Album Review: Susuma Yokota - Symbol (Uncut)

 
3/5
Classical music inspires Japanese ambient master's partial return to form after recent house excursions

Attempts to integrate classical music into electronica have led to many follies like William Orbit's mortifying Pieces In A Modern Style, but fortunately Yokota has always been a master of subtlety and imagination. Symbol is successful when it refuses to respect its stolen elements, recontextualising familiar snippets of composers like Mahler and Ravel as if they were samples from more standard sources. 'Purple Rose Minuet' works best, Debussy's 'Clair De Lune' floating over a minimal heartbeat, and while overall it's patchy, it's fortunately far more than Hooked On Classics for the laptop generation.

Album Review: Susuma Yokota - Symbol (Uncut)

Album Review: Lemon Jelly - '64-'95 (Uncut)

3/5
Colourful and playful third album succeeds in departing from their gold selling template

Those expecting Fred Deakin and Nick Franglen to retread the idyllic pastures of their first two albums will be shocked as the kings of Day-Glo downtempo up the BPMs. With each track built around an unlikely sample – from Masters Of Reality to Flanders & Swann – the results are as varied as the sources. Opener “‘88 aka Come Down On Me" shoots for Orbital’s crown, and the album’s closing spoken word cameo from William Shatner is shattered by a decidedly “rawk” climax. In between, familiar acoustic guitars and pastoral meanderings abound, but the tone is less whimsical, occasionally ecstatic, and at times surprisingly reminiscent of big beat.

Album Review: Lemon Jelly - '64-'95 (Uncut)

Album Review: Psapp - Tiger, My Friend (Uncut)

4/5
Anglo-German collaboration reaps rewards in derelict Kings Cross studio

With a distinctly honeyed voice hovering between Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Dani Siciliano, Psapp’s cat-obsessed Galia Durant weaves languid and inventive melodies over colleague Clarim Classman’s strikingly raw production. The enchanting results – not unlike Siciliano’s husband Matt Herbert let loose in a toy shop – combines found sounds as diverse as pneumatic drills, dial tones and cat’s toys with a delightfully fresh and playful melange of electronics and old instruments. With hauntingly naïve choruses, unexpected harmonies – especially on the fragrant “Calm Down” – and Durant’s pure and mellifluous delivery, it’s hard to find fault with this uplifting debut.

Album Review: Psapp - Tiger, My Friend (Uncut)

Album Review: Francoise Hardy - Tant De Belles Choses (Uncut)

3/5
Blur and St Etienne endorsed Yeh Yeh Girl makes a sultry return to form

Eternally elegant French icon Francoise Hardy – now a successful writer of astrology books – leaves behind, for the most part, the rockier sound of 1996’s Le Danger in favour of the more intimate, gentle sounds of ‘70’s albums like La Question. With several appearances by her son (by French legend Jacques Dutronc) Thomas Dutronc, who contributes mature jazzy guitar licks, and contributions from Ben Christophers and Benjamin Biolay – a rising star of the French nouvelle chanson – this is a welcome return, even if at times it suffers from an ‘80’s production style that, on the title track, recalls the worst excesses of Pink Floyd .

Album Review: Francoise Hardy - Tant De Belles Choses (Uncut)

Album Review: Rebelski - Stickers on Keys (Uncut)

4/5
Twisted Nerve and Badly Drawn Boy reveal hidden talents of Doves’ keyboard player

Despite his daytime job with Doves, Martin Rebelski’s debut for Heavenly remained largely undiscovered, but with Damon Gough’s patronage – he brought the record to Twisted Nerve personally – this album should fare deservedly better. Largely instrumental but bombast free, it’s tender and defiantly low key, at times reminiscent of The Blue Nile’s most intimate moments, as on “Play The School Piano”, and occasionally indebted to Harold Budd and Steve Reich – check “Remote Control”, also featuring Doves’ Jimi Goodwin on drums. Equally successful are forays into more traditional songwriting, featuring vocals by Roger Quigley (Montgolfier Brothers) and Mike TV (Beats For Beginners), with “Little White Lights” twinkling as gently as the title suggests.

