Fuckbook

Condo Fucks - Fuckbook
released 23 March 2009 on Matador

There you go, it’s official: sweary band names are cool. Hot on the heels of Fucked Up and Fuck Buttons - both of whom made No Ripcord’s Top 50 Albums of 2008 list - come Condo Fucks. But despite the name, they’re not Satanic grindcore merchants or day-glo nu-rave upstarts from Leeds, they are in fact the band we all know as Yo La Tengo.

Back in 1997, Yo La Tengo released I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One which inside, featured references to back catalogues of various fictional bands, supposedly on Matador. As well as G.I. Joe Extreme and The Shitheels, there was the Condo Fucks. They’ve invented a back story and given themselves new noms de plume: Georgia Condo, Kid Condo and James McNew. Oh, guys, stop it, our aching sides. Seriously, did these guys learn nothing from Garth Brooks? Yo La Tengo’s last album, I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, proved they were adept at myriad musical genres and they released a semi-covers album in 1990 entitled Fakebook, so why the need for the new identity?

Although it remains a fairly unimaginative stunt, the pseudonym makes more sense once you actually listen to the record. While Yo La Tengo are full of imagination and style, Condo Fucks are akin to a high school garage band. In fact, forget that, they’re the best high school garage band you’ve ever heard and one you’ll wish you were in. Fuckbook is the sound of a band with a quarter of a century’s experience really getting back to basics and rediscovering why they fell in love with music in the first place. There’s no studio polish and no second takes; everything is recorded as live (each track starts with a count in, just to reinforce that point) and the vocals sit so low in the mix, they’re all but indecipherable.

While as a general rule albums with little production where you can’t hear the words aren’t to be recommended, to hold that against Fuckbook would be kind of missing the point. Condo Fucks take their cue from the pantheon of garage punk greats, all the way from The Stooges and MC5 right up to The White Stripes and The Black Keys. However, the choice of songs (all the tracks are covers) is more indebted to classic pop of the 1960s, such as The Kinks and The Beach Boys.

Make no mistake, this is a rollercoaster thrill ride of an album, but the line between distortion and feedback heavy garage band and unlistenable wall of noise is a thin one, and one they very nearly cross on Accident. Happily, that’s the exception rather than the rule, and Condo Fucks rip through the rest of the set with the zip and vim of teenagers, adding a surf and bubblegum twist to each number as they go.

Opening track What’cha Gonna Do About It (originally by The Small Faces) races along on a buzzsaw riff reminiscent of The White Stripes’ Black Math. A cover of The Kinks’ This Is Where I Belong is so steeped in drone it’s practically no-wave and their version of The Beach Boys’ Shut Down (parts 1 and 2) is full of life and a treat for the ears. The real highlight, however, is Condo Fucks’ take on With A Girl Like You by The Troggs. Georgia Hubley (sorry, Georgia Condo) takes lead vocals and her restraint twinned with the ‘ba ba bahs’ of the backing vocals turns the song into an understated pop gem.

Not very subtly attempting to re-launch your band may be a fairly questionable idea but it’s all academic in the end; no matter what the name on the front is, there’s no doubt that this is a great album. It’s brave to attempt a whole album in a style you’re not known for so long into your career - it’s not something you can see U2 doing any time soon. Fuckbook is a fantastic, energy-fuelled riot of an album and - if you wish to view it as such - yet another brilliant addition to the embarrassment of riches that is the collected works of Yo La Tengo.

Grace/Wastelands

Peter Doherty - Grace/Wastelands
released 16 March 2009 on EMI

For the most part of the 21st Century, Pete(r) Doherty has been seen as something of a joke in the UK. He’s better known for his various misdemeanours than his recorded output, he spends time with people who are a negative influence, drugs are involved and he’s always wearing that stupid thing on top of his head. So far, so Winehouse, but the comparison only stretches so far. Whereas Amy Winehouse has had commercial success in spades, Doherty’s main trading commodity remains the car-crash that is his life. Winehouse’s last album, Back to Black, has sold nearly 3 million copies in the UK and has gone 9-times platinum. Doherty’s most recent effort as frontman of Babyshambles, Shotter’s Nation, managed a paltry five weeks on the album charts. Clearly, something needs to change.

