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2007-11-16
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BORDER CROSSING
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
KARTEL
HIP HOP / FUNK
Border Crossing’s second album is packed full of an inspiring range of musical styles - at once London-centric and worldly in its outlook and message - and great collaborations, most notably Rick Ranking (Roots Manuva and Nightmares On Wax) and UK hip hop master Jehst, two guys who are lyrically adept, entertaining as well as instructing. The most appealing thing about ‘Freedom Of Speech’ is this variety, which makes it truly feel like an album. This is trickier to achieve than you’d think, especially as bands are now more often rated on singles alone. The instrumentals, ‘Internal Affairs’ and ‘Border Crossing’, are layered, dreamlike and cleverly placed in the track-listing, especially the latter, as it follows the electro beats of ‘Side To Side (Disco Whip)’, a song which celebrates Border Crossing’s party sound. The band doesn’t falter as it leaps across a plethora of tempos and beats, and successfully creates booty-jigging whoomp whoomp bass in ‘Rumba Medley,’ as well as kicking back and adopting a downbeat style reminiscent of Break Reform with ‘Forget About It’. Reading up on the history of Border Crossing – mixed reviews of debut album, ‘Ominous’; breakdown of the initial trio; issues getting signed to a new label after RGR went into liquidation – you can tell that ‘Freedom of Speech’ has been a real labour of love for Seorais and Aj, but even without this knowledge it deserves repeat listens, from the summery, dubby opener, ‘City of Love,’ to the whistling melody of ‘Flying High’. |
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2007-11-16
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GRAVENHURST
THE WESTERN LANDS
WARP
ALT-FOLK
As all us amateur cosmologists know, the Big Bang theory states that the universe originated from something somewhat smaller and has been expanding ever since. This same principle could apply just as well to Nick Talbot’s Gravenhurst. Having gone about things in a rather modest fashion in the early parts of a career that saw sparse folk records released on tiny indie label Silent Age (beginning with 2001’s debut ‘Internal Travels’), everything about Gravenhurst has grown outwards since – signing to Warp (the universe, too, becomes cooler as it expands), gaining more members and admirers, and intensifying the band’s sound considerably. ‘The Western Lands’ continues where 2005’s much-lauded ‘Fires In Distant Buildings’ left off, with broody, elongated ‘post-folk’ songs with more than a nod to shoegaze that somehow end up sounding like electronica without the electronics. The likes of ‘Trust’, ‘Hourglass’ and the closing ‘The Collector’ are perfect examples of this, while the gloriously epic instrumental title track leads the album into shimmering post-rock territory. The comparatively brief four minute ‘Hollow Men’ is probably the real highlight, though, with feedback and rocked-out guitars providing a jagged contrast to Talbot’s trademark mournful voice and boasting a breakdown that sounds like ten jumbo jets taking off. Talbot and Gravenhurst continue to make quite stunning records, utilising both song structure and instrumentation to achieve the ultimate atmospheric effect. Best listened to late at night while contemplating life by candlelight, ‘The Western Land’ is a dark and intense record that at least matches its predecessor. |
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2007-11-16
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SCOUTING FOR GIRLS
SCOUTING FOR GIRLS
EPIC RECORDS
INDIE
London indie-pop trio Scouting For Girls are already pretty huge – God bless Myspace – and their solid fanbase will no doubt rush to the shops to spend their pocket money on this self-titled debut. Following forefathers Franz Ferdinand’s mission statement of making music for girls to dance to, school friends Roy, Greg and Pete go one step further, making music about girls they fancy, so that the young ladies can imagine that the songs are about them, whilst dancing along. ‘She’s So Lovely’, ‘It’s Not About You’ and ‘The Airplane Song’ – tracks 2, 3 and 4 – all open with some line or another about a chick they’re digging, along the lines of ‘She’s a strawberry milkshake,’ from the latter, which continues to describe the femme fatale as ‘a messy creation.’ Cue precocious teenage girls’ firm belief that their new favourite band, like, totally understands them. But let’s not be too critical here. While the songs don’t shock or surprise, they’re amazingly catchy, and the lyrics are fun, albeit predictable. The subject matter doesn’t vary much from relationships, break-ups and the dreaded L-word, loneliness, which features in pretty much every song. The two stand-out tracks are the funny, almost novelty numbers of ‘Michaela Strachan’ and ‘James Bond,’ homages to their idols. The refrain ‘It ain’t gonna happen / With me and the Strachan,’ is inspired, although the song echoes Busted’s comedy ode to Britney, and McFly’s pining tune to that girl from TV show ‘As If’…. Scouting for Girls: the thinking teen’s Busted. |
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2007-11-16
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KITTY, DAISY AND LEWIS (VA)
THE ROOTS OF ROCK N ROLL: KITTY, DAISY AND LEWIS’ A-Z
SUNDAY BEST
ROCKABILLY
America has taken such a battering in recent times that we could all be forgiven for assuming that the entire country has, throughout history, been an aggressive, destructive, useless force of evil. It’s difficult to imagine a time when the country was considered even vaguely benign, let alone being an attractive and alluring contributor to culture. Yet merely the laziest of cultural archaeology unearths a country with the most sexy, vibrant and young of cultures not so long ago – the country that gave birth to the teenager. Everything really cool happened in the American fifties – kids standing in drugstores around soda fountains drinking glass-bottled Coke, leaning on chrome mustangs in jeans, quiffs and leather, going to the first discos and stealing forbidden kisses. James Dean, motorbikes and Kerouac. Listening to the most unbelievable pop music of all time. Nothing, but nothing, can make you want to dance quite as joyously as rockabilly, swing, blues or boogie woogie. It’s good time party music, twisting, jiving and shaking hips. Kitty, Daisy and Lewis are making quite the career out of playing up to the latent ideal of teenhood in all of us by ripping such music off; this double disc is as good an introduction to their world as any. The crackle of spinning vinyl and naivety infuses every track, from big names like Louis Jordan and Tex Williams to (literal) Unknowns. Everyone should own at least one record like it. It might as well be this as any.
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