Category: Music

Paris Motel – In the Salpêtrière

21st February 2009 / / 0 Comments

Paris Motel is the band/ensemble of singer and multi-instrumentalist Amy May. They sound like… well, imagine Kirsty MacColl fronting The Divine Comedyand you start to get an idea. But I don’t want to take that comparison too far, because that would undermine the distinctiveness of May’s own vision.

To explain the title and idea of the album, I’ll quote directly from a blog post by Amy May:

The Salpetriere is a hospital in Paris where they used to keep ‘undesirable’ women in the 18th and 19th century – madwomen, prostitutes, epileptics, paupers and unmarried mothers ended up there. I’m using the idea of the hospital as a metaphor for the collection of songs about extraordinary, interesting women (who may or may not have been mad, depending on your point of view).

Now, I already knew about this theme before I started listening to the album; but what often happens with me and story-based songs is that I don’t pick up all the details of the stories — and that’s what mostly happened here, too. Fortunately, that’s not disastrous, because there is still much to love about In the Salpêtrière: the music itself is lush, and Amy May’s vocal style is great, ‘classical’ but leavened with just enough of a London twang.

Singling out individual tracks seems almost unnecessary when the whole album is so impressive, but let’s have a go. ‘After Wanda’ starts out quite stately, and builds to a wonderful climax. ‘Three Steps’ is an epic sea shanty; and ‘Stockholm: The Art of Forgetting’ deftly combines a jauntier rhythm with a choral interlude. But the whole album is glorious, and highly recommended.

Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light

20th February 2009 / / 0 Comments

Antony Hegarty undoubtedly has one of the most extraordinary voices of any singer of his generation; and he has the ability to write songs that do that voice justice — and one song in particular, the magnificent ‘Hope There’s Someone’. Hegarty’s problem in the past has been consistency: ‘Hope There’s Someone’ overshadowed everything else on the second Antony and the Johnsons album, 2005’s I am a Bird Now, with only a couple of songs towards the end approaching it.

Now, four years later, comes The Crying Light. I don’t think any of its ten songs quite matches ‘Hope There’s Someone’ — but I do think the result is a better, more satisfying album than I am a Bird Now. The songs (as a whole) are stronger, and the music more varied — the texture is more orchestral this time around, and ‘Kiss My Name’ is heading towards jaunty (musically if not lyrically).

But it’s Hegarty’s voice that dominates, and when he gives it free rein to soar, that’s when the album is at its best — see, for example, the title track. The lyrics of ‘Another World’ may read simplistically (‘I’m gonna miss the sea, gonna miss the snow’), but when sung by Hegarty, they can still get under the skin. And the album has several big, orchestral epics, like ‘Everglade’.

Although The Crying Light hangs together as an album, musically and lyrically — themes and images of nature proliferate — I don’t know whether I’d want to listen to it all in one go again, at least not for a while. It seems the kind of music best heard piece by piece — and I’m pretty sure that there’s even more to appreciate in it than I’ve already found.

Franz Ferdinand – Tonight

5th February 2009 / / 1 Comment

In a way, it felt strange to realise that this was the first time I had actually listened to a Franz Ferdinand album all the way through. But then again, after I’d listened to Tonight (the band’s third album, and first in four years), perhaps it’s not so strange; because it seems to me that Franz are much more of a singles band, or an individual songs band. I t hink the twelve tracks on Tonight would sound better in isolation than they did hearing them all together.

Franz Ferdinand have their own distinctive sound, which is essentially dancey guitar music with some unusual left turns. ‘Ulysses‘, the album opener and lead single is the same, but different: it has more of a groove, it sounds a bit… earthier, a cousin of ‘The Dark of the Matinee‘ that’s been around the block a few times and maybe dragged through a couple of hedges. Nothing in the next few songs matches it for impact; but, as I said, I suspect that may be because it’s first, and because I didn’t hear the others individually. (I ought to test that sometime.)

The real departures from what I’m used to hearing Franz sound like don’t come until the very end. First of all is ‘Lucid Dreams’: whilst all the other tracks don’t even reach four minutes, this one lasts for nearly eight — the reason for which is a four-minute techno bit stuck on the end. This is not necessarily the best way to make a long song, and it does seem rather superfluous.

The album’s closing track, ‘Katherine Kiss Me’, is acoustic, which I’m unused to hearing from Franz Ferdinand; but better — my favourite song on the album, in fact — is the song immediately before it, ‘Dream Again’. It’s slow, echoing, strange, and shows more of the range Franz Ferdinand capable of. Entertaining though Tonight is, I’d have liked to see more of that range on display.

A Camp – Colonia

5th February 2009 / / 0 Comments

A Camp is, of course, the solo project (though now more of a band) of Nina Persson from The Cardigans, a band I’ve never really listened to. Sure, I know two or three of the hits, but that’s all. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Colonia… but it’s great. Mainly an album of ballads, deftly constructed, but most of all, beautifully sung by Persson.

But what I really like about the album is the darkness of the lyrics compared to the sweetness of the music. Take ‘Love Has Left the Room‘, a soaring, romantic-sounding song about breaking up. Or the opener ‘The Crowning‘, in which “we’re gonna party like it’s 1699” at “the crowning of” someone’s “useless, ruthless head”.

In short, Colonia is the sort of album you have to go back and listen to again, if only to check that Persson just sang what you thought she did — but it’s far from the only reason when the songs are so good.

White Lies – To Lose My Life

1st February 2009 / / 1 Comment

An album that begins with a track called ‘Death’ might not sound like the most cheery of listening — except that the track in question is no maudlin dirge, but an exhilarating rush of a song. When the title track goes, ‘Let’s grow old together, and die at the same time,’ it may sound cartoonish. And yet… and yet, there’s something about these guys.

White Lies are a trio from London who have been hailed as one of the current Next Big Things by the British music press. The ten tracks on their album are built of broadly similar components: big, expansive music; Harry McVeigh’s soaring vocals — and the lyrics? Well, the line ‘Everything has got to be love or death’ from the first song sums up the main concerns. And I like the results a lot.

Sure, White Lies are another guitar band with something of  an ’80s electro influence. Granted, there isn’t as much variety of style and tone in To Lose My Life as one would ideally like to see. Okay, maybe nothing else on the album is quite as instantly memorable as ‘Death’ (though a couple of tracks come close). But what is on the album is done so well. Any one of these songs will fill the room, as it were, which is not something I find with many albums.

Listening to To Lose My Life makes me want to hear this music live, because that seems to be the environment in which it best belongs. But the recorded version will do just fine for the time being.

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