iconocaust (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} iconocaust) wrote,@ 2007-10-05 04:02:00 |
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Trax
Manic Street Preachers - "Indian Summer" For a band that used to be all revolutionary spitfire and ill-advised glam gloss, it's almost shocking just how boring Bradfield and company have gotten. "Indian Summer," the third anodyne single from an album nobody needed, can't even shore up the often hilarious reserves of misplaced idealism that patched over some of the rougher spots in the late-era Manics discography -- this is the sound of a band that sailed past relevance date years ago and is only just starting to cotton on the fact.
Oasis - "Lord Don't Slow Me Down" Speaking of has-beens, Oasis return with their first new material since Don't Believe the Truth. And... well, it's an Oasis single, naggingly familiar both in its shameless appropriation of rock cliches and in the simple fact that Noel Gallagher ran out of new chord progressions back in '95 and has resorted to cribbing bandmate Andy Bell's "Turn Up the Sun" to create a queasy approximation of Sheryl Crow's "A Change Would Do You Good" waking up in an airport lounge with a hangover. Shameful.
The Hives - "Tick Tick Boom" Bouncing off the walls with nowhere to go, "Tick Tick Boom" is the ugly end result of the Hives' once-novel cartoon rock finally expiring. For a taster of an album that features such decidedly un-Hivesy flourishes as piano-driven tracks and Pharrell Williams, it's hard to imagine a more conventional lead single; even a forensics lab would be hard-pressed to find much practical difference between this and anything the Hives have recorded since 2000, except for the simple fact that the novelty of watching grown men named Dr. Matt Destruction blasting out retro-tinged tracks with names like "What's That Spell?...Go to Hell!" is long gone.
The Alones - "Silver" In the post-talent scene that's flourished in Britain like a bacterial growth since the Strokes' amateurish excuse for rock made it big, big, big, new bands capable of putting together a coherent song or producing a track that actually sounds professional are like a national treasure. "Silver" wouldn't have even made a blip on the musical radar back in '95 or '00, but in this day and age, that icy indie rock is like a briny, faintly smelly oasis in a vast desert of unabashed crap.
Lethal Bizzle - "Police On My Back" Back in the day when the So Solid Crew had yet to make the transition from chart force to punchline, the British garage scene was overrun with "Crews" and "Cartels" looking to make the leap from council estate to cash money millionaires the honest way: dole-line gangsta rap, the desperate and often willfully annoying genre that would later be legimitised as "grime." Among those was the More Fire Crew, whose hit "Oi!" took "irritatingly catchy" to an entirely new level; built around a refrain of "Oi! Where dat More Fire Crew?" that burrowed into your brain like some kind of horrible alien parasite and refused to budge for weeks on end. And while MFC may have vanished into the ether when the garage scene finally collapsed under its own pompous weight, former More Fire Boy Lethal Bizzle does his old comrades proud by releasing a joint that's not only impossible to get out of your head, but also samples The Clash for that extra bit of crossover appeal. Top stuff.
The Young Knives - "Terra Firma" In which three men who look like they should be teaching geography to fifth graders tackle post-punk New Wave. Perversely, it's probably the most compellingly addictive thing to come out of Britain in a long time.
Manic Street Preachers - "Indian Summer" For a band that used to be all revolutionary spitfire and ill-advised glam gloss, it's almost shocking just how boring Bradfield and company have gotten. "Indian Summer," the third anodyne single from an album nobody needed, can't even shore up the often hilarious reserves of misplaced idealism that patched over some of the rougher spots in the late-era Manics discography -- this is the sound of a band that sailed past relevance date years ago and is only just starting to cotton on the fact.
Oasis - "Lord Don't Slow Me Down" Speaking of has-beens, Oasis return with their first new material since Don't Believe the Truth. And... well, it's an Oasis single, naggingly familiar both in its shameless appropriation of rock cliches and in the simple fact that Noel Gallagher ran out of new chord progressions back in '95 and has resorted to cribbing bandmate Andy Bell's "Turn Up the Sun" to create a queasy approximation of Sheryl Crow's "A Change Would Do You Good" waking up in an airport lounge with a hangover. Shameful.
The Hives - "Tick Tick Boom" Bouncing off the walls with nowhere to go, "Tick Tick Boom" is the ugly end result of the Hives' once-novel cartoon rock finally expiring. For a taster of an album that features such decidedly un-Hivesy flourishes as piano-driven tracks and Pharrell Williams, it's hard to imagine a more conventional lead single; even a forensics lab would be hard-pressed to find much practical difference between this and anything the Hives have recorded since 2000, except for the simple fact that the novelty of watching grown men named Dr. Matt Destruction blasting out retro-tinged tracks with names like "What's That Spell?...Go to Hell!" is long gone.
The Alones - "Silver" In the post-talent scene that's flourished in Britain like a bacterial growth since the Strokes' amateurish excuse for rock made it big, big, big, new bands capable of putting together a coherent song or producing a track that actually sounds professional are like a national treasure. "Silver" wouldn't have even made a blip on the musical radar back in '95 or '00, but in this day and age, that icy indie rock is like a briny, faintly smelly oasis in a vast desert of unabashed crap.
Lethal Bizzle - "Police On My Back" Back in the day when the So Solid Crew had yet to make the transition from chart force to punchline, the British garage scene was overrun with "Crews" and "Cartels" looking to make the leap from council estate to cash money millionaires the honest way: dole-line gangsta rap, the desperate and often willfully annoying genre that would later be legimitised as "grime." Among those was the More Fire Crew, whose hit "Oi!" took "irritatingly catchy" to an entirely new level; built around a refrain of "Oi! Where dat More Fire Crew?" that burrowed into your brain like some kind of horrible alien parasite and refused to budge for weeks on end. And while MFC may have vanished into the ether when the garage scene finally collapsed under its own pompous weight, former More Fire Boy Lethal Bizzle does his old comrades proud by releasing a joint that's not only impossible to get out of your head, but also samples The Clash for that extra bit of crossover appeal. Top stuff.
The Young Knives - "Terra Firma" In which three men who look like they should be teaching geography to fifth graders tackle post-punk New Wave. Perversely, it's probably the most compellingly addictive thing to come out of Britain in a long time.
