M.I.A. - Matangi

I like M.I.A, I like her a lot, and while she brings a wildly varying maelstrom of opinion breezing in wherever she goes, you can’t fault her for a lack of conviction. There’s been a many number of controversies that’ve made waves since we last had an album of hers on the scene - her spat with the New York Times, her ostensibly vicious marital difficulties, and of course that step on the landmine of American puritanism during her Superbowl appearance, but it would be cynical to see the torrent of media coverage, which has become an important pillar of the M.I.A. brand, as making up for a lack of substance on her part. At least, that’s the kind of thing I would automatically assume if I weren’t an M.I.A. fan (I’m bitterly untrusting like that). On the contrary, to me M.I.A. is all substance, and while her outspoken antics are part of the whole reason I do really like her, the oft-forgotten feature of Maya Arulpragasam, her music, is always excitingly newsworthy as well.

While it’s generally agreed that M.I.A.’s first two LPs, Arular and Kala, were solidly impressive slices of original bricolage electronica, not everyone was overjoyed with her last album, 2010’s Maya, particularly for its inclusion of dubsteppy grittiness (I mean, Rusko was brought in as a producer) that I don’t think gelled comfortably with most people. Pitchfork certainly didn’t like it. People were also quick to lambast M.I.A. for her then-ridiculous intro track The Message – ‘connected to the internet, connected to the Google, connected to the government’ – as being on the same intellectual level as nutty, chem-trail conspiracy theorists. I think that was probably the first conclusive victory in M.I.A.’s war against the world, for how wrong they were. But despite its position as a definite step down in quality, Maya was still really fucking good, even if its creator’s melting pot of creativity didn’t boil so sweetly as with the still-numinously-awesome Kala. In Matangi, M.I.A.’s still ranting, still raving, still making batshit crazy genre-bending worldbeat belters, and hasn’t lost a single shred of her magnetic confidence. The grimy aesthetic she took on in Maya still lingers, and will divide listeners as much here as it did then, and she’s still dabbling with currently-fashionable genres (giving a trap beat her best in Double Bubble Trouble), but her schizophrenic beat-hopping, supported by her ever-sarcastic rap-ranting, is still as bewitchingly unique as ever.

In getting everyone hyped for the new album, M.I.A. described it as Paul Simon on acid, as decent and concise a review as you’re gonna get, and the emphasis should be placed on acid. M.I.A. has a varied roster of producers at her command on Matangi, including longtime collaborator Switch as well as Hit-Boy and Doc McKinney, who produced the two best Weeknd albums. There’s even a track here – Exodus – which is simply Lonely Star with Abel Tesfaye removed and a rarely melodious vocal from Maya laid over the top, in a mildly unsuccessful and baffling decision on her part. But the production retinue all tow the line of M.I.A.’s unified sound of audial bric-a-brac, which from what we can ascertain from M.I.A.’s uncompromising public image, is understandable. I love to use the word ‘bricolage’ when describing M.I.A.’s tracks, and I think Come Walk With Me is the best example of this on this record, with its Apple Mac volume clicks and camera sound effects – it’s rough around the edges and completely bonkers, but I can’t help but be swept up in its pure creative enthusiasm. Warriors is a similarly bizarre but successful piece of work, with M.I.A. putting the wild variations from her vocal chords to good effect. I can fully understand the people who are turned off by the indulgent zaniness that this album’s built out of, but for me this is the most exciting thing about any new M.I.A. release – you really never know exactly what you’re gonna get.

There are two particularly soaring triumphs on this album – the first is Bad Girls, which we’ve all heard a billion times at UK nightclubs for nearly two years now, and it sounds just as shiveringly fantastic here as it did there – but the real killer app on this device is Bring the Noize. It’s just as much of a full-frontal assault as her other romances with volume, but where most other M.I.A. tracks are a hit-and-miss result of crazed experimentation, Bring the Noize is a track in which all its elements come together to create a cohesively awesome result. The tribal kick drums, the jelly-kneed vocal distortions, the distant chant, the rhythmic creaking sounds, I mean it’s just as crazy as ever, but it all works beautifully. Maya’s reverb-drenched rapping is at the forefront, and it actually sounds like she’s trying to rap here, which is a risky move considering that M.I.A. isn’t much of a rapper, despite what her befuddling Wikipedia page designates, but luckily, she pulls it off, and resultantly proceeds to exude pure concentrated coolness. And it all builds up to a terrifying crescendo, followed by a darkly paranoid ending, where ‘choose’ becomes a portentous syllable. It’s horrifyingly good. While we’re on the subject of club bangers, Y.A.L.A. has a shouty vocal hook that I originally found just the tiniest bit irritating, but as the swagger-stomping beat kicked in, I found myself falling for it. If M.I.A.’s having fun, I’m having fun, and Y.A.L.A. has M.I.A. at her piss-taking, crunk-as-fuck finest.

