Music vid: The Walkmen - While I Shovel The Snow

No band does "wintry" better than The Walkmen. This is a band, after all, which has written songs called In The New Year, No Christmas While I'm Talking and The North Pole. And Lisbon, another superb outing from the New Yorkers, features another seasonal offering with While I Shovel The Snow and this video.

Review: Radiohead - The King Of Limbs

Radiohead albums; one week you're wondering just when the next one might come along, the following week it's sitting on your laptop. Following 2007's In Rainbows, Radiohead have trumped convention once more with The King Of Limbs; touted as (probably) the "World's First Newspaper Album", and to be released its full grandiose form on May 9 (including, amongst other things, two ten-inch vinyls and 625 pieces of tiny artwork), the album arrived in digital form last Friday with no prior fanfare or warning. But have the band, as with In Rainbows, pulled another rabbit out of the hat, or is The King Of Limbs merely smoke and mirrors?

On first listen, The King Of Limbs sounds both instantly familiar and yet subtly different to prior Radiohead albums; more a reconfiguration of past sounds than a step into the new, TKOL is a neat amalgamation of the past decade's work, pitting the skittish electronics and beats of Amnesiac and even Thom Yorke's  solo outing The Eraser against the warmer textures of In Rainbows. At a time where praise and admiration has been heaped, overzealously perhaps, on James Blake's dubstep-meets-soul, the dubstep influenced sound of TKOL, particularly during it's first half, proves a shrewd decision; Feral, with its cut-and-paste vocals, glitchy beats and restlessly shifting dynamics is particularly effective. The first minute of opener Bloom's complex cyclic drum patterns, tinkling piano and wobbly electronic bleeps feel disconnected at first, but the introduction of Yorke's vocals see these seemingly disparate elements meld together in wonderful fashion. Whether you're listening through a hi-fi or a pair of headphones, TKOL yields different rewards; the former reveals the satisfying room-shaking levels of bass on songs like Morning Mr Magpie whilst the disorientating shrouded vocals on Feral are surely best heard on the latter.

Of course, even Radiohead's more difficult albums have featured moments of almost unparalleled beauty,but on the second half of TKOL, the band may have excelled themselves. Codex is one of those weighty piano ballads which they seem to do so well, made all the more poigniant by molten waves of horns which shimmer under its surface; surely another Pyramid Song in the making? Give Up The Ghost is even lovlier, floating Yorke's haunting vocals over a warm campfire beat and acoustic guitar, before dissolving into the mist. Closing track Separator reprises the circular drum patterns of the album's first half, but allows Johnny Greenwood's guitar to lap gently and lovingly around the track's core.

More experimental than In Rainbows, but better executed than the likes of Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief, The King Of Limbs slots very neatly into the Radiohead canon. Having waited over three years for a new Radiohead release, some might feel short-changed by TKOL's mere eight tracks and 37-minute running time. But for the second time in a row, Radiohead have dropped upon us a fully cohesive album of front-to-back excellence.

87/100

Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel) to curate December ATP!

Crikey! If he carries on like this, everyone will have to drop the "recluse" tag. Not content with just playing a special set at the New Jersey leg of the Portishead-curated I'll Be Your Mirror festival, Jeff Mangum is now curating an entire ATP Festival at Butlins, Minehead during 2nd-4th December! Tickets go on sale this friday from the ATP website. The Neutral Milk Hotel legend will be playing a headlining set, and has already enlisted the following (with much more to come):

JEFF MANGUM (from Neutral Milk Hotel)
SUPERCHUNK
THE OLIVIA TREMOR CONTROL
YOUNG MARBLE GIANTS
THE MAGIC BAND
THE RAINCOATS performing The Raincoats (debut LP)
A HAWK AND A HACKSAW
TINARIWEN
THE APPLES IN STEREO

Looks like it could potentially evolve into an Elephant Six-orgy; surely Mangum won't pass the chance to join OTC on stage? If that's not enough, Mangum is also doing a run of shows across North America in the months leading up to ATP. For those of us without the cash to spare, here's praying he'll do a couple of UK dates around the time of ATP.

New Radiohead Album The King Of Limbs available THIS Saturday

Radiohead have trumped convention yet again with the announcement of their new record The King Of Limbs. Described as the "World's First Newspaper Album", it can pre-ordered now from this website; the digital form becomes available to download on Saturday 19th, whilst the physical copy will be shipped on the 9th May and will comprise:

• Two clear 10" vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve.
• A compact disc.
• Many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.
• Shipping is included in the prices shown.
• One lucky owner of the digital version of The King Of Limbs, purchased from the website, will receive a signed 2 track 12" vinyl.

