reviews.txt

# Amplifier - The Octopus (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/ddvh
space rock;Manchester trio Amplifier are without a label for this third album, but have forged ahead with a remarkable independent spirit nonetheless. From first glance, it’s difficult to tell whether this double-disc concept album is the result of a band left to their own devices, or whether they’re a band with nothing left to lose and are giving it their last ounce for you, the listener, to contend with. Scratch the surface even slightly, however, and you will be in no doubt that it’s the latter. After bursting onto the British rock scene in 2004, drowning in huge grunge-y guitars and enormous choruses, they developed their sound for The Insider in 2006, adding more of everything. Now in 2011 they appear to have timed the peak of their genius self-indulgence with a time where prog isn’t a dirty word any more. If you wonder why they couldn’t fit 16 songs onto one CD (eight on each, like an octopus), it’s important to note that only one song runs at under five minutes. When there’s nobody reining you in, it’s far easier to express everything you wish to and Amplifier’s main protagonist, Sel Balamir, has really gone to town here. After drip-feeding their fans with The Wave – a slow, menacing stampede of space-rock – there are two true standout tracks on The Octopus. The aptly-named Interstellar is a 10-minute trip into the unfathomable galaxies of Balamir’s mind. Yes, there are hints of Pink Floyd. The title-track is another one swathed in glorious and tender harmonies that trickle out before gathering together to deliver an absolute monster of a chorus. With lyrical themes that venture toward the apocalyptic and other-worldly, it’s an album that commands respects and time to be afforded to it, but the rewards are plentiful. If two discs seem slightly overwhelming at first, then the other perspective is that there is so much quality to digest here that your value for money is not even in question. In a year when some of the great prog bands are expected to release new material, Amplifier have set standards high from the beginning. The Octopus is an album for others’ material to be compared to – not only in 2011, but for many more years to come.

# Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/b8dp
rock;As the follow-up to the Floyd’s iconic, record-breaking 1973 concept album The Dark Side Of The Moon, this album is often unfairly overlooked. With the benefit of hindsight, Wish You Were Here has the same faultless pacing and sequencing of its predecessor, but a more coherent musical narrative, structure and tone, as well as greater lyrical sophistication. Here, the ‘concept’ is more down-to-earth, since much of the record is an extended tribute to the late Syd Barrett ­ the genius behind their early works, who flew too high and burned too bright, becoming one of rock’s most infamous drug casualties before Pink Floyd emerged from London¹s psychedelic underground scene to become one of the biggest success stories of the 1970s. It’s also the last great album by a band that would produce something as adolescently puerile as The Wall by the end of that decade. Barrett is the subject of the epic “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, parts One and Two” of which take up more than half the playing time and bookend just three other shorter tracks. Despite some questionable keyboard tones from Richard Wright, the majestically unhurried instrumental intro is a triumph of suspense. It¹s nearly nine minutes before Roger Waters starts singing and the effect is startling, as are the words: ‘Remember when you were young?/ You shone like the sun / Shine On You Crazy Diamond!/ Now there’s a look in your eye / Like black holes in the sky’. It’s debatable whether the ‘iPod generation’ will get all of the eerie, almost visual sound detail in the more melodramatic “Welcome To The Machine”, which presages some of the pomp of their later work. Guest vocalist Roy Harper is a gritty presence on the music industry-bating “Have A Cigar” and the breathless title track finds Waters’ lyrics at their most soul searching. Some may baulk at Dave Gilmour’s long, bluesy guitar workouts, which form the backbone of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and crop up throughout the album. Hey, these were the dying days of prog. rock. Punk was just around the corner and it’s easy to see why, but mid-seventies post-psychedelic angst seldom sounded so chilled.

