The Pattern Theory - The Pattern Theory (Album)

Although, as a Newcastle resident, I feel enormously spoilt by our selection of bands, I must confess that I’ve always been just a tiny bit jealous of gig-going folk in Leeds, a city which seems to spawn another outrageously creative band every three days. Take The Pattern Theory for example, a band who are now Berlin-based, but whose roots are unmistakably Leodensian. Sound-wise, their closest kin would probably be the likes of Explosions in the Sky (or, if you’ll permit me to carry on the Leeds motif, maybe Vessels). While they don’t employ the world-endingly noisy crescendos of those two, the record is brimming with familiarly undulating swells of melodic build-up. The band build hypnotic little patterns of melody and deconstruct and rebuild them at their leisure, with Framed Fields the best example of this, starting off all plaintive and achy before it almost imperceptibly picks up the pace and turns into something more urgent. The overall result is an enormously listenable and beautifully eloquent instrumental album with an impact that is undeniably softer than that of its forebears, but which is no less enriching for that. One of the best debut records that will emerge this year.

4/5

Hunx and His Punx - Too Young to be in Love (Album)

Neither Hunx nor any of his Punx seem to give a flying fuck that the year is 2011. As technology barges us ever more forcefully to the inevitable point where music will be downloaded from tiny little hard drives installed in molecules of oxygen straight onto our actual brains (for a reasonable monthly fee payable to Apple, of course), Hunx and His Punx are cheerfully ensconced in the 1960s. Their brand of bubblegum girl-band pop-n-roll yearns for a simpler time, a time when Phil Spector was merely an eccentric genius with a tendency to use firearms as a motivational prop rather than a murderous lunatic with an increasingly erratic taste in hairpieces. A time, even, when David Cameron didn’t even exist! Imagine!

The band look back on those days with rose-tinted spectacles, of course, but anybody who enjoys well-built pop music will find it difficult not to be swayed by the arguments in favour of bygone days which Too Young to be in Love presents. So impressive is the execution of the album, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it represents Hunx and His Punx’ first proper foray into long-players, following on from 2009’s Gay Singles, a round-up of early 7” singles. Basically, they’ve completely and utterly nailed it, and I’d question whether they should even bother trying to follow it up, because it’s difficult to imagine them managing to better capture the essence of what they do than they have here.

On first glance, Too Young to be in Love appears to be a pretty simple prospect. Indeed, Hunx himself might happily have you believe that it is a one-dimensional collection of Wall of Sound-inspired pop songs about boyz, but any air of naivete conjured up is a mere affectation, presumably designed to augment the authenticity of the homage. Every Punx harmony, or Hunx whimper about making “my momma cry” is accompanied by a raised eyebrow and a knowing smirk. (Let’s not forget, the little boy lost singing here is also the chap who made an enormously NSFW appearance in Girls’ video for ‘Lust For Life’). The whole thing is very deliberately and very impressively assembled, something which makes it all the more impressive. Hunx takes the convincing part of the sweet lovelorn boy, while his Punx add bite to proceedings, most notably on ‘The Curse of Being Young'.

While Too Young to be in Love may be hugely impressive, it’s certainly not going to be for everybody though. For a start, I’d suggest staying clear of it if you find yourself in any way irritated by the world at large, because there’s a danger that Hunx’s nasal croon or the proudly retrogressive nature of the songs might push you over the edge. If, however, you feel inclined to indulge yourself with a sugary pop treat, then few albums released in this or any other year will be more effective.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong (Album)

I don’t think I’m being too harsh on The Pains of Being Pure at Heart when I say that when they released their first album two years ago, they weren’t exactly weighed down by the burden of an expectant public. Flash forward to 2011, though, and the gradual but significant impact of the debut means that Belong represents one of the most significant indie releases of the early part of the year. It’s testament to both the simple endearing quality of the aforementioned debut, as well as the ever increasing power of blog-trotters the world over, that the band find themselves in such a position, but it also means that, for the first time, there’s a pressure on them to produce the goods.

Things start promisingly with the album’s title track, a pleasingly meaty chunk of guitar distortion, emerging more from the My Bloody Valentine extreme of the band’s oeuvre than the Field Mice one, which would appear to suggest that a couple of years of heavy touring have galvanised their sound. As it turns out, this proves to be a bit of a red herring because a few seconds into second song ‘Heaven’s Gonna Happen Now’, the fog clears and the band revert to chiming, melodic type, remaining in that mode for the bulk of the rest of the record. Nobody should be particularly surprised by this, because even at this early stage in their career, The Pains have always been the sort of band who gave the impression of being happily ensconced in their C86-shaped niche. This, by the way, is no criticism, either. As it happens, I absolutely loved The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but let’s not beat about the bush: if you found that record too derivative, too twee or too cloying, then Belong certainly won’t change your perception of the band

As you would expect, then, the things that Belong does well are exactly the same as those that The Pains of Being Pure at Heart did well. It’s liberally strewn with sharp pop hooks which, as before, rely heavily on the interplay between the shoegaze-with-a-small-s guitars and Kip Berman’s breathy vocals. The weariness in Berman’s voice again provides an interesting counterpoint to the youthful exuberance of the musical backing, and ‘My Terrible Friend’ is probably the most effective example of this that the band have yet produced. Other particularly satisfying highlights of the record include the aforementioned title track, and the beautifully direct, twinkling pop of ‘The Body’ and ‘Girl of 1000 Dreams’.

