Random album review #5

The Japanese Popstars - We Just Are

I'll level with you - We Just Are is a great album, but I'm boring myself trying to write about it. For an electro house long player, it's good - REALLY good. All the songs are nothing less than banging, and it's full of thumping bass, euphoric build ups and slamming drops. But still it bores me a bit. I think the problem is that it's very four-on-the-floor head nodding music, which when listened to in a bedroom environment has a fairly short shelf life in just one listening session. I'm sure that if I was listening to it via one of The Japanese Popstars' live shows (which are highly rated and widely acclaimed - they're touring at the moment so I hope to catch them soon) then I would be doing nothing but gushing praise for We Just Are, but as it is (I'm currently sitting in my room hunched over my computer, it's a fairly grey day outside) the euphoric build ups are soaring by rather under-appreciated. All of the tunes on the album are obviously designed to have you reaching for the lasers rather than for a cup of tea, and while I can easily appreciate that each of the tracks are finely crafted pieces of dance music they just don't fully inspire when simply listened to on the CD, and really need to be experienced in a club environment. So my recommendation would be: aim to see The Japanese Popstars live, then the album will probably take on a whole new feel afterwards. A similar thing happened to me with Digitalism a few years ago; tracks like Pogo and Jupiter Room had intoxicated my brain with German electro goodness, but I'd been fairly cool on the rest of their album Idealism until I saw them live at Reading 07, a highly spiritual experience that made me enjoy the record a lot more from then on as listening to each track evoked the buzz of the live performance. That's how I see We Just Are: bit boring in mp3 form, probably very WOW live. Check out their tour dates, if they're playing near you then I'd definitely recommend trying to catch them live: http://www.myspace.com/thejapanesepopstars

Seeing as I've dealt with We Just Are fairly quickly, I'll tag on a proposal of what you should be pumping out your stereo's speakers instead. Bassline has for a long time been an object of scorn in my eyes, for two key reasons: 1) I don't carry a flick-knife, and 2) I don't own a modified Citroen Saxo. If you catch my drift. Despite spending a considerable amount of time in the bassline capital of the world, Sheffield, I've never felt the urge to attend any Niche nights, generally because my finest stab-proof vest coincidentally always seems to be in the wash when they're on. Shame. Instead I've tended to plump for the watered-down version of bassline, wonky fidget house, as pioneered by the likes of Jack Beats, Martelo, and various other inhabitants of Hervé's Cheap Thrills imprint and beyond. They make music that's acceptable for the middle-class young adults of Great Britain to bounce around the room like chimps to, safe in the knowledge that they can flail along to the wobbling basslines as much as they like without fearing to meet the eye of anyone else in the room.

I still wouldn't be first in line at a bassline or speed garage night, but my opinion of the music itself has rocketed in the space of the past day. This is because for once, I actually listened to some bassline. Proper bassline, courtesy of Rinse 05, mixed by Paleface. All of the Rinse series is great, and as this particular mix was actually released in the middle of 2008 I probably shudda trusted the Rinsers and acquired this record sooner, but it was just that tag stopping me: bassline. I already had Ministry of Sound's The Sound of Bassline compilation, but had never been fully captivated by some of the rather cheesy pop stuff on there (it's got the likes of What's It Gonna Be and Heartbroken on it). I was drawn to the Rinse 05 mix, however, because I'd been noticing Paleface cropping up quite a bit in association with the "UK Funky" scene (he's one of the cousinz in Crazy Cousinz - see Songs I'm Currently Loving), and felt a bit of bassline might shake me from my We Just Are-induced stupor (that's a wee bit mean, it really is a good album). Upon listening to the Rinse mix, I noticed something:

IT'S SO FUCKING GOOD!!!

Paleface rinses (ahem) no less than 40 tracks in the space of just under 80 minutes, showcasing some wonderful skittering beats and bouncing bass, as well as elements of grime and R&B (the suitably underground-sounding stuff, no Heartbroken here), which leave you wanting to do nothing more than dance around wearing a monkey suit on a trampoline for 72 hours straight, fuelled by gallons of Red Bull (that's the strongest stimulate they do at bassline nights, right?). Paleface's mix also incorporates much of the tribal afrobeat reminiscent of UK Funky that had lured me in in the first place, and with each track tending to get no more than a minute and a half blast before the next tune begins it's wobbling bass onslaught, this mix really keeps you bopping your head, shoulders, knees and toes. I've reached the conclusion that bassline is probably the most fun music genre out there - although I don't think I'll be rushing down to Sheffield's (newly reopened) Niche club to share my findings with the other clientele any time soon.

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Having given We Just Are fairly short shrift and established that bassline is the greatest thing in the world, all that's left to do now is sit back and let the otherworldly powers of the iTunes shuffle function select the next random album to be reviewed. Fingers crossed, eh?

.........

Oh Christ on a bike. I've listened to this album pretty much not at all, this is gonna be tough.

