terminal to such an extent that it would surely be better to listen without having ever heard them before.

Chartsengrafs 05/10/08 - Waiter just took my table

Getting a number one single is a major achievement, however it feels otherwise at times. More than one, even more so. And a whole string of them? Well! Still, though, there are some chart certainties over the last 10+ years. The first single from a new Madonna album will go to number one (unless it's "American Life"). The first single from a new U2 album will go to number one (unless it's "Stay"). And the first single from a new Oasis album will go to number one...

...unless it's "The Shock of the Lightning". In fact, their new one can only make it as far as 3, behind Kings of Leon at number 2 in their fourth week. Which may quite neatly answer where all those previously reliable Oasis fans have gone. The signs have been there for a while - look at last year's ignored one off single barely making the top ten - but this is still quite a big deal. If this is not a one off exception like the above then, regardless of the actual quality of the song (better than "The Hindu Times", worse than "Lyla", which is an extremely narrow gap in which to fit), signs that the drudgery of their dominance and influence over the rock scene may be finally be coming to an end have to be welcomed.

So, what of the actual top song of the week? It's "So What" by P!nk, who has managed a slow but impressive turnaround after seeming to blow it completely with third album Try This and it's rubbish singles "Trouble" and "God is a DJ". Sadly while it has the usual rock hooks and gloss, she's taken the success of "Stupid Girls" as a sign that it's great to be super mad zany!! and meta and to insert references to the press and , oh my god, Jessica Simpson! How 'contraversial'! That's before we even get onto the video, which is a whole lot worse.

Sugababes climb to 4, poised for a full on assault of the top next week, and Boyzone are somehow at 5. It's going to take years for everyone to realise that the Take That thing was a complete one off reliant on the fact that their new songs were miraculously quite good, isn't it?
Almost nothing else happening in the top twenty bar Platnum brining bassline in right at the bottom. "Love Lockdown" makes an almost apologetic fall from 16 to 18 and "Paper Planes" seems to have peaked as it slips to 21. At least Faith Hill follows it out.

What else? Erm, Kings of Leons' second entry stays firm at 29, Biffy Clyro's horrible "Mountains" has now been around for seven weeks, N-Dubz and MGMT sneak in at 37 and 39 and Gabriella Cilmi's "Sweet About Me", probably the third best song to have come out of the whole Winehouse-Duffy-etc. thing is for some reason back in again at 38.

In the albums Kings of Leon are unsurprisingly still at the top. Could they possibly hold Oasis off next week? Surely not?
Will Young gets a things-aren't-so-bad-after-all 2, James Morrison picks up anyone who bought his album and still had a tenner spare just behind at 3, and Andrew Johnson at 4 briefly had me thinking on my first scan through that Antony Hegarty had managed a top five album. Seasick Steve's I Started Out With Nothing, and I've Still Got Most of it Left reaches 9, possibly on the strength of that title alone.

Further down it continues to be a long way to fall for Travis, who nine years on from Coldplay-like album chart/festival dominance find their new album entering at 20. That's one place ahead of Ironik, but three behind Trivium and one behind the Jonas Brothers.

Short stories

Jessica Popper calls Hello Saferide's Annika Norlin her 'favourite lyricist in the world'. After a week and a bit of getting to know More Modern Short Stories From Hello Saferide, I think she may have a point.

Musically, the second album by the self-proclaimed country singer reminds me repeatedly of Travis' The Invisible Band. Simple, inobstrusive arrangements, guitar sounds produced to sound big and warm (in a really good way) and sporadic inspired touches, especially the big number with strings at the end. The real difference, and why the not completely flattering comparison point is unimportant, is that everything else in her songs just there to support the words within.

I can even prove it pseudo-scientifically, since unusually there's actually a control sample to test against. Säkert! features all of the above but, since I don't speak Swedish, effectively no lyrical goodness. And as a result I've barely listened to the thing since getting it in a desire to seek out everything she'd recorded.

