The Swell Season... live, Royal Festival Hall, 26th October 2010

The Swell Season made a happy, triumphant return to London on Tuesday evening, with the large, appreciative RFH audience vociferous and adulatory from the moment they stepped onstage.

Hansard likes to mix up the set and usually throws in some unexpected covers, while respectfully playing the major hits. This time the covers were from Van Morrison, a fierce, howling, solo accoustic version  of "Astral Weeks", and later a faithful, soulful take on "Into the Mystic". Both were unexpected highlights, with Hansard both paying genuine homage to a musical ancestor, and demonstrating his own fantastic ability.

There was a relaxed atmosphere throughout, with Irglova often taking centre stage to sing her bittersweet, romantic songs. Also an interlude for violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire's original work "Emer's Dream", and in the encore a guest appearance from alt country artist Sam Amidon.

Overall highlights were the Morrison tracks, everyone's favourite "In These Arms" and "Falling Slowly"... and all of it really. They never let you down...

Links: Setlist.fm - http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-swell-season/2010/festival-hall-london-england-3bd57cd8.html

Villagers live... Scala, London, 5th October 2010

Conor O'Brien's Villagers played a crowded Scala in Kings Cross on Tuesday evening. Demonstrating his typically strong-willed artistic auto-prerogative, he opened with a couple of new, solo acoustic songs (titles unknown) - confident that his focused, single-minded stage presence would force the bubbly audience to rapidly hush. And the gig floated upwards and outwards from there, each song gradually raising the level. With just the debut album in the repertoire there's not a great deal of material, but nevertheless, what there is is rich and deeply moving.

In stark contrast to most artists, the deliberate effort and control he puts into vocal enunciation is already something of an O'Brien trademark and  is even more obvious live than on record. Like a poet, it's not just the words that matter, but the aural sound of each specific syllable - he caresses and cajoles them like any other capricious instrument.

It was also a joy and a relief to hear him still tweaking and fiddling with the songs, rather than drilling through them on auto-pilot. So the odd chord was altered, a new bridge squeezed in, the instrumentation rebalanced... This showed an artist in love with his music and his muse, but also working hard to keep that fire burning.

A flame like this is special and doesn't tend to burn very long (.. is anyone else also half dreading the next Winehouse album?) ...  let's hope it's bright a while yet.

Groove Armada... an urban soul renaissance

Groove Armada were formerly reknown for their catchy, accessible mix of coffee table electronica and house party breakbeats. With mega-hits "Superstylin'", "I See Ya Baby", "Madder".. their music is perfectly engineered for, say, a suped-up boy racer car stereo, or a Saturday afternoon barbeque soundtrack.

Previous album Soundboy Rock turned the GA focus to urban r'n'b, but new album Black Light takes the band again in a new direction. Essentially GA have taken the 80's clubland melting pot where disco, soul, r'n'b, white-boy funk, pop... et al. all mucked in together with varying exploitations of the revolutionary new electronic technologies - the synthesiser and the drum machine, and have run it through their own superb production factory. At their best they weld a near-perfect union between pop and club, taking (i.e. writing) real songs and producing them using dance based technologies, rhythms and aesthetics.

This 80's musical renaissance has clearly gone well beyond simple nostalgia or ironic retro-fashion. Bands are delving deep into the work of Talking Heads in particular, but also all the early synth based pop, and are digging out and refining beats, tones, moods, effects (especially the saturating, arena-sized reverb).  Here GA take on the big stage, soulful pop of say Yazoo or Level 42, and re-engineer it with a deeper, fuller, sound more suited to this new millenia. Andy Cato has pointed to the band looking back to Bowie (presumably his post Ziggy work - Heroes perhaps?), Numan, New Order, and perhaps this is indeed in there too. Noticeably absent is anything in the way of their trademark, gentle "retail electronica" - there's no "My Friend" or "Hands of Time". The pedal is to the floor (well, relatively speaking at least).

As ever GA rely on guest vocalists and this time out for the majority of the album the vocal baton is passed back and forth between Nick Littlemore (Empire Of the Sun) - doing a kind of punky white boy rap thing, and Saintsaviour - chanteuse dramatique - who is perhaps on a holy quest to find Stevie Nicks' heart-torn-rock-queen tiara.

"Warsaw", with Littlemore, is based around a large 'n dirty electro-house bassline, it's a get-the-party-started raver's whistle of a tune.  With a weird juxtaposition but to good effect Will Young features on the album's recent single "History". This has the bittersweet pop-funk of say Tears for Fears, but with a subtle undercurrent of house throbbing through the insistent beat, and the beefed up bass.

"Cards to Your Heart" is a new wave funk track hounded along by a fat electro synth, while "I Won't Kneel" with Saintsaviour's multi-tracked, reverbed vocals sounding like the Bangles, or Belinda Carlisle, is exuberant, glossy urban soul, you half expect Meatloaf to appear any moment and sweep her in his arms. (Check out the video - it's spectacular http://youtu.be/te800CeEjBM )

Possibly the best track on the album is "Shameless" which features the surprisingly fresh sounding, bona-fide 80's legend Bryan Ferry, with his trademark breathy, louche and coolly distanced crooning, this understated house track has ample mood-space.