Belong, unquestionably, find its mark more often than it misses it, and on those occasions, the songs are every bit as strong as those on The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. It’s all the more frustrating, then, that there are a couple of moments on the record which make it feel like hard work, namely the disappointingly dreary ‘Anne with an E’, and closing song ‘Strange’, which sees the band aim for a big finale without even getting close to the sort of grandeur they seem to think they’re attaining. It’s a shame that the album ends on such an underwhelming note, because there’s a danger that the listener will be left with the false impression that Belong is a disappointing record, which it really is not. It might be a stretch to say that it surpasses what went before it, but given the what the band where up against, there’s aboslutely no shame in that at all. All things considered, The Pains have quite neatly circumnavigated their unenviable task, adding some real gems to their back catalogue in the process.

Jeniferever - Silesia (Album)

I’ve always had a massive soft spot for Jeniferever. Right from the misleading Smashing Pumpkins reference of their name, to the incredible grandeur of their debut record Choose a Bright Morning (and, to a slightly lesser extent, its follow-up Spring Tides), they’ve always been right up my street. I’m sure, then, you can imagine my delight to be tasked with the duty of reporting that Silesia is an absolute fucking triumph, and the main reason for its success is that, crucially, there is absolutely no attempt to replicate the Sigur Rós-esque beauty of their snails-pace elegies of yore. Yes, Silesia is still stunningly pretty in places, but it is also imbued with a brand new sense of urgency, playfulness even, which is gratifying in a whole different way. Take Deception Pass for example; it’s a thumping, booming slice of unsettling weirdness with a rhythm that your ear can never seem to quite catch up with, casually placed slap-bang in the middle of the record. This is telling of a band who are refreshingly willing to take risks when they could have quite easily knocked out BBC ident soundtracks ‘til the IKEA trucks came home. You need Jeniferever in your life.

5/5

Times New Viking - Dancer Equired (Album)

Times New Viking’s sense of timing here is pretty serendipitous, given how the much-ballyhooed return of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart has put fuzzy mumble-pop back on the public’s agenda again. In an enormously over-crowded genre littered by saminess, Dancer Equired makes a decent fist of standing out from its contemporaries, but then you’d expect that from old hands like TNV for whom this represents their fifth full-lengther. By their own scratchy standards, they’ve softened a little, with Dancer Equired lacking the abrasive trebly scree of much of their earlier work, which has, I guess, robbed them of one of their most satisfying ingredients, but which has also undoubtedly made them a more listenable prospect. Don’t worry though, they still sound grubby as fuck, to the point where you actually start to wonder if the likes of Ways to Go and Downward Eastern Bloc are a willful attempt to wind up the audiophile zealots to whom the mere mention of 192kbps is akin to cheerfully shitting in their shoes. All in all, Dancer Equired is nothing we weren’t really expecting from Times New Viking, but it's good murky fun all the same.

3.5/5

Those Dancing Days - Daydreams and Nightmares (Album)

The subject of pop for pop’s sake has inspired some reasonably heated debate on these pages in recent weeks, igniting a slightly indier incarnation of the decades old beef between pop lovers and ‘serious’ music fans. Well, if you’ll indulge me my soap box for just a moment, I’ve always believed pretty fucking strongly that there is no purer musical thrill than a song which inspires in one the uncontrollable urge to dance and sing. And at a time when insipid, lifeless pop bands are tiresomely numerous, genuinely good ones deserve to be cherished just as much as the most creative of avant-garde pioneers

Slink forward Those Dancing Days, then. Having captured the twee zeitgeist in 2008 with their debut record In Our Space Hero Suits, its follow-up Daydreams and Nightmares sees them in an altogether more insistent frame of mind. It’s a bit of a stretch to say they have found a harder edge, but they’ve certainly developed an unmistakable fresh sense of urgency. As well as having attained a new level of vitality, the band also appear to have well and truly nailed the art of the chorus too, as evidenced by the almost instantly memorable mid-sections of ‘Dream About Me’ and ‘Reaching Forwards’

The strongest overall examples of the admirable pop nous of Daydreams and Nightmares can be found in its central one-two of ‘Can’t Find Entrance’ and ‘Fuckarias’, which are without doubt two of 2011’s catchiest singles so far. The breakneck pace of both songs and the snotty attitude of the latter are characteristic of the evolution of the band’s sound. Mind, you, I’m not sure the subject of ‘Fuckarias’ will feel too threatened by the barbs which are being levelled at them: “You’re an uninvited clown... You’re in my space, get out of my face”. Those Dancing Days might be able to convincingly beef up their sound, but, endearingly, their cuddlier core is still pretty plain for all to see.

Throughout Daydreams and Nightmares, in fact, there are numerous reminders that the band haven’t entirely ditched discarded the unfettered tweeness that characterised their first record, and there’s still plenty here for sensitive souls to fall for here. ‘I’ll Be Yours’ and ‘Help Me Close My Eyes’, for instance, are appropriately big-hearted, as is the closing track ‘One Day Forever’ (once you get over the bizarre resemblance between its opening few seconds and those of Grizzly Bear’s ‘Two Weeks’, that is). There’s plenty more evidence of the saccharine in the lyrical content too, or even from a cursory glance at the song titles, illustrating that Daydreams and Nightmares is still, at heart, a collection of sweet pop songs. You’ll just have to circumnavigate the extra layers of polish and synths to find it. Presumably the influence of Patrik Berger, latterly Robyn’s producer, has had a big part to play in all this. Hell, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine one or two of these songs being recorded by Robyn, most notably ‘Help Me Close My Eyes’.

All in all, the progression Those Dancing Days have shown here is pretty damn impressive by anybody’s standards. Whether this will be acknowledged by either our little world, or the wider public, I wouldn’t like to say. What I can say with some safety, though, is that Daydreams and Nightmares is a better record than In Our Space Hero Suits. A fellow DiS scribe at that time may have decried the band’s lack of anything memorable, but that is no longer an accusation which may be levelled at them with any kind of fairness.