But probably the most interesting track here is Lights, a comparatively humble-sounding, laidback and drippingly psychedelic oasis from the rest of the album’s thumping energy. The girl who sings the moon-eyed chorus sounds like M.I.A., but can’t possibly be M.I.A. When did M.I.A. ever sound this relaxed? The sensation of the track is dreamily childlike and a hard-shouldered deviation from what we’ve all come to expect from its creator. In it, M.I.A. leaps between personas, alternating between shroomed-up and awestruck, chilled to the edge of cool, and frustratedly snarky, complaining brazenly to someone about something, the context of which escapes my understanding, but her exasperated, down-to-earth lyrical waxing through a leafy-green kaleidoscopic backing track forms one of the most surprising and startlingly different offerings from the old girl that any of us have witnessed in a while. I’m not sure what the mandate of the track is (except simply to blow off some important steam), but its invention sounds terrifically lush, especially coming after all that noisy electronic rug-cutting, and it’s worth a paragraph of its own just for its sheer uniqueness.

As with its predecessor, Matangi has its flaws. Double Bubble Trouble isn’t great; the beat is passable in its way, but the whole trouble/bubble rhyme slinging is pretty inane. The title track’s alright, but it’s rather on the uninspiringly dumb side of things as well; Only 1 U’s better solely for that bell sound effect, otherwise it’s proudly loud but unsatisfactorily dull. Also, M.I.A.’s lyricism isn’t her finest asset, and even for a fan like me, the manifesto/presto rhymes, the Lara Croft reference, the Drake references, the country-namedropping, yeah, it’s not fantastic, and these missteps are damaging, especially since I know she can do better than this. Even on this album, I can get behind the audacity of lines like ‘my blood type is no negative’ and the ridiculous entirety of aTENTion. But it’s interesting to note that, as an artist whose music will forever overlap with the world beyond it, and her own personal image, you can’t help but admire the fact that even when there are moments of failure, it never hurts M.I.A.’s rock solid image as an icon of no-fucks-given badassery. The illusion is never shattered. And even when she’s not at her best, M.I.A. will always be cooler than you. Matangi isn’t a brilliant album, but it’s a solid piece of work, with some really spectacular highlights, and even when she’s not hitting the seminal highs which brought her superstardom with Kala, she still has the distinction of not sounding like anyone else, and continues to concoct tunes from a mindset that is uniquely her own.

M.I.A. - Bring the Noize

Burial - Rival Dealer

Since releasing the unforgettable Untrue all the way back in 2007, enigmatic entity of genius William Bevan has satiated our cravings for his genre-defying and tearduct-assaulting brand of music with a collection of EPs, all brief in track number, but heavy in content. 2011’s Street Halo was a sedatedly rhythmic continuation of his famously dark atmospherics. 2012 saw the release of the religious experience of Kindred, as well as the cobwebbed night terrors of Truant / Rough Sleeper. Now it’s the end of 2013 and we devoted followers have finally been blessed with a new Burial release, and it’s as emotive and fascinating a piece of work as all that has preceded it.

Burial’s never stuck to one particular template, and if his music reflects anything apart from a kind of urban wistfulness, it’s the producer’s own mental fluidity, switching from one soundscape to another with a rewardingly experimental sense of structure. While it would’ve been just as critically appreciated for Burial to continue building tunes with the chopped-up garage beats that shot him to superstardom, thankfully Burial has taken it upon himself in these recent releases to flex his creative muscles, particularly in these long and varied extended play tracks, and in dabs of experimentation, like the sudden drops into absolute silence dotted throughout his previous EP. He’s trying a few new tactics here, too, heading in a more oldschool musical direction that I’m sure will be met with mixed opinions amongst Burial’s ever-faithful listeners, wherein he mixes things up with thunderous big beat in the title track, and dares to sound at his most un-Burial in the 1980s drum cascade at the denouement of Hiders. But I couldn’t be happier over all this experimentation, it’s interesting to hear how Burial’s been trying his hand at new sounds and new ideas without bankrupting that instantly recognisable sound of his; he’s continuing to change and grow at the rate of a continually relevant artist.

