Records

Esoteric

Too Much Posse

Fly Casual

Some relevant facts about this album: [1] fittingly for the comics issue it features a humorous comic involving a pterodactyl; [2] the pterodactyl theme continues inside, with samples used to hilarious effect; [3] the liner notes include an overly long essay about posse cuts; [4] the album itself is overly long, but if you’re a fan you’ll want to get it as it’s apparently gonna be super-limited; [5] it makes a great gift for someone who likes pterodactyls and white rappers.

RODNEY G. JONES

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

DIRTY

DIAMONDS

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH

WASTELAND

BEST COVER OF THE MONTH

MIN2MAX

WORST COVER OF THE MONTH

BOY KILL BOY

Nobody and the Mystic Chords of Memory

The Colored See…

Mush

Our natural reserves are running dry, the world is at war and the planet faces an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that we may not survive. How do our musically gifted friends in California see fit to soundtrack such a momentous point in time? Oh, maybe with a bit of cosy and sentimental sunshine pop that occasionally employs a bit of trip hop inspired backing. Drivel. Throw them to the lions.

JULIUS SEIZER

Jel

Soft Money

Anticon

Once upon a time there was a tall black kid in baggy jeans and white sneakers and an attitude so fresh that he conquered the world. He was so charming that even rich white kids with two degrees fell in love with him. His name was Hip Hop. Unfortunately the white kids were so in love with him that they got an old friend of theirs, Trip, to wear the same clothes Hip Hop did, because they wanted to make him just as famous. They almost succeeded, but not quite. Trip was way too square and not fresh at all.

GANGSTA BOOGIE

Boxcutter

Oneric

Planet µ

It’s frustrating when the first track of an album completely blows me away because 9 times out of 10 the rest of the album pales into mediocrity as a result. This one crashes its yoghurt truck embarrassingly early but if you turn the rest of its pasty-faced middle-class bedroom riddims up loud enough it doesn’t really matter. It still lets you pretend to be a rude-boy in front of your mum’s mirror without having to go to an actual grime night and risk a beating. Boxcutter is to grime what The Bug is to ragga. Safe!

JULIAN FORREST-HILL

No Bra

Noise Pollution”

Muskel Records

Shoxton am-dram fruitcake No Bra’s last single “Munchausen” was hilarious and deserved to sell 90,000 copies. This one takes itself a little too seriously, politely droning on about “noise pollution” while completely forgetting to introduce a brutal body-music beat. Guess she’s showing her sensitive side. Extra points for using a picture by Vice photographer Tim Barber from the Party Issue for the cover, though.

THANDIE NEUTRON

Mike Patton

Peeping Tom

Ipecac

Patton makes a million records, but this is the big one, apparently, which you can tell because he’s wheeled out his “I used to be in Faith No More” voice. It’s UNKLE on a budget, and he does collaborations with Kool Keith, the usual Anticon suspects, as well as Massive Attack and, amazingly enough, Norah Jones. So that’s this and the Little Willies album this year for Norah. You’ve got to admire the breadth of that remit.

JOEL RABINOWITZ

Punx Soundcheck

When Machines Ruled the World

Pale Music Int.

Ray Kurzweil is a mad scientist inventor type who invented things like the flatbed scanner and optical character recognition and stuff. He believes that quote “Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity—technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history” unquote. Let’s hope that like in

Terminator

we can get some guns and fight back. If we win, this album would be a good one to listen to while sitting around reminiscing about the good times, like when Mike blew that cyborg’s head off with a shotgun or when we had that rocket launcher. Especially the bit where a dude who sounds like David Bowie in

Labyrinth

goes “Liaaahh!”.

OL’ CURLY

Crowdpleaser & St. Plomb

Mental Groove

Those who’ve followed the movements of these two Swiss producers over the last five or so years will know that they rarely put a foot wrong, but at the same time they’ve never quite taken things to the next level. But

is where it finally all comes together on a versatile album of glistening electro and playful rave that ought to put the Get Physical guys in Berlin out of business (please?). Kate Wax sings on one song. She felt Vice’s review of her album last year was sexist. Honey, it wasn’t.

LES PANINI

Perspects

Peopleskills

Interdimensional Transmissions

“Why are you listening to Nine Inch Nails?” my girlfriend asked when I was halfway through the Perpects album. She was spot on, as usual. I’d been struggling to think of an act to compare

Peopleskills

to and, being a high-horse-riding snob who considers himself way above Trent Reznor’s vulgar output, I hadn’t considered that this record—euphoric nihilism from Detroit—is actually a fucking great industrial goth disco album.

