Review: Massive Attack – Heligoland
Their last real album was released seven long years ago, so the hype you can slice with a knife that has been surrounding Massive Attack’s latest offering since the 6 months prior to its release is understandable.
Is it?
Is it, really?
Let’s face it: Massive Attack are never gong to be able to pull another Mezzanine or another Blue Lines. However the longer the gap between successive albums, the more the ‘OH MY GOD it’s going to be EPIC’ mentality sets in and that is the worst mentality that can be cultivated, because it is inevitably going to end in disappoint especially when the epic-est albums are long gone and untouched.
And Heligoland is by no means a bad album. It sounds just like Massive Attack and Massive Attack just sounds like 1996 and as a result Heligoland, despite the multitude of collaborators adorning its tracks, comes across looking a little out of its depth. A little old-fashioned. A little quaint.
Don’t get me wrong – ‘Pray for Rain’ is a great track, probably the best on the album. But Heligoland tries so hard to be Mezzanine and it’s not going to be Mezzanine. What made Mezzanine so good was how it was so DIFFERENT from whatever was around at the time. It was even different from Blue Lines. But here you have the single – ‘Splitting the Atom’ – which is an extension of the last thirty seconds of ‘Exchange’. ‘Girl I Love You’ has already been equated with ‘Angel’ on numerous unrelated reviews – a stance I strove to disagree with, but the resemblance stares you in the face when it comes on, even before you know what song is playing. The album itself sounds a little bit blasé – a bit “Yeah, we’re Massive Attack, we make pretty sounds and we can get Damon Albarn and Mazzy Star to sing over them for us.” To be fair, ‘Paradise Circus’ is probably the most contemporarily relevant song on the album and it also rather good.
Something happens when ‘Rush Minute’ kicks in and Robert Del Naja’s all too familiar voice shows up. You wonder why Massive Attack even bother with collabs, or why said collabs have to be such a big deal when there’s a perfectly decent set of pipes already in the band – one way more characteristic of a resurrection than all the Mazzys and Damons would ever be.
It’s a pretty cool story, though, the one about how Heligoland artwork isn’t allowed to be displayed down in the London Underground because it looks too much like graffiti – or ‘street art’ as the politically correct term goes, the one that they then proceed to outlaw. Anyway, summarising the album itself – it’s good, but it’s outdated.
Review: Yeasayer – Odd Blood
By now you must’ve/should’ve heard Yeasayer’s ubiquitious ‘Ambling Alp’ single and/or been to its acid trip of a website. If not, my gosh, get out from under that rock and find it for it is the song to counter all the self-pitying, martyred, wallowing-in-pools-of-their-own-pathetic-misery songs out there – and there are a lot. Speaking with an admirable amount of patient sympathy Chris Keating tells us wisely ‘the world can be an unfair place at times’ and ‘but your lows will have their complement of highs’ before empowering you with the sagest advice of the lot: “if anyone should cheat you, take advantage of, or beat you, raise your head and wear your wounds with pride” – suck it, Radiohead.
Opener ‘The Children’ is possibly the biggest (only?) anomaly on the entire album. You brace yourself for an album laden with similar neo-Daft Punk, Technologicky vocals, but it never arrives. Odd Blood is an album that is so blatantly attractive that it’s nearly a guilty pleasure with its undisguised poppishness. This is an album that has songs you can DANCE to – There are not many non-mainstream bands whose music requires such restraint to keep oneself from flailing one’s limbs. Several are, in fact, of the self-pitying, martyred variant and to dance to someone’s woes is just cruel. And frequently impossible.
‘Madder Red’ has a Spectacularly Oracular opening, if you get my drift (of course you do). Suddenly the fact that Yeasayer’s toured with MGMT doesn’t seem as inconsistent as it initially did, for it appears that one is merely an rockier version of the other. ‘Madder Red’, like ‘Ambling Alp’ before it, is semi-anthemic with its harmonies, its unisonly voices and its incessantly pounding beat.
‘I Remember’ and ‘O.N.E.’ have the same synths that characterise almost all of Memory Tapes’ work. In the case of O.N.E., I can even trace the track on which first I heard them – ‘Graphics’. Now the two releases are way too close for me to make a call re: influence, BUT I must point this out. ‘I Remember’ is worryingly mundane compared to the songs preceding and following it. Meanwhile, ‘O.N.E.’, is a fantastically catchy track reminiscent of some of the most stereotypical R ‘n’ B and pop the 90s had to offer. It’s also got a chorus that to the listener is a blatant untruth – ‘no – you don’t move me anymore’ – what? I can barely type as I struggle to stay rooted to my seat. Must. Dance. MUST! – it even has a Michael Jackson inspired close. There’s more Memory Tapes meets MJ on ‘Love Me Girl’ – more crazily infectious tunes, more uncontrollable chair bouncing that carries on to and through ‘Rome’ before appearing to lose its way and skid off course somewhere around Mondegreen which bases itself entirely upon the opening ‘schwing-schwing’ of ‘Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth’. The breathless ‘everybody’s talking about me and my baybeh’ chorus is catchy, no doubt, but there’s something a bit off about the way the song is pieced together, the way it’s so full of stuff and the way the ending seems unnecessarily drawn out. It stays faithful to the slightly abashed poppiness of the rest of the album yet doesn’t manage to come together quite as seamlessly as the rest of the tracks.
