Ian Brown... an ego visible from space, but still one of the greats

He surely needs no introduction, with the general population either loving or loathing him for his cliche-defining sense of himself. But put briefly aside personal tastes, I'd say it's inarguable that he's among a small handful of the most resilient English artists working in contemporary rock-pop (who else would you add? Morrissey... PJ Harvey... Robert Smith... your thoughts are welcome below), not only for the enormously influential Stone Roses, but for more than a decade of solo output.

What the stadium-sized ego clouds though, so heavily that many miss it altogether, is a mature musical sensibility that's able to go beyond the post-punk/ new romantic resources of his peers. Rather, Brown can draw intelligently and originally on inspirations as wide ranging as reggae, Motown, and early rave, all the while he nevertheless has a rare gift for pop songs with killer hooks. Still, I can imagine some of the heavier tracks with a guest appearance from Dizzee Rascal.. and I wonder why he's not really embraced hip-hop in his quest for universality.

He has a unique sound, a kind of post-modern northern soul where the trademark is his voice - that defiant, Mancunian drone that's utterly unmistakeable. As his solo career has progressed, he's gradually broadened the musical palette, becoming adept at the moody anthemic ballad, while maintaining that nose for a fantastic indie pop classic. Moving beyond guitar pop, he uses synths and loops, and ethnic percussion, just has naturally as the old guitar-bass-drum standard. It's also a pleasure to see him live and find that, at the same time, he's maintained a loyal, solid, accomplished band behind him.

His hits collection The Greatest .. is just such an essential album for anyone of this generation. To date though, his studio albums have been inconsistent - some brilliant classics, intermingled with fairly ordinary fillers. I believe it's an understandably common side-effect of working solo - it's just so difficult to maintain real inspiration and inventiveness over the length of an album. The collaboration that comes from working in a group acts both to provide a larger pool of ideas to draw on, and as a kind of built-in quality control where the rubbish ideas are nipped in the bud early on.

As a result, the new album My Way is approached with only limited expectations. To cut to the chase - well, it's about as good as hoped, no landmark moment in the decade, but contains some real gems. After repeated listens, it's weighed down somewhat by mid-paced, preachy, synth stompers which tend to all run together by the end. The best bits are when he picks up the pace, ratchets up the groove as on "Marathon Man" - a dirty synth tech-funk.

The standout "hit single" candidate is the opener - the infectious "Stellify", clearly destined for The Greatest Part II.. it's Brown at his typical pop best, singing about (- of all things -) being in love. He's also, slightly off-puttingly, added some mildly humorous touches, a 60's cover of the satirical "In the year 2525", a wry, doom-laden look at the long term future of the human race... and "Own Brain", a riff working off the anagram of his name.

As ever, he spends of lot a time railing against the soul-less, the cheaters, the enemies who are out to get him, and a lot more time telling us to love each other and be at peace with the universe.

The one that's been echoing around my head the most is "For the Glory"... hard to know whether he's just not moved on from the Roses, or whether he feels forced to sing this because the rest of us haven't.

".. when the bombs began to fall I didn't do it for the Roses...
as I was striding 10 feet tall well that's another story,
for the glory,
the good that you do..
will carry you through,
I did it for you,
I didn't do it for the glory".

The Decemberists... steadfast inventives (The Coronet, 19 Nov)

These people are anti-pop. Hard to resist the tempting idea that it mighht be both fun and instructive to strap Simon Cowell firmly into a chair at the front and force him to watch the entire gig... Defiantly, they opened by performing the recent folk-rock operetta - Harzards of Love, in it's entirety, from start to finish, without so much as a hello. Obstinately imaginative, like the nerdy kid in your class who refused to write in anything but green pen, they will clearly do things their way or not at all.

Ok, perhaps it was more to do with me standing in an unadvantageous position toward the back, but the set never totally convinced. It's a difficult thing to pull off a complete thematic suite in modern music, particularly if you're disavowing the singalong chorus. Still it's a strong, immensely ambitious work, amply crafted with variations in tone and power, shifting between three lead vocalists, covering a bagful of musical bases, from sea shanty to heavy-end blues - if you're prepared to pay attention it richly rewards. Centrepiece is the apocalyptic folk of "The Rake Song", but the piece as a whole builds in momentum, and the overarching theme "Harzards of Love" is interwoven throughout. Closing, are the triumphant "The Wanting Comes in Waves" and the final melancholic farewell ballad, the 4th part of "The Hazards Of Love 4 (The Drowned)".

Like the proverbial game, the second half was markedly different to the first. Working now through their back catalogue and playing the (relative) hits. Their sound is an amalgam firstly of Old European folk - iconified not just by the instruments - mandolin and accordion, but also by the close harmony singing, but secondly by new world indie punk. There are echoes of the Pixies and Violent Femmes, and one can imagine Jack and Meg White would feel right at home at a Decemberists' family singalong. But it all lies firmly on a bedrock of apparently Irish traditional folk, as if perhaps they're emigrant decendants of the Pogues.

Lead singer and general lightning rod, Colin Meloy has a strong, simple, melodic tenor that would cut acoustically through any pub full of noisy revellers on either side of the Atlantic. He also has a finely tuned sense of comic timing and this was engaged in hilariously conducting a mass singalong, appropriating a blow up killer whale as prop and a bandmate as fall guy, and gently lambasting the locals for foolishly naming the area after a dodgy pub in Oregon - the tongue in cheek American-ism bowling over the gleeful audience. My musical star of the team though was the accordian and general everything-player Jenny Conlee.

