Suede – Bloodsports

I think I should confess straight off: I’ve always hated Suede. I remember walking up to the old Town & Country and seeing the cover of their debut album plastered across the railway bridge on Kentish Town High Road and thinking, God, could the androgyny be any more calculated? And Brett Anderson’s nasally wailed sixth form Bowie shadow was an anal prolapse of a personality that couldn’t be avoided no matter how many bottles you ground into your eyes - and now he’s back, schlepping the same sexually tortured screamer over a guitar thrash straight out of 1993. In fact, Blood Sports is almost a perfect recreation of Suede, which is as it should be, being as they share the same producer, Ed Buller.

But, bizarrely, I don’t hate Bloodsports. Much to my own chagrin, I can’t deny that it takes genuine talent to squeeze your fortysomething loafers into the deep imprints of your passionate teenage trainers and to step with the same power, the same passion, through the same landscape that you created and obviously still believe in. Brett Anderson is doing this right now, without irony or regret, and it would be churlish to deny him the credit for it. The bastard.

Roomyrating: 7
Depeche Mode – Delta Machine

Depeche, by contrast, haven’t exactly tried to sonically replicate Violator – they’ve stuck with producer Ben Hillier – but they’ve brought in Flood to flip the faders, so it does sound enough like Violator to be considered “an overdue return to form” by anyone tragically non-plussed by their last two albums (i.e. everyone.)

The aural throwback, however, has genuinely galvanised Gore & Gahan, who both sound more committed than anyone ought to be entering their fourth musical decade. Yes, it’s obsessed with sin and redemption and vodka/horse/tea addiction in a cracked-black leather blouson way that shouldn’t befit men of their age, and yes, it sometimes sounds like someone’s just selected ‘Depeche Mode’ in GarageBand, but this is DM back to what they do best - cramming enormodomes with sex & death as only they can.

Gahan has never sounded better, and the way his voice entwines with Gore’s suggests a perfect mind-merge for the first time since Songs of Faith and Devotion – perhaps even more so, considering the pitiful state of band relations in 1992. Thankfully, Delta Machine is the sound of two men drying an ocean of bad blood by just maturing and accepting what the other does best, at last.

So, it’s magnificent, but, what with Gore making an album with Clarke and sharing a stage with Wilder, who’s to say Depeche Mode’s best album isn’t yet to come? Bring on the imbecilic rhyming couplets and live drums!

Roomyrating: 8.5

Just when you thought guitar, bass and drums had nothing new to say; just when you thought a fresh-off-the-slab Stereophonics album had proved, conclusively, that rock n’ roll was dead, along comes Bowie to blow us all away. Again.

The title track has more life in one upward inflection than most bands can summon in a career. Valentine’s Day slams Brett Anderson against a mirror and proceeds to rabbit punch his kidneys into a pissy purée for three minutes while whispering in his ear “This. Is. How. It’s. Done.” If You Can See Me then pulls the same trick on Bono and I’d Rather Be High makes the triumverate, with Liam Gallagher (of all people) Bowie’s suddenly blood-wazzing victim – the whole album is basically Dame Dave handing the entire rock world its ass with a postcard in the crack reading ”This is how you make relevant music.”

And why is it relevant? Because it violently smears shadows across the music even as it rails against them. Because it is what life is – a defiant daily cry that should only get more strident and more powerful as Bowie actually approaches death.

He’s on a win-win all the way to the glam rock grave. So long as he side-steps that Tin Machine reunion.

Roomyrating: 9

Here’s the first of some very quick-off-the-wrist album reviews covering what’s recently been spewing out of my Spotify, starting with:

Tegan and Sara – Heartthrob

Don’t get me wrong, I like the songs, but I just can’t see any non-commercial reason why their mature souls are being rammed into an 80′s New Wave Magimix set to Visage.

Again, I’m far from averse to the whole Sinead O’Connor meets Marina Diamandis at the Wag club sonic car crash idea. It just feels a little bit calculated and more than a little bit unnecessary, even if the retrotech framing can enhance the more fractured/fractious songs.

