SINGLES and STREAMS ROUND-UP inc Hot Chip, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Martin Callingham, The Prodigy etc
Hot Chip - Huarache Lights - ★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Break out the glowsticks and earnest chinstrokes, here come the Chipsters with their sixth album, their second for Domino after 2012's In Our Heads. It's a tough act to follow but Huarache Lights doesn't disappoint. It's very much in the vein of Over and Over or Shake a Fist, but lacking the urgency of say, Night and Day (how was that not a huge hit?). Here we have chunky '80s drums, a snatch of vocoder, bleeps, hooks a-plenty, a weird, weird old bassline from somewhere (Orbital perhaps?) and not so much a tune as an event. They're the Devo of the EDM world and they get the nod from me.
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Ballad Of The Mighty I - ★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Now here's something - a Gallagher feelin' the funk. Not a '70s James Brown funk you understand, a brutal relentless sort of DFA-cum-The Rapture hybrid that's slick, yet just the right side of 'indie-disco' to be highly likeable. Taken from the second High Flying Birds album, Ballad Of The Mighty I has elements of The Hollies Bus Stop (no really, listen), is drenched with strings and some of the best arranging I've heard in a long time. Even with the title Chasing Yesterday, the next album's still got to be worth a listen if this effort is anything to go by. And I'm not normally a fan, to be fair.
Martin Callingham - Folding - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
From the pastoral singer-songwriter's guild of Drake, Thompson, Mitchell, McRae and Duffy (that's Stephen Duffy, by the way), comes the hushed tones of one Martin Callingham whose previous occupation was to front a band called Joyce The Librarian. Folding is a soothing extract from his latest opus Tonight, We All Swim Free, boding well for what's to come from the Bristolian's arsenal. If Sunday mornings mean lolling about in bed with the need for a comedown, Callingham's got your card marked with this wistful moody ballad.
Paul Weller - White Sky - ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Distorted angry man hollering hatred at those in power - what's not to like? Well, the lack of a song, for one. Y'see if you're going to hate on the privileged and those in rule, you need a hook. Tick. Then you need a voice. Tick. Then you need a memorable song. Untick. Sadly, for the first time in a long while, Weller has eschewed the great and good that made him untouchable. He's better than this short sharp chunk of blustery kerfuffle. Let's see what the next album throws up and put this rowdy old schtick down to shock.
Taylor Locke - Call Me Kuchu - ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Mr Locke makes exactly the kind of distorted sub-blues that Paul Weller was knocking out ten, fifteen, twenty years ago but sounds more like Rod Stewart than Rod himself. Call Me Kuchu hails from Locke's newest album Time Stands Still, out now kids, and is a bold, marauding few minutes of effervescence if ever you heard them. Locke can riff with the best of them and Call Me Kuchu is an exacting fireball of dubbed-out funk-rock that neither appals or enthrals - it just rocks. And sometimes that's all you need.
Tom Figgins - Rain On Me - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
This is one of those rousing acoustic strumalong anthems that Frank Turner's been knocking out in his sleep. Which is no bad thing. Figgins has a set of well-honed pipes and thankfully doesn't sing in that typically affected sad-face mockernee accent that blights so much music these days. Thus, to this end, Rain On Me is indeed sad-face but isn't irritating enough to be blasted with a sawn-off at point-blank range. All of which means this bearded wonder might be worth a second listen after all.
Tenfivesixty - Dashboard Light - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Motorik is how many people might describe this intriguing barrage of pulsating beats and gear-shifts. Boring might be another description. Personally, I see some potential in this seven-minute epic although Tenfivesixty won't be winning prices for lyrical content. They might get some props for the decent chorus though - a chorus that soars in a sweetly-sung way and not a million miles away from something Talk Talk might have knocked out thirty years ago (not surprisingly, The Tenfivesixty contributed to the splendid Spirit Of Talk Talk tribute a few years back). Likeable.