# The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/cvnv
electronic;Somewhere around the eighth minute of Full of Fire – a pounding electronic monstrosity that sounds like a techno version of a panic attack and is nothing like the longest song on The Knife’s fourth album – singer Karin Dreijer Andersson’s breaks into an interpolation of Salt-N-Pepa’s 1991 pop smash Let’s Talk About Sex. “Let’s talk about gender, baby / Let’s talk about you and me,” roars her heavily pitch-shifted voice. It is terrifying. It is funny. It is quite, quite mad, and as representative a moment as any on the wildly daunting follow-up to the Swedish sibling duo’s peerless 2006 electro-pop masterpiece Silent Shout. In fact, to even begin to get one’s head around the extent to which the band that crafted modern standard Heartbeats has now hurled aside all pop sensibility, it’s probably instructive to listen to 2010’s underrated Tomorrow, In a Year, The Knife and friends’ soundtrack to an avant-garde Danish opera about Charles Darwin. Filled with long, hook-free movements, lyrically preoccupied with evolution, and emphatically crafted as art over entertainment, there are a great number of similarities between it and Shaking the Habitual. The difference, though, is that where Tomorrow, In a Year was a focussed record that used a quiet, cerebral palette of sound to evoke the immensity of prehistory, Shaking the Habitual is a thunderously loud and vivid record that screams and detonates with the full force of the present, all cacophonous electronic textures and shrieking meditations on the state of humanity. There are allusions to environmental crisis, to gender crisis, to Margaret Atwood’s blackly comic genetic engineering novel Oryx and Crake. There is a devastatingly uncomfortable 19-minute track called Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized. There is a relatively catchy number called Without You My Life Will Be Boring that zips along kinetically on impassioned vocals and dazzling gamelan-style percussion. There is a sense of aggression, and there is a sense of mischief. Records do not come more provocative, abrasive or uncompromising than Shaking the Habitual. Does that make it good? It’s so unapologetically indigestible that it’s hard to say at this stage: Silent Shout is clearly superior as a pop record and Tomorrow, In a Year is much more satisfyingly fathomable as a piece of art. Shaking the Habitual is something else, but it’s hard not to find that profoundly exhilarating.

# OutKast - Stankonia (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/v5m5
hip hop;Imagine the hip hop of today without the influence of OutKast’s fourth album. No Stankonia: quite possibly no Frank Ocean, no Janelle Monáe, no Shabazz Palaces; no southern playas taking the four elements from New York to outer space via the suburbs of the ATL. How boring. While Stankonia wasn’t the first taste of this dynamic duo’s inspired interpretations of rap – schizophrenic pieces that tapped funk up for its number before forgetting to call it back; snapping trap-rap rockers unleashed before the world caught up with the parlance – it was the most perfect distillation of everything that’d come before it. Immediate long-play predecessor, 1998’s Aquemini, was a plaudit-magnet in its own right; a platinum-seller which piqued significant domestic interest yet didn’t translate to a global audience. But with the new millennium came new opportunities for partners-in-rhyme André 3000 and Big Boi: Stankonia is the sound of every cracked-open door being kicked off its hinges. Before Stankonia came B.O.B – an unusual lead-single selection given its ménage-a-trois of jitterbug drum’n’bass, gospel backing vocals and a virtuosic instrumental sensibility owing much to Sly Stone and Hendrix. The single was no commercial high-flyer, but set a tone that its parent LP would adroitly adhere to: anything goes, so long as it flows. And flow Stankonia had to, brilliantly, because for the second consecutive set its makers pushed CD capacity, filling a 74-minute run-time. Amongst its 24 tracks are skippable skits, although these add contextual colour to the album’s singular bravado, but for the most part Stankonia serves the album format, rather than the other way around. Its sequencing, its pacing, these are perfect; transitions from casual vocabulary to lightning verses, electrifying. Time has painted some cuts as relative filler: the booty-clap bounce of We Luv Deez Hoez and fizzy meditation on carnal etiquette I’ll Call Before I Come are shallower of emotional depth than the still-exquisite Ms Jackson and the (Sign “O” the Times-period) Prince-recalling Toilet Tisha. It was Ms Jackson that cracked the UK for these ATLiens, charting at two. That remains their highest position to date, one better than the evergreen Hey Ya! achieved. With no OutKast LP since 2006’s Idlewild, it’s unclear if they’ll ever match its chart impact. But if Stankonia forever remains this outfit’s ultimate record, it’s some achievement to call the greatest hip hop album of the 21st century one of your own.

