Records

PLANNINGTOROCK

SHUNDA K

JAMES PANTS

TV ON THE RADIO

A schizo rapper equal parts politician and gangsta, Killer Mike is torn between those non-identical twin Kings, Martin Luther and Don. Miles better when snorting fire than concern-trolling or pushing the positives, Killer Mike is the Ice Cube who was never seduced by Hollywood. That said, the way things are going in the land of the armed, the line “The banks got bailed out but we still sufferin’/So I got a gun ’cos I done had enough of them” might win him a prime-time sitcom about a Tea Party fundraiser.

STEVE WHY

J. ROCC

Some Cold Rock Stuff

Stones Throw

Amazingly for a long-standing member of Beat Junkies, not a single record gets scratched in the making of

Some Cold Rock Stuff

. This is more fun than a turntablist’s record has any right to be, cut ’n’ pasting the kitchen sink while omitting the dog-eared clichés that wore down all but the most trainspottery a decade ago.

MC DUNEBUGGY

Like most good liberals, I wanted lesbian Christian rappers Yo Majesty to blaze a trail through hip-hop like Eric Pickles through complimentary sausage rolls. Sadly, the cold reality was humdrum Miami bass, minus the macho hang-ups about carpet-munching. Shunda K’s optimistically titled solo debut is at least twice as long as it should be, thinly voiced and punctuated by weak guests. The not-desired-at-all effect of 76 minutes of this is like living above a shit nightclub while your flatmates squabble over the remote.

DUDE MCNUDE

DURRTY GOODZ

Overall

Inapeace

Durrty’s first album you can actually buy is neither as good as

Axiom

nor as bad as

Born Blessed.

While he can’t resist the odd group hug (“Imagine”), at least he’s given up the East End Marley shtick. And when he cranks it up full he still sounds like no one else, except on the fantastic mass-imitation “Battle Hymn”, where he sounds like everyone else, only slightly better.

SHANTY MUDDLER

I genuinely can’t work out if calling yourself James Pants is a brilliant or terrible idea. Although we should remember that in America, where James Pants comes from, “pants” means “trousers” rather than “underwear”. Maybe the idea is like, “Forget the name, my sumptuous blend of soul, electro-funk and 80s synth speaks for itself.” But I’m stuck here still thinking, “James Trousers. I’m not sure that works. Does that work?”

TOM PANTALON

INSTRA:MENTAL

Resolution 653

NonPlus+

Twelve months ago Instra:mental were credited with breathing new life into drum ’n’ bass. Either they’ve declared the patient recovered or given it up for dead, because

Resolution 653

wears the minimal look of 90s techno and the robust booty of dubstep. But for all its stern coating—that sleeve is as joyless as a bowl of cold porridge—this album bounces off the walls like an amphetamine-raddled toddler.

MOUSA KOUSA

AUSTRA

Feel It Break

Domino

Austra is the new band from Toronto’s Katie Stelmanis, a small woman with a big voice who put out a single, “Join Us”, on

Vice

a year or two back, and seeing her properly get her shit together gives us a warm feeling in our happy place. I guess you might say it’s not unlike Bat For Lashes, but with a bit less yoga lessons and tie-dyed kaftans and a good deal more piston-pumped EBM primed for intense fisting escapades in the toilets of a goth club.

NED BUNGER

CHRISSY MURDERBOT

Women’s Studies

Planet Mu

Rude footwerk sounds from Kansas City’s Chris Shively, titled things like “Pelvic Floor” and “Heavy Butt”, with a band of MCs in tow. There’s some juke nights due in the UK at the end of this month and I genuinely can’t wait to see what it looks like when enthusiastic white people try to dance to this music. It’s going to be hilarious.

DEAN FUNK

ICEAGE

New Brigade

Dais

If we call Iceage the best new band in Denmark I realise that’s probably not going to have you shaking out drawers in a frantic hunt for your passport. However, if we call them four impish 19-year-olds channelling the Germs, Minor Threat and the Buzzcocks through cheap guitars and fist-punching choruses, hopefully it’s OK if I take the liberty of suggesting we meet somewhere in the vicinity of Copenhagen airport’s baggage carousel.

CHARLES HANSON

THE GATES OF SLUMBER

The Wretch

Rise Above

Album number five from Karl Simon’s sloth-like power trio sees them returning to what they do best: trying to sound as much like Wino’s back catalogue as humanly possible. Opener “Bastards Born” sets the monolithic ball rolling, trilling away like an outtake from Saint Vitus’s

Mournful Cries

. If you’ve ever wanted to feel the freedom of rockin’ a skullet, or have difficulty knowing where real life ends and Dungeons & Dragons begins, this is the album for you.