Glass City Vice - Landslide - ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Roll The Futureheads, Foals and Bloc Party into one concise harmonic indie-pop outfit and you might, just might, arrive at Glass City Vice. Hailing from Brighton and partially possessed of beards, you could be forgiven for being a tad sceptical about such a young band. Well, this single is a tale of two halves. For a track to be called Landslide, I'd expect more than just polite verses and a trickle of oh-oh-ohs all over the place - I'd either be expecting menacing electronics (Cabaret Voltaire's uneasy Landslide from Red Mecca) or some emotional torment (Fleetwood Mac's Landslide). Instead, this does indeed sound like a bunch of hipsters warbling for coins. But lo, the b-side 72nd Street chimes into earshot with its big clumpy drums and neat hooks and all is forgiven.
DJ Fresh feat Ella Eyre - Gravity
Woooah. Big tonsils wailing over a drum and bass beat from the late '90s? Check. Next.
The Prodigy - Nasty - ★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Woooah (again). Big mouthy tonsils over a drum and bass beat from the late '90s? Again? Do what? As far from triple X-rated as you could wish to get, The Prodigy nonetheless have made a considerable career out of trying to be the kind of obnoxious neighbours you'd be willing to crossbow between the eyelids at the drop of a baseball cap. And for that reason alone, you have to love 'em just a little. Far from their best, Nasty is nasty, sure enough, but still a million times more enjoyable than other bandwaggoners of bassweight around at the moment. Zinc turns in a decent remix, Spor reinvents Pendulum for his and Onen shoves the whole thing through a blender from Lucifer's kitchen.
Florence and the Machine - What Kind Of Man - ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Four years after Welch's ubiquitous and, with some onlookers, influential 2011 album Ceremonials, comes the first extract from the upcoming follow-up. As intros go, there's little change from her first salvo with Florence trilling sweetly all over the first half of the song, like some mermaid muse tempting her followers towards the inevitable - gargantuan-lunged operatics and marauding drums from the bowels of Beelzebub. Expect much fawning from all quarters of the press and endless spins of this somewhat overblown experience. Expect little more than a yawn and zero excitable reaction from me.
Break out the glowsticks and earnest chinstrokes, here come the Chipsters with their sixth album, their second for Domino after 2012's In Our Heads. It's a tough act to follow but Huarache Lights doesn't disappoint. It's very much in the vein of Over and Over or Shake a Fist, but lacking the urgency of say, Night and Day (how was that not a huge hit?). Here we have chunky '80s drums, a snatch of vocoder, bleeps, hooks a-plenty, a weird, weird old bassline from somewhere (Orbital perhaps?) and not so much a tune as an event. They're the Devo of the EDM world and they get the nod from me.
Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds - Ballad Of The Mighty I - ★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Now here's something - a Gallagher feelin' the funk. Not a '70s James Brown funk you understand, a brutal relentless sort of DFA-cum-The Rapture hybrid that's slick, yet just the right side of 'indie-disco' to be highly likeable. Taken from the second High Flying Birds album, Ballad Of The Mighty I has elements of The Hollies Bus Stop (no really, listen), is drenched with strings and some of the best arranging I've heard in a long time. Even with the title Chasing Yesterday, the next album's still got to be worth a listen if this effort is anything to go by. And I'm not normally a fan, to be fair.
Martin Callingham - Folding - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
From the pastoral singer-songwriter's guild of Drake, Thompson, Mitchell, McRae and Duffy (that's Stephen Duffy, by the way), comes the hushed tones of one Martin Callingham whose previous occupation was to front a band called Joyce The Librarian. Folding is a soothing extract from his latest opus Tonight, We All Swim Free, boding well for what's to come from the Bristolian's arsenal. If Sunday mornings mean lolling about in bed with the need for a comedown, Callingham's got your card marked with this wistful moody ballad.
