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.

In October The Maccabees headlined the Lake of Stars festival in Malawi, Africa and are currently on tour with Editors in Europe. Both bands return briefly to London to play a Little Noise session at the Union Chapel in Islington in aid of Mencap on Monday 16th November.
 
It’s been a great year for The Maccabees with career-defining sets at Leeds and Reading Festival this summer which had The Observer dubbing them “festival heroes” and NME reminding us “they’re probably the best home-grown indie rock band the UK has to offer right now”. In Wall of Arms they have released one of the best-received albums of the year. The record entered the UK album charts at number 13 in May, winning praise across the board from fans and critics alike.

Recorded in Paris and England with producer Markus Dravs (Bjork, Arcade Fire, Coldplay), they blasted the myth of the “difficult second album” out of the water with songs like the epic No Kind Words and brilliant singles Love You Better and Can You Give It.
 
SHOCKWAVES NME AWARDS TOUR

FEBRUARY 2010

Thursday 4th – Newcastle O2 Academy
Friday 5th – Glasgow Barrowlands
Saturday 6th – Manchester Academy
Sunday 7th – Leeds O2 Academy
Tuesday 9th – Nottingham Rock City
Wednesday 10th – Norwich UEA
Thursday 11th – Birmingham O2 Academy
Saturday 13th – Cardiff University
Sunday 14th – Bristol O2 Academy
Monday 15th – Brighton Dome
Tuesday 16th – Bournemouth O2 Academy
Thursday 18th – Portsmouth Pyramid / Portsmouth Guildhall
Friday 19th – Cambridge Corn Exchange
Saturday 20th – Brixton O2 Academy

JAN 26: SOUTHAMPTON, Joiners – 0238 8022 5612 / www.joinerslive.co.uk
JAN 27: CARDIFF, Clwb Ifor Bach – www.ticketweb.co.uk
JAN 28: LONDON, Borderline – 08448 472 465/ www.ticketweb.co.uk
JAN 29: NOTTINGHAM, Rock City – 0871 3100 000 / www.alt-tickets.co.uk
JAN 30: BIRMINGHAM, Academy 3 – 0844 477 2000 / www.ticketweb.co.uk
FEB 01: SHEFFIELD, Academy 2 – 0844 477 2000 / www.ticketweb.co.uk
FEB 02: LEEDS, Cockpit – 0113 245 4650 / www.lunatickets.co.uk
FEB 03: MANCHESTER, Night & Day – 0161 832 111 / www.gigsandtours.com
FEB 04: NEWCASTLE, Digital – 08444 771 000 / www.yourfutureisdigital.com
FEB 06: GLASGOW, ABC – 08444 999 990 / www.gigsinscotland.com

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.

Despite the long lifespan, this isn’t a nostalgia gig; Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes (shortened to The Jukes from now on) have released 4 albums of new material in the last decade and his audience expect to hear the new songs as well as the 70s classics. The audience at the Buxton Opera House were mainly the expected glad to be grey generation with some notable exceptions, including the teenager behind the mixing desk applauding the solos and singing along to songs recorded around 2 decades before he was born.

The Jukes are a 9-piece band (lead vocal, guitar, keyboard, bass and drums plus horn section of baritone sax, tenor sax, trombone and trumpet) playing a huge range of material from Jukes originals to Atlantic soul and (on this particular night) Rolling Stones covers (and many, many more). The incredibly high standard of musicianship and rapport is matched by the showmanship and professionalism of the band, who respond instantly to any curve balls thrown by Southside as the show progresses. As well as playing some great blues harp, Southside has a phenomenal soul voice; think of honey poured on gravel and you’re about there.

The set opens with the barnstorming “Shake ‘Em Down”, which is a great showcase because it’s a straight-ahead rocker and shows off the band at its best with big horn fills and the guitar and keyboards right up front. There may be set list taped to the front of the stage, but it’s pretty much redundant after the first song. The band, and particularly Southside, read the audience incredibly well and will play whichever song is going to work best. The fact that the band have been together so long, means that they respond instantly to any changes of direction and even call the tunes themselves at times. With a back catalogue of around 200 of their own tunes, plus about another 500 that they’ve played at some time the band are never allowed to coast. It also means that you never see the same set twice.

The band are all very accomplished musicians, but they also like to put on a performance, which means that there’s always something interesting happening on stage, such as the horn section storming the front of the stage or Southside insisting that the band all sit down while he sings “Don’t Look Back” (a hit for Peter tosh in 1978, if you must know). The set (which is always at least 90 minutes long including encores) features old and new material including the big crowd pleasers such as “The Fever”, I Don’t Want To Go Home” and the wonderful Springsteen ballad “Hearts of Stone” which closes the show. The real highlights for me were the relatively new “Passion Street” featuring a wonderful tenor sax solo from Joey Stann and, of course, “The Fever” which allowed trumpet player Chris Anderson to cut loose on a solo which started as laid-back, played with a mute and finished as blistering, strident raw brass.

If you want to experience a band of excellent musicians who love what they do and give everything every night, then you should really go to see The Jukes at Shepherds Bush Empire this Friday.

By the way, an honourable mention goes to Ian Siegal who opened for the Jukes at the Opera House, playing a set of acoustic blues which was excellent and well appreciated by the partisan audience. A great night out and, yes, they are the best bar band in the world.

Here are some exclusive pics from the gig.

If any track was ideally suited to battling it out in the singles chart, then this is surely a strong contender. ‘Home Run’ starts out with resonant electronic guitar riffs chords before driving drum beat launches the song into full flow.

The lyrics work well and it has a nice popular music feel to the track. There some clear similarities in their sound to bands such as Radiohead and during softer moments, even Coldplay.

The band is not afraid to use silence as a musical force which is unusual amongst most bands in today’s society; this effect is heightened by following such sections with much louder and contrasting rhythms.

A strongly recommended single from a band that is sure to hit the big-time very soon.