Hometown Glory

He's the type of guy you could take home to your mother; sweet, intelligent and you know he'd call you the morning after. I am of course talking about Josh Pyke, Australia's way of making it up to the world for allowing Keith Urban to sing...to exist. His second full-length LP is Chimney's A'Fire, and while the title may sound like a chapter out of a Dickens novel, Josh should be congratulated for overcoming the trap that many artists fall into of repeating the clichés we've heard a million times before in his brand of folk-pop. Thank be to God there are no "i love you, i love you, i love you...", "you're so beautiful" or any other kind of crap that have nearly destroyed every man with an acoustic guitar's chance to be taken seriously. No, no, no, i am happy to say Josh cooks up a more sophisticated flavour of love and loss. That being said, unfortunately the concession for this lyrical smart has been a certain amount of musical monotony, that taints the album due to a significant lack of variety between upbeat and down-tempo songs.

Last year, Josh Pyke featured in my top albums list of 2007 - his first album Memories & Dust provided confirmation that the folk-pop troubadour had the lyrical wax to match any of the Damien Rice's and Ryan Adams's out there. Barely a year later, he has released part two, and it's pretty much just more memories and more dust - Chimney's A'Fire is not so much a jump forward but a shimmy to the side of what we've already heard from this Sydneysider.

This album could have a polarising effect on fans due to the fact that musically - it is remarkably (and somewhat disappointingly) similar. Generally the melodies and arrangements of the songs are basically the same as those on the debut album if not slightly more complicated. But its complexity does not pay off completely, as it rarely does in this genre, and the result is unfortunately predictable and sometimes boring music. There are the basic finger-picking guitar ditties and the sweeping majestic string accompaniments but none of the twists and turns that could have made the songs that little bit more catchy and memorable.

Add this folly to the baffling fact that Josh, who produced the album himself has begun the album with the most sleepy and downright forgettable track - which does not make for good first impressions. What's worse is that track two, You Don't Scare Me is such an upbeat, catchy song, it makes you think that there is more to come. Alas, there is not, as track 3, The Summer serenades in, a song so saturated in nostalgia that you might as well sit the kids down and tell them the story of how you met their mother at a Bee Gees tribute show and how petrol used to only cost 75c a litre.

This being said, what Chimney's A'Fire lacks in musical nerve and freshness it makes up for with such accomplished lyrical density that you start to wonder whether the album will be nominated for an ARIA award or the Noble Prize for Literature. Okay, maybe that's an unjustified over-statement, but what I'm trying to say is this guy can string some words together; take the last verse from The Summer:

"But time is like the ocean,
you can only hold a little in your hands,
so swim before we’re broken,
before our bones become,
black coral on the sand."

Okay i know out of the context of the songs it sounds a bit pretentious, but believe me, when you hear him say it, he might as well be Socrates. Well maybe not Socrates, but Josh definitely has the ability to make even his most Snow Patrol lyrics not make you wanna beat the crap outta him. His sincerity alone keeps him afloat and pretty much gives him wuss-immunity for the entirety of the album.

Never quite straying from the lullaby tempo, the album is best listened to as a whole rather than individually, assuming you're not driving or operating heavy machinery at the time. If Josh doesn't impress you in the first innings, he finishes a lot stronger than he started, with the penultimate and closing tracks delicately showing his class and growth as a songwriter. New Year's Song should be praised above all other songs on this album for its innovative phrasing that has already characterised Pyke in his brief career, with an extraordinary ability to make the mundane sound wistful as he opens the song observing,

"If you’re freezing on your left side,
And you’re boiling on your right side,
Then I guess you might be warm upon the line,
There are many ways one can divide a life,
And I’ve got mine"

Closing track, Where Two Oceans Meet while at first seems like a book-end waste of time like the first track, runs deeper than first impressions. It reminds me of Ben Harper circa. 1997 - a very good thing indeed. Slow and meditative with gospel inflected beauty, Josh shows a different side of his pallet branching out from his folk-pop to deeper territory, exactly what he needs to be doing at this point in his career.

With more balls than his physique gives him credit for, Chimney's A'Fire shows off Josh's natural talent as a producer. The drawback of producing your own work though is always going to be becoming too one-eyed because there isn't another person in the studio to draw you in different directions. And while that may be the case with this largely down-tempo second LP, Josh succeeds on a whole due largely to his unmistakable talent as a songwriter getting him over the line. With enough diamonds in the rough, this album only promises more to come, with his lyrical muscle flexing and his musical landscape not shifting too far from the comfort zone of his fans, something they will either love or become easily frustrated with. For me, while there are patches of mediocrity the beauty of the album is infectious and for now I'm just going to stay warm upon the line.