Album Review: Rebelski - Stickers on Keys (Uncut)

Album Review: The Dears - No Cities Left (Uncut)

4/5

Britpop mixed with bombast to dramatic effect by Montreal visionaries

Who would have predicted that the most thrilling and inventive ‘British’ album of the year would in fact be delivered by a Montreal aesthete and his band? Had anyone in Britain actually known The Dears, would they have bet on the corpse of Britpop being reanimated and reconfigured by frontman Murray Lightburn, a cocksure Dickensian styled rogue who looks like he has gone ten rounds with life and been knocked down in each? Would they have even dared to suggest that this palest of white boy’s music could be (whisper it) hijacked by a black dilettante? (Name one black so-called Britpop band and maybe that last statement will carry less weight than it sadly does.)

The Dears are all about breaking conventions, and when you’re taking on the sacred cows of indie-pop, you’d better be as good as you think you are. The Dears take as their touchstones The Smiths and mid ‘90s Blur, a doubly dangerous thing to do when Lightburn’s vocals recall both Morrissey and Damon Albarn. Fortunately The Dears are frequently even better than they believe, for the most part able to outrun these ghosts and bust through the structural constraints their influences impose, seemingly fearless in their pursuit of music of true pathos, gravity and swagger. This is literate stuff, make no mistake, and it’s all the better for it.

From the outset it’s clear that Lightburn’s intentions are precocious, crediting himself here as sole writer, producer and director. It’s his role as “director” – in the cinematic sense – that sets No Cities Left apart, as he seeks to create a record that carries a narrative without becoming a turgid concept album. At times The Dears do suffer from the weight of their inspirations – “Lost In The Plot” sounds worryingly like Gene – and, were this album the film it dreams of, then it would benefit from an intermission. But at its finest – “Pinned Together, Falling Apart”’s blood curdling denials of lost love, “Never Destroy Us” hurtling towards its unexpected and desperate denouement, the spine-tingling dub of “Postcard From Purgatory” – No Cities Left is an exhilarating example of what happens when Britpop is unchained from the kitchen sink and given real drama to contend with.

Q&A
Murray Lightburn on The Dears’ plans for world domination…

UNCUT: Ever worry that you’re bringing coals to Newcastle?
LIGHTBURN: To be honest, that’s a little bit of a bullshit question. I’d like to think The Dears bring more to the table. Maybe we’re trying to lure the English in with something familiar. Once we’ve nabbed a few, they’ll go along with whatever we do in the future. Perhaps our next record will be our ‘Back To Africa’ phase and we’ll all be wearing dashikis and playing bongos like Damon fucking Albarn. We could do that everywhere until we dominate the world. Seriously, when it comes to rock music, what is English or American or Canadian? It all came from some niggers in the Southern US, anyway. Go back a little further and it was African slaves. It’s all fucked now, don’t you see?


Did you include the ‘a’ in Dears like the ‘a’ in Beatles?
Shoot us if we did.

Album Review: The Dears - No Cities Left (Uncut)

Album Review: William Shatner - Has Been (Uncut)

 
4/5

The stars come out for Captain Kirk

Largely written with Ben Folds – though Lemon Jelly also weigh in with the lovely “Together” – Shatner’s second album in 35 years will be remembered for its magnificent version of Pulp’s “Common People”. Initially absurd, the novelty of Shatner – also joined by Joe Jackson – declaiming Cocker’s brilliantly satirical lyrics is soon eclipsed by the genuine verve of the performance. Henry Rollins lends his anger to the furious “I Can’t Get Behind That”, Aimee Mann pops up on the touching “Trying”, and while Has Been refuses to take itself too seriously, going where few would ever go, it is definitely deserving of the cult status it will inevitably earn.

