Jens Lekman - "The Opposite Of Hallelujah"

So, while Radiohead are off pwning the whole world with their optionally-priced albums and label-less surprise releases, I've been listening to Jens Lekman, Regina Spektor, Jeremy Warmsley and Eugene McGuinness, while also returning to Pulp, and discovering that Pete Doherty does actually still know how to write good songs (look out for a review of "Delivery" tomorrow or the day after). So I figured, even though this is probably old as fuck, and although altogether more important things are going on in the blogosphere, and, you know, although Messrs Yorke and Greenwood are going to be making every other song in the world irrelevant in a week's time, it would be cool if we could all just sit back, chill out, and enjoy some pleasingly old-fashioned, idiosyncratic, string-laced and gleeful indie-pop. Now, I'm not a Jens Lekman fan, as such, having previously heard "Friday Night At The Drive-In Bingo", thought something along the lines of "oh, a cheerful Richard Hawley" and tossed it aside, but you'd be a fool to declare that "The Opposite Of Hallelujah" - originally from the 2004 EP of the same name, and more recently from Night Falls Over Kortedala, a forthcoming collection of recordings from the past three years - isn't one of those annoying songs which comes so close to perfection you really do have trouble understanding it. A little like "Lila", "June On The West Coast", "Poison Oak" and perhaps a few others not by Bright Eyes, although here the genius is more musical - it's in the melody, I suppose - and perhaps a better comparison would be someone like Patrick Wolf? That is, "The Magic Position", a song I've certainly learnt to rely on for it's general, genuine, astonishing exuberance. The string parts are vaguely similar - catchy enough to be used as backing music on some BBC1 rubbish about seaside resorts, yet deep enough to not detract from the lyrics - and though the methods used in the two tracks were obviously fairly different, a similar, perhaps subterranean in a sense, yet certainly very cosy atmosphere (think, if you will, of a green underground paddock containing a family of magical pink fairies) prevails.

"I took my sister down to the ocean..." sings Jens (and if you noted the similarity to Bright Eyes's "tomorrow when I wake up I'm finding my brother and I'm making him take me back down to the water..." from "When The Curious Girl Realises She Is Under Glass", you're pretty much the most wonderful person in the world) "...but the ocean made me feel stupid" , he concedes. Later, his "words of wisdom" have "vanished into thin air", and his "metaphors fallen flat". I imagine the story goes something like this; Jens takes sister down to ocean, prepares to explain meaning of life, crab thwarts metaphors, they cycle back, he laments not having explained to her, then tells himself that "it" is "the opposite of Hallelujah", and that the sister doesn't know what Jens is going through. It's the sort of open-ended narrative that it's difficult to make sense of at times, but which nonetheless produces the odd ingeniously unpretentious couplet ( "We made our way home on the bikes we had borrowed, I still never told you about unstoppable sorrow...") and would make an interestingly arty late-60s short story. As I said, though, the lyrics pale in comparison with the sense of joy with which Jens conducts them; and as his tale of indecisiveness and general woe is augmented by those wonderful strings and his rich baritone, a mystery is born.

[MP3] Jens Lekman - The Opposite Of Hallelujah

Foo Fighters - "The Pretender"