7/10

Vessels - Helioscope (Album)

It’s lovely to have Vessels back. It feels like way too long since they unleashed the post-mathrock colossus of their debut album White Fields and Open Devices upon the British public. Sadly, as it turns out, the ungrateful bastards who inhabit these shores were paying no attention whatsoever, abandoning White Fields to a horribly undeserved fate as an overlooked classic. Alas, providence has given us the chance to right that wrong with the release of Helioscope, because Vessels have, very magnanimously, delivered another stunning record. Much of what characterised White Fields is still present; the lunatic creativity, the staggering musical proficiency, the sudden and delightful swells of volume and swerves of tempo. Hell, parts of Helioscope (‘Recur’ and ‘Art/Choke’ in particular) could have been lifted right off White Fields. But Helioscope also shows that Vessels have developed a new brand of subtlety, something neatly illustrated by the moody beauty of ‘Meatman, Piano Tuner, Prostitute’ or the paranoid brilliance of ‘The Trap’. I’ve always had difficulty imagining a record more ambitious than White Fields and Devices, but if such a thing could be said to exist, then Helioscope is it. Vessels are a fucking marvel, and hopefully they haven’t finished surprising me yet.

5/5

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

The King of Limbs definitely represents new ground for Radiohead in its cohesiveness and its unnerving, stifling mood. For these reasons alone, it is a good album. Problem is, though, all has gone before means that something merely ‘good’ represents failure for Radiohead. I’m six listens in and it’s yet to fully reveal the intangible wonders of a Radiohead record, but fingers crossed it’s just a matter of time.

7/10

Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Album)

The four years since the release of the last Bright Eyes album Cassadaga have found Conor Oberst in a curious sort of critical limbo. For a number of reasons (the most frequently cited one being its propensity to the overblown), Cassadaga proved to be one of the most poorly-received albums of Oberst’s career. For what it’s worth, the criticisms weren’t entirely fair, because, firstly, it contained some of Conor’s best songs in ‘Hot Knives’, ‘Lime Tree’ and ‘Cleanse Song’, and, secondly, it’s hardly as if Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning were particularly low-fi recordings, and history seems to have been kind enough to them.

Ever since Cassadaga, though, every release to which Oberst’s name has been tagged has been greeted warily, almost to the point of apprehension. Sure, there were the odd isolated pockets of praise for the two Mystic Valley Band records and Monsters of Folk album, but utimately neither set critics a-quivering with anything even approaching the fervour inspired by Fevers and Mirrors or Lifted. Again, the less than enthusiastic reception of these records felt harsh, but that’s a debate which we will have to set aside for another day lest we find ourselves two thousand words deep without even broaching the subject at hand. One fact has become plain from all this prevaricating though, and it is that since 2007, any album recorded by Conor Oberst is more likely to inspire trepidation than unequivocal excitement.

Well, there’s a very strong chance that The People’s Key will be remembered as the point when the wind changed again, and suspicion ceased to be a feature of a Conor Oberst pre-release campaign. To put it succinctly, it is a brilliant album. And, crucially, a large part of its brilliance stems from the fact that it is completely unlike any previous Bright Eyes album. There’s no cynical attempt to rehash past glories and there is no experimenting aimlessly for experimenting aimlessly’s sake. All we have here is the sound of Oberst, Mogis, Walcott and co sounding completely fresh, pushing Bright Eyes forward into a new space, with inspired results.

Conor has recently spoken about how he went into the studio to record The People’s Key armed only with the lyrics, preferring to allow the instrumentation develop organically during the recording process with Mike and Nate. This spontaneity has resulted in an album which is bristling with vitality, and which, in an entirely different way to Cassadaga, boasts a luxuriously full-sounding cast of instrumentation. The songs are adorned with any number of new and unexpected little flourishes, like the rattle and clamour that heralds the beginning of ‘Jejune Stars’, the strange chugging guitar sound which carries ‘Haile Selassie’ along or the stuttering halt which concludes ‘A Machine Spiritual’, all of which combine to make The People’s Key a living, breathing thing. Oberst has been at pains to suggest that it is a ‘rocking’ album, and there’s no denying that it is, but it’s also utterly beyond the constraints that are implied by that description; it is forward-thinking and progressive too.

There are some things about The People’s Key, though, that are comfortingly familiar. For starters, it wouldn’t feel like a proper Bright Eyes album without a meandering spoken word intro, supplied this time by Refried Ice Cream’s Denny Brewer, who reappears on a few more occasions throughout the record to provide a dignified gravitas akin to the last Gil Scott-Heron album. At first it’s difficult to reconcile his grizzled, vaguely existential monologues to a Bright Eyes recording, but the more the album sinks in, the more integral they begin to feel to the whole tapestry. When you detach yourself from the engulfing embrace of the record (easier said than done, by the way), the resigned philosophy of Brewer’s contributions is actually a perfectly logical counterpart to Oberst’s ruminations on humanity and the universe at large, which are becoming increasingly outward-looking as he gets older.

As the album reaches it’s conclusion, we see two more flashes of ‘old’ Bright Eyes, the first being the aching piano-led ‘The Ladder Song’, which is as beautiful as any of Oberst’s greatest ballads. Aside from showing that he can still gently crush you with the sadness of his voice, ‘The Ladder Song’ also provides encouragement that even in the midst of the swollen sea of instrumentation, he still knows when to keep things minimal. The other glimpse of the Bright Eyes of bygone years comes in the form of the meditative closing song ‘One For You, One For Me’, which bobs along gently, in the process discreetly creating the same sense of low-key stateliness which made Lifted such a stunning album.