Album Review: William Shatner - Has Been (Uncut)

Album Review: Frank Black Francis - Black Francis Demo / Frank Black Francis (Uncut)

4/5
Blasphemy or reverence? Startling new interpretations of Pixies classics paired with earliest recordings

Frank Black Francis: the beginning and the end. One could treat these two dramatically different discs as bookends to Pixies history if the band hadn’t just completed a triumphant reunion tour, while talk of a new album continues. But the release of the first tapings of songs that ended up on Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa, paired here with fundamentally new arrangements of familiar material, seems to represent both the first and final chapters of Volume 1.

It’s the “Black Francis Demo”, recorded by producer Gary Smith three days before the band entered Fort Apache studios, to which Pixies obsessives will be most drawn. Despite their existence purely as preparatory run-throughs, these acoustic readings of songs like “Isla De Encanta” and “Break My Body” are passionate, far from cursory performances that, stripped of complex arrangements, highlight memorably the peculiar melodies at their heart.

But it’s the generous inclusion of “Frank Black Francis” that makes this essential. Recorded in Hackney last year with Andy Diagram and Keith Molene (currently David Thomas’ Two Pale Boys), it sees Black and his revisionist crew take hold of some of the finest Pixies work and variously turn it inside out, strip it bare, dub it out or reduce it to brass rubbings, revealing how these bizarre tunes are capable of adapting to extreme surgery. The sweet but ghostly shell of “Caribou”, the eerie horns of “Nimrod’s Son”, the Colliery Brass Band take on “The Holiday Song”: it’s all uniquely mind expanding, as exciting as hearing Come On Pilgrim for the first time. If Black’s decision to experiment with his earliest work highlights the comparative banality of his recent solo material, one can only hope that the experience reinvigorates him in the future as much as it has here.

Alone, perhaps, each of these CDs might appear to be somewhat scraping the Pixies barrel. But to pair them is, frankly, an inspired piece of marketing. Beginning with the very genesis of The Pixies, and ending with nothing short of a revelation, Frank Black Francis may be, as he himself calls it, “messing with the gospel”, but somehow this revisiting of his roots seems paradoxically to have expanded his horizons.

Album Review: Frank Black Francis - Black Francis Demo / Frank Black Francis (Uncut)

Album Review: Nancy Sinatra - Nancy Sinatra (Uncut)

3/5
Is the Go Go Girl going going gone..?

When Nancy Sinatra performed in Oslo in 2002, national newspaper VG carried a front page photograph with the headline “Tragic”. An Edinburgh show around the same time was little better received. Yet when she performed this year at Morrissey’s Meltdown in London, a wander through the auditorium during the legendary ‘These Boots Were Made For Walking’ elicited scenes reminiscent of a walkabout by Robbie Williams. Style rules over substance, in the capital at least.

It’s undoubtedly style rather than content that’s on show on this quasi-comeback album, where she dresses herself in the musical equivalent of the finest threads. Here the songs are penned by veterans like Bono, Jon Spencer, Jarvis Cocker and Thurston Moore, and of course her unlikely neighbour Morrissey. Nancy has often rested on others’ laurels, whether her father’s or writers like Lee Hazlewood’s, and this time is no different.

It’s easy to forget, given how iconoclastic Nancy is these days, that her standing centres upon only a small amount of music. Certainly she made many records, but few are memorable. Here she’s once again dependent upon her collaborators, and the truth is that few can match the skills it took to draw the best out of her. Calexico and Jarvis Cocker fare best, simply by aping Lee Hazlewood, though Thurston Moore’s contribution is striking by sounding like nothing she has ever done (though like most of what he has done). But much of the album lacks cohesion and even seems lazy: Bono & The Edge’s tune was in fact originally written for Ole Blue Eyes himself. There’s no trading on Dad’s reputation here, then…

It’s left to the relatively unknown Reno to rescue things with ‘Bossman’, whose massive chorus finally allows Nancy to display some character, and ‘About A Fire’, which strangely echoes ? & The Mysterions’ ‘96 Tears’. That this is the only uncredited song on the promotional CD seems to emphasise that Nancy doesn’t know where her strengths lie.