B+

7th Heaven...?

I read something about the mythical 7th album for bands the other day...

The Beatles - Rubber Soul
Rolling Stones - Beggar's Banquet


Oasis - Dig Out Your Soul

I know what you're thinking, so sod off. I am not one of those Oasis maniacs that every time a new album is brought out I quiver upon hearing Liam's raspy voice. Nor do I still claim that they're the best band in the world - though their live show is spectacular. Therefore i too nearly choked on my toasted sandwich upon reading such a gloriously ostentatious comparison in one trashy English music mag. But should we really be surprised by such a claim? Each album since the decade-defining duo (Definitely Maybe & Morning Glory) have seen the precariously obnoxious Gallagher brothers declare that it's the best record since Sgt. Pepper's. Yet many critics, half in awe of their god-like status in Britain, do not dare say otherwise, as if afraid of being on the receiving end of a notorious acid spray from the silver tongue of Gallagher Snr.

So it was with great anticipation but also apprehension that i listened to the new album by these Mancunian gobshites, and you know what? It was actually fucking good. Better than good, it was brilliant...and all of a sudden i was off guard, I hadn't prepared myself for this, it almost felt like I was back in '96 listening to Wonderwall on double tape over and over again (I was 8 years old, gimme a break...) It sounded as if Oasis had stopped giving a fuck about being the world's greatest band, and for the first time in a decade had just started playing some good old fashioned Britpop.

The next problem was writing this piece, how do you tell people Oasis are amazing again without sounding like a groupie fuckwit that is still clinging to the group's past glory? They had let their fans down for over ten years, surely no one would listen to me screaming from the rooftops that things had suddenly changed...for real this time. So anyway i cracked open some cleanskin Shiraz and started typing away...

I got about 200 words in before i found this...

Now usually I would not post another writer's material - it's just not narcissistic enough - but seriously, not only am I going to give you someone else's review - it's from NME. Pretty much the main culprit of the last 10 years of Oasis dick-sucking and unnecessary glorifying - but here I was reading a review by one Barry Nicolson and it was expressing (much better than i was doing at the time) every single thought i had in my mind. So I thought, "Fuck it" and without further adieu...

One wonders what the young, hungry and infinitely profane Noel Gallagher – the yob-poet gob o’the North with a ring of coke crust around his nostrils and a sheaf of era-defining songs stuffed into his back pocket – would have made of his older, wiser and still infinitely profane self these days. From atop his citadel he watches keenly with magpie eyes the comings and goings of a musical landscape he helped to shape. He deigns to descend from time to time to pour scorn where needed or praise where deserved. Occasionally, he gets his band together and they make an album. The album itself tends to be less important than the act of its creation; nobody really expects anything earth-shattering but it’s nice to know Oasis are still around, like dormant gods of a bygone era, stirring occasionally in their slumber but never approaching anything like full potency. They’re the sort of band a youthful Noel Gallagher, the one whose ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ dreams weren’t real quite yet, might have snortingly derided as something unprintable.

Yet, despite the fact he’s made it explicit in recent interviews he doesn’t give a monkey’s what anyone says about Oasis, if there’s one thing that strikes you immediately on your first listen to Dig Out Your Soul, it’s that it sounds like a band not exactly reinvented, but certainly rejuvenated. There’s a new-band urgency and invention to it, a sense that Oasis are no longer straining to ‘be Oasis’. Take into consideration, for example, the fact there’s no big piano anthem, à la Stop Crying Your Heart Out, nor yer-my-besht-mates moment like Little By Little or Let There Be Love. The closest we get to a ballad is the floaty psychedelia of Liam’s I’m Outta Time. In fact, Dig Out Your Soul is – more or less – the rough’n’ready rock’n’roll album the Gallaghers threaten to make every time the critics are down on their current effort but somehow never get round to.

