Manic Street Preachers - The Second Great Depression

Something wonderful has happened. I got seduced.

Me and the Manics have always been an on-off kind of affair. First, the coltish, hard-rock strut of 'Generation Terrorists', which features both their best and worst songs - 'Motorcycle Emptiness' and 'Nat-West Barclays Midlands Lloyds' ("Black Horse apocalypse!" Ha).

Then, 'Gold Against The Soul', with its gloriously unfashionable eulogy to an old warhorse ('La Tristesse Durera') wedged up alongside the petulant sneer of 'Roses In The Hospital' ("We don't want your fucking love!"). Fine by me...

Then, Richey was gone and we all bowed heads and paid respect to that most raking swirl of fear and self-loathing, 'The Holy Bible' - a tortured young man's crazed sign-off to a world he simply didn't want to be a part of any more.

'This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours'? Nicky Wire's leftist sloganeering sitting stodgily with James Dean Bradfield's vocal power-cords.

'Know Your Enemy'? I can't remember a single track. Actually, 'So Why So Sad' is okay...

'Lifeblood'? Anaemic. It sounded like the end. Like they were all out of ire and ideas. Cued up for sad-eyed solo careers and session spots.

On first couple of listens, new album 'Send Away The Tigers' trickled over me like one of those prickly, weedy showers you get in crappy guest houses. Did the job, but not much fun. It gave me the distinct impression I was listening to music, but pretty much left me just as it found me.

But after the third and fourth goes (I love 'em enough to owe that) the sales rep-friendly simplicity began to feel more like no-bullshit charm. The sound of three men getting a bit older with both dash and dignity. Like they've realised how clinging to arch, hormonal swagger as they approach their forties is all very Peter Stringfellow and it's time to lose the politico pomp and get busy telling you their truth - they've lived a little, they're older, wiser, smarter and - yes - a fuck of a lot cooler than they were six years ago ranting on about Cuba.

Not that the spirit is weak or the darkness diluted. There's a song on 'Send Away The Tigers' called 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough'. It's a nice tune. Probably on the radio right now. It features that lovely woman from The Cardigans. And it's about suicide. Or, more specifically, about the horror and regret of having someone close to you commit suicide ("I could've shown you how to smile/I could've shown you how to cry"). Nicky Wire doesn't write too many songs directly about his old friend Richey, but this is where he makes his often-mumbled feelings achingly clear - including a twinge of irritation at being perceived as the band's second-best well-read angry man ("I could have written all your lines...")

So, I got seduced. Like out of a dodgy rom-com. First, I hated it. Now I can't get enough of it. Particularly 'The Second Great Depression', which, although it's clearly something to do with Iraq and all that, I'm personally reclaiming as a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful song about the mental alchemy of transforming pain and sorrow into fond/bittersweet memory (also see 'Enola/Alone').

I'm not saying 'Send Away The Tigers' is a great album (the squally 'Rendition' and closer 'Winterlovers' are clunkers). But its resemblance to 'Everything Must Go' is telling. That album was a bullish new beginning, but still cast in the shadow of their former life. After ten troubled years, the Richey weight has finally lifted. 'Send Away The Tigers' is the sound of a band finally emerging from the murk of mourning and into a new dawn with a clear, confident voice.

[MP3] Manic Street Preachers - The Second Great Depression

Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa

I've just come back from a nice holiday on the Isle Of Wight, which is one of my favourite places in the world. Ulrich Schnauss's new album 'Goodbye' is out soon and, a few weeks ago, I hated it. Now I love it like a wayward child.

The Isle Of Wight is hardly, say, Wyoming, but a brief switch from the teeming, toppling oppression of London to a relaxed, manageable, mostly seafaring and rural little rock was exactly the shift I needed to appreciate the album's widescreen, none-more-epicness. Probably something to do with the cheery, rolling, green, pleasant hills contrasting with the far-away grey and gloomy jostle of the surly Solent. (It rained a lot).

Ulrich Schnauss is a man who probably finds concepts like 'melody' a bit quaint. He works in broad, swooping brush-strokes; splattering his canvas with interlocking, often overwhelming textures. He conjures panoramic, windswept, abstract landscapes; dream-woven with gale-force sighs, glittering despair, lurching euphoria... Every individual note yawns and howls and reverberates like it's glancing off the wall of a bottomless pit.

He used to listen to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, see. And, with 'Goodbye', he's clearly tried to make his own private 'Loveless'.