Neither deserving of epithets like “tragic” or mass hysteria, Nancy Sinatra instead leans as much upon her status as it does on the strength of her songwriters. Sadly, both seem here to be largely on the wane.

Q&A
Nancy Sinatra on London audiences, Morrissey and Mick Hucknall…

UNCUT: Is there anyone that you wish you could have collaborated with?
SINATRA: So many! We were hoping to have Elvis Costello. He had the multi-tracks of the song but sadly his schedule just didn’t allow for the recording of his vocal. We were sent a terrific song by Doves and as with Elvis, they couldn’t work out the recording of the track in time to include it. They are such a great band. Of course I have a long wish list: Debbie Harry, the Pixies, Mick Hucknall, Pink, Paul Weller, Joan Jett, and so on and so on…

UNCUT: How was it to play your first London show at the Royal Festival Hall?
SINATRA: The London audience is the most generous in the world. They don’t ever judge one on appearance or age. They only care about the music. Morrissey made it impossible for me to fail there. He is my mentor. It was a breathtaking experience.

Album Review: Nancy Sinatra - Nancy Sinatra (Uncut)

Album Review: Lazyboy - Penguin Rock (Uncut)

4/5
Kylie collaborator and Blue Room co-presenter’s long promised debut

With Lemon Jelly opening the commercial floodgates for a more light hearted form of downtempo electronica – see also Royksopp, Hint – Dan Carey, two time Ivor Novello nominee for co-writing and co-producing Kylie’s “Slow”, and Rob Da Bank, Sunday Best founder and Radio 1 chillout specialist, up the ante with an imaginative cast of collaborators. Roddy Frame steals the show with the uplifting “Western Skies”, Lee Scratch Perry spouts coded politics on the title track, while the up and coming Estelle’s melodic hip hop brings soul to the party. Blending styles playfully, the bizarrely titled Penguin Rock offers joyously frothy background beats for lazy boys and girls.

Album Review: Lazyboy - Penguin Rock (Uncut)

Album Review - Lou Rawls: I Can't Make It Alone (The Axelrod Years) (Uncut)

4/5
Near fatal 1958 car crash fails to prevent long term career resurrection

With a voice like childhood friend Sam Cooke’s, Lou Rawls’s career covered soul, gospel, jazz and finally Budweiser ads. But his 60’s work with DJ Shadow-endorsed producer David Axelrod is amongst his finest, a loose limbed soul captured here in all its raw glory. Interpretations of Donovan’s “Season Of The Witch” or Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth” are perfect introductions to his versatile voice and sit snugly alongside the likes of Axelrod’s Grammy winning “Dead End Street”. Rawls’ laidback passion and Axelrod’s superlatively groovy production are invaluable additions to fans of both artists, as well as all of a soulful persuasion. Another immaculate collection to match Stateside’s Axelrod and Minnie Ripperton retrospectives.

Album Review - Lou Rawls: I Can't Make It Alone (The Axelrod Years) (Uncut)

Album Review: The Feminine Complex - Livin' Love (Uncut)

5/5
Legendary debut album plus stripped back demos from female pop pioneers that time nearly forgot.

When this debut album - originally released in 1969 - was first reissued on cult US indie Teenbeat complete with sleevenotes from Lambchop's Johnathon Marx, many thought it had to be an elaborate hoax. Could a Nashville girl group really be this good and remain undiscovered? Not for ever. A choir of Dusty Springfields produced by Phil Spector would struggle to be this wondrous. Like Lee & Nancy's Some Velvet Morning, The Feminine Complex, as the name suggests, deliver multilayered deceptively innocent, largely self penned psychedelic pop that swings gently from exuberant to spooky via forlorn and sentimental. Unknowingly groundbreaking and essential.

Album Review: The Feminine Complex - Livin' Love (Uncut)