Nick Drake - Bryter Layter Boxset Review

Nick Drake
Bryter Layter Boxset
(Commercial Marketing)

"I think that's one of the problems with Nick's legacy, if there is a problem. I get sent tapes just by people out there who have a guitar and want to write songs, and they are very touched by Nick Drake and they make a demo tape, and they send it to Nick Drake's producer and they say, "What do you think of this? I love Nick Drake, can't you hear it in my music?" And 99 percent of those tapes that I get – or electronic submissions these days – are breathy vocals, Aparicio guitars and form without essence. There's nothing in there of the wit or the subtlety of Nick, or the sophistication of his music. What drew me to Nick wasn't the subject matter, but the tremendous originality and freshness of the musical vision. And it's always been mysterious"   - Joe Boyd

There is an epidemic out there, a nasty rash. Even Simon Cowell's noticed. It would seem that the singer-songwriter is everywhere, all so similar, all so dull, all so slimily seeking our fondness. Everywhere you turn there is someone bearded, someone earnest, someone with passion trying to sing you a song from the heart. The song is nearly always the same. It will be about 'holding on'. It will be about 'letting things go'. It will be about 'staying together'. Not a single word will be poetic, although the writer will frequently mistake the use of scientific or managerial speak in the lyrics as being poetic. It will take a condescending look at a 'character', mistaking pity for compassion and metaphor for depth. It will be the very best the writer and singer can do. And that is why these people need informing of something. That they are all, convincing though the mutual backslaps and incestuousness is - suffering from a severe type of mental illness, the kind of Aspergers-delusion that in any other walk of life would require a psyche-evaluation and a recommended sabbatical for six-months to a year.

    I know some of these people. Every city has them, their little community of folkies and troubadours, who all go to the same pubs on the same night to watch each other close their eyes and be transported within the ever-engrossing confines of their windswept souls. Together they keep their delusions alive, that they're cutting away the flab and fanny that chokes meaning in modern industrial pop and returning things to an agrarian wood'n'wire purity, a place where the city can be risen above even as it's so 'bravely' explored. There's several fronts to this arrogance - first and foremost the supposed gallantry of 'writing their own songs' immediately auto-annointing themselves with the burnished glow of self-sufficiency, their superiority to those puppets who sing only other people's words, play other people's tunes, y'know like Elvis, Frank Sinatra. These folk have the guts and grit and dauntlessness to write all their own songs, y'know, like Nickelback, Ed Sheeran.  There's also the further arrogance that can only come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what music's all about - collaboration between people- this rather modern idea that the singer songwriter stands alone, works on their vision alone, that we are lucky to bear witness to such purely committed artistry, uncut as it is by the concision or urge to edit that others would bring. Finally there's the arrogance in assuming that what people want to hear is songs 'from the heart', which usually means an incredibly constricted set of cliches have to be in place for that song's writing and execution. Politically it can be extroverted yet must always return to a deeper message of survival DESPITE the interference of others, personally it has to arrive at a moment where the singer figures it all out, self-diagnoses his or herself and prescribes a better future or a self-satisfied stasis. It's from their heart and you will listen, regardless of any selfishness behind the expression, attuned as you are to the lazy universality of the lyrics, the ease of empathy all that vaguery about confinement versus the open road inspires. Vocally the singer must twitch, at carefully timed ("quirky) moments of particular import, into their 'other' voice, the one they only flex when they're really feeling it, tapping their internal maelstrom for the rawest emotion, that moment where all the men get to sound like that overrated cunt Jeff Buckley and all the women set their larynxes to 'foghorn'. In the delivery of their songs, eyes will be constantly closed, heads will sway, locked in on their own genius, rarely making contact with an audience who should feel honoured to be witness to such courage and daring.
   That inflated sense of truth and connection doesn't just animate the performers, it also brings together the audience, galvanises their sense of commitment to an entirely urban bucolic ideal of 'what music is all about', the tacit unspoken critique and conservative fear of the real city and all that problematic post-60s diversity that despoiled and defiled the true troubadour impulse.
    To a tiny extent you can blame people like poor old Nick Drake for these kind of delusions. Drake was off on his own, toted a tape, he played a 24 hour festival with Fairport, got his tape to Joe Boyd, and Boyd knew then something special was happening. As Boyd points out though, this gives too many people the idea that in their seclusion, in their endlessly self-important, humourless explorations of their innards they'll find something unique that needs hearing. Whereas what actually emerges as important whenever you listen to Drake, particularly 'Bryter Layter', his most interesting album, is that other people's interference was crucial, and that really what Drake was can't be reduced to so brutishly simplistic and loaded a formulation as 'singer-songwriter'. He's far too odd still, far too different and special still despite the legion of lunkheaded copyists he's inspired, to be so easily summated, or so confined to the tools he used or the supposed lack-of-image he put across (which of course becomes its own image).