And, in his own doleful little way, he's succeeded.

You have to admire any musician for whom 'making music' simply isn't enough. Like Kevin Shields, 16-odd years ago, Schnauss is aiming higher - for alchemy. Turning rough to smooth, discord to harmony, lament to eulogy...

'Medusa' is like charging, head-down, through a clattering rainstorm, being dive-bombed by thunderclaps, to emerge at the end in a spotlight of hopeful sunbeams. (Check that closing swell of heavenly choir).

And God bless him for contrasting all the melodrama with that kinky little four-note popcorn-pop. (Crank the volume in the last five seconds and you can hear the kernels zapping in the microwave).

[MP3] Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa

Something For The Weekend: The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

Let's get this nice and clear. Brandon Flowers, if he lives to be 106, will not write a better song than this.

Actually, he's written one other song that runs it close - 'Why Do I Keep Counting?'.

You're probably snorting. Thinking, 'What about 'Somebody Told Me'? And 'Mr Brightside'?

What 'All These Things That I've Done' and 'Why Do I Keep Counting?' have in common is that they're both the sounds of an all-too-human self-doubter howling out for a sign, some kind of spiritual redemption. I mean, apart from the sex and love stuff, shouldn't all songs be about that? (Also see - Gnarls Barkley - Crazy).

What makes 'All These Things I've Done' so delicious is that Brandon Flowers is, apparently, a man who believes in God. I half-envy people who believe in God, because they have a nice, neat moral framework to define the edges - a clear line of defence against all the chaos.

Then again, it must be pretty frustrating when, with all your fleshy, needful human cravings, you can't help but spill over the boundaries.

So, the narrator of 'All These Things I've Done' is a man who considers himself 'good' admitting he's done 'bad' and vowing to change track - to use the experience of the bad to recalibrate the good.

Musically, it's a glorious great stomping juggernaut. A one-man march of defiance against his greatest failings. A gutsy proclamation of how it hasn't killed him so he's decided to make himself stronger.

But The Killers - bless 'em - are hardly the most charismatic band in the history of rock. Just look at them. They pull all the right moves but silly haircuts and ill-advised facial hair can't hide basic awkwardness. Still, as the mighty JG Ballard once wrote, "Be ordinary in your life, extraordinary in your art".

'All These Things I've Done' is the sound of an ordinary man (got soul, not a soldier) creating something very extraordinary indeed.

The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

"I wouldn't trade one stupid decision for another five years of life..."

Sorry to go all literary on your ass, but there's this poem, right... There's this poem by TS Eliot, called The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. And you should read it. Go on. It's here... Read it!

Good, eh? A withering, unflinching, lyrical evocation of the slow-motion panic of ageing. The queasy feeling that the best is done and the worst is yet to come. All gnawed up and toxic with time-terror.

By contrast, this is the best song ever about how looking back can be a big part of moving forward. About not being a Prufrock. About being thankful to have something to reflect on - not regret.

And, Jesus, one of the tracks of the year, too. The way it's so cheekily based around that circling, jittery, mantra-like loop of bittersweet bullishness which, in the last minute or so, comes crashing out into a euphoric, one-hit chorus of celebratory nostalgia ("If I could see all my friends tonight!")

I've just listened to it again and spent the 7-something minutes thinking, one by one, about all the people I've known who I liked or loved and, although I might never see or connect with most of them again, how they've all played some part into shaping who I am today.

Good therapy.

[MP3] LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

A song about dirty, greasy, stabby, grabby, needy, greedy, whorish, moreish, shouting, pouting, slappy, happy, wrong, wrong, wrong, bad, bad, bad sex.

The best kind, then.

[MP3] Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

Something For The Weekend: Furniture - Brilliant Mind

Furniture are yer classic '80s one-hit wonders - a ragtag of Londoners and Eastern-Europeans who, astonishingly, released four albums. But 'Brilliant Mind' is their sky-highlight. A precious, pristine, perfectly distilled four minutes of fame.

'Brilliant Mind' made the UK Top 20 in the days when the UK Top 20 really mattered, but it's surrounded by a wonderful swirl of obscurity. A pop hit not popular enough for anyone to actually remember.

It's a song so good it became the death of them; a black hole insatiably sucking back everything else the band put out to prove how they weren't just about one song.

But they were, and what a song: jaunty, off-kilter intro... chilly, pre-packaged drum-fills... standard-issue miserabilism... And then that thrilling, mid-point starburst of sax-propelled sorrow and self-pity.