The final word on The People’s Key is left to Brewer, allowing him to sign off what he started with a neat symmetry, as he leaves us with a sermon on the importance of forgiveness, mercy and the importance of moving on. Whether the finality of his words will prove to a prophetic final chapter in the Bright Eyes story is, for now unclear, because Conor is about as reliable as James Murphy when it comes to giving definitive answers on the future of his band (and long may he keep us guessing). Either way, The People’s Key is fit to stand toe to toe with any record that will be released in 2011, and serves as a timely reminder of the distinction between form and class.

Medium 21 - Killings From the Dial (Album)

Some time around 2003, Fierce Panda and Island got their heads together to form Temptation Records. You’d be forgiven for having difficulty in recalling this, because by the time we rung in 2004, Temptation was already lost to the history books. However, before it shuffled meekly off into the good night, it was able to create at least some kind of a legacy in the form of a clutch of singles and an album each from The Rain Band and Medium 21. I won’t pretend to have ever heard a note from the former, but the latter ended up spending much of the last decade as unexpectedly dogged companions in my travels along life’s dusty highways (well, Gateshead’s potholed highways to be precise).

The band’s arrival into my life came under unusual circumstances, with an envelope (addressed to me) containing promo posters, flyers and a promo copy of the ‘By My Side’ single dropping completely unheralded one morning onto the doormat of my second year Uni dwelling. To this day, I have absolutely no idea to whom I had given my name and address in order to warrant such a despatch, but my studently love of any kind of freebie as well as my pleasant surprise at the music contained on the disc outweighed any bemusement at the presumptuousness of whomever had sent it. (Who knows, if The Rain Band had been similarly brazen, you could very possibly be reading their eulogy right now, rather than that of their erstwhile labelmates).

Aside from a fleeting snatch of support from Mark and Lard, the songs from Killings From the Dial received practically no airplay (Perhaps I should have done a little more with those flyers than just giving a handful to each of my three flatmates). While this, of course, is true of the majority of albums, most aren’t able to straddle the fine line between musical richness and radio crossover potential quite as assuredly as Killings From the Dial did. ‘Black and White Summer’ and ‘Albert Ross’ in particular possessed a panoramic sense of wistfulness which could have quite easily made them genuinely big singles. In the end, they wouldn’t get the chance to achieve such lofty heights, because ‘By My Side’, only the second single from the album, would prove to be Medium 21’s last release.

Perhaps the only thing which might have limited any potential mainstream appeal would have been singer Jon Clough’s voice, a peculiarly throaty drawl which could have polarised sections of the wider record-buying public. For me, though, he’s the perfect example of the (enormously cliched, but still accurate) premise that you needn’t be a great singer to be a great singer. His vocals were always an interesting counterpoint to Medium 21’s more melodic moments (the likes of ‘The Plight of Losing Out’ and ‘Poisoned Postcards’) and they added real character and a genuine sense of urgency to the more agitated sections of the album like ‘Acting Like a Mirror’ and ‘Daybreak vs Pride’.

One of the most impressive things about Killings From the Dial, and the thing which would elevate it above most of its more successful contemporaries was the way the band were able to so convincingly blend gorgeous sun-dappled acoustic pop, off-kilter wanderings and occasional bursts of paranoid darkness. Their skill in making the sometimes disparate elements of the record sit so comfortably together, sometimes even in the same song (see ‘Catalyst R.U.N.’), resulted in an album of enviable depth and intriguing complexity.

Ultimately, Medium 21 would never recover from the demise of Temptation, and in spite of a number of attempts on Clough and co’s part to rekindle the band in various guises, Killings From the Dial would prove to be the only album they would ever produce. It’s an enormous shame that the band never got to stretch their legs properly and attempt to build on their debut, because even though you wouldn’t envy them the task of following it up, you get the impression that the creative range they possessed could have taken them to untold places. If nothing else though, at least their fleeting tenure left us with a more fulfilling record than most bands can muster in a full career, and in these grim and desperate times, that’s something for which we should be grateful.

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar (Album)

I have been waiting for The Joy Formidable’s debut album for about three years. Well, actually, that isn’t strictly accurate. As it turns out, I’ve been waiting for around half of The Joy Formidable’s debut album for about three years. You see, a sizeable proportion of The Big Roar’s songs have been kicking around for a good while now, with four of them reappearing after originally featuring on mini-album A Balloon Called Moaning a couple of years ago. But hey, let’s not get too precious about the band’s decision to recycle old work, because I guess the usual purpose of a debut album is to represent a compilation of an artist’s best work from their inception to the record’s production. A more relevant query is just exactly why it has taken so long for the album to arrive when The Joy Formidable have been featuring on ‘Ones to Watch’ lists since 2008.

For the most part (and I’m genuinely pleased to say this, having developed a growing soft spot for the band with each single release that has gone by), The Big Roar has been worth the wait. It is an impressive showcase of the twin cores of The Joy Formidable’s sound, blending urgent ballsy rock-outs with dreamy grunge blissfests. This is illustrated very neatly indeed by the opening one-two of ‘The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie’ and ‘The Magnifying Glass’, with the former showering us in wave after wave of ecstatic guitar fuzz, and the latter pulling off a wonderful Nirvana-esque directness of the kind that Feeder used to think they were good at.

One of The Joy Formidable’s strongest assets has always been frontwoman Ritzy Bryan’s voice. It’s something which they have utilised to its fullest potential here, safe in the knowledge that it is strong enough to hold out even under the pressure of the heaviest squall of guitars they can muster. Her seductive, throaty (and exceedingly Welsh) vocals work interact beautifully with the noisiness, never more than on ‘A Heavy Abacus’ or ‘Cradle’. Indeed, so beguiling can Ritzy’s vocals be that it’s slightly jarring when she briefly secedes control of the mic to bassist Rhydian Daffydd on ‘Llaw=Wall’. He’s perfectly capable, and his cameo perhaps offers a little breathing space from Ritzy’s voice, but it’s kind of like when James Hanna sings on Asobi Seksu songs, they just don’t sound like quite the same band.

