Jean Michel Jarre - Téo & Téa

Téo & Téa could be described as mood music – within minutes of putting it on for the first time, I was in a bad mood. I had been looking forward to a new album from Jean Michel Jarre for some time – I don't know what my expectations were exactly, but it certainly wasn't this. The first track, "Fresh News" became painfully irritating very quickly, but fortunately it was over just as I was about to head for the skip button. Skipping the first track on a new album? Surely not a good sign.

The overall style of Téo & Téa could easily be compared to Zoolook or Metamorphoses, with a heavy use of samples, cut up sounds, drum loops and vocal treatments. Unfortunately it is not as successful or as enjoyable as on the aforementioned albums, and although Téo & Téa is energetic and dynamic, the passion is sadly lacking.

I had heard the title track prior to the album's release and although it didn't particularly appeal to me with its heavy dance influence, it does stand up as one of the album's strongest tracks and certainly most danceable. However the style of "Téo & Téa doesn't represent the style of the album, and anybody hoping for an album of dancefloor fillers, will be disappointed.

Having previously photographed his ex partner Isabelle Adjani's girly bits for the cover of 2003's Geometry of Love, this album sees Jean Michel's new wife Anne Parillaud guesting on faked orgasm duties during "Beautiful Agony". Although musically it makes for one of the album's better tracks, one does question if the series of intimate moans is absolutely necessary.

There are several moments of brilliance throughout the album, but these are just parts of songs rather than full pieces. For me the tracks that really work well are "Téo & Téa 4:00am", "Beautiful Agony", "OK, Do It Fast", "Partners In Crime 2", "Melacholic Rodeo" and the album's best song and main saving grace, "Vintage" – perhaps the only track truly comparable to classic Jarre.

Although original studio albums have been few and far between over the last 17 years, albums such as Chronologie, Oxygene 7-13, Metamorphoses and Geometry of Love rank among his greatest works, and are all albums with which I fell instantly in love. With this in mind, Téo & Téa's inaccessibility comes as something of a surprise, with only a few tracks coming anywhere close to the classic sound and style one would normally associate with Jean Michel Jarre. In all fairness, the rest of the tracks could have been produced by anybody.

Don't bother with the bonus DVD either, unless you have a surround sound system to play it on. There's also the 3-minute CGI heavy promo video for the title track, which is nice but somewhat short lived. It is a shame that the long form video hasn't been exploited more on DVD issues such as this, given the ease of production by today's technology. Instead all you get to accompany the 5.1 mix is a slightly animated version of the album sleeve (the neon signage flickers).

Not that I was ever expecting another Oxygene but Téo & Téa lacks the flowing atmosphere and creativity found on most of Jarre's albums. And while it's good to diversity, it doesn't feel like I have been taken anywhere new with this album. Labelled as his first 'proper' studio album since 2000's Metamorphoses, one can't help but question if the creative spark has gone out during the time elapsed.

It's not that the music is bad though – on the contrary. It's fun, upbeat, funky, certainly lively... but it just doesn't take me on an exciting musical journey like his other albums do. I don't feel at all inspired by it, and that, is perhaps what I find most frustrating.

Overall, Téo & Téa proved to be quite disappointing, which after such a long wait, is particularly saddening. Although something does keep drawing me back to it, so maybe time will have to tell with this one...

Honeyroot : Heavy Drops : Manhatten Clique Remix

Taken from electronica pioneers Honeyroot's debut album "The Sun Will Come" out 16th July 2007.
From the very first to the very last note, The Sun Will Come is a classic summer album, to sit alongside Air's Moon Safari, Moby's Play and Royskopp's Melody AM but with a sound that is uniquely Honeyroot. A must for beach parties, dance floors and back gardens across the globe..

Honeyroot - The Sun Will Come

Cast any preconceptions aside right now. Although Honeyroot may compromise of Heaven 17 lead singer, Glen Gregory and ex- ABC member Keith Lowndes, this is no rehash of eighties synth pop and certainly doesn’t herald a return of the New Romantics. Instead, what is to be found on this little gem of an album is an eclectic mix of ambient, electronica dusted bliss.

These Sheffield sons have created a seamless album, mixing together dreamy soul tinged ditties along with uplifting, dance infused tracks, flecked with electronic gold. With touches of Royksopp, Zero 7 and fragments of Air’s Moon Safari, this is a veritable audio treat for any ears.


“Goodbye” begins the sweet seduction of the listener, with its ethereal tones rising up slowly and swelling to a terrific climax of strings and synths. Intensely cinematic, it explains why the band are so in demand for penning scores for film, television and advertising.


The vein of seductive dreaminess continues throughout The Sun Will Come; everything drips with a mesmeric quality. The honeyed, soulful voice of Briony Greenhill on the slow burning “Nobody Loves You (The Way I Do)” is intoxicating as she almost playfully promises 'I’ll take you places you have never been'. This is moody, lo-fi heaven of the highest order.


But when the album does veer into more into more electronica inspired areas, it does so with gusto. No sparse beats, nor an excessive amount of beeps and pips, just the most pin sharp, exacting noises, timed to perfection. Every single iota of noise seems to have been put in place with the most tender and precise of hands and infused with an intense joy.