You'd think, after so long in the industry, Dave Grohl would've gotten tired of his band's brand of straightforward, stadium-pleasing rock and roll. The largely acoustic second disc of 2005's In Your Honor gave rise to the notion, I suppose, and last year's acoustic live opus Skin & Bones (recorded on the IYH tour in LA, and named after an obscure b-side which inexplicably became a staple of their setlists) gave further credence to the idea. Yet, apparently, these two experiments are all we're going to get from the folk-rock incarnation of the Foos for a good while now, especially seeing as new single "The Pretender" - and, imaginably the majority of the recently-released Echoes, Silence Patience & Grace LP - is so annoyingly akin to 1997's really-not-that-good,-people The Colour And The Shape, that you almost expect Grohl to suddenly break into the career-defining chorus of "Everlong" or the ingeniously breakneck riff of "Monkey Wrench" at any minute. But then, that's only really a minor quibble - we should really be thankful just to have Dave, Nate, Chris and Taylor's eternally optimistic pop-metal tunes there for us whenever Bloc Party are seeming too po-faced and Placebo too nymphomaniacal - and, in reality, "The Pretender" is as brilliant as anything on One By One or the better half of In Your Honor (er, There Is Nothing Left To Lose, as well as being simply an awful lot better than any of their other albums, was a fairly mellow surf-rock affair). But the most important factor when talking about this song is that it isn't actually 'just another Foo Fighters song'; unlike perhaps the utterly boneheaded "No Way Back" or "The Last Song", it definitely seems to have some amount of meaning and intelligence behind it. "What if I say I'll never surrender? What if I say I'm not like the others?", Grohl interrogates, before cascading into one of those infamous moments of guitar lickage as Grohl whispers over the top wilfully paranoiac lyrics like "I'm the voice inside your head that you refuse to hear, I'm the face that you have to face, mirrored in your stare", before it all goes loud again. And then quiet again. Hey, he wasn't in Nirvana for nothing. But, as I said, this isn't just dumb chorus-mongering designed for a stadium of robots with Led Zep t-shirts on their chests and lighters high in the air. God knows what it's about - varying sources have suggested Courtney Love, George Bush, his wife, an entirely fictional love interest or an entirely fictional world leader - but at least it doesn't contain the lyrics "Lately I've been living in my head, the rest of me is dead".

Perhaps I'm being a little harsh; after all, there are countless genuine good points about this band that you just won't find from any other. For instance, they're AMAZING live. I saw them in Hyde Park in July '06, they played the greatest setlist imaginable (including absolutely nothing from their inexcusable self-titled debut and an awful lot from ...Nothing Left To Lose), brought out Lemmy, Brian May and Roger Taylor, had those trippy flashing green lasers, and basically put on the sort of show you'd take a martian to if you wanted to demonstrate exactly what a rock and roll show is. Plus, they had Angels & Airwaves supporting, whose recycled RATM riffs and absurd 'I AM THE MESSIAH' moments are always good for a laugh (No, seriously, when exactly is Tom Delonge going to come out and announce that the whole AVA thing was a massive joke and that he, like, so totally fooled us all?). Secondly, their music isn't as one-dimensional as it might appear from the outside - compare, for instance, the ferocious, soaring, HUGE "My Hero" with the utterly gorgeous "Next Year". The two were only one album apart, three years in actual time, yet by the time the latter was recorded, Grohl had mellowed out to the extent that love songs no longer hurt your ears, and could, on the odd occasion, be construed via elaborate metaphors involving space travel, the US Marines, and, if you're really overanalytical, the way the US government used the Space Race to detract attention from the Vietnam War. "The Pretender" doesn't have such overarching subtexts (or perhaps it does, and we just haven't worked them out yet), but what it does have is that disconcerting feeling of being repeatedly hit over the head (possibly with a dictionary, after all, this is the Foos being intelligent) and having brief excerpts from lullabies being whispered into your ears between blows. Nirvana perfected it (Check out the mindblowing posthumous release "You Know You're Right" for the best example), and now Grohl and co are taking it to another level altogether. And long may they continue.

[MP3] Foo Fighters - The Pretender

Gallows - "In The Belly Of A Shark"

Anyone who's paid attention to the movements of the genre over the past five years will agree with me on this one; punk rock is severely on the decline. Sure, the faux-emo of the past two years has all but died following Fall Out Boy's disappointing follow-up and Panic! At The Disco's charmingly generous lack of one, and we've had a new album from the Dropkick Murphys (if you don't own The Warrior's Code, go jump in front of a bus. Then get up and buy The Warrior's Code, obviously), and I guess Matchbook Romance broke up (surely the greatest service to music they could have accomplished. I don't expect you to have heard "The Greatest Fall Of All Time", but if you have, you'll agree with me), but setting those minor causes for celebration aside for a moment, the scene's in a similarly stagnant place to where it was in maybe 2001, before Brody Dalle took it into the NME and Good Charlotte (still the greatest guilty pleasure ever, however great Cherry Ghost's "People Help The People" is) took it into the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Understandably, Gallows want to change that. And the British music press want Gallows to change that. And, you know, I want Gallows to change that, so of course I'll take the opportunity to introduce new single "In The Belly Of A Shark" - a definite improvement on "Abandon Ship", although with a similar nautical theme - to the three or so people who are reading this.