SUBURBAN DWIGHT

V/A

min2MAX

Minus

The trouble with all this minimal stuff is that, stylistically, it’s a dead-end, unless the producers involved are imaginative enough to take it elsewhere. If you got last year’s stunning

Minimize to Maximize

compilation, for example, then you don’t really need this inferior follow-up, even though the colour scheme’s nicer. The whole

min2MAX

campaign seems ridiculously pretentious this time, too. Isn’t this just music to snort ketamine and fall about to in semi-legal warehouse spaces? Stop being so serious.

TEASELS YARNSWORTHY

5 Mic Cluster

Crystal Mic

Output

Top techno geezer Mark Broom and Chrome Hoof’s Milo Slee squidged out this slap-happy acid-pop beauty over the summer in East London with a couple of friends. Some of it’s like Squeeze covering ESG, or the Blockheads playing Plastikman. It’s funny, honest and stupid.

CYNTHIA SYNTH

DAT Politics

Wow Twist

Chicks on Speed

The sixth album from this French bunch reveals yet another layer of pop-synth craziness beneath the previous layers of crazy synth-poppiness. It’s as if the mice led away by the Pied Piper just hung out over the hill and had a fun little party. It’s also the perfect soundtrack for that time you overdid it on the sherry during which you plucked your eyebrows so that you wound up looking like the bald chick from

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

.

DAVID COTNER

The Wee DJs

Touchin’ Bass

Dark and dirty electro business from, as the wording would suggest, dark and dirty Scotland. Buy it because a) it’s good and b) everyone should have a record in their collection called

Fear and Lothian

.

ED GARRARD

Wasteland

All Versus All

Transparent

What kind of 1997 DJ Spooky shit is this? Where is there an audience for this stuff, Slovenia? This is the kind of bilge former crusties used to play at dinner parties in Stoke Newington during the dot-com boom. They used to say things like, “web design is the new circus skills for the millennium!” while they tucked into a nut roast. They were very, very bad times indeed.

TONY MOLESTER

The Accused

Oh Martha!

Nuclear Blast

You can’t blame these guys for attempting to cash in on the resurgence of a genre that they were integral to. Before the style magazines start writing about the return of crossover, let’s take a moment to enjoy the fact that The Accused are a bunch of dads pushing 40 and still penning brilliant lines like, “Hooker fortified pork products / Just chock-full of heroin and Aids”. Okay, they’re a bit short on ideas when they have to include two covers (of Tank and Olivia Newton-John) on a 30-minute album but fuck it, why should we expect anything else? Metal has never been anything other than plain dumb and if you don’t like it you can go listen to something more worthy—Sunn O))) perhaps, and pretend you aren’t bored to tears.

NATHANIEL

Sonic Youth

8.5

Rather Ripped

Geffen

Just when you think this band have finally become like The Fall, where you can’t really distinguish between one album and the next, and people give them good reviews whatever they sound like, it’s cool to hear a Sonic Youth album that in its way is almost AOR, but also very weird, and very cool. Funny words. Amazing cletan guitar sounds. The Kim ones are good. And, hey, don’t they look good for people in their late 40s, too? They should do a workout DVD or something.

ROBIN JOHNSON

Drive-by Truckers

A Blessing and a Curse

New West

What I don’t understand about irony is how, exactly, it’s different from tribute. Just because inside your thought-dome you’re going “Haha” doesn’t make the finished product any different. So are Drive-by Truckers an ironic Southern band or a Skynyrd tribute band? I don’t know, but fortunately it doesn’t matter because this just sounds like Bon Jovi.

SKY MCDOUGAL

Lansing Dreiden

7.5

The Dividing Island

Kemado

At first it seems like sort of a comedown from all the soaring blow-driven synth jammers on their last album, but then about halfway through it suddenly bumps back into the red, like this flight I was on that had its back wheels fully on the runway, then took off at a 45-degree angle to avoid another plane, prompting three passengers to yell “Oh shit!” at the exact same time. OK, maybe not quite that magical.

LEROY GUMPTION

The Longcut

A Call and Response

Deltasonic

Someone asked me if “the kids” still gave a shit about Thurston Moore. I said I didn’t know, I’d have to go and check. Before I had a chance to, this little doozy fell into my lap. Ten twisting slabs of stern Mancunian post-hardcore later, I had my answer. Which was: “Probably”.

AL EATON

Demolition Doll Rods

There Is a Difference

Swami

I’ve had a boner for this band since I saw them open for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion ten million years ago. They came onstage half-naked with car parts taped to their boobs—the two girls and the guy—and played the swampiest, gnarliest garage rock I’d ever heard. Margaret Doll Rod played the guitar by squooshing it against her various naked body parts, and she could growl-sing like Jennifer Herrema minus the heroin. Danny Doll Rod played macho dude riffs while wearing high-heeled go-go boots and sparkle lipstick. I was riveted. (And horny!) I’m so glad they’re still going at it. I hope they never stop and then one day they’ll be hard rockin’ grannies, just like me and Dead Moon.