I know it’s fairly cliché to call Burial a true ‘artist’, but it’s such an apt way of describing his particular style of pensive musicianship. Burial tracks feel sculpted and abstractly pieced together like an audial collage, and he’s keeping to his own inimitable style in the broken, unpolished, dust-in-the-cracks veneer of his tracks. The rolling beat of opening track Rival Dealer, for instance, splutters into life, awkwardly finding its footing in empty space which is devoid of a rigid beat. There are several instances in which the beat fumbles out of time completely, which would be an obvious cardinal sin when discussing any other musician, and there are strange elements like the snare in Come Down to Us which sounds jarringly lo-fi, but with Burial’s distinctively fractal sound it only adds to his tracks’ crackly collage aesthetic. The moments in his tracks rise and fall with the fluidity of thoughts and feelings. Maybe that’s why Burial gets under your skin more than most, but it’s also probably got a lot to do with his choice of absolutely beautiful samples and synths. The choral synth that’s the main meat of Hiders is like the warmth of a church on a winter’s night. The autotuned lament that closes Rival Dealer provides tranquil respite from the dark urgency it trails off from. There’s the oriental loop that dances over the dubstep swing of Come Down to Us, and the gorgeously impure vocals that run throughout all three tracks. I don’t know where he finds these samples and sounds, or how he decides to integrate them, but considering the amount of time since Burial's last effort to release just these three tracks, they certainly sound like the result of real, painstaking care and effort.

We also have the unusual pleasure of being provided with a mission statement to go alongside this release, in the form of a surprising text sent by Burial to Mary Anne Hobbs, where he clarifies that there’s an ‘anti-bullying’ message behind this release, which is something I would’ve never expected and is actually a pretty awesome gesture on the bloke’s behalf. Although Burial has a landscape sound that can, at times, feel strange and dissociative, you can hear this theme of ‘everything’s-gonna-be-okay’ embedded here and there throughout the EP – in the triumphant cadence of Come Down to Us and the loving glow of Hiders, there’s clearly something inspirational going on. One of the first samples you hear before the EP fires up is a voice exclaiming confidently that ‘this is who I am’, and the album closes with a speech about believing in yourself despite times of hardship from transgender film director Lana Wachowski (of The Matrix fame). Taking all of this into account, even though the EP begins in the harshest darkness and the whole thing has an edge of night required in all Burial releases, there’s a lot more light shining through this EP than has maybe ever been witnessed in the mysterious tunesmith’s back-catalogue. While I, and a lot of people, adore Burial for his brooding atmospherics and revel in the cathartic grimness of the majority of his tunes, all his forays into new sounds and directions have so far been wonderfully fruitful, and the more positive shade of emotions which he evokes here are just as heart-shudderingly sublime here as in anything else he's made. Rival Dealer is a three-track EP that nonetheless feels packed with a truckload of finely-crafted emotional depth, and continues to show how Burial is one of the most fascinating and uniquely talented musical artists of this or any generation.

Burial - Rival Dealer

On the VMAs, Miley Cyrus and Selling Sex to Children

The VMAs, if you’re really not aware, is MTV’s yearly celebration of pop music in all its glorious banality. It’s a ceremony of universally fake smiles, constructed personalities, broad, simple, thoughtless entertainment and a who’s-who of dead-eyed products disguised as human beings. I paid an unusual amount of attention to the show this year, and while flicking through the coverage online thanks to a curious and overwhelming boredom, I found myself in an uncomfortable world of American superficiality that, now I don’t watch TV anymore, I’d almost forgot existed. It reminded me that, as much as I’ve tried my hardest to be an apologist for pop music as a necessary evil in the capitalist culture that Western history’s sailed into, the sheer banality and obnoxiously shallow direction that pop music has taken is undeniable. And it just seems to be getting worse.

