Chimpomatic

Youthmovies

Good Nature

Drowned in Sound

Youthmovies are an Oxford based quintet put together by Al English and Foals founding member Andrew Mears. After a series of well received EPs comes their debut album Good Nature, a distillation of the band’s various incarnations and the long graft of touring and festival playing.

The band cites King Crimson, Steve Reich and Sonic Youth as their official influences but there’s a lot going on in here and straightening out some kind of musical heritage is pretty pointless. In today’s musical landscape of retro-mania it’s refreshing to find myself perplexed and this is both the band’s strength and stumbling block.

There’s innovation aplenty here, songs that build and fragment, tease and frustrate; shifting from squalls of guitar, brass and heavy drumbeat to sudden, becalmed stillness. 8 minutes is a long time though and Youthmovies don’t shy away from extending their template of alternating (often conflicting) musical movements over such lengths. The effect is idiosyncratic and unpredictable but can be tedious in the same measure.

At it's most successful, on tracks like If You’d Seen A Battlefield, the band concede that melody is not a bad thing. The music slips between cascading guitars and rhythm driven brass, then erupts into a baroque guitar crescendo. It’s exciting. But the band’s habit of reducing lyrics to short phrases, repeated like mantras, expose a problem and in this particular song - a dangerous truth. ‘It’s not going well and it’s not going badly, it’s just going’, repeats Andrew Mears and he’s got a point.

Something for the Ghosts begins a 9-minute run by mesmerising you; shifting from wistfully repeated lyrics to tumbling guitar chords and building drumbeats. In many of these tracks, the changes of tempo and pace can become exhausting and ultimately a bit aimless. Here the song avoids becoming fractured and drives on, building ominously and with a kind of savage determination. It’s a shame then, when it hits the closing lines; ‘Motorway crash-barriers make me feel like we’re going to crash’. It’s not just that the words claim a kind of minimalist, poetic potency which is clearly beyond them but that in their delivery, Mears once again veers the sound dangerously close to Bloc Party territory.

Youthmovies tackle the label of prog-rock head on in their promotional material, then kind of do a little shimmy to avoid it sticking. They declare that it’s only ‘prog-rock’ to the ‘initiated’ but then spend the album trying to convince you that ‘progressive’ isn’t ‘a dirty word’. They’re right it isn’t and Good Nature does manage to get you onside. But equally they’re wrong to suggest there’s nothing pretentious about the swelling bombast and lyrical misjudgement which occasionally undermines the album. 6 tracks in, Good Nature hits it's stride and the journey’s well worth going on. There’s plenty more to come from Youthmovies I’m sure.

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#LG

13th Mar 2008 - 1 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

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The Stills

Without Feathers

Drowned In Sound Recordings

The Stills, who broke on the scene back in 2003 with the lauded ‘Logic Will Break Your Heart’, are from Montreal and having been spoiled rotten on good Canadian bands of late I expected much from this lot. As a difficult second album, “Without Feathers” was probably made all the more tricky by one of the main men jumping ship due to ‘musical reasons’. Not to be defeated, the drummer, Dave Hamelin, stepped up to write the songs, sing the songs and traded the skins for strings to play the songs on guitar (which looks a little bit big for him on the ‘destroyer’ video).

‘In the beginning’ appropriately starts things off as a general introduction to the type of indie-rock and lyrical themes (heartbreak and headaches) we can expect on the rest of the album. This is followed swiftly by ‘Destroyer’ a jolly sounding track with a driving beat and an uplifting horn section which backs Hamelin as he chirps on about how much he hates someone and how they better pipe down as he’s coming to kick their sorry ass. ‘Helicopters’ is another cracking little tune which has them sounding as close to the Doves as one could get without a lawsuit. 

‘The house we live in’ is a nice mellow little number as he tries to persuade his special lady friend not to jump ship, but from then on in the songs never really hit the spot. It feels like they lose their way a bit and compensate for this by over egging it on the keys and horns. I would dedicate a whole paragraph to how ‘Retour A Vega’ really got my goat, but they’re from Quebec so I can forgive them for singing in French and simply mention it in passing.

