Norwegian artist Jenny Hval is a novelist as well as a singer-songwriter, and her new album certainly has a literary approach to music making.
Since exploding to fame a decade ago with the single “Pompeii” and its parent album Bad Blood, Bastille have maintained impressive success on both sides of the Atlantic. To this writer’s ears, the bombast of their early music was off-putting, and the voice of songwriter and frontman Dan Smith unpleasant.
Danish pop star MØ is as well known for her collaborations as her own music. Shining brighter than all of them is the globe-slaying, 24 carat dance craze "Lean On” from 2015, created with Major Lazer and DJ Snake, and, for a few years, Spotify’s most-streamed song.
The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.
We did that whole state-of-things COVID/Brexit/anxiety/neurosis blah-blah in the end-of-year pieces last year. And, indeed, the year before (when Bozza was elected). Not this year. I’m over that. Let’s crack on. Live life. Own it. All that. An equivalent bullishness of tone, filtered through a defiantly feminine aesthetic, rules Marina Diamandis’s fifth album (she of Marina and the Diamonds). Or, at least, the parts of it that aren’t concerned with “highly emotional people” or mourning the end of her five year relationship with Clean Bandit’s Jack Patterson.
The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Simo Cell Yes.DJ (TEMƎT)
A persistent moan of this writer in recent years, about gigs attended by those his own age (54) and up, is that, however good the band is, the audience are stationary, staring, semi-catatonic. They don’t twitch or move, facing stage-wards earnestly, silent, as if watching Chekov at the theatre. Their joy, if it exists, is internalised, unreleased. Dancing something forgotten long ago.
Here comes the bride. True to Kero Kero Bonito’s unique musical and visual style, a chaotic but masterfully executed fusion of Japanese kawaii culture, kaleiodoscopic synth and indie rock, the audience at Heaven were greeted by lead singer Sarah Midori Perry entering in a wedding dress complete with bridesmaid, while instrumentalists Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled both played the part of disaffected ushers behind their synth decks.
As the summer folds away on itself, theartsdesk on Vinyl returns. Beset by backlogs at pressing plants and delayed by COVID, it's finally here, jammed to the gunwales with commentary on a grand cross section of the finest music on plastic. Dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH
God Damn Raw Coward (One Little Independent)
Anne-Marie Nicholson is a hard-working young woman from Essex whose career description is “Global Girl-next-door Pop Star”. She has incrementally worked her way there, attended the marketing meetings. Anyone requiring a CV that exemplifies the steady, data-farmed, disciplined path to contemporary major label pop stardom, should look to hers. Spontaneity and originality are out, every media detail is micro-managed, but a multi-platform, multi-territory project such as this can reap grand rewards.