Review round-up: Sigur Rós, Ratatat and Black Kids

Time for a little new(ish) album review round-up wrap-up dealie. Reviews of the new Beck album, laid-back indie folk The Fairline Parkway, and the 02 Wireless festival to come this week too (if you’re lucky)!

Sigur Rós - Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
XL Recordings

Ooh, now this is good. While those Sigur Rós have never been Smiths-level depressing, their epic sound has always had a sense of melancholy, conjuring up images of desolate Icelandic landscapes (or slow motion wildlife footage, if you watched BBC One at all last year). Their new album is a lot more upbeat, and the epic-ness has been toned down - from Lord of the Rings level to, say, Willow - with the opening track featuring some Rodrigo Y Gabriela-style foot-stomping and some just-on-the-right-side-of-good (ie not Keane) piano smacking.

We do get some of the orchestral ballads as well, mind - including the nearly ten-minute “Festival” - and the sumptuous final track “All Alright” which - get this - is actually sung in English! What a novelty.

Ratatat - LP3
XL Recordings

Well, Messrs Stroud and Mast aren’t going to get any points for originality on their thrid outing, follwing the promising-but-lacklustre self-titled debut and the rather good, but rather repetitive Classics. We’ve still got the exact same guitar sound, the little flirts with world music… and they’ve still got the hip-hop Kraftwerk thing going on (i.e they’re ultra repetitive, but it sounds kinda alright). Unfortunatley, this failure in developing their sound makes you wonder; what’s the point in buying the album, if it’s the same as the other two?

Even the fact that one of the songs - “Mirando” - has a music video of the song set to scenes from Predator can’t save the imaginitivley-titled LP3. I guess you could buy it, if you’re a big Ratatat fan; otherwise, you could just put Classics on shuffle and pretend that the altered tracklisting makes for a different album (which is pretty much what the band have done, only they’re trying to charge you for it).

Black Kids - Partie Traumatic
Mercury Records

Isn’t it nice when one of those overhyped bands actually records a half-decent record? For every MGMT-style disappointment, it seems, there’s a Black Kids-style success. Full of the dancey, falsetto-vocals, slightly eighties charm heard one those Wiazrd of Ahhhs demos - only brightened up, courtesy of producer Bernard Butler (this just about makes up for him being pretty much responsible for flash-in-the-pan Welsh “soul singer” Duffy) - with the wispy guitar, funky Talking Heads base, squelchy keyboards and Ronettes-style female backing vocals all mixing together into a damn fine album.

About time for the backlash then. I’m all set with my “I liked them before they were popular!” argument once “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You” becomes an invetiable chart hit (it better!)

Album review: Weezer - Weezer (The Red Album)

With their third (!) self-titled album - and sixth album overall - Weezer, and lead songwriter/singer/guitarist Rivers Cuomo, seems to have shaken themselves out of the creative funk that they had during 2004’s uninspiring Make Believe. Well, for a little bit, anyway.

Weezer - Self-titled
Geffen

For one, Cuomo has gone away from the horrible po-facedness of Make Believe’s really awful tracks, like “We Are All On Drugs” and “Beverly Hills”, and has returned to the self-deprication, satire and sarcasm (the 3 “S”s) familiar on the band’s debut, which is probably the album their latest has the most in common with.

“The Red Album” is probably the poppiest, and silliest, of the band’s albums since “The Blue Album”, as evidenced by single “Pork And Beans”, which namechecks various designer brands and designer producer Timbaland, in a faux-hip-hop way, and it’s accompanying internet-meme-aping video. And it seems our hero’s finally accepting that he’s getting older; no more whining about girls he fancied in high school, now it’s worrying about losing his hair.

Opener “Troublemaker”, a short, shart shot of pop-punk, sets up the return to funny Weezer, as Cuomo recounts his rise to the top, as he plays some “heavy metal riffs and you will die”, following the statement “how’s this for arts and crafts?” with some teenage-quality noodling (which, naturally, he sings along with).

The most ambituous song on the album, meanwhile, comes along with the second track. “The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)” features police sirens, a rapped intro by Cuomo, a little piano, and some pretty-decent falsetto. The song is Weezer’s “Happiness Is A Warm Gun”; or, their “Paranoid Android”, made up of several different, distinct parts, which all fit together pleasingly.

