1. Urge Overkill

2. Massive Attack

3. Primal Scream

I’m always going to cheer on the Aussie indie musician.  If it isn’t hard enough getting a hearing on a small label, it’s only harder when you’re from a small country - and not even a very trendy one at that.  So count me as a champion of the underdog, Tamas Wells being a case in point.

I mean, the guy clearly has no interest in musical fame.  He’s spent most of the last five years in Burma with his aid-worker wife - not a fast track destination for musicians.  He puts out impossibly twee folk music about ordinary people dealing with dilemmas like brown bedspreads and crappy jobs.  He tours major Australian cities every couple of years, playing one gig in each town only.

Fame might find him this time regardless, because his latest album Two Years In April is something to marvel at.  Moving away from the mid-nineties-ish tweeness of A Plea En Vendredi, Tamas has brought his sound up to…2004, I suppose.  He’s gone for the fireside, banjo-led reveries of Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans or Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days - and he’s come bloody close to them for quality.

Wells’ voice is less remarkable than Sufjan’s or Sam Beam’s, but it’s idiosyncratic and totally listenable.  His sing-song, repetitive vocal style is pretty compelling and doesn’t get old nearly as fast as it should.  Wells played and sang almost all the parts and the simple interlocking instrumentation sounds complex and wondrous.  In fact, this sounds much more like an album composed in a shack with intermittent electricity
than the last album, which apparently was written that way.

Maybe after this album he won’t be the underdog anymore, but it won’t make me love him any less.

Tamas Wells - “Fine, Don’t Follow A Tiny Boat For A Day”

Tamas Wells - “The Day That She Drowned, Her Body Was Found”

It’s too early to really say, but 2008 feels like the year that a lot of quiet acts are going even quieter.  Hammock’s Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tomorrow was their most zen-like album yet - you can barely make out instruments.  Ellen Allien’s Sool finds a techno producer moving away from beats almost entirely.

Perhaps the most surprising is the young post-rock collective Gregor Samsa.  Their first full-length, 2006’s 55:12, was a great balance between the off-centre classical of Rachel’s and the quiet indie pop of Low.  The songs came from nowhere and often disappeared to the same place, but there were memorable melodies and clear vocals.

On Rest, the vocals are so hushed they’re barely more than whispers.  If the instrumentation is still complex and orchestral, it doesn’t have any of the crash and bombast.  The most amazing thing is how effectively it holds your attention.  If anything, the quietness forces you to crouch down and plant your ear next to the speaker to try and understand what’s happening.

Where much more dramatic albums will fade from view, I think the already-faded Rest will stick around.

Gregor Samsa - “Ain Leuh”

Me? I’m a sucker for a good pop tune. For all my indie affectations, sit me down in front of a fun video clip from some dorky pop group and I’ll probably be singing along in seconds. Unlike commercial rock, which seems to suck all the passion and life out of a vital genre, commercial pop can be a blast.

Still, I don’t always embrace the poptimist buzz-groups. Girls Aloud for example - well I can take or leave them. Now Alphabeat, they’re a group I can get behind. They’ve got guitars, they sound like the best bits of the 80s strung together. They’re Scandinavian (Danish to be exact) and that’s immediate pop points from me.

Alphabeat - “Fascination”

Some of their singles are dynamite. “Fascination” is the most energetic blast of pop sunshine I’ve heard in years. “Fantastic 6″ sounds like Bis doing the soundtrack to High School Musical 5. The album, This Is Alphabeat, kind of trails off after a few tracks but that’s not surprising. I mean, it took Phoenix three albums to get consistent and Alphabeat are really only just starting out.

If you haven’t heard them already, then now’s your chance.

Alphabeat - “Fantastic 6″

Alphabeat - “Fascination”

Covering obscure songs is an odd choice in some ways.  After all, it doesn’t have the instant-recognition factor that will lead to major sales.   And the fans that know the song are probably so damn precious about it that they’ll hate you for attempting it.

That was what happened to Mark Kozelek’s Tiny Cities (all Modest Mouse covers) and to a lesser extent the Twilight Singers’ She Loves You (various artists).  They couldn’t ride the gimmicky wave that say Cake’s “I Will Survive” owned, and they managed to piss off a few indie purists along the way.

I think the new covers album by avant-folkie Adem should manage to get away with it, but only because the quality is really high.  The choices for his album Takes are pretty left-field and mostly from the 90s/early 00s.  Nothing too sacred there - but maybe the hipsters will still hate it.

A couple of favourite tracks of mine that he’s attempted are Pinback’s “Loro” - hardly a cult classic, even, but a great song - and Low’s “Laser Beam”.  Pinback is pretty easy to pull off and to be fair, Adem doesn’t really change things.  Low is harder, mainly because “Laser Beam” is such a classic example of Mimi Parker’s astonishing vocals.  Still, he gives it a woozy soul that works almost as effectively.  With this album, the initial impression may be that he hasn’t done anything remarkable - but each listen will turn up different angles.

Really, you should have a listen to all of it.  There’s some Yo La Tengo, some Smashing Pumpkins and a brilliant Aphex Twin reworking.

Adem - “Loro”

Adem - “Laser Beam”

A fun experiment to do is to queue up  soul legend Al Green’s new album Lay It Down back to back with one of his early 70s efforts and to try and pick when the album changes.  You’ll probably pick it, but only if you’re paying attention.

