Alphabeat are special for a number of reasons. For one, they’re from the Danish version of Motown – their hometown of Silkeborg is famous for its huge number of car dealerships. For another, there’s loads of them, six in fact. Anders SG sings, as does Stine, Anders B plays guitar and some keyboards and is quite the whizz in the studio, Rasmus is the band’s resident keyboard player, Anders R plays bass and is another keyboard player while Troels is the drummer – without him, there is nothing. They went to school together and aged fifteen (they’re now all in their early 20s) they formed a band. They first moved to London in the summer of 2007 around the release of their debut top ten album This Is Alphabeat and the huge pop smashes and playlist staples Fascination, Boyfriend and 10,000 Nights. They lived in a big house together. In Hackney. Now, rather sensibly, they live in three different houses

Alphabeat have recently been confirmed as the main support act on Lady GaGa’s Monster Ball tour in the UK in February. In a recent interview with VH1 she picked them as one of her favourite new acts, saying “I really love Alphabeat, they’re great and they’re going to come out on tour with me.”

Check the dates after the break.

18-Feb-10 Manchester MEN Arena
22-Feb-10 Belfast Odyssey Arena
24-Feb-10 Liverpool Echo Arena
26-Feb-10 London O2 Arena
27-Feb-10 London O2 Arena
1-Mar-10 Glasgow SECC
3-Mar-10 Cardiff International Arena
4-Mar-10 Newcastle Metro Radio Arena
5-Mar-10 Birmingham LG Arena
7-Mar-10 Sheffield Arena
8-Mar-10 Nottingham Trent FM Arena

This is David Saw’s second album and the publicity surrounding it focuses on the fact that David’s best friend is James Taylor’s son, Ben Taylor and that one of his early songs was covered by Carly Simon who is Ben Taylor’s mum and ex-wife of James Taylor (the singer-songwriter ,not the English jazz organ player of JTQ fame). So Carly Simon covered a David Saw song. Why?

If you want to know why the singer/songwriter/troubadour genre vanished after a period of huge popularity in the early to mid-70s, this is a great demonstration. The genre became so popular that even the most mediocre acts managed to get record deals (a bit like Scottish bands in the mid-80’s). This album sounds like it came from the butt-end of the 70s troubadour boom.

David Saw has a reasonable voice and is a reasonable guitar player but the songs sound like they were written by an angst-ridden year 11 music student; musically they’re simplistic and lyrically it’s all a bit naïve. It’s frustrating to hear someone with a sliver of potential fail to deliver because they’ve pinned themselves into an out-dated frame of reference.

The singer-songwriter genre has undergone a dramatic shift since peaking in the mid-1970s. The style and the subject matter of artists like David Gray, Newton Faulkner and Jason Mraz is a world away from James Taylor, Carole King and Carly Simon. Unfortunately David Saw is firmly rooted in the 70s school of songwriting, concentrating on melancholy songs of lost love with the occasional lightweight, uptempo song (“Buy My Record”, for example) and that just isn’t enough for a 21^{st century singer-songwriter.}

If you want to hear a good contemporary male singer-songwriter, listen to some of the people listed at the start of the previous paragraph, or maybe Neil Young if you want to hear someone who was part of the original scene which influenced David Saw’s songwriting. For a real wild card comparison, you could try the 2000 album “Northern Songs” by Lee Griffiths (also influenced by James Taylor) which is a much more gritty version of the British troubadour’s art. Alternatively, you could just listen to anything by Malcolm Middleton or Richard Hawley.

If David Saw can move away from the obvious 70s influences, then he may have something interesting to sing about but it doesn’t look good on the evidence of this collection.

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This is one of those albums that creates an instant impact from the dirty opening synth intro of “Detroit” and leads you through a kaleidoscope of musical styles. The arrangements feature electronic and acoustic instruments blended together with a batch of songs which ranges from ballads (“After The Flood”) to widescreen epics (“Plans And Reveries”) and everything in between.

Black Gold happily admit to incorporating their many musical influences into the patchwork quilt of “Rush” and invite us to identify the original sources of their sonic petty larceny if we can. There are various species of musical magpie: the “Jeff Lynne”, which steals audaciously and produces a wonderful song which is original and makes no attempt to hide the theft; the “Guy Chambers”, which uses a phrase which you recognise but you have to think about for a while before working out that it’s from “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” or “Dear Prudence”; and the species on display here which, like The Avalanches in 2000/2001, steals a couple of bars at a time from anywhere they can and throws them all in to the blender (you can spot a reference to Ronnie Wood’s playing on The Faces 1971 single “Stay With Me” if you listen carefully) . There is another species, the “Mika”, but we won’t go in to that.

