albums

Rip It Up, Issue 218, 1 October 1995, Page 30

albums

GARBAGE Garbage (White)

It’s that rarest of gems, a real case of do believe the hype. Garbage have arrived and the lights have gone on in the underworld. It’s inhabitants are exposed, in all their sexy, stalky and sick madness, and it makes so much sense, you might wonder how you’ve lived without this new confidence for so long. The marvellous Shirley Manson (whose vocals are often uncannily reminiscent of Curve’s Toni Halliday’s) is the first point of contact. ‘Come down to my house and stick a stone in your mouth / You can always pull out if you like it too much...,’ is her sultry welcome, on ‘Supervixen’, and she ends the album on the mournful notes of: ‘l’m waiting, I’m waiting for you,’ on ‘Milk’. Thus, a full circle has been drawn. Her invitation has been declined (you can’t blame the boy for being scared), which is like setting us up for a sequel to this album. I’m quivering with anticipation at the mere thought of it. The next point of contact comes via the samples and broken loops of Smart Studios brains Steve Marker and Butch Vig (the aforementioned hype means no explanation is given here). The case in point is the cyclonic swirling of ‘My Lover’s Box’, which makes for headphone sex of cataclysmic proportions.

Manson, Marker and Duke Erikson all take guitar credits, and

the results are exhilarating. Driving, duelling, delicate and deranged, often within seconds, guitar chaos has rarely sounded so perfect. Then the simplicity that kicks off a song like ‘Queer’ shows Garbage’s ‘more is more’ aesthetic knows when to take a back seat, as well as when to mug the driver. What a ride! BRONWYN TRUDGEON

LOVES UGLY CHILDREN Cakehole (Flying Nun) The music on this Christchurch three-piece’s debut album surges out of the speakers like a shock wave out of an opened blast furnace. Squalling guitars and clattering drums collide with agitated vocals to produce a sound guaranteed to shake your fillings loose when played at stun volume (which is, of course, mandatory). What keeps Cakehole interesting is the strong melodic thread Loves Ugly Children run through their songs. Sometimes that thread takes the form of a backing vocal, occasionally it’s contained in a propulsive bassline, invariably it’s buried deep in a bed of seething guitars. Good thing too, 'cause without it, Cakehole would be just another album full of noise for noise’s sake — a noble, but ultimately annoying pursuit.

If Cakehole gives the impression Loves Ugly Children are painting their aural canvas from a limited musical palette, so be it — the band is making no apologies.

Cakehole makes a virtue of its lack of variety, revelling in its seemingly one-dimensional punk blast. But there’s nothing retro or formulaic about Loves Ugly Children. What you’re hearing on this invigorating debut is the sound of a band reeling off 15 sonic bursts of honesty, with enough passion and energy to fill a double album. Never mind the bollocks, here’s the, er, Cakehole. MARTIN BELL

THE CHARLATANS The Charlatans (Beggars Banquet) Part of the retrogressive baggy boom that burst onto the British scene around the same time as the Stone Roses, the Charlatans, with Hammond organ and Wurlitzer conspicuously in the foreground, always sounded like they had a limited lifespan as they explored the legacy of the Faces etc. Now they’re into their fourth album, a brave and big boss bass and keyboard groove that transcends the fact the songs are nothing special. So, persistance has its rewards. ‘Feeling Holy’ sets the confident and aggressive tone as the rhythm section belts into your gut and vocalist Tim Burgess sneers something about how he feels real good. The impressive thing is how they manage to maintain this post-baggy funk/soul right to the gratuitous appreciation of ‘Thank You'. Don’t write these guys off at all. GEORGE KAY

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS One Hot Minute (Warners)

The Red Hot Chili Peppers and their legendary love of life return for One Hot Minute. On a goodly number of tracks, the Chili Peppers decide to bust the extremely laidback grooves and let all their emotions hang out. Depending on your frame of mind, this can be an incredibly beautiful, life affirming experience, or have you diving across the room for the fast forward button before you choke on your own vomit. Apart from the first track, which sounds spookily like Jane’s Addiction (including vocals), the addition of Dave Navarro doesn’t seem to have altered the classic Peppers style a whole heap. On their bass-slapping excursions into riotous funk and roll, the whiff of

smelly, near naked loons bouncing around rooms can become overpowering. If the smell of new age hippie is a pleasant smell then this could be the karma ride your looking for.

