to my boy - The Grid (Vid)

From The Grid Album

To My Boy - Messages

Two boys make up this promising outfit and describe themselves on their Myspace site as "2 piece futurist pop made with guitar and computer. From Liverpool and Chesterfield we write letters to you". Their names sound almost familiar - Sam White and Jack Snape. A kind of modest White Stripes with more plugs, then?

Well not really, though the Chesterfield element bears investigating, as singer White has a touch of the Phil Oakeys about him, occasionally giving a robotic campness, but stopping short of outright glam.

By all accounts it sounds like the duo had an enormous amount of fun recording Messages. It's an album that holds many gems in its half hour, and left me reaching for the repeat button immediately. Initial impressions are of a beefed-up paean to industry and technology, clear for all to see in the song titles (Tell Me Computer, Oh Metal, Grid), and even more obvious to hear in the lyrics - "I have a model for you, I made on my computer", proclaims Model proudly.

The admission of a love affair with technology does not, however, remove this record of charm and personality. Sure, White can automate rather well, but shows pleasing signs of cracking on Talk and Fear Of Fragility, where far more vulnerable human emotions are explored. It's a side that removes any accusations of one dimensionality that were beginning to build after the perky bluster of the album’s first half.

Tunes and rhythms are something these chaps do well too. Eureka's blustering drums could fill a warehouse with their OMD pretensions - and the tune would ensure all those present were singing along. Outerregions sounds like a souped-up version of Just Can't Get Enough, an enjoyable stomp in the chorus giving way to more intimate asides in the verse. Meanwhile Talk's synthesized counterpoint reveals more intricate orchestration, a fine example of the attention to detail the boys secure in their programming.

While the temptation is to lump To My Boy in with the Klaxons, Shitdisco and other purveyors of that sound everyone's attaching the word 'rave' to, the truth is that while there's a strongly danceable element to their music, these two have made an album that delights equally in lyrical vignettes and personal feelings. To come through an electronic album holding those principles aloft is an achievement worthy of respect.

Digitalism - Pogo (Vid)

From the album "Idealism" (2007)

New Young Pony Club - The Bomb (Vid)

London's New Young Pony Club with their new video for The Bomb.

New Young Pony Club - Fantastic Playroom

Forget New Rave. New Young Pony Club have just started New Disco. Fantastic Playroom makes no bones about exactly what the band want to achieve. These songs are all solid pop nuggets, dripping in innuendo, squelchy bass and danceable rhythms.

Having already made something of an impression with earlier singles Ice Cream (you're probably familiar with this via the Intel adverts) and The Bomb, surely the only way is up for a band already being heralded in trendy circles as the next big thing.

There's every chance that NYPC will be one of the bands that are on everyone's lips this year. After the considerable success of CSS and the sudden (and frankly surprising considering their back catalogue) rise of The Gossip the stage is set for another band with an ear for a dance tune to make a name for themselves.

Opening up the album with Get Lucky with its choppy guitar riff and eminently danceable beats things get off to a good start. Tahita Bulmer's vocals are detached but strangely engaging. She hardly sounds interested in a word she's singing as she drawls like a pervy female version of Dylan; - if Dylan had been more interested in Glo-Sticks and cutting a rug. Yet when she sings "I'm gonna give you all my love" you have to sit up and take notice.

The samba like rhythms of Hiding On The Staircase are instantly infectious while constantly niggling at the back of your mind that you're sure you've heard this before on Luscious Jacksons' Natural Ingredients. Not that this is a bad thing in the slightest, in fact it is a very good thing indeed.

Next up Ice Cream hits all the right buttons with its unbearably funky bass, minimal arrangement and filthy lyrics. When was the last time you heard a band imploring you to "Dip your dipper"? I'll tell you when. Did Frankie Howerd ever release a single? If he did, it was probably then.

The Bomb and The Jerk both sound like they could have been found in an archaeological dig that only goes down as far as the first floor of an '80s Our Price. Not that they're entirely derivative, there's definite hints of Indie moxie in alongside the Gary Numan keyboards and that is just enough to save them from having feet of clay.

