Mogwai - Rave Tapes

The title and artwork hint at a Saturday night party album, but things couldn't be further from the truth. What we have here is arguably - soundtracks aside - Mogwai's most elegant and restrained album to date.

Opening track, Heard About You Last Night, sets out their stall. Picking up from where the Les Revenants soundtrack left us, the hauntingly beautiful track is underpinned by a tranquil keyboard.

The band have always embraced technology and electronics to complement their music, but this is their most overtly electronic album, with synths having equal footing  alongside the guitars and occasionally being given centre stage. Take Remurdered - the track that they previewed online last year - brooding and teasing, the keyboards support the guitar until midway through, where the guitars are usurped by an uplifiting, exquisite synth riff. Simon Ferocious emphasises the electronic side of the band even more but takes us into much darker territory whilst distorted guitars cry out for attention in the background.

It's not all synths though - Hexon Blogon does exactly what you'd expect from a Mogwai track, whilst Repelish updates the formula with the recording of someone discussing Stairway To Heaven and satanic messages in music, coming across as a less abrasive relative of Slint's seminal Spiderland album.

And that just a review of side one...

Fans hoping for a Like Herod or Glasgow Mega-Snake are going to be disappointed, but there's plenty for the rest of us to feast on. Still very Mogwai, yet pushing their own boundaries - frequently a very mellow, enjoyable experience whilst still retaining their edge and finding beauty in the darkness. This is something you're more likely to listen to in the small hours after a rave rather than at one.

Oh, and there's a  lovely free 7" single,  featuring the track Tell Everybody That I Love Them, if you buy the album from an independent record shop. 

Bad Lyrics

I'm sure fans will rush to the defence of many of these lyrics with an excuse - "they mean blasting gelatin", "it's northern dialect"...but I'm not convinced. These are some of my favourite lyrical cock ups*...some great and not so great tunes.

Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak
"Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town". How exciting. Where in this town could it be? The jail perhaps?

Johnny Cash - Folsom Prison Blues
"I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die". Then why are you stuck in Folsom Prison (in California) when Reno is in Nevada?

Busted - Year 3,000
"and your great, great, great granddaughter is pretty fine". 5 generations spanning a millennium? Actually, given the advances in science, it's quite possible this could happen and either people will live to be 200 or one of these descendents will be cryogenically frozen. Maybe the song is much deeper than I gave them credit for.

Queen - Killer Queen
"Gunpowder, gelatine, dynamite with a laser beam". All pretty dangerous 'killer' items. Except for gelatine, which you use to make Turkish Delight. Gelignite would have been a more effective weapon.

Wah! - The Story of the Blues (Talkin' Blues)
"I remember something Sal Paradise said, he said 'the city intellectuals of the world are divided from the folk body blood of the land and are just ruthless fools' ". Wonderful, if slighty pretentious, literary reference by Pete Wylie to Jack Kerouac's On The Road. However, the quote was actually from another Kerouac character - Jack Duluoz from Vanity of Duluoz.

Labrinth and Emeli Sandé - Beneath Your Beautiful
Just the title... Beneath Your Beautiful what? Oh, do you mean you're? According to Labrinth this was done on purpose to annoy 'grammar Nazis'. Of course it was Labrinth, of course it was. He also apparently got the name Labrinth when looking through a dictionary - presumably one that doesn't include the letter y.

The Chemical Brothers & Noel Gallagher - Let Forever Be
"How does it feel like to let forever be?". Or does he mean what does if feel like?

Alanis Morissette - Ironic
The biggest irony is that she clearly doesn't understand what irony is.

*I'm certainly no great lyricist, I don't claim to be a master of the English language - I was going to include Instinction by Spandau Ballet, but I understand it is actually a proper word, used by those for whom just saying instinct isn't enough - and I haven't read Vanity of Duluoz, but if you can't laugh at something as ridiculous as music, what can you laugh at?

Hungover Albums 2013

So here it is, the moment you've all not been waiting for. In the absence of a Hungover radio show, here's some albums that either featured on the show or would've done if Chorlton FM was still on air - some albums that I really like, including some that I will no doubt have forgot about in a couple of years. You might like some of them too.

Public Service Broadcasting - Inform-Educate-Entertain
The much anticipated (by me) debut album. Having already heard half the album through previous singles, I was thinking "hang on, I want something new", but given that ROYGBIV, Spitfire, Everest and Signal 30 were all astonishing singles, it would be foolish to miss them off. The other tracks couldn't quite live up to these standards, but then not much can.

Warm Digits - Interchange

This

Steve Mason - Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time
Fantastic ambitious album finally realising the potential of the Beta Band over an entire album. I thought Boys Outside was a great album, but this is even better!

Arctic Monkeys - AM
Despite what the NME claim, this isn't their best-ever album and bringing in an R'n'B influence isn't all that radical - after all, R'n'B artists have been doing it for years. But it is still a fantastic forward thinking alternative rock album. The closing track "I Wanna Be Yours" does sound like a Flight of the Conchords song though.

Joe Gideon and the Shark - Freakish
A band I fell in love with by chance (The Deltics supported them back in 2009 or whenever) - lovely people, awesome live band. Finally a second album comes out, complete with more of Gideon's black comedic tales of self loathing and loves lost and found - and this time The Shark gets to sing two songs.

