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Records

It's records – reviewed!

BLACK LIPS

MY MORNING JACKET

PIERRE LX

COCKNBULLKID

It’s hard to imagine what Tyler could have done to this to stop it being the most talked about album of 2011. Swap all the nice jazz chords for fart noises? Call in Scroobius Pip for some searing cultural asides? Alternatively, Tyler could continue to pitch himself somewhere between Dre, Richard Pryor and Bart in a

Simpsons

porn gif, record an album even nastier than

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Bastard

and sashay towards the sunset safe in the knowledge that soon there’ll be statues of him in every skate park in the universe.

ANN ARCO

HOCUS POCUS

16 Pieces

Onandon/Universal

Judging a rap album in a foreign tongue is always tough, but flaccid funk is the same in any language. This Nantes group have been around since the mid-90s, a time when this kind of thing was only about five years out of date, and if they’ve learned anything since then, they’re keeping it to themselves. There’s a reason there’s never been an acid jazz revival, mon ami.

MONSIEUR MANGETOUT

Formerly signed to Roots Manuva’s Banana Klan label, rapper Jimmy Screech sounds like Manuva’s over-eager younger brother. If he was a footballer, he’d be playing midfield for a League One side, routinely patronised with terms like “bags of enthusiasm”, his willingness to run until he drops not quite disguising an essential lack of match-winning artistry.

DUDE MCNUDE

BEASTIE BOYS

Hot Sauce Committee Part Two

EMI

Consider that it has now been 17 years since Ad Rock did that “I’ve got more rhymes than I’ve got grey hairs” line and you’ll realise that we are now entering a whole new strata of old guys rapping, and those perennially tiresome comedy skits where they get pensioners to “bust rhymes” is actually simply a premonition of the 2030 Vegas comeback circuit. Mind you, if the Beasties ever do the rhinestone jumpsuit tour, it should probably sound a bit like this, a mix of

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Check Your Head

-style funk jamming and cool things that rhyme shouted through a megaphone that, if you squint, could probably pass for lost cuts from their imperial age.

EL PEE

About two years ago, Daniel Lopatin was making some of the best “alone on a space station” cosmic drone music out there. I don’t know what happened but somehow he’s ended up in Jan Hammer’s studio with a chum making fiddly keytar funk that rests right on that pivot point between “deftly handled 80s revival” and “fondue party of your nightmares”. A track called “Too Much Midi (Please Forgive Me)” would seem to sum this one up.

CHILL DAVE

ART DEPARTMENT

The Drawing Board

Crosstown Rebels

House music took a massive wrong turn when it threw its love into screechy keyboards and left the cavernous basslines to dubsteppers, who just fell asleep with them in the corner. As if the Art Department duo’s reclamation of the bottom end wasn’t enough, Kenny Glasgow steps up with his Robert Owens croon. It’s pretty much the same song for 75 minutes, but who cares when it’s this good?

STEVE WHY

THREE TRAPPED TIGERS

Route One or Die

Blood and Biscuits

I don’t even want to know what obscure ear-bleed jazz these guys think is acceptable dinner party music. You’d be round their house, and they’d be all like, “Oh, so you like Radiohead, do you? That’s interesting. Then maybe you should hear this guy—Jazz McLobotomy—he’s fabulous. No, I’ll put it on…” And for 37 minutes you’d have to sit there meekly while someone stuffs a trumpet into a water buffalo in a variety of arrhythmic ways. Which is to say that after the promise of the three EPs, their debut is more… promise: there’s a lot of really neat Squarepushery post-everything ticking going on here, but somehow the bomb never

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quite

goes off.

PERRY STALSIS

PIERRE LX

Out 1

Initial Cuts

I want to believe that the “LX” in Pierre LX stands for “60”, a nod to this young French producer’s favourite keyboard, the Juno 60. But the truth is it’s a phonetic abbreviation of “Alexandre” (his name is Pierre-Alexandre Simoes). Similarly, I’m trying to convince myself that he made this raw and tender techno masterpiece in a battered Detroit bunker back in 1987, but the fact is he composed

Out 1

last year above an off-licence in Hackney, opposite Iceland. Somehow, that’s just as romantic.

THEYDON BOIS

DIGITALISM

I Love You, Dude

V2

The title might be the most brazen love letter to the US since the catapult of shit that was “America” by Razorlight, but this makes sense if you reckon the Yanks to be four years behind Europe in appreciation of dance music. Very little has changed in Digitalism’s Justice-shaped world since 2007, but when change seems to mean reviving the weediest part of 80s synth-pop while affecting homosexuality and hooking up with Julian Casablancas, I’m with the guys throwing sub-metal rave shapes till they collapse.

SERENA WILLIAMS

TEARIST

Living: 2009–Present

Thin Wrist Recordings

Tearist remind me of that scene in

Mad Men

where the pretty girl gives Don Draper an old-timey BJ in the car, and he thinks to himself, “She wants me to know her. The problem is that I already do.” I want to like you, Tearist, and I basically do. It’s just that you are not significantly different from the other analogue-synth goth bands who are using the same keyboards as you and have the same pretty-young-woman-who-probably-likes-choke-sex as their singer. If you come to town, I will come out and I will be into it, but I will not make eye contact when I pass your merch shrine.

