The Dirty Dozen – February 2011

A preliminary rummage through the coming month’s singles unearths The Megaphonic Thrift, whose Talks Like a Weed King (****) impresses by resembling Silversun Pickups given a shot of Sky Larkin’s vitality. Equally pleasing is the airy and irresistible Sensations in the Dark (****), which sees solo Gruff Rhys land closer than ever to the odd-pop benchmark set by Super Furry Animals. The b-side better encapsulates its creator’s broad and explorative palette by resembling a Geisha dance played through underwater telephones.

Rhys might have built a career from the peculiar-yet-popular, but David Lynch has come to define it. Factor in remixes and Good Day Today/I Know (****) is over an hour long, though for a man who’s birthed radiator ladies and disturbing micro-pensioners, a disregard for conventional duration is a minor eccentricity. The director has prior form in the music world, but that doesn’t stop the assuredness of this new guise from astonishing.

Like Lynch, Villagers’ Conor O’Brien is a dab hand at strange and evocative imagery, and though Becoming a Jackal (***) is poetic and beautiful and so on, it’s also a re-release – an economy I’m going to hold against it whether it’s fair to or not.

Lykke Li’s own idiosyncrasies seemed to freeze her out of pop’s big leagues last time round, and though the Swede should theoretically find an indie chart full of Florence-fanciers more receptive, I Follow Rivers (***) offsets the advantage by being rather drab.

Fenech-Soler are surely only a marketing push away from chart success of their own, with Demons (**) typical of their hook-filled dance-pop. Calvin Harris has bought many a pair of daft glasses on the back of less, but bland catchiness shouldn’t be a raison d’être in itself. No, if you want innovation in your dance music, dubstep is officially this decade’s genre of choice. Magnetic Man are its de facto mainstream ambassadors, but when guest John Legend’s soulful vocals on Getting Nowhere (***) impress more than the production, something’s either amiss or being watered down.

L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N. (***) is O.K. – not high praise, but Noah and the Whale don’t lend themselves easily to grand declarations of love. Their comeback is a twee Walk on the Wild Side, and though it won’t reverse opinions, it should give the apathetic a nudge towards the thumbs-up camp.

Talking of grand declarations, the already-polarising Brother are up next. “It is what it is,” sings Lee Newell on debut Darling Buds of May (**), and it’s tempting to appropriate the sentiment and move on. But a shrug of “each to their own” won’t cut it in the presence of ‘the future of music’ – colours must be nailed to masts. So here goes: this isn’t terrible, but only because illiciting displeasure is beyond its capabilities.

Almost as un-Googleable are CD/EX, which handily extrapolates to Chris Devotion and the Expectations. I Need Your Touch (***) pushes all the right buttons, their proficiency with dirty, old school riffage already catching the ear of Rocket From the Crypt’s John Reis, to whom they pay an obvious debt. Exeter’s The Computers went one better and actually recorded Group Identity (***) in Reis’s Californian home, with a reverential recreation of Train in Vain on the b-side confirming their passion for punk kicks, but also verifying their lack of new ideas.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH

Renaissance man Chilly Gonzales will spend 2011 hawking not just new album Ivory Tower but a movie of the same name. The lead track from both earns him single of the month: You Can Dance (****) might epitomise breezy cool to the point of pastiche, but it’s pulled back by effusive euphoria.