"Look me in the eye sister", with Jess Larabee standing in for perhaps Joan Jett, or Pat Benatar is a regular soft rock song - big guitar / faux guitar chorus, in the tradition of say "Power of Love". This is followed by "Paper Romance", which sounds exactly like something by MGMT, and that's no bad thing at all, while "Time And Space" with both Saintsaviour & Jess Larabee, has shamelessly lifted the iconic bass line and more from Roxy Music's "Love is the Drug", but done it so well you can't help but  love it.

"Fall Silent", with Littlemore again, clearly shows the influence of GA's younger contemporaries - say, Animal Collective, with multi-layered 'group sing' vocals and super-chorused synths, this is indie music played on electronic instruments. Album closer "Just For Tonight" is more Fleetwood Mac-esque soft rock, adroitly carried by Larabee's fine vocal. 

In summary, yes - you can't escape the retro, and no, there's nothing remotely new in it at all - this is exactly as mainstream as it could ever really be. If you're looking for something a bit more adventurous and unexpected, try instead the new Gorillaz album Plastic Beach. But for comfortable, masterfully produced, nearly-cool but-unfortunately-too-white, dance pop you can certainly rely on Groove Armada to deliver.

Links:
Paper Romance -  http://youtu.be/UbpWBDfpUBA

LCD Soundsystem... punk-dance, yes, but mellowing...

James Murphy is a punk-dance trickster, deftly shuffling musical styles and references in a quick fingered blur. He's famously iconoclastic in person, but on record he's also resentful and acerbic, vengeful and sarcastic, yet somehow finds a way to make a perfectly likeable brand of dark pop.

This Is Happening is his third album under the LCD... moniker and it's the sound of a talented middle-aged man facing up to his flaws, but still not shy of throwing a few punches when he sees fit. Where earlier albums ranted and raved (often against the corporate music industry), here he's coming to a reluctant detente, as on "Pow Pow" - ".. from this position.. oh just relax, from this position... I make some stand, I make my peace with the man..."

This is Happening is a brief nine tracks long, but each track gives ample space for the groove to ferment and rise. Key reference points, as on previous albums, are Bowie, Eno and Reed, 80's art rock, dirty New York disco, and 90's acid house. And yet this album is calmer, the synth's are less abrasively toxic. Seen live, LCDS are essentially a regular indie band playing dance music, but on record he writes and plays nearly everything himself, in true enfant-terrible fashion. Typically, Murphy will set up a groove - be it house, funk, disco, rock - run a vocal riff over the top, and let it build toward some kind of climax. His David Byrne-esque, shouty vocals are not particularly strong, but they are distinctive and simple in a way that lends itself to catchiness.

"Dance Yrself Clean" starts out as a simple disco groove, before a super-fat, electro-house synth comes wading in over the top, squashing everything in it's wake. "Drunk Girls" is a bitingly sarcastic party song with hand claps and a mocking "Oh oh I be-lieeeve.." chorus. At the mid-point "I Can Change" is about domestic battles and a man clinging on to love. This is followed by the particularly 80's sounding "You Wanted a Hit", where he returns to beating on the music industry. Highlight is the off-message and sentimential album closer "Home", where Murphy briefly sheds the self-loathing and bile and allows himself a little hope.

This is Happening is an engaging and enjoyable album, but it lacks the edgy progressive-ness of earlier work. This is a little disappointing considering the promise engendered by the debut, and especially so when compared to the freshness coming from contempories such as, say, Crystal Castles. The LCDS work is released on Murphy's own DFA label, which is a current hotbed of the more transgressive and genre-breaking, leftfield end of dance (The Rapture, The Juan McClean, Hot Chip..), and so the singles generally come with a variety of leftfield club orientated remixes which can be more liberally inventive than the original format.

Links:
Drunk Girls - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdRaf3-OEh4

Broken Bells, Field Music... thinking person's pop and looking back to psychadelia

Broken Bells and Field Music are two of the current wave of groups who hark back to golden era of psychadelic pop. The Beatles, The Kinks, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, the young Pink Floyd and others... shared a similar ethic and influenced each other. They began as hit parade outfits, outgrew the medium and went on to explore other possibilities.

The music they carried on to make was both lyrically and melodically dense. While in their later period The Beatles were more liberally experimental, the Kinks and the Pet Sounds-era Beach Boys kept the song at the centre of focus - not straying off into cul-de-sacs of strange, looped sound effects and throwaway half ditties. For us today though, after punk, after Velvet Undergound, the Clash, the Jam, and the after shocks which reveberated on into post-punk, new romantic, gothic, grunge... - music largely became simpler; no mid-song changes in tempo or time signatures, melodies are generally borne by the lead vocal with the lead guitar taking a back seat unless there's a bridge.

The psychadelic sophiscation in structure can be readily heard in the use of multi-layered melodies, tightly packed lyrics, the folk-ish use of backing vocals right through the verse, the occasional lack of any lead vocal in a chorus, and the use of multiple phrases or segments in a song well beyond simple verse and chorus. All these elements were a movement away from pop music's roots in the simple blues forms.