   For starters, his guitar playing. If you're 'committed' a music-fan enough to only experience one sense at a time then you'll see on the cover that he's playing an acoustic guitar, but if you're a human being you'll realise - my god WHAT a thing he turns it into. Not simply an up and down thing of strum, or a finger picking thing of detail but the fretboard as dancefloor, the soundboard as rumpus room, a labarynth of geometry and shadow, a rhythm section all to itself. One of the funkiest guitarists of all time and the only other British people I could remotely compare his playing to is John Martyn and Vini Reilly - players so unique that a lifetime spent trying to emulate them would be a lifetime wasted. Anyone who's ever tried to learn how to play a Nick Drake song knows that it's not contained in the chords, or the structure. It's contained in the unplaceable tunings, the shape of the way he leans into what he's playing, the way his fingers, deep within themselves, are actually possessed of an almost frighteningly inhuman mechanical grace, the way he absolutely resolutely refuses to play everything he could be playing. And where alot of musicians allow their bad cliched habits as players inform their equally uninteresting songwriting, so Drake's songs are always pitched in a totally unique place, somewhere between reverie and resistance, somewhere between being buffeted away by a breeze or a whim and being the heaviest blackest darkest shit you've ever heard in your life. There's a private humour to Nick Drake's songs that allows that heaviness to not hurt or become wearisome, there's a cellular bleakness that stops it being all air and light, that slowly has his vision closing in on you, closing you down, enveloping you. 'Bryter Layter' was the first Nick Drake album I ever heard, consequently it's my favourite, but I think beyond that initial way his voice just made me crumble I think it's my favourite cos it's his poppiest, his lushest, the one where you feel he's most part of the world. 'Introduction' I used to put on as a little bathe of sunshine every morning, still it's one of the most evocative openings to an album you'll hear, cracking your shell, letting the rays in, and the clouds. Listen to Jake Bugg's fuckawful pointless cover of 'Hazey Jane II' and then listen to Drake's and you can hear exactly how much is going on here more than chords and words. Richard Thompson's guitar is key as it is throughout, sliding things round the corner, fracturing and forming the shapes, Robert Kirby's simply gorgeous strings (best 'rock'-band string-arrangement this side of Paul Buckmaster or Tony Visconti) force Drake out of himself and out into the street. 'Chime Of A City Clock' & the heart-rending 'One Of These Things First' both gently remind you just exactly what an astonishing riddim-machine Nick was, how vital Dave Pegg's bass is throughout, what a genius move it was getting Beach Boys veteran Mike Kowalski in to do some sunkissed shuffle & stealth.
   "Hazey Jane I" is the moment for me when 'Bryter Layter' stops just being dazzling and starts negotiating its place in heaven, Dave Mattacks giving the drums the same sense of rippling endless fade-out that Paul Thompson does in the last minutes of Roxy's 'For Your Pleasure', Pegg, Drake & Kirby making the rest a swish of zephyrs and brokenness. 'Bryter Layter', the title track is twisted supermarket muzak, the most unsettling warp of almost too-sweet melody my young head had heard since the 2nd side of 'Forever Changes'. John Cale's viola and harpsichord on 'Fly' are just exquisite, working with Pegg's fantastically medieval low-end to lend Drake the poet-knightly air of the Stones 'Lady Jane' with none of the meanness of spirit, just a beautiful proneness and wilted need that suits the words and the voice perfectly. Boyd's brilliance at bringing the right people together in service of the songs, not the artist, works so brilliantly throughout 'Bryter Layter' it becomes less and less like a singer-songwriter's album, more and more like an ensemble piece, albeit an ensemble who have to follow the curious mix of clear-eyed hardboiledness and red-eyed dissipation that Drake's songs inhabit. All the words I've ever heard to describe Drake, 'ethereal', 'airy', 'introspective' seem to me to be reflecting a response to his voice rather than the way his songs actually come across - this idea that Drake's natural shyness leads to an obscurity of purpose or meaning is demolished through 'Bryter Layter's stunning closing side, perhaps suggesting that it's always a mistake to think the shy boy can't be a monster on the quiet, or that a naturally weak voice can't dominate your day. Drake's voice sounds anything but non-committal, has the same unbridled sense of personality and difficulty and bloody-minded naturalism that you sense Drake was always possesed with. So 'Poor Boy' is never in danger of being earnest, is always taking the piss out of its protaganist and out of you, P.P Arnold & Doris Troy's sweet backing vocals cutting loose on the chump, skewering his self-pity. "Northern Sky" seems to want to wipe the slate clean, clear the clutter of poesy any songwriter finds him/herself backed into, start afresh with a "new mind's eye", Cale's wondrous celeste adding to that sense of rebirth at the dead-end of a loveless lifetime, Drake now seemingly getting down to the basic yet inherently ambiguous statements of hope and irredeemable darkness the whole album's been playing with. And 'Sunday' is just the perfect closer - back in the strangely off-key muzak world of the title track, suffused with a warmth that's pure Bosworth archive from Kirby's hanging strings, the flute at times embodying what you feel Drake might have sung, at times slipping free and skipping down the road with a naivete and innocence you couldn't credit him with - it leaves you wondering who the hell is this Nick Drake guy and why has he chosen to bookend and sandwich his LP with these moments of purely instrumental lissomness when you've been told he was a singer-songwriter, someone who meant it man, someone who played from the heart. Throughout 'Bryter Layter' it's clear he's playing, writing, from a way more twisted, more open, more generous place than that.

   A word about the box. I don't have it. I don't care about it and neither should you. Drake's is a story that needs no more fleshing out (and Brad fucking Pitt should be banned from ever talking about him again), and requires no more artifacts beyond the records as they are. They themselves are inexhaustible and infinite enough to be getting along with, and ticket stubs, posters, extra artwork, free downloads, sketches, nuts'n'bolts demystifications I can do without.  I'm utterly disinterested in Nick Drake the man, just as I'm utterly disinterested in all singers 'from the heart', all musicians who see music as a way of keeping a journal, inflicting their self-absorption on the rest of us. I'm still, despite the unpleasant speculations and romanticising of the rock 'audience', totally fascinated by the sophistication, ease, and suggestiveness of Drake's music. His depression and demise are as tragic to me as any persons passing, but no-one should allow them to in any way affect their enjoyment of the things he made, cos his music in its sheer intransigent existence absolutely denies the sadness, denies whatever 'message' you might draw from the way he ended up. What you hear on 'Bryter Layter' is the man at play, in delight and wonder, exercising his powers to their fullest in collaboration with some of pop's brightest sparks and most humane spirits. Nick Drake, though so often used as emblematic of some auteur spirit, especially by his fans who've "discovered" him through something other than the records, is, like any interesting musician proof of the exact opposite, that the best artists need others to truly bring out what isn't inside them, what's more than they contain, that you only get to be thoroughly honest when you're being honest about your own inherent dishonesty, unreal about your reality, real about your unreality, and music is the perfect artform to express that essential dualism so many straight-ahead singer-songwriters are missing. In comparison to Drake's shy reticence, the confidence and sickly self-regard of his self-appointed descendants is a natural consequence of their musical myopia and their pipsqueak souls. Drake's harder, tougher, funnier, than any of them, and 'Bryter Layter' is his most welcoming and giving statement. If songs were lines in a conversation the situation would be fine. It aint, and Drake knew it, knew how much more songs could be, how much more his songs had to be. Love it, and live in here forever.

THE F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE MAY 2013

SINGLE OF THE MONTH I

Laura Mvula
That's Alright 
Sony 

People I'd trusted had said good things about Laura Mvula and I'm gratified to find they were absolutely goddamn right. Fantastic rolling beats, sudden smears of indecently clean horns and that's pretty much it but soaring above it all is Mvula's voice, clear, powerful, fantastic lyrics. "I will never be what you want & that's alright/ Cos my skin ain't white/And that's alright/ Who are you?/ The center of the universe?". What an utterly fucking brilliant brave necessary thing for a pop song in 2013 to say. Imagining how massively inspirational this will be to the people who need it. Also thinking GOT to get hold of the album toot sweet. Count me in as obsessed from first contact. 

Jake Bugg 
Country Song 
Mercury 

Mindful to fill this review with enough lucrative keywords to keep my SEO optimizers happy (hi guys, check the caps!)  in the whiter than white corner we have this little QUALITY arsewipe and oh my giddy fuck you won't believe what you're hearing! A voice so bereft of pleasure it's like filling your pants with TOP hot gravel, a guitar so aimlessly MINT dull you wanna see if his basin-bowlcut head will fit inside the soundhole, well aware that it won't, still keen to bloody well try with some heft and a CLASS shoehorn and several stout whacks with a polo mallet.
  Bugg, you donkey, be quiet. Lots of people are telling you you're great. They're all twats. You're not great. You're fucking CLASS rubbish.

Daughter
Human
4.A.D

Definitive, state-of-the-art indie-folk that immediately makes you think you've heard it already. You just can't remember what product it was advertising. You're pretty sure it was a slimline device of some description but it could've been anything from car insurance to a new, liberating type of sanitary towel. A little research reveals it's never been used on an advert, but the fact you THINK it's from an advert is testament to Daughter's ability to seamlessly slip alongside the zeitgeist of sounding both sparkly and as if under the pall of a Victorian illness, and take their place amongst other listless croakers covered in fairy-lights and filled with what sound like pleurisy on the gravy train of soundtracking adverts directed at middle-class students and 20-30 yr old ABC earners and other people who close their eyes in bliss as soon as they hear an acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel in heavenly bearded & floral-dressed union.

