Emma Lock – Shooting Star (iTunes)

If you took a dose of Joss Stone and mixed it with some Evanescence, and possibly a twist of Kate Bush, you’d have a fair idea of Emma Lock is coming from. She’s from Cornwall, looks amazing and this is her first set of songs. You can hear extracts at myspace.com/emmalock and her own www.emmalock.com. While some tracks struggle to find a shape and purpose, Transindental and Stepping Stones are wild, accomplished showcases for a great emerging talent. ***

Madness - Singles Box Sets Vol I & II (EMI)

If you’re looking to build a complete digital music collection of Stiff Records or their leading lights, Madness, then you can get a step closer this month. EMI’s 04 December release makes all of the Madness b-sides available for download for the first time ever. The Stiff era singles are included, as are later tracks like Uncle Sam and (Waiting For The Ghost Train). There are 32 tracks in the Vol. 1 package including the rare Don’t Quote Me On That promo disc. Although whether this is the version that only ever originally appeared on 12”, or the standard Work Rest & Play EP version used in the ‘physical’/CD Singles Box Set Vol. 1 that was released in 2003 remains to be seen…***

Moby – Go (Downloadable Deluxe Version) (Mute)

The promotion and marketing of Go – The Very Best of Moby has been a complete fiasco. With different track listings for at least six countries and various online ‘exclusives’ popping up all over the place, it’s been impossible to keep track of. Even Moby himself realised and made a special blog posting on Halloween to try and clear things up. You can read it yourself at www.moby.com/journal/2006-10-26/confusion_around_go_the_very_best_of_mob.html. The bottom line for download collectors? Get the Downloadable Deluxe Version – “a/k/a iTunes plus more stuff,” as Moby called it – for seven bonus tracks including a 2006 remake of Go, a Murk remix of Porcelain and possibly his greatest track ever, God Moving Over The face of Waters. **

David Bowie - Black Tie White Noise Extras (EMI)

This digital only release has 12 tracks from Bowie’s 1993 return-to-form album that reunited him with Nile Rogers and Mick Ronson. All sorts of remixes, off-cuts and oddments are here. Like Real Cool World (from the Cool World soundtrack), the Rock and Brothers In Rhythm 12” remixes of Jump They Say and a remix by the much missed Moodswings of a track called Nite Flights. If you only download one, make it the Dub Oddity version of Jump They Say or, as a reserve, the curious Indonesian Vocal Version of Don’t Let Me Down and Down (Jangan Susahkan Hatiku). ****

Enigma - A Posteriori (Liberty/EMI)

Despite reaching his sixth album as Enigma, no review of Micheal Cretu’s ambient/pop crossover ever fails to mention his inaugural hit, 1990’s Sadness Part 1. But at least this reviewer can start by saying how I couldn’t stand it! The chant/beats mash-up, the female vocal… I found nothing original or exciting in it at all. What I did love, was his minor 1993 hit Return To Innocence (like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan meets Public Enemy) and 1996’s even more minor album Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! (one of the few enjoyable dance albums released that year).

This one is much less varied than any previous effort. Cretu has got some great Euphoria-style sounds going on, but little else. I can’t decide whether it’s all blissfully chilled out, or just lacklustre. Most tracks are instrumental and few - save for the finale, Goodbye Milky Way - lack the emotional charge that Cretu has always managed to add into the ambience.

As an aside, this is the first promo CD I’ve seen with the individual reviewer’s name printed both on the cover and actual disc, which means that music piracy is about to meet a new, major hurdle and that the nabbing of moral-free reviewers is about to become quite a spectator sport for eBay-watchers!

Ian North - My Girlfriend’s Dead (Repressed)

Ian North was a punk rock fall-out who got inspired by Kraftwerk and combined a newfound love of synths with dirty, grimy guitar pop. Not a million miles away from, or rather a US version of, The Gadgets or most of Some Bizarre’s label roster from 1980.

As such Ian North’s UK counterpart was, in a way, Matt Johnson who was developing a similar lo-fi male solo + synths/guitars/drum box style. But where Johnson’s lyrics were heavy weight – referencing Hezbollah as far back as 1989 – North’s were shallow. He had some great synth sounds and the drum box is as gritty as ever, but they’re let down by songs about girlfriends being models, girlfriends being on the front of magazines, and girlfriends being the “jet set.”

