Where now for the uncrowned elder statesmen of big-budget rock? After the decidedly hot-and-cold reaction to Mondomovie, their last album, Shower have apparently taken a lesson from Clifton Woods and now present a more laid-back, chilled-out tone, going back to their roots in the post-industrial Rhode Island rock scene. Some of the songs even display an ironic self-awareness: in Any More for Leather and Break Horizon Bells Michael Dell satirises his iconic status as rock's premier frontman, his mock-mordant lyrics cycling airborne over Keith Reed's ever-jangling guitar. Crimson Grass forms a heartfelt dialogue with the band's previous albums: with the extensive quotations from past successes like Gunflower and Lumbago Tree, the band seem to be reaching out and asking a few tough questions of themselves. What direction will their music take from here? Has their time passed, or can they still rock the system? On the basis of this album, the answer to both questions is a resounding 'Yes!'
Fresh from their lucrative new deal with Epigram, the Lancastrian balladeers are back with their rawest, most politicised album yet. The title track, which refers to detention of Afro-Castroist guerrillas by the corrupt Pinatubo regime, sets the tone. Smugglers frontman Mark Davey bawls out these working-class anthems with hammer-and-nails sincerity, his hollow northern vowels resonating ever more anger from the steelmills and coalpits of his youth. "We left our pain/The human brain/In a bargain bin", he sings, as Simon Macclesfield's angry guitar and Brian Golding's percussive drum-work nail down the Smugglers' sound: post-punk, pre-retro, all rough edges. A must-have.
Linen Jeans are the quiet, sullen guys who used to sit at the back of class and go home and write toilet-paper-rolls of poetry after school: the kind of guys who subscribed to teenage-angst aged fourteen and never looked back. In Butterfly, their first album to hit the mainstream shelves, they serve up their angst-poetry as music. Sounding like a homespun blend of semi-grunge, sub-rock and My First Keyboard Lesson, Jeans aren't helped by the crane-like vocals of lead singer Guy Blessington, who makes each track sound like the strangled death-cry of a bleating hen. Not good.
For those not yet convinced of the greatness of this latter-day punk-rock outfit from North Carolina, look no further than A Night with Cheese, the second track on their outstanding new album. Straight away, lead guitarist Dale Sobchek launches into a thunderous, thrilling four-chord riff, augmented by layer upon layer of incredibly textured guitar and bullet-popping drums, creating an instant and undeniable aural sound-space. And for most of the album it never lets up: the aggressive, untamed lattice-work of Sobchek backed up by Carl Foster's throbbing bass, reminiscent of Blunt Cascade's Hal Cardaway at his best. And then there are the vocals - oh, yes, the vocals. Caroline Pewter's voice is an all-in-one madonna-whore-complex, sometimes down-and-dirty, sometimes divine, like the offspring of an archangel and a two-bit hooker. Her lyrics are one part Foucault to three parts T.S. Eliot: listen to the sustained, but self-aware, patter of Miscast as Orfeo, or the sublime verbal autonomy of Howl at the Moon. "Can I behave/The tidal wave/Navigation takes me out to sea/You gotta swallow your pride and believe in me." Classic stuff.
The outspoken rapper returns with his own distinctive brand of in-your-face profanity and militant Buddhism that isn't afraid to kick ass. Any fears that the man Koan was going to tone down his act are quickly dispelled in the powerful first track, Strap Her Down and F**k Her, a tour-de-force of verbal virtuosity and sustained sprung-rhythm attack. He rails against the gross materialism of western society using the shocking image of a man forcing his wife to have sexual congress with a horse: this is powerful, visceral stuff, Koan using double and sometimes even triple assonance to underline the force of his point: "Come here b*tch/And twitch/Your ass for my switch/-Blade, whore." Under his carefully-contrived public image as a boorish, wife-beating thug (which he lampoons in Wife-Beaters 101), Koan's savage lyrics reveal a passionate reforming poet, a William Blake for the 21st century. Witness the biting irony of A Whore's a Whore and Meat-Hookers (which quotes Lymphomania's Towel Feeder), and see the injustices and inequalities of society being skewered before you on a plate. A true artist.
Breakfast Sump, aka Leila Hapgood, first hit the headlines last summer with her smash club anthem Into the Halo, which featured her disembodied vocals hovering over a rippling pseudo-ambient electronic sound-space. Halo is the centrepiece of this her first album, in which Hapgood takes the tenets of house/trance and weaves in her own distinctive retro-psychadelia, pulsing in sine-waves of moody blue, green, purple and orange. Excellent downtime listening.
All Danish bands must of course live under the shadow of the mighty Freya, but Rennet is one band willing to stake their own claim to music excellence. Nils Mortensen's outfit have raised a few eyebrows over the years, and their latest album should win them more than a few admirers. From the alt-folk excesses of Journeyman's Bottle, to the intricate 3/4/3 structure of Show me (the Faith), to the steady rock dirge Porterhouse Blues, this is an all-round solid album. Despite his tender years, Mortensen's vocals combine a time-worn grace with a steady vulnerability: overall the band's sound is Trailor Wedge meets Outscape meets Kurt Cannabich. Worth checking out.