March playlist

So much good stuff around at the moment, more than I can reasonably post on Facebook.


First up Austra. Just got the album of this. Not quite as instantly smitten as I'd expected – not yet, anyway – but this is gorgeous. Here in its harder, longer form. All the work of Katie Stelmanis, a Latvian-American out of Toronto with a voice for the opera and beats for sex in club toilets.




Clipse's last album was pants, and I can't remember the last time Fiddy was any good. But this new single from Pusha T is a blast. Clipse never put a foot wrong with Neptunes, and if they're producing their solo albums, all will be right again.




Another lone woman working wonders. I was meant to spend the day writing up an interview with Tune Yards, but that's on hold. And this is the best way to spend my time without getting depressed hunting for work. The new album is the nuts and her live shows are meant to be even nutsier. This is something like how I'd hoped Vampire Weekend would sound until it turned out they were wimpy indie at heart.



J.Rocc's album is a massive surprise. Expected drab turntablism, got some spacey, bass-heavy carnival madness. For my money you can hear it best on Party, but this seems to be the first single – and J.Rocc Party isn't exactly chosen with SEO in mind – so cop this.

Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek about to release their first album as Africa Hitech. This is just immense.



Really recommend this new Instra:mental album, Resolution 653. Thought they were meant to be d'n'b, but don't much sound like it to me, which is why probably why I like it so much. Parts of it sound like a colder, harder Isolee. And others don't. Can't find any videos, so hopefully this album megamix will do.

The return of Raekwon in the last few years almost makes up for his old mucker Ghostface losing his way a little. Here he pays tribute to, um, Bon Jovi and lords of rawk. Possibly the first rap track to big up its rock credentials without using really shitty axe wankfluff.

Belting Braces

                     This originally appeared in Word Magazine, January 2011

ADELE

21

XL

TONY CHRISTIE

Now’s The Time

ACID JAZZ

It’s pop’s true perennial, one that’ll be here long after the guitar-bass-drum legions have gone the way of the washboard. The double-barrelled shotgun of big-song/big-voice predates rock and keeps getting in the way of its conquest: halting the Beatles’ run of consecutive chart-toppers when Release Me hemmed in one of their best singles, Strawberry Fields Forever, at number two; pilloried as the pinnacle of bad taste on Abigail’s Party; even raising the damned Titanic in the ‘90s.

Adele Adkins wasn’t supposed to go that way. Hyped as XL’s “new Amy” to Rough Trade’s competing Duffy – a rare case of indie labels scampering down a path laid by a major, Island – her first album, 19, was a too-light-by-half exercise in gentle soul, folk and jazz.  Its saving grace – and the driving force behind an impressive two million worldwide sales, significantly boosted when she fluked her way onto the same record-breaking Saturday Night Live bill as Sarah Palin – was the beast of a ballad Chasing Pavements. Drenched in strings and with a hook that allowed Adele to unleash her vocal cannonade at full blast, it achieved that delicate balancing act of subtlety and force-of-nature emotional torrents that stop the right side of histrionics.

Having perhaps sensed that for Adele more is always more, her second album strips away the soft padding that marred her debut. While 19 placed her in some metaphorical supper club, 21 – like her debut, named for her age – puts her centrestage in Vegas, with songs that typically start at 11 and work their way up. Not that these are overly ornate – Rick Rubin, who produces four tracks, didn’t get where he is today by burying the voice in superfluous instrumentation – just dramatic, every gun set to stun. With Adele slaloming her way through the notes, you feel on the cusp of being overwhelmed, even when, as on the Rubin-produced Cure cover Lovesong, she’s backed by nothing more than acoustic guitar and the gentlest of strings.

Adele is a graduate of the same BRIT school that brought us Amy Winehouse and Kate Nash, but has always seemed like the oldest child in the playground, and not just in her generous physical frame (all the better for booming them out with). A former indie kid who kept her fondness for Celine Dion hidden from friends, even her Twitter account has lain untouched in 18 months. No winsome mundanity here about teeth-brushing or trips to Tesco’s – all 11 songs on 21 are powerplays, postcards from the edge of some relationship crisis or other. It’s not without drawbacks – you’re never more than ten minutes from an X-Factor-style emotithon, the worst of which, Set Fire To The Rain, sounds like it was made with the aid of a wind tunnel and a Bonnie Tyler fright wig.