DEREK WAGNER

A surprise from Boston’s Deathwish Inc, a label usually happy to concern itself with tough-guy hardcore and Converge vinyl pressings. As the opening few minutes of the San Francisco band’s debut unfurl, traces of the nu-gazey haze waft up and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d got hold of Nadja’s 300th self-released CD-R. Thankfully, at the four-minute mark, the submerged blastbeats appear and the Burzumic howl kicks off with scant let-up over the four epic tracks as the melancholy and minor chords deliver an hour of mournful pleasure. Like Drudkh without the racism, or Wolves In The Throne Room without the hippy bollocks.

KURT CREBAIN

LITURGY

Aesthetica

Thrill Jockey

Liturgy signed up to Thrill Jockey, which I think means that “transcendental black metal” (no, really) is the new “librarians playing ponderous experimental rock”. True metal people seem to hate Liturgy because they wear jeans and t-shirts instead of panda paint and spiked codpieces and seem to be generally fairly open-minded about music, which is obviously a cardinal sin.

Aesthetica

is pretty great, though, a blend of rapid BM riffing and vaguely post-rock swells that is at least five times more interesting than another bullshit underground BM album recorded on a broken four-track for that special shoegaze effect.

EL PEE

It’s goodbye New York, hello Beverly Hills for Dave Sitek’s slightly overrated soulful art-rock collective. Has the West Coast changed them? Going on the first track, the answer is “Yes, and into the Scissor Sisters.” Luckily, elsewhere we’re back to the familiar template of fussily produced electronica, massed horns and what passes for “soul” if you get all your music news from Pitchfork. Album of the year!

FLORENCE RIDA

SKELETONS

People

Crammed

Did you notice that at some point in the last three or four years, indie-rock was quietly infiltrated by a generation of pale young men from the music conservatoire, clad in the requisite tousled hair and cardigans but secretly so far ahead of you with your pathetic power-chord-thru-distortion-pedal skills that it was basically game over? Skeletons might be some of those guys. Their songs are neat in an intricate, slightly difficult way and they have songs about dead gang members that might turn out to be the “singing like you’re Aaliyah” of 2011.

DEAN FUNK

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART

Belong

PIAS

They say love’s not a competition, but it is—it’s just that no one’s really sure of the rules. One thing that is certain is that the Pains Of Being Pure At Heart suck at love, and they exploit that by making music that’ll resonate in a very obvious way with anyone who’s ever dreamed of fucking their first serious girlfriend in her wedding dress. Why should I listen to the sound of your hearts breaking when Wild Nothing, Minks and a whole other Samaritans switchboard’s worth of guitar bands do it with more poise and panache? And why should anyone care about what you think when you look like you buy all your clothes at train stations?

DAZ BOOT

FRIENDLY FIRES

Pala

XL

So shamelessly summery it should come with a free shirtless builder and a wasp-covered ploughman’s,

Pala

finds Friendly Fires getting everyone in the mood for a beach holiday, up to and including a song on which Ed Macfarlane describes his flight to Hawaii in hilarious detail (“Feeling the shakes keeps me reticent/Stuck in my seat from the turbulence”). Hella polished, but if you’re not in the mood, it’s like being frogmarched between Magaluf fun pubs by a Club 18-30 rep. The official soundtrack to much self-conscious summer “fun”.

ALDI HUXLEY

DUTCH UNCLES

Cadenza

Memphis Industries

Despite touring with fellow Mancs Everything Everything, the Uncles have always added a sniff of humour to their math-rock, prog-pop, ranting, raving, time-shifting, spirit-fingers, mental widdly-widdly thing. There’s a streak of the wanky magicianship of Sparks in their tank: do an idea, get bored with it, do another idea two seconds later; don’t care if anyone thinks it’s crap. Well, I don’t think it’s crap, Dutch Uncles. But then, I am not a qualified music journalist, so it could still be crap.

HERBERT MORISSONS

THURSTON MOORE

Demolished Thoughts

Matador

PLANNINGTOROCK

W

DFA

Ever since they worked together on

Tomorrow, In a Year

, I’ve always wondered what two kindred enigmas like Karin Dreijer Andersson and Janine Rostron actually talk to each other about. Do they enjoy the odd girly night in together? A bottle of Lambrini. Twenty Silk Cut. A box-set of

Green Wing

on the TV and a dead crow on the stereo? Whatever they mumbled through their respective facial prostheses, it was worth knowing: Rostron’s taken a little of that Knife fairy dust and used it to teleport herself to the next level. Like opening a bag of opals and finding them all imprinted with the names of your previous sexual partners, W is luxurious, iridescent, tender, mesmerising and deeply, beautifully creepy.

