Category: Buzz Chart

Brother Ali is a rapper who can make you smile in the blink of an eye. Honestly, you can pick any Ali track at random and within 30 seconds, you’ll be grinning from ear-to-ear like some kind of deranged Cheshire Cat and this new album, Us, is no different.

The rapper is joined by Atmosphere’s beatsmith Ant who laces his usual mix of upbeat drums and pretty melodies, this time using the live instrumentation that got it’s first airing on Atmosphere’s When Life Gives You Lemons… album and once more gives Ali the perfect landscape on which to tell his stories.

Being introduced on your own album by Chuck D is not just a statement of intent for things to come, it’s a whip crack that forces you to sit up and listen before launching into The Preacher, with it’s horns and handclaps, which is sure to be another bonafide crowd pleasing classic to rank alongside Forest Whitaker and Room With A View.

Ali’s storytelling, which encompasses other people for the first time, as opposed to just his own personal trials and tribulations, gives it another dimension and makes it a much more rounded album than The Undisputed Truth, his last full length effort. The vibe continues through tracks like Games and Fresh Air, which you can hear by clicking above, and Best @ It which features a killer opening verse from Freeway.

The final track, Us, is the sonic embodiment of the slogan that runs through the album – There’s no me and no you, it’s just us – and is the perfect showcase of a talent that has been bubbling under for too long. This is the album to push Ali through and there isn’t a man on this planet that doesn’t deserve it more.

Abjekt.

Hipsters, prepare to squirm! The year, 1982, and, most likely after reading about them in Sounds, I picked up Flipper‘s “Love Canal/Ha Ha Ha” 7″ from Subway Records in Brighton. I dug the band name, and the cover looked sick. I wanted in!

But then I got home, and after a couple of spins I was just not connecting at all with the twisted discordant grind. I took the 7″ around to my friend Martin to see what he thought. His eclectic musical taste was gaining at pace, as was his appetite for opiates. Of course he locked right in to Flipper’s groove. I told him to keep the 7″, and returned to more accessible sounds.

Domino Records have reissued a bunch of Flipper’s early releases, with “Generic“, their ’82 debut LP being the obvious starting point, and easily their most crucial release. And, funnily enough, Krist Novoselic, in his chipper liner notes, recalls a similar non-plussed experience when he first heard Flipper, on a beat up tape lent by his buddy Buzz Osbourne … but closes with the advice that “if it does not grab you straight away, give it a few spins and it could very well creep up on you and knock you off your feet”. It certainly worked for me. As time past by I grew to appreciate what Flipper was about, rocking out to their explosive and challenging psychotic jams that had their sights set firmly on blowing our tiny minds and beating us in to submission, eventually.

Flipper Rules… Ok? Ok!!

Pete Craven.

I think of Polar Bear Club as a hardcore band yet this record really isn’t that heavy at all. It feels like a Small Brown Bike record but with far superior production and a slight tinge of The Get Up kids and a little bit of folky influence in there. The album’s dramatically strong impetus comes mainly from the fact that, although there are fairly fast and upbeat tracks, a lot of the songs are actually quite slow.

This breaks up our usual perception of hardcore as being fast-paced and makes Polar Bear Club an altogether more interesting prospect than your average band in their genre. ‘Boxes‘ is the perfect example of how this band take a simple formula, add some slightly-out-of-the-ordinary riffs around the main melody without over-complicating everything and come up trumps with a classic-sounding song.

With album number two, Polar Bear Club have truly perfected the art of balancing simplicity and originality, crafting a collection of accomplished tracks full of hooks, interesting nuances, and that rough yet melodic heart-wrenching vocal their small but growing fanbase has come to know and love. Variation is key here and where a lot of bands’ songs often end up blending into one, Polar Bear Club clearly define every offering with a specific theme and sound that doesn’t stray from their aesthetic but adds something new to their spectrum of sounds. ‘Drifting Thing‘ in particular shows a softer side to the band and a wildly different side to their instruments from that which they normally use with lilting vocals and palm-muted guitars.

Above all, ‘Chasing Hamburg‘ is an album that is undoubtedly heartfelt, one that you can identify with and one that is begging for a singalong or 20.

Winegums.

When Every Time I Die dropped The Big Dirty in 2007, their augmented Southern Rock stylings ensured not a pair of hips was left in the house that wasn’t swinging this way and that to their riffs. So when they released the brilliantly titled The Marvelous Slut with its angled tones and screamed vocals, the fuse had been lit to see just what sonic explosion would be held within their new album’s cover.

