entertainment manchester

album reviews > album reviews > single reviews > live reviews > features

Nine Black Alps - Love/Hate

Quite how Manchester grunge revivalists Nine Black Alps managed to get a song on the soundtrack for Sony animation movie Surf's Up we'll probably never know, but it certainly showed that they are making inroads into the American market. That's hardly surprisingly really, when you think about it, because of all of the young British bands around at the moment, they owe the most to American music, so are bound to go down better over there than the quintessentially English likes of Klaxons or Arctic Monkeys. Nirvana were writ large across NBA's debut album Everything Is, while Sam Forrest both looked and sounded like Kurt Cobain, but the music was good enough to rise above the comparisons and prove that they were able to stand up on their own two feet rather than merely steal from one of the most popular bands of the last two decades. Of course, taking your lead from bands like Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr might help you make friends and influence people Stateside, but isn't much use when it comes to popularity back home. Just ask Bush. So, while Everything Is got good reviews and they built up a decent fanbase, Nine Black Alps struggled to really breakthrough to the mainstream like a certain former support act from Sheffield managed to do. So, the dilemma facing them with their follow-up is which direction to go in. Do they try to Anglicise their sound to appeal to audiences here, or stick to their guns and hope to make it big in America? The answer, seemingly, was to do a bit of both, because Love/Hate is both slightly less grungey than their debut, but isn't a dramatic departure either. The first two singles from the album pretty much sum it up perfectly, with Bitter End and Burn Faster both sounding like they could have been from Everything Is, just with a slightly more cleaned-up production, and the same goes for most of Love/Hate. The end result is that songs like Future Wife and Happiness And Satisfaction are more accessible than stuff like Not Everyone, but less exciting at the same time. Forrest's knack with a twisted melody was obvious before, and it comes to the fore more here, and it works well, but still leaves the album feeling a bit flat. It's far from a bad follow-up, but Love/Hate ends up as something that you don't love or hate, so really it's something in the middle. It sounds like the '/' from the title, and that's never a ringing endorsement.

Orson - Culture Vultures

In The City starts this weekend and Manchester is rightly proud of the effect its unsigned music festival has had on the industry, giving lots of great bands the big push into the big time. However, it doesn't always go right. Two years ago, Orson arrived in town as a completely unknown American version of a pub rock band and left on the road to stardom, at least on this side of the Atlantic. No Tomorrow became a smash hit single and their debut album was a big success too, despite being basically just a load of reheated Rolling Stones guitar riffs without the songs to match. They enthusiastically relocated to London last year, having found themselves a niche market, and are now back with a second album, hoping that England's infatuation with them won't have been dimmed as 'we' sober up and see how ugly/rubbish they are in the cold light of day. Good luck. Culture Vultures is a curious choice for album title, as it pretty much describes their approach to music, picking the dead flesh off great songs from years gone by and devouring them, without any real purpose. This even extends to recycling their own songs, with Ain't No Party [like an S Club party?] basically an attempt to completely repeat the 'party on!' formula that worked like a treat for No Tomorrow. But of course, it doesn't work nearly so well and just sounds like a one trick pony desperately doing a little dance in a slightly different order to try and convince the audience that it's new and exciting. Whenever Orson do hit on something that works, like The Contortionist, you are still left with the feeling that you're only enjoying it because it reminds you of another, better song. And as for some of the lyrics, well how about this little rhyming couplet: "Listening to Biggie Smalls and now she's screening all her calls." Maybe then she'll go and eat some toast rather than seeing a ghost. Orson aren't a truly terrible band, and they do have some decent pop hooks here and there, but Culture Vultures is definitely an album too far for them and leaves them looking like what they are: a pub rock quality band who got lucky and made it big. Briefly.

Dave Gahan - Hourglass

Dave Gahan's debut solo album Paper Monsters got a decent enough reception, but was slightly overshadowed by its own lyrical content, which was unrelentingly honest and personal at times. Being the first collection of songs written by him after years of singing Depeche Mode tracks by Martin Gore, it was a slightly patchy album, but there were signs that he had potential as a songwriter. There was at least enough potential on there for his band to let him contribute as a writer to the most recent Depeche Mode album Playing The Angel. That kind of endorsement certainly seems to have boosted his confidence, so he's back now with a follow-up to Paper Monsters, and Hourglass is a much more confident-sounding album. It also sounds quite a bit more like Depeche Mode, which may be a sign that he was more comfortable with not straying too far from his day job this time, and while tracks like Deeper And Deeper veer towards industrial metal and 21 Days has clear gospel influences, there's much more electronic music here. Opening tracks Saw Something and single Kingdom are both excellent, sounding like Gahan's band at their best, but Hourglass is also dragged down at times by some songs that are a bit too sparse and slow, with Miracles and closer Down amongst the offenders. While they arguably showcase his solo talents better than the more dramatic tracks like A Little Lie, which could quite easy be from any mid-80s electro album, they also affect the pace of the album as a whole. But with ten pretty solid tracks and some very atmospheric production, Hourglass is a very good solo album from someone who hasn't always been known for his creativity as a musician. Gahan has always been a charismatic frontman, but this proves that he has learned a lot from Gore and has got a lot of offer both within Depeche Mode and on his own.