The main walking, talking sack of money that everyone’s talking about is Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus is part of a long trend in the dark and mysterious pop culture machine to get ‘em while they’re young, like a Colombian drug cartel – creating a pop superstar from a disgustingly young age to bring in the younger audiences and then unsubtly sexualising them later on in order to cater for everyone else; because the ‘sex sells’ mantra has never been more obsessively taken to heart than in the music industry. If you talk about Justin Bieber with the anti-Bieber crowd, most of them tend to say that all they’re waiting for is the inevitable ‘fall’ that comes to any child star when the onset of puberty, megalomania, intense media scrutiny and a thousand other weights of intense pressure crush them to breaking point. People love that narrative. Miley Cyrus hasn’t lost it just yet, and there’s always an outside chance that she might never properly ‘lose it’ in a Michael Jackson or a Britney Spears kind of way, but nevertheless her journey from simple child to an 'adult' adult is looking gently misguided to say the least.

If you’re a female pop star, the general expectation is that you have to be hypersexualised. After all, to put it cynically, you need something to get people talking about you, and it’s not gonna be the talent. Beyoncé is the most obvious exception here – she’s mastered using her talent alongside her sexuality without coming across as crude and exploitative. Katy Perry would be the opposite of this, embodied as she is by some seriously terrible music and a complete lack of intelligence and integrity, while constantly pandering to the childish sexual mores of her audience as the basis of her whole career (Remember that Perry shot to fame with the song ‘I Kissed a Girl’). This is the route Cyrus has chosen – or rather the one that the clandestine marketing panel behind her persona has chosen. It was most apparent in the ‘We Can’t Stop’ video, which appeared to me like a post-gangsta-rap Less Than Zero, and revealed the brand new finally-legal-now sexy Miley Cyrus in the same way you’d reveal a new iPhone generation. Cyrus smacking other girls’ bums and writhing around in the doggy position is a vision of the other great mantra of any big entertainment industry in the last decade or so – ‘subtlety doesn’t sell’.

Chucking some unsubtle sex appeal onto Cyrus’ act when she reached adulthood wasn’t particularly shocking or at all surprising in itself, but this year at the VMAs that unimaginative marketing strategy hit a new level of OTT in Miley Cyrus’ performance and her new general demeanour. For one thing, she couldn’t keep her tongue in her mouth, slapping it out at the side every now and then like an escaped slug in order to remind the thousands of onlookers that she’s ‘feisty’ and ‘raunchy’ and ‘up for it’ in the most horrendously creepy way possible, also stopping to wipe her fanny on a giant teddy bear and unskilfully twerk every now and then (because the mainstream media has discovered twerking in the same way a mum discovers the word ‘cool’). She sings ‘We Can’t Stop’, of course, which sounds like all the obnoxiousness of a single generation concentrated into a boring pop hit, but then just when I think I’ve seen enough embarrassment for one night, Robin bloody Thicke waddles out of the darkness, and the two creepiest examples of everything wrong with the sexual attitudes of Western culture collide in a head-cradlingly cringe display of retrograde stupidity.

To take a minute just to talk about Robin Thicke, ‘Blurred Lines’ is a song I can’t fucking stand and will never forgive the world for accepting as part of the fabric of human culture in this day and age. The song itself isn’t bad and is actually pretty interestingly made and decently produced and sticks in your head like a skewer, but the lyrics, its message, its approach and of course its video, only appear to represent something a lot ‘darker’ than the simple ‘joke’ that Thicke (who himself is an imbecile, by the way) tried to pass it off as. The word that me and most other critics of the song like to use in relation to it is creepy. It’s so creepy. It reeks with the stench of the male gaze. It drips with the excited sweat of the rapist. ‘I know you want it’, ‘you’re a good girl’, ‘do it like it hurt’, eugh, it’s enough to make you shudder. Guys singing about wanting to have sex with girls and girls wanting to have sex with them isn’t cause in itself for the feminist alarm bells to start ringing, but the attitude in what’s possibly the biggest song of the year sounding like the mutterings of a masturbating sex offender has aggravated me more than anything else pop music has shit into my stream in the past eight months.