If there's a criticism to be levelled at Fantastic Playroom it's that at times it can seem a little bit uninspired and similar across the whole album. As singles, most of these songs would fly off of the shelves, but taken as a whole album it can get a bit tiring. Bulmer's vocal style does nothing to alleviate the problem, and although she occasionally sounds like B52's Kate Pierson (on Grey in particular), more commonly she can be found lurking around the beat sounding a little bit bored.

In addition I can't get the fact that many of these tracks sound exactly like Le Tigre but stripped of much of the joy and polemic that made Le Tigre's Disco Punk so exciting.

These tiny niggles aside New Young Pony Club will undoubtedly make the jump to mass popularity. This summer, Disco doesn't suck, it is most certainly in, so don't forget to dip your dippers.

Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye

There are special songs, and there are special memories, but if you're one of those nostalgia-bitten people for whom neither seem quite vivid enough on their own, nothing matches what happens when the two dovetail. The beauty of these moments is they refuse to be architected-- we can't force them any more than we can explain them. And while the Junior Boys aren't magicians, they speak the language of that magic as well as anyone making music today. (In the band's official bio, K-Punk blog's Mark Fisher writes that So This Is Goodbye is a "travel sick" record-- I'd go him one further and say that specific sensation of travel sickness is at stake every time they set out to make music.)

Just their second full-length overall, So This Is Goodbye isn't just an improbable notch above 2004's Last Exit-- it's also among the best records you'll hear all year. The first complete album made by vocalist Jeremy Greenspan without the aid of founding member and presumed rhythmic engine Johnny Dark, it finds the Boys (now rounded out by onetime engineer Matthew Didemus) working within comparatively streamlined song structures, the rhythmic capriciousness that so strongly informed their debut all but erased from the whiteboard. And yet, despite this radical formal departure, Goodbye draws out so many of the same sensations and colors that it feels like a natural next step. If anything, the absence of those slippery rhythm tracks puts the focus even more squarely on Greenspan, who delivers with a record full of elegant melodies.

Beyond the glowing synthlines, frigid percussions, and Greenspan's marvellously tensile voice (imagine Ben Gibbard with much higher cheekbones), the Junior Boys' greatest weapon is space. With an economical 10 tracks spread out over nearly 49 minutes, the pop in So This Is Goodbye is hardly immediate; instead, its songs are allowed to percolate and unfurl. On paper, especially to the average thrillseeker, that might sound a bit offputting, but it's not like these are all ballads, either. Opener "Double Shadow" begins with a gentle pattering sequence of synth beads but blooms into a smartly melodic slice of electrohouse that Booka Shade would be proud to call their own. Elsewhere, with its serrated analog lead, gushy pads, skipping rhythms, and pressurized vocals, "The Equalizer" accounts for one of the album's finest arrangements, while the uptempo first single "In The Morning" finds Greenspan merging icy r&b with 4AD's warm guitar sounds to beautiful effect.

In the end, though, the biggest goosebumps come courtesy of the slowburners. The penultimate track "When No One Cares" recasts the Sinatra standard as a wobbly space ballad, closer "FM" crosses the finish line in an unhurried cloud of staccato arpeggios and warm harmonies, and standout "Count Souvenirs" marries liquefied synths and keening minor-key melodies with the album's starkest imagery ("Empty stalls and shopping malls that we'll never see again/ Hotel lobbies like painful hobbies that linger on"). Finally, the album’s title track finds Greenspan singing: "So this is goodbye, no need to lie/ This creature of pain, has found me again/ So this is goodbye," possibly in reference to Dark, or to his departed former label head Nick Kilroy, or to someone else entirely. It's the album's heartbeat, as well as one of its weightiest moments-- an acknowledgment that in times of despair the best course of action is often just to keep moving. Wanderlust never sounded so good.

PlayRadioPlay! - The Frequency EP

PlayRadioPlay! is the creation of Seventeen year-old Dan Hunter, a Texas kid who has become the latest MySpace phenom. His songs have already hit over one million plays on his MySpace site without his album even being released. He's opened for FallOut Boy and secured a slot on the 2007 Vans Warped Tour. One listen to The Frequency EP, his debut on Stolen Transmission, reveals why.
Texas Straightedge Softcore

Billing himself as "Texas Straightedge Softcore", PlayRadioPlay! is like Atom and His Package without the goofiness or Apoptygma Berzerk with a bit more linear structure. It also hearkens a bit to a million club bands of the late '80s and early '90s (think of shades of EMF, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, and Jesus Jones had they relied heavier on Barry D's keyboard bits). All in all, this kid seems way to young to carry his musical depth.