    I remember when I first started hearing female voices like this, Lisa Germano, Lois, other 4.A.D acts like Liquorice - like all 'weak' voices (see also Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Paul Westerberg, Marianne Faithful) what was winning was when you felt that they were at least trying to sing the best they could, or at least not giving a fuck and making you live with their technically imperfect throats. What bands like Daughters suffer from is that here you get the feeling they're AIMING for that weakness, trying to sound frail ergo damaged ergo interesting. It's music that settles for being the aural equivalent of a Zooey Deschanel Marie Claire photoshoot and I pretty much blame Cat Power for all of it. Pass.

Palma Violets
We Found Love
Rough Trade 

Had to check a few times that this wasn't a live bootleg, or ripped from a youtube video of a live show. It sounds like the really dull final 5 minutes of a set wherein a band drag out a song to tediously strung-out, drawn-out lengths of quiet/crescendo, of interest only to the die-hard & drunk. Turns out they think this is actually a single and counts as a song. Quite astonishing. No hook. No shape. Nothing of interest. Sonically we're talking Shed 7 at their arse-pummelingly overwhelmingly headfuckingly very very best. I hope you're feeling as massively imbued with hope as I am. Remember, cut down the vein, not across. Speed is of the essence. Early bus home. Down. Not across. 


Stooshe 
Slip 
Warners

Deliberately dated but like Stooshe's other singles just damn well irresistable. Best girl band in the UK and should be getting precisely three thousand times as many column inches as the anodyne likes of the shitting Saturdays right now. "Slip" you know, and you know it's catchy as fuck and you know it's absolutely salvaged by the twenty second bridge whereby the thumping undertow totally absconds - gives the entire song a pivot around which it can work its propulsive magic. You have no choice in this matter. Summer smash par excellence. 

Jay Leighton 

Wish I Was Springsteen 

Strata Music 

" . . . or maybe James Dean, I'm forever waiting for the start . . . I need something to jump start my heart". I can help you out there actually mate. Seriously. 

    First off, face it, the Springsteen thing ain't gonna happen (thank fuck, last thing we need is yet another Springsteen - can you imagine how many sweaty bandana-wearing saxophone solos that's gonna put in the world?) - you're "Jay Leighton" (real name Zarathustra Fantakkabo, renamed himself to blend in better), yet another shitty singer-songwriter whose coming decade will be spent vainly waiting for the call from the Match.com ad-department that will never come. So here, attach these bulldog clips to your nipples and I'll start rotating the vitreous lever on the Leyden jar. I'll kickstart yr heart alright y'stubbly loser, I'll kickstart its fucking head in.

Azealia Banks 

Young Rapunxel 

Polydor 

Wonderful unsettling intro like something Cabaret Voltaire woulda boomed out of a Sheffield-circling van circa 1975 — then the beat gets going, AB gets going and so does any interest you might've had right out the door. Bass nowhere near loud enough, vocals actually too distorted to be effective as anything other than a messy irritant. Two minutes in, it all falls apart, and AGAIN it gets interesting. Then the beat starts, she starts blahblahing and again you start snoring. Next time, AB, go harder, go weirder or just plain GO.

Lissie 

Shameless

Sony 

One of those videos where all the lyrics appear on screen. In the 5 seconds in between the word 'stunt' hitting the screen and the pay-off rhyme arriving my mind, as yours will, whirled through a few possibilities, the anticipation growing. I was set to tip Lissie the wink for her lyrical boldness, even though the rest of the record is a horrible mess of raunch and over-produced 'tude' like they rebuilt Meredith Brooks using the body parts of K.T.Tunstall. And, perhaps inevitably the rhyme, when it finally arrives, is a massive dissapointment which necessitated a massive dish of ointment on my wounded expectations. We don't need anyone to make this kind of music except Pink, who is the best at it.

Suede 

Hit Me 

Warner Music Group 

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you ARE broke, definitely don't fix it. La la LA la la. La la LA la la. Works damnit. 

Mylo Stone/Percy Filth/Split Prophets/Serocee/DJ Rogue 

Brukfoot 

Bandcamp

Love it when a posse cut actually stops you asking the usual questions about why people need to collaborate (too little to say on their own usually) by actually piling genuine rhyme talent together and creating something undeniably great. This is an awesome cut from some of Bristol's finest including Res & Upfront from Split Prophets (much boosted in this column), shot through with a great heavy reggae vibe & fantastic scratches from DJ Rogue. Ruff n rugged n essential.

Nametag & Nameless 

Blaow 

Brick Records

Had to keep checking this, turning it off, turning it back on, to make sure that what I was hearing was what they intended. At first the way the beat comes in over this strange shard of Americana-touched bliss-pop just sounds WRONG - as the track progresses that wrongness doesn't dissipate but does start to make a weird kind of wonky sense, especially cos the rhymes seem entirely oblivious to the musical mayhem underneath. On the flip check out the comparatively conventional but still odd 'Namecheck' and wait for the album 'For Namesake' armed with tranq darts and a butterfly net. Here be madness. 

Little Nikki 

Where I'm Coming From 

Be-Union/Sony 

One of yr bona-fide growers, interesting latinate-touched melody, sprightly production, great mid-section of crossfaded bleeps & bloops. See what the record company have done to it though? Made a video wherein she has to go stand under a flyover and sing her song whilst a dance-troupe and some kids on skateboards & BMXs wheel around her with such a total pointlessness it's like a Tory Party central office idea of youth culture. It all serves to stop you listening, stop you noticing that there's something interesting going on melodically in this song, forces its odd crooks and shapes into an almost staggeringly identikit notion of 'that urban sound'. Embarassing, horribly dated, faintly sinister shit that only seems to happen with UK record companies and their treatment of UK black music. For shame.

Ghostface Killah Ft. Adrian Younge 

The Rise Of The Ghostface Killah 

Soul Temple Entertainment 

I haven't heard '12 Reasons To Die' yet but wooaah if this gives a flavour of Younge's production I'm gonna have to hunt it down soon - spectral spindly shimmery heavily reverbed desert-guitar & Morricone touches riding a bristling breakbeat, Ghostface sounding more agitated than he has in a while (v. reminiscent of 'Niggamortis) and a scratch-laden breakdown that's so gorgeous it sounds like goddamn Tarnation! You're damn right you need this to send you into the sunset, both barrels smoking. Superb. 

Misha B 

Here's To Everything 

Simco Limited/Sony

Bit of advice for young artists, when your record-company people come through the door and assure you they have a 'summer anthem' ready for your next single, give 'em a swift knee to the groin, a clenched palm to the windpipe and then run in the opposite direction, fast, until you can no longer hear the advances of their moist sucking tendrils and the hot guff that ripples over the sharp cilia they extend towards your soul. I LOVED Misha's 'Hot Fun' and was GUTTED over her getting outstayed by Little Mix (although have to say LM are redeeming themselves with their singles - love the old-skool 90s hip-hop thunk of their Missy collaboration). Since then though she's been getting increasingly 'anthemic' ("Do You Think Of Me" was the first sign) - her personality getting erased in favour of big production jobs, expensive-sounding show-off-shit, asked to sing increasingly meaningless lyrics, reaching a zenith with this little-bit-liquid, little-bit-dubstep, little-bit-house bolus of nothing . Nothing of HER in it, and with someone clearly so capable of being an amazing pop star if encouraged to, that's a criminal shame. Get dropped Misha and do your own thang. It'll be much better than this. And you'll keep getting hits after summer's come and gone cos you're good enough.