JEGA - VARIANCE

We're talking ambient IDM electroscapes here people, a bit Boards of Canada/Boxcutter-esque. I think. Like I said, I haven't really listened to it, so I'm basing these descriptions on the brief snippets of the tracks that I'm scrabbling through now. I'm not really sure why I have this album to be honest, I've really not paid it much attention at all, ever. Oh well, I'm sure it's good. It sounds like it could be good.

Here's a sampler:

Jega - Soulflute

(It took ages on this shitty internet connection to upload the 'songs I'm currently loving' to mediafire and I can't be arsed to now upload the actual soulflute mp3, and you're just gonna have to learn to live with that)

Songs I'm Currently Loving:

• Les Gillettes - Pompeii - Erol-approved slice of infectious electro house, sure to be heard on many a dancefloor in the coming months
• Paleface & Kyla - Do You Mind (Crazy Cousinz Remix) - I'm rather reluctant to use the term 'UK Funky' for this upcoming musical style as it's biologically impossible for a white person to use the word 'funky' in any situation and emerge with any shred of coolness, but this is a tuuuuune *makes 'T' sign with hands*
• Army of the Pharaohs - Dump The Clip - Old-Skool East Coast hip-hop gem
• Fuckpony - Orgasm On The Dancefloor Saturday - I find it beyond comprehension that anyone could look at the combination of words in this artist/track's name and not think "YES. THIS IS WHAT I NEED".
• Bibio - Sugarette (Wax Stag Remix) - The Hardcore and The Gentle favourite Bibio released a follow up to the excellent Ambivalence Avenue the other week, including a few new songs and remixes of tracks from AA. Guess what? Yeh, that's right. This track's one of 'em.
• Pom Pom - Untitled 06 - It seems to be the case in the electronic music world these days that the zanier the name, the more brilliant it is. All of the tracks on Pom Pom's album are untitled, and they're all wicked.
• Jogger - Nephicide - Jogger's debut album This Great Pressure was released last week, and as Alan Hansen might say, it's pretty tasty. This track is completely bonkers, and sounds like what I'd imagine Deftones, Squarepusher and Fionn Regan having an orgy would sound like, with Daedelus videotaping. Which of course is a good thing. And I checked - 'nephicide' doesn't mean murdering your nephew. You know you were thinking it too.

Now it's time to hand out The Hardcore and The Gentle's 'Props of the Week' awards, with props this time going to Monsieur Jack Opus for the heads up on Sbtrkt, and Turnado for the low-down on Chainsaw Calligraphy during Gaslamp Killer's set at Thrasher the other weekend.

• TJR - Just Gets Better (Sbtrkt Remix)
• 16Bit - Chainsaw Calligraphy - This song throws you over it's knee and proceeds to spank the living daylights out of you, ignoring your squeals and squirming and telling you to "take it like a bitch". Or, at least, that's how it seems to me. And I bloody love it.

Random album review #4

If you don't mind, I'm gonna kick off this post with a short review of The Event: How Racist Are You?, which I've just watched on 4OD. For a programme that primarily announces itself as "the event", I'd struggle to think of a bigger non-event that I've ever seen in my life. What could've been a thoroughly interesting and potentially harrowing piece of television was in fact an hour of volunteer douchebags arguing with each other and the experimental teacher Jane Elliott, and completely scuppering the whole experiment through their own obnoxious pig-headedness. The show was designed, through a micro-recreation of apartheid which divided people with brown eyes and people with blue eyes, to demonstrate how all of us can be perceptible to racism while not realising that we're actually engaged in discrimination. However, this was pissed upon by the cloth-brained middle-class twerps who were determined to turn the programme in to an opportunity to get up on their high horses (or remain on them, having probably rode in to the studio from their Surrey country homes) and assert that they weren't racist in the first place, and had clearly reached the limit of human learning capacity as there was nothing new anyone could teach them that was of any value. These people are a prime example of what the experiment was trying to teach - that you aren't always aware of racism until you're the victim of it yourself - but these wealthy white pillocks couldn't even stop downing pints of their own sexual ejaculate long enough to GET THE FUCKING POINT, and the programme leaves you feeling very depressed at the end as you know that the volunteers weren't going to be put through another experience of apartheid - lynching. Two women in particular really grinded my gears: some chick called Wanda (seemingly named after a fish, and needs to be battered like one too) who completely sabotaged and screwed up the final part of the experiment that was shaping up to be the most interesting section. And the bitch to end all bitches - Terry Taylor. I really fucking hate Terry Taylor. I hate her so much that I felt compelled to add another section to the side of this blog (on the right-hand side somewhere) of people I hate, just so that if she ever googles herself (which she probably will, the stuck-up cow) then hopefully this blog will appear in the results and she'll know how much I want to shove a nail bomb up her arse. She will of course have to filter through the results for Terry Taylor the ex-pro wrestler, who I'm sure is a decent bloke and whose back-side shall hopefully remain nail-free for ever more. I'm not gonna waste much more precious blogging time on this vile hag by detailing every fucking annoying thing she does (I recommend watching the programme yourself, if you want a thoroughly unrewarding hour's telly), but probably her worst part is where she tries to belittle one of the mixed race volunteer's account of how he feels ashamed to pick his daughter up from school in a white middle-class area because he fears his daughter's friends will judge the way he looks, by comparing it to how her rugby playing husband has to wear a suit to work each day instead of his rugby tracksuit. DEAR TERRY TAYLOR, PLEASE USE THE TIP OF ONE OF YOUR HUSBAND'S RUGBY BALLS TO GOUGE OUT YOUR EYES SO THAT NEVER AGAIN CAN YOU DO YOUR OBNOXIOUS AND PATRONISING EYE-ROLLING, THEN KINDLY THROW YOURSELF OFF A CLIFF. I HATE YOU. THANKS, BYE.

