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 (Inertia)
Happy-sad Swedish singer-songwriter returns
Even though Sarah Assbring (the Swede behind the El Perro Del Mar moniker) seems like a particularly introspective and emotional person, her new record carries an essence of joy that positively makes it glow. Despite sometimes mopey tones, the spirit of the songs on this, her third album, is pure optimism – both bright yet wary. It’s bittersweet in a big way, with doo-wop sounds blending with twee aesthetics. Her voice is silken, but warbles sometimes with a particular sort of restrained emotion as she sings things like “glory to the world” over the top of a lamenting vintage organ. There are old-timey sounds, toned in sepia and faded around the edges – pianos, aah-ohhs, happy-go-lucky horns – all of which infuses her ballads with a sense of class and style. The thoroughly human essence of her songwriting is matched with a Phil Spector style of pop production, all done by her with audible subtlety and craft. It’s never overwrought, in fact, quite the opposite – this restrained sort of emotive sensitivity is surely as sincere as you can get. It’s lucky for us then that this young Swede is as lyrically competent as she is at instrumentation and structure, creating warm textures like the inside of your favourite winter coat and a timeless air that sticks with you long after listening.
****
RICHARD MACFARLANE  Be first to comment on this article
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 (Domino/EMI)
Bizarre Brit rock, complete with deranged choirboy vocals
Wild Beasts are a band quite at home on Domino, the label that also houses R&B ghouls Clinic and punk blues howlers Archie Bronson outfit. For this combo also has a unique, almost otherworldly spin to rock music that makes their debut album Limbo, Panto a peculiar but certainly intriguing listening experience. However, it must be warned, if you don’t like “unusual” singers, Wild Beasts are not going to be your cup of tea – main vocalist Hayden Thorpe possesses a truly bizarre falsetto that is somewhere between a choirboy and the ghost of a doowop singer, like Frankie Lymon from beyond the grave. The overall band sound is slightly (but only slightly) more conventional, a dark, grandiose hybrid of chiming indie guitars, spooky blues rock and, on single Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants, a thumping disco hybrid. Once you’re used to the eccentricities, the strange beauty of the likes of Vigil For A Fuddy Duddy and The Devil’s Crayon reveal themselves. And in frontman Thorpe, Wild Beasts have a distinctive “love him or hate him” vocalist, up there with early Roxy-era Bryan Ferry or Pere Ubu’s David Thomas in the rock oddball stakes.
***˝
MATT THROWER Be first to comment on this article |
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 (Polydor/Universal)
A return to roots for The Music after four years in the drug mines
The Music have gone back to the dance-influenced, more electronic sound of their first album while leaving all of the stadium-rock exuberance and triumphalism of their second. Crash bang wallop with fast beats and fancy guitar work. Singer Robert Harvey veers between open-hearted cliches for the arena like “How can I fly if you won’t give me wings” and repeating lines like he’s The Living Sample, such as the title track’s “Strength in numbers / No one can come between us.” As always with The Music it’s the emotion packed into the delivery more than what he’s saying that matters. Harvey sounds less like Robert Plant now and is finding his own voice, spending a lot of the album singing about the drug hell that chewed up that big four-year gap between albums, especially in songs like The Spike and Drugs. He’s at his best when he takes his personal experiences and crafts them into an anthem like No Weapon Sharper Than Will, which is one of the best songs they’ve ever recorded. If the album were all of that quality there would be a lot of happy Music fans around, but unfortunately it does dip and blur together in the middle. The closer, Inconceivable Odds, is another standout though, a gentle acoustic number in sharp contrast to the rousing chorus-chants and guitars to dance to of the rest of the album, and it works perfectly as a four-and-a-half minute chillout room to finish with.
***˝
JODY MACGREGOR Be first to comment on this article |
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 (SonyBMG)
More proof of the power of feel-good simplicity, perhaps too muchMore proof of the power of feel-good simplicity, perhaps too much
Ah, the double-edged sword of success. This London trio’s debut album has been huge in Britain but it has also seriously stirred up the critics, one side saying Scouting For Girls are “a shoe-in for the shittiest band in Christendom category”, and the other talks of “the band’s knack for easy melody, (with) a delicious sense of urgency and excitement”. Either way, it’s all a bit far-fetched for what is really just inoffensive, slightly gawky, adolescent-themed, piano-pounding pop, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Occasionally you get echoes of Ben Folds Five, but not as smart and lacking both the irony and the implied anger, or even at times Muse, but without their earnest pomp and circumstance. Which is really the point with these guys – in their minds, they haven’t grown up yet, so they can sing of schoolday crushes (She’s So Lovely) and movie heroes (James Bond) without embarrassment, and wrap it all in a singalong pop that nags at you. And if there’s not much depth and a limit to how far all this persistent chirpiness carries, Scouting For Girls clearly know how to sugarcoat these sentiments well enough to make a mark.
**˝
BILL HOLDSWORTH Be first to comment on this article |
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 (Universal)
He’s not quite a bird of a different feather, but he has been noticed
Sam Sparro is Australian-born but was raised in L.A. and honed his music in London. Essentially hip-swinging soul-pop with both electronic groove and funk elements and a good dose of retro stylings, this debut album ends up straddling a variety of connected club-shaped sounds. One moment (on 21st Century Life), he’s unleashing bubbling Daft Punk funk with a human face (most of the time, at least) and less obvious electronics, the next (Sick) he seems to have tuned into the synth-pop bands of ‘80s Britain, then he’s dropping into cool crooner mode for Waiting For Time (but with electro blips), some ‘80s disco-funk in Clingwrap, some George Clinton-flavoured funk for Cottonmouth and so on, ending virtually in jazz piano mode in an unlisted track, Still Hungry. Sparro skilfully threads his way through all this but doesn’t manage to avoid a generic feel at times. But apart from those odd moments of all-too-familiar averageness (Recycle It!, Too Many Questions), Sparro still serves up a flavoursome mix of floor-friendly tunes, one of which – Black And Gold – has already been picked up overseas as the newest club anthem.
***
BILL HOLDSWORTH Be first to comment on this article |
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 (Star Trak)
Third album from The Neptunes and that one other guy
There are two ways to look at a new N.E.R.D. release. Since two-thirds of the band are the hit-making producers The Neptunes, you can choose to see either a bunch of ideas that were too leftfield and out-there for the pop stars who hire the duo to add gloss and perfect drum sounds to their songs, or a bunch of ideas too silly and rubbish for same. The truth is that Seeing Sounds is probably a little from column A and a little from column B. First single Everybody Nose (All The Girls Standing In The Line For The Bathroom) is a collection of cocaine innuendos, even sneezing look atchoo! into a Miami bass chant that oddly turns into a piano crooner halfway. More gleefully dumb lines to shout along with on the dancefloor include “You jump around like you ADHD!” in Anti Matter and “Spaz if you want to / spaz if you want” in Spaz. The guitar that’s absent or downplayed among the robot synth and bucket-drum percussion of their Neptunes tracks continue to flourish here; the boy-band harmonies of Sooner Or Later build up to an epically addle-daddle guitar solo that’s worthy of Van Halen. Once again, a N.E.R.D. album is more interesting as an examination of what’s going inside the head of The Neptunes than as music on its own: lyrics about dancing and girls, pop-rock instrumentation that wouldn’t pass muster anywhere else, only the occasional glimmer of catchiness and fun.
**
JODY MACGREGOR Be first to comment on this article |
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