So seeing Miley Cyrus, who performs with the style of an ignored stripper, lech herself shamelessly onto Thicke, who looked like a dad with a guilty boner, inflamed a conservative part of my brain that I beforehand never knew existed. Alice Glass said once in an NME interview that the mainstream media ‘sells sex to children’, and she’s right. Girls are being taught to be used and guys are being taught to be users. Sex towers above all other values. Miley Cyrus is trying so hard to be ‘raunchy’ because that’s what the established pop music culture requires of her. The status quo at the moment is for men to be almost obsessively perverted and sex-crazed and for women to be shamelessly objectified, norms which instead of appearing to be moving past, we as a culture all seem to be encouraging and pushing to undignified levels. Criticism of this kind of shit isn’t prudish, or against free forms of sexual expression, because there’s nothing sexually liberating about any of this crap. It’s all restrictive and mindless and cheap and basic and catering to an audience of backwards-minded sex-obsessed simpletons which I hope doesn’t exist in as massive a chunk of the population as watching the VMAs would lead you to believe. Also, I tend to think that trying to manipulate your base urges to get you to buy into a product is an insult to you as a human being.

There is hope in the fact that Cyrus’ performance absolutely bombed; as far as I can tell from the online reaction and the awesome viral Smith family reaction screenshot, everyone found it fucking hilariously awful. But, although using crude sexuality in order to cynically grab attention is nothing new in any form of pop culture, Cyrus’ failed attempt last night seemed indicative of something really fucked-up in the modern mindset of North America and its cultural compatriots here in the UK. The almighty power of the pop music industry is infusing younger generations with a depressingly immature and shallow sexual attitude, and upholding and absolving these attitudes where they’re already present. And of all the things that depressed me about watching a small fragment of the VMAs – the shit music, the vacuous coverage, the self-centred brown nosing, the repressed congeniality of the employees of the mainstream – I think it was being reminded of mainstream culture’s pernicious championing of perverse sexuality and gender attitudes that depressed me the most. The VMAs is a parade for the Nazis of culture.

Kanye West - Yeezus

Kanye thrives on contentiousness – if he wasn’t as renowned for his arrogance and pigheadedness as he was for his music, he sure as hell wouldn’t be the behemothic superstar we all know and love to hate. On his last album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he took account of his now-legendary dickishness by making his dickishness the album’s central theme. This artistic direction led to Kanye attempting to balance his persona’s unashamed hedonism with a sort of penitent sensitivity towards how this could be perceived as not entirely commendable of him and how he was actually a good-natured and troubled individual underneath all the sickeningly garish displays of wealth. Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually another critical success for Yeezy, though I debated constantly as to whether it was the bona fide magnum opus that Kanye intended as well as a piece of pure devilish entertainment value. Three years on, here comes Yeezus, where the post-Taylor-Swift-incident navel-gazing continues.

However, before we get into the ins-and-outs of Kanye’s infamous delusions of grandeur, let’s talk about the parts of the album which don’t involve Kanye speaking his mind, because let’s face it, it’s the production on Yeezus that’s got everyone talking. The vibe here is similar to his aforementioned previous effort – a big luxurious-sounding mishmash of synths, pianos, horns, as well as the twisting of Kanye’s own voice through juttering self-samples and autotune. But as everyone’s pointed out, the tracks are noisier, harsher, abrasive and just a little unhinged in places where the production on his previous album was softer and had a more dignified feeling of composure, and the album sounds all the fresher because of it. The beats really do sound like the work of a madman – or at least producers on the commission of a madman, considering the V.I.P. list of auxiliary talent that Kanye brought in to assist in giving the ten tremendously demented tracks the stylishly mangled treatment they deserve.

And the variety of expert opinions really shows in the quality of the tracks on this album, with each dark, steely composition pulling you further and further into the madness. And there’s method within the madness. There’s a lot of exciting shit that jumps out at you within the overall production, like the aggravating electronica that manifests itself in numerous zips, squeals and growls. Or the eclectic and strategically placed, as well as comparatively sparse, sampling picked up from all kinds of crazy places - like the jarring breakdown halfway through New Slaves into Hungarian space-rock - but the more notable samples are the dips into Jamaican dancehall every now and then, which I wouldn’t have thought would work well at all, but in fact work really, really, really well. Despite all the leanings towards descriptions like ‘noise’ and ‘industrial’, the whole thing is a very tight ship, bearing all the hallmarks of professionalism that we’ve all come to expect from Kanye – he’s still never made a bad album, and part of that is because he has an excellent ear for what sounds awesome and what can go into a track to make it grab your attention.