Nonetheless, Odd Blood is a pleasantly promising start to the new year. An honestly, carelessly enjoyable album only slightly dampened by a couple of tracks towards the end. Nothing a replay of Ambling Alp & Co. can’t fix in an eye-blink of an instant.
Review: Cymbals Eat Guitar – Why There Are Mountains
WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-WHOA-OO-OH! – the delightfully manic-depressive ‘…And The Hazy Sea’ grabs you by your hair and slams your face into ‘Why There Are Mountains.’ ENTIRELY unpredictable it yells at you, gently explains matters, yells at you again, consoles you, drifts into thoughtful silence and, while you rightfully shiver in your corner, then lets out a final frustrated scream in your direction before skulking away.
This barely-out-of-teens Brooklyn quartet must be aware of their own skills, as they released their debut album independently of any evil record label. Their confidence is not misplaced but then again, if you’d had The Wrens’ Charles Bissel giving you guitar lessons and recording your demos, you’d probably be pretty smug youself.
Cymbals Eat Guitars have a sound that is essentially a more elaborately conceived version of Pavement’s, to which they add a (what would usually be seen as) incongruous mixer in the form of a markedly Shields-ian drone. A sound you get a taste of in the opening of ‘Indiana’, and one that is shoved down your throat on ‘Share’ which incorporates both Loveless-era MBV as well as the more jangle-pop stylings that characterised their early years. As similarly epic as ‘…And The Hazy Sea’, ‘Share’ is quite the masterpiece as it manages to smoothly integrate, of all things, a horn section and a distorted hair-metal guitar squeal, as if these were the most natural things on earth to accompany the equally natural Pavement/MBV hybrid.
They branch away slightly from overbearing drone on Wind Phoenix veering more in the direction of perky, chime-laden indie-pop and oh, so much Malkmus. Wait, did I say indie-pop? I’d like to take that back. As hook-laden as the vocals are, there’s nothing ‘pop’ about the discordant cacophony that explodes in the midst of the song before peacefully subsiding and picking up the initial indie-pop thread where it had left off and then carrying on as if nothing had happened. It’s like having your day interrupted by the apocalypse and finding it to be nothing more than a minor distraction in the course of your usual routine. Cymbals Eat Guitars are impressively sure of themselves and with a sound as this polished and professional, you wonder if the reason they remain liberated of a label is because they simply haven’t been snapped up or because they’re earning themselves some indie cred.
Review: King Kong Ding Dong – Youth Culture Index
‘Youth Culture Index’ is an album by a band that is, aptly, yes – aptly named King Kong Ding Dong. If I were to get all intense and analytical about it, I’d break down for your convenience exactly how the ‘King Kong’ bit is symbolic of the powerful tribal (is there a more PC-term one could use?) underline that propels itself through the entire album while the ‘Ding Dong’ is a nod in the Philadelphian direction of bandmembers Ben Daniels and Josh Meakim, both of whom also belong to eerie-echo-loving A Sunny Day In Glasgow.
Well, what else could that name possibly mean?
(Step. Away. From Urban Dictionary)
Thankfully it can be condensed to the more mature sounding and keyboard-considerate KKDD. KKDD make music that is predominantly instrumental. Or, to be more accurate, music that is lyrically sparse. ‘Youth Culture Index’ is very – rainforesty. It’s a litle bit Tarzanian. The album appears to unfold in a moist, leafy clearing in an African jungle. The first song’s name is Jample. What does Jample mean? I have no idea, but it certainly sounds right. The song creaks the album open and subsequently launches itself with a backdrop of periodic high-pitched ‘hmm’s set against a rough, muddy guitar riff. There are some plodding African drums (way to perpetuate a stereotype, eh?) before a soaring, semi-wailing, indecipherable – because it’s no language I know – vocal shows up. The theme of the album soon shows itself to be ‘discordance’ as this voice chooses to engage in a furious duel with a woodwind instrument with each struggling to out-waver the other before finally giving up and collapsing in an exhausted puddle of smugly voyeuristic string-plucking.
What is this static? This hazy signal? This… this… this drone? It’s the start of ‘(You’re The) Drone Machine’ is what it is. It’s not 5 minutes of buzz, fear not. The subversive whirr is eventually drowned out by some crazy instrumentation before it disappears completely and along comes another hook not unlike the one in the first track, except instead of a duel, this time it’s more of a dance.
‘Hot Train’ has you wondering how taut those guitar strings really are (answer: not very). ‘Evil’, to the best of my perception, is the only song to feature a real English word. That word being a villanously rattled ‘eeeeevuuuul’ which walks hand in hand with an ominous groan across a dark, gloomy, bass and drum-ridden path.
On the whole, Youth Culture Index is a series of scattered sounds and repeated notes. There is little or no complexity in terms of each instrument’s contribution to a song but the layers, loops and dramatic changes within each track’s personality make it simultaneously minimalistic and elaborate. It also sounds very removed from civilisation. If you still can’t imagine how that could possibly be, why not give some of the tracks a listen on their website? ‘Jample’ and ‘(You’re The) Drone Machine’ remain my favourites while ‘Distant Drums’ gets an honourable mention by virtue of its sharing the same hook as Drone Machine.