Muse 
Panic Station 
WMG 

Usual comparisons. Queen. Bowie. Bullshit. What 'Panic Station' sounds like is EXACTLY THE SAME as the bridge in Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. I mean, uncomfortably so. To the point where all you can hear is that verisimilitude. In my experience, Muse, live, are an effective, value-filled use of your entertainment dollar. Quite why you'd want to waste any of your leisure time sitting around LISTENING to this drek I can't imagine. You're outta time. You're paralysed. Without the soul for getting down.

Ocean Colour Scene 
Doodle Book 
Fontana 

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 

Mermaids 
Mute

Old farts at play. Them and me. Have it on good authority that Steve Craddock's an absolute wanker. Not just being mean. Just passing on some insider info to fans who should know . Have it on MY authority that 'Mermaids' is a weak Tindersticks rip-off. Being mean. Just pissing off fans. OCS's last album peaked at #49 on the album charts. Just cheering up everybody.

Nitty Scott MC 
Language Arts 
Soundcloud 

Loving Nitty's soundcloud page cos the music's ace &  female MCs not willing to appear in children's clothes are too few and far between at the moment. 'Flower Child' & 'Bath Salt Freestyle' had me intrigued but this is even better, beautifully laced together by the Good Reverend Dr. who was also behind 'Auntie Maria's Crib'. The album 'Art Of Chill' drops soon, get in on this now. 

The Staves 

Facing West 

Atlantic 

"Why are The Staves using what looks like a woodcut print-stencil for their font? We've got computers that can do that kind of thing now. Why are they using ukeleles & accordions on their music? We've got computers that can do that kind of thing now?" - that was the first thing I typed.

    Then, this song got under my skin a bit. It's the harmonies man, really nice. No wonder Glyn Johns is involved, he knows the score. Sweet stuff from Watford. See? I am here to be convinced. No false vocal affectations here, good lyrics, a Freakwater-stealth in the playing and just a lovely levitational sense of multi-headed Roches-style one-ness from the chorus, leaving enough space for you to try out yr own harmonies - it's lovely. Fuck. What's happening to me? 

 Durag Dynasty 
Spiral Event 
Nature Sounds

DD are Planet Asia + Tristate + Killer Ben (this track also features Evidence from Dilated Peoples) but what you should really know about this track is that yerman Alchemist is on the mix - getting kinda addicted to what he's been cooking up in his soundlab of late and 'Spiral Event' is no exception, a queasy unsettling mix of blaxploitation funk and wierded out jazz-wibblery lashed with fire from the various MCs but velcro-ing the oddest melodys to your brainpan since the first time you heard 'Black Satin'. Stoopidly stoopendous.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH II 

Strange U 

Klaatu Barada Niktu 

Eglo Records 

Superb new stuff from Kashmere & that loon Zygote that you KNOW you need to own. Apparently lifted from the 'Scarlet Jungle EP' which is now top of my shopping list cos fuck me this is fetid, bass-heavy, aggressively heavy mental wreckage par-excellence, the mix occassionally getting so lo-end dense it spills into distortion, the rhymes and loops like some way more aggravated UK version of Quasimoto but possessed of a doomed menace all its own. Absolutely essential. 

Swiss Lips 

U Got The Power 

Sony

The 1975 

IV EP

Dirty Hit Records

Sony fucking own the world now don't they? So could they find some time to plow some funds into music colleges, changing the curriculum from its heavy emphasis on pro-tools & production and getting some teachers in to conduct a new unit called 'REMEMBERING TO WRITE A FUCKING CHORUS'? Cheers.   These twin bunches of wannabe Trevor Horns are much loved by Radio Fuckwit, sorry Radio 1's Sara Cox and Scott Mills and Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe and it shows. If you want to find an unfunny long-winded cunt who knows fuck all about music tune in to Radio Enemy Of Humanity, sorry Radio 1. Shittest most utterly worthless radio station on the planet and I hope they all, from Grimshaw thru to Lowe, get done for kiddie-fiddling in 20 years. Seriously, look at a Radio Funny As A Burst Polyp, sorry, Radio 1 schedule one time. Who the fuck are these people? Local commercial stations have to squeeze in at least 4 ad-beds an hour and still manage to talk less shite than these fucking wannabe Butlins redcoats, and be way way funnier with it. A generation of DJs now who probably 'look up' to Chris Cunting Moyles. Big fans of Swiss Lips anyhoo. All you need to know. This is the kind of music that such feckless wankshafts consider 'exciting' and 'awesome'. It should be ignored, avoided, scrambled away from desperately like the over-tooled runny cockcheese it all is. 

Gunplay 
Pyrex
Maybach Music Group

Something weirdly fantastic about this utterly amoral, lyrically inexcusable paean to crack dealing (esp. when heard in conjunction with its deeply lurid video). Partly it's the demented dwarves-in-the-rockmine loop that's shot through the whole thing, partly it all hinges on this little hook that happens every other minute that sounds like metal popcorn popping in a pan. It surges ahead in the mix, summoning up both the rock-making process but also the chatter-toothed insanity of the most desperate crackhead better than any more earnest analysis could ever give. Like I say, utterly irredeemable. Utterly essential.

Courteneers 

Van Der Graff 

Polydor

Genuinely couldn't believe what I was hearing. Felt sick to the stomach when I realised I'd have to hear it again just to check that something so utterly awful, so entirely irredeemable in every way, actually existed. Rare to hear but everything The Courteneers are doing is bad.You can't believe that songwriting so utterly inept, that music so stupendously dreadful can actually be paid for and promoted in this day and age. Before I heard them I was willing to just let them be off on their own shit, being as terrible as their name warned. Now I want to hunt the fuckers down and do the brakes on their tourbus.

   Of course, I wouldn't because entirely innocent non-shitty indie-rocker people could be hurt so it looks like I'm gonna have to get my HGV license, slowly work up through the ranks of the haulage and coach-driving industries until I can cunningly manouevre myself into position as Courteneers driver-of-choice (I'll wear a big floppy hat. massive Raybans and a false tache, they'll never suspect a thing), make sure I travel with them on their next Alpine or Andean tour and then simply accelerate through the first cloud-height mountain road-barrier I see, plunging me and them into a suicidal freefall and subsequent impact-explosion that should evenly splatter our fragile bodies within the wrecked confines of twisted metal, games consoles & chemical-toilets that will become our final smouldering resting place. Don't ever say I'm not dedicated.

Cappo & Nappa 

Red Hot 

King Underground Records

Oh maaan, what a fantastic piece of music - a beautiful swell of strings, ringing rhodes, sublime jazzy touches, Cappo really showing what a unique voice he has and Nappa proving yet again that as a producer he's a great LISTENER as well as creator. Wonderful stuff that seems to bring summer on with each surging second. Lap it up and hold tight for the soon-come 'Rebel Base' album. 

Fun

All Alone 

Fueled By Ramen 

'We Are Young' wore me down eventually. Not to the point of liking it, but to the point of accepting its existence, the fact that for the next few years I can legitimately expect to hear it at least twice a week against my will because I live in the modern world of radios and televisions and in-store broadcasting and it is irrevocably now part of that world. This is poop though, as you'd expect from anyone formerly willing to be in a band called 'The Format', from its deceptively Left Banke-like synth part which shoulda been on harpsichords, all the way to its crappy chorus, shot through as it is with all the melodic grace of Opus and Freiheit and a kindergarten hook as desperate as it is sinister. I've heard better songs sung by Mr Tumble to be honest. Lazy pricks.