After such a long wait, the Chili Peppers may have lost the plot, rather than reinvented rock ’n’ roll as we know it. More like the Canterbury plains than the Southern Alps... no peaks, maaaaan. KEV LIST

BLUR The Great Escape (Food) First off, for those who can’t wait, it’s brilliant. Now, on with the review. If there is an English band that has grown up in public recently it’s

Blur. Leisure, their debut, was a baggy bandwagon, then Modern Life Is Rubbish merely paid homage to the Kinks. But when they found their feet, they knocked everyone for six with the outstanding Parklife, it was a regenerated Blur, full of great songs and a taste for experimentation. And now, well, now it’s all on.

Fifteen tracks packed full of assured tunes that tickle your ears on so many levels. We open with the kinky suburban sex tale of ‘Stereotypes’, where Moog clashes with merry-go-round. Then there’s the single 'Country House’, pure pop that’s haunted by the line: ‘Blow me out, I am so sad / I don’t know why.’ Then we come to tire first of the album’s six strong laments, ‘Best Days’ — ‘Other people would turn around and laugh at

you, if you said that these were the best days of our lives!’ — but of course they are, for Blur fans especially. And just as you’ve been lulled into a smooth, sentimental state, along comes the jumpy ‘Charmless Man’, with it’s ‘la, la, la’ chorus and Graham Coxon’s guitar caning! All that’s only four songs in! The strange thing is, despite its perfect pop and super smoothies, the overriding theme of the album is futility. If Modern Life was Albarn’s idealistic view of England, and Parklife was the naughty, funloving side, Escape is his powerless disgust with what his country is becoming. But as heartless as it sounds, if it’s Damon’s disappointment that makes him turn out songs like ‘The Universal' and ‘lt Could Be You’, then I hope he never snaps out of it. Well, not completely anyway. What makes The Great Escape

so much better than Parklife? The same thing that made Parklife so much better than Modern Life. Albarn’s twisted observations are getting darker, the pop is more infectious than Ebola, and you want to listen to the thing over and over. That’s what it’s all about, really, isn’t it? A Brit-pop masterpiece. JOHN TAITE

GOLDIE Timeless (FFRR)

And now, heeeeeeeeeeeere’s Goldie, one of the first jungle artists to be signed to a major label and the first to get any real media coverage. Timeless breaks out of the jungle mould, though. It does everything — jazz, soul, ambient, hardcore — and merges them all into what Goldie would rather you just called ‘music’. It’s juxtaposition that sets Goldie apart as an

innovator. Layer ‘pon layer, ‘pon layer is his style. There are the adrenalin rushes of BPMs racing at 170, the delicate ambient style synth over top, the blips, bass and samples. And he’s managed to part the beat sea to let the lyrics through. When soul gets a look in, it’s new urban soul, technological soul that will spin the heads of purists and make them spew. The vocals of Cleveland Watkiss, on ‘Adrift’, rise above all these sad pulses of sound and a lonely sax. ‘State of Mind’ is more jazz, but the deconstructed production, the strings and the synth, the backlooped beats and tinkling ivories take it beyond just jazz. 'Sea of Tears' starts out solitary guitar, becomes beats, bass and strings, becomes ocean samples, and then comes crashing down into this sad little guitar again. It all takes 12 minutes. It feels like three minutes. Goldie’s music is to London what hip-hop was to New York — he’s absorbing the environment and regurgitating it musically. Timeless was produced by Rob Playford (the boss of the immaculate Moving Shadow label), so you have an idea of how smooth this sucker is gonna be. It’s all the newest in new. Perhaps too new for many — but once you’re in, you’re fully into it. JOHN TAITE

KING LOSER You Cannot \ ' Kill What Does Not Live (Flying Nun)

In the corner of the lounge bar sits the new King Loser album, huddled up, desperately dragging on a cigarette, looking cool as fuck in second-hand threads. In walks the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, a smart suit and newfound friends. They stare in total awe at Loser, wishing they could be only half as cool.

On YCKWDNL (catchy acronym), King Loser do Dick Dale’s ‘Miserlou’, the opening track on the Pulp Fiction album. If you accuse Loser of bandwagon jumping, you’ll probably, first, be punched in the face then, secondly, chucked a copy of 1993’s Sonic Super Free Hi-Fi, which included

songs like ‘Surf’s Lost’ and ‘Dick Dale’.

Original surf music seems the epitome of health compared to King Loser’s dirtier and sleazier take on it. Guitars die of effects overload, drums (or possibly drummers) explode, keyboards run rampant, while lazy vocals are crooned over the songs by both Celia and Chris Heazlewood. It ends up much more than the sum of its influences.