There have been enough bright spots throughout his career to suggest that there is a genuine creative talent at work, if only he could rein himself in enough to let it stand out. On Grace/Wastelands, Doherty aims to shake off his reputation and let the music do the talking. In his own mind, he’s a wandering troubadour chronicling the tales of England and this is the persona he’s looking to burn into the nation’s collective psyche. In order to assist, he’s roped in Graham Coxon, another whose view of England is seemingly taken at times exclusively from The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society.

Opening track Arcady follows a well-trodden Doherty pattern; it’s a love letter to England, but an excessively romanticised England; the kind where girls are more likely to be found poring over a well-thumbed paperback than downing neon alcopops. Over jaunty acoustic guitar strumming and restrained percussion, Doherty sings “In Arcady life trips along/Pure and simple as the shepherd’s song.” It’s here that a peculiar quirk of Doherty’s voice comes to the fore, that while he can hold a tune, he often sounds like he’s singing with his tongue sticking out.

For Libertines die-hards, the most anticipated track would be A Little Death Around the Eyes, which was written with old bandmate Carl Barât. It’s a fairly dull song with a terrible opening line to the opening verse (“Your boyfriend’s name was Dave/I was bold and brave”) that producer Stephen Street does his best to rescue by swamping it with 1960s-style strings until it sounds like a Last Shadow Puppets B-side.

In fact, the first half of the album in general is fairly dull. Recent single, Last of the English Roses, is mildly diverting, but ultimately it’s lacking in any real substance. Just as you’re about to completely write off the entire album, Doherty throws something in from leftfield. Sweet By and By sounds as if it came from the 1920s jazz and swing era and although it’s not a perfectly executed pastiche, it’s sufficient to re-grab your attention. From that point onwards the album regains focus. Palace of Bone breaks into a Stranglers style bassline halfway through, and that’s before the best track of the lot, Sheepskin Tearaway. It’s a bluesy, heartfelt ballad, sparse and delicate and perfectly complemented by the vocals of trip-hop star Dot Allison. While the album may not be a total triumph, this song alone makes it worth hearing.

The phrase “return to form” is much overused in journalism circles and it would be little more than hyperbole to suggest that a return to form is what Grace/Wastelands is. It can’t touch the Libertines’ début, Up the Bracket, with its excitement, immediacy and production values that sound like it was recorded in a biscuit tin. However, it’s far superior to Babyshambles’ wretched first album, Down in Albion. Consider Grace/Wastelands more of a step in the right direction, a sign that maybe all is not lost and he can turn things around yet.

The Law of the Playground

The Boy Least Likely To - The Law of the Playground
released 9 March 2009 on Too Young to Die

When The Boy Least Likely To released their début in 2005, you’d be forgiven for dismissing them as a couple of indie milksops with less cojones than a castrato. The album was called The Best Party Ever, the cover art featured crudely-drawn cartoon animals and balloons on a dazzlingly-bright yellow background, there was more glockenspiel than a primary school music class and a song about old-fashioned fizzy drinks (Warm Panda Cola). However, given a bit of time to bed in, it had more substance than you would have initially thought. Fun and bouncy on the outside maybe, but songs on the fear of growing up (Monsters) and woozy, lurching pop tunes (Sleeping with a Gun Under My Pillow) marked The Boy Least Likely To as potential successors to Belle and Sebastian’s crown.

Like Belle and Sebastian in recent years, The Boy Least Likely To have beefed up their sound somewhat, with more thought given to the production nudging them towards the mainstream and away from their lo-fi roots. However, that’s where the similarities end, because where Belle and Sebastian have managed to keep sight of what marked them out in the first place, The Boy Least Likely To, well, haven’t. It’s as if they looked at their last album, reduced it into three key ideas (namely childlike innocence, catchy hooks and a sprinkling of school music box instruments) and forgot about the subtleties and nuances that made the first album more than just disposable pop.

In fact, disposable pop is precisely what this album is. Now, there’s nothing wrong with something throwaway now and again, but it’s difficult to stomach over the course of eleven tracks. Each song may be perfectly fine in isolation, but put them all together and the relentless chirpiness of it will have you banging your head against the wall and reaching for the vodka. Whereas the first album had a ramshackle charm, The Law of the Playground appears calculated and oddly soulless. The sparingly-used childhood references in The Best Party Ever were interesting and made you smile, but here you are completely bombarded with them. The non-stop cutesy imagery and saccharine melodies comprise something which could lead a psychiatrist to a fairly damning diagnosis.

