All the gods hang around where you are

I reviewed Marnie Stern's Chronicles of Marnia album for The Guardian. File this record under BMO2013 (in non crit parlance: best music of 2013).

The wind was sweet and smelled of home/the sea was rough and felt unknown

I reviewed Woodkid's excellently sad debut album, The Golden Age, for The Guardian. The themes - mourning yr childhood, general existential yearning, facing/fleeing adulthood through escapism, fairy tales and fantasy - are ones I totally dig, especially this year. So many end-of-an-era changes afoot, so many emotional rites of passage to traverse! I know this is all rather cryptic; Hold tight for a blog or two sometime in the near future.

Love Yr Money

It's '92 up in here! I wrote about Daisy Chainsaw's Eleventeen for The Guardian's hidden treasures series. 

We sing of what we know/in our own accent

I wrote a piece about Bristol's politically-conscious folk hoppers for The Guardian. Trying to write through fluey brain fog is never the one. Still, yay for regional hippyhop types who're questioning what Britishness means in an age of riots, Coalition-led cuts and deepening class divides. Grau axed the '77  Joan Baez rap video I linked-up in the piece, so I've produced it here, for yr pleasure.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/nov/06/hip-hop-folk-protest-music


New Strings On An Old Guitar / Clayton Blizzard from Hans Lucas on Vimeo.

She shows you her wounds and you think that you know her well

I reviewed the Divine Fits album for The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/23/thing-called-divine-fits-review

Bitchcraft

On breasts, slut rock, Butcher Babies, Rockbitch and Tribe 8, for The Guardian. I was deep into a dedicated rnb phase when Rockbitch were a touring band, and consequently missed out on the wild spectacle of their debauched rock shows, but I'm enjoying the reminiscing that the publication of this piece has prompted - from friends, friends-of-friends, readers, my girlfriend (who managed to see them 3 times before they folded as a live act) and folk who enjoyed 'experiences' with the troupe.

By the waterside, summer wading in sunder

A little something I wrote on Poliça's Give You The Ghost album for The Guardian here. I'm pretty certain  'Lay Your Cards Out' will end up on many a 'best of 2012' list come the end of the year. Also, I guested on The Guardian podcast to interview Northern acoustic punker Louise Distras, on protest music, DIY and raising a finger to political apathy.

Long, supine upon the bank, his gaze is fixed on his own eyes, twin stars

I got sick of seeing all those 'ROCK IS DEAD aka where have all the men gone?' articles in January, so I wrote about how awesome rock in 2011 sounded to me.

Complexities, treacheries, we watch through glass, we see nothing

I reviewed the new Tindersticks album, The Something Rain, for The Guardian.  Its an affecting record, streaked with jazz and loss and intimacy, and Stuart Staples' sad, rich, baritone poetry, which I think has the same kind of andro magic that I hear in Antony Hegarty.


 What I didn't have wordcount/space to say in the review:

The 9 min spoken-word opener 'Chocolate' (perfomed by David Boulter) felt initially problematic to me. It essentially ends with a MTF joke, which I think, despite being one of the worst, hackneyed transphobic punchlines, is in this song's context an unexpectedly tender (if clumsy) comment on love, acceptance and human connection, and about how precious that is when life can be so sad and ridiculous and expect so much of us. It's a shabby, ragged kind of love song (cheap pints, woodchip bedsits, Fox biscuits) and totally lacking the high jinx comedy of Cukor's films, but it made think of the queertastic outro scene in Some Like It Hot when Jack Lemon's honeytrap drag act (which by the end of the film had evolved in to a genuine trans ID) is revealed to his magnificently nonchalant millionaire lover as they ride off in to the sunset in a shiny-white fancy speedboat, with machine gun gangsters on their tail and Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis (in his own Cary Grant drag) making out in the back seat, the uniting factor between the film and song being not the punchline but the reveal that follows it, subverting that "SHE is a HE!" pantomime in to an act of trans acceptance/empowerment. 

Grief knits the album together, but I found the erotic instances the most exciting, particularly 'Show Me Everything'. Tight percussion, strip tease bassline, faintly sleazy organ notes and charged, ambivalent desire, glazed with numbness ("latex on my fingertips, we touch through glass, we feel nothing") but wanting and hoping ("We could take those stones, we could build something") to feel everything.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/16/tindersticks-the-something-rain-review

I wake up, eyes to the sun

I guested on the Guardian Music podcast this week, and talked about Georgia-based Rough Trade quartet Alabama Shakes, ex punkband kids playing a noisy, joyful fusion of blues, rock, gospel and classic RnB. Its easy to imagine Brittany Howard's huge, gravelly vox filling a revival tent, but they came up covering AC/DC and Led Zep as much as Otis Redding and James Brown, and shun the 'soul revival' label in favour of straightforward RnR. I heard their wrenching live version of 'You Aint Alone' before anything else, and was struck by Brittany in the same way I remember feeling when I heard Millie Jackson's 'If Loving You Is Wrong' as a kid, overcome by the sheer force of the song's emotion, swept up in those tumultuous leaps from huge, frayed, stomping wails to desperately hushed, shivering from-the-gut whispers. 