ROCKIN’ GRANNY

The Futureheads

News and Tributes

Somehow I managed to survive the indie uprising of 2004 without hearing the first Futureheads album—they’re like the chubby Maximo Park, right? Or is that The Young Knives? So confusing. This new one is literally the sound of four blokes from Sunderland in matching suits playing fast tuneful rock music, and if that doesn’t get you excited then what if we throw in some lazy references to Wire, Queen and XTC? Does that help much?

THEYDON BOIS

Jesu

“Silver EP”

Hydra Head

Justin Broadrick delivers 29 minutes of gloomy power bliss-outs that harken back to days of yore. The early-90s, that is, when there was a very healthy cross-pollination occurring between the outsider fringes of metal, indie and dance music. Crusty kids in fetid Heresy T-shirts were necking Es in fields along the M1 and tripping their filthy faces off while the po-faced, centre-parted Slowdive set weren’t all that out of place at a cider-soaked punk all dayer in Stoke-on-Trent. This manages to marry the ecstatic dirge of My Bloody Valentine with the molten heaviness of Streetcleaner era Godflesh and make it feel, well…nice.

MAURICE CHEVALIER

Serena Manesh

S/T

PlayLouderecordings

Have you ever wondered what became of the Muppets’ house band, The Electric Mayhem? After poor record sales, television cancellations and the death of Jim Henson I thought they were gone forever. Boy, was I wrong. Janice and Dr. Teeth are back, and apparently they have spent the last ten years in Norway listening to Slowdive and taking Animal’s ADD Medication. Pitchfork has crowned these clowns the band to watch, but personally I think they’ll never make it without Zoot.

SGT. FLOYD PEPPER

Boris

Pink

Southern Lord

Japan’s Boris have written an album that’s a sort of primer for the various permutations in the Boris canon. You get the epic rock bombast, the acid-laced boogie jams, proto-grunge fuzz-box freak-outs, heavier than thou maximalist doomscapes and brief moments of elegiac tranquillity. These are blatantly referential homages to all things heavy that eagerly administer Rock’s Law and are guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your throne for the duration.

FRUITY MCGINTY

Danielson

Ships

Secretly Canadian

“Good mornin’ sir! It’s a sale today! Can I interest you in a kick in the teeth? It’s only £4. No? Okay, how about 12 tracks of pretentious, childish, artless, irritating, bouncy indie-pop with ‘performance art’ leanings for a measly £16? What? You’ll take the kick in the teeth, you say? Lovely. Just take out your retainer please, and…. heeere we go!”

DUSKER WHO

Forward Russia!

Give Me a Wall

Dance to the Radio

FR! are producing the most irritating guitar music available anywhere in the world right now, which is probably good news for Biffy Clyro if for no-one else. How many pointless fiddly bits? Millions of the little fuckers, all in a line. Then the dude bellows some doomy balls and that’s supposed to blow our minds because Paul Epworth’s produced it. People: it’s not because of a corporate conspiracy that you havent got a record deal. It’s because all your songs are wank.

LUCKY LUCIANO

One Two

Love Again

Four Music

Someone should make a cartoon about One Two. In it, Frederic and Severin, two charming and stylish French bohemians, ward off armies of music-hating ghouls with their danceable punk-funk and neon power-pop. It’d be a cross between

Yellow Submarine, Jamie and the Magic Torch

and

Sharky and George

and it would be fucking massive.

JAIMIE HODGSON

Boy Kill Boy

Civilian

Vertigo

These guys are trying to be the British Killers, which is fair enough in a “hey, don’t judge me, everyone’s got to earn a living” way. But was it naïve to expect a bit more shame? Apparently so. Just listen to these shaggy fools. They’re belting it out! At times this sounds like the Inspiral Carpets doing

Rocky Horror

, but somehow the thing this is most like is when they redo British sitcoms for America and everything’s essentially the same, but there aren’t any jokes any more.

THE MAJOR

Hope of the States

Left

Columbia

Part of me suspects Hope Of The States are actually Embrace, but wearing those masks you get in James Bond films. No songs, can’t sing, bloody orchestras over everything—has anyone ever seen them in the same room? Makes you curious about the funding process, too. What happens exactly? Do you just ask for half a million pounds and they say, “Oh, sure, we were looking to give that to someone.” Anyway, same old atmospheric intro story: all starter, no main; all fanfare, no charge.