The Big Roar may not be perfect (Whirring wanders away into guitar-mashing rambling for about two minutes longer than it has to, and Maruyama isn’t entirely necessary), but there’s a hell of a lot about it to admire. There’s little indication that the songs have been written across of period in excess of three years, because the oldies sit perfectly comfortably alongside the newer songs, with the big positive of the lengthy gestation period being that it allows the band to display more progression than is usually possible in the span of one record. As time has gone on, they have sharply honed their sound, developing it into something which not many bands are doing right now, (certainly not this well anyway). Yes, their shoegaze/grunge influences are displayed fairly nakedly, but what they are doing is still entirely their own. However, probably the most impressive thing the band have managed with The Big Roar is to have struck up a convincing blend of proper arse-kicking rock and something which is enriching and engaging. It’s a really strong debut album which shows room to grow, and give us good cause to be excited about what the future holds for The Joy Formidable.

Conquering Animal Sound - Kammerspiel (Album)

I have long been of the opinion (and I suspect that I’m far from alone on these pages in thinking this) that the best record labels are those which are able to bring together bands with some kind of aesthetic similarity. Certainly the records released by my favourite labels over the years have, on the whole, tended to have a common thread which distinguishes them instantly as a product of their particular imprint. In recent years, one such label to have emerged to fit in with this particular penchant has been Leeds’ Gizeh Records, home to the likes of Glissando, Sleepingdog and Fieldhead. When a Gizeh release lands on your doormat you know that you’re reasonably likely to encounter something chilly and unearthly, but also something which more often than not will be a beautiful and enriching piece of work.

And so it is with Glasgow-based duo Anneke Kampman and James Scott who comprise Conquering Animal Sound. Their debut album Kammerspiel is a ghostly collection of minimalistic beats, loops and fragile ambience, overlaid with Kampman’s beatifully frail vocal. Its delicateness and woozy air mean that it is a record which is best absorbed late at night, preferably at the point last thing when your brain is at its sleepiest. In this context it becomes almost lullaby-esque, with Kampman’s soft burr tailor-made for soothing away the mental aches of the daily cut and thrust

Too often records made up of minimal components are misinterpreted as being gloomy, but this is unlikely to be a fate which befalls Kammerspiel, given the sunlit glow which bathes its sounds. Take opening song ‘Maschines’ for example, as it begins with a twinkling melody and builds gently like the breaking of the day, culminating in Kampman softly cooing “You are home”. As the album progresses, you come to realise that the template of ‘Maschines’ is in fact the blueprint for much of Conquering Animal Sound’s work. Frequently their songs begin in timorous fashion, gradually layering more and more sounds on top as they build. Let’s be clear though, this isn’t to say that Kammerspiel is in any way guilty of being formulaic, because the band display a boundless creativity with the finer details throughout, a little snippet of tape hiss here, a dissonant hint of cello or a snatch of thickly-distorted vocal sample there, meaning you’re never really fully aware of where they’re taking you at any point.

In spite of its predilection for abstract noise, Kammerspiel is still at heart an album of songs and melodies which frequently follows the verse/chorus structure. Clearly, Conquering Animal Sound are more than just aimless experimentalists, because throughout there is a strong feeling that while you might not know what they are going to do next, they most certainly do. Probably the most naked song on the album is final track ‘Ira’, which dispenses with much of the effects, leaving the beauty and the melody of the song unabashed. It’s an interesting taster of what Conquering Animal Sound might be like were they a little more conventional, and while ‘Ira’ might be sufficiently pretty to stand on its own two feet, the contrast between it and much of the rest of the album illustrates the importance of the flourishes of the noises and samples.

With Kammerspiel, Conquering Animal Sound have simultaneously managed to capture on record the full depth of their creativity and imagination, as well as the inherent beauty of their sound. It is a wonderful piece of work which deseves to be cherished, and gives us far more than we might reasonably expect from anyone’s debut album.

9/10

Hannah Peel - The Broken Wave (Album)

The route Hannah Peel has taken on the way to her day job as a solo recording artist has been quite a circuitous one, taking in various projects both musical and otherwise, but the arrival of her debut record finds her cast into an unenviably competitive scene replete with artists both male and female making similarly quirky folk music. In such a saturated market, particularly one encompassing so much ethereality, it can be difficult for an artist to separate themselves from their contemporaries or break free from the cliches of what folk music represents.

Unquestionably, Peel’s work comes more from Newsom’s end of the scale than Marling’s, carrying with it more than a hint of the otherworldly which stems in part from the ghostly, frail quality of her voice, which at times can be spellbinding here. It’s clearly one of her strongest assets, but it’s nice just how sparingly she exercises it, keeping it for the most part reined in rather than letting it overshadow the songcraft, an economy which is truly crucial in the album’s success. Because there is little doubt here, The Broken Wave is a hugely impressive piece of work, which showcases Peel’s adroitness with a melody quite beautifully, with the simple, elegant swells of ‘You Call This Your Home’ and ‘Song For the Sea’ being wonderful cases in point.

Peel’s previous musical meanderings with the likes of The Unthanks and Tunng have proved to be beneficial in the construction of The Broken Wave, because it has meant that she has been able to call on an impressive cast of collaborators, including the latter’s Mike Lindsay who is responsible for a strong production which is equal parts clean and off kilter. Also present is Nitin Sawhney who lends a hand composing the beautiful strings on ‘Don’t Kiss the Broken One’ and ‘Solitude’, resulting in two of the album’s most bewitching moments.

