A God-awful Small Affair

This may well be the third studio album from Vancouver musician Grimes, but forgive me if I treat it as I treat debut records. The world has largely been kept away from her music thus far, but Visions surely deserves to change that. Real name Claire Boucher, her third release has secured almost universal praise and it's about bloody time I joined that bandwagon. There's an interesting parallel between her work and the work of Zola Jesus - both have enjoyed a deep exploration with the dark and the ethereal in their music over the past 3 years and their first two albums have been met a little tentatively. Both of their thirds have focussed more heavily on the songwriting and the overall thematics of the record, and as you may have seen in my Conatus review, that's certainly a great development. Its intro, 'Infinite ♡ Without Fulfillment' initiates a certain amount of 80s dark-pop that only reinforces the Zola Jesus comparisons. But there's also a clear K-Pop inf...

I'm really not sure where the time has gone. I mean there's a difference in that I spent time listening to Treats on my bus ride to college whereas now I listen to them on the... bus ride to university, but has it really been 2 years already? It's like the dust from their earsplitting, ground-shattering debut hasn't had time to settle. Those of you who've yet to embrace this particular New York duo should probably be warned that they come as a bit of an assault. Their debut record in 2010 stormed into just about every critics' favour and placed highly on several 2010 lists, but the biggest impact was their infiltration into popular culture. Gossip Girl, FIFA video games, Skins and a handful of movie trailers have used their tunes, and they've been given expert advice and work from the likes of M.I.A. and Spike Jonze. So where do the band cross the bridge from breakthrough to mainstays? Well there's no immediate change of sound, that's for certain. O...

For the second year in a row a successful songwriter has won the BRITS' Critics Choice Award. Following on from Jessie J, who already had a glimpse of fame for writing Miley Cyrus' excellent Party in the U.S.A. (admittedly the 'success' might not be so memorable for Sandé (Devlin, Tinchy Stryder and Alesha Dixon singles)), there's a worrying predictability about their recognition of new artistry. Especially when new acts such as Mumford and Sons, Plan B or Ed Sheeran are ignored in a so-far 100% solo female "she'll look pretty stood on the stage accepting it" environment. I'll move on before I get too bitter. Sandé, an Aberdeenshire singer with Zambian heritage, had to change her real name (Adele) thanks to a certain fellow Brit winner. So let's hope her album, which has already spent 2 weeks at #1, doesn't turn into an inescapable battalion like 21 did (although if it's anywhere near as good, maybe we could forgive her). Beginning t...

Oh lo-fi. The gift that keeps on giving. Its infiltration into much of today's indie bands hasn't gone unnoticed, and although it would appear that few have been commercially successful (Yuck, Ariel Pink, Smith Westerns) there've been more than a fair number of excellently-received albums in recent years from the softer side of rock. Perhaps that explains the British fascination with the decline of 'hard' rock. Nonetheless, it's a rebirth that's splitting music fans - coincidentally, and rather neatly, with the rise of the usage of the word 'hipster'. Take that how you will. The Cleveland band have already released two LPs before this in late January, but not even Wikipedia acknowledges their existence. So whether you're feeling a little bit wet from that fact, or sneering at their third try's success, we can derive from all of that very little musical detail. It's just something lazy music writers will peddle in lieu of informative writi...

Subjection to British rock media would leave one under the impression that the search for rock music is a difficult venture, but across the pond they're virtually churned out on a production line. Quite why anyone would want yet another rawk band is beyond me - but the latest new candidates are Howler. The Minnesotan fivesome lie somewhere comfortably between garage, grunge and surf rock and whilst those aren't necessarily new genres for us to play with, a band's debut is always going to have a handful of well-written songs, right? Well, kinda. Because America Give Up begins with the almost-painfully slow and dreary 'Beach Sluts', which just feels like a recording studio brainwave that went "let's give it a naughty name and just hammer home the riffs in the chorus". Lyrically, musically and thematically it's so unoriginal that it almost throws their debut into jeopardy - and this isn't helped by the run-of-the-mill 'Back to the Grave',...

The US mainstream scene is an odd place. You think you've got it sussed with your pithy remarks about Flo Rida, Katy Perry and Chris Brown and then out of a blue a totally random folksy band will burst into chart-topping stardom. Whether this is due to Superbowl advertisements and a guest feature from the undeniably talented & lovely Janelle Monáe - single-handedly responsible for the rise of "where the hell is the shortcut for that accent?" buzz up and down America - or just a genuinely talented band being rewarded is anybody's guess: there'll always be bands that the hipsters would prefer to get the success... and they invariably don't. It's just something about their inoffensiveness that uneases me. They have buckets of theatricality and cutenesses about them that's willing to account for the glaring lack of uniquity about them, and even though they drop the F-bomb twice in just the intro it feels more like an out-of-touch take on youth and reve...

It takes a great deal of resolve for me to overlook a name and album combination as impossibly Googlable as Django Django's Django Django but thankfully they caught me on a good day. Or a day where I had nothing else new to listen to. Something like that. I just wish this had been released a couple of months later than this was because everything about it screams SUMMER ANTHEM - much in the same vain as Cut Copy's Zonoscope did last year. The four gentlemen of Django Django met at an Edinburgh art school, and have been freely labelled as genres varying from art rock to electronic psychedelia, but labels are for squares, man. Maybe they're constructs devised by journalists so they have about 4 paragraphs worth of subject material for any given music article. Maybe. AND SO the Introduction welcomes us into their world with some crickets chirping and some Crystal Castles-lite electronic experimentation, but the forefront of all this is a rather sinister mirage of synths and ...

Let me start off by saying that I'm a little bit biased about this review because I've just booked tickets to see him in May. Is that bias? No I don't think so. Silly Shu. Anyway, the lack of a Wikipedia article may belie the importance and infamy of this, Mike Hadreas' second record - just a month ago he was thrown into controversy when YouTube banned his music video for 'Hood', which depicted the singer in drag and embracing a shirtless gay porn actor, for being 'not family safe'. The same website has allowed Lana del Rey's Born to Die video to go unrestricted, despite depicting a car crash fatality and a topless woman (which, last time I checked, was generally less acceptable by the media than shirtless men). Michael Stipe attacked the decision, and intentional or not, Perfume Genius found himself the poster-boy for the fight against homophobia (for a brief period of January 2012, at least). Those who were aware of his debut, Learning , however w...

As part of the NME's continual assault on giving everything "guitar"y excessive amounts of praise (whilst simultaneously condemning Kate Bush's 50 Words for Snow to a 7/10, the same score they gave to Britney Spears' Femme Fatale ), the Maccabees have found themselves in a whirlwind of hype. They've totally escaped me until this, their third album, and ultimately I decided to download it because I needed something to wile away the time until the release of Born to Die. So imagine my surprise when I discover one of the strongest, most fascinating British rock records in recent years. Of course, the possibility of them crossing over the Atlantic was effectively savaged by a typically anti-British Pitchfork review (who might as well respond to all UK acts in future with an ink stamp of "Not quite Radiohead", it'd be as ignorant) but at least here in our superior music-land (and I'm aware I'm playing with fire considering the majority of my ...