In the second half of the '80s, easily digestable synth-pop was bedded in and the silly haircuts and costumes made it all the more non-threatening. But Furniture's story isn't kitsch or pastel-shaded; it's a tragedy. Shat on and shafted by record-company greed and incompetence, they were under-supported, had their album pulled and deleted, were dropped, cast out into a lengthy court-case... And when they re-emerged in 1989, the world had moved on and their moment had gone.

With hindsight, 'Brilliant Mind' is more than just a dark and doomy wallow; a lament to love and obsession gone awry. It's the signature song for the band's descent from Top Of The Pops to rock-bottom ("Everybody's yelling about you and yours and how I'd have the answer if I'd only open up and just let you in/They must be out of their brilliant minds...")

And, excuse the clever-cleverness, but have a back-to-back listen to Furniture and this National track. Those Tindersticks/Nick Cave comparisons seem a bit off now, eh?

[MP3] Furniture - Brilliant Mind
[MP3] The National - Daughters Of The Soho Riots

Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors

I'm not going to play the 'Who's best - Editors or Interpol?' game, because it's stupid and makes people say things like, 'Editors are the poor man's Interpol' when, of course, they're the poor man's Bunnymen and anyway, Interpol are the poor man's, middle-class, more-exotic-because-they're-American Joy Division and...

Fuck it. Go on, then...

I've spend a week with the first two Interpol albums on repeat and I can confidently say that they're the most overrated band in the world right now. Y'know, I think they're really, really good, but Christ, the way people go all dizzy-eyed and devotional at their very mention...

Editors go for clarity. They have a keener ear for melody, while Interpol can be a bit meandering and murky (see 'The Heinrich Maneuver', a single that sounds like a throwaway album track). And although Interpol have some towering tunes (NYC, Untitled, Slow Hands...) they haven't quite mastered the art of telling a story, of crafting an album as a progression, a journey.

Editors first album definitely did that, and judging by this swelling, panoramic bewilderedbeast, their second is going to be another grand symphony of melancholy ("I can't shake this feeling I've got/My dirty hands, have I been in the wars?/The saddest thing I've ever seen/Is smokers outside the hospital doors...").

[MP3] Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors
[MP3] Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - Standing In The Way Of Control

Take that, Mark Cunting Ronson.

[MP3] Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly - Standing In The Way Of Control

The Field - A Paw In My Face

There's that knee-jerky thing about electronic music being all maths and no soul. Measured and modulated and programmed but not organic enough to glimpse the humanity of its creator.

Yeah. That's true for bad electronic music. But this is very, very, very good electronic music and there's more soul and life here than in a thousand over-crooned, wobbly sensitive-male singer-songwriter extended Americanised vowels or Liam Gallagher sneers or Maria Carey-style yodel-warbles.

They call it 'microhouse'. They would. Probably because there's a heavy four-to-the-floor thing going on - but only as a solid foundation for the faraway, sexy, liquid, dream-soaked layers and textures to glide and swirl over.

They know nothing. This isn't House. It's early, Derrick May-style Techno with sunlight washing out the neon. All the flab stripped away, dark, visionary, electronic (practically machine-fetishising) but simultaneously evoking urban claustrophobia and the wide open space of hope and yearning.

It's that relentless, mantra-like, racing-heart pulse. Music for staring out of train windows to.

And Swedish, naturally.

[MP3] The Field - A Paw In My Face

Something For The Weekend: Super Furry Animals - Presidential Suite

This is a song about the Clinton-Lewinsky thing and so it's crammed with sly political jabs and clever, cutesy wordplay ("Another Cuban cigar crisis...") but it's also quite shiveringly beautiful and one of the most out-and-out romantic things I've ever heard.

Musically, it meanders around a sweet, lilting trumpet before lifting off into that gorgeous, swooning, swimming-in-chocolate-milk chorus.

I like things that shouldn't work in theory but somehow mesh in reality. Beauty blossoming out of defying logic. It's the way singer Gruff Rhys mutes his usual (wonderful) snarling Welshness into something soft and swelling. "When we met", he croons. "There were fireworks in the sky/Sparkling like dragonflies/Spelling 'All bad folk must die!'" Equally silly and poetic.

I also like to think it's more generally inspired by some kind of illicit passion - something fleeting and forbidden. I love the idea that the heat of a stolen moment could be so impenetrably shielded; bullet-proofed from the leaden mundanity of prying eyes ("We belong in the Presidential Suite/Armed guards in the street...")