On the plus side, it’s extremely well packaged and comes as the second release on Cherry Red’s new Repressed imprint. So if you want to hear who both Talking Heads and The Ramones played alongside at CBGBs in 1980, then give this a try. But don’t expect poetry.

Andrew Poppy - She Not Here / Box of Bowls (CDR)

The latest, leaked sounds from the Poppy camp sound very promising. Track two is a whirlwind of pure piano flourish, an real analogue bubblebath that carries on from one of my favourite moments from years ago - that piano cadenza at the end of The Impossible Net.

She Not Here is a new dimension to the composer's work - vocal driven, but more akin to ideas in previous albums like Alphabed and Under The Son than the pop art of Another Language. The vocals languish over organic sequences and a Schubert sample. How and when will these tracks be officially available? We wait with baited breath...

Anne Garner - Magic and Madness (CDR)

The best album I've heard so far this year is completely unsigned... just waiting for some savvy record label person to step in and sign up. If Kate Bush was new now, releasing The Kick Inside in 2006 but getting it produced by Trevor Horn then it might sound a little like Magic and Madness.

There are plenty of Bush-isms in Anne's voice and songwriting but unlike just about every other female singer around at the moment, there's no showboating, just pure melody and the occasional hint of a northern (?) accent.

I could spend all afternoon heaping hyperbole on this album - or coming up with comparisons to stir the imagination (a cross between Caroline Lavelle folkadelica and William Orbit-era Madonna being one) but instead I'll listen some more, because it's addictive, and wonder how it might leak out to a wider audience...

Original Soundtrack - Chicken Little (EMI)

I'm off reviews at the moment while I concentrate on my book, but the sight of Chicken Little and his three-eyed puffball friends on the sleeve is difficult to resist. Besides, this new Disney soundtrack is also probably the oddest placement of an early REM track ever…

The song in question is It’s The End Of The World As We Know It. The second REM track I've done this week after a drought of quite a few years. The first was Trout - Michael Stipe's duet on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew, when I reliased (admittedly rather belatedly) that it was built around a massive sample from the Easy Rider soundtrack.

And there’s also a nice dose of the long-missed Barenaked Ladies. But it’s got electric guitars on it unfortunately. Barenaked acoustic is best.

There’s a track from Joss Stone here - the first time I’ve knowingly put her through my hi-fi. It’s a duet with Patti Labelle of Stir It Up which leads me to think Joss should do a full-on disco album next. That would be far more palatable than her current blues throwback style.

ABC - Beauty Stab/How To Be A… Zillionaire!/Alphabet City/Up (Universal)

We all know that The Lexicon Of Love was pop perfection. Why else would it have been reissued and remastered so many times in the last few years? But it’s the flawed masterpieces – where beauty meets brutality – that make ABC excel. Like 1983’s Beauty Stab - which replaced strings with guitars and romance with political angst - a masterpiece black and white documentary of Sheffield life. Stark contrast to Lexicon’s Technicolor fantasy.

In hindsight its songs stand up better than ever, the remastering is strong and it’s only the sleeve notes - and several barrel-scraping bonus tracks - that stop this reissue getting a full five stars. 1985’s How To Be A Zillionaire, though, has everything. A proper set of bonus tracks – there were just so many studio experiments in this period. Ocean Blue’s hitherto unavailable Single Mix is amazing, despite remaining bizarrely absent from Martin Fry’s on-going live work.

Alphabet City - Martin Fry and Mark White’s 1987 attempt to remake Lexicon - showed increasing prowess as producers. In fact if the ABC catalogue is to be truly marketed, the next reissue needs to be a compilation of their work as a production unit, for the likes of Paul Rutherford and Lizzie Tear.

By 1989’s Up, Keith Breeden’s glorious sleeve art was being downplayed and ABC would have shuffled into banality were it not for Fry and White’s spirit of adventure –which pulled them into rave culture, fusing Strings of Life with UK pop. Like all the others in this set, the bonus tracks seem to have been bolted on in a completely random order. So you might need some finger work to on your CD player’s programme function to get the most out of them.