New Junk Asthetic is an album that will unite all Every Time I Die fans, that much is clear. Whilst the swagger from the previous album is still there, in the grooving stylings of Wanderlust [which you can hear by clicking the player above] which will make even the squarest of nerds bounce to the chugging guitars, they have reverted to their older material for this marriage.

Who Invited The Russian Soldier and White Smoke are the perfect examples of that, at times stripped down, at times a full on assault showcasing the versatility of Keith Buckley and co. as they pound their way through what must be the best rock album of the year. The album seems slightly short but by the time you reach the end, you only want to play the entire thing again so it’s no bad thing.

All in all, New Junk Asthetic is that record that makes you want to smash up your surroundings and watch it burn, don’t continue living without it!

Abjekt.

As more and more re-issues, best of compilations (the stars of this review’s own Collected is no exception) and single tracks keep cropping up on the internet to be half-listened to while you open up another tab in firefox and develop some sort of attention deficit disorder, bold statements like ‘there’s no such thing as an album anymore’ aren’t so much bold as an unfortunate actuality.

Almost TWENTY years ago Massive Attack released the groundbreaking ‘Blue Lines‘, a full on album that everyone has or should have listened to at least five times all the way through without stopping but maybe while doing something else like cleaning. The albums that followed in the same decade were just as worthy of your time and attention, then pow pow here come the 00s and aside from 100th Window which wasn’t fully Massive Attack anyway; it looked as though these Bristol-based beatniks were another victim of the music scene becoming increasingly temporary and a bit rubbish.

Or hopefully a ten year break is just what they needed for LP5, which, untitled or not, carries so much hope of being a proper album that, while not totally absent from the last decade, has been missed. An LP. A fully Massive Attack, Del Naja, Danny G and some speculated awesome contributors (Damon Albarn, Guy Garvey, Damon Albarn, Tunde Adebimpe, Damon Albarn and hopefully Damon Albarn) LP. Maybe this will be one of the albums that spur the idea of the album to make a comeback? Please?

Who knows. But the out-of-fucking-nowhere Splitting The Atom EP is a damn good teaser. The title track has mad ominous keys that carry tweaked influences from both Gorillaz’ Demon Days and Portishead’s Third but remain ultimately and unquestionably Massive Attack. Bulletproof Love serves as a minimal-tech platform for Guy Garvey of Elbow to sound great and a little Kid A (the track, not the album) on before a huge and unmistakably Blue Lines era style crescendo in the middle that gives me shivers and hope that LP5 may just be worth the ten year wait.

Stanley.

Last year I went to see Municipal Waste play live at the underworld in Camden. To quote myself I said “Maybe a “detox” is in order before the Waste come at us again with something fresh, something new and something that will make us go utterly ape shit for these guys all over again.” What the Virginian thrash powerhouse have done is produce a record that is more focused, more furious, more aggressive and I, for one, have gone utterly ape shit for it!

It seems as though a lot of the main stream metal media have turned their backs on this whole ‘Thrash revival’ thing that’s going on. Municipal Waste have had their critics and their doubters over the past year or so but with the explosive nature of their sound, magnified on ‘Massive Aggressive‘, it appears that all of this ‘hating’ is just pissing in the wind.

‘Masked By Delirium‘ sets the break neck pace for the album and will silence all nay say-ers. ‘Upside Down Church‘ and ‘Wolves Of Chernobyl‘ to name a few are stand out, trash masterpieces which are only added to by Tony Foresta’s visceral, unrelenting vocals. Sit down at your desk, shut you pie hole and prepare to get schooled by the Waste with thrash metal 101.

‘Massive Aggressive‘ is consistently impressive. The amazingly titled ‘Horney For Blood‘ and ‘The Wrath Of The Severed Head‘ really shine through with not only blistering axe work from Ryan Waste but an all round superb rhythm section manned by Land Phil and Dave Witte. The Waste have clearly found their musical groove and are tighter than ever.

Simply put; I love this record. It makes you want to bang your head, pound beer after beer and mosh like you’ve never moshed before. The Waste have dropped a dirty, throbbing, heinous, slab of thrash right in our laps and it’s nothing short of fucking brilliant. Buy this record, listen to this record and watch as it melts your face off. Municipal Waste are back and as always, they’re gonna fuck you up!

Tom Lindsey

Earlier this year, Bibio released the fantastic, hey this would probably sound wonderful in an offbeat forest-based horror movie that’s more bittersweet and nostalgic than frightening, ‘Ambivalence Avenue‘. To my knowledge, such a film doesn’t exist, unless someone with too much time on their hands has re-made Blair Witch Project with more campfire songs, the odd spook here and there for good measure and everything turned out okay in the end. If this ever happened for some reason I hoped they at least considered using Bibio for the soundtrack.