# Funkadelic - One Nation Under a Groove (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/4828
funk;Funkadelic’s 10th album and their commercial breakthrough, One Nation Under a Groove was the starting point for many British listeners. An underground delicacy stateside since 1970, the group had yet to enjoy much popularity in the UK. But by 78, the Funkadelic part of leader George Clinton’s P-Funk mothership had travelled from being an acid-drenched funk-rock ensemble to something resembling Parliament, their hit-generating sister band. One Nation Under a Groove immediately welcomed new listeners inside Clinton’s parallel universe, with all of his ideas, mythology and strangely monikered players. For example, Bootsy Collins is one of the ‘Bass Thumpasaurians’ on the album, and Bernie ‘DaVinci’ Worrell and Walter ‘Junie’ Morrison were ‘Keybo' Dans & Synthezoidees’. When Clinton conceived the album’s title track – from a girlfriend’s comment when he was making a film outside the United Nations – it gave the whole P-Funk enterprise one of their biggest hits and an overall mission statement for Clinton’s wild vision. The track is arguably Clinton’s greatest popular moment: supple, lithe and funky, it evoked soul past and present and had a chorus to die for. With its blend of Funkadelic Blamgusta Vocaloids (Voices For Da Nation!) – Clinton, Morrison and Garry Shider – the single was number one on the US R&B chart for six weeks. The track also reached a respectable nine in Britain, too. It was to be P-Funk’s only foray into the UK charts, although Clinton was later to enjoy some solo success. One Nation… was (is!) rich on stomping, repetitive grooves, Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock doing exactly what its title suggests. The album initially came with a free single that showed that the band hadn’t lost sight of their original far-out remit. It featured a live version of their 1971 standard Maggot Brain, featuring Mike ‘Kidd Funkadelic’ Hampton’s searing guitar work, playing former member Eddie Hazel’s solo perfectly. One Nation Under a Groove as a whole may not represent P-Funk’s greatest work, but it is certainly very memorable, and acts as a perfect introduction to George Clinton’s freaky, funk-drenched alternative reality.

# Edwyn Collins - Understated (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/3xwx
art rock;As incredulous as it might sound after one play of his latest album, Edwyn Collins still describes the music he’s made since his two brain haemorrhages in 2005 as works in progress. Even the keenest fan of Collins and Orange Juice will struggle for ways in which the irrepressible Scot might improve this eighth solo album. It’s a thankless task sidestepping those haemorrhages. Not least because, struggling to strum his guitar, Collins has to call on a crack team of musicians (Barrie Cadogan, James Walbourne and Paul Cook among those here) to bring his ideas to life. The theme of the album, too, never strays far from his trauma. But where his last album, Losing Sleep, saw Collins getting to grips with song structure – the least of his problems when he’s relearning how to make a cup of tea – this is knockout stuff that suggests his knack for melody remains intact. Here he marries his art-rock past to classic and country soul in elevating, jangle-heavy high definition. There’s nothing faithful about the Motown or Stax influences, either. He weaves them seamlessly into bristling art-pop for a sound that fits like a well-worn suit and dovetails perfectly with songs remembering his youth and coming to terms with his present. The slinky horn-accompanied Dilemma features the album’s most touchingly self-deprecating words – “Dilemma, that’s me all over” – while the strutting Baby Jean is more defiant: “Got music to see me through, I’ve got art to ease the pain.” It’s deftly done thanks to an openness – the same he showed in faltering interviews in the aftermath of his illness – that gives these songs their beating heart. The tear-jerking It’s a Reason (“It’s a reason to die for, it’s good reason to strive for”), the Velvets-y Forsooth (“I’m so lucky to be alive, that’s why I’m living my own youth”) and what sounds like a long-lost Wigan Casino classic, Too Bad (That’s Sad), are all so upliftingly buoyant that even the blackest horizon holds promise. Thirty-odd years after singing about ripping it up, then, Collins is calling on the past to help him through. It’s working brilliantly.