Gallows aren't doing anything new, they're not revolutionaries, they're not originals, but they certainly feel like it. Their music is pure Black Flag, infused with the righteous fury of MDC's "I Remember" (Surely the best song of the entire 80's USA hxc scene(s)) and the musical eclecticity of Bad Brains, struggling to survive under the heaviness they seem to have stolen from within the shaven heads of Agnostic Front, yet in a climate where music such as this is scarce (and when it is present it's generally awe-inspiringly shit), their plagiarism matters about as much as their shoe size. "In The Belly Of A Shark" is, in a word, ferocious; the kind of song where you genuinely feel like you're being punched around the face for three minutes, yet afterwards immediately reach for the play button to do it all over again. It's the sort of song where you inadvertently actually develop a sort of shamefaced fear of ever running into these scary, scary men down a dark alley in their native Watford, and the after-effects of it (general contusions and lacerations, broken bones and perhaps the loss of hearing in whichever ear's closer to the speakers) are curiously similar as well. Put simply, if you're the sort of indie-as-fuck fool who genuinely thinks that The Shins shouldn't go and spontaneously combust, like, right now, or the sort of abject twat who'd deny that "Welcome To The Black Parade" was a work of genius, or that The Ramones were the best band ever, you won't like this. If you listen to Snow Patrol, you won't like this, though that goes without saying. And if you think Slipknot is "just noise", you won't like this. But, you know, if you've got a moderately-sized brain nestled somewhere inside your cranium, then I'm sure you'll know that this is GENIUS.

[MP3] Gallows - In The Belly Of A Shark

The Wombats - "Let's Dance To Joy Division"

This timing is just perfect. So last time round I wrote about the Editors (admittedly an awful long time ago, but I wrote more than 1000 words on them, so it's justified) - surprisingly good mope-rock for the masses, and responsible for more suicides over the past two years as "Fix You", "Yellow" and "Speed Of Sound" put together - and, in a highly amusing twist of fate, later that evening what fell into my hands was nothing less than this month's equivalent to Patrick Wolf's "The Magic Position"; that is, the most life-affirmingly enjoyable 'cheer-the-fuck-up' ever, put into the form of three minutes of brilliantly catchy power-pop by Liverpool's terrifyingly promising Wombats. "An End Has A Start", for all its headache-inducing bass drums (there are lots) and soaring, ethereal guitar lines (there are LOADS), was never exactly going to be the best song to return you to normality from the depths of depression, so obviously fate (apparently a very nice person, who wants you to be as happy as possible. Bit like the Wombats, actually) intervened and wants me to bestow this upon you, just in case I've inadvertently caused a suicide somewhere down the line with my shitty doom-pop and now need to be cleansed for my sins. And surely giving you "Let's Dance To Joy Division" is - alongside simply imploring you to carry out the actual action described in the title - the best way to do this, and add a little more joy into the world? Or maybe that was a little too evangelical/pretentious/confusing/fucking stupid for you.

In the whole-heartedly charitable interest of keeping this post at a reasonable length for once (even if that means I have to forsake my only rational excuse for taking three days to write it), I'm now going to skip the planned (and indeed, three-quarters written (If I understood Wordpress, I think I'd have a subpage dedicated to scraps such as these; small passages removed from posts for length reasons or just because they're shit)) dissection of why exactly I prefer this song to "Backfire At The Disco", "Kill The Director" and even "Moving To New York", and move on to an actual review. (I'm obviously not very good at keeping posts at reasonable lengths, seeing as I've just made it a foot longer explaining - utterly pointlessly - what I've done). "...Joy Division" is subtly different from "...New York" (previously seen by me as the obvious pinnacle of the band's existence, a track which was unlikely to be surpassed until their seventh album at the very earliest) in a number of ways - it's slightly more fast-paced for one, and the verses don't sound so lethargic and resigned; it's also notable for showing a significantly wider emotional range. "Moving" was... how to phrase it? Monochrome - not in terms of musical variety as such, but in terms of feelings; the spectrum of what he was singing about seemed more than a little narrow and drab.

