http://www.theebatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/ en jamie@thebeatsurrender.co.uk Copyright 2010 2010-02-22T16:41:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/groove-armada1/ Just what you need in these dark days of the everlasting bloody winter, some good electronica music that inspires thoughts of a warm spring, shorts and flip flops, as I’m sick of wearing jeans and hoodies, and hopefully some nice beats over a few barbies or trips to the seaside. So here comes Groove Armada to see if they can lift my spirits like they’ve managed to do in the past with some of the best singles of the dance genre from the last 10 years, however, I’ve had the notion that Mr Cato and Findlay are somewhat pretenders to the throne, in that they’ve never managed to nail it when it comes to doing a shit hot album, unlike their peers Basement Jaxx and Death in Vegas. But there’s no slouching about on opening track Look Me in the Eye Sister, which is more rockier and progressive, with a feel that its actually going somewhere, unlike most electronic music when it incorporates guitars, it has that dirty feel to it that Dirge did all them years ago, the vocals executed perfectly by one Jess Larrabee. Things keep the momentum of cross genre on Bowie inspired Fall Silent and Larrabee again astonishes on Just for Tonight, which is everything that was good about Elton John and Fleetwood Mac in the 70’s, and I Won’t Kneel could be the bastard child of any good synth led track that managed to be the highlight of recent piss poor football hooligans films (The Firm is crap). Album 2010-02-22T16:41:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/broken-bells-broken-bells/ I like Spagetti Bolognese, I also like pancakes and golden syrup, but unlike Buddy the Elf I don’t like them together, and my point is that sometimes the joining of two great forces doesn’t necessarily mean something that is so spectacular that only the Starship Enterprise could find it. So new super duo Danger Mouse and The Shins frontman James Mercer think they can give us something different and exceptional, where so many have fallen, with opening track The High Road just about getting there, but it’s a little middle of the road to the point where I have to ring my uncle Pete up to see if I pass the middle aged man test. Thankfully, I just about failed. Honest. Vaporsize has that familiar sound of, yes we live in California and although were in our thirties, we love the 60’s and campfires, and sing alongs, and VW camper vans. Saying that, is that a crime? Well yes, your grown men, pull yourselves together and take that bloody flower out of your hair. Again, Your Head Is On Fire is nice, but nothing special by any means, reminding me why I don’t mind the Shins, but why I find it hard to get through a full album before my short attention span kicks in and my hand creeps towards the old eject button. Album 2010-02-22T15:11:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/the-sunshine-underground/ Leeds Academy has become something of a target venue for local bands to aim towards since it’s opened it’s doors. OK the Kaiser Chiefs and Pigeon Detectives were already big enough to more than sell it out by the time they played, but for anyone a bit lower down in the pecking order of mainstream success it represents acceptance on a large scale locally. So in the last year we’ve seen The Cribs sell out the venue and when we chatted with The Sunshine Underground last year for the website they said they had one eye on Leeds Academy as a venue they’d like to play. That eye landed and hit the spot officially tonight. They couldn’t have picked a better night for it either, a Friday night with an up for it crowd, that looked pretty much sold out to me and by the time they’d played their way through a mixture of new tracks off the album Nobody’s Coming To Save You and older hits like Borders and Put You In Your Place it was fair to say that these Shropshire lads had completed their transition into a fully accepted Leeds band. Before them though we had two support bands, the first of which was Club Smith (a bit like the war with the Germans, it’s best we don’t mention the H word to Club Smith), another local band albeit one who are just starting out on the journey that they and we hope will see them return to the venue as headliners. They deliver an emotionally charged set of songs, with an opening slot starting at 7.30pm and the venue not yet filling up they cleverly choose to keep the more upbeat and in my eyes stronger songs for the back end of the set. So by the time Sam Robson and co are belting out Green Room it’s to a decent sized crowd that has formed in the venue and they are certainly holding their attention. Showing just how unfair the musical world can be and how strangely it operates, we find ourselves subjected to 45 minutes of Cosmo Jarvis next, the reason i’m actually in the venue as my assignment tonight is really to review them. After Club Smith have ended the set so well and knowing The Sunshine Underground set is likely to be a funked up guitar dance off between them and the crowd, it was a strange choice of support act sandwiched in between them. The first warning sign is the American drawl that greets the audience and we look around to find a combination of a surfer dude and GI Joe staring back at us, flanked by a band that appear to be wearing jumpsuits for no reason whatsoever, or at least not one that is clear as the singer isn’t! Live 2010-02-22T12:51:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/hot-chip-one-life-stand/ Every one likes Hot Chip, me, the Mrs, the kids, hip kids, geek kids, old people that like humming, taxi drivers, radio 1 (big time), the music press, I wouldn’t be supprised if Nelson Mandela, the Pope and Jeremy Paxman all thought Hot Chip were shit hot. But why do these 80’s throw backs manage to get so much good publicity along with the plaudits, its simple in the way that any computer geek will ever tell you, they