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The Feeling - Join With Us
The Feeling are a band who I feel like I should probably like, but I struggle to do so. They make music that is resolutely 'uncool', and that enrages most music critics, who spend much of their lives sucking up to bands like Razorlight while they are cool, and are therefore confounded when a band who make cheesy music sell in the numbers that The Feeling's debut album did. I've got a load of music in my collection that's much less cool and much cheesier than anything by this lot, including music by most of the people who inspire their songs. But for some reason, I find it very difficult to like them. Even the songs themselves confuse me slightly. There's so much in them that I should enjoy, some great melodies and harmonies and choruses that you could eat your dinner off. But they still manage to irritate me more than entertain me. On their first album, they came up with a few decent pop songs that did well as singles, but also too much in the way of bland nonentities that merely padded things out. But it was just about sweet and adorable enough overall to make it bearable for the most part. The difficulty of following it up is that The Feeling appeal to a very fickle market of music-buyers, not the kind who put posters up on their bedroom walls, but the kind who see an album in Tesco and think 'hey, I liked that song, I'll get this CD'. Will any of them still care this time around? That is the kind of uncertainty that surrounds the launch of this second album, so clearly they have worried about it and decided to paint everything with slightly brighter colours, in a musical sense. Mika has had a lot of success in the last 12 months by appealing to the cheese market and pretending to be Freddie Mercury without the great music, and there are definitely times on here where Dan Gillespie Sells does the same. It's not as obvious, but things are definitely meant to be a bit more camp and fun this time around, as highlighted on the title track and Turn It Up, both of which are very catchy, very bright and very irritating. They have all the ingredients to be very good too, but somehow it just becomes the musical version of kryptonite. Take the first single, I Thought It Was Over, which is apparently about the fall of the Berlin Wall, but is utterly inane and full of a kind of disco beat that makes you want to burn down every disco you see (not with anyone in them of course). That is the kind of effect The Feeling have on people, and it's a shame, frankly. They have the potential to be a fun guilty pleasure, but for some reason (personally, I think it's Gillespie Sells' voice) Join With Us makes you want to do anything but join with them.
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Sheryl Crow -
Detours
Since releasing
last album Wildflower - a very underrated
album, by the way - times have been
tough for Sheryl Crow. She broke up
with fiance Lance Armstrong and was
diagnosed with breast cancer, so it's
perhaps no surprise that Detours finds
her in a rather disgruntled mood.
She's become increasingly politicised
recently too, and that flows through
her music here, though thankfully
her memorable toilet paper rant doesn't
feature. The first half of the album
is very much about the state of the
world today, and America's not-always-positive
role in that, with lines like: "The
president spoke words of comfort with
teardrops in his eyes, then he led
us as a nation into a war all based
on lies" make it clear which side
of the political divide she falls
on. Jaunty first single Love Is Free
may be one of the poppiest songs she's
released in years, but it also has
a dark side to it as it's about the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: "Greasy
fingers in your jelly jar. They jack
your money while you sleep in your
car. They got the karma, they ain't
getting too far." Some of the political
lyrics are a little clunky at times,
as they often tend to be, and there's
bound to be people who are turned
off by the left-wing hectoring of
songs like Gasoline, but Crow generally
just about pulls it off, and while
there's nothing new in the cross-cultural
duet with Ahmed Al Hirmi on Peace
Be Upon Us it's a nice enough effort
and her heart is in the right place
at least. However, when the tide turns
inward on the title track and Crow
gets back to more personal material,
she sounds a bit more comfortable,
even if the emotions involved are
much more raw than just anger at the
world in general. Detours is a lovely
song with sweet lyrics and it works
well as the centrepiece of the album,
followed by tracks like Now That You're
Gone, I'm Drunk With You and Diamond
Ring, which seem pretty obviously
to be about her split with Armstrong,
with the middle of those tracks perfectly
detailing her emotional state: "I
can't stand all this freedom, I've
been here before and it's such a bore.
You're all I ever needed, if only
you'd walk through my door." It's
not all depressing though, as Detours
finished (apart from a UK bonus track)
with Lullaby For Wyatt, a charming
love song for Crow's adopted baby.
It's an album of two parts that never
quite reaches the heights of some
of her other material, but whether
she's raging against the machine or
searching her soul, Crow delivers
with real passion and that's what
makes Detours an album that's at times
powerful and hopefully thought-provoking
too.