# Ludwig van Beethoven - Violin Sonatas (violin: Leonidas Kavakos, piano: Enrico Pace) (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/c828
classical;Although they don't encompass the same colossal range of musical development that runs through many of the other genres Beethoven tackled throughout his career – the symphony, string quartet and piano sonata – the 10 violin sonatas are nevertheless a remarkable body of work. All but the 10th come from the relatively condensed period of 1798-1803, yet within this microcosm is a dazzling world of masterly invention – especially vivid in these engaging performances by hot-property Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos in a well-matched collaboration with pianist Enrico Pace. Beethoven takes the developments of his classical forebears Haydn and, to a greater extent, Mozart and runs with them – right from the first sonata, the violin and piano are equal partners, an ethos adopted effectively by the soloists here. Kavakos' tone is both sweet and full-blooded, never overblown; Pace's contribution is lithe, characterful and sensitive. Both are crucial to the album's success – although you would never guess from the cover photo of Kavakos alone, and the fact that Pace's name appears in much smaller print. In the hands of Kavakos and Pace the opening chords of Op.12 No.1 are a positive statement of intent for the whole cycle – bold, incisive and bristling with energy – and the set proceeds to bubble along with terrific energy; slow movements are graceful and luminous. The honeyed opening melody of the “Spring” sonata, and the dreamy, mill-pond tranquillity of its Adagio, are highlights. The duo doesn't succumb to the temptation of imposing a late-Beethovenian romantic weight onto these early works – the performances sing and dance with youthful vigour, paying due homage to the music's classical roots, and finely harnessing the exciting romantic frisson that Beethoven injects into the mix. Aptly, the grandeur is notched up for the final sonata – Kavakos' professed favourite – Op.96 from 1812. The Decca recording is clear and immediate, though a shade too closely miked, and the stereo separation of the two instruments is a little too defined. That aside, this vital, joyous set of Beethoven's boundary pushing sonatas takes its place among the very best.

# Érik Truffaz Quartet - El Tiempo de la Revolucion (CC). http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/2xwx
jazz;There was a generation or two of trumpeters who picked up ideas from the meteoric musical trajectory of Miles Davis and developed them after Miles himself had moved on. Palle Mikkelborg and Enrico Rava are good examples, but the Swiss-born Frenchman Érik Truffaz is one of the most consistently creative. He just can’t help sounding beautiful and lyrical, whatever the setting. A good example here is his work on the slightly grungy sound of vocalist Anna Aaron’s song Blue Movie, which has a delightful, whimsical trumpet solo with Harmon mute that could have sprung out of any Davis recording from the 50s or 60s. As on many recent Truffaz discs, regular partners join the trumpeter: namely Marcello Giuliani on bass and drummer Marc Erbetta. They understand perfectly his desire to connect to the worlds of hip hop and dance music, and leave him free to weave his Miles-ean patterns with plenty of space. However, it’s keyboard player Benoît Corboz who creates the most magical textures here, on Hammond, Fender Rhodes and acoustic piano. Over drum ’n’ bass patterns, dance grooves and grunge beats, the keyboards swirl restlessly, making a moving tapestry for Truffaz’s horn odysseys. Yet, Corboz can inhabit orthodox jazz territory too, producing a heartfelt Rhodes solo on La Luna Mentirosa that matches his leader’s lyricism and introspection. Aaron guests on three tracks, but the heart of this disc is the intense connection between the members of Truffaz’s quartet. The 11-minute Revolution of Time is a classic, looking back to the great days of the jazz tradition of the 50s and 60s, but somehow utterly contemporary at the same time. Suffused with Truffaz’s beautiful tone, and with acoustic rhythm section at an almost unbearably slow tempo, the closer is a subtle masterpiece.