Yet here they seem to have dropped this approach in favour of the wonderful triumph-in-the-face-of-adversary feel they've now gotten hold of someplace. It's not something you'd expect to work - such things obviously don't happen in real life and generally look like shit in films and on TV, but, apparently, when put to use in catchy-as-fuck pop-rock tunes, they have a tendency to find themselves among the most uplifting things ever. If you read this blog with any amount of regularity (which, in all probability, you probably don't), you'll already know this, but I have this theory, which I previously dictated in my "Magic Position" review. Basically, the idea is that songs which are unreasonably happy - like, say, "We're From Barcelona" or anything by the Pipettes - are never going to truly cheer you up. You need some foundation of sadness to which you can relate for it to work, and evidently Wombats frontman Matthew Murphy knows this. And so we get lines like "so let the love tear us apart, I found the cure for a broken heart... let it tear us apart." - even if it meant fuck all he'd gain points for the clever referencing of one of the greatest songs ever, so the fact that it's possibly the most stunningly (un)meaningful non-Bright Eyes moment I've heard in recent times just adds to the spectacle.

[MP3] The Wombats - Let's Dance To Joy Division

Editors - "An End Has A Start"

Nowadays, what with the success of "Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors" and their current status as the world's new Coldplay (at least until the original Coldplay get off their arses, kill Mark Ronson and reclaim "God Put A Smile Upon Your Face"), it's more difficult than ever to deny the simple truth that Editors really are a very good band. Their songs are as anthemic (why oh why does Blogger insist that that isn't a word? No, you twat, I don't mean 'anaemic'!) as ten trillion U2's (And everyone knows that their only good song in the last ten years was "City Of Blinding Lights", which Editors basically did ten times better on "Smokers" b-side "An Eye For An Eye"), and charismatic frontman (Just kidding! This man has all the exuberance of Thom Yorke upon learning that people actually only pretend to like his band in order to seem cool) Tom Smith has a set of vocal chords that sound like the genetically-enhanced bastard offspring of Michael Stipe and Ian Curtis, except without the tendency for blue face paint, or songs that still have the power to make you shit yourself thirty years on. The only real problem with the band is the lyrics. Which, admittedly, is really quite a big problem, when you think about it. Take a look at the first two verses:

I don’t think that it’s
Going to rain again today,
There's a devil at your side,
But an angel on her way .

Someone hit the light,
Cause there's more here to be seen,
When you caught my eye,
I saw everywhere I'd been.

The ideal format for this would really be on paper, in which I could easily annotate the lyrics by drawing lines and such to show exactly what I'm talking about, but apparently Blogger's painfully twenty-first century posting features don't allow for such things. The fools. Anyway, let's start with the first of the two paragraphs: Essentially, an uninformed amateur weather forecast and a description of a person who's soon to be saved from their evil ways. Yes? (Another more appropriate format would be an actual physical spoken verbal conversation, in which you could perhaps grunt your agreement with my baseless statements). We'll ignore the first two lines - from anyone else, the couplet would be a positive one, although from Tom Smith's omnipresent MMMMMMISSSERRRRRABBBBLLLLLLLEE tone of voice we can safely assume that he's actually a massive fan of shit weather and as such feels that he has yet again had his hopes dashed by the cruel hand of fate - and focus on the third and fourth for second - For a start, what the fuck does this mean? It sounds like a metaphor of some kind - presumably he isn't speaking literally, although I wouldn't put it past him - but what exactly it's a metaphor for, god only knows. Could it be about redemption? Or maybe the opposite? Based on the previous couplet's 'bad as good' aesthetic, could perhaps the devil actually be at the side of the angel, eliminating the existence of the completely characterless 'character' completely? Perhaps I'm talking bollocks.

So, what make you of the second verse? Apologies for the Shakespearean Yoda moment there, I'm just coming up with increasingly desperate attempts to relieve the monotony. My first impression;... What? He essentially implores one of those he is currently with to shed more light on their location, due to his conviction (Apparently his dialogue is as self-confident as his guitar playing) that there's more to be seen. The third and fourth lines are completely unrelated to the first and second (sensing a pattern here by any chance?) and at first glance suggest a certain amount of affection for the 'you' he's referring to. But do they? We've established that, because of their status as miserable bastards, positives can sometimes become negatives in Editors' world of doom, despair and decapitated bunnies, but apparently unbelievable horrors can also come out of things that, in anyone else's song, would be construed as a finely-timed but utterly pointless piece of absurdity. "When you caught my eye, I saw everywhere I'd been"? Perhaps he means the first part literally, and the love of his life actually was responsible for physically catching Mr Smith's eye after it was hacked out by a callous, machete-wielding zombie. Or perhaps (this one's actually likely, in a fucked-up sort of way), he's talking about the pre-death tradition of your life flashing before your eyes? Admittedly, it's an odd way of phrasing it, but this is an odd band.