And emo kids take note – Hunter's lyrics are heartfelt without being melodramatic. Even on tracks like "At This Particular Moment In Time", when he bemoans his inability to impress a girl because he's not yet 18, the song is painfully sincere and wistful, without ever hitting that painful wall known as emo patheticism.

The Frequency EP opens with "Bad Cops Bad Charities", PlayRadioPlay! launches immediately into his A-Pop beats and lyrics that sound like a younger version of Bright Eyes' Connor Oberst having a good day. All of it adds up to a great sweet sound that leaves you with a pleasant feeling in your tummy.

He doesn't constantly rely on manufactured beats, either. "Complement Each Other Like Colors" is a bit more organic, with synth lines accented by stripped down drums and guitars, sounding like it could have come out of garage rather than a Powerbook.

And even when he's relying on his manufactured beats, he's no one-beat pony. Unlike many synth-pop outfits, each song doesn't carry the same Casiotone demo beat. It's all carefully constructed for each song, proving that Hunter knows that simply owning the software doesn't make one a songwriter.

He closes the EP with a cover of the Killer's "Mr. Brightside", and captures all of the emotion in his stripped-down synthesized version that the big guys did in their full-blown version. PlayRadioPlay's version is easier to dance to, too!

At a time when a million kids are taking the easy emo route, it's refreshing to hear this young Texan kid put thought into his songwriting and make songs with depth and emotion, yet empty of cliché.

Au Revoir Simone - Fallen Snow (Vid)

Music video for "Fallen Snow" from the album "The Bird Of Music".

Au Revoir Simone - The Bird of Music

The cover for The Bird of Music has the three girls of Au Revoir Simone dressed in virginal white against an abyss of sunshine—and so it makes sense when they say that their music could have soundtracked The Virgin Suicides. And they're not too far off. If there was any kind of trope to stretch across this one, it would be from that film: the limerent, boy-voyeur coming upon a bunch of bedroom sirens trapped between gilded walls, getting caught up in the buckle and swoon of humid flesh and musty bedrooms.

The Bird of Music sounds like that sort of pop-vigil; with reconstituted instruments that sound like byzantine synths and Sunday morning organs, bleeding equal parts innocence and sturm und drang. The drum machine sounds like feet endlessly pacing bedroom floors and there's plaintive vocals with diary-fed lines about, you know, feelings—a boon to the big buckets of romantic despondence that coat most of the album's eleven tracks.

Opener "Lucky One" is a petite anthem with a windchimey send-up that stutters into an all-for-one sing-along, "Let the sunshine / Let it come / To show us that tomorrow is eventual." From then on things range from emotive dirge to buoyant dirge, with a few quiet stunners stuffed in between. "Fallen Snow" borrows a chapel organ for a tentative stomp through a tough breakup, one of the album's most recurring themes. A song set to heartbeats, "Violent Yet Flammable World" is caught up in a big wash of hum and brood. The girls trade harmonies between a cascading melody and soundtrack music so soul-sopping that it can overload the lyrics—which it too often does. Head-scratch simile "We fold like icicles on paper shelves" never begins to make sense. You've come upon the unlocked diary of a crush only to find an itemized list of digested foods and unicorn doodles.

The Bird of Music would seem to be the same unadorned synth-pop-as-confessional that came of age with the Young Marble Giants and recently burned up all over again with the Blow. And when it comes off right, it's effortless and overwhelming. But there's always the caveat of this sort of fantasy; The Girl in Glass Case thing only really works when the glass gets shattered: there's blemishes and idiosyncrasies and a funny walk but you're already won over. Closer waltz "The Way to There" latently admits that maybe Au Revoir Simone haven't busted their fingers yet: "If you feel compelled towards me / Then it's just gravity."

Chemical Brothers - Do it again - We are the night (Vid)

Amazing & beautiful idea. Hundreds of illuminated balloons set free during the night in Berlin. The invention of flowies.