This EP continues in similar awesome and lovely vein and could well spark one into making one of these films. There is a definite darkness to the sonically lush electronic beats but this is all sucked up into and is enriched by the happy memories that songs like Lovers’ Carvings just arouse inside of you whilst listening. Ultimately, the small and mostly remix-based (not a bad thing, they’re all mighty boss) EP is a very pleasant offering towards those parties that tend to happen at the end of summer or on the campsites at festivals I wish I had gone to.

Stanley.

There has only been a select few of UK bands who have been lucky enough to be signed by Bridge 9 records, so when I found out that Dead Swans had been signed up by the biggest label in hardcore I expected good things from the album.

When you first put the record on you are greeted by Thinking Of You, the song starts out slow and sludgy and I thought this could be really something different and great, until 20 seconds in when the song takes off. Every line of vocals is sung in a call and response way by singer Nick, every so often in hardcore music this is really effective, but when it’s on nearly every song it loses its charm.

After being unimpressed by the first song I didn’t want to condemn the album as the rest might be different, but I was wrong. Almost every song starts in the same way, fast music, fast vocals in call and response fashion, the structures aren’t all that inventive and most songs have discordant finger picking at the end of each bar which is all too cliché.

Even when the song Ivy Archway ends with an instrumental acoustic piece I feel I’ve heard it done all before in bands like Give up the Ghost and The Legacy. Dead Swans are obviously fans of the aforementioned Give up the Ghost as nearly everything about them is a tribute, “poetic” lyrics, discords, octaves and stereotypical breakdowns, even Nick’s voice sounds like Wes Eisold. You could argue that the genre is melodic hardcore and it’s very hard to be original, but plenty of bands, especially in the UK have written brilliant melodic hardcore songs that sound like no other band.

It wasn’t until I got to the song Winter Overture that I found a song I genuinely liked, as its all instrumental and pretty original in its format. Unfortunately that’s the only real gem on the album and to be frank I’d rather listen to a melodic band with more originality.

The sad truth is that in today’s dying hardcore scene this album will probably be one of Bridge 9’s best selling of the year and everyone will love it and Dead Swans will continue to be at the top. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it as they’ve all been in bands that haven’t gone anywhere in the past, just that there are other bands out there writing better, more original music.

Jonathan Teggert

Sights and Sounds are a band whose name is a statement about themselves, when you look at the album artwork for their new release Monolith you are mesmerised by beautiful imagery and when you play the record you are barraged by an array of different sounds.

Unfortunately this isn’t the best thing in the world, as sometimes the songs sound like Isis and sometimes they sound like Thrice. Although Sights and Sounds are clearly a very talented band, you often feel like instead of creating their own sound they have taken what bands have already invented and tried to throw it together to make something new but it doesn’t always work.

The album has a whole stoner rock vibe about it, which is a positive on Sights and Sounds’ behalf as that genre of music is having a real resurgence at the moment and hopefully they will get in on that. Songs such as The Clutter and Pedal Against the Wind have a very similar sound to progressive emo bands such as Brand New and it’s a sound that really works for the band and suits singer Andrew’s voice really well.

This band is obviously a very experimental band and although Monolith may be quite a confused album it has a lot of potential and I feel that a lot of people will dig it. I really hope that Sights and Sounds define themselves more clearly by the time they release another album as I get the feeling it could be something special.

Jonathan Teggert

I would rather try to avoid sounding too much like every hype machine influenced blogger on the planet and blowing everything a gazillion miles out of proportion, but I genuinely have not been this excited about an album dropping in a very long time. Let me explain why.

Bicycle is the first single to come from the debut full length from Memory Tapes due in September and it is, and I will not hesitate in saying this, absolutely incredible. In amongst the excessive free downloads that the blogosphere shits out, regurgitates and shits out again (normally with additional corn-infested remixes) on a daily basis, songs like this are a huge breath of fresh air.

It’s beautifully composed; enough intricacies to keep your ears busy yet puts melody, uplifting choruses and New Order influenced basslines a priority so that it remains a pleasure to listen to again and again. And while most things surfacing at the moment are either club bangers or summertime grooves, this crossing the boundaries and sounds spectacular regardless of context. Enough bounce to keep dancefloors happy, and more than enough life assuring harmonies to fulfil the soundtrack of a perfect bicycle ride.

Seek Magic, the album this single is getting me all tingly and randy for, is available for pre-order now from Rough Trade. I personally am assured we’re in store for more lovely, lovely music.

Stanley.