The Sun Will Come is reminiscent of sitting under trees on warm days; dappled sunlight breaking through the leaves, allowing you to reach an almost Zen-like state: a higher state of musical consciousness, if you will. The only bugbear is that it does not contain their haunting cover of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, but nonetheless, this is still a remarkable and impressive album.

Pop Levi - The Return To Form Black Magick Party

Pop Levi's Debut Album ©LM

Pop Levi - ReviewReviewReview The Return To Form Black Magick Party (Counter)

When your real name is Pop Levi, what else to do but rise to it? This London-born, sometime Liverpool-residing tenant of LA-la-land formed Super Numeri and played bass for Ladytron on his way to The Return To Form Black Magick Party. It's unclear which part of his previous work was below par.

Originally signed to Ladytron lynchpin Danny Hunt's Invicta HiFi label, Pop released a couple of singles before being snapped up by Ninja Tune, who loved him so much they set up his own imprint, Counter Records, with which to show him off. From the album cover of that label's first release, Pop's big eyes stare out from under a silky mop of blond locks, the face suggesting a pinch of John Lennon and a smidgen of Monty Python's Graham Chapman. He looks talented and interesting. So far so stylistic, but what about the music?

When a press release compares an artist to Marc Bolan, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix and just about everyone else in music whose cool has stood the test of time from the '70s to the noughties, the correct response is to suck teeth and fetch a truckload of salt. But Pop's helium-tinged vocals, the record's warm and full-sounding production (the work of Pop himself, with Devendra Banhart's knob-twiddler Thom Monahan), songs with enough hooks to run a fishing fleet and an otherworldly, all-consuming addictive quality that's completely beyond the current vogue for dull guitar bands all point to a press release that has a point.

Sugar Assault Me Now opens the album as it means to go on, getting the Bolan comparisons in early (see also (A Style Called) Crying Chic). If ginger beer could be a song, this effervescent slice of psychedelic glam would be it. Hand claps, excitable drums and layers of delay pedals lashing about in the vocal tracks all envelop a song at once familiar yet once removed from overly so. And like much of what follows, it sounds like Pop had a damned fun time making it, evoking the spirits of the greats as he went along.

After the mildly frantic opening, the pace varies. There are slower tracks too, each one distinctive enough to be memorable as unique from the rest. Blue Honey is the obvious Hendrix comparison, but only in passing - there's much more on display here. Any doubts about his originality are laid to rest by future single Pick-Me-Up-Uppercut, an insistent and ostensibly straightforward pop song that is, by its production, transformed into The Pipettes floating in a bubblegum balloon through the galaxy. Skip Ghetto is a change of pace and mood again with acoustic guitar and a vaguely hippyish feel, and in a record chock-full of highlights is one of the woozier of them. Flirting is another of the record's quieter numbers, reminding of Lennon. Marvellously, he's as effective at these numbers as he is at the uptempo stuff.

Just when you think Pop must be running low on whatever it is he takes to make this stuff, along comes Dollar Bill Rock, a three-chord wonder that runs across the dance floor, tells you T-Rex never died, grabs you by the hand and takes you hopscotching. Who needs illicit substances when this really rather tremendous stuff exists?

Mournin' Light is a little more adventurous with rhythm, but in an exceptionally strong album it's probably the weakest number. But no matter, for there are three more divine little ditties to follow, beginning with the spaced out, echo laden See My Lord. This could be the soundtrack to Lennon meeting yogis and floating about in a meditative ether of wonder and enlightenment. Happily he comes back to the place inhabited by us mortals sporting Hades' Lady, the yogis shambling a drum beat somewhere off to his left. He stays in Lennon mode for the closing ballad, From The Day That You Were Born and wraps up a quite extraordinary debut with the panache with which he began it.

Pop Levi is an oddball, an eccentric in the finest English tradition and a man who evokes the effortless, timeless cool of many and varied heroes of modern music's life and times. That he does all this on a debut without missing a beat must surely be enough to secure him wild fans, industry gongs and oodles of silver for his sassy charms. Planet Earth is better for this album's existence.

Goose - Bring it On

Video clip from the Belgium group "Goose" titled "Bring it on" Racing in soapbox cars downhill thru a Belgium city (more)

Goose - Bring It On

Belgium isn’t well known for producing anything much of musical worth, so it’s understandable to hold some reservations about a band who aim to reinvent the dance floor, busting some moves with their rhythms and beats.

Goose have managed to mix rock, pop and dance beats together with what seems to be natural ease. This glam-style of music has an infectious quality to make you move. You’ve got to be either deaf or paralysed if you don’t tap your feet to Goose’s music.

It makes a welcome change to come across a dance style of music that isn’t pieced together with samplers, instead using good old musicianship. Combining Beatles-style harmonies, T-Rex beats and dirty synthesizer sounds similar to Kraftwerk, Goose align them all to form an array of tunes. It’s easy to say that there is a resemblance to LCD Soundsytem, but there’s much more to them than that.

People have been saying for a long time that this form of music is the future, and with Goose there’s every reason to think that perhaps it is.