[MP3] Super Furry Animals - Presidential Suite

Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat

James Ford and James Shaw have gone from using vacuum cleaners for percussion (on previous incarnation Simian's 'Chemistry Is What We Are' album) to being the lean, clean remix machines (best is their wholesale slash-up of The Klaxons' 'Magick').

This is off of their forthcoming, wonderfully titled debut album 'Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release', features Ninja from The Go! Team on vocals, a shameless nick of Technotronic's 'Pump Up The Jam' riff and - my favourite - an audacious, breath-holding breakdown of three-second silence.

It'll soon be as inescapable as last year's Justice twist on 'We Are Your Friends'. Lots of luck with the being a "freak on the dancefloor" thing, though. Unless you're well and truly twisted out of your tits on something glitchy and metabolically shambolic.

[MP3] Simian Mobile Disco - It's The Beat

The White Stripes - Icky Thump

Jesus wept, the tottering great stomp of it. The testosterone-sozzled, tomcat yowl. The very-metal Led Zep rolling riff and the non-more-Prog squealy-twiddly keyboard...

Apparently, the new album has bagpipes on it. Nothing good has ever come from bagpipes, and Jack White still faces a long crawl back to credibility after the Coca-Cola cocksuck.

But if this is the standard-setter, he could knock up an in-store Starbucks muzak medley with Richard Ashcroft and Johnny Borrell on vocals and I'd still wave it off as a momentary glitch.

[MP3] The White Stripes - Icky Thump

Something For The Weekend: The Eagles - Hotel California

"Warm smell of colitas rising up through the air..."

While current(ish) music is the general theme around here, I'll stick up a 'classic' track at weekends. Something that would make my All-Time Favourite Playlist. And, because these songs are inevitably going to be (over)familiar, I'll have a bash at a bit of context...

So, Hotel California is one of those mythical songs that everyone thinks is about Vietnam, or Aleister Crowley's mansion (because of the "they just can't kill the beast" line) or a Christian church that was abandoned in 1969 and taken over by Satan worshippers and that you can see Nicky-Boy himself in the window on the album cover (smudge, bottom-left)...

But it's more of a lament for the death of the hippy era (1969 seems about right), with writer/singer Don Henley reflecting on his culture's loss of innocence, courtesy of the rapacious LA music biz.

It's Henley world-weary and bloated after a decadent decade of groupie-collecting, dollar-hoarding and drug-hoovering. More broadly, it's a bittersweet flex of regret at the way heads-down hedonism gnaws away the soul.

A face-slap for ol' William Blake, then. The road of excess doesn't lead to the palace of wisdom. It dirt-tracks out to some whitewashed flophouse where the palm trees sway seductively but the interiors are hollow. And once you step inside that world, there's no going back ("You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave...").

And if that's not bleak enough for ya, have a go on my favourite Don Henley solo song about sudden-death anxiety...

[MP3] The Eagles - Hotel California
[MP3] Don Henley - New York Minute

The Twang - Either Way

The trouble with love songs is that they're often too neat and modulated. As if something so raw and consuming and contradictory could ever be adequately captured with a few carefully selected words and a nice tune.

This is the least articulate love song ever. It's buzzing on speed, bouncing off the walls of a shabby phone kiosk, trying to syphon the contents of your heart into a greasy mouthpiece. "You should never drink and dial", goes the line in Sideways. That's exactly what's happening here - unfiltered outpouring.

There's a laugh-out-loud perfect moment where he's practically hyperventilating and... and... desperately trying to tell her... and... and... maybe isn't explaining himself too well... and... and... he just thinks fuck it, and shouts, "I LOVE YER!" in a gutteral great Stan Collymore voice.

And there's a xylophone solo!

[MP3] The Twang - Either Way

Grand National - Talk Amongst Yourselves (Sasha Remix)

Grand National are a pair of British blokes called Rupert Lyddon and Lawrence Rudd, who used to be in a Police/Queen covers band and whose 2004 debut album, 'Kicking The National Habit', was a sly burst of choppy, dubby, reggae/ska-flecked pop that really deserved to be noticed a bit more than it did (hardly at all). Dig it up and have a go on 'Playing In The Distance' and the ace, Police-like 'Daylight Goes'.

They've just released a B-sides and rarities album and while Sasha's monolithic rework of 'Talk Amongst Yourselves' has been around on his terrific 'Involver' mix album for a while now, it's nice to finally get an isolated version of it - the chugging, mournful original thrillingly reworked around a rumbling great black hole of thrumming bass and glacial angst ("And there's nothing to say 'cos I won't go through it/And there's nothing to do 'till I put myself up to it...")

