With a title like Angels & Ghosts you’d expect there would be elements of gospel and elegiac rock, and the album certainly doesn’t disappoint: Gahan’s voice is at its vampiric best as an evangelical crooner seeking redemption rather than the grunge rock messiah he was in Songs of Faith of Devotion, or the dark wave synth seduction of earlier Depeche Mode albums. The album swings from Gahan blessing his congregation with songs like Shine to descending into sin with songs like Tempted. One Thing is a beautiful slow dance of a song whilst also ruminating on all of the apathy in the world and feeling disconnected to the present and showing a desire to just get out of town.
It’s a different world today/No one seems to care much anyway/ Don’t listen to what they say/They don’t know what they're fighting for/There’s always life on Mars out there for me. Yet at the same time realising that the one unifying force that keeps us all going is love (“You just need one thing/Love”) and that despite the multitudes of shit and absurdity that we go through in a day, the micro aggressions, the stupidity, the apathy of our lives, we get through it because of those we love. It’s hard not to compare the album to his work with Depeche Mode, especially when the album feels so much like an else world Songs of Faith & Devotion. The album is rock tinged gospel in a lesser key – more mellow, less immediate, but nonetheless seductive to the ears. Let’s face it, Dave Gahan could sing out the names of English counties and it would sound sublime.
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When New Order mounted a comeback in 2001 after a hiatus of 8 years I was glad to see them, but other than Crystal and 60 Miles an hour, honestly the album left me cold. However, Music Complete seems to be the comeback I was waiting for.
Restless is a catchy pop single about not feeling like you fit in with this ever changing world, and being left cold when the weight of the world is heavier than your own expectations of life. It’s cheery apathy which questions can just a taste of love sustain you and can we achieve our impossible dreams in a world that tries at every time to prevent you from doing so. Singularity harks back to the bands origins in Joy Division with a bass line so reminiscent of Shadowplay I was half convinced it was a Joy Division song I’d never heard. It recalls the best of their past work whilst giving a knowing nod to their past. Singularity is about attraction, but also about trying to escape from the prescribed roles and moving on with our lives one day at a time. It’s a song about recognising and remembering your past, but not being bound by it and letting it define your present or future. One day at a time/Inch by inch/For every kiss/On lovers’ lips/For all lost souls/Who can’t come home/Friends, not here/We shared our tears. Plastic examines the superficiality of attraction, the confusion of love with lust and how love can be an intoxicating poison. The song turns completely around in the end, starting off with showering the object of his desire with praise, to a middle act of uncertainty in the tumult of all of these emotions when Bernard Sumner sings “If you break me, will you fix me?/And if I’m missing, will you miss me?” The song ends with the realisation of the artificiality of his love interest and him leaving her behind. Stray Dog features Iggy Pop’s inimitable drawling narration like a Faustian pact in a boxcar with bootleg liquor. The song’s about unconditional love, alcoholism and the temporariness of love and how sometimes love is the act of staying in one place when our bodies and lives just want to move on, no matter how good our intentions are. The album is dark, brooding and industrial yet still great electronic pop, recalling both early New Order and the more pop side of the band. The title “Music Complete” is apt, as this feels like the band’s most complete and accomplished album in years, and is a real return to form. Hey, I did another article for Get Into This! This time on video game music in popular culture. Check it out.
http://www.getintothis.co.uk/…/from-tetras-to-brutal-lege…/ The band’s first album in seven years, The Light in You shows that some albums are worth the wait. The Queen of Swans is a song about the transformative nature of love, juxtaposed with images of ghosts and death, and references Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, a place where lovers or the lovelorn leave letters in the crypt. Are You Ready similarly deals with falling in love with as an otherworld experience that can only be explained in metaphor. The album is replete with the idea that love is transitory, fleeting, sad and beautiful, but its worth feeling. It’s an eerie, twinkling, intimate and introspective album. Jonathan Donahue sings lyrics to us from another world: a world that still has magic and still has the ability to stir something inside of us and make us feel something.