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor (WEA)

In a 1998 edition of DJ I referred to ‘Ray Of Light’ as “a great William Orbit album that just happens to have Madonna signing on it.” The same could almost be said of this new one, in which Stuart Price a/k/a Les Rhythmes Digitales packs a big, throbbing, non-stop punch disco while Madonna surfs the wave and interrupts the occasionally genius house with tales of New York city freaks and, ahem, domestic bliss in Wiltshire. Aside from the lead single ‘Hung Up’, the Chicane-esque ‘Get Together’ and the Mirwais reunion for a Moroder-sampling ‘Future Lovers’ are the main highlights.

Eyeless In Gaza - No Noise, The Very Best Of… (Cherry Red)

A 22-track, 25-year anniversary compilation is a fitting consolation prize for a band that were for so long ‘almost… but not quite’. As pure target market for eighties experimental pop I saw them on the fringes all the time (Smash Hits was great in those days, all you needed was an interesting idea or picture to get in their pages). But they never went one stage further into radio play territory – which is where the disappointment lies. If only they had they would – and I am 99% certain of this – been huge.

All the right elements were there but, before you think I’m labelling them as a sort of B-division Talk Talk, it’s worth remembering that Eyeless In Gaza weren’t copyists or chasing after other people’s glories. They had a unique sound, of which Martyn Bates’ Joe Strummer-esque howl was the centre point. “Martyn is one of the great white soul singer voices,” Alan McGee says on the sleeve notes, “by soul I mean Ian Curtis, not Jamiroquai…”

If the E’s in your collection include Eno, 808 State, Einstürzende Neubauten and Echo and the Bunnymen then there’s a place for this alongside them. It’s just a pity that a compilation subtitled The Very Best Of comes with such a measly eight-page booklet!

Various - This Is Not Retro, This Is The Eighties Up To Date (TINR)

The best website for eighties music is by far remembertheeighties.com, which has been a labour of love for Richard Evans for several years. It remembers the decade from a British perspective for a start, and has tracked down many singers and bands that time might have otherwise forgotten.

So it’s only right that he gives a platform for some of them and the new material they’re working on today. So where are they now? Well Howard Jones is in euro trance territory. Kajagoogoo have bought a drum machine and headed a long way off from Ellis Beggs and Howard. Peter Cox is sitting firmly in the middle of the road. The Alarm, though, are exactly where you last saw them, and haven’t dropped any quality control. Perhaps most impressive is a delicate and melodic new one from Pete Coyle of the Lotus Eaters.

You can’t help but skip on with a sense of browsing a ‘Friends Reunited’ for your record collection - and find out what everyone else is up to these days. My only worry about this album is commercial – would a Sigue Sigue Sputnik fan really be interested in something with Modern Romance on it? Either way, if you want to catch up with everyone from Nik Kewshaw to Heaven 17 to Toyah, this is the place.

Various – GRLZ, Women Ahead of Their Time (Crippled Dick Hot Wax)

It’s the stories behind the songwriters that makes this album an artefact. As Vivien Goldman says in the liner notes, “Most of the voices here blossomed, bloomed, then flared out into free-fall like bright fireworks.” Which makes hearing stuff like The Slits’ I Heard It Through The Grapevine and Anna Domino’s Zanna even more important.

There really were a lot of breakthrough female artists in the early eighties, writing and presenting pop music in truly new ways. But have things really changed if you’re new and exciting and female? Or are we stuck in a compromise where the path to success – and we should ask Jem – is just to be the new Dido? “There was a high turnover among these girl groovers who,” Goldman writes as if ’83 was ’06, “found touring a hard combo with motherhood, or the pressures of eternal infancy thrust upon female pop performers just too much of a pain.”


This review also published in: Record Collector

Madonna - Confessions On A Dancefloor (WEA)

Travel late on the Paris metro. Lay flat out in the sweatiest, glammest club you can find. Take a sharp blade and carve out the biggest chunk of the dancefloor you can and hold it to your ear. That’s the sound of the new Madonna album.

Mostly co-written with Les Rhythms Digitales’ Stuart Price, Madonna’s ninth album doesn’t deviate from the in-your-face experimentation of Music and American Life. But what is new is a return to the disco era, from the mirror ball front cover to the Abba sample that underpins debut single Hung Up. It’s the first track in a continuous mix: over an hour with no silence, no breaks and certainly no ballads.

