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Album Reviews: The Big Pink, Howler, Neil Cowley Trio, Anthony Hopkins and Mr Oizo
Check out this week’s latest album reviews
THE BIG PINK
FUTURE THIS
**
Robbie Furze and Milo Cordell’s follow-up to the much-feted A Brief History of Love is succinct and endlessly poppy, with enough distorted guitars to appeal to indie kids. It’s attractively framed by Paul Epworth, the producer of the moment (Adele, Cee Lo Green, Florence and the Machine, Plan B), with a dynamic mix from Alan Moulder (Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails). Heck, it even includes a sample from Laurie Anderson’s 1981 novelty hit O Superman.
If only there was more to get your teeth into here. Lyrics such as “love runs faster than time” and “tell it like it is, all across the golden globe” are vague to the point of meaningless. Stay Gold and Rubbernecking seem to be mostly chorus and little song. Only the Killing Joke-meets-Curve anthem 1313 and the pensive 77 hint at greater depths. The future for The Big Pink may not be quite as rosy as their past.
HOWLER
AMERICA GIVE UP
***
Having recently supported The Vaccines, this youthful five-piece from Minneapolis are being tipped to be the Next Big Guitar Band. If the Next Big Guitar Band is an amalgam of the Strokes, the Ramones and the Jesus and Mary Chain, they’re in just the right place at the right time.
In 19-year-old Jordan Gatesmith, they do at least have a frontman with swagger and an eye for a memorable quote.
Songs such as Beach Sl*ts, This One’s Different and Wailing (Making Out) rattle along with an adolescent, hormonal urgency; Back to the Grave is the Reid brothers with the feedback toned down; in Pythagorean Fearam Gatesmith does his best Iggy Pop impersonation.
Sure, America Give Up is derivative but it does at least fulfil its makers’ intention to be “an album of rock’n’roll nastiness”.
Neil Cowley Trio
The Face of Mount Molehill
****
From the opening track of contemporary jazz pianist Cowley’s new release, there is a promise of something different. The beautiful ballad Lament grows swiftly from something sparse and vulnerable into a flowing soundscape, and as the album progresses, the compositions are fleshed out with wonderfully arranged parts for string ensemble.
The album features not only the regular trio, but also guitarist Leo Abrahams (renowned for his work with Brian Eno) whose influence upon the music shines through.
To pigeonhole The Face of Mount Molehill as a jazz release would do it an injustice – it is simply great music.
Anthony Hopkins
Composer
****
You read it right, the veteran Welsh film actor has recorded an album of classical compositions, performed here live and with some gusto by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
It kicks off raucously with the piece Orpheus that somehow blurs the line between Stravinsky’s The Rites of Spring and a Hammer film soundtrack before abruptly giving way to a pensive, romantic mid-section plump with heavenly female voices that recall Holst drifting into the ether in the final movement of The Planets.
This sets the tone for an album that sweeps between English pastoral flavours and Russian verve.
Stella plays it safe with harp apgeggios, lilting strings and woodwind and a melancholy viola melody, while Evesham Fair has playful interplay between romping piano, twinkle-toed woodwind and huffing brass.
Bracken Road is the standout piece, where bittersweet piano is haunted by jazz trumpet and clarinet refrains.
Sounding nowhere near as derivative as you’d expect and always surprisingly accomplished, you might want to pop Composer on while you tuck into some liver, fava beans and a nice chianti. Sff-sff-sff-sff!
Mr Oizo
Stade2
**
Frenchman Mr Oizo will be well known to people of a certain age for penning the wonky techno tune Flat Beat, which was used to soundtrack a famous Levi’s commercial featuring a bodypopping yellow puppet called Flat Eric.
The track could’ve set Mr Oizo up nicely if he’d been he’d been happy to take his music on a commercial course, but he’s proven stubbornly experimental, delving further and further into a crow-scaring soundworld of juddering blocks of erratic beats and manic blip and squawks.
Although there might be intricate craft behind tracks with throwaway names like Douche Beat and Oral Sax they often sound like something being randomly spewed out by a malfunctioning PC. It’s playful, but only in the sense that a small yappy dog running round and round your legs might be considered playful.
Still, there might be a place for this somewhere in your life, possibly while you’re drunkenly negotiating a fairground funhouse or trying to catch boiled sweets being thrown at you by angry monkeys.
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