It's so loose and vague, it could be 'about' pretty much anything - self-doubt, self-destruction, something aching and unrequited...

Take what you will. I just hope they're named after the Blackpool rollercoaster rather than the horse-race.

[MP3] Grand National - Talk Amongst Yourselves (Sasha Remix)

John Cooper Clarke - Evidently Chickentown

This recently popped up as the closing track in, of all places, a Sopranos episode. Which, on paper/screen, seems deeply strange - like Ted Chippington appearing as a guest star on The Simpsons - but it worked beautifully as the backdrop to an oppressive montage of Mob boss Tony and prodigal son/successor Christopher.

JCC is a manky Manc who, back in the '70s, had the gleaming brass bollocks to stand up in front of crowds of gob-happy Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks fans and bark his poetry at them. With its toytown synth metronome clattering away behind JCC's pummelling monotone, 'Evidently Chickentown' is, pretty much, rap. Comin' up from the streets. The back streets. Of Salford.

It's the first track on the album 'Snap, Crackle & Bop' which, when I was at school, had a peculiar, extra-obscure cult appeal. Because the voice sounded like someone your dad might know, because it had loads of swearing, because it featured JCC's other highlight, Beasley Street ("Belladonna is your flower/Manslaughter your meat/Spend a year in a couple of hours/On the edge of Beasley Street...").

But mostly because it was really hard to find. These days, of course, in cosy, homogenised Internetland, you can't move for the bastard thing. Shame, that. Kind of blunts the exotic edge of music that needs a bit of hunting down. The chase often being as good as/better than the catch. And that.

[MP3] John Cooper Clarke - Evidently Chickentown

Bat For Lashes - What's A Girl To Do?

Christ! It's Lily Allen's Satanic hippy death-cult evil twin.

This is Natasha Khan (aka Bat For Lashes) and I keep reading that she's sort of Kate Bush with a bit of Bjork and maybe a sprinkle of Tori Amos. But I love this because it sounds like something that's spent the last forty years swirling through a time-warp after being booted out of the Ready, Steady, Go! studio for being smoky and sexy instead of kooky and kinky.

And her album's called Fur And Gold, which sounds vaguely filthy.

[MP3] Bat For Lashes - What's A Girl To Do?

Arctic Monkeys - Do Me A Favour

Sometimes, you get the odd song that feels, y'know, bespoke. Like you personally commissioned it to soundtrack a specific flavour of your life...

This is the sleeper track on the darker, smarter new album. 'Fluorescent Adolescent' may have the anthemic festival flush, and 'Brianstorm' is Blur's 'Charmless Man' written by someone funnier. But this is the one for me. Fatty.

See, that chiming guitar bit sounds like The Smiths because Arctic Monkeys are this generation's Smiths. Oh yes they are.

I know, I know. And there was you, thinking they were
the new Judas Priest...

Me? I feel the gummy breath of middle-age bristling my neck-hairs, but this still gets me good. If, however, your age has a 'teen' in it, then - sorry to break it to you - but it's no good rebelling against your parents any more. Their work is pretty much done. You're on your own from here. These four people will serve you well.

[MP3] Arctic Monkeys - Do Me A Favour

The National - Mistaken For Strangers

Well, yeah...

"You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends
When you pass them at night
Under the silvery, silvery Citybank lights
Arm in arm in arm and eyes and eyes glazing under
You wouldn't want an angel watching over
Surprise surprise they wouldn't wanna watch
Another uninnocent, elegant fall
Into the unmagnificent lives of adults..."

[MP3] The National - Mistaken For Strangers

Soulsavers - Revival

So, this is the opener from the 'It's Not How Far You Fall, It's The Way You Land' album and it's a swelling great gospel twist on REM's equally flooring 'Country Feedback'. The album is pretty much a Mark Lanegan (ex-Screaming Trees) solo work (he does most of the vocals) with producers Rich Machin and Ian Glover occasionally wheeling in the likes of Bonnie Prince Billy and the singer out of Doves. And it's magnificent. Stately and doomy and a little bit Spiritualised and a fuck of a lot Death In Vegas' 'The Contino Sessions'. Y'know - sozzled and tear-streaked, down but far from out, doomy but not gloomy. It's a wallow thing...

[MP3] Soulsavers - Revival