However, it’s after this point that things drop of slightly. “Heart Songs” is a pretty standard, slightly dreary ballad, with some pretty bad lyrics, and would seem more fitting on the already-blasted last album, while “Everybody Get Dangerous” sounds like…well, Sum 41. Eww. They even say “boo-yah”, and there’s more rapping - which adds to the nasty nu-metal taste. Who ever knew Rivers spent his time at Harvard following John Belushi’s Animal House frat-boy example?

“Dreamin’” is similarly uninspiring; “Thought I Knew”’s Grandaddy-esque mix of electronic and folk elements is interesting, but somewhat forgettable, which may be due to the rather un-unique vocals provided by guitarist Brian Bell, who also wrote the song. “Automatic”, the other song on the album not written and sung by old man Rivers - this time the culprit is drummer Patrick Wilson - is a rubbishy second-grade Foo Fighters knock-off.

Bascially, the album devolves into dull, mid-tempo, radio-friendly (and not in the good way) rock songs “Pork and Beans”-onwards, with some inoffensive electronic elements here and there. What the band need to do to progress further out of their rut, is to stop holding back - why make an album half of great, new, different stuff, and half of the same boring, safe stuff you’ve been peddling for years?

To make another genuinely great album, Weezer need to…well, make an album of “Pork and Beans”s and “The Greatest Man…”s. That would be a massive leap forward, and a heck of a lot better than this album which is, frankly, mediocre. Get the “Pork and Beans”, get “The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived” when that is inevitably released as a single, and download “Troublemaker” off here (or on iTunes). And let’s leave it at that.

Download “Troublemaker”

Album review: Nine Inch Nails - The Slip (or, the culmination of Trent Reznor’s madness)

First an independently-released Brian Eno-esque instrumental album, then a slow trickle of free songs; Trent Reznor and his Nine Inch Nails cohorts now release a full, “proper” album; for free, available for download from the band’s website.

Nine Inch Nails - “The Slip”
NiN.com

A message posted on the Nine Inch Nails website yesterday, presumably from Trent himself, read “thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me“. This could possibly lead you to think The Slip is just some half-arsed stop-gap between albums; and if so, you’d be wrong. Well, kinda.

After the intro of “999,999″, we launch into the loud and abrasive “1,000,000″ , which has something of Year Zero’s “Survivalism” about it’s vocals and distorted guitar. So far, sar enjoyably average. Second track “Letting You”, meanwhile, sits somewhere between this newer, less industrial sound, and the speedy drumming of “March Of The Pigs”, from the industrial, Downward Spiral-days.

“Discipline”, meanwhile, recalls With Teeth’s “Only” - but more so. While initially sort of unsurprising and abit dull, it has grown into a new-wavey, but darker, pop song - or at least as poppy as NiN will ever get, with some lovely piano which, at times, seems like it may lapse into Linkin Park territory. But it doesn’t, because Trent is awesome, and Linkin Park aren’t. “Echoplex”, another of those previously-released free MP3s follows in the same, almost-poppy vein, with some almost-funky bass at the outset. Same for “Head Down”.

“Lights In The Sky” seems more inspired by the Ghosts album(s), with a single, solitary piano and Trent’s voice, one their own. While not reaching the dizzying heights of “Hurt”, it’s still pretty good. And is a nice breather, before we head into the over 7-minute “Corona Radiata”. Starting with a creepy ambience, it, er, stays like that, until a repetitive drum pattern, and some creepy treated-chanting comes in. It’s quite odd, and quite spooky. This is where the album starts to drop off a bit, for me.

“The Four Of Us Are Dying” is too reminiscnet of “Echoplex”, minus the lyrics. Things pick back up for the final track, “Demon Seed”, but it’s a case of too little, too late.

Overall, it’s an album of two halves; the first, a reinviograted, more electronic and poppier, yet still dark and loud Nine Inch Nails album. The other half is more like a collection of left-overs from the Ghosts instrumental albums. Disappointing, but at this price (ie free), who can complain?

Download “Echoplex”