The influence of the various members of Broken Social Scene who got asked to help out on a few tracks is evident throughout the album, but the ‘scene’ they are not. While there’s enough here to indicate they’ve the potential to match their peers in the future, a couple too many tracks seem like a radio friendly mixture of said good Canadian bands and middle of the road British indie pop bands (I’m thinking Snow Patrol). If it was an EP of the first four tracks then I’d love it, but as I say, maybe I’ve been spoilt and have gotten greedy.

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#Locochimpo

12th Jun 2007 - 4 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

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Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton

Knives Don't Have Your Back

Drowned In Sound Recordings

As a fervent fan of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene I've been an admirer of Emily Haines for some time. In her BSS guise she makes me swoon. Every time I hear 'Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl' from the album 'You Forgot it in People', (the stand out track from an album packed with potential stand out tracks) I wonder why they don't make more use of the mercurial Ms. Haines. Her sporadic presence in BSS always reminds me of a skillful winger stuck out on the sidelines away from the action. As an example 'Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl' reveals all that needs to be known of Emily Haines. Its all about the voice; one that makes me fall in love, believing she must be both beautiful and cool. Beautiful, because she sings like an ethereal siren. Cool, because when she sings of how 'you used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that' she epitomises the existence of everyone who is, or ever was, a bona fide indie kid the world over. 'Knives Don't Have Your Back' explains why sometimes it's not always completely fulfilling to fall in love with the coolest girl around.

Some will know that Emily Haines is not only a sometime contributor to the Broken Social Scene but also the front woman of Metric, a more dancey and punky outfit which took London by storm with their live shows earlier this year. 'Knives Don't Have Your Back', her debut solo album backed by her band the Soft Skeleton, offers a collection of songs that one senses she has longed to reveal away from the limitations imposed by her alternative roles. It is essentially a series of confessions and tales of loss eeked from her soul via the conduit of a piano. This exposure is simultaneously touchingly tender and achingly painful. The obvious comparison to be made, based on fragile sentiments and confident piano loops, is with the early material of Tori Amos; though minus the melodrama. But more than any other act it is the Velvet Underground that springs to mind on first listen. Its not so much the music or attitude of Lou Reed and John Cale that this album recalls but it is the qualities, if not the actual tones, of the two female Velvets that haunts from the grave. 'Reading in Bed' and 'Our Hill' exemplify the manner in which Mo Tucker, on songs like After Hours, manged to display a femine vulnerability while 'Doctor Blind' and 'The Lottery' are reminiscent of Nico's brooding sexuality.

Just as the Velvet Underground were shot through with the energy of New York, Sigur Ros encapsulate the sound of Icelandic fjords, or the Beuna Vista Social Club are the essence of Cuba, the sound of 'Knives Don't Have Your Back' mirrors the geography of Emily Haine's Canadian homeland. The songs are so evocative of skating on frozen ponds with wintery skies and endless horizons. There are moments of absolute sublime beauty; 'Winning' and 'Nothing & Nowhere' are songs that can break your heart and then mend it in the space of just a few minutes. If you had your ipod set to shuffle and any one of these numbers came on randomly you would think that if this chosen song was representative of the whole album then 'Knives Don't Have Your Back' would warrant a rating of nothing less than 5 out of 5. There are no problems with any single one of the songs individually. They are subtley crafted with heart wrenching honesty in isolation, but stacked back to back they can leave one feeling a little cold. There is a longing for some comfort and warmth just as I imagine there would be if one fell through the ice of a frozen Canadian pond. Perhaps she is aware of this; on 'Reading in Bed' she asks 'after all the luck you've had, why are your songs so sad?' I'm still in love with Emily Haines but she's perhaps just a little bit too cool - no matter how beautiful a crisp winter morning is sometimes you just wish for the advent of some spring sunshine.

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#Muxloe

30th May 2007 - 3 comments - Add Comment - Tweet

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