Big hunk o' chunk.

Loads of recent reviews:


New Hot Club EP

Born Ruffians- Pile o' shit.


Crystal Castles- Good Stuff


David Byrne- Work of Crystalline pop genius

Roll Deep- Jus' Deppressin'


The Fall- O FFS.

Serena Maneesh- Mucky puppies.
--------------------------

Rufus Wainwright review for Gaudie:

Rufus Wainwright
All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu

This review will avoid the two standard journalistic clichés you find nailed to Rufus Wainwright all the time: (1) that he’s a hedonistic ex-drug addict Wildean gone wild, and (2) that he makes ‘orchestral pop’. These are neither important nor particularly true; Rufus, like Joanna Newsom, uses inventive methods to create wide-ranging, idiosyncratic pop music, which doesn’t mean it’s ‘chamber pop’ or anything else. Anyway, on All Days are Nights, all this is gone and it’s Wainwright alone with piano, so close and so simple that you can hear him draw breath.
He has always been an extroverted, anti-private artist, but it’s more the case than ever on this album. It sounds like the songs are constructed as they go along. This is best expressed on ‘The Dream’, at the heart of the album, which is a five-minute drift around Rufus’ confused consciousness, like in the few moments after you awake from a dream and rapidly, second by second, it slips away from you, remembering less and less with each passing moment. As it is in life, so it is in art.
Three Shakespearean sonnets are translated into songs-sonnets 43, 20, and 10 (we’re mercifully saved from 18 ever becoming a pop song), to be exact. These are the choice cuts from a project Rufus did just before the premiere of his first opera last year (incidentally ‘Les Feux d’artifice t’appellent’ on this album is a stripped down version of the final aria from that opera), involving a wider selection of the sonnets. The sonnets he chose are about Shakespeare’s elusive ‘dark lady’, and Rufus claims that Lulu is the dark lady within us all. And the album does brood, somewhat sultry and detached, complex, perhaps even inhospitable at points. But, just like Shakespeare, we don’t find this sultriness repellent, but enticing, and so you are drawn in.
The piano is complex, soft, trailing and trawling underneath Rufus’s drawling, the songs sprawling out across his well tempered clavier. Rufus, lacking his usual constellation of instruments, uses the piano’s huge range of sounds and techniques to full effect, from swells of arpeggios to bashy chords, to plucking the strings and hitting the soundboard. Rufus sings in a low register, sometimes coming close to mumbling, for much of the time, only to break up into smooth, serene highs at the apexes of the songs.
People have said, and will say, that the album is burdensomely miserable and melancholic, yet misery is not what the album is about. The truth is that Rufus Wainwright has a slightly sad, hangdog voice, in all of his songs on all of his albums. He is always yearning for something more, it is the voice of a self-centred man, and to be self-centred is to be melancholy. But on previous albums this has been hidden underneath swathes of Ravel, or huge, bold brass. But on this album, there is nowhere to hide. It reveals what Rufus has been trying to express for a long time; the inherent sadness in wholeheartedly throwing yourself at the world. This is just a standard Rufus Wainwright album with the more fantastic parts and exotic arrangements removed, and we’re left with nothing but him. It’s not a ‘sad’ album as such, it’s just a thoughtful album, and thoughtfulness is so often confused with being miserable, or boring. But it’s neither of these things, and nor is this album.




--------------------------------

I also reviewed this Alicia Keys single not realising it wasn't gonna be released in britain and so obviously didn't get published.


Alicia Keys ft, Beyoncé
Put It In a Love Song

Let it ring out across the hills. Luscious, opulent R&B is back. Everyone’s talking about Gaga’s Telephone right now, but this is the Beyoncé cameo that deserves true attention. Beyoncé is unquestionably at the top, or approaching the top, of her game right now but whereas in Telephone she was supporting an essentially weak song, here she’s just part of what is an already beautiful song. Alicia Keys is a sporadic producer of moments of pop genius, every few years she comes along with a song that is universally adored; think of Fallin’, No One, and recently Empire State of Mind part II.
This is the next part of this series. At first it sounds simply, perhaps merely, beautiful but eventually you realise that there’s nothing conventional about it. The chorus is a series of descending pleas asking for universalised affection; if you love me, do everything that anyone has ever done when they love someone. The verse starts, and it’s insanely hyperactive-“ifyoureallyneedmelikeyousayyouneedme”- and continues the onslaught of demands and affirmations.
Beyoncé comes in, as she does in Telephone, as the robust, bolshy shadow of the song. Her range has always been small but more than enough, and her cameo is a brief stripe of aggression before the blissy, quivering chorus comes and washes everything else away. Then they sing in tandem for a burst of anger in the middle eight, before, once again, more chorus loveliness.
The song is surprisingly minimalist, musically speaking. The verses consist of just a rattling drumbeat, over which is put a trail of three or four notes on guitar or piano at occasional points throughout the song. The song is whiney but beautiful, commanding but fragile, threatening but a request for commitment.
I don’t know what pop music should sound like if not like this.