A review of the album 'Break Up The Concrete' by The Pretenders

Review Snapshot: Though it leans more towards blues and country than its predecessors, the ninth album by Chrissie Hynde et al. is still recognizably safe classic rock. But slipping it into a Greatest Hits package feels needlessly defeatist.

The Cluas Verdict? 4.5 out of 10

Full Review:
This is odd: our review copy of the new album by The Pretenders comes in a double CD with a Best Of. What’s more, the hits compilation is Disc 1 of this set and the new album is Disc 2. You’d think it’d be a brave record company exec who’d propose this to Chrissie Hynde.

Do you really need us to review The Pretenders’ hits? Surely you already know from constant airplay those smart late-‘70s rockers, radio-friendly ‘80s poppers and blustery ‘90s stadium ballads. (We’ll only point out that this compilation doesn’t include a catchy 1999 cover of The Divinyls’ ‘Human’, which is a pity.)

So, the new album, then. For the most part, ‘Break Up The Concrete’ is unremarkable blues-tinted MOR rock. Hynde, forever in skinny jeans and black t-shirt, still pulls the same rawk chick shapes but with a hint of nostalgic wistfulness on gentle country rock numbers like ‘You Didn’t Have To’, ‘One Thing Never Changed’ and ‘Love’s A Mystery’ (“Lovers of today/Aren’t like lovers of the past”). It’s strange and slightly sad to now associate Hynde, one of rock’s great icon(oclast)s, with concepts like ‘nostalgia’ and ‘gentle country rock’. But then, you can hardly expect iconoclasm from someone who subordinates her new album to a Greatest Hits disc in the same package.

There are a couple of interesting moments on this record all the same. Opener ‘Boots Of Chinese Plastic’ is a rousing bit of rockabilly, a sound that suits Hynde’s attitude and voice. (Unfortunately, it’s let down by naff verses about Buddha, Hari Krishna, Allah and Jesus.) And ‘Almost Perfect’ is an acoustic bossa nova groove where Hynde sounds jazzy and (almost) fresh – could that be for her a new route worth investigating?

Anyway, Hynde would do well to heed her album title: please destroy that dull, grey rock. And next time let your new album stand or fall on its merits rather than hide it under the oldies.

Aidan Curran

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A review of the album 'Here Come The Vikings' by Astrid Williamson

Review Snapshot: One glorious lyric aside, a record of chugging ones, epic ones, book-smart lyrics and all the regulars of indie-by-numbers. You’re a busy person with other records to hear and other things to do, so this needn’t detain you.

The Cluas Verdict? 5 out of 10

Full Review:
The fourth solo album by former Goya Dress singer Astrid Williamson is more plugged-in and amped-up than her previous records. Unfortunately, while for her this might be a grand creative leap, for the listener ‘Here Come The Vikings’ is mid-table indie-rock of the sort you’ve heard many times before.

To be fair, there are brief flashes of personality on show here. When she rocks out, like on opening ‘Store’, Williamson has a strong and soaring voice similar to ‘The Lion And The Cobra’-era Sinead O’Connor. But a lot of the uptempo tracks here are unoriginal and unimaginative chuggernauts, while slower numbers like ‘Crashing Minis’ and ‘Pinned’ strain themselves to sound like epic heartstring-tuggers.

The blandness of the music is reflected in the lyrics, which mostly have a sense of being all craft and no feeling. The poppy ‘Sing The Body Electric’ shoehorns in fairly arbitrary references to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Walt Whitman, as if Williamson desperately wants us to know that she knows who they are. And then at the other extreme, ‘Falling Down’ features the anodyne ‘insight’ and uninspired clichés of your average Celine Dion or Bon Jovi hit: “They say a little information/Can be a dangerous thing… Love is all we need/Why do we keep on falling down?”