But there’s more than enough to demonstrate that Adele, far from being just another cookie off the stage-school cutter, could still be selling out the enormodomes when the rest of the class are banding together for the BRIT School Reunion package tour. Her delivery, first breathy then blowy, on the retro soul gem I’ll Be Waiting sounds like a gauntlet flung in the direction of Ms Winehouse, whose forthcoming (yeah right!) LP will have to defy visible physical and creative decline to produce anything to compare with it or the stupendous, stark R&B of Rumour Has It. As if to prove she can occasionally do understated, Someone Like You, on which she’s accompanied only by a piano, sounds like Alicia Keys’s immaculate No One remixed without the eruptions.

She will, it’s hoped, be served better by time than Tony Christie. Like Adele, Christie is a singer whose voice is built for the big occasion, one that would’ve been an easy listening mainstay, had he found more memorable material. Instead he spent most of his career in the shadow of Tom Jones, eking out a living in German clubs while the Welshman strutted the stage in Vegas. Revived with a nod and a wink by those twin towers of northern humour, Peter Kay and Jarvis Cocker (who pens Get Christie, an awful homage to Get Carter that borrows the film’s theme tune and most famous line), he’s released two albums of covers post-Amarillo. Now’s The Time is original material, recorded with the aid of other Sheffield stalwarts such as Roisin Murphy, who appears on the most successful track, the bold, confident 7 Hills, and producer Richard Barrett of All Seeing I. It’s a stab at recreating his early ’70s heyday, but sounds instead like a bid for an Austin Powers soundtrack or Glastonbury’s veteran’s slot, a self-conscious stew of showy big band tunes, heavy on brass but light on funk, swing or drive. In this battle of the big voices, the veteran’s locked in a pastiche of the past; the newcomer is busily re-proving that old adage about quality being timeless.

Good Cop Nazi Cop

This interview originally ran in The Word in 2010, ahead of the publication of If the Dead Rise Not


“For a short period of time the German language was a series of very large German words, formed from very small German thinking.” Bernie Gunther says this the way he says everything; with a curled lip, a tone that dares you to disagree and the bitter regret that, though he was helpless to do much about it, he might’ve done a little more. His creator is rather more comfortable company, sipping tea in The Ivy’s private members’ club. A 53-year-old Scot with an RP accent and a complexion so deep-tan he could be Iberian (he attributes it to his Pict ancestry), Philip Kerr has built one of the most durable characters in modern crime fiction, a Marlowesque private detective thrown down streets far darker than those his forerunner trod.

Gunther’s beat is ‘30s Berlin. The Nazis have dumped Weimar into history’s dustbin, but the decadence forever associated with its name still lingers. Germany is in transition from one of the world’s most liberal states to its most tyrannical. A former homicide tec whose face doesn’t fit the new Nazi-dominated police force (KRIPO), Gunther’s kept busy by the never-ending wave of disappearing persons, many of them Jewish. “Whatever crime you’re detailing,” Kerr says, “you know there’s always something far worse going on in the background, the spectre of it. [The Holocaust]’s the great crime of the millennia, whereas a lot of crime writing seems a bit parochial.”

Gunther first appeared in 1989’s March Violets, soon followed by two more (the first three novels are still in print as the trilogy, Berlin Noir), then a gap of some 15 years, when he was revived for The One From The Other. “Crime writing is a bit like being on a treadmill, crime writers do cookie cutter novels, and I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t sign on just to write one sort of thing for the rest of my life. And I was lucky enough to be able to do that, now it would be impossible.” So Kerr ventured elsewhere, writing children’s books (as PB Kerr) and techno thrillers, sci-fi and historical counterfactuals. “I wanted to be like Kubrick, going from Strangelove to 2001 to Clockwork Orange,” he says. “A friend of mine called it fucking with your niche. I fucked with my niche.”