So, in the interests of balance and subjectivity, the positive points. Well, the second half of the album is slightly less grating. In fact, the middle track, The Boy Least Likely To is a Machine, is pretty good - it ditches the juvenilia and provides a bit of much-welcomed paranoia and gives hope that the band do actually have some grip on reality. For the first time, the band hit on a revolutionary idea which most musicians know as ‘minor chords.‘ Unfortunately, the next song is all about a cat and is entitled Whiskers. Enough said.

The full list of nostalgic references would be extremely long, but as a brief snapshot, this album mentions: conkers, balloons, marbles, pea shooters, rainbows and more besides. Most heinous of all is Every Goliath Has Its David which brings up that most irritating of cartoon characters, Scrappy-Doo (“I’m not a coward/I’ve got puppy powers”). That sound you can now hear is your own teeth gnashing as you cringe.

The world view that runs through the album can be summed up by the title of one of the songs: When Life Gives Me Lemons I Make Lemonade. Now, that’s not a bad philosophy on life to have in all honesty, but for music to resonate it needs a bit more substance. At its best, The Law of the Playground is a bit of light relief on a cloudy day. At it’s worst, it’s irritating and infuriating and sounds like a Toploader album written for ten-year-olds. If The Boy Least Likely To concentrated more on writing music they want to write rather than what they think other people want them to write, they could have their day in the sun once more.

Invaders Must Die

The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die
released 23 February 2009 on Take Me to the Hospital/Cooking Vinyl

Every now and then, a song comes along that grabs you by the scruff of the neck, pins you against the wall and demands to be played over and over again. The title track from Invaders Must Die, The Prodigy’s fifth studio album, is that song. It starts simply enough, it’s just the same bass note repeated seven times. That may not get the hairs on the back of your neck standing up on paper, but those notes have just the right amount of reverb on them to let you know that this is classic Liam Howlett. The bass rumbles on, before a riff comes in, then a drum beat, and the whole time the track is building and building, the tension ever-increasing. The music stops, a distorted voice proclaims, “We are The Prodigy”, and we’re off: jackhammer drums, grinding industrial guitars and a behemoth riff that could strip paint. It’s the most exhilarating opening track you’ll hear all year and gives the rest of this album an awful lot to live up to. Ultimately, it can’t fulfil its early promise.

Both the title track and the current single, Omen, are built on the kind of riffs that are so infectious, it would be difficult to not make fantastic songs out of them. These are the best tracks by some distance and interestingly, they’re the only two songs where Howlett shares producing duties – his partner in the studio being James Rushent of Reading electro-punks Does It Offend You, Yeah?

Bar a few inspired bright spots, the rest of the album is faceless Prodigy-by-numbers. The attention to detail is astonishing with the craftsmanship behind every beat, bass squelch and keyboard stab clearly evident, but it hardly matters when you haven’t got the tunes to back it up. The songs – Omen and Invaders Must Die excepted – could have come from any Prodigy album in the last twenty years; they’re built around nihilistic drums, aggressive synths and vaguely threatening phrases tossed together in the vain hope they might represent some form of meaningful lyric. Crucially, however, they lack the humour of a Charly or Out of Space or the immediacy and pop hooks of a Firestarter or Breathe. In short, nothing really stands out.

That’s not to say there aren’t positive points to take from this album. Keith Flint makes a welcome return on vocals, and his beery, leering style lifts the tracks he features on. Dave Grohl makes a couple of guest appearances too, and the Grohl/Flint effect is at its most potent on Run With the Wolves, where Flint drawls, “Yamug, swy-ayadda cutchoo daan, yarun wivda wolves whilea hunlika haand" behind energetic work from everybody’s favourite rent-a-drummer. Incidentally, if you don’t speak fluent Basildon, the above lyrics are actually, “You’re a mug, that’s why I had to cut you down. You run with the wolves while I hunt like a hound.”

After that, there’s not much else worth reporting: Take Me to the Hospital is a claustrophobic, nightmarish come-down to begin with, but the effect is slightly diminished by a mid-section which sounds like the poor relation of No Good (Start the Dance). Colours features singing children and what can only be described as rave panpipes – both choices are equally questionable. Closing track Stand Up actually makes an effort to break new ground, attempting to add muscle and bite to The Go! Team’s cartoon-dance shtick, but by then it’s too little, too late.