Curiously, the two new albums are both eponymous - Broken Bells and Field Music (Measure) , this is usually taken as a statement of artistic identity - "This is the real me". Although both albums evoke the psychadelic period, they're still fundamentally rock-pop, but exploring the busy, inventive end of the spectrum. Further, it sounds as though there was also deliberate engineering choice to aim for the more 60's type of sound - Hammond organ sounding synths... basic, overdriven electric guitar... regular wooden drums rather than electric or digital sounds.

Broken Bells are the American duo James Mercer (vocals, guitar, bass), and Danger Mouse (real name Brian Burton, playing bass, drums, vocals, keyboards). Danger Mouse is the more famous of the pair following his banned Grey Album (an unauthorised mash up of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album), followed by a stellar production career working with Gorillaz, The Rapture, Beck and the Black Keys. Mercer is otherwise the lead singer of the Shins and formerly Flake.

An early archetype for this type of song was the Beatles' Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. The most obvious example here is Broken Bells' "Your Head is On Fire" - beginning with a multi-layered intro that presages the chorus - it has synths, a melody and a repeating group chorus, before the song stops, changes tempo and rhythm, and an enters verse with accoustic guitar and strings... there's a stop, then it changes back into the chorus phrasing. "October" is like a 21st century retake of the Kinks' "Sunny Afternoon", so laid back it's almost wearing board shorts and a straw hat.

However there's a lot more going on here than Kinks raiding - BB also have a fine sense of soul. "The High Road" has a 70's folk-rock groove, and "Vaporize" continues the vibe with Hammond style organ, perhaps mining a similar heritage-seam to recent Radiohead work. "The Ghost Inside" adds a slight Motown/Stax swagger to its 'post-world' cool strut, with slowed up funk bass, handclaps, and a great hook of a chorus, it's reminiscent of the better Gorillaz output (say, "Kids with Guns") and possibly the best song here.

This type of music is often about uncontained creativity - songs are not whittled down into a more classic 3minute pop structure, and the ideas are not puffed out beyond their merit - so you tend to end up with lots of slightly disjointed, unfinished sounding phrases. I tend to find it can lack flow, or momentum and can be hard to follow. The constant stop-start nature of the tempo disrupts the way I personally experience music - groove first, then harmony, melody, and finally lyric.

It's sophisticated, and that adjective doesn't necessarily mean a value judgement of either or bad, any more than it would (or should) imply such in another art form. As ever, the value judgement is more about personal taste, but also about the resonance of the ideas conveyed and the skill with which this is done.

That said, with DangerMouse's ever-smart, efficient, pop editing and ear for a hook, they can't go too far wrong and this album is likeable and accessible.

Measure, although inspired by the same period, has a slightly different vibe and it's also quite definitely an album of two halves. It begins with cheerful, seaside-pavillion pop, perhaps a little over-consciously sounding like the '67 Beatles' (Sgt. Peppers or Magical Mystery Tour). There's acoustic guitar and handclaps, noisy drums, loads of harmony, and bouncy, barroom-singalong choruses. Then, in the second half, things go a bit prog, specifically they go quite a lot 'early Pink Floyd'. "Clear Water" has a strange, stompy cack-handed rhythm to rival "Money", and "Lights Up" is a stoned, escapist fantasy (say, from Meddle), lazily dragging itself up into standing for the song to eventually start. before again wandering off into the night.

They resemble the early Floyd in a number of ways. Firstly there is that sense of the opaquely meaningful. The lyrics all seem to be about deeply mystical, very important things... but you've absolutely no idea what. This is heightened by the regular use of deep harmonies during verses.  A second reason is the use of a main melody on a bass guitar. This is a neat trick, retaining the melody in a phrase, but also giving the song a cavernous sense of space to float around in. Then there's Floyd-ish use of vibraphone, and strings (obviously), and 'ambient' sound effects (again - obviously). And a final reason is the falsetto vocal. This is usually a pet hate, but in this context it's not unlikeable.

"All You'd Ever Need to Say" is a monstrous riff-jam, packed with melody lines and harmonised phrases of just a few bars at a time. It can be a bit dizzying. It's core is a funky riff - but with the legs and arms chopped off leaving it not all that funk after all. The final three tracks form a movement "Something Familiar / Share the Words / It's about time", with repeated melodic themes running throught the set. "Something Familiar" is just the kind of sprawling "kitchen-sink-and-everything-else" song that Queen, or better yet - Meatloaf, are famous for (written for the piano perhaps?)


A irritating shortcoming is that at a number of points in the album, there seems to be unintentional similarity or direct repetition of earlier riffs and melodies. So I kept finding myself thinking "Hold on.. didn't I just listen to this earlier...?".
 

Measure is actually very good - it's packed full of ideas and melodies, it's very well executed and engineered, coherently produced. It's just not my taste; there's the frustrating lack of actual groove... the falsetto vocals... the obscurantist lyrical direction. There's a rock opera in here struggling to break free. If you like this, make sure you also check out the Flaming Lips - especially their last album which is fantastic.