On A Mission

Katy B - On A Mission
released 4 April 2011 on Sony

Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with all the musical genres and sub-categories that are knocking around. For those of you who like your music ordered neatly, Kathleen Brien – better known as Katy B – fits into the box labelled “UK funky.” If you don’t know what UK funky is, you could always ask Katy herself, as she wrote an essay on the subject while studying for a degree in popular music. I’m no expert myself, but presumably it’s different to US funky, which I imagine to primarily consist of Bootsy Collins, George Clinton and Nile Rodgers jamming non-stop for three days aboard a spaceship made entirely of hallucinations.

Anyway, Katy B is a very different proposition; she’s been providing guest vocals for underground tracks since the age of sixteen and has been heavily supported by former pirate station, Rinse FM. She gate-crashed the UK Top 5 late last year with her calling card, Katy On A Mission, and there’s been no stopping her since.

 

On A Mission is the sound of the dancefloor being brought to the pop charts. In fact, it could even be labelled a concept album in the loosest possible sense, as it has a theme running through it of a big night out. Stylistically, there are plenty of nods to dance music trends of the last twenty years, most notably the breakbeat of the 1990s and the formerly ubiquitous sound of UK garage from the early 21st Century. Thankfully, Katy B brings more to the table than the irritating two-step beat that was unavoidable a decade or so ago. Credit must go to the production team behind On A Mission, as it is they (Geeneus, Benga, Zinc, Artwork and Skream) who elevate the album from merely “good” to “great.”

 

Opener Power On Me isn’t anything to write home about, but the album really bursts into life with aforementioned single, Katy On A Mission. It’s a song that expertly captures the thrilling moment when you enter a club and the sheer force of the music completely envelops you. Katy B’s clipped, English tones (listen as she sings, “I try to push past but he wants to play”) contrast perfectly with the bass-heavy, dubby production of Benga. On A Mission deftly mines non-commercial genres and repackages them for crossover success; there’s a very strong pop, radio-friendly vibe running through the record, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for experimentation and fresh ideas. The marvellously-titled Witches Brew throws oscillating bleeps around with some huge bass and Magnetic Man collaboration Perfect Stranger is uncompromising dubstep.

 

From Katy On A Mission’s start-of-the-night feel, we move to unwanted attention and rubbish potential hook-ups (Why You Always Here and the effortless Movement) all the way through to the closing of the club, Lights On, which features Mercury winning Ms. Dynamite. It’s a joyous track about not wanting the night to end, and the wish to keep dancing once the club lights come up. Seeing as the UK hasn’t had a decent female urban star since Ms. Dynamite’s halcyon days, this song could also be viewed as a symbolic passing of the baton.

 

We’ll neatly sidestep the insipid Easy Please Me with its terrible opening line of “Standing at the bar with my friend, Olivia,” and conveniently move onto final track, Hard To Get. We’ve gone out, had a drink and a dance, made it to closing time, survived the night bus, and Hard To Get is the post-club comedown. It’s languid and sexy funk, with horn stabs and sultry vocals, and an ideal way to end both an evening and the album. As if to let you know we’re at the end, Katy B does her album “thankyous” towards the end of the song, finally thanking the listener for “joining me on my mission.” She then puts on an endearingly silly voice, and collapses into laughter. It may seem an insignificant moment, but it shows Katy B’s one of us. She might be a star now, but she’s just the girl next door who lives to go out and have a good time. What could have been an unspectacular let-down of an album has become a triumphant pop masterclass that’s likely to soundtrack many a good time this year.

 

On A Mission has plenty for the charts, plenty for the dancefloors and plenty for people who take their music a bit more seriously. Katy B could be loved by everyone and she probably deserves to be; after all, she’s just made the pop record of 2011.