"I Wonder Who is Like This One" sets the stall, spinning the observation that 'people are like songs' into an incredibly sweet and witty story of how love doesn't quite live up to The Beach Boys. The same intelligence and emotional honesty shines through every song alongside an amazing observational eye for how and why people act how they do. "Overall"'s skewering of the sensibilities of over-anxious middle class parents and "Travelling With HS"' admission of inability to relate to other people are both perfect, among many others. There's not many single lines of amazing poetry to quote, but the combined effect is brilliant.

"Parenting Never Ends" catches that nagging feeling on becoming an adult that you aren't quite ready yet and are stringing everyone along - 'People give me work and money/They depend on me now/If they only knew how thin the ice they walk on is'. As it takes its wish to return to simpler times to an illogical and culminates in requesting to rerurn to her mother's uterus, it also sets up one of the a
smartest bits of sequencing in ages. As its reverie gets cut off by the opening chords of "Anna", one of the more straightforward songs, whose child never born ending is obvious from the start, is lent a big dose of added poignancy by the contrast.

The fact that so much of her work is grounded in the ordinary means there's a contrast to be made with the increasingly popular Kate Nash 'I use mouthwash/Sometimes I floss/I’ve got a family/And I drink cups of tea' school of lyrical banality. The idea somehow gaining in popularity that songs referencing everyday things for the sake of everyday things is inherently a good thing. The idea that millions of people out there who also drink cups of tea will be deeply touched by the fact that someone is just the same as them, and has said so, in song!

When Annika gets to specifics of the mundane, on "X Telling Me About the Loss of Something Dear, at Age 16", when the song's character is at work at a shoe shop after her regretted first experience of sex and she sings 'Do you want those in red, I said/Two fifty with laces, I said' it's to hammer home that she vividly remembers every moment of the unfairness of normal life having to carry on. It doesn't matter that I've never been in remotely the same situation because the ability to relate to eloquently expressed emotions completely transcends where those emotions come from. Sort of an obvious lesson but it would still be great if it was more widely realised.

JoFo in Soho

Johnny Foreigner at Madame JoJo's, 30/09/08

First of all, despite their name and hearing positive things about them in all the right places, I don't really get Dananananaykroyd, and seeing them did nothing to change that. Their levels of energy were pretty amazing and a couple of songs that locked into a noise section and then pushed and pushed it (twin drummers and all), persisting way past expectations, impressed. That was brief though and left looong sections where none of the multitude of ideas presented connected at all, not helped by frankly baffling between song banter. Perhaps if I'd been down at the front among the hug-outs I would have understood better?

Johnny Foreigner I definitely do get, in that their debut Waited Up Til it Was Light is one of my favourite albums of the year. I love its thrilling combination of Los Campesinos!-esque spiky boy/girl indie pop with twisty guitar noises straight from early Idlewild, and the way they their songs each hurtle through a vast maze of interconnecting ideas and hooks. Thing is that despite listening to the album a great deal, if you ask me what much of it means, or what most of the lyrics actually are, I'll be a bit stuck. In fact, ask me to even name half its songs on hearing, and I'll be a bit stuck. So I might not be best placed to talk about their show in a particularly authoritative way.

This fact made me stand out almost as much as my friend who had never heard of them, becuase Madame JoJo's was packed with fans prepped for every moment. A lot of people who on being told that "Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes" was next could produce its opening 'baba bababababa!' with no further prompting rather than scrambling to catch up. Who could be relied on to fill in lyrical gaps in non-album tracks as well as to catch crowdsurfing singer Alexei at the close. This is a band already inspiring remarkable loyalty, clearly.

The resultant atmosphere definitely helped the band but it's not hard to see why they've reached such a position. Some of the finer detail and dynamism of album versions was lost as songs become uniformly faster, louder, scrappier, but it was worth it for the power added, for the sight of Alexei wrestling every out there sound from his guitar and Kelly and him joyfully trading alternating lines and even words across stage. When they did they sometimes even resembled a beefed up version of The Delgados circa Domestiques, which can only be a good thing. And though fantastic current single "Salt, Pepa and Spinderella" no longer started in as itchy a state of suspense as on record, they raced through it to 'turn on the real drums!' and lit up the room more forcefully than I'd dreamed possible.