Juicy J feat Pimp C and T.I. 

Show Out (Remix) 

NA 

Again, it's the bass that's crucial here, and it's so solid and engulfing it seems to take up over 50% of the soundscape until you're waist-deep in it, struggling against the quicksand, happy to slip under. JJ typically great on the mix and on the mic, and the soon-come album 'Stay Trippy' (great title) should be one of 2013's most illicit thrills. A one-man hit factory.

Primal Scream 

It's Alright It's OK

Ignition 

It's not though Bobby, is it? It's not alright. It's certainly not fucking ok. It's a cliche that Primal Scream just keep wanting to sound like the Stones, and it's become something they've done so often you can guess that on Last FM The Stones are listed as an artist 'like Primal Scream'.

    But hold on a minute - this somehow manages to transparently aim for an 'Exile'-era 'Shine A Light/Just Wanna See His Face' gospel pulse but falls SO calamitously short in every respect it almost seems an insult to call it 'Stonesy', an offence to God and the Devil to even mention the Stones in the same breath. No feel, no Charlie/Bill/Keith gaps or wobbliness to the playing, just a stiff competence that erases pleasure and Gillespie's voice as ever this weak whining pathetic punchable thing that stinks of leather-trousered gusset-chafe on a hot day. What it reveals is that really, in every respect Primal Scream are simply inadequates, always have been, and are the godfathers of every single band since who've had irrefutably 'classic' record collections but a total inability to summon even one tiny iota of the spirit or joy of any of that listening to their own music because they have nothing to give except pisspoor fanboy wannabe dress-up and musically empty pasquinade. Fuck Primal Scream man. I prefer music.

SINGLE OF THE WEEK III

Vado 

God Hour 

We The Best 

Love the bass on this, a thick, oozing detuned thang oddly reminiscent of New Flesh For Old at their most out-of-control, well served by some heavy kicks and rippling choral vocals. Great lyrics from Vado as well about religious paranoia, the church and the streets that church aims to interpret and control. Crucially, there's a palpable sense throughout 'God Hour' that this could only come from those Harlem streets it so effectively portrays. That's not down to anything you can put your finger on, but anyone from anywhere can feel it intuitively and instinctively. Addictive, engrossing stuff.

A-Trak 
Piss Test (Remix) 
Fools Gold 

Juicy J, Jim Jones, Flatbush Zombies, Flosstradamus and the mighty EL-P guest cameo on this, and for once, the party deserves that kind of multi-headed ruckus. Nice thick, heavy synth-saw leads, pulsating dubby electro backing and absolutely no attempt to try and falsely turn that kind of instrumentation into anything lame'n'lazy enough to be 'club friendly' or euphoric. Wicked posse cut, as found on Fool's Gold excellent 'Loosies' comp.

Gamu
Shake The Room 
G Sound Records 

Why the fuck were people surprised that Cheryl "Get The Jigaboo Up Here & I'll Sort Her Out" Cole sent through Katie "Kill Me With Knives" Waissel & Cher "Eternally Shit" Lloyd in favour of the far superior Gamu Nhengu? Cole is a remorseless violent shit-for-brains with not a clue about music and is a nasty racist bitch into the bargain, what else was she gonna do? She just did the cleansing job before the public got a chance to rid themselves of another black face on the telly, duhh. That said, this new single from Gamu is a nonsensically dated 'nother attempt to retool Arthur Conley's 'Sweet Soul Music' for generation CandyCrushSaga and a song that Gamu herself seems massively uncomfortable with. Let young artists make their statement about the present before you confine them to the past you dimwits. A waste of a great voice and a unique story. 

Theme Park 
Ghosts 
Transgressive/Coop

The male Haim. If they're gonna play their guitars up that high, tucked in under the nipples, couldn't they take the stance to its logical conclusion and cover up their fuckugly faces as well? I think they think they're Orange Juice but they're nowhere near as pretty and have nothing to give or grace us with other than more music, more of it, more lumps of music, more drums, and more bass and more guitars, just more of it, until it feels like it's up to your windpipe & tickling your glossopharyngeal nerve, until there's no way out without your orifi getting dangerously impacted. Not quite Disneyland. Flamingoland, just outside Pickering. 

PEACE - IN LOVE (Columbia)

"I. Man's perceptions are not bound by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho' ever so acute) can discover" - William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion

A) CAPSULE 

Well of course this review is late, album came out weeks ago. I can't earn a living out of writing about pop anymore though so I have to do my proper job first. It fucking angers me that this is the case. All apologies. Anyhoo here's an old dead guy called F.R Leavis. He once said . . .

'The common pursuit of true judgment' : that is how the  critic should see his business, and what it should be for him. His  perceptions and judgments are his, or they are nothing ; but,  whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to co- operative labour, they are inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to  the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with” - F.R.Leavis, initially quoting T.S.Eliot, "The Common Pursuit"

Here's a new album from a new, very much alive band called Peace who the BBC and the NME and lots of other people paid to know and talk about music assure me is already one of the highlights of the year.

It's called 'In Love' and is one of the shittiest most shameful things I've ever heard. Apparently anyone who doesn't like it is a buzzkiller - fine, some buzzes need swatting into oblivion and squishing against the pane, let me in a  childish retaliatory fashion aver that anyone, and I mean ANYONE who does like 'In Love', should be instantaneously considered a cunt like they've had a good word to say about Thatcher. That's not an over-reaction. 'In Love' is all bad all the time and Peace's fans are all cunts all the time. ALL CUNTS. ALL THE TIME. 1 and a half out of 10.

B) YOUTH DEFENDERS 
Now, I can hear some mealy mouthed motherfuckers groaning already: "Seriously Neil, what's the point, you KNOW you're gonna hate it, WE know you're gonna hate it, why bother? Why not tell us about something you like?" How many times do I have to say it? Because they keep dragging me back in! Because the stercoraceous parasites that still swarm round the festering clag-ridden arse of mainstream Mercury-nominated British pop eject methane of such a nose-razing pungency I can't keep quiet! And whether they like it or not, as Leavis intimates in typically astringent style, they and me are in this together, forever.
    Of course, no-one sent me the Peace record. I don't know those people no more. So I did what any skint fucker wanting to hear them did, dl'd all the tracks through the magic of listentoyoutube.com and sat back as the data was converted into soundwaves and then I made my first mistake. I read the reviews. Everytime I write about pop these days I think 'this could be the last time'. And then I see the shit other people are getting away with and sadly have to strap on the gloves again. Fucking stop lying so I can stop truthing. Please.

I read the NME say that 'As Britain suffers from youth unemployment and economic crisis, our greatest currency is the chime of a golden tune. Peace have delivered 10 of them. So what if they’re a bunch of pirates and not pioneers? This is their time."

I read The Quietus promise that Peace were " vibrant, singer Harry Koisser assuring “We’re gonna live forever, baby” over cooed, chorused backing vocals and bright, Squirey guitar . . .  you can’t touch Peace, armoured as they are with a few good tunes, youth, fans and happiness. It doesn’t really matter whether you give them a chance or not." 