Paul Weller - White Sky - ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Distorted angry man hollering hatred at those in power - what's not to like? Well, the lack of a song, for one. Y'see if you're going to hate on the privileged and those in rule, you need a hook. Tick. Then you need a voice. Tick. Then you need a memorable song. Untick. Sadly, for the first time in a long while, Weller has eschewed the great and good that made him untouchable. He's better than this short sharp chunk of blustery kerfuffle. Let's see what the next album throws up and put this rowdy old schtick down to shock.
Taylor Locke - Call Me Kuchu - ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Mr Locke makes exactly the kind of distorted sub-blues that Paul Weller was knocking out ten, fifteen, twenty years ago but sounds more like Rod Stewart than Rod himself. Call Me Kuchu hails from Locke's newest album Time Stands Still, out now kids, and is a bold, marauding few minutes of effervescence if ever you heard them. Locke can riff with the best of them and Call Me Kuchu is an exacting fireball of dubbed-out funk-rock that neither appals or enthrals - it just rocks. And sometimes that's all you need.
Tom Figgins - Rain On Me - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
This is one of those rousing acoustic strumalong anthems that Frank Turner's been knocking out in his sleep. Which is no bad thing. Figgins has a set of well-honed pipes and thankfully doesn't sing in that typically affected sad-face mockernee accent that blights so much music these days. Thus, to this end, Rain On Me is indeed sad-face but isn't irritating enough to be blasted with a sawn-off at point-blank range. All of which means this bearded wonder might be worth a second listen after all.
Tenfivesixty - Dashboard Light - ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆
Motorik is how many people might describe this intriguing barrage of pulsating beats and gear-shifts. Boring might be another description. Personally, I see some potential in this seven-minute epic although Tenfivesixty won't be winning prices for lyrical content. They might get some props for the decent chorus though - a chorus that soars in a sweetly-sung way and not a million miles away from something Talk Talk might have knocked out thirty years ago (not surprisingly, The Tenfivesixty contributed to the splendid Spirit Of Talk Talk tribute a few years back). Likeable.
Glass City Vice - Landslide - ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆
Roll The Futureheads, Foals and Bloc Party into one concise harmonic indie-pop outfit and you might, just might, arrive at Glass City Vice. Hailing from Brighton and partially possessed of beards, you could be forgiven for being a tad sceptical about such a young band. Well, this single is a tale of two halves. For a track to be called Landslide, I'd expect more than just polite verses and a trickle of oh-oh-ohs all over the place - I'd either be expecting menacing electronics (Cabaret Voltaire's uneasy Landslide from Red Mecca) or some emotional torment (Fleetwood Mac's Landslide). Instead, this does indeed sound like a bunch of hipsters warbling for coins. But lo, the b-side 72nd Street chimes into earshot with its big clumpy drums and neat hooks and all is forgiven.
DJ Fresh feat Ella Eyre - Gravity
Woooah. Big tonsils wailing over a drum and bass beat from the late '90s? Check. Next.
The Prodigy - Nasty - ★★★★★★★☆☆☆
Woooah (again). Big mouthy tonsils over a drum and bass beat from the late '90s? Again? Do what? As far from triple X-rated as you could wish to get, The Prodigy nonetheless have made a considerable career out of trying to be the kind of obnoxious neighbours you'd be willing to crossbow between the eyelids at the drop of a baseball cap. And for that reason alone, you have to love 'em just a little. Far from their best, Nasty is nasty, sure enough, but still a million times more enjoyable than other bandwaggoners of bassweight around at the moment. Zinc turns in a decent remix, Spor reinvents Pendulum for his and Onen shoves the whole thing through a blender from Lucifer's kitchen.
Florence and the Machine - What Kind Of Man - ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆
Four years after Welch's ubiquitous and, with some onlookers, influential 2011 album Ceremonials, comes the first extract from the upcoming follow-up. As intros go, there's little change from her first salvo with Florence trilling sweetly all over the first half of the song, like some mermaid muse tempting her followers towards the inevitable - gargantuan-lunged operatics and marauding drums from the bowels of Beelzebub. Expect much fawning from all quarters of the press and endless spins of this somewhat overblown experience. Expect little more than a yawn and zero excitable reaction from me.