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FROSTY FRITZ

BONG

Beyond Ancient Space

Ritual Productions

Not really messing about with that name. Or that album title. Or that label. Sociologically speaking, I’m not really sure why it is that a bunch of stoned longhairs from Newcastle feel uniquely qualified to sonically envisage the experience of voyaging through Lovecraftian outer dimensions, but this blown-out snake-charmer drone is pretty much what the BBC should be playing behind Professor Brian Cox, at least if they’re hoping that the audience will collectively gain a momentary, terrifying glimpse of the boundless enormity of the universe and immediately shit their pants in fear.

MILEY O’CYRUS

FUCKED UP

David Comes to Life

Matador

They say that people who use swear words are lacking in imagination, but unless you can point me to a band with a respectable name who have done something along the lines of writing a 78-minute

Tommy

-style rock opera about a boy living in a fictional British industrial town called Byresdale Spa that’s the site of some sort of terrorist bomb attack at some point in the late 70s, I’m going to be calling bullshit on that one, I’m afraid. Here Fucked Up voyage a little deeper into the progressive, orchestrated sound they were doing on

Chemistry of Common Life

. On one hand, it’s a shame they’re not doing cryptic mysterious-guy punk anthems anymore, but you know, when you’re handed a crown, you don’t complain how it’s not a sceptre.

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CHARLES HANSON

Phwoar! The buffest dudes in math-rock have been down the nerd gym working out some real hard time-signatures, and now they’re back, ready to put your cerebral cortex in a reverse suplex. There’s nothing that stands up to “Atlas” here, which is a bit of a shame, but on the bright side it seems the fella with the Sideshow Bob hair who did the slightly annoying high-pitched singing bits apparently couldn’t hack the pace. So instead, it’s down to our three brawny brainiacs to turn out the ADHD carnival jams, backed by a handful of guest vocalists including Eye from Boredoms and, appropriately, the prince of warmth, Gary Numan.

HUEY MATTISON

BLACK LIPS

Arabia Mountain

Vice

An absolutely killer new record from the best American rock’n’roll band since the MC5. Everything you love about Black Lips is on here: the upbeat, unpretentious pop jams, the ragged Stonesy blues numbers, the druggy garage bangers and, in “Raw Meat”, the best song the Ramones never recorded. This is total genius from start to finish and the band and the label releasing this deserve blowjobs from God for creating such a masterpiece.

ANDY CAPPER

For the past four years, fashionable London has congregated in its secret headquarters to play a game called “Get CocknBullKid on to this year’s ‘Ones to Watch’”. And so each December she gets voted on to the list, and then the voters laugh as she fails to put out any material, ending the year exactly where she started it. She’s been the musical equivalent of a pet rock. So it’s bloody annoying to find out that she’s put paid to our little game by releasing a full-length album. Even more disappointingly, there’s enough decent pop meat on here to sell a fair few copies. So long as no one ever mentions VV Brown.

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JACQUELYN HYDE

MY MORNING JACKET

Circuital

V2

Guys, you used to be something we were all obliged to care about. My Morning Jacket was one of the more fashionable namedrops of 2002. You taught us how to be sophisticated without being Wilco. But now that your rootsy folk-rock thing has been done to death, you’ve become a victim of your own success. Now, I go into a coffee shop and it’s all “White Winter Hymnal” instead of “Wordless Chorus”. I guess what I’m really trying to say, My Morning Jacket, is that I never liked you; I just thought I liked you because everyone else seemed to. And upon review, now that no one else is obliged to care, I’m quite happy to abandon you. Good luck with your patchy, dreary new album. Oh, and… I’m sorry.

LASZLO KOVACS

WHITE DENIM

D

Downtown

White Denim really know how to party. By which I mean they know how to take all breakables out of the living room and secure them in a locked bedroom, while having plenty of bins and ashtrays distributed throughout the carpet-protected designated party-area. They’re very party-conscious like that. They also still make groinal Texan psych-rock, albeit stuff that seemed slightly more awesome before Tame Impala came along. Whereas 2009’s

Fits

thrashed about like a marlin on a toothpick for part one before mellowing into deep narcotic stupor in part two,

D

is all consistency: a remarkably mid-paced effort that sets the psych-dials to “winsome sepia”. Sensible.

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JOHNNY NOSEBLEED

EMMY THE GREAT

Virtue

Close Harbour

Emmy the Great’s second album opens with a song called “Dinosaur Sex”. Dinosaur sex, Emmy sings, achieved nothing. It happened for a few million years, and then they died. This is why, five years from now, people will still care about Emmy long after they’ve ceased to give a shit about Laura Marling. Because Emmy can draw the full ghastly, midnight-sweats, pupil-dilating cosmic emptiness of the universe into the mental image of two Tyrannosaurus rexes bumping each other, their tiny arms flailing uselessly as they fail to locate the clitoris, procreating their way towards meaningless extinction. She’s so wry, she’s practically Wry-an Adams.