Deutsche Elektronische Musik 2
Soul Jazz release a second volume of...err...Krautrock. Covering the well known (Faust, Tangerine Dream, Can) and the lesser known (Electric Sandwich anyone? ) it's an equal to volume one and even introduced me to some new (old) music.

Cavern of Anti-Matter - Blood-Drums
The blink and you'll miss it release featuring Stereolab's Tim Gane. Like an instrumental Stereolab album with more Krautrock and less farfisa organs. A few hundred copies were pressed. On vinyl only.

The Flaming Lips - The Terror
The lush production of "Yoshimi..." and "At War With the Mystice" seems a long long time ago now. A dark, chilling album with some great tunes buried inside somewhere.

David Bowie - The Next Day
A promising debut album.

Ian McNabb - Eclectic Warrior

Boots has continued to write some great tunes, but here he's found a band in Cold Shoulder, who come on like a psych rock Crazy Horse, that can do the songs justice. Highlight for me (and arguably my favourite track of the year) is the astonishing nine minute opus Memory Be Good To Me, Memory Come Back To Me.

R. Seilog - Doppler
From a spellbinding set at The Green Man festival to this promising mini LP.

OMD - English Electric
Aren't old bands who have reformed supposed to put out albums that trade on the band's 'classic' sound and former glories? I guess that's exactly what you've got here, but those former glories here include the career suicide Dazzle Ships album, so we get a new release featuring spoken word announcements, women counting up to ten and some bloke saying "I want a future so bright that it burns my eyes". Oh, and some tunes too.

Queens of the Stone Age - Like Clockwork
It's just so good to have them back.

Julian Cope - Revolutionary Suicide
Steadily turning into our greatest living historian, how can his poppiest album in years contain a stunning 15 minute dirge called The Armenian Genocide? We also get They Were On Hard Drugs, which takes us on an alternative tour of how the ancients lived whilst the title track has the most Cope-like key change ever.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Push the Sky Away
Do I need to repeat what I've already said?

Euros Childs - Situation Comedy
Darker and funnier than an episode of Terry and June.

Oh/Ex/Oh - Extant
Released in late December 2012 but I'm letting this one sneak in as I didn't hear it until 2013. The Boards of Canada album was very good, but this stood out for me as one of the great electronic albums of the year.

Hookworms - Pearl Mystic

Deep fried space rock from Yorkshire

Euros Childs - Situation Comedy

Bad day at the office and then I get home to find this waiting for me a few days ahead of its release date. A new album by Euros Childs.

I'm pretty sure that every record that Euros has been involved in, from the early Gorky's Zygotic Mynci releases through to his most recent 'experimental' release At The Dance, has brought a smile to my face. 

This is no different.

Things that made me smile:
It's on vinyl.
The front cover, with a grumpy Euros in front of a picture of him as a child with (I presume) his dad.
The gatefold sleeve - a still from the Tête a Tete video (see below)
The song titles - Ooh La Oona, Brides in the Bath, Holiday From Myself.
Sample lyrics: "I'm not going to dress up like your mother anymore".
And that's all before I've even listened to the music.

On first listen - and I'm writing this as I listen to it for the first time - it puts forward a convincing case for being his finest solo album. Piano led, but featuring a full band (including Laura J Martin on flute), the album is overflowing with melodies to die for and sugar coated with Euros's vocals - still one of the sweetest voices there is. Things come to an impressive finale when the beautifully stunning (or is that stunningly beautiful) Trick of the Mind floats by for 14 minutes.

Oh, and whenever I buy music direct from his National Elf website, I get a personal note from Euros (I presume he does this for everyone and he's not just singled me out as his überfan). "Hello Tim. Thanks for buying Situation Comedy. Hope you like it! Euros" it said. It made me smile.

R.Seiliog - Doppler

After blowing us away with his closing set at this year's Green Man Festival, R.Seiliog releases a mini-LP of krautrock doodles, which is the perfect companion piece to the new Cavern of Anti-Matter album.

A promising sign of things to come - please make it a full length album next time though.

Cavern of Anti-Matter - Blood Drums

Heading towards the top of the album charts anytime soon... Oh, hang on, it's a vinyl only release that hardly any record stores seem to be selling? It was always likely to be a niche recording anyway, but I suppose those of you who don't have a turntable or the will power to track this down are just going to have to trust me on this one.  Because this is a great album! The ideal companion piece to R.Seiliog's recently released Doppler mini album.

Following on from the "You Are An Art-Soul" EP (different versions of all those tracks appear here), former Stereolab man Tim Gane 's latest venture involves the band taking you through 16 tracks of loose jams, broken analogue techno, and post-krautrock bliss - or, as the text on the gatefold sleeve brilliantly states, 'black and white psychedelia'.

"Movin' on Static" almost makes you want to dance and "Dystopian Shopping Mall" sounds just like the music you would expect in a dystopian shopping mall - The Love Unlimited Orchestra collaborating with Throbbing Gristle. The whole thing sounds very much as you would expect from a Stereolab-related record.

Anyway, have fun tracking this down. It's probably a limited edition too, just to enhance its obscurity rating. Destined to become a lost classic.

Beautiful Rewind

And out of nowhere (other than a warning a couple of months ago that an album would appear out of nowhere)  Four Tet's new album, Beautiful Rewind, arrives on my doorstep.

First impressions? Beautiful. Lots of sampled female vocals so far.