Blur: 21
Bruce Dessau
The moment you reach “I Call This Home”, the third track of Saint Saviour's debut album, it’s obvious this is an album to stick with. A pulsing rhythm beds guitars that reverberate like vintage Cure. The voice is quavering, anguished. Then it opens up. Suddenly driving and tense, the dramatic, shimmering song sounds like an anthem in waiting – albeit one with a maverick sensibility akin to that of Fever Ray, Goldfrapp and Marc Almond. It fits that Saint Saviour has played live with Hurts.
Though he first came to public attention via the Los Angeles-based Brainfeeder psychedelic electronic hip hop collective led by Flying Lotus, 25-year-old producer Lorn comes from “the middle of nowhere in Illinois”, and it's easy to see in his music a less sunny disposition than many of his comrades. Most of the Brainfeeder crew have a loose-limbed funkiness to their sound and an accumulation of sonic detail that speaks of heat and humdity.
It has occasionally worked against Hot Chip that their first single – or, at least, the first to make any impact – was “Over and Over”. This 2006 song is such a perfect pop nugget, brutally reducing the appeal of club culture to a snappy yet celebratory couplet, that later work seemed wet in its shadow. Not that you’d know it from the music media adulation that attends the band.
A few years ago the ultimate in post-modern bollocks appeared – Guilty Pleasures, a club night built around the notion that tepid crap from yesteryear is brilliant. So let’s go dig Toto, Go West, Andrew Gold, Dr Hook, any old toe jam. Of course, there’s no reason why anyone shouldn’t dance around to anything, and it’s refreshing, now and then, to give the po-faced Punk Year Zero thing a kick-in, but actively celebrating drivel is another matter. "Dreadlock Holiday" is not a guilty pleasure, it’s just shite. Move on.
Gary Numan (born Gary Webb, 1958) was born in Hammersmith and raised in the western outskirts of London, the son of a bus driver. By the latter half of the Seventies he was fronting punk band Tubeway Army but his fortunes changed dramatically when he added synthesizers to the formula and became, with the album Replicas and songs such as “Down in the Park” and “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, one of electro-pop’s great innovators. His coldly catchy music, sci-fi imagery, adenoidal voice and air of robotic isolation was hugely influential.
Being pigeonholed as "disco" became the kiss of death for many of the genre's lesser lights, but a select handful were able to transcend its limitations. Chic and the Bee Gees managed it, and so did Donna Summer, disco's so-called "First Lady of Love" whose career stretched over four decades. Having hooked up with Giorgio Moroder to help define the hypnotic, hedonistic message of disco, Summer was subsequently able to embrace pop, rock and gospel music. Her powerful, soulful voice lent conviction wherever her musical explorations led her.
Kooky ladies are very much of the moment, an ongoing moment, actually - the last couple of years, to be precise - but they seem to be with us to stay which is surely a good thing, especially in the playground. Better them than unreconstructed pole-dancing, as promulgated by the Pussycat Dolls et al. Then there’s Gaga, of course, who’s a lot of both. Now the kook generation, from Ellie Goulding to Paloma Faith, have to decide (once they've steered clear of wannabe-Mariah X Factor tedium) what ratio of gay club 3am hard house stomp to inject into their cod-Kate Bush freakery.
Santigold – Philadelphia singer Santi White - does not neatly fit into any stereotype of the modern female pop star. In fashion photographer Jason Schmidt’s multiple cover images she is both an Amazonian warrior guard and a waistcoat clad masculine business overlord, and on record she adopts many more personas, but none of them are submissive or porno-chic sexual. Instead, Santigold makes stomping proud, shout-pop, chanty anthems that sit midway between early Eighties chart-toppers and utterly modern post-R&B US dance, of the Beyoncé ilk.
