TAKE ME BACK, NEW ZEALAND

I fixed up the candy, look!

The Shocking Pinks, "Broken Lens" - Just to make sure we're all caught up on the latest drama, here's a rundown: (1) James derides entire citizenry of New Zealand as toothless sheepfucking Peter Jackson-enabling hillbillies bereft of any sort of cohesive indie-rock scene. (2) Enraged New Zealander becomes engorged with nationalistic fervor, takes James to task in comments section. (3) In a fit of spiteful intoxication, James decides to investigate further, a course of action which eventually leads to a copy of the Shocking Pinks' Mathematical Warfare on his hard drive. (4) Mathematical Warfare is played once, revealing itself to be an exceptionally good album and the protagonist in this sordid saga to be an incomparable idiot. Seriously, folks - Mathematical Warfare is a technicolor palette of ways in which a modern rock album can sound good, and those of us who've managed to live our lives without staring down the barrel of its pleasures deserve to be slapped for our stupidity.

The problem, sorta, is that I have absolutely no confidence in my ability to represent it in any appropriate manner; Mathematical Warfare plays as fast and loose with musical styles as anything else I've ever tried to describe as a cohesive album. Well, maybe not "loose"; if the album as a whole is defined by anything, it's by the intense discipline on full display in every hook, drum pattern, and bassline. Of course, that's not to cast the Shocking Pinks as Sons of The Associates or whatever; Mathematical Warfare takes a deliciously deft detour around the tedious, hermetic soundscape offered up by so many of its sonic peers (no matter where they fall on the spectrum) by leaving the mix pointedly rough and highlighting the lack of attention lavished on the recording process (large parts of Mathematical Warfare almost sound as if they'd been recorded completely live). They're also not afraid to veer from their chosen path as wildly as if they were being chased by the cops; Mathematical Warfare can go from "Collarbone"-esque indie-funk to Electrelane-y motorik to Prinzhorn Dance Academy-worthy lo-fi indie skronk in the space of fewer songs than you might have ever thought possible. It's a disorienting listening experience at times (especially since the album's so long - eighteen tracks? maybe they should have signed to Cash Money instead of DFA), but it's an incredibly rewarding one, exponentially moreso the more you're willing to sign yourself over to its charms.

None of this, however, makes picking a representative track any easier. "Broken Lens" seemed like a safe enough pick, what with its sinuous "I Zimbra" polyrhythmical underpinnings and claustrophobic hi-hat exoskeleton making for Mathematical Warfare's most immediately accessilbe moment, but you really do owe it to yourself to investigate this album on your own; it's all enjoyable on the same terms as "Broken Lens" (i.e. "HEY FUCKER, HERE'S SOME STUFF YOU CAN WATCH YOURSELF GET CATASTROPHICALLY INTO AS LONG AS YOU CAN FIND SOMETHING TO TAP ALONG TO"), even if it's got places to musically go and people to musically see. I don't mean to cast it as an unqualified masterpiece or anything; it is merely a very good record, possibly one of the fifteen or twenty best ones released in 2005. But it's most inarguably a masterpiece of just doin' stuff, because holy fuck does Mathematical Warfare do a ton of stuff, and holy fuck does it do a bunch of it well. (Click here to buy Mathematical Warfare from Amazon.co.uk)

Evie Sands, "I Love Makin' Love To You" - Speaking of albums which aren't masterpieces by any stretch of the definition yet which deserve at least a fraction of the attention being devoted to Dayglo Torah (incidentally, I ALMOST TOLD YOU), the world has recently seen fit to reissue Evie Sands' Estate of Mind, and SURPRISE BITCHES, it's actually pretty good. I'm not going to lie and act like I hadn't been hoping for a better album; as someone who buys and unironically enjoys those Guilty Pleasures compilations, I keep waiting for the album to justify my undying fascination with chart-oriented blue-eyed-soul, and sadly Estate of Mind isn't that album - its lunging stabs at commercial relevance come off as more than a little calculated, especially when judged next to the tracks that let Sands' army of studio guns-for-hire do their thing. Luckily, however, even if this contrast ends up definining Estate of Mind, anyone who actually listens to the record will be quick to point out that it's hardly the norm; most of Estate of Mind is nothing more than immaculate (and I use that word for a reason - Rev-Ola did a great job on the remaster) pop music from a bygone era which, at its best (as "I Love Makin' Love To You" can most reasonably be described), all but oozes with a devastatingly arch sultriness. Most of this, to be fair, is attributable to Sands' voice (which practically sounds lab-engineered to lure ships into the rocks), but the music behind her is nothing to sneeze at either - there's a patina of warmth coating Estate of Mind from back to front against which Sands' voice can only be said to lounge; suffice it to say that Estate of Mind practically cultivates its own ecosystem. It's not the album I might have been hoping for, true - but Leslie Feist could record this exact same album and the hipsterati would be lining up to try and stick their dicks through the center-hole. (Click here to buy Estate of Mind direct from Rev-Ola)