JACKIE RUBINSTEIN

Vetiver

To Find Me Gone

Fat Cat

The last one of these came out in the Spring Of Devendra a couple of years ago and got a bit lost in the subsequent rush of mandolinists, which was a bit unfair. No penicillin is being discovered here or anything, but when Andy Cabic and his people get with the cello droning on track 2, it’s really cool. Otherwise, if for some reason you need to buy a CD that encapsulates the experience of visiting Borders, I’m saying, “over here”.

THE MAJOR

Eleventh Dream Day

Zeroes and Ones

Thrill Jockey

Oops, kind of jumped the gun on the whole 90s Chicago nostalgia rush there. No big deal, it happens. Why don’t you go have a seat in there with the Smoking Popes and math-rock and chill out for a bit? Oh don’t worry about it, you can put my fond reminiscences of earnest music-making wherever, just sit, seriously. Make yourself comfy.

YAWNA NG

Robin Guthrie

Continental

Rocket Girl

Part of the genius of Robin Guthrie is that he makes everything he touches sound like the Cocteau Twins, and it’d be the same if he was working with Slipknot or Kanye West. Possibly not a huge surprise then that this sounds like a cross between the Cocteau Twins and, occasionally, Mogwai. No Liz Frazer, of course, which renders the picture atmospheric but critically incomplete, like a Christmas card that only depicts snow.

THE MAJOR

Crystal Skulls

Outgoing Behavior

Suicide Squeeze

Why have the word “skulls” in your name if you’re not going to rock? I hear “skulls,” I think bloody noses and somebody pooping onstage, not hippies wearing leather pouch necklaces containing homemade herbal remedies and the keys to everlasting boredom.

SAD FACE

M.Craft

Silver and Fire

No matter how fantastic M.Craft’s second album is—and it is—there’s something about this kind of talented and cultured male singer-songwriter that automatically makes you picture a Brit flick rom-com. As Martin flits from nu-folk heart-wrencher to dusty flamenco gem, you just can’t rid your mind of the face of that guy who played Egg in

This Life

.

RANDY PAN

V/A

Dirty Diamonds III

Diamondtraxx

Hello amazing compilation of fantastic music I should know about but don’t! So pleased to meet you. The three dusty-fingered Parisian playboys behind

Dirty Diamonds

have excelled themselves on this third edition, mixing obscure cult classics with less obvious tracks by current artists to create two CDs of exquisite mood music. The first disc has a narcotic country rock vibe with songs from Wilco, Brooks, Mazzy Star and The Earlies; the second, my favourite, cruises through Cristian Vogel, Ennio Morricone, The Emperor Machine and two extended disco romps from Soft Cell (“So”) and Germany’s 70s hotrod Supermax (“Lovemachine”). Google Supermax and enter a world of moustaches, divas, synthesisers and glittering cocaine excess.

JENNIFER JUPITER

Eugene Mirman

En Garde, Society!

SubPop

I’d say about 50% of comedy is timing. Oh wait, I mean delivery. Oh wait, is that the same thing? I’m no comic obviously, but Eugene Mirman is, and he gives good timing and delivery. He is also good at using funny-sounding words to comedic effect, such as the word “dandelion.” That’s a funny word! I listened to this at work with my bitter and cool co-worker Cris and I watched him trying sooo hard not to crack up in the corner. It was too cute.

SLEN HEART

Howling Rain

Howling Rain

Birdman

This features Ethan from Comets on Fire and John Moloney, the guy from Sunburned Hand Of The Man who’s a gun nut and looks like he works building log cabins. That may all make a bit more sense when you hear this: in all the important ways this is a Creedence Clearwater Revival album, except in among the stuff about Jesus and horses, someone has bolted on some very heavy noise.

PHIL MENNARD

Leafcutter John

The Forest and The Sea

Staubgold

An album with a concept, this tells a true story of what becomes of two people lost in a forest—apparently. I wouldn’t know as I’m not much of a lyrics man and my drug-addled attention span won’t permit such Herculean feats of listening but I hope it all works out in the end. Sure, the mellow glitches are a bit turn-of-the-century and the snippets of song don’t reach further than The Black Heart Procession, but it never dwells on either long enough to bring on a rage.

CHIP WITHERS

Six Organs of Admittance

The Sun Awakens

Drag City

It’s been almost two years since people started listening to folk again. And Lord, how thankful I am. Six Organs Of Admittance are Ben Chasny plus some other amazing musicians. Even if this time around there are more electric guitars and more violent rock moments, this remains an excellent testament to the power of good folk music. It’ll take you out for a ride in a battered old pick-up truck. Then it’ll sit you down out in the country, give you a beer, and share some embarassing secrets with you.

LOLA FORTUNE