Opener Bag It Up – complete with a not-so-subtle steal from It’s Raining Men, of all places – is a pounding rhythmic mess of distorted psych-rock that doesn’t sound like the work of a band in their 15th year. It sounds vibrant and cocky and a little bit cheeky, with Liam snarling about having his “Heebiejeebies in a little bag” and “going for a walk with the monkey man” before a coda that fades into a swell of noise. It’s still unmistakably Oasis, but it’s playful, less obvious and unafraid of going into unexpected places. The Turning continues in this vein by getting into what could technically be classed as a ‘groove’ (not to be confused with ‘going dance’, mind), with a verse consisting of a melodic drone of classic Oasis garble (“We live with the numbers, mining a dream for the same old song”) that gives way to a climactic BRMC-style pseudo-biblical chorus about rapture and fallen angels. Dark and brooding, it’s only part two of a five-song streak that represents the strongest start to an Oasis album in years.

Lead single The Shock Of The Lightning is a pretty good approximation of where Oasis are at in 2008. That same Gallagher swagger still courses through it, but it doesn’t have to rely on terrace-chant choruses (of which Noel’s probably exhausted himself by now) to get its point across. The Noel-sung Waiting For The Rapture similarly shirks the obvious route, with its ragged Five To One riffage sounding almost like a poppier Queens Of The Stone Age. But let’s not marginalise Liam. Of his three contributions to Dig Out Your Soul, one is truly inspired, one is merely good and the third is a bit rubbish, albeit in a fun way. The former is I’m Outta Time, the album’s softest moment, which sounds not unlike a softer, sweeter Comfortably Numb (without all the heroin doom, obviously).

Liam’s no Morrissey, but what he lacks in lyrical nous he makes up for in sheer audible soul and wide-eyed earnestness. That said, “If I’m to fall, would you be there to applaud?/Or would you hide behind them all?” sounds like it might be directed towards the ever-critical Noel. Soldier On, meanwhile, is a doomy, swirling psychedelic march set to a looping blues riff that closes the album in suitably atmospheric fashion, and Ain’t Got Nothin’ – about his infamous Munich brawl of 2002 – is spirited but a bit inconsequential, with Liam’s rasped instruction of “Here’s a song, sing along” belying its rather lazy rehashing of the previous album’s The Meaning Of Soul. It’s one of a handful of duds, of which The Nature Of Reality’s cod-mystic quagmire is probably the worst offender, with more vague lyrical clichés about all things on, of and in the mind over a sluggish melody that doesn’t really go anywhere. Gem’s To Be Where There’s Life – another of Oasis’ infrequent dabblings with the east – is a bit better, its drone-rock groove (there’s that word again) at least a sideways detour into new-ish musical vistas, but it doesn’t quite come off. There’s the sneaking suspicion that the songwriting democracy installed by Noel to steady the ship after Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants may not always be compatible with quality control.

But just when you worry things might flounder, The Chief crops up with a song as good as anything he’s written this century. Falling Down is a distant cousin of both his Chemical Brothers collaboration Setting Sun and Don't Believe The Truth’s Part Of The Queue – a swoonsome, blissed-out melody sung by Noel over jaunty, ever-shifting drums. Atone point he declares “We live a dying dream/If you know what I mean”. Nope, we’ve got no idea either, but it’s one of those grand Oasis moments where you don’t have to.

So, where does all this leave them? Well, when you consider Oasis’ largest evolutionary leap so far has been using drum loops on a couple of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants tracks, Dig Out Your Soul sounds like an astounding act of musical creationism. Liam continues to impress as a songwriter, although he’s at his best and most inventive when he’s at his sweetest. And Noel, for his part, seems no longer bound by slavish devotion to writing typically ‘Oasis’ songs, with Oasis all the richer for it. But more than anything else, there’s a feeling that Dig Out Your Soul might actually be their best album in over a decade. In other words, not quite the fabled, oft-promised “Best one since fookin’ Definitely Maybe!” but certainly the best one since fookin’ Morning Glory. And you never thought you’d hear that, did you?

B+

So while the album may not be Rubber Soul - it's most likely as close as Oasis are going to get to it in the 21st century, which is enough for me, (and the tens of thousands of Brits that will fill Wembley Stadium a few times over).

MGMT - There! I said it!

Where to start with MGMT. So many things annoy me with this band i don't even know where to begin. Firstly, their name is dumb and it's derived from the even stupider name, "Management." Secondly, their album cover, costumes and over all demeanor smacks so hard of trying to be different from the so-called mainstream that they are pretty much an oxymoron. Note to MGMT: you are the fucking mainstream.

