Music Reviews

All album reviews appeared in The North Guide, a Time Out-style listings magazine for Newcastle, 2000-2003. I’ve also written extensively about music for The Gen and Essential Newcastle, specialising in new regional music.

Motorhead
Hammered (SPV)

BE-WARTED ICON OF greasy, leather-bound rawk Lemmy was famously fired from prog nonces Hawkwind for being on the wrong drugs. Ergo, upon the arrival of Motorhead’s new album on my desk, I thought I’d better scour the backwaters of my medicine cabinets, veg rack and old coat pockets in search of the absolute correct stimulants and/or depressants to get my own mind into a fit enough state to be “Hammered”.
Snort! And loaded on two Lemsips, 46 Pro-Plus and a deliberately over-microwaved jacket potato I return (with a sprout stuck to left side of nose for comic solidarity) and ready myself for the aural battle about to commence. And guess what? It sucks like Thora Hird eating an apple. For the most part mid-paced ‘driving’ rockers (that’s driving in the ‘driving my Mondeo to Roxette like a wanker’ sense, not the drill into head/Pistols sense) that would struggle to make even the most Germanic mullet stand to attention, this sounds exactly like you’d imagine Lemmy would if he jilted his amphetamine bride in favour of sipping OJ: completely clapped out.
In fairness, a handful of tracks aren’t too shocking. Brave New World comes with an animal of a riff and some fine social Wilde-isms (“Being poor is worse than having AIDS” – ooh, touché), Shut Your Mouth almost actually rocks and Red Raw is a blatant 2000-miles-an-hour retread of Ace of Spades, which I have absolutely no problem with, ever. Lemmy still walks the walk, sings like he eats dwarves for fun and can certainly talk the talk (song titles Shut Your Mouth, Red Raw and No Remorse sound like the taglines to porn movies I’d love to see) but sadly, the only card for him nowadays is the bus pass.

(Published: The North Guide, April 2002)

Etienne de Crecy Presents…
Super Discount (Different)

INSTEAD OF WRITING this review properly I could just thumb through my dictionary picking out 9.6 superlatives per letter, but that wouldn’t be fair and I’d be buggered when I got to X. So here’s some thoughts on one of the best albums of the last decade.
Five years ago, house music was tired. But in a dark bedroom in Paris, a group of young friends (Laurent Garnier, Alex Gopher, the Air and Daft Punk gangs and Etienne de Crecy) sat with a bag. And in that bag was Detroit techno, easy listening, hip hop, acid house and soul. And they shook the bag up just to see what would happen. And what happened was Daft Punk’s Homework, Air’s Moon Safari and de Crecy’s own masterpiece, Super Discount: or namely, French house. It was crazy. It rocked.
And five years later, it rules the world. Of all these seminal, essential albums, Super Discount is possibly the best. 62 minutes, a dirt-mall supermarket theme including titles which translate as The Boss Has Gone Mad! And Everything at 10 Francs, all produced or remixed by de Crecy, a new music genre invented, yada yada. Prix Choc is sexier than sex, Le Patron Est Devenou Foux! is a totally perfect disco blowout and Air’s Soldissimo contains one of the most beautiful cadences ever committed to vinyl in the name of ‘dance’.
It’s a record for baking sunshine, sweat-drenched nightclubs, daytime cocktails or midnight coffee; an urbane, chic, electrifying whirlwind of sound. I didn’t much care for dance music before I heard this record. This timely re-issue (with a bonus remix disc that’s another story altogether) gives us all a chance to reacquaint.

(Published: The North Guide, June 2002)

Blues Traveler
What You And I Have Been Through (BMG)

BLOODY HELL. IMAGINE trying to write 300 words describing, say, a potato. From top to bottom. Okay… it’s brown. It comes from the dirt. It’s shaped a bit like a broken football. Under certain circumstances, like differential light conditions, etc., it’s quite easy to mistake it for a piece of shite.
It’s at times like the first minute of What You And I Have Been Through, when John Popper, Blues Traveler’s medically unfortunate vocalist and big-throated talisman launches into an effects-laden solo harmonica chorus of The Star Spangled Banner, that you wish Veg Monthly could just come and whisk you away for a lifetime of penning beautiful prose about growbags and celery. Within five minutes of that Hendrix-aping atrocity, the band bellyflop into a porridge-thick fretless bass-thwacking, Muddy Waters-in-his-grave-turning blues jam that doesn’t abate for the next, ooh, hour, and my critical nodes start making a sound akin to an effects-laden solo harmonica chorus of The Star Spangled Banner. This… is just noise.
Blues Traveler, as you’ll all remember, were the fat boogie guys dressed in Amish gear who played a free, Farm Aid-style concert in the middle of Kingpin, which, as you’ll all remember, was a movie about a one-handed bowler played by Woody Harrelson. (At least I hope this really happened, otherwise that’s one fucked-up subconscious I got.) Their niche, as it were, comes alongside other campus faves like Phish and the Spin Doctors: hairy, pathologically earnest purveyors of the groovy cosmic jam, honed by years of bad grass abuse and constant, drudging live shows like the one chronicled here. Blues Traveler sound at best like the plant from Little Shop of Horrors fronting the jazz-funk band who did the music for TV test cards.
It’s hard to pick any highlights from What You And I Have Been Through, but then it’s hard even to tolerate for more than a few minutes for even a boogie-rock disciple like myself (The Doobie Brothers? Future of rock ‘n’ roll, mate). Go through this again? I’d rather stick potatoes in my ears.

(Published: The North Guide, February 2003)