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)