This fabricated facade is even more infuriating due to the fact that it's already been done in the 80's, the record executives are just re-hashing a marketing plan to people who are too young too remember the glam-rock days of old. Well, who'd want to remember them anyway? But still, this is most likely the reason no one over the age of 25 has paid any attention to MGMT - they are a collage of every 80's style the world has since tried to destroy, most of which can be found at any local opp shop. My point being, they're not that fucking unique.

The majority of my reluctance to join their world-dominating cult though stems from the simple fact that their music is not as good as everyone says it is. Seriously, the second half of the album is like drinking sour milk, you don't notice how bad it is until it's halfway down your throat...but even this wouldn't be as bad if they didn't cock tease their listeners with momentary flashes of brilliance that promise so much more than they deliver.

Opening track Time To Pretend is harmless if not a bit mundane. It has all the predictable weird effects on keyboard synths and electro-tampered vocals that (Yawn, sorry) have been playing in shit indie nightclubs through even shittier sound systems for years; the only difference is that these guys are on a major record label and have a higher publicity budget. Add this predictability to the fact that the lyrics are based on the lives of Pete Doherty and Kate Moss. The band they will say they are trying to be ironic or that they're making social comment. But they are still dedicating the first song on their debut CD to one of the most over-rated. fuckwit musicians in modern music and his paper-thin, air head model ex-girlfriend. Both of these people should not ever be the focus of a song or any other form of popular culture, it's just demeaning to art.

Weekend Wars is one such flash of brilliance I mentioned before, a four minute lightning flash of brilliance that makes you hope a storm is coming. The tampered vocals are gone, the over-produced sound is gone and the lyrics are semi-decent. Pretty much all of the
things that hampered the opening track disappear, replaced by a dreamy chorus and a rollicking beat that saves first impressions. Hopes are high at this point.

Despite having a name that makes it sound like a Jonestown hymn or something those Hillsong people would have printed on their shirts, The Youth is a perfectly fine and forgettable third track. But even right now as i write this, i can't remember a single lyric or what it sounds like, so I'm going to have to go put it on before I write anymore...that itself says a lot doesn't it? Oh yeah now i remember, more tampered vocals, more weird noises. Surprise surprise! The verses are shithouse, incredibly slow and meaningless but the chorus is somewhat catchy if not slightly grating and a wee bit annoying. Still, the overall song is inoffensive, a neutral song that some critics would call a waste at this point in an album. In hindsight, it sadly might be a highlight of the album, funny how things turn out like that...

Single Electric Feel is good. Yes i agree it's good. It's kooky, it's cool, it hits the right edges, but it is you that have made this song shit. Yes, you. Plus the fact that them singing about electric eels reminds me of a weird sex show i saw in Thailand once. But mostly its the public, with its unjust, over-emphasised glory and hype leading it to be played on 6 different radio stations simultaneously that have killed it. So thanks, thanks a lot for that, i hope you teeny boppers with your fucking ringtones are fucking happy now because it's dead. It's in the ground and for people like me, it's never coming back again. You can dig it up and throw this jewel in the shitpile that is the rest of the album because i can't stand hearing it anymore!

The only thing else on the album that comes close to the gold MGMT fans must see covering the CD is the song Kids. Now this is the part where all the indie-not-so-indie-lovers will complain, "That's like the BEST song on the album!" It's over five fucking minutes and has an eight-bar melody. It's too fucking long! Yes the intro is cool and i dig it as well, i definitely think it's very catchy, but isn't anyone else sick of it after 5 minutes of repetitiveness? The band milked it, plain and simple. If it was three and a half minutes long i would be agreeing with all the skinny-jean wearing, deathly-white looking boys who swear by this so-called anthem - but that extra 2 minutes just shows that MGMT do not have enough experience in this bizz to know when a song is going to drag on. An amateur mistake that wastes the potential for a classic song.

Look to be honest i don't want to even waste my time writing about how mediocre the rest of the album is. The last five songs drop off considerably from the edge MGMT had been resting on uneasily so far in the album. Of Moons, Birds & Monsters is the only song of note that manages to pass a test of whether i can listen to a song all the way through. It should be commended for that, it comes to a pretty cool climax, if not taking its sweet time to get there.

While there is definitely room for improvement, the band shows hints that they can make a cool song, but this album doesn't deliver more than one. As for all their unjustified praise and adoration, well i have to come back to my prophet Alex Turner who said "I guess all that's left, is the proof that love's not only blind but deaf." (Sigh) Maybe I'm getting to old for this sort of thing.

C