Musically speaking (and for the record, I'd like to explicitly state that any sentence beginning with those words is going to be hell for me to write), it's pretty much the song of the year - "Reinvent The Wheel" and "505" come close in terms of atmosphere, but neither of them conjure up one so crushingly agonising that you almost feel smothered just from listening to it. The drums pound against your skull incessantly, and the opening guitar sounds to me a little bit like a musical interpretation of a shard of glass - sharp, fairly terrifying, and potentially life-threatening - while Smith's vocals are still akin to how Stipe might sound while simultaneously singing "We Are The Champions" and having a massive nervous breakdown on the studio floor. The best bit - the track's undeniable pinnacle, and something for Coldplay to aspire to if they still want to be relevant by the next album - comes at 2:34. Yes, it's the inevitable 'everything drops out' moment, and it's the most appallingly cliched piece of songwriting ever, but the production and the vocals carry it through with more style than I think anyone could have been expecting. He really does have a fucking good voice, you know.

[MP3] Editors - An End Has A Start

PS: Fuck, I should keep a log of ridiculous computer errors caused by my workings on this site. I just went to count how many words this post contains (just over a thousand, as it happens), and the script froze my Firefox completely and left my computer for dead. Java hates me.

Plain White T's - "Hey There Delilah"

Oh, come on. This is just unfair, right? I don't do bad American pop-punk anymore, so why exactly is it that I genuinely believe the Plain White T's' "Hey There Delilah" to be truly among the best songs of the year and possibly the best of its genre (that is to say, sensitive semi-acoustic emo-pop) in the last decade? I mean, look at their name. Look at the rest of their back catalogue, specifically the insipid, sub-FOB pop-rock "Take Me Away". Look at their sullen, sepia-tinged promo photos in which they'd rather contemplate their favourite Smiths songs in a generally world-weary fashion than have an ounce of charisma and actually look at the camera (Yes, I know I was called a wanker last time I discussed a band's photos on here, but the above was just asking for it, right? Besides, this isn't about what they actually look like so much as it's about how some Hollywood Records high-up told them to pose in order to catch the attention of weepy MCR fans across the world, and criticising a record label for not giving a shit about the music is always fun). Now, if that overlong bracketed 'please forgive me' segment hasn't made you completely forget what I was talking about (I know it's done just that for me, but my attention span is sufficiently below average for it to have not affected you too.), all of the aforesaid problems (bad image, bad moniker, bad songs) had previously convinced me that even though the re-released "Delilah" had a lovely gatefold cover which was a little bit like a cheap version of The Maccabees' "About Your Dress" (but then, on the other hand, the track wasn't four minutes of wannabe-Kooks art-school pretentious shite, so I guess it equals out), it wasn't the sort of thing I was into. Yeah, I was wrong - it happens to the best of us - and "Delilah" is the sort of song that even my deepest indie sensibilities couldn't prevent me from falling in love with.

I first heard the track seemingly millions of years ago - all I know for sure is that it was on the PureVolume.com, a former regular online haunt for me (and presumably, countless others who steadfastly refused to use MySpace... and were technically too young, although that doesn't sound as impressive), that it was the whole site's most played song ever, or something like that, for a week, and that I liked it quite a lot. Now, I won't use the term 'love'; I rarely 'love' a song on my first listen (although, contrarily, I do actually reckon it did just happen five minutes ago with the new Wombats single), and, annoyingly, I'm not sure I actually listened to it more than once. And so, in the rather epic interval between then and now (around eighteen months by my calculations, although my calculations are rarely correct now that I don't sit next to Richard in maths lessons), my only knowledge of the T's has come from sporadically-received news of imminent releases, and, crucially, a solo acoustic performance of "Delilah" on the BBC's otherwise pitiful Reading and Leeds coverage. Now, any British music fan with access to a television set will know what I mean there: at random intervals during the hours otherwise dedicated to festival live footage and more ugly Radio One people than you can count, they occasionally plucked a young band - or Nick Lowe - to perform a solitary acoustic set in front of a camera in some scenic location (a forest, a platform looking over the Reading site, or a pseudo-New Rave-looking studio). And when T's frontman Tom Higgenson performed "Delilah" there, it was, amusingly, the first time I'd heard the track in a bloody long time. And so, as heroically portentous and literary as it sounds (as well as possibly sounding like I'm talking about cancer) , I realised I couldn't continue ignoring it.