Yeezus is brimming with energy, and Kanye makes no effort to restrain himself, leading to hyped-up bouts of insanity like the Black Skinhead. Guilt Trip, especially, feels like what is in my opinion the album’s most resounding success, with its chiptune-and-piano vortex of trap where Kanye’s flow sounds particularly at home. Hold My Liquor also deserves a mention for its unnerving echoing-through-emptiness production and weeping synths, as well as another stirring bit of participation from Justin Vernon, who’s all over this album as he was in Dark Twisted Fantasy. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, the relationship between this album and Kanye’s previous is a fascinating one, as they both work in much the same way and show the same level of invigorating creativity – the most notable difference is that Yeezus lacks the throng of guest appearances that peppered Dark Twisted Fantasy, leading to an album that’s very noticeably more about the man himself – I mean even more so than usual. Which brings me to something that needs to be addressed, even though as you can hopefully tell from my enthusiasm, Yeezus is an excellently constructed album and as indulgent a piece of entertainment as his last effort, which was arguably one of his best, if not the best. But there’s a problem that dwelt within that album that remains with this one, and to really express what that problem is, we need to talk about the man himself.

First of all, Kanye’s not a great rapper; never has been, never will be. He’s had a few decent lines here and there, but it’d be lying to say that his more obvious presence on this album matches the quality of the more technical, musical side that runs alongside it. I never really know where I stand with Kanye – he staggers between toothless social commentary and an incredibly off-putting lack of maturity that clash awkwardly with each other. And a lot of his lyrics are just plain stupid. Here are a few examples:

“Hurry up with my damn croissants!”

“Your titties, let em out, free at last,

Thank God Almighty, they free at last”

“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce”

“I wanna fuck you hard on the sink,

After that, give you something to drink”

I mean that’s the kind of shit we’re dealing with here, and the problem is that I just can’t run with it, it just seems to display Kanye's inability to write with any sense of tone or feel or anything, and is mostly made up of uninspired rhymes and references. For a rap album, the rapping is noticeably poor. What's worse is Kanye’s poorly-concealed intention for the music he makes, and the lyrics he writes for it, to be interpreted as having serious artistic merit. I mean, I understand that he knew what he was doing naming his songs things like ‘I Am a God’ – for Kanye to lose his wanton arrogance is to strip him of his most effective marketing asset – but there seems to be an attempt at real heart on Yeezus that, to make another comparison with the sister album before it, falls weakly flat.

For a man who’s forever linked by fathering a doomed child with Kim Kardashian – the last person you’d associate with anything other than totally vapid philistinism – he seems to love writing songs that beg to be heard as heartfelt testaments to having a depressing time having meaningless sex with meaningless people with meaningless wealth, and he seems to genuinely believe that this constitutes an evocative critique or some sort of message other than vacuous descriptions of an affluent and hedonistic lifestyle with a depressing slant shallowly built into it. The world he evokes through his songs is surprisingly lifeless, and seems to be mostly built on bland misogyny. Blood on the Leaves, I’m in It, Bound 2 – these are all great beats, but despite all his trying to prove his artistic capability as a deep and complex individual, his lyricism comes across as the best he can possibly manage, which is shallow and directionless. Blood on the Leaves is actually a great song, but the decision to use Nina Simone’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in a song about a rich cokehead going through a divorce sits uncomfortably, and seems to be a good example of Kanye’s lack of any real sensitivity.

Kanye is many things – he’s talented, exciting, charismatic, consistently relevant, and I do honestly believe, good-natured, but it's an uncomfortable truth that he's not as intelligent as he thinks he is. Kanye may be skilled, and musically he has serious clout, but he’s clearly trying to reach greedily above the level of hip-hop beatmaker to be seen as someone with real depth, even though he’s a man to whom the world beyond the superficial universe he inhabits might as well be invisible. Yeezus is gripping on a musical level, but for an album that seems to be making attempts at being strongly personal, it all seems as shallow as ever. However, if you don't care about boring questions of artistic authenticity in regard to someone as preposterous as Kanye West, as I'm sure most people won't, then on a level of solid musical entertainment, Yeezus is bursting with vibrancy and filled with creative flashes, and is another worthy effort in Kanye West's impressive discography.