Originally printed in Issue #326 of the Kirkby Extra, November 2015. Like Grapes of Wrath in a drunken haze whilst getting the taxi back from the night before, B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down has a detached nihilism about it – you’re along for the ride but you’re not really there. This is aided by the fact that the songs drift one into another – they’re all good songs, but feel like different movements of the same song rather than each son being its own thing.
Pretty Pimpin’ is a song about disassociation with the man in the mirror with lines about “brushing a strangers teeth, but they were my teeth,” and of drunken dislocation with time as well as self. The song has a lackadaisical quality about it, of just drifting from day to day feeling like someone else and not knowing what day it is. The repeated refrain, “I woke up this morning didn’t recognise this boy in the mirror” also speaks of the man in the song not recognising who he is anymore as he grows older – he’s still a boy, but he’s not the boy he was, and every day he’s someone different. "I was buggin' out 'bout a couple-two-three things Picked up my microphone and started to sing I was feeling worse than the words come out Fell on some keys, and this song walked outta me" Lost My Head is about song writing as emotional exorcism, getting the words out of your system so they don’t churn around your head and drive you crazy. Vile nails it when he says he doesn’t want to talk or shout about it, but he will sing about it – there’s something of a confession ethic in getting on stage and singing out your troubles rather than just talking about it. Why confide in a friend when you can confide in a room full of strangers? Performance is catharsis when you’re being ridden by the demon of inspiration. The album is reminiscent in tone of Bruce Springstein with shades of Ian McCullloch, replete with world weariness and imagery of the outlaw on a dusty pilgrimage through the heart of America that’s part myth and part everyday mundanity. I just wish that each track felt more like a distinct adventure from the last – if there’s one complaint I have about the album it’s that everything blurs into one, which is a shame because I do like it and the feeling and scenery the music evokes in me. But maybe that’s the point of it and I’ve missed it completely: that the songs travel from one to another like a car or a train passing through places just long enough to take in the scenery and atmosphere but not long enough to put your feet on the ground and get your bearings. Richard Hawley understands love in all of its vicissitudes, remembering the romances of yesterday but without being a prisoner to nostalgia or embittered by his experiences. Hollow Meadows is an album about navigating through the lost woods of your life, feeling sure for once you know what direction you’re heading in only to be caught in an emotional storm and to have a shadow of doubt hanging over you leaving you rudderless. It’s an album about reflecting on past loves, being lost, and being in love. Hawley’s voice is reminiscent of an early Scott Walker, deep and resonant and full of longing, fragility and tenderness. His fireside baritone is perfect for autumn - rich and full of texture, like the auditory equivalent of rustling through fallen leaves.
Originally printed in Issue #325 of the Kirkby Extra, October 2015. I haven’t listened to much Ben Folds since Rockin’ the Suburbs, but when I heard the opening single Capable of Anything, I snapped to attention. As the opening track of the album and the first single, the song is a brilliant appeal to the senses offering the promise of potential with the gentle, stirring and intelligent lyricism you’ve come to expect from Ben Folds. The song takes the form of a man singing in earnest debate to his lover, asking for forgiveness for a slight not discussed, and repeating the refrain “you are capable of anything” (including forgiving him) but his partner doesn’t see that potential.
You are capable of anything/But you don’t seem to think/That you could fly so low or sink so high/That you could steal or cheat or kill or lie/But you might It also questions how responsible it is to say to anyone that their potential is limitless, and how there is no good response when you try to fly so high only to reach a glass ceiling or the walls of your own physical and metal limitations, frustrated to find out that the world has gravity, consequence and limits. However the song ends on an optimistic maybe, “but you might.” Not a Fan is a vulnerable but cutting song about a man trying to see what his girlfriend sees in a certain pop star, trying to embrace the difference in their respective tastes and love her for the difference, but not being able to reconcile himself with her terrible taste until it tears the relationship apart. The whole album is replete with songs of a relationship that is either on the verge of breaking down, but the album is at once playful and witty as well as thoughtful, sad and contemplative. F-10 DA is wonderfully playful, as Ben Folds sings a sequence of notes whilst the notes he sings out are repeated are then played back to him by the orchestra, a duet of musical education – it’s in this song that his collaboration with the orchestra YMusic really shines, melding Ben’s voice and the orchestra into a fun call and reply track that just works. The album is chamber pop brilliance evocative in turns of ELO and Arcade Fire’s chaotic orchestral sound in funeral, crossed with three excellent completely orchestral movements towards the end of the album. I can only confer my highest recommendation that you listen to this album. Your ears will thank you and love you for it. Heavily influenced by Talking Heads, Brian Eno and LCD Soundsystem, De Lux shows with Generation that it’s ok to be influenced by your heroes and that you can still make something new from it.