Invaders Must Die isn’t a bad album, but in the end it suffers from having a beginning which is, if anything, too good. The UK music scene would be poorer without them but if they are to move forward, it’s time to learn that they need a few more tunes to go with their own brand of hardcore raver’s machismo.

Years of Refusal

Morrissey - Years of Refusal
released 16 February 2009 on Decca/Polydor

Everyone knows something about Morrissey. People who couldn’t name a single song by The Smiths even if you pointed a gun at their head know who he is. Despite his repeated proclamations that fame doesn’t interest him and he just wants to be left alone, Morrissey knows how to play the game better than probably anybody in music except Madonna. He has always courted controversy and has been a fixture of the music press for nearly three decades. It has been said that in the early years of his solo career, issues of the NME which featured Morrissey interviews would outsell Morrissey albums.

As such, it’s impossible to not have any preconceptions about Years of Refusal. Regardless of the content, there will be legions of die-hards who will buy and cherish it and people who wouldn’t listen to it if they were paid. In effect, Morrissey has been so good at creating and maintaining an image that it’s almost a hindrance when it comes to getting people to listen to his music.

Happily, Years of Refusal is more or less a triumph. It’s difficult to think of any other artist who is approaching 50 and is producing something so fresh and relevant whilst still doing what they do best and have been doing throughout their career.

It’s a Morrissey record, so you’re initially going to be listening out for the lyrics rather than the music. However, to do that would be to do the band a disservice, as they demonstrate that their arrangements are much more than just a vehicle for Morrissey’s trademark wit and wisdom. Whether it be the powerful marching drums that drive Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed or the flamenco guitars and horn flourishes that adorn When I Last Spoke to Carol, the band are cohesive and more than deserve equal billing with the man himself.

As far as the lyrics go, there are signs that Morrissey is possibly mellowing with age. Songs are titled Sorry Doesn’t Help and Black Cloud rather than Some Girls are Bigger than Others or Girlfriend in a Coma. In fact, there appears to be nothing as deliberately attention-grabbing and obtuse as even the assertion that “you have never been in love until you’ve seen the sun rise over the home for the blind” from You Are the Quarry’s First of the Gang to Die. Some songs here could even be described as practically conventional in their lyrical style. That’s not to say there isn’t the odd suggestive and fruity couplet that will raise a wry smile; take It’s Not Your Birthday Anymore where Morrissey croons “All the gifts that I gave can’t compare in any way / To the love I am now giving to you, right here, right now… on the floor.”

And croon Morrissey certainly does. Another feature of his ever-mellowing outlook is that he has fully grown into his voice and it suits him like never before. He has become a proper chanteur and is aging with a stylish élan.

Of the twelve tracks on show, the first eight are endlessly listenable and demonstrate the fact that when on form, Morrissey sure knows how to write a tune. In fact, it’s not too high praise to suggest that current single, I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris, is amongst his best work, Smiths-era inclusive.

But just as it seems that Years of Refusal is destined to become a classic, Morrissey’s inspiration runs dry. You Were Good in Your Time is a mawkish ballad that strays dangerously close to Lloyd-Webber-esque show-tune material and will have you skipping back to the high-energy and bombast of the fantastic first track, Something is Squeezing My Skull. The final two songs are lacklustre Morrissey-by-numbers efforts, with album closer I’m OK By Myself the worse offender. It appears to have been written by not-particularly-funny pop satirists and sounds like what people who don’t like Morrissey songs think Morrissey songs are like. It’s miserable, it’s whiny, it’s self-absorbed and it displays the kind of attitude that would be more suited to a surly teenager.

Herein lies the frustrating paradox that is Morrissey. For most of the record he appears to be content to make music, but he can’t resist the occasional blatantly attention-grabbing stunt which appears completely at odds with his supposed dislike of fame. It’s almost as if he’s resigned to his press caricature at times and it’s none more apparent on the opening lines of All You Need is Me: “You hiss and groan and you constantly moan but you don’t ever go away / And that’s because all you need is me.”

Years of Refusal proves that - to borrow a lazy cliché - you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. However, it demonstrates that, given time, the dog can learn how to make the best of those tricks. This album is at its best when it’s idiosyncratic, unique, vintage Morrissey. Yet it’s Morrissey’s other, less appealing idiosyncrasies that are his undoing and until he learns to rein them in and just do what he does best, he’s forever destined by be judged by his image instead of his music.