TESCO JOWELL

SHINE 2009

Realism

Cascine

ARCTIC MONKEYS

Suck It and See

Domino

Ey up, lad, ’ave ya ’eard that Soundgarden?

JOE ELLIOTT

CARLTON MELTON

Country Ways

Agitated

Maybe it’s just like the changing of the seasons, but recently it seems like all the stoner-psych records I hear are the brain-damaged, don’t-eat-the-bad-acid kind. I guess that shows the people who made it are bad-ass and have lived some pretty dangerous lives, but personally I think it’s nice to hear some genuine old-timers (this lot were in Zen Guerrilla) zoning out to some wordless, blissful hazy-days feedback. This album was recorded in a geodesic dome, and the press release features the word “vibe” in bold capital letters.

CHILL DAVE

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CULTS

S/t

Columbia

Hot new US boy-girl duo Cults haven’t put a foot wrong—in fact, they’ve done

everything

right. They translated 2010’s mad blog buzz into a sweet major label deal and this summer they’re the must-see festival band on everyone’s lips. So what do they sound like? Imagine the Kills and the Ting Tings jamming with the Raveonettes and Crystal Castles, all produced by—wait for it—Phil Spector on his new iPad 2. The sound of now has well and truly arrived. Don’t tell me you’re not ready.

THANDIE NEUTRON

BARBARA PANTHER

S/t

City Slang

I know that writing about music sounds like the easiest and funnest thing in the world but there’s only so many times you can read something about “the Rwandan Björk” and imagine in your head all the myriad glittering possibilities, before tracing them back to the deeply pointless actuality and feeling your soul starting to corrode and your dreams disintegrating into dust.

CARL VISION

WU LYF

Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

LYF Recordings

WU LYF claim their name comes from the slogan “World Unite! Lucifer Youth Foundation”. But actually it’s a misspelt attempt to name themselves after Des’ree’s famous phrase: “Woah, life.” After cryptograms-within-Enigma-codes of deafening anti-hype, it’s vaguely disconcerting to learn that the Future of Music largely sounds like Modest Mouse, which is almost as disconcerting as realising that its authors were ten years old when

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Good News for People Who Love Bad News

came out. But in the continued absence of Isaac Brock, this will do pretty good: fragile, densely-woven keyboard and guitar riffs that wend, fuse and diverge with their own mysterious majesty, like ragged binds of mountaintop heather.

ANNA GRAHAM

“Get ready for the new rules,” chirp Shine 2009 on “New Rules”, but judging by the tone of their debut, the guidelines this slick Helsinki duo outline amount to little more than dressing like EMF and listening to Janet Jackson. It’s very much a 90s thing, right down to the funky shuffling and featherlight synths, not to mention Paula Abdul’s appearance on “So Free”, and that’s just fine, especially when “Modern Times” sounds like one of the Field Mice’s groovier numbers.

LES PANINI

If you’ve heard “Glass Jar”, the first track Gang Gang released from their new record, you’ll know how good they can be. Though there’s nothing else on here as good as that, musically at least

Eye Contact

is amazing in parts. But seriously: someone should have told Liz Bougatsos to STFU a long time ago. She and her wordless mewling have been indulged for far too long by an indie-rock press so caught up in their fawning that they can’t separate her from the band. She is a walking patchouli tyrant that must be stopped at all costs. She sounds like a child who’s been told it’s profound.

CUTTY NARC

CUT HANDS

S/t

Very Friendly/Susan Lawly

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You may know William Bennett as the dashing frontman of power-electronics pioneers Whitehouse, but did you know that he also has an Afro-noise project called Cut Hands and composed a lot of the music for the

Vice Guide to Liberia

and

Mandingo

!? You did? Good! Because now those eerie tracks—all frantic rhythm and grinding drone—and others are finally collected on this debut album, and what may surprise you is how tasteful the whole thing sounds. Sure, there’s a pervasive air of queasy menace suggesting ritual violence and bloodthirsty child soldiers are never far away, but at the same time, “Backlash” could be a chirpy early-90s rave track and “Who No Know Go Knows” has an undeniably infectious jazzy swing. Weirdly, “Rain Washes Over Chaff” reminds me of the theme from

Crocodile Dundee

.

JENNIFER JUPITER

Not quite the album of wall-to-wall party bangers we’re all hoping Russell Haswell gets round to releasing one day, though there’s plenty of unexpected disco stimulation to be found on his recent trilogy of podcasts for FACT, thesweetestnoise.com and Entr’acte.

IN IT

documents on special UHJ vinyl and a 5.1 Dolby Digital DVD Haswell’s grisly live sets from last year’s Autechre European tour, which means you hear men in the audience jeering and clapping before being assaulted by ruptured noise for several minutes. It’s business as usual, but in surround sound.

SUBURBAN DWIGHT

EFRIM MANUEL MENUCK

High Gospel

Constellation

“Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows”. “Heaven’s Engine Is a Dusty Ol’ Bellows”. “Chickadees’ Roar Pt. 2”. I could read Efrim’s song titles all day, just so long as I didn’t have to listen to his music while doing it.

CANDI APPLE