The Chemical Brothers - We Are the Night

It's going to take another few years, a lot of nostalgia, and even more critical evangelism for the Chemical Brothers to be recognized as one of the most all-around consistent acts of the 1990s. More than a decade after the release of their debut album, 1995's Exit Planet Dust, they remain inextricably tied to Big Beat electronica, a genre that had already fallen out of fashion by the time the tech bubble burst. Since most of America's hopes for so-called "electronica" were pinned on a cynically marketed next-big-thingism, its chart failure has tended to overshadow everything else-- including a fair critical appraisal, as Salon's Michelle Goldberg demonstrated in a pan of the Chemical Brothers' 2002 album Come With Us: "Commercially, the mid-to-late-90s conceit that electronic music would wrest the airwaves from guitar rock dinosaurs has proved as fanciful as the idea that online video rental could be a billion-dollar business."

You don't need to have the Chemicals' Singles 93-03 video compilation in your Netflix queue to question the relevance of that statement: Electronica was a failure as a mass-culture lifestyle trend. But it was successful, too, in one important area: producing memorable pop records. Even in the post-crash doldrums of the early 2000s, the Chemical Brothers sustained their creative stride more effectively than most other artists clogging up the modern rock charts 30 notches above them. Albums like Come With Us and 2005's Push the Button were more pacekeepers than trendsetters, sure, but there was a cohesive freedom to them, a sort of universal dance music catchall vibe that cross-evolved through acid house, electro, hip-hop, and whatever else they could layer big, explosive bass over. Even as their returns began to diminish the further they got from the staggering peak of Dig Your Own Hole, the mild creative downturn wasn't significant enough to damage the overall feeling of optimistic, psychedelic egalitarianism embedded in their music.

This, though, this We Are the Night-- no, come on, not now. Not after Fatboy Slim's Palookaville and the Prodigy's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned and Orbital's The Blue Album and Daft Punk's Human After All and the last two Moby records. Just because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons are falling off the cliff a few years later than most of the other once-great hopes of 90s dance music doesn't make the plummet any less frustrating or embarrassing. Not even the low points on Push the Button suggested they were about to tank this hard.

On We Are the Night, the Chemical Brothers have switched from integrators to imitators: Where 1999's Surrender opened with "Music: Response", expertly streamlining the cutting-edge electro-funk of early Timbaland, "Do It Again" sounds like a public domain version of a FutureSex/LoveSounds beat, with perky synths and an aloof radio-dance churn gutlessly approximating the elements that make those tracks work. Guest singer Ali Love turns in a mediocre Timberlake impression-- although even JT himself couldn't pull off a dippy couplet like "got a brain like bubblegum/ Blowing up my cranium."

The album's title track attempts to weave the duo's euphoric buildups and breakdowns into warmed-over Krautrock, but with a beat that never crests, its dynamics are left to a weakly kitschy Perrey-Kingsley melody, damning the track to 6 1/2 minutes of a rickety retro-future parody of the 360-degree treadmill from 2001. "Das Speigel" is an ill-advised stab at minimal house-- have the Chems ever even attempted to pull off minimal anything? -- and after layering on enough electronic giggles, squeals, melodicas, guitars, and extraneous sound effects to a briefly-promising groove, it turns out sounding like something from side 6 of Booka Shade's Sandinista!.

Other autopsies of this album might pin its weaker moments on the guest spots, but those mostly just make an already-bad situation moderately worse. "All Rights Reversed" would still sound like groggy emo if they got somebody besides the Klaxons to mutter close-harmony vocals over its inflated theatricality. It's probably for the best that "Battle Scars" wasn't given to a better singer than Willy Mason: His head-trauma Gordon Lightfoot vocals and the sub-Rod McKuen lyrics ("There's a line in the sand/ Put there by man/ By man whose children built up castles made of stone") are perfectly suited to the track's tedious, xylophone-laden indie sleepwalk. And while there's been a well-earned avalanche of derision aimed at Fatlip's dopey nature-doc rap "The Salmon Dance", he had to work with the beat the Chemicals gave him; most MCs, faced with the prospect of rhyming over something Arthur Baker might have concocted after an afternoon of gorging on vanilla-frosted hash brownies and Spongebob reruns, would probably rap about dancing like a fish on crack, too.