Erick Ronick’s voice is strong enough and versatile enough to deal with an incredibly wide dynamic range, effortlessly moving from the solo acoustic arrangements to big electric and electronic songs and throwing in some interesting falsetto for good measure (and great vocal harmonies as well), while the varied styles and instrumentation make this an album that grabs the attention from the opening synth riff and refuses to let go.

A couple of tracks from this album (including “Plans And Reveries”) have already been used as incidental music on US TV shows and the rest of the album is strong enough to suggest that you could be hearing a lot of Black Gold in the next year or two.

There are albums which you can listen to once and all of their secrets are revealed; “Rush” isn’t one of those. This album rewards perseverance because each time you listen to it, you pick out another reference (or two, or three) to songs or styles which don’t necessarily jump out at you on the first listen.

And the bad news; maybe the programming of the tracks isn’t quite right. Towards the end, the album falls off dynamically, but this is minor criticism of a great debut album.

The new album, which was two years in the making, is quite different to their previous ‘Decemberunderground’ and while it isn’t as strong as it’s predecessor, it’s still a great listen and will be huge with AFI fans everywhere.

Lead vocalist, Davey Havoc said: “Honestly I’ve never been more proud of an AFI record. We are thrilled to hear it come to life.”

The single ‘Medicate’ is a really catchy and memorable song with a good sound and lyrics; it’s easy to see why it was chosen as the first release from the new album.

‘End Transmission’ is a great track and is one of my favourites; you can really imagine dancing along to this one at a gig and ‘Beautiful Thieves’ is another highlight of ‘Crash Love’ as it’s a catchy song with a really strong chorus.

‘Veronica Sawyer Smokes’ is definitely another one of the standout tracks; it’s a brilliant song with memorable lyrics that would make it a great next single.

‘Crash Love’, which is available now, is a really good album and some of the tracks will be excellent for getting the crowd going for their 2010 tour which will hit the UK on 5th April in Rock City, Nottingham and finishes up in Newcastle on 11th April.

The press release accompanying this album focuses heavily on the novel partnership between the band and HMV and the digital pre-release of the album and the single “Evacuate” earlier this year, while saying very little about the actual music, which is an interesting indicator of the content of the album.

The first listen to the album was frustrating and disappointing and subsequent attempts (well into double figures) didn’t really improve things very much.  The overall impression I take from the album is that the basic elements: the instrumentation, the vocals and the production have all been over-cooked.  Singer Nathan Nicholson has a great voice with an extensive range but his falsetto is over-used, making some of the songs difficult to listen to.  The use of vocal and lyrical hooks is another example of excess; 1 or 2 hooks are usually used to pull the listener into the song but this album is full of songs which have so many hooks that they seem to cancel each other out.

The production is perfect throughout the album but this only seems to highlight the fact that there’s very little substance to any of the songs particularly in the lyrics, which are usually fairly clichéd (“Forces” is a good example of this).  There are obvious references to the band’s many influences dotted throughout the album (I don’t need to tell you what they are, you can spot them easily enough) which detracts from the creation of a unique identity for the band.

The structure of the songs and the production values of the album look like an attempt to catapult the band straight in to the stadium rock league with the likes of U2 and Coldplay (yes, they are 2 of the references you can pick out on the album) without passing through any of the traditional intermediate stages of the process.

After many attempts, only “Spitting Fire” left a positive impression; I could actually recognise it 5 minutes after hearing it.  The album is a disappointment because the production is great, the musicianship is very good, the vocals are very good but the whole is much less than the sum of the parts.  It’s a bit like unwrapping a liqueur and biting in to only to discover that the filling has evaporated.

Daisy’s songs stagger as the band’s heaviest to date. With a variety of styles, embarking from the explosive, ‘Nirvana-like’ mastery of ‘Vices’ and ‘Be Gone‘ through to tracks such as ‘Daisy’ and ‘Bed’ which agonise over self-contemplation, to melancholy pieces like ‘You Stole’ and ‘Noro’, which is the final track and brings the album to full circle. Lyrically, the songs here are more dingy, emotional and reflective of band member Jesse Lacey’s life happenings and thoughts.