At least ‘Shut Your Mouth’ features an innuendo-drenched couplet that even Cole Porter would have envied: “Please forgive my pursuit of you/But I have to get to the root of you.” (Keeping in that spirit, our spellcheck wants us to change Astrid’s first name to ‘Astride’.)

But apart from that tantalising flash of invention, there’s nothing new or memorable about this record. You couldn’t imagine real Vikings coming and going so unremarkably.

Aidan Curran

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The joys of Youtube have been denied lately in China - government didn't want any huamn rights themed videos showing  up in the a year of anniversaries like June 4: 20 years since the 1989 Tiananmen bloodbath.

This may not be such a problem: China afterall has copied youtube: most slavishly in youku.com and Tudou.com is a less blatantly copied local video sharing site. But neither is a great alternative to the original, I discovered with an experiment seeking video content for Bruce Springsteen. It's harder to navigate when your Chinese is scrappy -as is mine - but such is the similarity to youtube that it's only a matter of clicking where you'd normally click on youtube pages. Like youku, you get a lot of music videos, and the odd TV and film clip. I also found a string of videos uploaded by a real Chinese Springsteen fan - unlike Dylan or the Stones the Boss isn't a big name in China. But what the Chinese copycats lack is the sheer variety of music served up on Youtube. There's none of the videos from mobile phones and cameras at one-off concerts. But that's foreign (Western) music. Type in Carsick Cars, the name of China's best indie act of the last five years into the youku/tudou search engines and you get a trove of rare footage, concert clips and fan-edited videos. So they're not the place to go for western rock and pop, but youku and tudou are good outlets for local rock music - and for improving one's Chinese language skills.

Given that October will bring the big party for the Party - 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China - I expect to see a lot more blockages of Youtube. I'll keep an eye on the local clones.

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There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer's mind when casting their votes.

The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers' top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don't stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de siécle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it'd be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).

Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that's one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)

Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the "vintage period":

Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

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As an appetizer for the main event, Let’s French is putting on a pre-festival show: Naïve New Beaters (right) will appear at Twisted Pepper in Dublin on Saturday 6 June.

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It’s the first time I ever bought a guitar in the same workshop it was made in. Well today I bought a US$30 from craftsman Mr Lay Lwin. In his 60s and dressed in the traditional wrap-around biyin 'skirt' that most Burmese men wear, Lay Lwin is chairman of Sein Shwe Lwin Guitar Garden, on Anawrahta road in the bustling Kyauktada township in downtown Yangon/Rangoon. The shop was a welcome detour in the downpour that blanketed the city for most of the day – this is rainy season. What got me was Lay’s smiling demeanour and loving attention with which he showed me each guitar. The US$30 price tag was also a clincher: prices fluctuate according to whether he’s using plastic or steel tuning gears, or if the strings and frets are steel or a cheaper alloy mix.

The top of the soundbox is pine, the sides plywood. It’s not surprising most of the country is still covered in forestry, that Burma would make guitars. Problem is much of that wood is being slashed by or for Chinese timber companies, who often pay off local officials to turn a blind eye as they drive their loot over the border into China’s Yunnan province. Still, the New Light of Myanmar newspaper earlier this week editorialized on the need to grow trees so the air can be clean and the country green, as if hardwood trees they’ve allowed to be chopped can be replaced overnight.

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Beijing Beat is in Burma this week, just as the country’s most famous citizen, Aung San Suu Kyi is on trial. There’s lots of well-armed police and military out on patrol, but this is no dour nation. The music shops, and there are plenty, sell guitar chord books and stacks of CDs and DVDs of local artists. Chinese pop is big in Burma. Staff sung along to Mandopop megahits while I was getting my hair cut at the East Boys hair salon on Seik Kan Tha Street A five minute walk away, three helpful attendants at the Man Thiri music shop – they produce and distribute CDs, VCDs and tapes as well as DVDs –  when I asked them for their best local folk and Burmese rock CDs plucked me out a work by harpist Haing Win Maung, and this by local hip hop/rocker Alex: Live at Inya Lake.