I noticed plenty of pre-emptive whingeing, a firmly entrenched nagging irritation at the inevitable critiques Peace would attract, the tiresomeness of being unable to square senses & reason. The Quietus review opens by heading such tedious nitpicking off at the pass, pointing out that it's only those old knackers addicted to their own grumbliness who'd be churlish enough to complain: "Ah, another week, another few hundred words of staunchly defending the right of young men to play guitars and be happy against the massed ranks of miseryphiles". 

 For the NME ,likewise it's those gloomy old farts who don't remember love who are missing out:  "The narrow-minded reckon their experience of history can’t be surpassed; that there’s no point in drawing inspiration from the past because it was better IN THEIR DAY. They murder people’s vibes because they’re buzzkillers. They criticise young people for being unoriginal and lazy because 58 years after Bill Haley And His Comets’ ‘Rock Around The Clock’ charted, idealistic, rebellious teens haven’t evolved beyond simple pleasures like first crushes, guitar strums, pop hooks and leopard print. This disappoints buzzkillers immensely. Buzzkillers will use songs such as Brummie quartet Peace’s ‘Lovesick’ – about reckless abandon and skipping school – to lambast uncomplicated singers like Harry Koisser for cooing “I don’t wanna make no sense” over an updated version of the refrain from The Cure’s ‘Friday I’m In Love’. They’ll demand something more sophisticated – a unique way of saying “I love you”, perhaps. You can safely assume buzzkillers are no longer in love, detest romantic gestures and are cautious of hype bands with hippy names."

   Hell I can't build fire in your belly. It's there or it aint. It's irrelevant that my most powerful memory of being young is not being in love but being in hate. I can say it's simpleton shit to relegate criticism to a role as simply championing music for the effort implied. I can also say that the reassertion of cliches like 'this is their year', 'this is their time' don't make those cliches any less cliched, or any less false (quite an achievement for a cliche to actually not contain one grain of truth). I can also suggest that the militant reason I never moved to London - cos all my friends would be cunts in bands and cunts in PR and other cunting journalists - is now precisely the thing strangling the life out of the music press and the major-label sanctioned pop culture it tries to backslap into our hearts.

But what the hell, I'll let them enjoy their moment of panic. Nobody gave a fuck when where I worked was trampled into the dirt for the sake of the market-leader, I ain't shedding a tear now I see those market leaders in freefall and panic, that palpable sense of heads-down busy-ness that is always the prelude to an ugly demise. You wanna go down scrabbling in desperation, or go down in righteous flames? They've made their 'choice'. At least for them it is a choice. For those of you wanting to crack in (still you come like sheep to the moon!) and seeing the opportunities dwindling I say Blow The Capital. Nothing is going on there bar the moving of money, the geographical agglomeration of a bourgeouise 'creative' class around a similarly narrow-based political elite , the clarion call to people willing to pay to feel artistic, to waft their bad art back n forth at each other. London's critical community inhabit merely a theme park for the 'creative'  (tickets cost your soul and last 4 years). You, you starlet, you antagonist, you are seriously best off out of it. There's more to call 'unoriginal and lazy' in the written word than the sung  note at the moment, and that's going some. Stay away from anyone who seeks to defend your generation en masse, who seeks to stick up for you or attack you because of something as happenstance as how long you've been here. You don't need fucking sticking up for on this. Your generation, like every generation before/since, is making appalling decisions from  tiny smug blissfully ignorant minds, low expectations and flat-out dreadful taste, and they need poking in the eye with a sharp shit-dipped stick at every opportunity. Anyone, particularly anyone young, seeking to defend you because you're young is clearly a clueless fucker & those self-appointed defenders of the jejune are myriad and deeply clueless in their fuckery. On twitter yesterday I read someone much followed, an authorative cultural voice who I'm pretty sure has always been wrong about everything, talking about Thatcher's funeral and saying that "no-one under 35 even knows who she is so why should anyone care?" When it comes to Peace themselves the reviews similiarly have a strange urge to actually forbid critics criticising, a strangely fascistic stance against naysayers seemingly consisting of nothing other than the infantile bleating of people saying 'awww you're MEAN, leave us alone, we're only bairns'. So much defense of the young. From so many people who are SO SCARED of the young. People with seemingly no actual experience of young people to realise that actually young people frequently want to learn rather than be understood, want to argue rather than be deferred to, want to have their opinions questioned, their idols trashed, their habits unpicked, want to be jabbed in the ribs, poked in the shoulders and told they're fucking wrong, just like anyone else, just like everyone else, occassionally told what's what, or at least given something to get their teeth into beyond an endless soppy syruppy nod to their superior knowledge, the scurrying pitiful sound of da meeja warily scuttling around a readership's feelings.   

   If there's one thing you can be sure of, if someone uses youth as an excuse for something, that person, young or old,  is massively underestimating young people, is actually denying young people equality by positively discriminating where it's absolutely not required, tacitly admitting that what they really think is the horrifically conservative idea that YES you do get extra pips on your shoulder for having been here longer than other people. Whereas us old fuckers and plenty of young fuckers (esp. those young people at the wrong end of the class/income scale now used to judge who is allowed to speak) who in 2013 are feeling increasingly alienated from the BPI/IPC/EMAP partyline of progress (the steady reassertion of business muscle after those scarily threatening years of an unbarcoded net) know from bitter experience that age don't mean SHIT and can NEVER be used as either badge of pride or shame.  Young people want to be spoken to across the table, not condescendingly DOWN to by the simplifications and lazy dumbness of those young enough to know better or the embarassing sticking-up-for-the-kids type shit older pop writers imbibe in to stay the right side of their juniors. Fuck this endless tiptoeing, you'll fuck your calves up forever. Kids are people. Relax & talk to em. Nothing wrong with music writing being like listening to your mates but why now always those boring boring unfunny mates, never the ones who make you bust a gut and blow yr mind and try harder? 

    
C) ORIGINALITY AND OTHER FICTIONS 
Another noticeable note to the shrillness of Peace's myriad defenders (who seem to be making a much louder noise pre-emptively shouting down their potential detractors than Peace's actual detractors, who seem to actually be non-existent) is that they all feel as if they constantly have to be proving a point about ORIGINALITY, either that it doesn't matter or that Peace are somehow being original by sheer dint of verve and gusto and the indisputable facts of commerce (so odd to hear defenders of 'indie'-rock and these are legion and extend throughout the net, equate popularity & 'quality' with such eery blitheness). Musicians both unconsciously/secretively mainstream and self-consciously outre blather on about originality on an almost constant basis, seeking their own exoneration or exultation (whole separate issue how the spineless underground is equally lacking in guile & purpose & reason to be right now). The starting point for anyone picking up an instrument is how can I make this give pleasure. Even the most avowedly avant-garde of arse-tronauts can only start by somehow referring to the past, what worked for them, what gave them pleasure, even if the racket they're making and the brows they're furrowing make it seem like the only pleasure is in looking like they're in pain. 'Originality' is not our primary desire from art, what we want first & foremost is pleasure and delight & to achieve that at some base level we're inevitably looking back, and we're playing with history. What makes bands interesting is how they see that history, who for them is important, who comes to the fore when conjuring their own abilities into the fray, crucially how much of their own personality they can imbue their art with. Working backwards from such self-evident truths - it helps if the players have personalities, something strong that pushes through to impart the unique stamp of the person doing it, the stamp that stops things being all merely licks & lineage & learning. The one-off hit of STYLE that's at the heart of what it is to be creative, the, yes, 'originality' of persona that allows music to stop being mere maths and become an eruption from an other, a fresh human communique, no matter how much plagiarising and bastardising you're doing in the process.And of course, the purest motivation no musician admits is that far down, inside their lonely cold marrow, they want to be liked. It's a totally honourable motivation that can lead to wonder. Peace don't sound like they want to be liked, they sound like they're far too busy making music to care about what you think. It's partly why I dislike them so. I really don't trust the musician. I trust people who play music. 