Oh Man the Future is focused on despair of the future dystopia, Sean Guerin singing a frantic list comprised of flying cars, cyborgs and World War 4, but manages to turn that crushing panic into something you can dance to. “39 more U.S. presidents until a woman finally makes it into office -not that it'll really matter- but a year later a revolution happens and the war for hunger and poverty ends; the government is destroyed (Oh man, the future!)” Oh Man the Future feels like the Once in a Lifetime of this album, and my god it’s a strong song, with Sean's exhortations of “oh man the future!” becoming more frequent until it’s repeated once every other line, becoming a mantra, losing meaning through repetition and feeling like one big long stream of consciousness. 30 is reminiscent of Rip it Up and Start Again by Orange Juice, but the singing is distant and far away, like it’s heard faintly through a closed window giving you a strange feeling of disassociation, like an out of body disco. The whole album is a series of strange and disparate images transfused with funk and synths and feels like a lost Talking Heads album remixed by LCD Soundsystem. I’ll try to make that my last comparison to LCD and Talking Heads, but to be quite honest, it’s a hard call to make as De Lux really does bear an uncanny sonic resemblance to them. It’s like asking somebody not to compare Tori Amos to Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell – the resemblance is there, and it’s not going to go away just because you don’t acknowledge it. I can’t help but be reminded of my disappointment in Arcade Fire’s Reflector album. I heard the titular single of that album, and hearing Bowie doing backing vocals and the Eno-esque brass instruments in the background and the synth beat, I thought I was going to get Arcade Fire’s Berlin album, and that they were going to go all Station to Station, or that it would be a new and darker sound like what was a totaly sea change in Depeche Mode when they recorded Construction Time is Here Again. What I got instead was an album that wasn’t anywhere near as dark, interesting and weird as I wanted – it was like Arcade Fire through the lens of LCD Soundsystem, and as a result wasn’t as good as either. However the key difference here if that De Lux has managed to pull off what Arcade Fire didn’t, and makes an album as funky as it is compelling and strange. It is an album that is the sum of its influences, Talking Heads, Eno and LCD, but De Lux does it so masterfully it doesn’t really matter – it’s a great album in its own right, it’s social conscience funk with post-punk and disco beats. A lyric in Oh Man the Future manages to sum it up better than I ever could: “Lots of people seem to be trying to do what others are not doing, but they don't just switch, since everyone is trying to do what everyone is not doing, it turns into what everyone was essentially doing” Damn right. Imagine you’re riding in a convertible at the end credits of an 80’s movie with an electronic beat and the lyrics sung completely in Spanish. There’s a romance in not knowing what Julieta is singing, but there’s wistfulness in her voice that suggests it’s about love and loss, and I don’t want to spoil the mystery by checking Google Translate. Sometimes the feeling an album evokes by how it’s sung is more important than the lyrics, such is the case with Julieta who sounds like a Hispanic Suzanne Vega with her blending of genre of electronic, folk and pop music. The album title translates as “Something Happens.” I think it sums up the fragility and uncertainty of emotion, but maybe it just means that life is a random series of events and sometimes it’s better to just go with the flow than try to assign any meaning to it.
Originally printed in Issue #324 of the Kirkby Extra, September 2015. |
Martin Summerfield
Monthly music columnist for the Kirkby Extra, sometimes article writer for Get Into This. Freelance writer/artist/maker. Archives
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