It’s impressive that the material can withstand such deep-freeze electropop treatment – and album closer ‘Shock to the System’ is pure Depeche –  but the overriding temptation is to just shrug my shoulder pads and walk away from this glacial confection.

It did get me searching out some early Ultravox though, and I bloody hate Ultravox.

Roomyrating: 7

 Adam Ant - Adam Ant Is the Blueblack Hussar in Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter

17 tracks veering from the barely-coherent to the fundamentally unlistenable, this seriously needed a steely, gimlet-eyed producer to squat on Adam’s back and scythe this into any kind of shape. Boz Boorer, unfortunately, is not that man.

Yup, he helps invest the best tracks here with a vaguely vibrant rockabilly swing, but there’s no focus to anything. The vocal mixes, in particular, are godawful, and there’s rarely a moment when the whole see-sawing horror sounds anything other than late-’nineties lazy.

I’m not dismissing Adam’s passion in saying that. It’s not necessarily his fault that it sounds so unadventurous – and, Christ knows, he more than did his bit for early ‘eighties adventure – but it is his fault that Blueback Hussar occasionally veers into the lecherously disgusting. Here’s a sample lyric from ‘Punkyoungirl’:

Punky young girl needs a middle aged man

Whose midlife crisis you began

Punky young girl, such a work of art

Licensing each body part

Ooh, don’t wanna go yet

Lift up your skirt, let me lick the alphabet

Thanks Adam, but I don’t need that image in my head. God bless you, though, for not doing a Tegan & Sara and going full-Duran. Surely that would have been the ultimate betrayal.

In the meantime, has anyone got Chris Hughes’ phone number?

Roomyrating: 5

However you choose to celebrate this Christmas I hope you have a good one.

(or right click here and ‘Save target as…’ to download. iPad and iPhone users can also touch that link to open the media in a new window)

Cheers

Head Chef

…All the sweet, green icing flowing doooown… Someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can take it, ’cause it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe agaaaain Oh, noooooooooooo!

And so I stood outside the sadly soon-to-be-demolished venue, clawing at a cone of soggy chips, waiting for the doors to open while the forgotten flotsam of gigdom gathered around me – the casual jacket/tour shirt comboed young men in their D&G spectacles and self-managing hair; the conspicuous paperback-humping plump couple in ill-advised spandex; the off-the-peg non-conformists in market stall tinted aviators and tassles; all these folk I’d last seen at a gig in 1997 who’d never changed, just like me. My luscious centre-parted locks may have been long gone, but I was still sucking in the gut while trying to cram every capillary with damp carbohydrate. Thank God the doors opened before I walked away just like I should have walked away from the old Marquee before that Diesel Park West gig fourteen years previously (oh why, mother, whyyyyy??)

But no, I was in, with just enough money to buy half a coke at the bar and await The Melting Ice Caps. Now, I was being a smidge cheeky earlier to suggest I was unacquainted with the Ice Caps’ uniquely synth soaked Anglosoul – I wrote about them in greater detail here, lamenting their shocking lack of recognition in a child abusing universe where sex-cyborg pop construct Pixie Lott gets her own beat box in a MaccieD’s Happy Meal - but halfway through their first song I was stunned, again, by the quality of whipsmart romantic whimsy the wider world’s missing out on.

My favourite track at Oxjam was ‘Ohio’, which I’ll post here in its back-bedroom-superlight-synth incarnation.

Live, with a full band, including a saxophonist, it was a spikily driven monster kept warm by frontman David Shah’s caramel croon. And then they all-too-soon wound up their set with my favourite Caps track of all time, the all-too-true ’Selfish Bachelor.’

