Archives for September 2011

Father, Son, Holy Ghost is the dif­fi­cult sec­ond album from San Francisco’s Girls after their suit­ably laud­ed debut Album in 2009. And if any­thing, their influ­ences are worn even more proud­ly here than they were first time around. The open­ing track, Hon­ey Bun­ny, mar­ries ear­ly Under­tones with Paul Simon cir­ca ’73, and the first four tracks on the album once again con­firm Girls as the next in line to a tra­di­tion of heart­felt, sophis­ti­cat­ed indie pop that traces its lin­eage to Big Star and The Replace­ments via Teenage Fanclub.

But as the third track, Die, pro­gress­es the more expan­sive sound­scapes of Fleet­wood Mac and Pink Floyd begin to emanate. And by the time we get to 5 and 6, My Ma and Vom­it, the sound and feel of late Bea­t­les has been blend­ed with The Dark Side of The Moon and fed into Spir­i­tu­al­ized to pro­duce a son­ic spec­trum that spreads out in all direc­tions at once.

What saves the whole thing from spe­cious opu­lence though is the emo­tion­al depth and guile­less, Lennonesque hon­esty that Christo­pher Owens pro­vides. More than mere­ly the lyri­cist and lead singer, Owens is the band’s cre­ative dynamo, and it’s his deliv­ery as much as it is his song writ­ing that rais­es their music and sends it soar­ing into the heav­ens. You don’t need to know the details of his back­sto­ry to feel his pain, but few will be sur­prised after hear­ing this music to dis­cov­er that his moth­er brought him up in the Chil­dren Of God cult, and that although both he and she escaped and sur­vived, the price they paid was the death of his broth­er and her sec­ond son.

Had Girls been mak­ing music ten years ago, theirs would cer­tain­ly have been the sound that Jonathon Caou­ette would have turned to for his sim­i­lar­ly heart­break­ing film Tar­na­tion, from 2003. Both Owens and Caou­ette use emo­tion­al out­pour­ings as a balm for the psy­chic wounds their del­i­cate, androg­y­nous, frag­ile tor­sos have been scarred with. In both cas­es, the results are dev­as­tat­ing, at once hope­less­ly dam­aged yet improb­a­bly triumphant.

The more you lis­ten to Father, Son, Holy Ghost the more com­fort­ably it rests as a mon­u­men­tal edi­fice. The boys from Prav­da gave it a suit­ably august 9.3 http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15811-father-son-holy-ghost/?utm_campaign=most-read-week&utm_medium=related&utm_source=pitchfork. That feels about right. Give or take a per­cent­age point or two.

Smoth­ered with love and fawned over by both Chan­nel 4 and the NME, and duly hailed as north Lon­don and then Britain’s next Big Thing, Bom­bay Bicy­cle Club have, sur­pris­ing­ly, turned out to be the real deal. After their debut album I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose in 09, and the fol­low-up Flaws a year lat­er, A Dif­fer­ent Kind Of Fix is their third album in as many years, and is a hap­py fusion of the two that came before.

The more upbeat ele­ments of the for­mer can be found in tracks like Take The Right One, Beg­gars and Leave It which have a grandiose, mon­u­men­tal sweep as if Arcade Fire had been cov­ered by New Order in their ear­ly 90s guise.

Whilst Frac­ture and espe­cial­ly the ethe­re­al, heady Still recall their sec­ond qui­eter album, as once again Nick Drake is chan­nelled, only this time around his sound is fused and meld­ed into an ear­ly 70s psy­che­del­ic sound­scape. If their first two albums passed you by, jump on board.

Fif­teen years ago hip hop was every­where. Hav­ing got big­ger and big­ger over the pre­vi­ous cou­ple of decades, all of a sud­den it became ubiq­ui­tous, so that numer­ous sub-cat­e­gories had to be invent­ed to describe its ever expand­ing hori­zons, and every sin­gle oth­er kind of genre began to incor­po­rate it in some shape or form.

You had the larg­erthanlife Dre, Tupac and Snoop Dog on the West coast, and The Noto­ri­ous B.I.G., Nas and Jay‑Z on the East. But you also had EL‑P’s Def Jux, Wu-Tang Clan and the Beast­ie Boys going off in their dif­fer­ent direc­tions, De La Soul and Juras­sic 5, and A Tribe Called Quest and Black­a­li­cious tak­ing it some­where else again, and DJ Shad­ow and RJD2 going some­where com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent again. Then there was Eminem, and 50 Cent, etc etc etc.

The whole thing came to a head with Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below from 2003. A mon­ster crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial hit, it seemed to take all the best bits of every con­ceiv­able musi­cal genre and fil­ter them all through the prism of hip hop. And then just as sud­den­ly it was all over, and over night hip hop became irrel­e­vant. And from what remained of the dust and detri­tus, a lone fig­ure emerged; Kanye West.

Okay, so that’s a slight exag­ger­a­tion. The Roots are still out there and last year’s How I Got Over proved that their already expan­sive musi­cal palette had got even more adven­tur­ous. Whilst that year’s Cos­ma­gram­ma, the third album prop­er from Fly­ing Lotus showed that hip hop was still capa­ble of pro­duc­ing a gen­uine­ly excit­ing, not to say impres­sive­ly eclec­tic new tal­ent. And The Ecsta­t­ic, Mos Def’s 2009 album, is a seri­ous piece of work. But it’s hard not to form the impres­sion that part of the demise of hip hop has been the absence of any­body big enough to stand up to the colos­sal tal­ent that is Kanye.

The one man that does seem up to the task is Jay‑Z, and after work­ing close­ly togeth­er on Kanye’s impe­ri­ous My Beau­ti­ful Dark Twist­ed Fan­ta­sy (see below) last year, they’ve joined forces to pro­duce an album prop­er. A num­ber of crit­ics have com­plained about Watch The Throne’s tri­umphal­ism, mis­read­ing it as a cel­e­bra­tion of the duo’s gar­gan­tu­an suc­cess. Which is to com­plete­ly miss the point. You can get a taster for where they were going to go on this album by lis­ten­ing to two of the more with­er­ing tracks on Twist­ed Fan­ta­sy, Mon­ster and So Appalled, where every­thing they declaim is punc­tu­at­ed with the refrain, “I know, this shit is fuckin’ ridiculous.”

Watch The Throne is an album from two giants who can’t quite com­pre­hend how it is that they have been giv­en so priv­i­leged a view from up there in the clouds, and who are con­tin­u­al­ly amazed at how lone­ly they are there. And yet no-one is going to decry more loud­ly than they are their right to demand it.

Whilst not quite as lay­ered as Twist­ed Fan­ta­sy, Watch The Throne is bom­bas­tic, demand­ing, dynam­ic, supreme­ly con­fi­dent and con­stant­ly ques­tion­ing and, like all the best music, impos­si­ble to pin down.