Kanye West - New Slaves

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

Everyone’s been describing this, the first brand new album from The Knife since 2006’s darkly fantastic Silent Shout, as ‘difficult listening’ – like it’s an album that’s dense with thought and feeling, built with meticulous ingenuity and, when cryptically decoded, speaks volumes about this, that or the other. I’m not so sure about this myself. While the Swedish soul-serenaders have made a point of running, terrified, from the evil giant of electropop conventionality, presenting here an album that’s about twice the length of their previous effort, I find myself wondering if this was an ambitious stumble in the right direction. It’s not immediately clear exactly how Shaking the Habitual is the mysterious family duo re-shaping preconceptions or breaking any real boundaries, as has been flaunted by many, except maybe the boundary of human patience.

Yeah, as excited as I was for this album, the consensus going around that there was going to be a strongly political heft to it made me sceptical. I love The Knife as much as anyone, but mainly for their strange and sinister synthpop, where concrete and tangible ideas seem to get lost in the fog of the catchy dance rhythms and menacing atmospherics, and while I appreciate the gender-bending aspects to their image and sound and Karin Dreijer Andersson’s trans-androgynous pitch-shifting, I’m not sure that Shaking the Habitual is the intellectual statement on the group’s political views that I think they might have intended. And if it is, it’s buried so deep under a mound of byzantine inaccessibility that I’m perfectly comfortable with being quite unable to ‘get it’. What I was expecting from this album wasn’t what it would say to my brain but what it would say to my ears – and on a purely sonic level, it’s a mixed bag, shifting between sounding frantically urgent and solemnly doom-laden, pausing occasionally (but not always briefly) for some ambient interludes, all the while balancing between exciting and tedious.

There’s a theme of tension running through all the tracks on this album; the songs are brimming with portent, and frequently sail off into some enjoyably dark territory. Because that’s what I really enjoy about The Knife – revelling in their world of weird foreboding, and having a little internal souldance at the same time. The more danceable highlights include the awesomely frantic ‘Full of Fire’ – nine minutes of industrially-driven madness – and several tracks make a show of the duo’s love for the percussive, like the woodblock jungle of ‘A Tooth for an Eye’ and the tribal drumming of ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’. But it’s the more oppressively sinister parts of the album that really stick a skewer into your heart. ‘Wrap Your Arms Around Me’ is a track scarred with vulnerability, a piece groaning with sexual malignance. But probably the most delectably bleak corner of Shaking the Habitual can be found in ‘A Cherry on Top’, which is a masterfully crafted vacuum of foreboding. It has that gothic-insanity feel, like spending a night alone in a madhouse. It’s just that sort of pantomime craziness that The Knife can pull off spectacularly, not least because of Andersson’s shape-shifting, intensely disquieting moan of a voice is one of the duo’s most powerful assets.

So, there’s a lot of good here, sure. I like the earthy clunk and squeaky siren calls over ‘Raging Lung’, a song that’s like travelling on a rusty tug over a misty ocean – I love the spongy trumpet sound and the heave of the background’s metallic bass snores. I like the introduction of other vocalists on ‘Stay Out Here’, the album’s most conventionally house-y song, which I think really adds to its unsettling power. All of this is well and good. But that’s not to say that this is a good ‘album’. Part of the problem is that Shaking the Habitual is astonishingly long – way, way, way overlong, which I think was a significant lapse of judgement on The Knife’s part – this is not an album that should’ve been an hour and a half in length, there’s just simply not enough material here to justify it. Especially considering that most of the ‘material’ I’m talking about might not even be considered music. The album has long, ponderous stretches of ambient noise and sound – two of the tracks here, ‘Crake’ and ‘Oryx’, are short spurts of rubbish that seem to exist for no other reason than their titles reference Margaret Atwood, thereby proving The Knife’s intellectual credibility to absolutely no-one. ‘Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized’ is probably the track you’d first notice as clocking in at nineteen minutes, and consisting entirely of reasonably quiet and brain-calcifyingly boring sounds of not much in particular. This, coupled with the needless and ineffective ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’ – ten-ish minutes of irritatingly repetitive squeaking that goes nowhere – means that at least half an hour of the album’s running time should’ve been snipped and shelved and The Knife should admit defeat and concede that these wanderings of madness stymie the album’s flow to a treacle-fast sludge.

