Reviews – Albums
May 2009
Beatmag’s rundown of the best to throw your hard-earned money at.
Beatmag Album of the Issue
Golden Bug
Hot Robot (Gomma)
Ah, Gomma, contenders once again for dance label of the year. Golden Bug is one of their reliable regulars, Antoine Harispuru, once of Paris, lately of Barcelona, and his grooves reek of nasty electro-disco, nightclub lavatory sex and techno pulsing in the dark before dawn. It’s all a bit sharp and funky for the Boys Noize/Crookers gurners, then again, Golden Bug’s music is also absolutely bang on for true druggy decadence. “My name is White Rabbit/I’m gonna prove to you/That all your bad habits/Are really good for you,” croaks ‘Midnight Rabbit’ while the single ‘Barbie’s Back’ is here in its ‘Blow Version’, lewder than a crack whore pole dancing for Pablo Escobar. Raunchy, rockin’ stuff.
The Pete Best Band
Haymans Green (Casbah Coffee Club)
‘Doing a Pete Best’ has long been shorthand for missing the boat to success. Best was, of course, The Beatles’ drummer booted out just before they made it. He became, unsurprisingly, bitterly depressed and, after his music career petered out, he spent 20 years working as a civil servant. In the mid-‘90s, possibly when he received a vast cash settlement for his role in The Beatles ‘Anthology’, he seemed to make peace with his history and took a band on the road Stateside. When his new album dropped through Beatmag letterbox, I didn’t listen to it for ages, imagining it would be the worst sort of lumpen bar band rhythm and blues. How very wrong. It’s a cracking pastiche of Beatlesy ‘60s pop, imbued with a longing nostalgia for a lost era, a lost Liverpool and a lost youth. Best’s songs are tenderly composed, certainly BBC Radio 2 retro, but well worth a listen.
MoHa!
One Way Ticket To Candyland (Rune Grammofon)
For those imagining MoHa!’s Candyland might be akin to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, think again. The Norwegian duo move even further away from their jazz origins for an album that’s pure industrial assault and all the better for it. This is avant-garde noise with no apologies, an electronic barrage backed by guitar and drums over amphetamine prog-rock time signatures. MoHa!’s Candyland is no sweetshop, it’s a clattering robot Hell only for those with strong stomachs.
Baikonour
You Ear Knows Future (Melodic)
The first Baikonour album failed to hit the retro-futurist electronic target it admirably aimed for. The new one, however, lands near the bullseye. Brighton-based Jean-Emmanuel Krieger returns with a collection that mingles Pink Floyd-ish, Krautrocky instrumentals with sparkling synthesized psychedelia. It’s apparently a loose concept album based on Krieger’s many visits to Nepal, not that you’d know without being told. It has a winning, free-floating grandeur and is almost certainly the first album to feature a song whose title is Nepalese for ‘I’m having sex with your mum’.
Ribbons
Royals (Osaka)
Prolific Seattle musician Jherek Bischoff has a hand in multiple bands, notably Ziu Ziu and Parenthetical girls, but that’s just the beginning of what he’s up to. Ribbons is his solo project (although he also records under his own name so things could get confusing). It’s a moping affair, his broken plaintive voice recalling Antony Hegarty, but Bischoff’s productions are less frail. The delicacy is countered with glitchy percussion and moody synthesized orchestration, and it’s deceptively tuneful. Ribbons’ music seems to brood about life’s sadness but sneakily lulls and comforts.
OLDIES/REISSUES
Johnny Cash
At Folsom Prison (SonyBMG)
One of THE great albums, Cash’s first comeback was recorded in 1968 in front of an audience of hardened criminals in a California State prison. These multi-CD packages of classic albums can sometimes lose the original’s focus. However, unlike, say, the reissued, extended ‘Who Live At Leeds’, which lost some of it’s precise visceral punch when expanded, ‘At Folsom Prison’ comes off OK. The original cherry-picked the best of two shows but the new package offers both gigs over two CDs, replete with spoken intros and warm-up numbers (from Carl Perkins and The Statler Brothers). What it loses in brevity and distilled essence, it makes up for in scene-setting and providing a rounded picture. In any case, the songs and versions here – ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, ‘Cocaine Blues’, ‘Jackson’ and the rest – become somehow mythic as they pass into history, mythic yet raw, gut-wrenching and simple. Cash was a one-off and his hard, humorous, conflicted old testament empathy comes over brilliantly. It also comes with an informative DVD documentary about Cash’s relationship with prisons and about those who were there.
COMPILATIONS
A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind
(Platipus)
Ever since Future Sound Of London transmogrified permanently into their Amorphous Androgynous persona around the millennium, they’ve been unfashionably but excitingly foisting LSD-fried psychedelia on us. Their third such album was recently released and is well worth a look, although the bottom line is that they’re sonically spectacular but sometimes lack actual songs. No such problem with their double CD mix album which lets mind expansion get funky in an acid haze of Donovan, Hawkwind, Osibisa, Miles Davis, Can, etc, alongside newer names such as The Emperor Machine and Pop Levi. This is no airy fairy Syd Barrett tea party; it’s sprawling, heavy, mind-blown stuff, held together by a forceful rhythmic dynamic.
Albums for review should be sent to…
Thomas H Green, Beatmag, PO Box 4653, Worthing BN11 9FG
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