Amid the prettiness of the music, there is a profusion of melancholy in Peel’s stories of love, loss and longing, but in spite of the tone, you can’t help but feel ultimately comforted by the songs because there is such warmth present in the delivery and the music which accompanies it, particularly on those occasions such as ‘Unwound’ or tradition Irish folk song ‘Cailin Deas Cruite Na Mbo’ when she revisits an old music box which was used in much of her earlier work. It’s genuinely surprising to learn that the album was recorded in a mere three weeks, because The Broken Wave is certainly not an album which sounds like it was hurriedly assembled. Indeed, one of its greatest triumphs is how full, and beautifully put together the whole thing sounds.

The release of The Broken Wave heralds the arrival of a genuine creative force in British folk music, and one of the scariest things about it is that you get the impression that Peel hasn’t really even got going fully yet. The record inspires a feeling that as she grows in confidence and experience she will get even better, which is quite a prospect.

8/10

Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will (Album)

Due to their status as demi-Gods of beard-caressing experimentalism, any new music recorded by Mogwai will inevitably be accompanied by gallons of hyperbolic messageboard bullshit both positive and negative which, if you aren’t careful, could completely distort your perceptions of the music before you even hear a note. Hardcore Will Never Die... has inevitably continued this grim trend, prompting all manner of bitter bollocks about the band having been shit for ten years. Stepping away from the vicious context for a moment, the record is possibly their most direct effort yet, and one of their most upbeat too. Indeed, the propensity for straight-up rock instrumentals like Death Rays and San Pedro comes as a slight surprise after the misleadingly murky pre-release download of Rano Pano. There’s unmistakably less introspection here than normal, with the gorgeous Letters to the Metro representing the only moment where the album skulks into its shell, and even the quiet is shortlived, as the band immediately resume their mission to live out their alt-rock fantasies. It’s all pretty exhilarating stuff, and just because their pant-destroyingly brilliant previous work might still shade it, that doesn’t mean you should believe the naysayers that Mogwai are dead as a creative force.

4/5

Kubichek - Not Enough Night (Album)

It’s staggering how quick and easy the Internet has made our access to an utter cavalcade of bands. Obviously this is a bit of a double-edged sword, because while we are now discovering artists we might not necessarily have had access to in years gone by, there is a very real danger that music eventually becomes something we stuff gluttonously and heedlessly into our ears simply because there are three other albums queued in our eMusic download manager which also need listening to this afternoon. If we’re consuming music like this, it is an unavoidable and regrettable side effect that innumerable great bands and albums will slip off the radar, which is pretty depressing if you stop to think about it.

Now, obviously, I’m not suggesting that lost classics are a new phenomenon, but the current industry model has shown us that no matter how wonderful the Internet revolution has been for music, there will always be great records which will be overlooked, it’s just that there are now loads more of them tantalisingly sat at the end of our fingertips. All of which brings me (reasonably) neatly on to our new feature, in which we will regularly focus on exactly that sort of album, a record which is dear to our hearts but for whatever reason isn’t as well known as we feel it ought to be.

If it wasn’t for a happy accident of geography which meant that Kubichek just happened to hail from the same part of England as me, there’s every chance that I might still be completely oblivious to Not Enough Night, and my life would be a tiny bit worse as a result. The band had been mainstays of the Newcastle scene for a good few years, having dissolved their previous incarnation and waded their way through gallons of record label shite before their debut album finally emerged in 2007, sounding far sharper and fresher than it had any right to given the slog they had endured to just get the thing made. Sadly Not Enough Night would prove to be Kubichek’s only album, a tantalising case of what might have been, but, God, what a beautiful corpse to leave.

The most enriching thing about Not Enough Night is the unrelenting pace at which the whole thing is delivered. For the majority of its forty or so minutes, the album is lived out at breakneck speed with both barrels aimed at pretty much everyone, from lairy Bigg Market meatheads (‘Taxi’) to “poetic friends” who “just wanna get their ends away” (‘Stutter’). Then you have ‘Hometown Strategies’ in which some poor small-towner is indignantly berated about being “too clever by half and too stupid to notice”. And don’t even get me started on the near-perfect headrush of album closer ‘Just Shut it Down’...

In less skilled hands the seemingly endless stream of spiky guitars and universal spitefulness could quite conceivably become tiresome, but there’s never really a danger of this occurring with Not Enough Night, simply because the sheer unadulterated energy it transmits is just so fucking primal that you can’t really stop yourself wanting to jump around your room shouting, or slam your foot as hard as you can on the accelerator.

While Not Enough Night’s primary function is unquestionably served as an arse-kicking rock record, there’s another interesting element to the album too, a more wide-eyed sense of feeling which only really rears its head on the odd occasions when singer Alan McDonald drops his snarl and the band gets lost in a gorgeous sea of instrumental bliss as it does on ‘Hope is Impossible’ and ‘Start as We Meant To’. This nod to the band’s very earliest recordings means that Not Enough Night appeals not only to the feet and loins but to the heart and head too. This extra dimension is a big factor in the album’s enduring appeal, to the point that it still finds as regular a home on my stereo as it did three and a bit years ago.

The Joy Formidable - The Big Roar Preview (Album)

It’s only been four years since they formed, but somehow it feels like it’s taken The Joy Formidable forever to get around to releasing a debut album. Having spent the last three or four years consistently appearing in ‘ones to watch’ lists and diverting us with an array of awesome dream-grunge singles and a barnstorming mini- album, the Welsh three piece have finally deigned to bless us with their first full-lengther The Big Roar which will land on record shop shelves on January 24^th. It’s worth ignoring the post-Christmas credit card bill just a little bit longer in order to grab yourself a copy, because this is a band who have been consistently growing in strength with every release, making The Big Roar a candidate to be the first great record of 2011. The album blends a load of new songs with a few that have been around for yonks (Whirring, Cradle and Austere), but sadly there is no place for the ridiculously moreish Paul Draper collaboration Greyhounds in the Slips or ‘festive’ single My Beerdrunk Soul is Sadder Than a Thousand Dead Christmas Trees. To a glass-half-full type like me, this would suggest that the songs which have made the cut might be even better. Besides, if you’re peeved by the absence of the aforementioned oldies, they feature on the stupidly comprehensive double CD and DVD box special edition, so indulge yourself. The band play the O2 in Newcastle on February the 8^th too, so if they are still strangers to you, there’s no excuse not to familiarise yourself with their music in the coming months.