The surf stuff is only half of Loser’s game. They also excel with the exquisite duet ‘Morning Dew’, the pounding, squally guitared ‘Song Remains the Same’, the 3Ds-y ‘Broken Man’. In fact, every song could be singled out for a kiss and a badge of merit. You knew it had to happen sometime — fashion and King Loser finally coincide. But when fashion inevitably moves on, YCKWDNL will still be the hellish summer groove album that will not die. MITCHELL HAWKES BLACK GRAPE It’s Great When You’re Straight... Yeah (Radioactive) Well, Damon Albarn may say: ‘lt’s a helping hand that makes you feel wonderfully bland,’ but Prozac certainly did wonders for Mr Shaun Ryder. That last Happy Mondays album was a miserable outing of vegetablised rubbish — they deserved to split. With Shaun hooked on smack and crack, it looked like it was all over for the legend of lad. But, damn, this is good.

It’s Black Grape now, though, because the rest of the Mondays abandoned Shaun after he’d messed up their lives and careers. He’s hooked up with Kermit from the Ruthless Rap Assassins, and of course Bez is still tagging along adding, urn, his Bezness. Unlike the Roses, who thought rock was the way to salvation, Ryder has stuck to what he does best. Straight has brought with it all the attractions of baggy — the funky guitars mixed with dance beats — and taken on 1995 without shame. Kermit’s toasting adds a tasty flavour to the proceedings, while Shaun’s stream of uncon-

sciousness vocals have risen from the dead — the smug grin is back, the dazed glaze gone. The songs are damn strong, like the heyday of Pills Thrills and Bellyaches — that strong. As ‘Reverend Black Grape’ only hinted at the groovy energy of ‘ln the Name of the Father’, so funk glories like ‘Yeah Yeah Brother’ only touch on the seedy menace of ‘Shake Well Before Opening'. Straight is the sound of a man who has beaten an addiction. It’s joy, maaaan, with some of the brightest and dirtiest beats, some of the funniest and stupidest lyrics ('Jesus was a black man / No, Jesus was Batman / No, that was Bruce Wayne’), some of the coolest riffs, and some of the best fun to come out of the UK this year. The blacker the grape, the sweeter the juice. JOHN TAITE

PET SHOP BOYS Alternative (Parlophone) NEW ORDER (The Rest of) New Order (London)

For better or worse, the Pet Shop Booys and New Order have been influential in the art of developing the 12 inch remix, and of using the 12 inch format as a depository for more indulgent B-side efforts.

The latter is the case on Alternative, a lavishly packaged and exhaustive double CD of the Pet Shop’s flip side flotsam and jetsam. At worst, these are maybe melodic also rans or poorly judged ambitions like the (‘The Sound of the Atom Splitting’), but Tennant and Lowe still seem to have a welter of catchy, melancholic synth lines and irone disco grooves. It’s just over the length of a double CD, the inconsistent ingenuity of even the Pet Shop Boys seems interminable.

(The Rest of) New Order is the remix alternative to last year’s pretty decent (The Best of), and it’s an obvious attempt at maintaining the band’s public probile in the absence of new material, should that ever be forthcoming.

Most of the remixes here fall into the extended, repetitive and functional dancefloor fodder.

Exceptions include the always brilliant and virtually intact ‘True Faith’, and a superbly uplifting total renovation of ‘Touched by the Hand of God’. There’s also a bonus CD, which has the terrifying prospect of seven remixes of ‘Blue Monday’, with only the ambient and reggae readings doing anything imaginative. The rest is certainly not the best. GEORGE KAY

KYUSS ...And The Circus Leaves Town (Elektra)

As I write, the temperature is still around 35 degrees and the sun has been down for an hour or two. It’s the ideal listening state for a new Kyuss, album as it’s the same sort of brain scrambling heat that spawned this music. Somehow, I’m beginning to understand how a band from Palm Desert can make the swampiest, murkiest sound imaginable. It’s delirium rock. Everything is twisted and warped by the heat, slowed down and heavied out to a point close to critical mass, then launched at the listener’s cortex. Kyuss have moved away from their last album’s, massive 20 minute long epics, towards more traditional songs, but they stay pretty twisted. New drummer Alfredo Hernandez is pretty much perfect with bassist Scott Reeder. Thus, the bottom end is about as firmly anchored as any rock band have managed, so guitarist Josh Homme can really work his art over this heavy artillery. The riffs shift from sludgy rumble to pure menace all too comfortably, and periodically just fly skyward in the best rock tradition. It’s a hard album to pin down in a few hundred words, but that’s why it’s so damn wonderful. Long live the desert rock. KIRK GEE

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD A Very Fine Love (Columbia) In 1968, in Memphis, Dusty recorded what remains arguably her very best album. Twenty-five years later she went to Nashville. Sadly, the results do not encourage comparison.