Gunther’s revival has seen him blossom. Always cynical and smart-mouthed, his misanthropy has developed a pronounced streak of self-loathing, fuelled by his wartime experiences as a reluctant SS member. Like Flashman, he has a habit of bumping up alongside any number of historical ogres, including all of the leading Nazis bar Hitler (“it’s good to have this ultimate monster in the background”) and the Perons. In the new novel, If The Dead Rise Not, he encounters Meyer Lansky and friends as they’re busily turning ‘50s Cuba into a Mafia colony.

But it’s the immediate predecessor, A Quiet Flame, which stirred most interest. While Peron’s welcome mat for escaping Nazis is a matter of historical record, Kerr adds a deal of conjecture, placing concentration camp architect Hans Kammler among them and speculating that Argentina may have had its own programme for Jewish extermination.

The novel aroused “horrified fascination” among Argentine journalists, but is based on a crime that was never committed. Or was it? “Others have speculated that they may have done. There were certainly camps for opponents of the regime, pre-Peron, during Peron, and during the ‘70s junta too. Argentina has always chucked the left in camps, and worse. I don’t think it’s too outrageous to speculate they might have done the same with Jews. Directive 11, forbidding Jewish immigration, was certainly true. The book didn’t go down well in Argentina. But look at the evidence – there were 8,000 Nazi war criminals in Argentina by the 1950s, so it seems perfectly reasonable to speculate on what they were doing, why they were there, who let them in, and if they were welcome, who wasn’t, and what happened to them?”

Gunther is now a globetrotter (The One From The Other explains why), but the stories always keep one foot in Berlin. Readers expect it and Kerr loves the place. He talks of his first visit to the Soviet East, just before the fall, with childlike excitement, his language peppered with the stuff of storytelling: “unbelievably exciting…bullet holes in every wall…fantastically atmospheric.” But he won’t freeze Gunther in time, insisting the character develops. He’s older now, not as imposing, less attractive, frequently paying for the sex that comes his way. “Too often heroines throw themselves at the character,” smiles Kerr. “It was fun this way, makes it worth doing. I’m not trying to inhabit the same pitch, I want to him to get older, greyer, so he can’t hack it like he used to.”

Swords of the Dance

Yet another old Word piece rehashed for interweb immortality. This originally appeared early Sept 2010, timed to coincide with Ninja Tune's 20th anniversary celebrations.

Perched between a gay pub and a grey council estate on a south London trunk road stands a lone house. Looking out of place, like it’s ducked the sweep of a demolition ball more than once, its anonymous blue façade makes no reference to its contents, save one small sticker below the buzzer: Ninja Tune. One of the longest-serving British dance labels, it was formed as an outlet for renowned producers Coldcut, Matt Black and Jon More, with an initial cash injection of just £500.

They’ve spent a bit more since, but not that much. The higgledy-piggledy three-storey headquarters is crammed with people, records, shelving and computers. An overworked server roars loudly in the corner while the lavatory sink threatens to come away from the wall. Black slinks into the upstairs office, containing hand-me-down and left-behind furniture, and sprawls on an old sofa. Dressed in black (the fact that his birth name is Cohn suggests this may not be a coincidence), with long, straggling hair, his is a more intense presence than the laidback, comparatively dapper More, who’s dressed in the age-appropriate (he’s 53) cap and jacket.

Birthdays and anniversaries are very much in mind. Black turns 50 soon, Ninja Tune celebrates its twentieth this year and they’ve been in this Kennington house they call home for 10 years. But not much longer: the label will move north of the river next year (Black himself is pondering making his partners an offer on the building), bringing one Ninja chapter to a close. Looking around at the walls – a few silver discs (Mr Scruff, Roots Manuva, Coldcut, Cinematic Orchestra) and a lot of posters – I wonder why two of the biggest names in British dance music (and in the late-’80s Coldcut were very big indeed, producing Yazz and Lisa Stansfield and famously remixing Rakim) ever chose to go it alone.