Munch Munch - Double Visions (Album)

Prior to recording their debut album, Bristolian quartet Munch Munch felt compelled to lay down some ground rules for themselves, (apparently in order to curb their maximalist tendencies), which included sacking off guitars entirely and limiting themselves solely to live percussion. You’d think such restrictive tenets would result in the whole thing sounding a bit constrained, but Double Visions is a gloriously creative hotchpotch of songs. To call it pop is simultaneously accurate and misleading, because, sure, there are hooks present, but there are bloody dozens of them. The record seems to have been built from little 30-odd second snippets which have been chopped up, put back together in no particular order and then sliced into ten songs seemingly for the sake of convention. As a result, it’s a pretty disorienting listen initially, but it doesn’t take long for the boisterousness and sheer fucking fun of the likes of Wedding and Bold Man of the Sea to come gushing over you like some heaven-sent remedy to the miseries of the Northern Winter. Not many bands are ambitious enough to attempt an album like Double Visions, even fewer are clever enough to actually pull it off.

5/5

Ou Est le Swimming Pool - The Golden Year (Album)

When their singer Charlie Haddon died on August 20^th this year, it meant that the release of the debut album by Ou Est Le Swimming Pool would pale almost entirely into insignificance. The story of the end of Charlie’s life is an awful one, and there is nothing I can add to it that you haven’t read already. While it would be completely crass for me to talk about The Golden Year without acknowledging the tragedy which preceded it, it would be equally wrong to discuss the album exclusively in the context of Charlie’s death. Chances are that if you’re reading this, then you know the background, and you’re probably here to get an idea of what the album sounds like.

For the most part, The Golden Year sees Ou Est Le Swimming Pool building on the reputation which their previous singles built for them as doyens of punchy synth pop. The album houses a good five or six instances where the band completely and utterly hit their mark from a pop point of view, snaring you with a catchy chorus or insistent synth line and refusing to let go. ‘Dance the Way I Feel’ and ‘Jackson’s Last Stand’, in particular, provide the sort of devastatingly effective thrill out of seemingly simplistic ingredients which so many bands strive for, but which few achieve as completely as this.

When you’ve hit on a successful formula for pop perfection, there’s always a danger of overdoing it, and laying it on too thick with the hooks which has the inevitable impact of diluting their effectiveness. This is a pitfall which Ou Est Le Swimming Pool sidestep here, because The Golden Year isn’t played out entirely at full speed, with the pop stompers broken up with the odd slowie. While the more downbeat moments like ‘Our Lives’ don’t necessarily show the band playing their strongest hand, they are useful in saving The Golden Year from overwhelming you with boisterousness (aka The Passion Pit effect).

In spite of anyone’s best efforts to separate The Golden Year apart from its background, it was always likely that there would be one or two moments where its context would result in moments more poignant than the band probably intended them to be. ‘Better’s occasional dark sentiments, although masked by an upbeat melody, make for pretty difficult listening: “The quiet walls are more help than a friend could be”. A similar effect is created by the waves of delicate hope which open up the album on ‘You Started’, particularly its “You have started the beginning of my life” refrain.

Whether or not The Golden Year will prove to be the only album Ou Est Le Swimming Pool ever release is, at the time of writing, unclear, and is something which is a private decision for the band’s remaining members to make in their own good time. Clearly, if they do continue it will be with an entirely different dynamic to that which produced this record, a dynamic which at once shows the finely honed instincts the band possessed even at this early stage, as well as highlighting the potential they had for the future. Hopefully the strength of the album means that this is what Charlie Haddon will be remembered for, rather than the manner of his death.

7/10

Her Name is Calla - The Quiet Lamb (Album)

The five years since Her Name is Calla’s first recordings have been punctuated by a steady stream of releases, but The Quiet Lamb represents their debut album (they apparently consider 2008’s The Heritage a mini album). Clearly they are not a band to be unduly rushed into anything, and they have recently pointed out the efforts they have made to ensure that the record is as perfect as it could be. This is quite a refreshing approach, really. You only get to make one debut album, and the age of accelerated consumption in which we live means that a band who are pressured into rushing out something half-cooked might never get a chance to rectify the situation.

The unhurried philosophy to producing the album is something which can be clearly discerned on listening, because it sounds painstakingly considered. It is an approach which fits Her Name is Calla’s sound perfectly, and the result is that The Quiet Lamb sounds utterly majestic. Like The Heritage before it, it is far from an easy listen, and its seventy plus minutes are splashed with far more dark shades than light ones, but it is a hugely well-executed piece of work. The attention to detail which has gone into it is clear from its sequencing. The album flows wonderfully, right from the portentous openings of Moss Giant, into the desolate, moody A Blood Promise, through to Pour More Oil which sees the emotion which has built up finally being vented. There are times on the album where you find one song has drifted into another without you even noticing the transition, such is its smoothness and completeness.