The atmosphere of this album is eruptive, yet dense. It captures flourishing melody, which leads to Daisy being victorious. However, Brand New’s latest sound and power they roar can be overwhelming at times and almost endorses the poetry in the lyrics that is the band’s original forte. Daisy, nevertheless, manages to be masterpiece of angst-rock.

Let me qualify the following review by saying that I’d never call myself a YYY fan – I tend to find Karen’s banshee/kicked dog yelps an acquired taste, one I have yet to properly acquire. I’ve given both Fever To Tell and It’s Blitz a couple of spins each and found the best moments to easily be much quieter, reflective tracks like the ubiquitous ‘Maps’.

Happily, aside from a few bars at the start of ‘Animal’, Miss O is clearly on quieter form and in my opinion the whole album is the better for it. Over the course of the 14 tracks Karen O (and the kids, as the cover points out) skilfully construct an intimate and dreamlike narrative – judging by the trailer for the film I’ve seen I can easily see how this music will work brilliantly with the visuals.

Karen’s softer, echo-y vocals are soothing and backed sparingly and effectively by the use of all manner of jangly instruments – there’s certainly no shortage of tambourine on this record. Combining this with the aforementioned kids many of the more upbeat songs on the album take on a gang, shambolic (in the best way possible) nature that appears to reflect the idea of this young boy becoming part of a group of ‘wild things’.

As I listened to the record I felt myself being reminded (no pun intended) of The Reminder, a brilliant album by another female artist, Feist. Both albums gave me that warm, comfortable feel and it’s testament to the quality of Where The Wild Things Are that it can easily be listened to as a record in it’s own right, without any association to the film. A final point that endeared me to this soundtrack:

(At this point my very own ‘wild thing’, my cat just wandered across the keyboard to add his thoughts…)
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(Concise and astute contribution from him there)

As I was saying, the final point that endeared me to this soundtrack was it’s overall sense of maturity and subtlety – in comparison to something like the Juno soundtrack for instance which felt as if it was trying too hard to be ‘cool’ and ‘in touch’ with the hipster crowd. Here, Karen O and the kids are simply enjoying making music, regardless of who’s listening – scoring a quick bit of indie music cred by including a Daniel Johnston cover in the form of ‘Worried Shoes’.

To sum up, Karen O has changed my opinion of her by providing a warm, enjoyably uplifting and intimate soundtrack that is capable of standing on it’s own merit but equally should provide excellent support to what I hope will be a fantastic film.

With glowing reviews from bloggers worldwide, as well as having BBC’s Zane Lowe as a fan, The Temper Trap are well on their way to UK domination. Energetic Dougie, Lorenzo, Toby and Jonathan have undoubtedly plucked a few heart strings with harmoniously strong tracks such as “Love Lost” and “Fools”. Contrasting the emotionally-driven songs on the album are musically intense “Fader” and catchy “Rest”, which are guaranteed to leave you singing at the top of your voice.

With The Temper Trap’s popularity swiftly rising, an amazing turn-out and atmosphere at this year’s festival season, not forgetting a UK tour which commenced this September, the ‘Ozzy lads’ appear to have a lot on their plates. Maybe take a leaf out of your own book boys – “Soldier On”! A must listen.

“We wanted to create lots of technical layers with an edge; to heavy, melodic tunes,” opens lead vocal/guitarist Dave McPherson. “With Daydream Anonymous we established a more mature sound and pushed our abilities as musicians. Now we’ve really stepped that up. The new album is darker, more epic and grander than we’ve ever been.”

Here is the video to ‘Single of the Weak’.

InMe are also touring, gig dates below:
September
16 The Royal, Derby
17 Newcastle Academy 2, Newcastle
18 53 Degrees, Preston
19 The Cockpit, Leeds
21 ABC2, Glasgow
22 Manchester Academy 3, Manchester
23 Rescue Rooms, Nottingham
24 The Garage, London
25 Chinnerys, Southend
26 The Harlequin, Redhill*
27 Concorde 2, Brighton*
28 Oxford Academy 2, Oxford
30 Talking Heads, Southampton

October
1 Orange Box, Yeovil
2 TJ’s, Newport
3 Hobbits, Western
4 The Cavern, Exeter
*supporting We Are The Ocean