The full Newspaper album package (including the MP3 digital version) is priced at £30; the digital version can be upgraded to WAV form for an extra £3. For those who prefer functionality over collectability, the digital version can be purchased alone in 320kbps MP3 or WAV form for £6 and £9 respectively.

Exciting news indeed, and after In Rainbows we can fully expect an album with the substance to match its genius premise.

New Gang Gang Dance album on the way

Saint Dymphna, the 2008 album from NY-based tropical experimentalists Gang Gang Dance was one of the most dazzling albums of the last decade. Seamlessly tying together post-punk, dubstep, grime and even 80's pop with worldly beats and complex rhythms, it's hard to think of an album in recent times which covered more sonic ground whilst sounding utterly cohesive. Not to mention one which got you listening to Tinchy Stryder.

And this year they're back with a new album Eye Contact, their first LP on the venerable 4AD label. Pencilled in for a UK release on May 9th, it ties in perfectly with their appearance just a few days later at the Animal Collective-compiled ATP festival in Minehead.

Here's a reminder on why Florence saw fit to steal from them:

Forthcoming Releases - February 2011

After a solid opening month to the year, February has it's fair share of high-profile releases. PJ Harvey returns with Let England Shake, whilst Mogwai stake their claim to Album Title Of The Year with seventh LP Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will. Then there's the matter of that debut LP from part dubstep maestro/part crooner James Blake, hot off the heels of last year's varied set of EPs. The jury is already out on whether this one lives up to the hype.

07/02

Akron/Family: S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT (Dead Oceans)

Earth, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 (Southern Lord)

James Blake: James Blake (R&S)

14/02

Asobi Seksu: Fluorescence (Polyvinyl)

Bright Eyes: The People's Key (Saddle Creek)

Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will (Rock Action)

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake (Island)

Yuck: Yuck (Fat Possum)

  

21/02

Six Organs of Admittance: Asleep on the Floodplain (Drag City)

28/02

Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes (LL)

The Rural Alberta Advantage: Departing (Paper Bag)

Gig Review: Wire @ The Scala, 2nd Feb

On asking a Wire veteran what Wire were like as a live band, he answered with one word: "Awkward". This was my first live experience of the evergreen post-punkers, but I knew enough to appreciate how accurate that summation was; Wire gained a reputation of always being one step ahead of their audience, shunning older or even current material in favour of songs they hadn't even recorded. My hopes of hearing I Am The Fly, which were already slender at best, now hung by the weakest of threads.

But the Wire of 2011 seem a little more willing to please. Last month's concise and pretty damn catchy Red Barked Tree is as ideal an entry point as you're likely to find into the Wire canon, and tonight they were willing to mix up a host of tracks from their new LP with material from across the ages. It took six or seven songs for things to really ignite - in the early going, the band both looked and sounded their age (with the exception of touring guitarist Matt Sims, who had a very unfair monopoly on hair) - but after those tentative early songs, the band roared into life, those chugging chords roaring through the venue. The new songs sat very well alongside the likes of Two Men In A Room, Spent and Pink Flag, Moreover rocking particularly hard during the ferocious mid-section of the set. There were moments of dry humour too, with bassist Graham Lewis apologising for the "excessive soloing" after unleashing a chunky bass riff all over set highlight Boiling Boy. And whilst that performance of I Am The Fly never did materialise, the band did at least admit to being "accused of copying themselves" before playing Clay which, it has been noted, sounds just a bit like I Am The Fly.

Credit too must also go to the outstanding Belgian support-act Madensuyu who seriously threatened to steal Wire's thunder on the night (and may continue to do so, as Wire's support act for the remainder of the tour). Comprising just of guitarist and drummer (with some eerie vocal harmonising between the two), their tense set combined Fugazi intensity with clanging Sonic Youth chords and post-rock progressions to magnificent effect. One power duo may have called it a day this week, but here is another one well worth cherishing.

Review: Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs Evil

Despite their instantly recognisible and inimitable sound, Deerhoof have always found a way to evolve with each release. But on 2008's Offend Maggie it felt for the first time like they were stagnating; perhaps it was to ease new guitarist Ed Rodriguez into the fold, but after the expansive textures of 2007's Friend Opportunity, Offend Maggie seemed like a retreat to the more straight-faced guitar-orientated rock of their 2005 magnum opus The Runners Four. Not that Offend Maggie was anything less than an excellent record, it just felt like an unexpected about-face after Friend Opportunity had presented so many possibilities.

