A God-awful Small Affair

It's secretly every British DJ's dream to have a #1 single with their debut album, let's be honest. So the fact that Rudimental already have 2 off of this, and the album went straight to #1 too, suggests this is a very big thing indeed. 2013 seems to be a great year for fresh new dance and D'n'B talent: Disclosure, Duke Dumont and Naughty Boy are racking up chart-toppers like no tomorrow. Rudimental - real names Piers, Amir, Kesi and DJ Locksmith - have carved themselves into that most British of contemporary sounds that was rather brought to the UK charts by Mark Ronson; that brand of revamped Motown, given an urban edge and handed over to just about any current soulful pop singer. The problem is that such records as Mark Ronson's Versions or Plan B's Defamation of Strickland Banks , whilst certainly stylish and successful, lacked something in the way of versatility. The record kicks off with its moody, understated title track and a pub-organ back...

So the last in my trio of millenium-debutant indie giants' 2013 releases comes from my dearly-beloved Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Following in the wake of a spate of guest appearances ( Santigold's Go ; The Flaming Lips ; David Lynch )  and soundtracking ( The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ; Where the Wild Things Are ), Karen O is faced with the gauntlet of presenting something fresh and exciting as a frontwoman 10 years down the line from their glorious debut. It's a little bit of a face-saving move, really, following the slightly failed attempts to become crossover artists with their poppier 2009 release It's Blitz! They may have been covered by Glee, but they weren't quite covered with sales. Still, the charts' loss is our gain. Album #4 finds the Yeahs embracing a wacky side, if that wasn't made abundantly clear by the terribly unappealing artwork. I'm trying to find positives but everything - the garish font, the weirdly plastic child, and that hair - jus...

When I was reviewing the Strokes' fifth LP earlier in the year, I was doing so whilst also getting into this. The thought crossed my mind that this, Bankrupt! , also a fifth album for a seasoned indie behemoth, was exactly what the Strokes were trying to sound like. Only, Phoenix wanted to do it well, and paid attention to it. Us Brits aren't terribly well versed in the Frenchmen, probably because of some channel-crossing tensions that always surface when it comes to sport, cuisine and war. 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was really the first I'd heard of them, but even then it struggled and charted at a lowly #54 over here. Let us swiftly rectify that, then, by means of a glowing review. Fingers crossed. It seems strange really that Phoenix should stick to that whole 1980s new-wave revivalism since they helped usher it in in 2009, and there is a danger of the genre dying (much like chillwave at the moment) and leaving Bankrupt! irrelevant and dated. They do...

As a music videomaker, graphic artist and songwriter, there's definitely a touch of apprehension about delving into Woodkid's debut. The frenchman operates under that typically meaningless genre of "neofolk", and has already raised eyebrows with his smouldering, bombastic work on Lana Del Rey's Blue Jeans video, the pretty and sunkissed Teenage Dream video, and his very own WTF moment Run Boy Run . But there's definitely something beguiling there: his crooning voice sits somewhere between Antony Hegarty and David Byrne, and his attention to detail with the orchestral arrangements are often fancy and dizzying. Real name Yoann Lemoine, Woodkid's debut LP comes at slightly unfortunate timing. The commercial use of Run Boy Run , by today's standards, is so long gone now that it's rendered irrelevant. We therefore cannot expect success of Alex Clare proportions. But who cares about that? We start off quietly for Lemoine's tastes, where ...

As far as album titles go, this is worryingly indicative. The New York indie gods' return in 2011 with the at-best mishmash Angles was effectively torn to shreds by the music press and whilst the furore was slightly exaggerated and undeserved - Under Cover of Darkness was beautiful - it was a large step down from the three records which made their name. Whilst the die-hard fans bicker over which album is best, we all know that it's Is This It , and therefore any attempt by Casablancas and co. to deviate from the lo-fi, chirpy indie line is unavoidably going to be met with tentative displeasure. Certainly, their numerous side projects - solo (Julian, Albert) and otherwise (Little Joy) - weakened down the culture shock, and the electronic elements of Angles were accepted as progress. Yet, to begin experimenting always risks the songwriting side of things suffering. The first cut released from Comedown Machine was 'One Way Trigger', the wildly eccentric series of...

The polarising career of Kate Nash is rather testament to her individuality. In 2007, atop the crest of the whole Myspace-indie pop thing going on in the UK (that ignited such predictably shortlived bandwagons as Klaxons, the Pigeon Detectives and Jamie T), Nash's debut Made of Bricks smashed its way into #1 on our album charts and made us all forget about her counterpart Lily Allen. Similar to Allen was that backlash - but rather than a purist whinging over her celebrity parents' riches, a lot of Nash's hate was directed purely at the musical output: her colloquial vocal delivery, her dear-diary confessional and crude lyrics, and her overtly simple production values. It certainly made her stand out, but sadly pissing people off is part and parcel of making it in music today, and a lot of extremely good songs - Pumpkin Soup, Mouthwash, Merry Happy - were overlooked because of that "fitter/bitter" line in Foundations . But the release of 2010's My Best Fri...

Everything about Bastille should read as irritating: the use of the triangle in their band logo, the use of their music in the ads we skip before YouTube videos, frontman Dan Smith's hair. They've even got that token new-cool-thing about them that the UK gets behind in their droves to give a debut #1 (see: Ed Sheeran, Emeli Sande). Let's not even touch naming yourself after the pinnacle of the French Revolution on the whim of sharing a birthday with it. Wisely starting on their strongest merit - the single 'Pompeii' - they immediately unleash about three simultaneous hooks. The most obvious is their chanted vocal refrain, a sort of Lion King homage that, if anything, sticks in the head. Lyrically, the song suffers a lot from cliches ("the walls kept tumbling down/ grey clouds roll over the hills") and a touch of megalomania (comparing a romantic turmoil with the explosion of Vesuvius? See the music video for more ridiculousness). Smith's vocals...