   It'd help musicians if the music press they read would shake up the trad cannon now and then, question the official past more, start ruling a few things OUT rather than just waive all the same old classics through the gates to be arranged & neutered into the same mutually-re(v/f)erential lists and hierarchies. A shake up of that order's not gonna happen anytime soon (rubs forefinger & thumb together, rolls eyes), but it's gonna have to if indie rock wants a way out of its current political/musical/sexual/lyrical holding patterns. With an at-least-slightly-cockeyed vision of the past (and that's gonna be found thru writers who feel like the past is worth fighting over, not just for alphabeticising or ranking) retroism needn't be a problem, I love plenty of impossibly dated music but only when I feel like I'm hearing a human being with a reason to be doing this, not just a fucking muso with the taste/learning required to earn 'the right' to do this. When mind-numbingly predictable sources are blended in a way that gives  next-to-nothing of the people involved, if you feel as you're listening that what was in mind was not art or expression or truth but simply the unctuous clever-clever stacking up of taste to the point where personality is voided, then I'm sorry, that's a shitty motivation to make music and I see no reason why I should have any motivation in listening to it. Nothing to say and, fatally, nothing to sound out, just cross-referencing, filing, no failures in technique but a massive fatal failure of spirit that thus keeps Peace tethered to their sources, unable to add anything, doomed to be a grab-bag, a precis of an era thankfully long gone. Fucksake, I remember where I was at the early 90s student-bop much of 'In Love' tries to replicate. I was sat on the steps pointing my plastic pistol at these future captains-of-industry fantastising killing these motherfuckers. I knew then that they were a closed club and they'd end up running tings. No fucking change at all. Look at them being interviewed. Just look for a second.

These are the people now who make pop, who write about pop, who PR for pop, who've got the whole fkn thing wrapped up now. Perhaps the most racially and economically narrow set of people ever to be in control of a music genre since the golden days of Oi. Or its cuddlier, less working-class, equally blanched 90s equivalent, Britpop.

     No accident that Peace appeal back to those 90s because it was those 90s where apologetics became the internal bloodstream, and arrogance thus became the blaring facade, of what was served up as alternative/independent. When simply saying you were rock and roll often & drearily enough was enough to make you iconic. 

Two songs from the 90s are key here, Robbie Williams uber-nasal (in tone & inspiration) 'Let Me Entertain You' and Oasis' endlessly-micturating 'Don't Look Back In Anger'. In their ways they've both laid the template for everything that's come since, that half-witted (yet convinced it's witty as fuck) self-awareness that instantaneously stalls joy, the tacit admission in both numbers that alright, best we can do is slightly crapper versions of what's come before, but hey, if we all close our eyes and pretend, who cares eh? And if that's admitted then any kind of pastiche is ok, will pass, so many moments from Oasis, just like Peace, where you think not only 'are they just going to steal that then?' but 'my god, how withered does your soul have to be to be willing to put your name to such flabby, lazy larceny?' 

    Take that admission of general abitshitness, that pride in 'getting away with it', in precisely avoiding the big statement either musically or lyrically in preference of making some facsimile of feel, attitude scruffed like factory-damaged jeans, a simulacra of 'importance', take that sanctification of the half-witted & slow-moving, combine it with a desperately insecure need to be loved, the dizzy dissipation in motivation that happens when social media infects pop not on a musical but on a spiritual level and you have the piss-stinking dead end we're in now. And just as social media interaction so often hinges on the upwardly hopeful australian inflection, that sense of plea within statements that begs for approval, that hopefully, cutely asks 'please, will this do?' - so 90% of modern pop has that plea within, is cowed by the offical history's omniprescence into desperately cloaking itself in the same tropes & motifs, pretending that it's squeezing fresh goodness out of these dried up dugs when all that's coming out is so much sour balloon juice. And because of the narrowing class basis of everyone involved, from press to PR to musicians, that mutual backslapping is getting plummier and plummier, as the real motivation behind doing any of this evaporates evaporates in a phut of hssssssss. In this fecund air where the priveliged young musician willing to work within the confines of the cannon find patrons easily and the young poet & the young prophet finds him or herself marginalised come Peace, good organisers, keepers of the dying flame of white guitarpop supremacy, great shite hope, what everyone NEEDS to keep their lies, their lives, their recovering businesses intact.

D) Graded

Before "Higher Than The Sun" even starts you think "what kind of slack-of-thought-process went on to give it that fkn title?" but being a charitable cove you let it begin its countdown to its end and straight away realise that Peace have all kinds of wonder at their disposal, not a scintilla of wit or innocence or personality or surprise about any of it, and next to nothing to say. Words shovelled together into a pile and left like that, like a students dinner/dogs breakfast, sitting atop the baggoid undertow trying not to be noticed. None of which would matter if for a single moment something surprising, pleasant, pleasing, joyful happened in their music. Instead of your heart skipping a beat your brain starts doing the maths: MBVish guitar in one ear, Razorlight guitar in the other, an atrociously lumpy rhythm section flailing somewhere in the middle, the moments of stop-start proudly marshaled with the ruthless editing order of (and FOR, presumably) a highlights montage on Soccer AM, the lyrics trying their hardest to be some kind of snapshot of young love, just coming over like vaguery and smarm.

"You wanna play it cool, you wanna be the man
You wanna hold my heart in your hand

But you know that the truth, is just the fruit of the fool."

Of course, mebbe words that meant something would be inappropriate for Peace's growing & glowing fanbase of Ruperts & Hilarys & pogoing Cameronite-rimjobbers, & a  beat that actually made you dance rather than flail wouldn't suit schmindie dancefloors. I can understand why Peace have made these decisions and made them as lucrative as possible but like the Stone Roses you wonder why anyone would want to listen to this given even a cursory knowledge of its sources, why you'd sidestep the fiery embrace, the tongue of flame down your throat, in preference for the lukewarm hot water bottle & the dummy & the security blanket of a band who don't look as good or as bad as you, a band as tiresomely inadequate as all mainstream white British entertainment is in 2013. It's in the tedious depths of 'In Love' wherein Peace's paladins in the press start reading uncomfortably like the kind of old-guard they're so keen to publicly decry. The notion that if you don't get this you've somehow forgotten what it is to be young is as nauseatingly condescending as the idea that young people can be excused ignorance about history & politics and all those things their media are insistent they don't care about anymore. Youth is no excuse for this mediocrity. And today's critics are perhaps the first generation of critics to actually use youth as an excuse, to actually even MENTION age at all as anything important. Strange, when even Peace know, everything is timeless now. Even their haircuts say so. 

