The Chemical Brothers – Further
While it continued the Chemical Brothers‘ trend of chart topping releases—2007′s We Are The Night was the duo’s fifth consecutive album to go #1 in the UK—the album awkwardly relied on a bevy of unusual collaborations (though, in reality, no more so than 2005′s Push The Button) which left it bearing little consistency. With Further they bucked the trend of reaching out for external collaboration (save for vocalist Stephanie Dosen who backs up Tom Rowlands on three of Further‘s tracks) and in doing so they have created a piece of music that oozes continuity; each track morphing into one another without the slightest bit of hesitation. Further is an album that sounds more like the Chemical Brothers of old than the group that released “The Salmon Dance” as a single; which is to say that it’s supurb. Read the full review
Wolf Parade – Expo 86
Wolf Parade’s greatest asset is the ability to appear on the verge of falling apart while marching ahead with lockstep precision. The Canadian indie-rock outfit’s third album, Expo 86, begins in the middle of a pounding drum lick that’s quickly joined by Spencer Krug’s quivering vocal, a zig-zagging guitar, a bloopy synth doodle, and a pulverizing bassline. Then things really get ramshackle on the opening track, “Cloud Shadow On The Mountain,” but not at the expense of the song’s twitchingly brisk forward velocity. The track sets the tone for an album that thankfully leaves Wolf Parade’s lackadaisical 2008 effort At Mount Zoomer on the couch for a long nap. Read the full review
Scissor Sisters – Night Work
A more troubled second album, still unshyly titled Ta-Dah!, featured a hit dance single whose lyrics pouted: “I don’t feel like dancing.” It was a move which proved that the Sisters were not merely the empty partying vessels routinely deployed at the wedding discos of heterosexual breeders. Camp – that cosy, normalising caricature of gayness – is what allowed the Scissor Sisters sell to a wide constellation of demographics. And that pesky camp is what they have tried to excise from their third album, Night Work, potentially threatening their tenure as Middle Britain’s tame wild things. With all its talk of dicks between legs, “Whole New Way” will probably not inspire the family singalongs the way “Take Your Momma Out” did.
This more hardcore Scissor Sisters outing is, really, their fourth: singer Jake Shearscorrect decided to scrap an album’s worth of songs and decamp (profuse apologies) on a sabbatical to Berlin, where the unbridled hedonism of that clubbing metropolis restored Night Work’s frisson. Read the full review