Wallis Bird - Spoons

Sometimes an artist comes along whose music you really want to like and know that you probably should, but something just doesn't click, and Wallis Bird fits into that category. Your reviewer has definitely got 'a thing' for female singer-songwriters, but Bird's songs are just a bit too vague and ethereal to make an impact and Spoons never really comes to life. This is a real shame because her back story is certainly interesting, as she had all of the fingers on her left hand chopped off by a lawnmower when she was a baby, with four of them being reattached. She then (quite a few years later, obviously) got into music and taught herself to play the guitar upside down, giving her a very unconvential style and sound. She's currently based in Dublin in her native Ireland, London and in Mannheim in Germany, where she spent time at college and has built up quite a German following. And did we mention that Spoons gets its name from her love of collecting spoons? Her debut EP Branches Untangle came out in May 2006 and featured a couple of tracks that appear here, The Circle and Blossoms In The Street, which was also recently released as a single. Those two are amongst the most immediate tracks on Spoons and showcase her quirky-folky approach to music, seemingly inspired by the likes of Ani DiFranco and Erin McKeown. She doesn't often explode into noise, but when it happens on Moodsets - the title track from another EP that came out earlier this year - it's certainly effective and you wish that she would put a little more spunk into some of the other tunes on her, because just too many of them float past without doing much. She's not afraid to experiment though, with the 'Arabian' horn refrain and bouncy rhythms on Country Bumpkin certainly livening things up, but Spoons is an uneven album that never quite lives up to the promise that it shows. We're not writing Wallis Bird off yet, but this is a bit of a patchy debut.

Van Morrison - Still On Top: The Greatest Hits

How do you sum up a career like Van Morrison's on just two CDs? For more than 40 years he's been making consistently great music, from the early rocky days of Them to the surprisingly good quality albums he's released in the last few years, like Magic Time and Pay The Devil. Of course, there's already been a few compilations of his music, but Still On Top is the most comprehensive one yet, going from the very start to the most recent, and there's some absolutely awesome songs here. A lot of them. Obviously, the highlights mostly come from the 1970s, when he was at his commercial and artistic peak with albums like Moondance, Saint Dominic's Preview and Tupelo Honey, and tracks like Jackie Wilson Said, Moondance, Into The Mystic, Bright Side Of The Road, Crazy Love, Domino, And It Stoned Me and Warm Love all come from this period and are all fantastic. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Morrison didn't really hit a trough in the 1980s, with his inner religious battles inspiring some really great albums and he's never really dipped since then either, so on Still On Top it is only ever really easy to date the songs by how young his voice sounds in them. Perhaps this was behind the decision not to put them in chronological order, like most of these kind of albums, and it certainly works. That's not to say that it is without its problems though. Only three tracks in, you stumble across Cliff Richard. It's bad enough that Van Morrison decided to sing a song about God with him, but need we be reminded by having it on here? The other major stumbling point is that there are no songs at all here from Astral Weeks, which is almost like rewriting the Bible without Jesus in it. Sure, it's best listened to as a cohesive work rather than individual tracks on a compilation album aimed as casual fans, but how can any Van Morrison greatest hits album be complete without representation from his best album? Maybe the idea is that everyone should already own Astral Weeks anyway, (and they should) and this is a sample of the best of his rest. Either way, it's a shame, but Still On Top is still a great collection of great music. Oh, and one Cliff Richard song...

Nightwish - Dark Passion Play

A lot of heavy metal bands have lost their lead singers and gone on to do fairly well without them. Just look at Iron Maiden (who actually got better than Bruce Dickinson took over lead vocals) and Black Sabbath (who did change their singer a few too many times for their own good, but are still legends). So it wasn't the end of the world when Nightwish lost Tarja Turunen, but it was undoubtedly a massive blow as her operatic singing was so central to their symphonic power metal, and there can't be many classically-trained opera singers out there who fancy slumming it with a bunch of Finnish rockers. After all, even she couldn't after a decade or so, which is why she ended up splitting with them. So, Nightwish decided to get a new female vocalist anyway, just not an opera singer per se, and chose Swedish rocker Anette Olzon. Dark Passion Play is her first album with them, so the question is, are Nightwish still as crazy, overblown and downright fantastic as they used to be? The 13 minute album opener The Poet And The Pendulum should prove that beyond much doubt, being literally full to bursting with melodramatic flourishes, mad lyrics, power riffing, growling, screaming, classical music, cinematic orchestral swirls and just about everything you would expect across a whole album jammed into one track. It's a very ambitious opener to the album and is clearly a statement of intent from the band to show that they haven't lost anything with Turunen's departure. Second track Bye Bye Beautiful is even about her departure from the group, and by this stage, there can't be many fans still missing her because while Olzon doesn't have the same power in her vocals, she fits perfectly into the mix, with Marco Hietala also taking up some more of the singing duties. Far from being a disppointment, Dark Passion Play is quite possibly Nightwish's most fully-realised album from the quiet ballads like the beautiful Eva (Olzon stamping her own identity on the group) to the epic tracks like Meadows Of Heaven, it's almost all excellent, with only the folky The Islander not really working. Tarja who?