Waldorf, "Erlkonig" - Given how quickly disco music can vacillate from "cool" to "uncool" in the eyes of its consumers, it's hardly a surprise to see how much of it - especially the modern stuff, although then again being right in the thick of modernity does tend to fog up one's vision - expressly deals with coolness. I mean, the DFA's brand of disco music is nothing if not painstakingly cool; nobody's going to chide you for not having any particular affinity for drawn-out cold-eyed dance-music epics, but that shit's clearly something for you to work out with whichever god you worship. Likewise, nobody's ever going to hold it against you for failing to see the appeal of a corpus of work as unyieldingly, mortifyingly ecstatic as that of A Touch Of Class; I've been a fan of theirs for nearly four years now, but I've pretty much assumed it's a pursuit in which I'm doomed to engage alone due to my inability to begrudge people's reticence to wave the flag for ostentatiously chintzy disco tricks and gleeful pansexuality-for-pansexuality's-sake. Lucky for me, then, that enough like-minded scions of truth exist on this planet to necessitate a sequel to the seminal A Touch Of Class Sucks! compilation; luckier still, it's almost as unimpeachable a collection of well-honed ridiculousness as its older brother. What always separated ATOC from their lesser cousins was their capacity to use stupidity as a hook rather than as a wholesale justification for a song's existence; it's not a coincidence that the Scissor Sisters' magesterial cover of "Comfortably Numb" first came out (heh) on ATOC, since it embodies the two-fisted combination of inarguably flawless music and "wait, what?"-worthy content which defines so much of ATOC's most enjoyable work. On Sucks, the standout (or at least the standout among tracks I hadn't heard before cracking open the packaging) has to be Waldorf's "Erlkonig", a lordly little slice of icy Kraut-disco magnificence gleefully ruined by its lyrics about elf-kings and stolen princesses and all sorts of stuff better left to unsavory mailing lists for people who write Willow fan-fiction; this is a song which, I swear to god, contains the couplet "MY SON, WHY COVER YOUR FACE IN SUCH FEAR/You see, the elf-king, father, is near!" for God's sakes. Frankly, I'd have a harder time imagining someone not being mortified by stuff like this; lord knows my toes were curling the first few times. What's great about "Erlkonig", then, is how lackadaisically its attitude towards forcing you to confront its preposterousness plays out; I like to think of the lyrics as the stick to which the musical carrot is tied and dangled in front of my face, the tunnel of light through which God coaxes dead folks' souls into the next world, every torturous second of The Wall not detailing the immutable consequences of failing to eat one's meat - in other words, the stuff you endure in order to confirm the overall experience of the journey. As someone who got acquainted with dance music through the unyieldingly dogmatic peaks and trenches of trance, I can say with unequivocal confidence that this is one hell of a great way to force a rapturous audience into putting off their pleasure; actively thinking that something's stupid, after all, still requires active engagement with the actual song at hand, which is a hell of a lot more than you can say for most dance music (or music in general for that matter). Besides, the more serious dance music gets, the more blood gets mixed in with the ink delineating the depths of humiliation the end-user will eventually bring on him- or herself; it strikes me as an intensely pragmatic choice - not the only choice, mind you, but an unequivocally viable one - to just go ahead and get the mortification over with now and have some motherfucking fun. And I swear to God that "Erlkonig" is fun as fuck in a way that will in no way remind you of a term paper. (Click here to buy A Touch Of Class Still Sucks! direct from the label)