manage to draw our attentions in and keep them sat plum in the chair enjoying the moment, and on top of that, they manage to know the formula for a great pop tune. And this trend hasn’t changed on latest album One Life Stand, they are still banging away on the indie anthems and floor fillers as shown on self titled latest single, and this is repeated on opening track Thieves in the Night, with all the geeky thumb twiddling doing overtime to get us going. Again the perfect combination of crossover is shown on Hand Me Down My Love, that you’d have this penned down as single, but then I’m listening to Slush and thinking this is going to go mad in a minute and sound all Enigma doing the native American thing, but no, it just turns into a bit of torch burner, that aint so bad, although at 6.29, it does tend to take the piss a bit for something that doesn’t shift gear at any point. Album 2010-02-09T19:14:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/four-tet-there-is-love-in-you/ I love getting assignments from the editor, especially when I got to listen and investigate all at the same time on something or someone I’ve never given the time of day to before. So seven albums in I’m about to educated on the man commonly know as Kieran Hebden, former player of Fridge and now musical chameleon with an impressive (I’m told) back catalogue of electronica music that infuses the best of hip hop to jazz. Sounds good. And it is, opening track Angel Echoes is everything I want in new music discoveries, it progresses nicely with the volume slowly increasing as the loop gets further in. However, on Love Cry, what Hebden manages to create is nothing short of epic, as were slowly thrown into the future beats of Battlestar Galactica before being shunted into tripy house rhythm, at 9.13 it’s the stuff made for those comedowns on a Sunday morning. Pablo’s Heart is exactly what it is, a heartbeat of sorts, and on Sing he manages to remind me why I liked Royksopp in the first placed with this cheeky little bubbly one, This Unfolds is reminiscent of early William Orbit, with its upbeat charm this record really is turning into a version of oral vallium. Album 2010-02-09T18:27:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/the-hot-rats/ Is there anybody on the planet who doesn’t like Supergrass? Always the beardy tramps with big coats (and I suspect,a hidden bottle of Bulmers cider) at the Britpop family party who, unlike their contemporaries never lost the ability to surprise and delight and, unlike Liam and Damon,were consistantly dependable and…let’s not foget this…bags of ‘fun’ (remember that concept kids…fun?) Top tunes with great catchy choruses and a daft video on Top Of The Pops, yep, the quality control-o-meter very rarely dipped into the ‘red alert this is a pile of pants’ sector. They were a social sounding board, you could stand at the bar and if you asked a complete stranger,’do you like Supergrass?’, if they said yes, you could proceed with the conversation, if they said no, well, ‘you sir are an arse and i’m off to get legless with that bird over there’. Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey (50% of Supergrass) have created another side project, this time the two of them have gone for the cover version option, remodelling and remaking some of their favourite tunes, unfortunately there’s no radical makeovers, no seventeen minute free jazz version of ‘Paranoid Android’ (although they have used the sevices of Nigel Godrich as producer), no folk acid dubstep version of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, no hard house country and western version of ‘Smack My Bitch Up’...no these twelve tracks stick pretty close to their original forms, but now with added hot ratness. The collection gets off to a cracking start with ‘I Can’t Stand It’, a dirty rollicking version of one of Lou Reeds throwaway songs as found on the Velvet Undergrounds ‘V U’ album, the band capture the sheer gonzo thrill of a simple primitive rock n roll tune with fuzzed up guitars to the fore and a moronic singalong chorus, love it to bits!! ‘Big Sky’ by The Kinks on the other hand is merely ok. The Doors ‘Crystal Ship’ is a lot better and captures the cool trippy ambience of the original. The strangest version here is ‘Fight For Your Rights’ by The Beasties, it’s been stripped bare and sounds completely different to the original, robbed of its machismo it sounds almost poignant. Album 2010-02-09T17:25:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/orden-ogan/ Orden Ogan are cliché, in the best possible way. Imagine a ‘Melodic Power Metal’ band – they label themselves with this genre – and you’ll get exactly what you’ve got in mind pressed on a CD and printed in the booklet. Actually, you’ll get something much better than you can imagine. And even if you’re usually not a fan of the genre, this album is going to delight you nevertheless. Coming from a town named Arnsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, Orden Ogan have managed to make themselves known in the Metal scene with their previous two albums, the self-financed Testimonium a.d. (2004) and Vale (2008), which was released on the small label Yonah Records. With their new album, called Easton Hope, they’ve made it to AFM Records, known for such big names as Ministry, Soil or even Whitesnake, and they also finish a trilogy, a journey that leads through the three albums…and musically as well as lyrically, the album is a worthy completion. Whilst the opening track Rise and Ruin could almost be taken from the Lord Of The Rings score, with its majestic choir and arrangement, the opening riffs of the follower Nobody Leaves show the direction the album is actually leading to. Orden Ogan manage to combine classic Heavy Metal elements – audible in the drumming and guitar riffs especially – with choirs, orchestral arrangements and simply catchy melodies. That singer Seeb can actually sing (opposite to the constant screaming that is often the only sound coming from ‘singers’ of other Heavy Metal bands) helps a lot and delivers another factor why the label ‘melodic’ definitely fits. Another outstanding feature of Easton Hope is that the songs are everything but boring or repetitive. They all suit the genre, but each has little exceptional aspects. Title track Easton Hope sounds dramatic and theatrical, the choirs once again amplify this, whereas We Are Pirates could almost be called a dancefloor hit that you’d imagine a bunch of people dressed in mainly black dancing in a moshpit to. Or indeed pirates singing it as a shanty. It even features an accordion! Its length of 7’ 33” on the other hand may sound really long in comparison to the standard 3’ 30” of most songs these days, but it’s definitely nothing special on the album. Each song, except the opening track that could be seen as a prelude, lasts at least 5 minutes. Album 2010-02-09T17:10:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/detroit-social-club-leeds-cockpit/ I have to say, that as much as I was looking forward to seeing the two bands on the line up tonight, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing them in the third room of The Cockpit. It’s not too bad (despite duff sound) when it’s quiet, but as this gig was looking like being very busy then, it would mean about ten people at the front would get a view, the rest would be treated to a tinny sound and a stench of stale sweat. We are spared that horrific prospect though with a sensible and fairly late decision (the day before) to change the gig to the larger middle room of the venue and now we have the opposite problem (but still the lesser of two evils), will they abe able to shift some extra tickets in a day to give the bands a decent crowd to play in front of. Having opening act Renaissance Dolls on the bill certainly didn’t hurt things, not only do they have a loyal following in Leeds they also are a band that have a confidence and swagger about them that suggests with the right breaks they could be heading for bigger things and by the time tjhey take to the stage the room is filling up nicely. A lot of that confidence is exuded through the frontman Tom Pearson, like the blonde hairded brother of Bobby Gillespie he almost seems to enter into a relationship with the microphone stand, he demands the audiences attention and in fairness to him, he gets it too. Although they have a definite focal point as far as the live performance goes, they are very much a group. Flanking Pearson on either side are guitarist Michael Jones and bass player Richard Sykes who both add an extra dimension to the synth that is piped through as a backing, the result being tracks that veer easily between emtionally charged indie tracks and a more upbeat electro edge. Richard Wales completes the Dolls line up and it’s from his solid foundations as a drummer that the groups sound is built on, he helps give the tracks extra beef and locks in the rhythm for a crowd that have certainly enjoyed a set that contained tracks Stand Up, Control and Rags To Riches. Having supported Oasis in 2009 and signed to Polydor it’s fair to say that Detroit Social Club are a band that are definitely tipped to take off this year when the debut album lands. The fact that it hasn’t landed yet seems to be a source of frustration for the lead singer who says something along the lines of “it’s taken forever to get out”, i’m not sure if that’s a gripe with the label or just down to how the band work though. Live 2010-02-09T15:09:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/peter-gabriel-scratch-my-back/ Peter Gabriel is one of this lands most distinguished artists, with 40 years service at the top, the man really is a living legend and although I wouldn’t claim to be a fan of his music by any degree, I would still say that Sledgehammer and Salisbury Hill are two of the greatest pop songs ever written. The concept behind Scratch My Back is that Big Pete covers a selection of songs, and in turn the associated artists will cover one from Mr Gabriel’s back catalogue at some point. However, your take on cover versions may be the same as mine, in that the intention is focused on individual thinking they can do so a song justice, but sadly, most of the time this is so far from the truth. I’m pleased to tell you though there are no such ego’s on this album, just Mr Gabriel and an ochestra, giving each of the tracks a more gentle feel, expressing another dimension of emotion, and gently tip toeing through the night as felt on Elbows Mirrorball. Like revarnishing an antique table, Heroes is stripped bare and given a whole new colour and foundation, and its not a rock and roll classic now, but more a personal message, and it’s the same with The Power of the Heart, which sounds beautiful, especially when the strings come into their own and sweep it all away. Album 2010-02-09T14:33:00+00:00 http://www.thebeatsurrender.co.uk/weekly/reviews/ocean-colour-scene-saturday/ Back in 1996, if my memory serves me right, Ocean Colour Scene were loved by masses (mainly young men) and hated by the Music Press, with many a journalist taking a swipe at them for being a bit too matey with Uncle Weller. Personally, although not a massive fan, I thought they were a decent singles bands that were very entertaining live. Anyhow, like the majority of bands round that time, the bubble seemed to burst with numerous albums and a greatest hits not managing to capture the publics imagination like Moseley Shoals. So, record number nine Saturday isn’t going to see much of a change in style, but what they do, they do quite well, as shown on bluesy numbers 100 Floors of Perception and Saturday, but as always they do push their luck on Old Pairs of Jeans. Sing Children Sing makes me cringe, and only the hardest die hard fan will condone such crap, the production is just as bad with over the top riffs, and if ever you needed proof that female backing vocalist (other than Denise Johnson) are the death of many a song, this is it. Album 2010-02-09T13:57:00+00:00