The Mercury Prize 2010

It’s the time of year when a bunch of people in “the biz” put their heads together and come up with a dozen acts to put forward for the Mercury Prize (or, to give it its full title, The Barclaycard Mercury Prize). Almost as traditional as the mid-July unveiling of the list is the customary griping about the make-up of said list. People always say that Christmas seems to be getting earlier year on year, but I think the gap between the releasing of the list and the deluge of criticism of the choices is getting smaller as each twelve month passes. In fact, some music journalists on Twitter, so jaded of the inevitable impending criticism, were pretending to have a moan about the judges’ selections an hour or so before the list was made public.

So, since we’re here, why don’t we sit down, have a nice cup of tea, peruse the albums on the list and offer up our views on this year’s shortlist?

Actually, do you mind if we don’t? My opinions on the list will be incredibly similar to yours and pretty much anyone else who’s decided to vent their spleen on the subject. All critiques follow a simple formula, namely: “I’m glad they included [Band A], what are they doing including [Band B] and what kind of moron would leave out [Band C]?” My Band A, B and C are The xx, Biffy Clyro and Field Music respectively - yours will probably be different - but it’s completely immaterial really.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a piece rubbishing the prize or even the concept of it. The majority of awards are fairly meaningless, and the Mercury is better than most at making brave choices and not necessarily kowtowing to public opinion. The point is that this hackneyed, predictable cliché of dismissing the list as worthless is beyond tiresome.

As far as I can tell, anyone who writes off the list would only be happy if their favourite twelve records of the year made up the Mercury shortlist, but how realistic is that? The chances of a team of experts and professionals coming together and choosing the exact dozen you want on the list are fairly slim. Guess what, everyone, taste is subjective, and your favourite album of the year not making the cut equates to a difference of opinion rather than a failure on the part of the award.

While we’re on the subject, the whole concept of “the best album of the year” is near-impossible to pin down. How do you define “best”? Most enjoyable, most inventive, most different, most surprising or any other superlative you care to toss into the ring? Any award for the “best” anything is wildly open to interpretation: in 1997, Titanic won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but how was that the best? If you’re judging “best” in terms of special effects or box office gross then the victory is fairly undisputable, but if you think of “best” pertaining to story or dialogue, then the success of Titanic (and subsequent nomination of Avatar for the same award in 2009) must be one of the indications of the impending apocalypse.

Critics also like to find trends amongst the winners of the Mercury prize: another pretty fruitless exercise. Attempting to apply anything remotely mathematically rigorous to such a small data set (there have been 18 winners) where the choice of who is victorious is influenced by so many external factors is essentially futile. There is a different panel of judges each year, attitudes change, scenes come and go, and if you want to predict who’s going to win this year, a look at the role call of previous champions will tell you absolutely nothing.

There is also the much-vaunted “Curse of the Mercury”: examples of acts fading into obscurity after their prize win, such as Talvin Singh and Ms. Dynamite. This was said to have been “lifted” in 2008 with the success of Elbow, but its return was heralded last year with a poor post-win sales showing from Speech Debelle. Interestingly, no-one seems to argue that a Mercury Prize win offers a significant boost in sales for an album. So, considering the fact no-one’s ever won the prize twice and a win means units shifted, it’s little surprise that follow-ups tend to relatively under-perform.

What was meant to be a defence of the Mercury Prize looks to have turns out as a defiant stance against the nay-sayers, but the point remains. The Mercury Prize is an interesting award, can lead to healthy debate and often rewards acts that look to do something out of the ordinary with their music. So, this year, let’s not pass judgement prematurely, let’s acknowledge that not everyone agrees with our own personal tastes and let’s look upon it as an opportunity to discover something that may have otherwise slipped through the cracks. The Mercury Prize has honoured fantastic artists like Suede, Pulp, PJ Harvey and Dizzee Rascal, while giving much-needed publicity to smaller acts like Burial, Fionn Regan, Seth Lakeman and, this year, Kit Downes Trio. It should be celebrated in what it seeks to do, whether we agree with the winner or not.

That said, if Corinne Bailey Rae wins on September 7, the judging panel are clearly a load of cloth-eared cretins who wouldn’t know a decent tune if it slapped them round the face of a weekend. But then again, that’s just my opinion…