Ooh. Now where to go? My apologies if you haven't enjoyed this particular review, but this is one of the first instances in probably a few weeks when I've had simply loads to say about a particular song, and I thought I could potentially make up for last month's fiasco (Six posts in a month? I'm lucky to have escaped with my life, I suppose) and any other fiascoes that may soon occur if I can belt out a thousand words on a song that you probably don't even like. But I think that's definitely the way this blog works; I either have far too much to say (so much that people apparently lose interest after the first sentence and comment solely on that calling me a wanker (I'll admit it, that comment really pissed me off) or not enough. Today I have far too much. "Hey There Delilah" is beautiful, anyway. And in that you have four words (the 'anyway' is necessary by the way, because this blog would be about twelve words long without unnecessary words and other such contraventions of Orwell's outlined six rules of English prose writing) that could effectively replace this post completely. But it won't, and I shall now proceed to actually dissect the song.

As with a small selection of brilliant songs and several other very good ones, it's nigh-on impossible to put a finger on what makes "Delilah" so good. Actually, no. That's a lie. It's the lyrics. That's a theory of mine (perhaps not a very good one, seeing as I'm sure many people have similar feelings, but just don't have MP3 blogs on which to air them); that whenever you speak of an acoustic song's delivery, you're really talking about the lyrics. That's what acoustic songs are really all about; the lyrics, and the sparse musicianship of the track is simply a way to elevate those lyrics above everything else. Right? The lyrics are the only thing of true importance, the centerpiece, the foundation that everything else is built on. And though Higgenson's aren't up to the standards of Bowie's or Lennon's or Sufjan's or Conor's - there are no references to "the lonely once bandaged" who "lay fully exposed, having undressed their wounds for each other", for instance - they're just nice. And that's another key word here, nice. He's singing to the titular Delilah, sure, but that doesn't matter. Rather than being specifically directed at the one person, he's really just explaining his feelings about that person (for the world to hear, or perhaps not, because no one had a clue who the band were when the track was first released), and as such it isn't a closed book like some of those legendary lyricists' songs - it's not a solitary, ultra-personal cry for help like "Poison Oak", it's a pop song. It's a pop song, and I still can't quite believe how good it is.

[MP3] Plain White T's - Hey There Delilah

(So, there you go. Zokotou.com informs me that that was 1150 words long, which, I believe, makes it the longest post on here which isn't an album review. Which is vaguely amusing. Let's only hope that this isn't as much of a disaster as the Good Charlotte review, which became the most-viewed page on the whole site, and was downloaded so many times that I eventually had to remove the link from the post so I had enough bandwidth to write about some other things sometimes.)

Siobhan Donaghy - "Ghosts"

Wow. This is one of those songs where you simultaneously wonder how exactly you've got this far into your mp3-blogging life without writing about it, and what on earth, given the opportunity, could possibly be said about it. You know, the "Chicago"s and "Lila"s and "You Are The Generation..."s and "Northern Sky"s; those select few tracks which are so mind-blowingly perfect that words can't express quite how astonishing they are. But, even so, those three songs - though all unique in different ways - at least remain rooted in a fairly basic song structure in some way, shape or form. "Ghosts" doesn't. Obviously. The vocals here are completely backmasked - presumably to let the listener come to their own conclusions regarding the track's subject matter - and as such, only emotion is truly conveyed with nothing much resembling any specific depiction of an emotion or event. As I don't have access to (or indeed, expertise regarding) any complicated audio-editing software, I can't reverse the track and see for certain whether or not Ms Donaghy is actually singing real words or simply gibberish set to the tune; then again, it's entirely possible that learning the real words would cause potentially grievous harm to my estimations of the track and my respect for its absurd, surreal sense of otherworldly brilliance. Because that atmosphere - a curious specimen which manages to radiate both a sense of celebration and melancholy via subtle waves of synths and a solid underlying beat - is really the only important part of the track: much like Sigur Rós's exploits in Vonlenska / Hopelandic, once there are no lyrics to divert your attention, it's easier to comprehend the genuine hidden meanings behind the track. And "Ghosts" perhaps manages it better than the Icelandic post-shoegaze (err?) quartet; the sound is somehow fuller - an ambient synth-pop sound comparable only with Johnny Boy's perfect "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve - and subsequently fairly difficult not to get swallowed up by.