Get Together is a standout for me. Throbbing, filtered disco, it’s Madonna doing the Ibiza beach party thing at long last. The sound of Chicane covering Burning Up. Sorry, on the other hand, is a low light - the first in a string of cod confessionals, lyrically trite memos to Guy Ritchie where the more real-life the lyrics get the more I cringe.

Madonna teams up again with Music collaborator Mirwais for Future Lovers, one of the most pulsating tracks on the whole album. They deliver something they must have dreamt of since the start. A whole track built on Giorgio Moroder’s bass sequence from Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. You’ll be pleased to know they’ve treated it kindly – adding nothing but a delicious ever-ascending vocal hook.

There’s just one thing missing from all of these pulse-driven tracks and that’s the killer chorus. Sure, there are plenty of pop references, more than any previous album in fact. Like running a “let it be” refrain into the return of Papa Don’t Preach’s string quartet for Let It Will Be. But you do get the killer chorus in track eight – Jump – which combines all of this album’s good points with a hook the strength of Deeper And Deeper.

Push - first track to run at a slower, lower BPM – is an interesting mix. More domestic boredom lyrically but saved by another killer chorus. How High is a missed opportunity though. A shame because for this one Madonna actually begins to deliver an actual confession on the dancefloor - “Should I carry on? Will it matter when I’m gone?” - and ponder something more deeper.

I Love New York is Ray Of Light revisited. Where William Orbit sci-fi’d up a country track for his urban soundtrack, Stuart Price uses sirens and FM radio power trance. And by this track you would have either binned this album (disappointed that Madonna hadn’t grown up into that guitar-strumming activist from American Life) or you wouldn’t have paused for breath for a solid chuck of 120BPM disco. Personally I think Madonna’s back there where Music album had her. But she’s dispensed with the fake bling and accepted the fact that disco in 2005 is about atmosphere more than attitude.


This review also published in: Record Collector

Can – Future Days/Landed/Soon Over Babaluma/Unlimited Edition (Mute)

For many readers who have never explored Can before, myself included, listening to these new remastered editions will be like meeting a long-lost relative. Someone from generations back who you’ve heard so much about but never actually met.

Their influence is massive. In Can’s case they represent the exact moment that the avant-garde and classical experimentalism head-butted the rock world. They formed in 1968 as a five piece, the most recognisable names being Holger Czukay and Jaki Leibzit. The two musical styles they brought with them – one a former student of Karlheinz Stockhaisen, the other an exponent of freeform jazz – set the tone for the band.

It’s a tone that has resonated for almost forty years. Mutant industrial, pop-progressive and electronic glitch-tech have all emerged from their ever-curious sound-lab. Which makes meeting these oddball relatives on CD for the first time all the more intriguing…

Future Days, the band’s fifth album, originally appeared in 1973 and came at moment of change. Vocalist Damo Suzuki was about to leave to become a Jehovah’s Witness and it was the start of the end for Can’s trademark two-track approach to recording. That’s one track for a live performance and one for overdubs, which gives this whole album an energy and vitality that’s lacking on their later work.

But then on the later work in question, their multi-track approach lead them for the first time into true ambient territory. Eno may have coined the term, but Can were recorded the first ever excursions into ambient music with Quantum Physics from Soon Over Babaluma (1974).

It doesn’t seem to have dated at all, which is more than can be said for the Bowie-like glam rock of Landed (1975). It has its moments, like the 13-minute rock-out and the sequel to Quantum Physics, Red Hot Indians, both of which sound delightfully alien, but the rest of it has aged terribly.

With Unlimited Edition (1976), Can were anything but glam. Here they started on a new path of prog-leaning, dark and dangerous avant-garde noodling. Back to their freeform roots and at its best on the funky shuffling of LH 7o2 and EFS No. 27 and EFS No. 7 which sound like the band are attempting to recreate Brion Gysin’s 1950’s Moroccan field recordings (Can did say EFS stood for Ethnological Forgery Series, after all).

These albums only scratch the surface of Can – there are scores of others in the catalogue and hundreds of hours of unreleased recordings. But they are still exactly like meeting long, lost that distant relative. At times inspiring, at others embarrassing. Some moments are bang up to date and timeless, then others make you realise just how geriatric they are. But for all their failings, they help you join up the dots and find out how you got to where you are today…