“We’d already had experience of forming a label with Ahead Of Our Time. That was done through Big Life, which was subsequently sold to Arista,” explains More.

Black interjects, “It’s like little fish that get eaten by bigger fish that get eaten by bigger fish. We realised we were little fish and it would be better if we swim for freedom.”

“So we escaped to the best place in the world for fish, which was Japan.”

“Surely the open sea?”

Fish-friendly or not, Japanese films inspired the name and the distinctive logo (designed later by Kev of DJ Food). The ethos – fiercely independent, techno-savvy, web-literate, supremely obstinate – was all their own. While British dance was dominated by house, which went from the underground to high street hegemony, Ninja went the other way, dabbling in anything but. “You can read Ninja Tune as a war with house music, definitely,” says Black. “When the first house records came out we were very excited, but we don’t like conformity, uniformity, monoculture. There are massive pressures pushing monoculture and destroying biological diversity and cultural diversity. You don’t have to be a green-bearded hippy to be aware of that. There’s nothing wrong with people getting off their tits and coming together under one rhythm. But when that rhythm takes over so there isn’t anything else allowed, that’s a problem. So we decided to become the resistance.”

Black, who’s collaborated with Crass before now, has a mile-wide anarcho streak, but that oppositional policy and attachment to life in the margins has made Ninja closer to a dance version of John Peel, a comparison that delights them (“a solitary giant fighting the forces of darkness,” says Black, typically). Just as Peel was always more interested in tomorrow than yesterday, Ninja’s 20^th Anniversary package, XX,  shuns nostalgia, instead bundling up six albums of new music and remixes. In 20 years they’ve never done a ‘best of’. “There’s always something more interesting to do,” says Black. “It’s an exciting time in electronic music right now, it’s swung back again, there’s some pretty wild new sounds and new characters out there.”

                                                                                                           

Ninja’s one brush with real fame came this time last year when the Mercury Prize went to Speech Debelle’s Speech Therapy, released on their Big Dada subsidiary. Its triumph turned to ashes when its failure to sell like Arctic Monkeys was held up as proof of the Mercury’s inverse Midas Touch and the artist herself turned on her label, whom she criticised for not getting stock in the shops. Ill-attended gigs told the truth of the matter: despite being the best record on an unremarkable list it was never going to trouble the scorers. Black shrugs, “It’s full of character, unique, but if you think it’s gonna be Lily Allen you better think again, because it ain’t; it’s something else, it’s an odd record.”

Whether Speech returns or not, Ninja Tune remain vital. Recent releases include The Bug’s excoriating ragga-dubstep, Grasscut’s future folk and Bonobo’s electronic soul, the still breathtaking “audiovisual rhythmic montages” of Hexstatic and the reissue of the Solid Steel series of mix CDs (a format practically reinvented by Coldcut’s 1997 70 Minutes Of Madness). They seem quite happy tootling away, rarely fashionable and largely out of view.

“Our philosophy is to not be distracted by the sound of people jumping on the bandwagon,” says More. Black adds, “We’ve been flavour of the week a couple of times and when you see how the machine works and how it’s set up to flog things when the quality’s not really there, we keep away. We know what we’re doing and we get on with it.” Here’s to another score.

Kanye's Thriller Night

Kanye West has compared his self-directed 40-minute short film Runaway to the abstract works of Picasso and Matisse. What they would’ve made of this breathtakingly cornball fantasy is anyone’s guess, but I suspect that other giant of 20th-century art whose name kept cropping up at last night’s screening – in the Bafta HQ on Piccadilly, no less – Michael Jackson would’ve felt right at home among the UK urban celebs (Tinie, Chipmunk) and the dozens of St Martin’s art students, reputedly invited at Kanye’s suggestion to “make it look cool”.

“With Michael Jackson’s passing I felt a responsibility to create things for our generation, to be more inspirational and be better parents,” he says. “The lowest common denominator is all you see on TV, we need to use our power in a proper way.”