[MP3] Siobhan Donaghy - Ghosts

P.S.: Apologies for the lack of a picture around the top of this post - firstly, my computer was in one of its very, very common periods of unbearable slowness while writing this, and secondly, I don't think, unless the artist involved is particularly attractive, that it matters very much.

Hard-Fi - "Suburban Knights"

It would be just be wrong if I only wrote positive reviews, right? That's not the way to hone your craft; I have to practice criticism as well as praise. At least, that's how I justify reviews like the one I'm about to compose. Because, though I unfortunately seem to be lapsing into an awful pattern here - namely one in which any band featuring four skinny, vaguely good-looking and confidently heterosexual indie boys playing guitar, bass and drums and singing bad songs (invariably about boredom, sex, or parties) is told that they should go jump off a cliff - bands like Air Traffic and Hard-Fi surely deserve everything they get, especially when their other songs (especially ones called "Never Even Told Me Her Name" and "Living For The Weekend") which are - if not excellent - certainly very good. Which, if you'll excuse the cliche, is one phrase that only a fool could use to describe "Suburban Knights", Hard-Fi's new single. Now, if there's one thing that the Arctic Monkeys have done right in their two years in the spotlight, it's realising that in the world of NME-beloved indie rock, you can't get away with repeating yourself. And while they (albeit quite subtly) stepped up a gear with Favourite Worst Nightmare, Hard-Fi have utterly failed to create anything that doesn't sound exactly like the contents of their debut album Stars Of CCTV. "Suburban Knights" is nice, yes, and certainly headed for countless not-so-indie discos, and it certainly boasts a nice singalong "whhhhoooooooah" moment at the beginning - the sort that even the Kaiser Chiefs, aka the most idiotic band on the planet, realised were actually a bit shit - and those opening vocals are spat in such a way that you can almost forget that Hard-Fi frontman Richard Archer was the man responsible for "Better Do Better", and, I don't know, there are plenty of things to like about this. But, on the other hand, why on earth would you want to listen to this? Klaxons, the best dance-punk band since Head Automatica, released their debut this year, so we're probably not short of catchy synth lines and existence-affirming lyrics about psychedelic drugs, and surely if you want a slice of really, really miserable working class life, you could just pick up a copy of The Enemy's We'll Live And Die In These Towns and have done with it? In short, Hard-Fi ceased to have any purpose around the end of 2005, so why exactly I'm wasting my evening writing about them in September 2007 is anyone's guess.

[MP3] Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights

The Gossip - "Jealous Girls"

As a rule, any record by anybody who has ever been in Hello! magazine (or, because I don't want to be discriminating, OK! magazine - I'm fairly sure the only thing to separate the two is that is one is suing the other) is going to be the sort of abject claptrap only generally found in books by Dan Brown or albums by The Fratellis. Look at the track record; at one end of the spectrum there's Rod Stewart, Elton John, Brian May and droves of other grizzled geriatrics who nobody's has given a rat's arse about since 1873, while at the other we have Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse; both capable of producing a fine song (see "Albion", "Rehab") but on the whole more interesting for their various character flaws, drug addictions and stints in The Priory than for their predominantly average music. Gossip frontwoman Beth Ditto - a relatively recent addition to this unintentionally comedic troupe of has-beens and never-will-bes - thankfully never quite fits into either of these stereotypes; her authenticity and radicalism set her apart from the aforementioned jaded pop veterans, and her revolutionary attitude towards the world comes between her and the latter group - with The Gossip, you get the impression that they actually mean something, and their music is just good enough for it not to matter very much what it is.