The Chemical Brothers' descent into ineptitude is at least accompanied by a few brief highlights: "Saturate" plays like one of Surrender's acid house throwbacks, complete with Bill Ward-size drums, while "A Modern Midnight Conversation"-- based on a whipcrack cowbell beat and the bassline from Crystal Grass' 1974 psych-disco classic "Crystal World"-- is as euphoric as anything they've done this decade short of "Star Guitar." But those flashes of effortless dancefloor-filling greatness used to be the norm for the Chemical Brothers; as exceptions on an album of colossal blunders, they can only serve as fleeting reminders. I once found it hard to fathom that Dig Your Own Hole was released ten years ago; it's easier to believe now.

Various Artists - Ed Rec Vol.2 (Vid)

Various Artists ED BANGER RECORDINGS
Ed Rec Vol 2
Out Now With JUSTICE, UFFIE, FEADZ, Mr OIZO, BUSY P, SEBASTIAN, DJ MEHDI ETC...

Various Artists - Ed Rec Vol.2

Bob Sinclar's 2006 hit "Rock This Party"-- an amusing rendezvous between dancehall's Kopa riddim and samples of C+C Music Factory's "Gonna Make You Sweat", and by far last year's most perverse French house track-- revealed just how meaningless the separations between French house's underground and overground are. You won't hear anything like the Sinclair track on Ed Rec 2, Ed Banger's second label compilation, although it's not for lack of trying. The stumbling block is in their heads, perhaps: Whereas Ed Banger are stymied by the erroneous assumption that interesting ideas can only be realized at the expense of unambiguously seizing the pop jugular, Sinclar just went out and did both.

Ed Rec 2 reveals clearly enough the flaws in the label's aesthetic vision: resident rapper Uffie, already a dubious proposition, sounds positively execrable on her ode to haters, "Dismissed", but if this is by far the worst inclusion here, it's not (just) because Uffie can't rap. Blame the creative bankruptcy of the label's intermittent fascination with sneeringly amateurish, stuttery send-ups of old skool electro, which also ruins the Yoko Ono electro of DJ Mehdi's "Lucky Girl". These artists should, one and all, give up on trying to tell jokes. Luckily, most of Ed Rec 2 witnesses the label roster in consolidation mode, staging a strategic retreat to the messy, rock-influenced take on French house which Daft Punk codified on Human After All. While the move invites accusations of redundancy, I'm inclined to look upon Ed Banger's reduced expectations with some sympathy. One needs to accept from the outset that Ed Banger are unlikely to produce something as all-conquering as "Rock & Roll" or as marvelously confounding as "Aerodynamic" in order to fully enjoy the enthusiasm with which they go about colonizing the space between these two poles, from the ridiculous Genesis synth runs of Mr. Flash's "Disco Dynamite" to the rusted-on percussion presets of Feadz's lurching "Edwrecker".

And perhaps some of the elder statesmen's production nous has rubbed off as well. Justice's "Phantom" fuses hyper-plasticity with noise for noisiness' sake in characteristic fashion. While it's hardly surprising, it's perhaps the duo's best executed effort to date, the descent from disco sparkle into a mid-range black hole and back out again carried off with agility, even grace. Busy P's "Rainbow Man" may simply reiterate the same grinding, slow, mechanical house blueprint that Daft Punk established with "Steam Machine" and that SebastiAn has since made his own, but why should we expect more than good craftmanship? Why can't there be an entire genre of these menacingly sexy dominatrix backing tracks? By comparison, SebastiAn's own "Greel" is disappointingly lacking in character, its mechanic gewalt expressing brute force but nothing to give that power meaning.

Indeed, it's usually when Ed Banger's artists get dark-- rather than merely loud-- that they are most compelling. Far and away the best track on this compilation, Krazy Baldhead's "Strings of Death" performs the unlikely feat of summarizing the label's entire aesthetic while sounding like nothing else in its back catalogue, boasting the type of muscular rock groove that the label should have been cornering all along. Instead of settling for a straightahead churn or stomp, it slinks its way around overblown, bluesy guitar riffs while paranoid synths and snapping electro beats add a slight industrial inflection, somewhere between Ministry at their most lithe and Depeche Mode at their most heavy. It's actually thrilling, and I'd wager part of the thrill derives from the unexpectedness of the equation, as if industrial glam-rock is the unintended and explosive result of a naïve French House alchemy experiment. If Ed Banger can only stumble upon greatness by accident, let's hope the artists never work out exactly what it is they're doing on tracks like these.