One of the most impressive things about The Quiet Lamb is its diversity, which adds breadth to its grandeur, but never takes away any of its coherence. The combination of wintry beauty and bombast is underpinned by occasional departures in tone like the funereal folk of Homecoming, or the closing trio of The Union, which veers from triumphal otherworldly brilliance, to ambient beauty, to some kind of insane soundtrack to a sunset horseback pursuit. The album’s undoubted centre piece though is Condor and River, a gorgeous mini-epic which feels like the album in microcosm, building entirely at its own pace from placid beginnings into something so luxurious that seventeen minutes wash by in an instant.

With The Quiet Lamb, Her Name is Calla have managed to simultaneously build on their previous work and open up new doors. One of the key components in how good they are is the fact that they sound like no other band, a genuinely unique proposition who keep adding more and more components to their sound. Their decision to take things at their own pace has been entirely vindicated, because the album is a wonderful slow-burning success. Even if it takes another five years for them to follow up, it’s okay, because there’s plenty here to sustain us in the interim.

Manic Street Preachers - Postcards From a Young Man (Album)

A little over a year ago, when on these very pages I covered Journal For Plague Lovers, an album which saw Manic Street Preachers triumphantly rugby-tackling their personal history, I pondered whether 2009 would be a fitting time for their unfeasibly epic story to end. At the time, my logic seemed fairly sound. The act of bringing the last of Richey’s abandoned words into public consciousness after fourteen years had an undeniable air of finality to it, leaving the band with something of an unenviable dilemma as to how they would follow up such an album. But of course I’m forgetting that the Manics have always been contrary bastards who have spent more than twenty years being perfectly happy to do exactly the opposite of what you might expect. Therefore, the release of Postcards From a Young Man sees them emerging from the shadow of Richey’s ghost for a second time, and in exactly the same manner as they did in 1996, with an album which is brazen in its radio-conquering ambitions. The circumstances surrounding the two records, however, are entirely different. Where Everything Must Go displayed a defiant sense of optimism borne out of tragedy, wrapping it up in bombast and saturating it with strings, Postcards From a Young Man finds a band at an altogether more settled stage in their lives, crucially no longer needing to escape from their history. In spite of the clear differences surrounding their inception though, both records share the same sense of rejuvenation, a feeling that the band are no longer weighed down by the burden of expectation, and able to make a record just for the enjoyment of it.

In a recent press missive, James described the album as “one last shot at mass communication”, and, regardless of how tongue in cheek his sentiments may be, it’s easy to see what he means. Postcards can most definitely be considered a pop album in the sense that it is unmistakably front-loaded, and that it contains three or four absolutely killer singles which stand head and shoulders above much of the rest of it. Following on from the archetypal lead-single stylings of opening track ‘(It’s Not War) Just the End of Love’ is the album’s title track, which amounts to the most perfect distillation yet of what the band have been trying to achieve musically and lyrically for nigh on fifteen years, as Nicky laments the sting of seeing your youth drift away (“This life, it sucks your principles away”) while James engulfs his words in swooning, sweeping guitar. Even grander is the Ian McCulloch duet ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’. The song is enormous in scale, coming across like some Spector/Walker Brothers hybrid on which McCulloch’s magnificently jaded delivery is supported by an uncharacteristically benevolent-sounding vocal from James. Towards the end the whole thing swells to improbable levels of grandeur when the gospel choirs kick in, to such an extent that it really should all be too much, but the song is so gorgeous that it is impossible not to get caught up in its waves of joyous sadness.

Its first three songs are Postcards From a Young Man’s undoubted high points, before it begins to settle in a little, but every now and again it revisits the stateliness of its beginnings. ‘Hazelton Avenue’, for instance, sees an unlikely ode to the simple pleasures of consumerism (would anyone have seen that coming in 1992?) wrapped in an elegant, swirling refrain, while ‘Golden Platitudes’ comes off like a more grandiose version of the MOR pop of Lifeblood, with the massively uplifting musical accompaniment offsetting a song tinged with the sadness of being betrayed by your own political party (and possibly also by your own failing ideals): “What happened to those days when everything seemed possible... Where did the feeling go? Where did it all go wrong?”

Although they are clearly its most recognisable and memorable facets, the happy/sad big guitar pop numbers don’t quite tell the full story of Postcards. There are also occasional blasts of the characteristic anger which clearly still lingers in the 40-something version of Manic Street Preachers, aimed at targets both old (The decline of national industry, and with it, national identity) and new (Wire’s distaste for the blogger culture which means that anybody with a keyboard can now dispense the same kind of bile which he has spent years honing, to the point that “the printed world is all done and dusted”.) Truth be told though, for all that the angrier songs are bracing, with the rattling chorus of ‘A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun’ a standout example, they are ultimately a little bit throwaway, and at times feel just a little bit redundant. Not quite to the same extent as the likes of ‘Underdogs’ on Send Away the Tigers, mind you, but still they never quite seem to rise above the status of being decent rock knockabouts.

Really, Postcards From a Young Man can not be considered to be a logical follow-on from its predecessor. In spite of the relatively short period of time between the two, the parallels are fleeting, and only the paranoid, tetchy ‘Auto-Intoxication’ would come close to fitting comfortably on Journal For Plague Lovers. We only really see one direct reference to the emotional impact of creating Journal, but it is a telling one when on ‘The Descent (Pages 1 and 2)’, James sings “I’ve lost my last defence / The pages that you left”. Finally committing the last of Richey’s words to wax has left the band exposed, and without the safety buffer they have enjoyed all these years, which might explain the gusto and defiance with which they have attacked this project. While they have undoubtedly recorded better albums than this, they have also recorded much worse too, and there are moments on here which prove they can still genuinely surprise even me, a hardened Manics fan of some thirteen-odd years, with their passion and skill. The long and short of it is that Postcards From a Young Man is a microcosm of the band’s career, rich in glorious successes, pitted with the occasional mis-step, often contradictory, but ultimately completely life-affirming.