"Jealous Girls" is the third single to be lifted from the 2006's surprise smash Standing In The Way Of Control - that is, after the explosive title-track which has, in its eighteen-month period of existence, soundtracked the first series of Skins, been released as a single several thousand times, and been remixed by the likes of US electro-punks Le Tigre and Belgian dance pioneers Soulwax, whose Nite Version remix of the track turns it into a veritable modern classic and enhances it for the dancefloor in a way that the album's producer, Fugazi legend Guy Picciotto, aparently could not. But while Ditto - who is, if you were wondering, joined in the band by drummer Hannah Blilie and guitarist Brace Paine (who in turn is confusingly also known as Nathan Howdeshell) - was seemingly at her peak railing against the Bush government's prophibition of gay marriage and howling lines like "SURVIVETHEONLYWAYTHATYOUKNOWOHOHOH!", "Jealous Girls", though perhaps not as righteously enraged as its predecessor, is certainly of equal interest on the musical side of things. The verses are staccato, falling into a rigid post-punk groove aided by the robotic drums and relaxed guitar, while Ditto sounds as dominant as ever in telling us "you're not the enemy, but underneath you don't agree, take comfort that it's over". Her voice is, as usual, exceptional - she remains the only true soul singer to have graced American pop music in the past twenty years, and the subtle outrage of her words only exemplifies the power of the vocals - and, backed with the omnipresent brutal instrumentation of the song's chorus (a triumph of unrelenting cymbals and grinding guitar which lends the song a genuinely menacing atmosphere), comes across as potentially more powerful than any other song released this year. Check it out below, as well as the dazzling live version which appears on the b-side and was recorded in June of last year at London's legendary 100 Club venue.

[MP3] The Gossip - Jealous Girls
[MP3] The Gossip - Jealous Girls (Live At The 100 Club, London)

Manic Street Preachers - "Indian Summer"

When I originally reviewed the Manic Street Preachers' recent Send Away The Tigers album, I payed surprisingly little attention to the forthcoming single "Indian Summer" - although it would seem I inadvertently predicted its third-single status with astonishing accuracy, I otherwise dismissed it in much the same way as everyone else; that is, an overhyped attempt to reclaim the glories of "A Design For Life" by incorporating a similar rhythm and a similar chorus in which the song's title is repeated, several times (the Manics certainly have a history of this - most notably in the vitriolic "You Love Us", but also in the overtly dumbed-down garage-rock of "Found That Soul" or the still annoyingly lightweight MOR pop-rock toss that was "You Stole The Sun From My Heart" - and have achieved typically mixed results). This ignorance on my part, though not the only example of it during that review (imaginatively titled "Nothing's Finished, It Just Fades Away", in a thinly veiled reference to both "Imperial Bodybags"'s lyrics and the band's vaguely Phoenix-esque career trajectory), was perhaps the most helpful in that it leaves me with much to discuss in this post - firstly, the chorus.

It really is, at the risk of sounding suspiciously like Eric Blair (I'm reading The Road To Wigan Pier right now, shortly followed by a recently purchased compendium of essays, and slowly sinking into the kind of depression only previously created by Bright Eyes's "Poison Oak"), quite dreadful. Possibly even odious. Because if someone or something is bad but aware of it, and shows the right amount of self-deprecation, it can pull it off and be hailed as a classic (The Libertines based their entire career on this clever little trick), but if it's godawful and still convinced of its own majesty, it invariably becomes quite painful to listen to. Unfortunately, "Indian Summer"'s chorus is more than just convinced of its own superiority, it's seemingly sure that it doesn't really need to do anything much to get to that comfortable Number 2 slot on the UK Charts - and as such the lyrics are perfectly ignorable under the Coldplay-alike string flourishes, and the little drum fills between each line (arguably the best thing about the song) go unnoticed and underappreciated under all the omnipresent self-righteousness. Because while the Manics' gift for a chorus which blends catchiness and meaningfulness perfectly is one practically unrivalled to this day (a fact which is surely something to do with the conjunction of Nicky's lyrics and James and Sean's music - they've actually each decided to do what they're best at, and as such the whole is much more than the sum of its parts), this one is just lacking the kind of determination that made the likes of "A Design For Life" pretty much era-defining.

So that's it; I could go on and explain how really the verses are quite nice (nicer, in fact, than the muddy and vaguely dead-sounding verses of the otherwise far, far better "The Second Great Depression"), and how that bit when the drums come in for a second or so at the beginning is even nicer - I could even make the not unreasonable claim that James Dean Bradfield's vocals are surprisingly excellent on here (although perhaps not as passionate as on Tigers closer "Winterlovers") and a variety of other positive comments, but, in truth, that chorus, and the sense of overblown showmanship that accompanies it, overshadow the other three minutes or so of this song. It's quite sad, really.

[MP3] Manic Street Preachers - Indian Summer