Stand out for me overall is the excellent "The Mariners Song", spine-tingling-ly evocative and beautifully weighted.

Volcano Choir... Vernon as indie-priest

Unmap... Justin Vernon is some kind of indie savant. I have no idea where this all comes from, it's almost supernatural what he does with music. By the sound of it, his work on the track "Still" - a rework of "Woods" from For Emma.. provided something of a creative launch pad. The track is reworked here and is a highlight of the album sounding fuller and more impressive where the original was tightly insular.

Instrumentally, he of course uses his own accoustic guitar, drums, and his trademark - group vocal harmonies throughout. But there are also electric guitars, various keyboards, electronic noodles... used on tracks like "Seeplymouth" to build full and powerful, moving soundscapes, perhaps slightly reminiscent of Spiritualized. He's unafraid to really slow things down, "Vote" starting as almost a plainsong chant that dissolves into an electric humm. Most .. errm... leftfield, is the fragile, obscure, Waits-esque "Mbira In The Morass".. (yes, right over my head too..).

This album is deeply calming, these are hymns from some post-modern indie church.

Titi Robin... a world music primer

A glowing, five-star review in the latest Songlines put me on to Titi Robins 1993 masterpiece Gitans. If I was required to introduce world music to someone, this would possibly be the first album.
The gypsy diaspora came out of the Indian subcontinent around 1000 years ago, to flow up and around both sides of the Mediterranean, all the way to Spain and Portugal, throughout Western Europe as well as up and on into Central Asia.

Along the way they both gave and took from the cultures they encountered. Words, scales, tones, rhythms, and especially small, easily portable instruments were adopted into the culture. So you'll find Persian tonality, African rhythms, along with the European fiddle and the accordion. Then there's the guitar, in all it's varieties, with millennia of development from both east and west. There's a diversity of percussion from hand claps, to tambourine, to bass drum.

It doesn't really get much more "world" than this.

Titi Robin himself is French, but made the album in homage to the gypsy music which inspired him, consciously compiling a fusion of the breadth of gypsy music and inviting some truly remarkable, accomplished musicians to assist in the work. He himself plays the guitar and the oud, and his longstanding project has been to fuse the styles of flamenco guitar with the Arabic oud - extending the same vision to the music as a whole. So the musicians involved here represent entire continents and cultures;

Gulabi Sapera (vocals - Indian/Rajasthani), Bruno el Gitano (vocals, palmas, guitar - French/Catalan), Mambo Saadna (vocals, palmas, guitar - Spanish), Paco el Lobo (vocals, palmas - Spanish) François Castiello (accordion - French), Hameed Khan (tablas - Indian/Jaipuri), Francis Moerman (guitar - Belgian), Abdelkrim Sami (percussion - Morocco), Bernard Subert (clarinet, bagpipes - French).

After a short intro there's the fairly straight-ahead flamenco of "La petite mer", with Robin's dexterous, balanced, inventive guitar building and building until past the halfway when, out of nowhere comes the fiercely raw vocal from the Saadna brothers. "Pundela" is a gypsy dance with the Rajasthani singer-dancer Gulabi Sapera, this time - strikingly - with the accordian and tabla juxtaposed directly, and Robin's guitar taking a relative backseat. Yet still, to me it sounds so much like the circular group chanting of a Malian or Senegalese tribal traditional.

A guitar-tabla duet of sorts follows in the densely improvised "Payo Michto", before the profoundly moving touchstone "Martinetes Y Debla"; an achingly mournful, meditative, spiritual song led by the deeply passionate vocal of Paco El Lobo. The song evokes for me the sunburnt courtyard of a north african mosque. It's so still. So grippingly emotive.

The middle section has a set songs with a more Arabic vein - "Mehdi" with clarinet taking the lead, has that oompah sound of traditional turkish music, like you might hear in the early hours at some upmarket restaurant in Istanbul - you can almost smell the apple tobacco and sugary mint tea, "Cuivre" with Paco El Lobo once more, the a capella "Kurja" - apparently a Rajasthani village folk song, then the deftly fluid, lyrical, eastern - "Marraine".

The centrepiece is the two parts of "Hommage a matelo" - a first movement of pure classical flamenco, moving gently into an accordian led east european klezmer tune.

On "Patchiv" the accordion of François Castiello is again to the fore, duelling with Robin's guitar.

To finish, there's a change of tack, the pulsating latin funk of "Rhumba do vesou" sounding, by comparison like a celebration.

Throughout, following the distinctive musical feature of flamenco, the guitar of Robin is in a literal discussion with the other performers. Whether the other is a gypsy dancer, the tabla, the accordian, a second guitar or a singer, there's a vibrant masculine-feminine argument that is the source of the drama in the music.

Gitans is the door to a different world. Incomparable and justifiably legendary.

See;
Robin and Sapera perform live - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqlHSN-QXew
Free Download of "La Petite Mer" - http://thierrytitirobin.com/Publish/creations/11/02%20La%20petite%20mer.mp3
Album available on subscription at emusic - http://www.emusic.com/album/-Gitans-MP3-Download/11583075.html