Various Artists - Ed Rec Vol.1

Apart from belonging to a proud tradition of dance music punning (Ed Rush, Ed Case-- and surely someone has snapped up "Ed Wound" or "Ed Trauma" by now?), French dance label Ed Banger's nom de plume says a lot about their sonic sensibilities: what better label home for Justice's crude but thrilling noisy house anthem "Waters of Nazareth"? But it also says a lot about their sense of self. Compared to the hyper-stylisation of Kitsuné or Modular, the label's compatriots in the new French house/nu rave movement, Ed Banger can seem a bit scruffy and, well, simple, enthusiastically embracing a mindless hysteria which their friends prefer to present in quotation marks.

Not that it's the dancefloor which Ed Banger's hysteria necessarily aims for: As well as the de rigeur rock signifiers, the material on its first retrospective is distingushed by its infatuation with (mostly old skool) hip-hop, from Uffie's end-of-the-line devolution of Fannypack and Princess Superstar, to Krazy Baldheads' glitch-laden rap, to Busy P's cut-up cubist booty. Filtered through the unabashed plasticity and stuttering zaniness of the label's sonic approach, hip-hop's primary role is to provide an ironic balancing, to be a byword for unmediated and organic rawness amidst so much carefully programmed insanity. It's a shame, though, that the results usually cleave closer to Kid 606 demolishing NWA than Daft Punk's "Oh Yeah": no-one seems to have told these guys about the value of just running with a good groove.

On the other hand, the pall of 1999 which hangs over so much of the self-conscious production trickery here is ultimately kind of endearing, suggesting a goofy lack of good taste or timing. Most ridiculously, Vicarious Bliss' "Theme From Vicarious Bliss" sounds like the Bomfunk MCs remixing Third Eye Blind-- this is not exactly a bad thing, but it's hardly a career move you can really get behind. So it's not surprising that for their remix Justice manage to conjure up a vision of jaded rock cool that wasn't there in the original-- a bit disappointing that it's exactly the sort of half-hearted rock-dance fusion the label otherwise scores points for avoiding.

Somewhere between the dance, the rock, the IDM, and the hip-hop, Ed Banger's artists occasionally and perhaps unwittingly stumble across pop, and it's these inspired accidents that make Ed Rec Vol. 1 halfway listenable. Para One's remix of DJ Mehdi's "I Am Somebody" is a dog's breakfast of Prince and hip-house, but it's indecisive messiness is also the key to its appeal, sounding like the leftovers from an aborted Basement Jaxx/Daft Punk collaboration that ended in tears. The pop in Ed Banger material exists on a sonic rather than conceptual level: as a song, Uffie's "Pop the Glock" is a totally unnecessary addition to the modern pantheon of sneering faux-MC triviality, but it's almost entirely redeemed by the extended Cher-like autotune harmonies that hover about Uffie's (intermittently torturous) vocals like a sickly aura.

Ed Banger's best performer is SebastiAn, who contributes bleepy, glitchy EBM disco filtered through a production sensibility that's three parts Depeche Mode circa Black Celebration and one part Autechre, which is the same as being all parts Nine Inch Nails remixes. This is a reason to like him, in case you're wondering: He may be as enamoured with mid-range blare as Justice, but you get the impression that SebastiAn's aggression is a bit fey and girlish too, like he's hoping you'll notice how prettily he grits his teeth. On the whole, his labelmates could afford to be more girlish: currently their wide-eyed ambition is held in check by a certain air of male jocularity, which reveals itself in the wild mood swings between stomping noise and overly fussy digital editing. No-one here is interested in sounding polished or professional, which is fine, but I could wish for a slightly more feminine touch at times (and no, Uffie doesn't count). Like, how much better would anthems like "Waters of Nazareth" be with a diva squealing over the top? Give me that over another monotone rockstar performance anyday.