Outsideleft Week in Music Doubles Up on the Pulp

Don't you just want to be there? Alright, you can't be in the fifth largest city in Niger, where this lot come from but you can, amazingly, be present as they bring the desert to America (I know, America has its own deserts but they could all fit into Niger, including the food deserts and the huge desert that is the soul of the Republican Party) in the form of a concert tour. That they have been allowed in, let alone are able to travel across the country on a 28 day tour might just be because ICE are too busy being horrible to everyone else. Either way, make the most of it. It will be exceptional in more ways than one. All the massive US tour dates are here

Quite a piece of moody keyboard retrofuturism, suitably buoyed by a fetching sliver one piece costume. I want one and I really want to sound like Lael Neale. Who wouldn't. This reminds me of Paul Haig's Ghost Rider (Motorcycle Hero) if the Ghost Rider was a pedestrian.Anyway, taken from forthcoming cool, cool LP 'Altogether Stranger' out in May. I mean, I suspect it will be great because these early tracks are so brill. Pedestrianise!

Cardiff's finest/worst are back after two decades or something with brass knuckles and the best song titles, embodying and skewering machismo like nobody. I would get a Peleton if they had a trainer channel. The album cometh in May, a reason to soldier on.

Great a new Pulp thing. Time for one of my Pulp stories. But first of all, the review. Jarvis Cocker's cold just seems to be getting worse. But it doesn't matter because those who love the fact that he is professionally from somewhere north of Brum will love him whatever the capacity for snot in his nostrils. Always seems so strange; there are some actual great singers from Yorkshire, so why anyone plumps for this yodel-honking chancer I will never know. Now, the Pulp story...

Arcade Fire are up to their seventh album now, but if feels like they have been around much longer.  At over five minutes long, I drifted off less than two minutes into this, so soporific was it. I'd challenge anyone not to do the same.  How a band as well known as Arcade Fire can get away with producing something so lazy is probably down to precisely the fact that they are well known and have a fan base that will buy every false start and fart they produce.  Save your money and pass on this.

No strangers to terrible acting, it looks like Brooklyn's TVOD spent about $10 on the video, which is just them arsing about in a tour hotel room, the car park outside, sitting at a bus stop, and so on, all filmed in a grainy 80s home video style.  I bet it actually cost $10,000 to make it look that cheap.  Musically, its formulaic stuff with ';Brooklyn alt punk band' written all over it.  There is a type and TVOD are one of those.  Surely there must be a bar where they all meet up to compare notes?

The whole premise of 'girl' bands getting older and becoming 'women' bands seems to hang on some kind of decades-old process, from throw-away puppets to icons, for example, Ronnie Spector, Shangri-Las, Crystals etc If the members, literally sometimes, survive, then it's possible they might be taken seriously as artists in their own right. What happens when ex-girl bands continue to use the same 'team' style writing and production is less certain. The Sugababes now seem to occupy a liminal space, between authentic and nostalgic. Lucky enough in their early days to work with some writers and producers who could harness their teenage freshness and create some truly original pop, now it's not certain what they are. Does it matter when a track is made like Weeds that has their now rounded, womanly voices swimming in a lush milky bath of harmonies and pads (and the little motif from the Isley's Summer Breeze)? It's grown up and wine bar chic but, somehow, a little more grit would have made it special. But there is a tour to promote and an audience who must not be alienated who probably wouldn't appreciate the more interesting possibilities that I can hear.

The masters of Chamber Pop, have returned once more, and it’s hard not to be delighted. Achilles is every bit as catchy and soaring as a lead single needs to be, heralding the arrival later this year of Rainy Sunday Afternoon. The time to worry about the pollen count may be all too close, but for now, immerse yourself in the pomp and circumstance,and take this as a reminder to dust down your extravagant coat, to sit with poise and know that our waltzing days are not done…

No I don't know what she's on about. Yes I do like the propulsive dubby beat. Perfect for creaking old men dancing. Imagine three of them dressed in black jeans, pointing the fingers of one hand, shaking an alcohol-free in the other. Three men, three chords and a hook that sounds as if the synth has jumped free of the studio and is running down the street to the docks to hitch a ride back to Japan to see its mum and dad. Strangely youthful. To be fair, I don't how many men were involved in the making of this. I'm talking about the imaginary dancing old men in my head. Three.

Tortoise are back and how. 10 years since they last made a record I think. It's intense stuff, they take breaks. They need breaks. This was recorded in 16 studios in 13 time zones or something wild like that. Carrying that much beard hair - they haven't shaved since their last LP - across the international dateline required a lot of product. Organesson is so great it's tempting to think we have Tortoise to thank for the whole library revival. And now to my Tortoise story... I was in Borders in Beverly Hills when Borders still existed and they had the music department upstairs... Oh out of words.

Every now and then, a newly signed band drop a single and you immediately hear the potential, these guys - they’re meant for greatness and dear lord, I hope they make it to the big time, even more excitingly - they hail from the steel city, and honestly it’s about time someone put us firmly back on the map… (In all seriousness, I’m all a bit delighted by Spike Island - which could have been a dialled in, Pulp by numbers effort - that the most loyal in the fanbase would lap up and assure a comfortable retirement for the band. Mercifully, it seems at this point that we’re in for an evolved, and gently aged continuation, rather than a toe curlingly uncomfortable attempt at recreating the glory days, I’m quietly excited to hear more from them as the year progresses.)

Colatura's new single 'I Want To Get Better', released in advance of a forthcoming EP, is a gorgeous melancholy slice of dreampop. The song is a shimmering wash of delicate guitar textures and pulsing synths, topped off with singer Jennica Best's wistful vocals. Colatura may not be reinventing the wheel, but they combine dreampop and shoegaze motifs old and new to make something quite lovely, and with real emotional heft. 

With a cool band name , a single with an iconic actors name, and a new album out, I was ready for something different from Chicago's Smut to blow away the cobwebs of this Week In Music's collection of aspic tinged and long-in-the-tooth journeymen.  The slightly muddy production, screaming, loose and ever-so-slightly not tight and not quite on-the-button guitar playing, and clattery biscuit tin drums does it for me.  There was another band called Smut I recall.  They were thrashy punk.  Full of anger.  Good stuff too for the time.  There will be other bands called Smut too, but lets forget those.  This is sloppy enough in a good way to act as an antidote to all the pristine pitch perfect goodness paraded in front of our downcast faces and bored, deadpan reviewers expressions week in, week out.

Two surprises: 
1) I never knew I wanted a Bryan Ferry record without him singing
2) I never knew he was the one who put together the music on Bryan Ferry/Late-Roxy records
This is unmistakably Bryan Ferry music, what with the vaguely Arabic scales in the softest of come-on rock, contributing to the dispassionate-woman-speaking-dispassionately trend and once again, I am here for it. I want his onanistic wail to appear like the Great Wave of Kanagwa and magically it doesn't, which somehow makes his presence even that more pronounced. Delicious.

Peter Murphy intones (he ALWAYS intones) "Uh Oh" a lot during the opening track to this, 'Swoon', which is the reaction I usually have when I hear Murphy is about to release anything ("Uh Oh" I mean, not swoon!). 'Swoon' is a weak opener btw, pedestrian at best. The next, 'Hot Roy' redeems itself with some pretty decent and urgent sounding music. Much of the backing sounds a bit dated and very 80's influenced (but what doesn't now?), and Murphy's singing tries very hard to show off a range, even resorting to 'La La La'-ing at one point.  The vocals are mixed high, which I guess you would expect from a solo album, but are a bit too in your face and could do with taking down a notch.  I can just imagine Murphy sitting behind Producer Youth whispering "make the vocals louder" in his ear when he mixed this down. I will admit I wanted to hate this as there is just something very irritating about an overblown ego like Murphy's, where every song is about him, and is so portentously IMPORTANT (in his eyes) that you must sit and listen, and his PR lays it on with a trowel.  One track is even called 'The Meaning Of My Life", so keen is Murphy that you know how great and deep he is. But I also have to admit that overall this is a pretty decent album, in no small part due to the production skills of Youth and that of various guest musicians.  Without them Murphy would no doubt be a cabaret act forever singing 'Bella Lugosi's Dead' for the Chicken In A Basket crowd. Nonetheless, I have heard a lot, lot worse than this, so there is certainly life left in the old horse yet. 

Wild fever dream of an album from the finest of fever dreamers, Mike Scott, of the Waterboys. This album is clearly out of time, like it would have been a brilliant Bob Dylan/U2 collab circa 2005. A brave step in the fine art of name dropping, this album about Dennis Hopper less paints a picture of the late cultural icon as it does (I'm being an armchair psychiatrist here) of Scott's desire to be seen that kind of icon. Which I cosign. The first four Waterboys albums might be four of the best albums from the cursed 80s. In the wasteland since, Scott has sought the right stone outcropping onto which to carve his sigil, and maybe Dennis Hopper's grave is not it, basically shouting his and other 60s icons names like producers on his mixtape, but there is something else here that is more important. The Waterboys' finest moments exude that yearning to exist against the spray of stars, unabashed, ready for ascension to the cosmos or into your arms. Underneath the scratched out tributed to Dennis Hopper (I keep waiting for the "Heineken? Fuck that foreign shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon" to come up) is a technicolor studio magnification of that same scrawny kid, begging to be as big as his dreams. When he gets to a throaty bellow on "Letter from An Unknown Girlfriend" the whole of the moon peeks behind his clouded material, I'm ready to carry him around the bar on my shoulders. I'm pulling for him. 

Blessed be the YouTube rabbit hole. This, presumably named for Throbbing Gristle's closest-to-a-dancefloor-banger, is a mysterious cursed beauty from some people that make WEEKLY experimental music albums. This isn't even the latest one. One needs heroes in this uncertain era.

Venom is a heavy album full of infectious energy that leaves you dying for more! This album features 11 tracks, but I'll just be reviewing a handful of my favourites over here.

Saw Amadou and Mariam just last summer at WOMAD. What a treat that was. So great. Such sad news this week then.

This is here because you know why. It's the least we could do for Clem Burke, simply one of the best pop group drummers ever. And this is my favorite of his tunes. 

I found this sitting in my vinyl collection and thought I haven't played this one for years, so lets give it a spin and see if I still like it.  It was glorious.  The trademark childlike vocals are a tad derivative of the Cocteau Twins Liz Fraser, but the music is something else.  No one mentions The Cranes these days.  Have they re-formed? Of course they have!  So expect arena tours, new albums, and all the rest to spoil the legacy.  Everyone that ignored them at the time will flock to see them and claim they always loved them. Until then, I have my scratchy original copy in a slightly scuffed sleeve to remind me that I did.

Sometimes the simplest tunes are the best. This instrumental which appeared on Sudden's first post Swell Maps solo LP clocks in at just 1 minute 47 seconds. Like much of his work with Swell Maps it is, to say the least, 'primitive' - sounding for all the world like it was recorded at low tide on a knackered Walkman*, as the tune was picked out on an out of tune Woolworths**  banjo. That though doesn't stop it being catchy, memorable and achingly plaintive.  It's a wonder no one has put words to it. For the benefit of younger readers:  *a tape recorder that fitted in your pocket,  and **Granny's version of poundshop..