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Album Reviews: Lana Del Rey, Django Django, Pacha Future Dance and The Soft Hills
Check out this week’s latest album reviews
LANA DEL REY
BORN TO DIE
****
So, after all the hype, clamour and internet brouhaha, does the debut album by Lana Del Rey measure up? The answer is yes, well, kind of, depending upon your expectations.
Yes, throughout it the singer formerly known as Lizzie Grant affects a preternatural coolness. Yes, the roles she inhabits in its dozen songs are mostly submissive – the gangsta’s moll, the bad boy’s army candy, the sugar daddy’s sweetheart. Yes, it owes a huge debt to the records of Nancy Sinatra and the films of David Lynch and Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause.
Is it depressing or, as has been suggested, morally objectionable? No, certainly not as much as Rihanna selling sexualised R&B to pre-teens. With the exception of Radio, which uses the F-word, Del Rey is far more restrained.
It could reasonably be argued that Born To Die is front-ended, giving away its most sumptuous songs – the title track, Off To the Races, Blue Jeans and Video Games – at the start. But Dark Paradise, Carmen, Million Dollar Man and Summertime Sadness have a melancholy pull, even if they’re lyrically shallow.
Crucially, Del Rey has that voice – smoky, elegant, mysterious – that could wring something out of the hollow sentiments of a song such as National Anthem. And that’s her real gift to the world of pop.
DJANGO DJANGO
DJANGO DJANGO
*****
EASIER to recommend without reservation is the new album from a London four-piece who have carved a niche between Hot Chip, Tunng and Everything Everything.
Indeed Django Django is a record that seems to revel in its geekiness, with the band namechecking inspirations as wide – and occasionally obscure – as Eric Satie, Moondog and Throbbing Gristle.
Django Django like disco beats, African polyrhythms, Teutonic electronica, West Coast harmonies, Bo Diddley guitar riffs and springy punk-funk. They can’t resist the odd pun (Hail Bop).
It’s quirky, witty, intelligent and best of all, there’s not a dull moment on it. The first great album of 2012.
Pacha Future Dance
Various Artists
**
If, as the title suggests it might, this latest compilation from Ibiza superclub Pacha brings us a taste of the sounds that will be gracing dancefloors and bleeding from the headphones of the electronic dance music fan sat next to you on the bus over the next 12 months, then we’re not in for a vintage year.
As is generally the way, the big guns are brought out early in the storming shape of Deadmau5’s Cthuhlu and the storming Knife Party remix of Swedish House Mafia’s Save The World, but it’s largely all downhill from there.
At the fore on these 3 CDs are the in-your-face bendy synth lines of electro, the motorik beats of tech house and the epic bleeps, suffocating compression and vertiginous reverbs of trance, and they’re all deployed at the expense of melody and innovation. By the time, on Dirty Herz’s King Kong, a gruff Germanic voice threatens to do something unspeakable to you “through the speakers” it’s hard not to feel demeaned.
The Soft Hills
The Bird Is Coming Down To Earth
***
Trading under what look suspiciously like made-up names, the Seattle quartet of Garrett Hobba, Brittan Drake, Randall Skrasek and Brett Massa bring us a debut album that, boasting folk, psychedelic, ambient and literary influences, promises plenty
Excellent opening track Phoenix doesn’t disappoint, sounding like a sumptuous blend of Fleet Foxes and Neil Young, with spine-tingling vocal harmonies declaring “In the misty morning I’ll be here with you” and mournful slide guitar suggesting otherwise.
Sadly, as well as being a highpoint it also wrongfoots the listener, as by the third track, Midnight Owls, the guitars have become more grizzled and the drums crunchier as the band move into glowering Radiohead-style territory.
You get hints of what the band are trying to achieve – to draw the listener into epic, mythical American vistas – but unfortunately their ambition often overreachs their talent.
Despite this, The Bird Is Coming Down To Earth’s mix of the sensitive and the aggressive makes for a pleasing and often intriguing listen.
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