TESCO JOWELL

LET'S WRESTLE

Nursing Home

Full Time Hobby

Steve Albini’s production roster is so long, it’s like he’s discovered an incredible Stelios-style business model to maximise turnover by slashing costs. If I go on his website and choose the dates I want him to produce my record, will it quote me some bargain basic price then try to sell me optional extras like “mixing”, “flutes” and “in-tune guitars”? According to their ticket stub, Let’s Wrestle are Albini’s customer #7532, and according to me, they are getting even better now he’s added a big fat whack of bottom end to their garden-shed rock.

ROD LIDL

ART BRUT

Brilliant! Tragic!

Cooking Vinyl

Eddie Argos lacks bitterness. Some torture themselves towards greatness by the sheer thwarted breadth of their ambition, but despite his potential, it’s all still just japes as far as Joker Ed’s concerned. “I still view every schoolboy crush as a missed opportunity,” he rants on an album full of all the same arrested developments that should’ve curdled into something richer and darker now that he’s well into his 30s. Eddie: show us that you really want it. I want to see your bile ducts tingle.

ASDA CROWFLIES

WILD BEASTS

Smother

Domino

That Mumford & Sons and their banjo-toting, farmboy ilk have managed to convince the world that England’s countryside is full of endless noons and milk-skinned virgins bringing you Bulmers for your wattle is tantamount to a tourist-board rock ’n’ roll swindle. Wild Beasts know different:

Smother

, like their two albums past, is only too aware that the moors are full of perverts and drunks. With the Lopatin-learned electronic drift of “Burning” and “The End Has Come Too Soon”’s gaseous, Field-like float, the Cumbrians sound as if they’ve tired of slinging their cocks around willy-nilly, but that doesn’t mean their libidos won’t still do it for them. On

Smother

, the only banjo in earshot is one whose string has just snapped, and painfully.

BEN OGLE

CASS MCCOMBS

Wit’s End

Domino

The saddest thing about a Cass McCombs record is not how beautifully bittersweet and perfectly executed his songs are, but how few people seem to recognise how far ahead of anyone else he is at pouring his heart out over such wistfully melancholic arrangements. Yet another heartbreaking work of staggering genius, the poor guy.

WAYLON JAMMINGS

Demolished Thoughts

is a bizarre sequence of non-sequiturs which hangs together only by dint of the peculiar oddness of both the words and recording quality. But come on: anything less from a Thurston solo record produced by Beck would have been a total disappointment. Uncle Thurston even manages to squeeze in an ode to semi-obscure early 20th-century bohemian artist Mina Loy which, let’s face it, you aren’t going to get on the Brother album.

JUNIOR KNIGHT

Spectrum Spools is a new offshoot of Peter “Pita” Rehberg’s Editions Mego label, dedicated to releasing new examples of the post-Emeralds wave of experimental modular synth music. With its long, crater-shaped movements and pulsing, arpeggiated synth washes,

A Sort of Radiance

is the kind of record that might have sold a hundred thousand copies to balding longhairs in terrible pullovers in the late 70s. What happened to those guys? They should come back around.

CHILL DAVE

BILL WELLS &

AIDAN MOFFAT

Everything’s Getting Older

Chemikal Underground

It’s now well established that rappers make a bit of money and immediately blow it on all sorts of stupid shit. This new Danger Mouse project suggests producers approach the same principle from a different angle. That is, fly out to Rome, hire a studio, drag a load of octogenerian Italians out of retirement and get them to recreate the soundtracks they made back in the 70s. Oh yes, and get Jack White and Norah Jones to sing over the top of it. Basically,

Rome

is the producer equivalent of drinking a $10,000 bottle of Cognac out of a ruby-encrusted golden goblet.

CHILL DAVE

Back in the 90s, Arab Strap successfully welded pessimism to post-rock. Here, their chief miserabilist mumbles through the contents page of a self-hate manual over a score by seasoned jazz guy Bill Wells. At times it’s so dizzyingly bleak the only sensible course of action is to revel in its absurdity, while highlight “Glasgow Jubilee” conjures up some morose alter ego to Benny Hill’s “Ernie (the Fastest Milkman in the West)”.

FRED WREST