That’s partly because of producer ?uestlove’s attention to period detail (even bringing in the Daptone Horns to recreate the Hi Records sound), but also because the singing and songwriting are just stunning.  Al is in amazing voice for a guy in his 60s and he gives it all he’s got.  For a laid-back album, there’s a lot of passion.

And it’s VERY laid-back.  Al isn’t signing about the kind of animal passions he lifted to high art in the early days.  No, this is a guy who’s settled down into a quieter phase of life.  Which makes it perfect love music for couples.  Particularly people who’ve been together since Al started making records.

But there’s enough beauty for the rest of us to enjoy it too - and occasionally he gets his funk back on.

Al Green - Stay With Me (By The Sea)

Al Green - Standing In The Rain

There’s really no fun in mocking Coldplay, especially not for someone who used to enjoy their music.  I may write off my love of Parachutes as a youthful indiscretion (I was still under 20), but I’ll still defend any number of their early singles.  That said, their drubbing at the hands of the critics has been of their own making.
By X&Y, the songwriting formula was so set and predictable and the lyrics so generic that it seemed like Chris Martin was sleeping on the job.

With this in mind, I was dubious about their claimed reinvention at the hands of Brian Eno.  Sure, Eno worked wonders with U2 back in the 80s, but he’d have a hard time making them any good these days.  And do we have such short memories?  Barely 6 years ago, Coldplay were “reinventing” themselves with some help from Echo & The Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch.  Remember the “experimental” first track, “Politik”?  And remember how A Rush of Blood to the Head only cemented Coldplay in the charts and properly defined their sound?

Then there came the grudging praise from hipster luminaries like Pitchfork and Popmatters and I wondered if maybe the hype was half right.

Now, having heard Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends, I’d call it about 10% right.  I don’t want to talk about the lyrics or the mundane singalong choruses.  If I could sentence a song to death for its crimes, “42″ would be first against the wall.  “Lost” would need a bloody good attorney.  But occasionally the experimental flourishes work and I find myself enjoying it.

I mean, c’mon, the segue at the end of “Yes!” sounds like My Bloody Valentine.  And “Viva La Vida” is a pretty good pop song.  If you hate Coldplay, this won’t be enough for you, but for me it’s a minor blessing.

Coldplay - “Yes!”

Coldplay - “Viva La Vida”

For all the jaunty British pop that’s been clogging up the airwaves in recent years, very little of it has sounded like the “Britpop” of my teenage years. Their influences are different and their approach is a lot more abrasive, to my ears at least. At risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, that’s a little bit disappointing.

Someone who does summon up memories of those long summers is Jim Noir, a mid-20s Brit whose electronic-infused take on classic pop makes me think of the Super Furry Animals or the Boo Radleys or the Charlatans. It’s like crack for someone with premature nostalgia.

His second, self-titled album is excellent and full of laid-back, vaguely psychedelic pop music. If you have a BBQ or something to soundtrack, you could do a lot worse.

Jim Noir - “All Right”

Jim Noir - “Ships and Clouds”

Over at a friend’s place the other week, we were listening repeatedly to a couple of the best albums of the last twelve months - by Portishead and Radiohead.

Now that’s a sentence that could easily have been used 11 years ago.  Radiohead were riding high off their landmark OK Computer and Portishead had followed up their absurdly popular debut with a darker but equally brilliant disc, Portishead.

In 2008, we’ve got Radiohead’s In Rainbows, which I’ve talked about elsewhere, and Portishead’s long awaited Third.  In the intervening years, Radiohead have put out three full lengths and a couple of other discs, while Portishead have been missing in action.

When you do something like disappear for a decade, you can either “reunite” and embark on a greatest hits type tour, or you can pretend you never really went away and take up where you left off.  Portishead have taken the second approach - and pretty literally, because Third doesn’t really sound like it would have been out of place ten years ago.  In fact, its none-more-dark reworking of the classic Portishead sound isn’t so different to what Massive Attack did with their sound on 1998’s Mezzanine.

It’s still made remarkable by Beth Gibbons’ heart-wrenching vocals and by some brilliant arrangements.  Whatever year it is, it’s an album to get involved in.

Portishead - “The Rip”

Portishead - “Machine Gun”

I’ve been avoiding this post because it actually breaks my heart a little bit. I’d prefer to write a post complaining about the lack of a My Morning Jacket album in 2008, rather than having to write about the album that they’ve released.

Kentucky country-rockers MMJ won me over with It Still Moves in ‘03 and Z in ‘05 and made me look into their backcatalog with the barnstorming live set Okonokos. But honestly, the new album Evil Urges makes me wonder if this is the same band. I mean, they were never a straight-up rock ‘n’ roll band and they’ve mined some weird territory before, especially on Z, but it was alway good.

Now in the first three tracks we’re given barely warmed-up Prince parodies (”Highly Suspicious” - I’d rather not talk about it all) and only tolerable MMJ-by-numbers (”Evil Urges”). It all just seems lazy and contemptuous.

Still, it’s rare that a competent band produces an album that’s ALL bad, so we get the minor blessing of a pretty song like “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1″. Albums like this are what iTunes was invented for.

My Morning Jacket - “Touch Me I’m Going To Scream Pt. 1″