But even with these tedious missteps of arty nonsense gone, the album remains pretty ineffectively paced, with even the best songs sometimes outstaying their welcome and becoming a little bit tiring, even if the momentum behind the tracks seemed so initially promising. The Knife are still cultivating some pretty powerful sounds here. It’s definitely not as bad as my frustration may have made it out to be, and when you skip all the boring bits, which are nicely organised into just one or two tracks, it’s a real delight of pained terror and urgent post-pop fun. But in many ways, the piece as an actual album is a failure, in that it’s impossible to make heads or tails of the socio-political polemic that is apparently somewhere to be found within it, and in that to listen to it all in one go is one very long, very unfulfilling act of hardship bordering on self-abuse. Saying that, however, I do recommend that you give it a listen, as there’s goodness to be found within its depths, and The Knife may sometimes stagger over to the wrong side of ‘arty’, but their unique talents are still inspiring and often riveting. If you like the weird shit then you’ll definitely be in luck here.


The Knife - 'Full of Fire'

Adam Green & Binki Shapiro - Self-Titled

The unusual foray I’ve been making into indie recently has led me to the new supercollab by the boringly-named Adam Green and the sickeningly-named Binki Shapiro; he’s one half of Ellen Page Soundtrack band The Moldy Peaches, she’s from ho-hum indie band Little Joy. Together they form this fairly pleasant ‘anti-folk’ album, according to its Wikipedia page, which is a moniker that has always irritated me, since it sounds as if it’s flaunting itself as some kind of movement as opposed to being inconsequential singer-songwriter rubbish that thinks it’s a movement. Like most relationship-focused twangly indie music, it’s frothy enough to leave you puking foam for about a week, and hails from that corner of the New York State of Mind that completely disgusts me, where aloof pretentiousness meets a self-aware “isn’t-life-great” mentality, but nonetheless, there’s enjoyment to be had here underneath all the twee, against which all cynicism remains super effective.

Well, I say it’s twee and frothy and all that, which makes it sounds as if this means that the subject material is happy-go-lucky, sunlit contentment, the kind of sound that can be heard in both of these indie darlings' previous outfits, but really the lyrical content’s more wan and wistful, sung out of two audibly pleasing vocal cords and cradled in a variety of acoustic instruments. The semi-narrative theme here is The Relationship - as in, y’know, that “it’s-complicated” up-and-down back-and-forth archetype that all couples around the world who believe themselves to constitute a ‘relationship’ love to relate to and even subconsciously kind of aspire to. That market is catered to here. In dealing with this theme, which is like the most standard topic for all modern music, I’d say that the album is a success. The duetting parts feel a little bit cheesy, but that’s the territory we’re in here, and besides, the cheese factor is diluted by the lyrics being not-terrible, elevating the duo above comparable She & Him levels of froth, which is the kind of boy-girl duetting we’re all used to. ‘Pity Love’ is a good one. The tales told in these songs never reach the depths of tragedy, or the highs of being joyously in love with another beautiful indiefuck like yourself, but it takes a sensible middle-ground option that sounds as if I’m calling the whole thing banal, but it’s not boring, it’s nice. And nice is good.

I should be finding some real problems enjoying this album, seeing as it’s a product of a world I have no wish to inhabit, and I’m not exactly in the know when it comes to this scene of model-beautiful strolling-in-the-park sort of music, but I do kind of enjoy it, to an extent, and it is fairly meritorious considering that it sounds as if it would be total drivel. It's a little sweet, that's part of its charm, but I wouldn't say it ever gets too saccharine. I think that what really steers it away from the chasm of mediocrity are the voices, the two sets of lovey-dovey lungs that pervade throughout. Saying that, it’s true that Shapiro’s voice is the far superior, and I’m glad that she gets a track or two to herself, like ‘Casanova’, where she gets all Roy Orbison on our country/western asses, and reminds me of Nicole Atkins. I love her voice; it’s got that necessarily adorable quality, but it also sounds tired and consciously weary, almost, y’know, like she means the shit that she’s singing about. It stands head and shoulders above her album-partner Adam Green, whose voice isn’t bad I guess, and at times it does sound like a self-conscious Lou Reed impersonator, but it has the ability to be loaded with a nice bassy sensation and yet sound strangely uninterested at the same time, which suits the hipstamatic-tinged universe that this album inhabits. I mean, from what I've heard, that’s what all this ‘anti-folk’ nonsense is about – playful but impassioned, jovial but lightly serious. And I can see the appeal in that.

This album’s one to play to your girlfriend/boyfriend if you want to display some sort of musical affection towards them but, secretly, you aren’t really into them. Not brilliant, but it represents a musical tide that could be worse.


Adam Green & Binki Shapiro - Pity Love