MTV VMA Performance: Kanye West feat. Pusha T "Runaway" | MeetThaDealer
- Watch more Music Videos at Vodpod.

In Runaway’s case this means rescuing a half-dead phoenix – gorgeous and, happily, wearing as little by way of feathered clothing as daytime telly restrictions allow – coaxing her back to life with a lush garden, a sheep and the power of Kanye’s sampling skills, marrying her, arguing, promising “I’ll never let you burn”, and then watching her rise into the sky while running through the words to his horrible Autotuned take on Bon Iver’s Woods.

This is actually a rare reversion to 808s And Heartbreaks. For the most part the songs represent a return to the form of, if not College Dropout, then at least Graduation. Hard and raw in places, grandiose and orchestral in others, it mostly maintains the form of tracks like Monster and is evidence that Kanye’s new album may overcome its clunky title My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (whither Good-Ass Job?) and drag him back from the precipice he’s been gazing over for the last two years.

He touched on these problems (notably the fall-out from his embarrassing awards-show intervention) in the post-film Q&A. Sounding worryingly earnest in his claims of divine intervention, he seemed like a new, rather boring man, talking about his heroic resistance to record company pressure to do something commercial. He saw this as “the same shit Michael went through”, as if the man who made the most successful album of all time, and regularly phoned CBS boss Walter Yetnikoff at all hours of the day seeking reassurance that its successor would sell even more, was merely a disinterested passenger in his own global super-megastardom.

But beneath the waffle the old arrogant, ever-quotable Kanye was there. “This is gonna sound like the Kanye of three years ago, but do you know how creative I have to be to be me?” he said. And “I wish I had a billionaire to invest in me, ‘cos investing in me is investing in arts through all the three-year-olds I’m gonna inspire.” Then he got lost in a rant against the snobs of the fashion world, blaming Lindsay Lohan for his failure to successfully launch his own range. “Lohan’s collection was like the 9/11 for Arabians (sic) to celebrities [doing their own fashion line].”

And when, reflecting on the extended ballet dance that forms the latter half of the title track, he said “hip hop is like black semen – anything that connects with it becomes that”, it was good to have the old Kanye back. Sorry doesn’t suit him any more than surrealism. But if the film reeks of superstar self-indulgence the new album should make some amends for the horrors of Heartbreaks.

REVERSE CHARGE

For those redirected from Facebook or Twitter, I don't really hate Mark Ronson. I've met him a couple of times and he's intelligent, witty and an engaging interview (though he might reconsider his policy of doing them straight off the red-eye from New York), but it seems like a popular search term and, in all honesty, his new album is a real nurse-the-screens! minger. This is a round-up of retro albums, records designed to both look and sound like something a few decades old. It first appeared in the October 2010 edition of Word Magazine – still on the shelves for a few days and re-posted here just to show you what you're missing.

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ROOTS MANUVA MEETS WRONGTOM
Duppy Writer
BIG DADA

BUDOS BAND
Budos III
DAPTONE

MARK RONSON & THE BUSINESS INTL
Record Collection
ALLIDO/COLOMBIA

ALOE BLACC
Good Things
STONES THROW

Maybe it’s all that dusty-fingered reverence for old vinyl, but when history repeats for hip hop artists it’s not as farce, but pastiche. So Roots Manuva’s latest reggae overhaul appears in a retro-futurist cartoon style by a celebrated ‘80s sleeve designer, while Californian Aloe Blacc slides into regulation Temptations supper-club suit and bowtie, even when the spirit he evokes most closely is that of Bill Withers’ smooth country soul. Like besuited Stones Throw label-mate Mayer Hawthorne, Plan B (another rapper profiting from his singing voice) and the sublime Raphael Saadiq, Aloe’s decided looking the part is as vital as sounding it. Brit-pop may have been born with one eye on the past, but even when they sounded like little more than Bootleg Beatles with their own songwriter, Oasis never quite clambered into the dayglo military jackets.