After that I could have gone home, my gig-going lust sated for another decade, but I stayed. If the night had started on such a high, what delights could yet await? Within moments Barbarossa breezed past my shoulder on the way to the stage, bearing more of a resemblance to Barry Gibb than Dick Harris, shattering my MacArthur Park dreams like so many crystal chandeliers. As he settled between his trio of synths I initially balked – as most would - at the ginger pony tail sprouting from the front of his scalp, but I’d also heard that he was married to Montserrat Lombard, the dippy WPC off Ashes to Ashes, and that apparently she was hiding among the crowd. Fortunately for her I didn’t have time to scrabble between punters’ legs checking for standard issue shoe buckles, as my attention was diverted by Barbarossa suddenly attacking his instruments with a keening tenderness.

Again, this was soul as I’d never heard it - classic in that you could hear its southern roots, but delivered with a yearning that was entirely Anglicised and authentic in a way barking soulless shills like James Morrison could never achieve no matter how many units they shifted. Obviously James Morrison connects, somehow, but how could he connect more than this, I thought, as I stared at the ginger Bee Gee in wonder.

On one track he was effectively accompanied by only an iPhone app, but here’s another sample from his Oxjam set with a full band, this time recorded at a session for my music blogging workmate and tonight’s charity empresario, Musiclikedirt.

As Barbarossa walked offstage to much applause I think I caught sight of his elfish wife, although it was hard to tell as she seemed to be wearing a Dick Turpin-style black handkerchief over her mouth, in a bid, no doubt, to avoid recognition. You’re the dippy WPC off Ashes to Ashes, love, not bloody Greta Garbo.

Anyroad, next up, Polarbear. Disappointingly not an Ursus maritimus, but a rapper. Now, I do not own - nor have ever owned - any ‘rap’. My Spotify playlists remain rap-free wastelands, and yet Polarbear’s button-holing tales of his Brummie youth somehow captivated me, with their perfectly delivered rhythms of thwarted dreams, lost loves, and stubborn hope. Tales like this:

And here’s a track captured during this year’s Camden Crawl

Polarbear’s about to start an eleven night run at Camden’s Roundhouse with his one man show ‘OldMe’, for which you can book tickets here. Such was his effect on me that I even contemplated going myself.

By now, though, I was on my fifth pint of Coke after having sneeked outside to be wallet-raped by the filthy kind of in-store cash machine that charges you two quid just for a peek at your balance, but I was happy. Musiclikedirt had swung just the right kind of musical cheeseboard under my nose and now I was only waiting for the crackers. Enter that polymath of the beat, Akira The Don.

He’d been an exemplary host all evening, enthusing the crowd, encouraging the acts, and generally being very funny. But then he did the raffle.

Look at those magnificent prizes. Quality Street, plonk, a stack of vintage 2000AD comics, and – good god - a microwave. Musiclikedirt had been hawking around the tickets all evening and I, myself, had bought ten. Imagine my outrage, then, when Akira pulled a ticket out of the hat and told the lucky bloke he’d “won all this stuff…everything!”

Everything?!?!?

‘The Don’ then salt-scoured our wounds still further by showering us with our own wasted tickets before blithely launching into his set – the fiend!  Do you not know how raffles work Akira? Do you soar so high above the non-Hip Hop elite that you’ve never been to a fête?!

Disgusted, I stormed out, the evening ruined utterly. I would have bawled ‘utter shambles’ over my shoulder had Akira not suddenly been surrounded by some heavyweight gentleman who I later learned were also ‘rappers’. No doubt they were similarly ignorant of raffle-throwing’s finer mechanics, the heathens.

Only joking. I’m told the show closed as it began, in triumph. Many thanks to Musiclikedirt for having the guts to organise such a splendid night’s entertainment and raise over six hundred quid for Oxfam in the process. I only left early so I could choose a suitably dark corner in which to wait for a man with a microwave.

No-one steals white goods from me Don, no-one.

(p.s. if you want to download the wonderful music of The Melting Ice Caps, for free, bless ‘em, click here. If you want to listen to more aching ginger Bee Gee action click here, and if you want to go see decent British rap at the Roundhouse remember to click here. You may be surprised. I was.)