Blueberry skies: Best of 2011

True Widow's As High As The Highest Heavens & From The Center To The Circumference Of The Earth bagged the #1 spot on my best music of 2011 list over at The Guardian because I have rinsed that album like no other this year; narcotic riffs, echoing harmonies, bone-rattling bass lines and aching tempos. Seeing them live at The Macbeth was probably my favourite gig of the year. 



2011 was good year for guitar albums: True Widow, St Vincent, EMA, Japanese Voyeurs and Anna Calvi all upped the game in diverse, inspiring ways (courtesy nod to PJH's harp/guitar work on Let England Shake). Progressive danc/electro-types also did well, with Austra, Planningtorock, Gazelle Twin, Katy B and Emika, and undergroundish hip hop came big, with THEEsatisfaction, Shabazz Palaces, Danny Brown and UK vet Jehst.  


A lot of the gals I didn't get to include on this list will end up on the Wears The Trousers end-of-year list, but honourable mentions of all genders include: Azaelia Banks, Lana Del Rey, Beyonce, SBTRKT, Machinehead, Yelawolf, Rihanna, Rustie, Colleen Green, Chelsea Woolfe, Tu Fawning, Hollie Cook, La Sera, Planningtorock, Love Inks, Pettybone, Nitty Scott, THEEsatisfaction, Grimes, Veronica Falls, Razika, Drugstore, Ghostpoet, Katy B, Wiley, Left Lane Cruiser, Daedelus, Jamie Woon, James Blake, Paul White, Danny Brown, SBTRKT, Blood Orange, Little Roy, Samiyam, Wild Beasts, Amon Tobin, John Maus, A Dancing Beggar, Canibus, Tom Waits, Willy Moon, Gang Gang Dance, Factory Floor, Tyler The Creator, Kreayshawn, Nicola Roberts,  Mastodon, Cosmic Dead and  Lasers From Atlantis.

Grau top 10 tracks of 2011 in video:

I'm New Here - Jaime xx and Gil Scott Heron



2. Hudson Mohawke - All Your Love



3. Active Child - You Are All I See



4. Japanese Voyeurs - Couldnt find a good live version of Smother so here's my favourite 2012 JV track, Milk Teeth



5. Michael Kiwanuka - I'm Getting Ready



6. Jehst - Starting Over



7. Emika - Count Backwards



8. DELS - Violina



9. PJ Harvey - The Last Living Rose



10. Barbara Panther - Moonlight People

First Sight: Cold Specks

My First Sight feature on Al Spx's deep south-style songstress Cold Specks, fresh off her spellbinding performance on Jools Holland this week. Out in today's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/nov/03/first-sight-cold-specks

Because they will try to convince us that we have arrived, that we are already there, that it has happened.

I penned a feature for Comment Is Free, on the closure of First Out Cafe/Bar, the falling pink pound, and why queer spaces everywhere are so vital.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/11/gay-club-scene?commentpage=3#start-of-comments

First Sight: Lanie Lane

Crushin' on Aussie songstress Lanie Lane in today's Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/sep/08/first-sight-lanie-lane

Americana riffs, jazzy feline vox, pin curls, lip lacquer, a 1957 Framer guitar called Betty; real purdy. 

Gazelle Twin - The Entire City

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/14/gazelle-twin-entire-city-review

First ever 5/5 at The Guardian Film&Music, for Gazelle Twin's The Entire City. Eerie/sensual gothtronica, queer tropes, sci-fi film score atmospherics  - how could I not love this?

Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

I wrote most of this review during what was later confirmed to be an infected wisdom tooth episode. Weird blue Ibuprofen pills left over from NYC + Afrocentric, neo noir space-age hip hop. Some seriously beautiful joints on this album, and also some of the sexiest cover/sleeve art I've had the pleasure of running my fingers across (the picture does not do it justice - lush black felt and twinkling gold flake leaf).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jun/24/shabazz-palaces-black-up-review

Rihanna and the rise of raunch pop

"I hate that my four year old's favourite song is S&M. At home, we've banned the music channels because of what they're putting out at any time of day, but that doesn't stop us hearing the full uncensored version at, to give a few recent examples, an ice skating rink during half term, a holiday park disco - for kids and numerous shops. This stuff is corrosive. The message it sends about what women are and what they are for is deeply harmful."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/12/rihanna-raunch-pop

First Sight: Michael Kiwanuka

 









Michael Kiwanuka, profiled for The Guardian:

"A 23-year-old north London singer-songwriter with the voice of a 1960s US soul man, a vintage sound brimming with yearning and cracked joy"

Beardyman - I Done A Album

Debut LP from Beardyman, reviewed for The Guardian:

I DONE A ALBUM

"You make it look so good/the way you put it like that"

My first First Sight feature for The Guardian Film&Music is out today, featuring Emika. She's a Berlin-based producer, originally from the UK. She makes creepy, seductive, bass-heavy songs. Get to know: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/mar/10/first-sight-emika