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Your support makes all the difference.CHRIS MORRIS | Blue Jam (Warp)
CHRIS MORRIS | Blue Jam (Warp)
Chris Morris's Blue Jam is effectively a DJ album, but of a different stripe to the usual offerings from the Oakenfolds and Sashas of the scene. With most DJ albums, all you get are the same 20 or so currently fashionable dance tracks that every other DJ is playing at the moment, linked with a favourite bass drum pulse, a few filter effects and a crossfade flourish or two. It's an abiding irony of the genre that the DJ him/herself remains a shady, half-glimpsed figure on their own album, their character suggested mostly by the tracks they play, and the way they play them.
Not so with Blue Jam, in which the character of Morris is always up close and personal throughout - often alarmingly so - thanks to the "comedy" sketches played out over a selection of ambient and post-rock backing tracks from the likes of Labradford, Eno, Amon Tobin, Jimi Tenor and Aphex Twin.
Deemed "unacceptable" for TV (according to a BSA ruling) and pushing the envelope to bursting point in the Radio 1 series from which the album was culled, Morris's humour employs the comedy of inappropriate response - from a couple reacting with nonchalance to their child's disappearance, to a man driven insane by a TV salesman's apathy to complaints of lizards coming out of his telly - as a satire on the way populist media dictate "acceptable" standards of emotional expression. Accordingly, he seeks amusement in the folk-devil subjects of the day: abuse, abduction, pain, porn, perverse sexuality, and the unquestionable innocence of children, a notion hilariously subverted in a sketch featuring a four-year-old girl as Harvey Keitel's clean-up character from Pulp Fiction.
As with the Surrealists, the sense of disjunction is rooted in the way the bizarre subject-matter is presented with calm, naturalism - when Morris's doctor examines a patient's penis in a disturbing manner, it's still presented in sotto voce surgery style, gently pressing home the inference that trust in professionals is easily misplaced.
It's a disturbing netherworld of deadpan horror and absurdity, set against a backdrop of ambient instrumentals which acquire, in this context, the darker mood of totalitarian muzak, soothing away one's discomfort.
The weakest bits are the "stings" featuring vocoder dissings of Morris's fellow-DJs, which seem pointlessly incestuous, if deserved. The same target is more effectively skewered in "Club News", in which a Radio 4-style announcer gives it the full Westwood, bigging up DJ Amyl Rightmate and The Fabattoir as he offers "some truly hexagonal dope on this weekend at the bop sheds and flash tunnels". Rrrrespect!
Words just aren't enough for this band.
DELTRON 3030 | Deltron 3030 (75 Ark)
Like rap music, but tired of all the guns and threats which comprise its shrinking worldview? Then Deltron 3030 may be just the thing for you, offering the skilled sonic manipulation of Dan The Automator and the turntable gymnastics of Kid Koala in the service of the rhyming skills of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, the rapper best known for his 1991 hit "Mista Dobalina". Distinctive and different, Deltron 3030 was conceived as a sort of hip hop sci-fi computer-game space-opera thingy, with the core trio and collaborators such as Sean Lennon, Damon Albarn and "Money Mark" Nishita sketching out impressions of life in the 31st century while flaunting ludicrous handles like The Cantankerous Captain Aptos and Sir Damien Thorn VII of The Cockfosters Clan. There's a courageous complexity to Dan's arrangements - nowhere better than on the title-track's imaginative blend of woozy pedal-steel guitar and grandiose orchestration - while Del's rap style offers a tumbling torrent of assonance and allusion, with phrases piled on phrases like candyfloss on a stick: there's undoubtedly something there, but you're never sure how substantial it is. But his attitude comes through in tracks like "Positive Contact" - in which the search for alien intelligence allegorises his attempt to make meaningful contact with fellow humans - and "Upgrade", wherein he suggests "Upgrade your grey matter, 'cos one day it may matter".
