September 29, 2009
Posted Fri 2 Oct 2009 3:58PM BST by Reviews Editor in Recommenders
Welcome to Yahoo! Music's whistle-stop guide to what's happening in music this week. Every seven days in Recommenders we check-out the latest tracks, downloads, leaks, links and video clips from the corners of every genre and let you know whether they're worth getting out of bed for. Today, CHRIS PARKIN puts the microscope up to THE INVISIBLE, LA ROUX, GRAHAM COXON, MUMFORD & SUNS, THE DRUMS and NATALIE IMBRUGLIA.With record shops shifting fewer units than an asbestos wholesaler, the Mercury Prize has only to concern itself with one thing these days: awarding brilliance. So giving Speech Debelle's bubbly but ultimately forgettable album the gong over that from the list's only innovators, THE INVISIBLE, was a cop-out. It's left to Yahoo! Music, then, to salute the jazz-brained gang whose phosphorescent "LONDON GIRL" twitches techily and grooves ever-so delicately, like disco-soul for existentialists afraid of mirror balls.
Another Mercury nominee who had half-a-fringe on the big prize was LA ROUX (pictured), by which it should always be meant Elly Jackson, daughter of "The Bill"'s June Ackland, rather than the duo she shares with anonymous knob-twiddler Ben Langmaid. When he takes more than just a teaspoon, a saucepan and a Casio keyboard into the studio with him we'll give Ben his due. As it is, La Roux's special appeal lies solely in Jackson's passionate and mightily polarising, against-all-odds voice rather than the dinkyland production of "I'M NOT YOUR TOY".
Although committed to tape some months before Blur's five-star reunion gigs, GRAHAM COXON's latest, "BRAVE THE STORM", could be taken for an autobiographical account of his gearing up for those dates with Damon Albarn and co; sonically this is the calm just before the Britpop typhoon. Once a bespectacled guitar-thwacking loon, here a folk-inspired Coxon picks his way through a bucolic, never-quite-whimsical landscape, riding a bouncy road of bass lines laid down by Pentangle's Danny Thompson, and worming his way into our hearts with that brittle, huggable voice of his.
As if to say traditional music and its offspring isn't always as pup-lovely as Graham Coxon's, Laura Marling chums MUMFORD & SONS lash out with a torrent of heartbroken tears and bloody spittle on their unusually bitter "LITTLE LION MAN", thrashing their banjos and wheeling out words unsuitable for radio. While it serves notice that perhaps they're not the cute, cuddly and overly earnest band some of us think, it's hardly on a par with Bill Callahan ripping out his heart and laughing in our face.
Setting themselves up for a fall of Babel-sized proportions are Florida émigrés THE DRUMS. "LET'S GO SURFING" is just about perfect. It's everything oikish, American teen-pop should be: an effervescent mix of Kim Wilde's "Kids In America', "Wake Up!" and the Modern Lovers, its every slacker hook, pogoing bass line and whistle designed to claw its way into our minds and set up a rehearsal space there. Enjoy it, though, for these newly relocated hipsters (Brooklyn, of course) have little else of quality in their decidedly '80s-looking suitcase.
Second only to Shakira's alarming "She-Wolf" video in the brazen-hussy stakes, NATALIE IMBRUGLIA kowtows to record label pressure (what else?) by appearing in a video for "WANT" that Nuts TV would have cracked open the Stella for. It would seem that making a return no one's much arsed about - albeit with a vaguely distracting, Kylie-aping electro offering - means acquiescing to more perverted minds who think playing to a popstrel's strength means flashing bare flesh.