They even managed to keep the momentum going through ever lengthening gaps between songs as they fought technical problems and Alexei's admission that he is too unfit to play without gaps 'like a proper band'. New songs were as intruiging and exciting as old and seemingly everyone went away with a smile on their face. Even the people who repeatedly shouted for "Sometimes, in the Bullring" and didn't get it. At least I think they didn't.

Chartsengrafs 29/09/08 - Head while I'm driving

I missed last week, but honestly not much happened anyway. Kings of Leon presumably continue to baffle onlookers from their own country, having extended "Sex on Fire"'s run at the top to three weeks and added a fairly massive selling number one album. Oh and (next single?) "Use Somebody" is in at 29 too. I must have heard it as I heard the whole album at the weekend, but don't really remember much past general professional likableness.

"Disturbia"'s long life on music TV channels allows Rihanna to reach a peak at 3 after twelve weeks, at the expense of Pussycat Dolls. Biggest climber near the top is Iglu & Hartley, up to 5 and a total mess in far too knowing a way, like they thought for a long time about being this lazy.

James Morrison is 6 (bad luck, Scottish international footballer James Morrison), although "You Make It Real" is still behind "You Give Me Something" for top YouTube result on him. About right since it is basically the same song, except with added slickness. Which is about twentieth on the list of attributes that it needed more of. I never got "About You Now" as anything other than good but too safe, and "Girls" at 8 definitely isn't that, whacking great well known sample nonwithstanding. But they seem to run out of song just as they get into their stride, with that sample just taking up way too much space for how much at adds to the song. The top ten closes out with evidence of the horrors of a downloads based chart as someone singing Faith Hill's sub-Dion "There You'll Be" on The X Factor is enough to return it.

Will Young stalls at 13, down from a mere 10 last week. A shame because "Changes" is the first thing that I unreservedly like so far, doing a good job of easygoing soul with its strings and falsetto deployed for an actual reason beyong usually being in this kind of thing. You can't record an album as fanbase-losing as his last one, go away for years and only come back with this amd expect them to come back though. At 16, Kanye West's continuing bid to be the biggest pop star ever gives us "Love Lockdown"! I have read much but not listened to it til writing this so don't know any comparisons with live versions or uninished versions or whatever, and the first thing is to be a bit surprised by just how bare it is. Second thing, those drums! The autotuned vocals do leave a bit of a feeling of just hanging in there, waiting for the drums and bass to kick back in, but it's worth it. "Paper Planes" glides into the top twenty at 19 and is still on it's way up, maybe? Is Pineapple Express actually out yet? Don't know my films I don't care about very well.

At 26... OK, I know there's Bond traditions to uphold, but "Another Way to Die"? Could you get any more generic a title? Surely Jack White could have managed a "Quantum of Solace", and if he couldn't then Muse probably already wrote one. The intro to the song almost singlehandedly redeems it though, throwing all the best recognisable bits of White Stripes and Bond together and implausibly making it stick. The piano's good too, shame that Jack and Alicia shouting at each other seems such an afterthought.

At the bottom of the top forty there's two (??) entries by Jonas Brothers, still taking the McFly model, diluting it down and then selling it back to us. Plus all that purity stuff of course. Hopefully it won't get any further than this but I'm not optimistic. Ditto for DJ Ironik's follow up single at 35. Pink is at 38, we'll talk about that a lot more next week. And Elbow's "One Day Like This", having taken a week's break, pops back up at 39 just in time to get in the way of the release of its follow up.

In the albums, beyond the aforementioned Kings of Leon, there's entries in the top ten for Pussycat Dolls (with a large number of songs that were meant to be on Nicole's ill-fated solo album, apparently), Bette Midler (ah, Strictly Come Dancing, so much to anwer for), McFly (inconclusive as to whether a mere 8 is due to giving it away for free with the Daily Mail, their fanbase deserting them, or both) and Dave Gilmour. Live in Gdansk!
Katy Perry appearing on albums-oriented Later (watch and note Pete and Guy of Elbow nodding along politely) isn't enough to get her beyond 11.