    That perceived current atemporality of music is actually nothing new in itself. Depending on your vintage at some point in your life you'll have been preciously horrified by what's going on in your name by your generation and will have retreated to a point where old music means more to you than what's on the radio or the papers. Waybackwhen that implied a retreat from the present, a spurning of airwave and print and telly with a sense of horror at how little that was contemporary actually reflected or touched you. Now, no such isolation, or the critique at its heart,  is needed - that atemporality is accentuated & lubricated by the fact that all that old music is also on the radio, in the music press (on the cover no-less, why risk finding a new band when another 'classic' 'from the archives' shot might entice not just lads but their dads too?) & prettymuch infinitely accessible at any given moment. There isn't that pressure anymore to be in touch with what's going on right now, or conversely any guilt or critique attached to hiding in the past because everything is going on right now, all points in pop space and pop time equally accessible, and often equally bereft of context. And so in this massive combined museum and shopping mall contained behind that screen you're staring at,  music fans, finger on device, have been lulled to a space where their 'choice', the twitch that finger takes, has all the demonstrable 'meaning' of a choice at the Ikea soda-pump, the market forcing your own sense of banality home, making it endlessly plain that it waits to digest, process, interpret, then pounce on those choices as you move on through the flow, rarely halted by pop-up, never stalled by advertisement, faintly grateful for your own targeting, trying to seek the glimmering heart of things amidst the falling times-remaining, the falling time left until the DL is complete, the miasma of pound signs that suffuses every click and share, the bits of pop's endlessly exploitable back-catalogue that every click suggests will be sellable to you. Easier when the music  doesn't make you think about the present. Or the world you're ignoring because of this screen. 

    So you find yourself doing more of that referencing back when listening to 'In Love' not cos of mere mean-spiritedness but because that's all that Peace seem to be engaged in.'Follow Baby' gives you ten seconds of Placebo & Nirvana before falling into that habit so common amongst todays schmindie royalty - not actually writing melodies but writing chords and then finding something vaguely unmemorable enough to sing over it that won't derail the progression of those chords, the taking up of your & their time, the wearing  down of the allocated hour. Beats again hitting with all the unforgettable student-bop pissweakness of EMF or Jesus Jones (without the 'futurism' arfarf). Becomes clear over the snoozeathons of the phoned-in 'Lovesick' (mobile phone commercial) and cold-sick Coldplay maneouvres of  'Float Forever' ("If you're not happy wearing denim you're the devil" - fuck YOU) that the real star of 'In Love' is Jim Abiss, the guy who yes produced all of Kasabians stuff but who did produce the first Arctic Monkeys LP (the last time I can ever remember UK indie-pop having anything approaching 'feel'). Hats off to him, he pulls out all the stops throughout 'In Love', punches the band to the right peripheries, jazzing otherwise pedestrian repetition with video-friendly shock effects, graining Harry Koisser's voice into a  prsitine amalgam of all the indie-rock singers he's ever loved, cinematising the mix till you're in the front row and the Dobly's at maximum width & depth. But even his brilliant trickery can't mask the sheer pisspoor paucity of Peace's imagination & desperately derivative & dry songwriting.  The limp "disco" of 'Wraith" is the kind of lazy-assed jam-that-shoulda-stayed-a-jam nearly all bands are capable of but should never dream of actually recording/releasing, here populated by some truly careless and dogshit-ugly textures (an awful house piano and some choppy 'dancey' guitar so neckless & ponytailed it damn near makes you puke). "Delicious" threatens to be interesting (well, I like the bassline) for its first ten seconds before Koisser's voice comes in, again singing about nothing, making sure that every melody is so horribly like a regurgitated meal you'd long forgot it becomes unswallowable emetic drek, the band forgetting about sparseness or detail or space (sure sign of a high-level musical 'skills' amongst all involved I'm sure) and just filling in all possible gaps with their endlessly widdly smart-arsed noodling and grandstanding soloing bullshit. Fucking hippy cunts.

    Just when you think things can't get any worse you get 'Waste Of Paint', so shameless & pointless a baggy rip-off (albeit tarted up with some of Abiss's wankiest moments of tricknology) it's scarcely believable that a label could sign and sell this shit. You've seen a billion bands like this and you've ALWAYS taken one look, listened for five seconds and then fucked off to the bar. "Toxic" unfortunately isn't a Britney cover, just some  grislyness that makes Muse sound like innovators before 'Sugarstone' & 'California Daze' see 'In Love' out on a wave of 60s-necrophilia like Kula Shaker factorial fucked The Bluetones to the power Reef until their sphincters started shitting out songs. And so and lo! with these borrowed tods in borrowed togs, the sound of 2013, the band whose year it is, the album that will doubtless be up near the top of those end-of-year-lists, comes to a pitiful end, a whimper, a solemn quiet meant to imply the passing of something legendary, a silence you can't help but feel would've been improved by an Abiss-arranged panoply of delay-suffused bogflushes and heavily phased straining noises. We can move on. And try and forget that this is the shit being boosted in 2013 as the best we can get. The most we can hope for. The chime of a golden tune (can't say I spotted ANY to be honest). Youth, fans and happiness. Sure, good luck to 'em. They were on two nights ago in Cov. They're on again tonight look. Sell-out notices can't lie. 

    But anyone party to this bullshit should be fucking ashamed. There is a direct link between letting people think that dilute regurgitations of the past is the best we can hope for and letting people think that the cultural and political realities of today 'have always been like this', that all politicians are bastards and there's no point fighting it because it was ever thus. A conservatism blankets indie, has really sunk in subcutaneously since the rise of the Stone Oasis Screams, the first bands to lucratively make 'indie' music a home for purely white music fans, denim blinkers on, winkle/desert boot-heels firmly stuck in the quicksand of their own fear and snobbery, their fashionable love of the musical products of a segregated past, their reactionary inability to absorb the music of a multicultural present. For those of us old gits who recall the "good old days", and those of us young folk for whom the present isn't just about shits and giggles and an expensive eternal gladhanding, we both know that they weren't fucking good old days, & that these aren't the greatest times of our lives, and so we both seek music that doesn't sound quite like either, that comes to rewrite history, change and charge the present with its own image, chart the future. Don't be fooled by the protectors of Peace that to hate them is to look back. It's not the likes of me or you, but groups like Peace that do nothing but look back, that have relegated the now to an endless slavish deference to an ancient past, the flattening down of edges to make the past ever-more palatable, the breaking down of rock to a smooth paste, spread thin . Good with olives & french bread. Of course it'd be commercial suicide to put anyone else on the cover, to seek something you can't explain, seek thrills, rather than boosting whatever Warners or Columbia have biked over this week, timidly acquiescing in a decaying culture. So I decided to review the Peace album and it'd be better to like them cos they're going places and I say fuck youth when it's this old, fuck fans if they're this fucking stupid, and fuck happiness if it means the smug assurance that the middling will triumph whilst the revolutionary and revelatory will be impoverished & obliterated. Kill buzzes like this on sight. Don't let pop's coalition (PR, Press, Labels) fool you. Their shit is so dead it stinks. Leave 'em to it. Best off out of it. As a matter of some urgency, we need to get elsewhere. 

"If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again" - William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion.