Kingdom Of Rust

Doves
2009

Last in a quartet of latest (at the time) albums by favourite artists that I bought together (see Invaders Must Die, Yes and No Line On The Horizon), and probably the best of the bunch. Doves had a very distinctive sound and a wonderfully creative approach to what is still, at heart, guitar-based pop/rock.

Lead track "Jetstream" illustrates this very well, packing some cool noises, a great melody and a real sense of dynamics into its five-and-a-half minutes; from the choppy, tremelo-d guitar leading us in, through sublte picking on a guitar, with a kick coming in after two minutes, heavy phase on the hi-hat and some lovely floaty synth sounds, all building beautifully. It's a trick they repeat with the title track, an almost countrified two-step with strings and everything. Great stuff.

Everything here is very identifiably Doves, with hummable melodies and superb sounds. "10:30" stands out for me for its fantastic build and heads down rock in the middle. There's something controlled and yet borderline psychedelic about it which I love, and if I could, this is the kind of music I'd make. The slower tracks are also good, although not my favourite of theirs - I think they sounds very close to Elbow, who do it slightly better.

At the time of writing, Kingdom Of Rust is Doves' last album, which is a shame because all four of their releases are superb. Officially they are "on hiatus", but the three members have all subsequently released albums in separate acts, and given their level of success relative to Doves, I find it hard to believe that if they were happy to work together again that they wouldn't have done so by now.

No Line On The Horizon

U2
2009

First impressions: is this the dullest cover art ever? U2's web site calls it "striking". Er, OK, thanks boys, I'll stick with "boring". Given that U2 had generally been considered to have been going through the motions for several albums before this anyway, it seems like a ... brave choice.

Second impressions: the music isn't immediately striking either. Like another purchase at about the same period, Pet Shop Boys' Yes, this is an album from a band I've loved since my teens that I bought just because it was their latest; and again, it was the last time I did so, probably because the album didn't grab me straight away.

In fact, I was all prepared to write this album off as another from a band past its sell-by date (even one with as long a shelf life as U2), and I'd even written up a whole blog post to say so. But while I was writing it, the songs crept up on me. What U2 do, they do well, and what they do is arena-sized rock. A sense of the epic comes built in. If that's to your taste - and it's always been to mine, since 1984 and the first time I heard the War album - then there's plenty here to like.

I would describe it as mostly mellow, mid-paced rock, although that makes it sound duller than it is. The first two songs, "No Line On The Horizon" and "Magnificent", both have that restless, searching quality that Bono conveys so well when he sings at the top of his range. There's some quieter, moodier moments in "White As Snow" and "Cedars Of Lebanon". There's an inescapable reminder of older, classic U2 moments in many songs ("White As Snow" has definite echoes of "One", for example), but I suppose that's difficult to avoid when you have a full back-catalogue and a distinctive sound.

Sure, there are a couple of cringey moments - "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" is the kind of meaningless paradox that appeals to shallow minds, while "Get On Your Boots" feels like a bunch of middle-aged men trying to be cool (although Edge's fuzzed-up riffing is pretty cool).

It's not a classic album and I'd be hard-pressed to name or sing the songs unaccompanied. But I'm still enjoying them while they're on. Not such a waste of time as I thought.

Wheels Of Fire

Cream
1968

Oh dear

Cream's legacy and reputation is poorly served by their recorded output. The albums are mired in muddy production and marred by shockingly poor quality control. Wheels Of Fire is a case in point. There are a few jewels in the muck here, but they are obscured by period nonsense and self-indulgent wankathons.

What Cream actually did best, nowithstanding their influence on hard rock bands to come, was pop music. Sadly, by the time of this album, they were veering between cod-psychedelia and blues as a competitive sport, and very little comes off well by it. "White Room" is a good enough song to survive, and "Born Under a Bad Sign" is a nice cover. Of the live tracks, "Crossroads" has some stupendous guitar playing and a sense of energy that carries it through.

Everything else is awful, albeit in fairness, different degrees of awful. Tracks like "Sitting On Top Of The World" and "Those Were The Days" are average songs with odd arrangements. On the other hand, Ginger Baker holds responsibility for the two most pungent stinkers, "Pressed Rat And Warthog" - egregious sixties whimsy - and the excruciating "Toad", a fifteen minute drum solo. FFS. No-one should have to experience that.

Quite why this is in Rolling Stones 500 Greatest Albums list is honestly beyond me. Just get a Cream best of and you'll be much happier.

Yes

Pet Shop Boys
2009

Clocking on for the day job one more time

This doesn't feel like an album that had to be made, rather just what the boys did to fill in time between other projects. It's very identifiably Pet Shop Boys: Neil's fey, surprisingly weak vocals, the heavily reverbed synths and the tastefully melancholy mood; it's just not very good.

It's all very lush and beautifully produced, but ultimately a little stale and lifeless. Neil Tennant's voice is a taste that I thought I had acquired, but found surprisingly grating this time round, and the rather forced melodies didn't help. Stand out tracks include "Love etc." and "The Way It Used To Be", but only for being a little less meh than everything else.

I have nearly every Pet Shop Boys album up until this one, but this is where the boys lost me. I bought the album when it came out but didn't bother listening to it, and now I've come back to it eight years later, I don't feel like I missed out.

Invaders Must Die

The Prodigy
2009

This is probably one of the last times I bought an album simply because it was the latest by an act I followed. The Fat Of The Land is a classic, and had put The Prodigy into the category of bands whose albums I would automatically get. I must have bought this when it came out, listened to it once or twice and then forgot about it.

Why didn't I listen to it? Well, I think in part because on initial hearing, it's a bit Prodigy-by-numbers. You can play spot-the-similarity through the first few tracks; it sounds like Liam Howlett was deliberately referencing his own back catalogue, particularly tracks like "Smack My Bitch Up" and "Breathe". It's also somewhat monotonous; there's not much light and shade, or variations in tempo and mood - just the crushing, trademark Prodigy beats and crunches, and Keith Flint's unconvincing "edgy" attitude.

However, this time round - nearly nine years later - I gave it more time, and I'm pleased I did. Howlett has a superb ear for sounds and his sense of track structure is excellent. Many of the individual tracks are good, but unfortunately the album structure is less well sorted and as a result, it becomes wearing, like being bludgeoned around the ears for forty minutes.

The first three tracks ("Invaders Must Die", "Omen" and "Thunder") merge into each other with little to distinguish them, although it's a good basic sound and I particularly like the title track. "Omen" comes back later ("Omen - Reprise"), when it's much better: slower and moodier. "Warrior's Dance" also has some nice dynamics. Finally, "Stand Up" closes the album with something a bit different, a slower Big Beat kind of sound. (Oddly, I heard it soundtracking a BBC rugby show only a few days ago.)

What I also understand more this time round is the sheer craft. Having dipped a very tentative toe into making music with computers over the last couple of years, and having watched this great deconstruction of "Smack My Bitch Up", I feel I now have a much better appreciation of the talent, application and persistence involved in making music this way. There's so much going on in these tracks, so many tiny little sounds and samples, each of which is carefully shaped and placed.

Reading - November 2017

The Guitar Magazine (Vol 29 No 03)

Terminally Single by Kate Jenkins (1991)

Sweet, but the heroine is a bit pathetic, despite being a career woman. This book is twenty-six years old, and starting to feel dated. The hero's behaviour would unquestionably be classified as harassment in the workplace, particularly in light of current news. Do recent events spell the end for office-based romances?

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2005)

Famous, and understandably so - it's easy to read and digest, but oddly bitty and fragmented. The idea is that all these chapters - essays, kind of - together present evidence of the power of the unconscious mind, whether it's a good or a bad thing. But it feels like a bunch of different ideas and observations loosely linked by a theme, rather than a narrative that goes somewhere.

Abbey Road

The Beatles
1969

I came to Abbey Road relatively late - which is to say, for some reason I was at least ten before I listened to it properly. Given that at seven I was putting A Hard Day's Night, Rubber Soul and Sergeant Pepper on constant repeat, it's an odd oversight.

Perhaps this late-coming is why it's never been such a favourite as other Beatles albums. It hadn't embedded itself into my juvenile subconscious in the same way. Or maybe it's because ... well ... it's not really quite as good?

For a classic album, let alone a Beatles album, it really does have a lot of filler. Fully half of the first side is bordering on awful. I know they had to let Ringo sing on a track but really, "Octopus's Garden" is just rubbish. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is trite and unpleasant. "Oh Darling" just sounds like Paul's trying too hard. It's even more puzzling when you consider that the remainder of those six songs are fantastic, in particular the ground-breaking "I Want You", real heavy music to a ten-year-old.

Then there's the second side. After "Here Comes The Sun" (about as good as a song can actually ever be) and "Because" (disposable) comes the much-vaunted medley. A medley of songs that weren't quite finished or good enough to make it as whole pieces. It actually only starts to make sense with "Golden Slumbers", more than half way through. Then, I'll grant you, it's superb. The duelling guitars on "The End" are just fantastic - and then we get that perfect ending couplet: "And, in the end, the love you take / Is equal to the love you make". (Which they then spoil by having a joke song follow it.)

Still, I suppose the fourth or fifth best Beatles album is still good, eh?