No one’s benefited from grafting the sound of young, black ’60s America onto modern pop more than Mark Ronson, who soundtracked Amy’s beehived reinvention, as a combination of ’60s soul, killer songs and carcrash infamy pushed her and her hairdo to global celebrity. Repeating the trick with his solo album, he reinvented indie anthems as horn-drenched soul standards, transforming himself from hip hop DJ/producer into genuine solo star (and nemesis to a generation of indie kids, who still haven’t forgiven him for messing with Morrissey and Radiohead).

But Ronson’s more interested in sound than schtick. Having won proper pop star status, he’s not about to go down with a ship that’s been boarded by the likes of Duffy, not in a world gone Gaga. For third album Record Collection – which I suspect went by the working title of No More Fucking Trumpets – he’s invested in a stack of old analogue synthesisers and brought in the rhythm section of funk revivalists supreme, The Dap-Kings, and a range of guest vocalists, including Boy George, Simon Le Bon and Rose Elinor Dougall of full-time revivalists The Pipettes. It maybe a ’70s/’80s hybrid on paper, but Record Collection couldn’t sound more at home on modern radio if it struck up light banter with a newsreader before delivering a blow-by-blow monologue about the crrrrazy weekend it’s just had.

With electronic riffs filling in where the brass section once stood, his new songs have all the immediacy of a bomb in a firework factory. Bang Bang Bang sounds like a collision between Lena Lovich and a Power Rangers soundtrack; The Bike Song could’ve been conceived in a School Disco nightclub. Chirpy rapper Q-Tip appears on both, but that’s nothing like as shocking as hearing original grimester Wiley jump in halfway through the title track, then dropping off as quickly as he came in to make way for Le Bon (whose voice still sounds like a wet blanket stretched to the size of a cricket pitch) and Ronson himself. It’s a pity two of the three vocalists here are so lousy, because it’s perhaps the most interesting song, with Ronson sending up his own sleb image while expressing his lust for stardom in the language of a love song. For a man who’s previously done little wrong Ronson engenders extraordinary loathing (one webzine recently invited readers to suggest suitable tortures, short of death – the most printable was “coat his bog-roll in cayenne pepper”). But ’80s pop, unlike indie and funk, isn’t protected by a Praetorian guard of the precious and purist. Irritating as it may be, I fear Record Collection will be massive.

If Record Collection sounds like a calculated stab at turning nostalgia into money, Duppy Writer, Good Things and Budos III are acts of indulgence. Duppy Writer is the third Roots Manuva remix album, but the first to place his career span in the hands of one single producer, Wrongtom. Best known for dubbing up Hard-Fi’s roots, he recasts the London rapper’s life work as ’80s dancehall, sticking rhythms from prime digital hits like Antony Red Rose’s timeless Tempo beneath Rodney Smith’s baritone noir. With a sleeve designed by Tony McDermott, the cartoonist who dressed King Tubby protégé Scientist’s albums 30 years ago, Duppy Writer is a timewarped treat.



As, for the most part, is Aloe Blacc’s Good Things. Spearheaded by the astonishing single I Need A Dollar, it’s a recession-era throwback to the days when blue-collar soul heroes serenaded their audience with everyday tales rather than heavily branded fantasies. Set to music crafted by flame-keepers Truth & Soul, it deftly recaptures the paranoia of Nixon’s reign (even a cover of Femme Fatale sounds like it’s there to make a point) and if Blacc can’t quite command a microphone like Curtis or Marvin, his songcraft has no modern peer. If retro funk can be said to have an originator, it’s the Daptone label, purveyors of just-so recreations of the early ’70s sound and look and home to the aforementioned Dap-Kings, from whom sprung Budos Band, the label’s Afro-jazz exponents. This is music that isn’t meant to change: numerical album titles, an all-instrumental brass-led formula repeated throughout, Budos III is for people who wish those blaxploitation soundtracks had never ended. They may be doing it over, but they’re undeniably doing it right.

Barbra Streisand

A genius career turn for our Babs

Duck Sauce "Barbra Streisand" from Mr Goldbar on Vimeo.