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Ginger - Market Harbour
Ginger is certainly
a busy fella these days. As well as getting
The Wildhearts back together and releasing
one of their best albums yet last year (plus
a few tours), he's put together another
solo album to follow on from Yoni, which
also only came out last year. And then there
was 'his' country album recorded as Howling
Willie C**t, while he's also released albums
in the guises of Super$h*t 666, Clam Abuse
and Silver Ginger 5. This is his fourth
album release as just Ginger and third album
proper (A Break In The Weather was a collection
of singles he released as part of a failed
attempt to have a 'Singles Club') and it
is probably the best so far. Not that the
others have been bad, far from it, it's
just that they have largely sounded a little
bit too much like under-produced demos of
Wildhearts songs or material that just didn't
sound right for them. They have shown various
sides to Ginger's persona beyond the rock
music he is best known for, and Market Harbour
continues that trend. One notable aspect
of it is that there initially seems to be
a heck of a lot of songs, even for someone
as prolific as Ginger, but when you listen
you discover that a lot of them are linking
tracks, making the album a cohesive body
of music, and that works well, particularly
when the links are as good as rollicking
folky knees-up The Ninns Of Mourning. The
songs themselves are quite a diverse mixture,
with tracks like Casino Bay and Attentionette
sounding like they could have been used
in his dayjob band, while others, like How
Hard Can You Make It and House Of Moths
are rather more reflective and closer Shatterproof
is one of the most mature and impressive
songs that Ginger's ever written. Market
Harbour isn't an album that grabs you by
the throat immediately, like last year's
Wildhearts record, but it is one that rewards
patience and an open mind. Ginger has taken
a long and varied path over the years, but
it has never been less than interesting
and on this form, we can only hope that
he keeps on going and going...
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Asa - Asa
Nigerian singer Asa has released one of this year's most beautiful singles, in the shape of the lovely Fire On The Mountain, so we were certainly looking forward to the arrival of her self-titled album. Her name is pronouned as 'asha' by the way. Sadly, the album doesn't quite live up to the promise of the single, as there are a few too many tracks on here that don't really do much, and while that fits in with the laidback mood of the album as a whole, it could do with a few more tracks like Fire On The Mountain, that at least catch your attention while you're listening to them. Asa's main selling point has to be her soulful and emotive voice, which has the fragility and raw beauty of Bob Marley, and when she wraps those vocals around good songs, the results are delightful. Tracks like opener Jailer and Eye Adaba are examples of when the formula works, but things start to tail off with the likes of No One Knows and Awe. Even when at her most catchy, you certainly can't quite picture Asa supporting Snoop Dogg, as she has done, because her music sounds more suited to a Jack Johnson kind of audience than a load of stoned hip-hop kids. It's often too laidback for its own good, but Asa's voice carries her through mostly, meaning that the highlights are good enough to make this worth checking out, but she needs to do a bit more next time out...
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Dusty Rhodes And The River Band - First You Live
Dusty Rhodes and the River Band are quite a strange band to take in at first. There's so much about them that seems like they aren't taking themselves very seriously, which makes it tough for you to be sure whether you should. Lead singer Dustin Apodaca and his band play a strange mixture of indie rock, folk rock and the kind of raucous party rock that Gogol Bordello have popularised recently. All of their music is based around country rock of the sort that The Band used to play, but it's all got a twist that makes it new and entertaining. The only problem with Dusty Rhodes is that you sometimes get the impression that you aren't having quite so much fun as they are, but when it works, which it does a lot in the first half of the album, it's an electrifying ride. The key part of their sound is the instrumentation, with accordian, banjo, mandolin and sitar all in their repetoire, giving all of the songs a very full flavour even when the tracks themselves might not be the strongest. Apodaca's throaty voice also helps, and he spends most of the time bellowing over the top of a jaunty and fun noise whipped up by the band, making for a great time for the listener. The clappy and repetitive gospel sound of Keys To The Truck is one of the less successful attempts at genre-mashing, but First You Live succeeds more than it fails, and songs like the title track, Leaving Tennessee and Dear Honey are all good enough to make this worth the purchase on its own. One of the best new bands to come out of California in a long time, and with a good grounding in all of the great West Coast music of yesteryear.
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Kyte - Kyte
Kyte are a band with epic pretensions, as the opening minutes of opening track Planet (and it's name, for crying out loud) prove. It's all ambient noises and the kind of guitar lines that are inevitably leading to an eventual crescendo, like a car crash in very very slow motion. There's nothing wrong with that of course, as there's lots of bands who do that kind of thing very well, like Sigur Ros, Oceansize and The Stars Of The Lid, to name but three. However, Kyte don't really achieve it, mainly because they mix this approach with fairly inane indie songs that fall somewhere between Feeder and Snow Patrol, but without the positives of either of those bands (well for Snow Patrol there's only really two songs, but you get what we mean). And with the songs stretched out mostly over six minutes plus, which is around four minutes longer than any of them should be. Even when they cut things down, like Boundaries, which lasts under four minutes, the song feels like it's going on and on forever without any real point. And that is what is wrong with Kyte. It's fine to sound all epic and spacey, but there has to be a purpose behind it all other than bland indie music. And on the evidence of these seven tracks, Kyte don't have anything else to offer.
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