Stupid cow. Anyway, on with the random album review.

Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYo

If you're unaware of the delightfully filthy and smut-filled world of Spank Rock, then a brief skim of their MySpace will soon give you a good idea of what to expect. At the time of writing, the songs in their music player are called 'Loose', 'Shake That', 'B-O-O-T-A-Y', 'Pu$$y' and 'Bitch!', while they describe themselves as sounding like:

"Fat girls in a hot tub, popping bubbly, after a long night of playing slots at Caesar's Palace. We sound like the X rated Motorcycle Diaries meets Kweli on crystal meth"

Apart from a love of crystal meth, there are other things that Spank Rock and Andre Agassi have in common. Namely, they're both fucking good. YoYoYoYoYo is both an absolute pain to type on a keyboard (try it) and an absolute banger of a Bmore hip-hop album. In my experience rap/hip-hop albums are notorious for being very hit and miss, with a lot of miss. Often filled with skits and filler tracks where they've clearly come up with a half decent beat, thrown some half-arsed vocals on top and said "yep, that'll do to pad out our album alongside our one or two genuine hit tunes", several of the hip-hop albums in my iTunes tend to have play counts of "0, 22, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0" - and usually those '1's are the result of library shuffling. Spank Rock's debut (and to date only) LP, however, is packed full of good tunes. Part of what sets them apart from other hip-hop groups is the electro-club element to their tracks, which may be becoming increasingly non-unique through the growth of the likes of Mad Decent and the Bmore and UK Funky scenes in recent times, but when it was released back in 2006 YoYoYoYoYo was, and probably still is, one of the finest examples of a 'hip-hop meets electro house' album.

It's audio porn in two senses. The rapping is pure smut from start to finish, with the emphasis very much on sex, drugs and fillin' holes, but the album successfully sidesteps turning in to a gimmicky all-sex-no-substance record and delivers some quality beats and samples to truly arouse your ears. For me the finest moments of the album come from the second halves of the two songs in the middle, Bump - Amanda Blank takes over with a groin-shuddering flow of deliciously dirty bars ("my rhymes are painful and fresh, my pussy's tasting the best") - and Sweet Talk, which drops the beat completely with about a minute left and the tune morphs in to an euphoric chorus sung by sugary sweet female vocalists, as well as anyone else who happens to be listening to this infectious breakdown. My other top tracks on the album are Touch Me, which heralds it's arrival with a fanfare of trumpets, and Rick Rubin, which must surely sample some '80s 8-bit video game for it's primary tune. As I said though, none of this album disappoints, and if you don't already have it then I'd highly recommend adding it your music library. I'd also highly recommend shooting Terry Taylor on sight, so you can tell that I can be trusted as a man of impeccable taste.

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Do you ever get that feeling that your precursory rant about an annoying volunteer on a Channel 4 TV experiment is actually longer than the album review that was meant to be the main body of the post? I'm getting that feeling now, not sure why...

Anyway - Postmen nationwide are striking for it. Somali pirates are demanding it in return for the safe release of a couple of British hostages. There has been fervid debate over it by the members of the EU for the past week or so. "What is it they all want?!" ...I hear you ask. Oh you jokers, as if you haven't been eagerly anticipating it yourselves: It's time to discover which random album we'll be reviewing next!!

Reet, here we goo... shuffle shuffle shuffle...

THE JAPANESE POPSTARS - WE JUST ARE

This group aren't actually pop singers from Eastern Asia (unlike this little fella), they are in fact electro producers from Northern Ireland. So there. Here's a track to wet your appetite for the next post:

The Japanese Popstars - Face Melter

I feel obliged to add that despite what previous random album reviews might suggest, I do actually have non-dance music albums in my iTunes. The good ones just seem to be rather shuffle shy. Yeah, you heard me 'Astral Weeks' - the GOOD ones. Fuck you Van Morrison, fuck you.

Songs I'm Currently Loving:

• Joy Orbison - BRKLN CLLN
• Terror Danjah - Green Street
• The Juan MacLean - One Day
• Brackles - Rawkus
• Fauna - Zombie - perfect tune for if your Halloween party has a tropical funk theme
• Ms. Dynamite - Bad Gyal - she's still "the same little girl that grew up next door to you", but just a bit more, er, ragga sounding

Some of you are probably asking: "Jack, are the next two songs two of your favourite songs of the year so far?"

Why, yes! They are! How did you know??

• Clark - Growls Garden
• Few Nolder - Chika - we always like to promote both excellent songs and excellent artist names on The Hardcore and The Gentle