The local official press is farcically out of touch – the regime’s greetings to Azerbaijani leaders for that country’s national day made the page one lead yesterday – but there are plenty of chances to get alternative views in Rangoon/Yangon. There’s the paper boy selling Thailand’s The Nation on the street near my hotel, and then, in the hotel lobby, the staff watching satellite TV coverage of Aung San Suu Kyi’s trial, piped in by the country’s opposition in exile in Norway. That seems to be Burma: a very, friendly, nuanced kind of place. Badly run, unnecessarily impoverished, but also full of surprises. Number one for me was how it makes a good first impression: the new international airport in Rangoon is smart, glass and chrome and attentive, friendly staff. Nothing at all as chaotic as my recent experience flying into Dhaka, in neighbouring Bangladesh. But then nowhere do you hear chaotic Bangladesh’s multiplicity of voices, and debate. I’m looking forward to checking out the live music scene, particularly the Lazy Club, where apparently aforementioned rocker Alex regularly plays.

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A review of the album Battle For The Sun by Placebo

Review Snapshot: If this is how good Placebo sound when they choose to write about 'stepping out of the darkness and into the light' can somebody please arrange to shower Brian Molko with sunlight for the foreseeable future?  An album full of urgency and optimism, Battle for the Sun has the potential to be regarded as Placebo's finest work.

The Cluas Verdict? 9.5 out of 10

Full Review:
After 13 years, 5 studio albums and 10 million album sales, you would have to wonder what possible reasons Placebo have to keep going, especially after the loss of major label backing and Steve Hewitt, the band's drummer for the past 11 years.  Wonder no more, the reason is clear; after spending over a decade dealing with life in the shadows, Placebo, and Brian Molko in particular, have decided to focus on optimism and positivity, the result of which is Battle for the Sun (released June 8).

Those of you familiar with the Placebo back catalogue, 2006's Meds in particular, will be aware that darkness seemed to be an essential element in terms of shaping Placebo's songs, almost to the point of self-parody.  Indeed, at that stage that Placebo were arguably, to quote our own Aidan Curran, 'a band who's future was long behind them.'  That's most definitely not the case however, and while there are still some dark themes on Battle for the Sun it is hard not to feel the sense of optimism that seeps from every nook and cranny of this record. Track 6, Bright Lights, for example contains the following refrain: A heart that hurts/is a heart that works. It's simple, yet equally effective and evocative and a million miles adrift of songs like Pierrot the Clown (Meds, 2006) or Summer's Gone (Without You I'm Nothing, 1998).

The album, recorded in Toronto over three months with Dave Bottrill (dEUS, Silverchair, Muse) and mixed by Alan Moulder (My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails), actually gets off to a very inauspicious start with Kitty Litter.  For the first 3 minutes, it sounds like typical Placebo fair, musically competent, lyrically excellent and then there is a subtle change of direction and bang, we have the new Placebo.  This continues straight into the excellent Ashtray Heart, which has more in common with the likes of Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire (it must be the Toronto air) than the Placebo of old.

Battle for the Sun contains far too many standout tracks to list them all.  The sense of urgency that drives almost every track, combined with very polished production, creates a unique listening experience where you find yourself waiting for the next track while not wanting the current track to end.   New drummer Steve Forrest does an exceptional job considering his mere 22 years and his pounding of the skins plays an important part on the majority of tracks, lead single For What it's Worth in particular.

When I review records, I start off with a score of 10 and try to find reasons to deduct marks.  With Battle for the Sun I found it very difficult to find fault.  It's as accomplished as it is refreshing and while producing an album that defies genres (and indeed people's pre-conceptions of them, this writer included) will be sure to garner Placebo new fans (maybe even Aidan), it is also a record that will startle and delight their many existing fans. I can give Battle for the Sun no higher praise than to say it could well prove to be the essential Placebo album.

Steve O'Rourke

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