Now that Rodriguez seems fully integrated into the band (as exhibited by their tremendously fun live shows), tenth record Deerhoof vs Evil sees the band's creative cogs in full motion once more. Following on from the three most accessible records of the band's career, Deerhoof vs Evil is as schizoid as anything they've done in recent memory; even a song as irrepressible as Super Duper Rescue Heads! can't help but descend into chaos in its final twenty seconds. The galavanting instrumental Let's Dance The Jet, with its scorched organ and gnashing guitar riff, is about as straightforward as it gets on this album, and even that's a bizzare cover version from some Greek film soundtrack.

That should give some indication of the range of ideas going on in Deerhoof vs Evil. The ear-popping opener Qui Dorm, Només Somia is awash with dubby blips and guitars and sung entirely in Spanish, whilst the fluid flamenco guitars on Noone Asked Me To Dance provide the perfect backdrop for Satomi Matsuzaki's feather-weight vocals. The Merry Barracks lurches from side to side with a five-note motif that cascades from speaker to speaker over the kind of snorting blues riff Jack White would be proud of. Then there's the disorientating tropical swirl of Must Fight Current in which Satomi threatens "I'm going to sue you" whilst guitarist John Dieterich mutters eerily in the background. And that's all within the album's first seven songs.

One glance at the lyric sheet will, as ever, cause considerable bemusement; Satomi opens Secret Mobilization by informing us "this is not based on a true story", as if the tales on this album could have any semblance of reality. The "evil" implied by the album's title might be gauged by the goings-on in I Did Crimes For You; over a procession of handclaps and ominous keyboards, Satomi monotonically tells us "this is a stick-up / smash the windows" in what sounds like the most perverse hold-up since the opening scene of The Dark Knight.

Things peter off in the album's latter third - Hey I Can is Deerhoof-by-numbers and the tuneless C'moon never gets off the ground - leaving vs Evil just shy of  top-drawer Deerhoof. But the album is confirmation if necessary that ten albums in, Deerhoof's ability to confound and surprise remains undiminished.

82/100

Listen to the Esben & The Witch debut here!

Violet Cries, the debut record from hotly tipped Brighton trio Esben & The Witch comes out on Matador Records next Monday, but you can listen to it in full here. It's a bit of a stonker too; hyped-british-band-in-actually-rather-good album shocker!

Review: Gang Of Four - Content

Keep It Like A Secret circa 2011 is beginning to read like it's 1979 again. Just two weeks after Wire's rather fine Red Barked Tree comes Content, Gang of Four's first album of new material since 1995's Shrinkwrapped. The album title - which refers to the role of TV scheduling as a filler for the space between advertising - certainly befits the band that released the seminal Entertainment! And on the face of it, this sounds like the same band too; Andy Gill still fires metallic shards from his guitar, the dub-funk basslines (now courtesy of Thomas McNeice in place of Dave Allen) are present and correct, and Jon King still seems like a man with something to say.

And yet right from the first track, things just don't feel quite right. The nervous energy that seethes through She Said "You Made A Thing Of Me" feels forced; over a reverberating guitar line and a pulsing rhythm, King's overly desperate vocals sound like someone trying to prove something to himself, namely whether he can justify Gang Of Four's continued existence. And so it goes for Content in general, it's a little short of, well, content; the outer shell of GoF is there but the essence of the band is conspicuously absent (the band did always say that  "essence" was rare, after all).

With the best of GoF's work, Gill's jarring guitar lines and syncopations dictated the band's jerking and oddly danceable rhythms. The same applies to Content, on the pounding stomps of You Don't Have To Be Mad and You'll Never Pay For the Farm, or the reflective A Fruitfly In The Beehive. But all too often, Gill's fretwork feels like a signature piece, consigning him to rip it up in the opening seconds of a song, before new-boys McNeice and drummer Mark Heaney lay down a beat that never goes beyond serviceable. Somewhere far away, ousted drummer Hugo Burnham must be laughing away to himself.

On my review of Wire's Red Barked Tree, I remarked on how in touch Wire were with their former selves. In hindsight, I may have underestimated just what an asset that is to a band of such venerability.  The album is blighted by its laboured production - for all its apparent bluster and energy, the final product is oddly subdued - but even taking that aside, Content is the sound of a band desperately trying to rediscover  themselves. Does Content justify Gang of Four's existence? Just about; it's not a bad album by any means, better even than many might have expected after all these years. But equally, it's difficult to see just where the band go from here.

60/100