PJ HARVEY | Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea (Island)
The title of Polly Harvey's sixth album apparently refers to her present peripatetic status, dividing her time between her bucolic West Country home base and her actual home, for the last year or so, in New York. Though to be honest, there's precious little of the former in evidence here: with lyrics like "Speak to me of heroin and speed/Of genocide and suicide, of syphilis and greed," it's clear we're not in Dorset any more, Toto. Which is the root of the problem with Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea: it may be, with the solid support of multi-instrumentalist old hands Mick Harvey and Rob Ellis, a welcome return to a more basic, guitar-driven rock sound after the ill-judged noisescapes of Is This Desire?, but in searching for the soul of NYC, Harvey seems to have lost some of her unique character, absorbing an unhealthy complement of that city's over-familiar lyrical tropes. As a result, for large parts of the album she sounds like a Patti Smith tribute band, struggling with the "Horses In My Dreams" and watching "The Whores Hustle And The Hustlers Whore" as she gazes down from the rooftops at those mean streets below. It's left to Thom Yorke to bring a breath of fresh air to the slightly stale proceedings, the calm fortitudeof his vocal helping on "This Mess We're In" stands proud of its surroundings.
BOB SINCLAR | Champs Elysées (Defected)
The appeal of Bob Sinclar's retro-disco constructions lies in their smooth, streamlined lines, in the way that nothing is allowed to impede the well-lubricated flow: it's the satisfaction of musical elements meshing perfectly, interlocking with a natural grace and seamless logic, the only lyrical baggage a few nebulous feelgood phrases like "Music is the love that sets me free". The hit single "I Feel For You" is Bob at his best, the elastic bassline riding a beat which zips along so slickly it barely touches the floor: a zero-friction mode designed for maximum propulsion with minimum effort. The "Champs Elysees Theme" takes this principle to its logical conclusion, the opening riff hanging on the same chord for a full minute, letting the tension build unbearably until sleek strings sweep off into the melody. It's quintessential Euro-disco, evocative of late-Seventies movies featuring Michael York driving an open-topped roadster along the Riviera, his companion's blonde hair streaming in the wind. As long as Sinclar sticks to this disco territory - an area bounded by Chic, Shep Pettibone, Earth Wind & Fire and Bob's Gallic forefather Cerrone (of "Supernature" fame) - Champs Elysées glides along beautifully; but sadly, the album's otherwise clean lines are spoilt by an unsatisfying deep-house techno exercise ("Striptease") and an even less welcome bout of insubstantial electric-piano fuzak, "Phasing News".
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BAHA MEN | Who Let The Dogs Out (Edel)
With its irresistible Afro-Carib groove, mildly saucy lyrics like "A doggy is nothing if he don't have a bone", and that ubiquitous title hook, Baha Men's "Who Let The Dogs Out" was the undisputed hit of this year's Notting Hill Festival, chasing the rain out of dampened spirits as those three "woofs" resounded all the way from Ladbroke Grove to Harlesden High Street. In view of which, the release of the parent album nearly two months later, as the leaves are dropping from the trees and Christmas ads start to punctuate the sitcoms, could be described as tardy, at best: you don't need to see the album sleeve, with the Baha boys posing on the beach, to realise that Who Let The Dogs Out is a classic summer album released at the wrong time. It's infectious stuff, none the less: the six-piece backing band's grooves employ a chassis of limber, fatback funk topped with Caribbean bodywork, the rhythmic detailing of ska, zouk and mento lending buoyancy to "Getting Hotter" and a confident swagger to "It's All In The Mind". Apart from the occasional lapse into naff boy-band balladry like "Where Did I Go Wrong", it's a fun formula sustained throughout, most effectively on "Get Ya Party On", which presents the Baha Men as a modern world-beat crossover equivalent of Kool & The Gang, party animals intent on a good time, without any undue gang aggro: "It don't matter who's the best side/Eastside, Westside." Amen to that.
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