As I Come Back (Again)

So I've decided to start doing a few more album reviews than before, which is to say I've decided to start doing some album reviews. There will, of course, still be plenty of pure MP3 content (by which I mean "MP3s and me bitching about the shameful dearth of third-person female manipulation of my junk), but album reviews are easy and I need to get back on the right track. SO:

Try and guess what pun you'll be seeing lead off every single review of this album

Shitdisco, "Disco Blood" (single mix) - It's just a sad fact of life: sometimes, even our most carefully cultivated methodologies fail us. My introduction to Scotland's Shitdisco, for instance, came to pass thanks to one of my iron-clad rules of singles-buying, namely that any single of even the most marginal interest put out by a band which doesn't appear to have an album in their future is to be immediately purchased. You will of course forgive me if I didn't expect to see an album proudly flying a flag reading "Shitdisco" in my lifetime; when I placed my order for the "Disco Blood" single back towards the tail end of 2005, I figured no band with a name like that pushing a sound like theirs promised to sound (second rule of singles-purchasing: if at all possible, let your purchasing instincts be guided as thoroughly by the hilariously untrustworthy descriptions furnished by the shops trying to take your money - hey, that initial listening experience isn't going to preserve itself) had a hope in hell of seeing so much as a second single, let alone a full album. Unsurprisingly, "Disco Blood" revealed itself to be a mix-CD stalwart almost on contact - I have friends with things like "lives" and "relationships" and "clean driving records" who, to this day, couldn't begin tell you who Bobby Orlando might have ever been, but know for a fact that he's coming 'round for tea. It wasn't even that "Disco Blood" was even necessarily all that great; it just sounded like a bunch of kids trying their damnedest to make something, and their enthusiasm for the task (to say nothing of the startling efficiency with which they accomplished it, given their means at the time) was just too infectious to deny.

At the time of this writing, Shitdisco's debut full-length Kingdom of Fear is two weeks away from its release date, and with it comes a really high likelihood of Shitdisco never crossing my mind again. Kingdom of Fear is, of course, by no means a bad album; with the exception of the less-than-engaging "I Know Kung-Fu" (ironically the b-side to the "Disco Blood" single), pretty much every song has something to reccomend it to the modern Anglophile, be it relentlessly frantic drums, searingly timely backing vocals, or that singular glee which only ever seems to show up on records made by young British kids acutely aware that although they may or may not be making art, they're definitely making a product. Kingdom of Fear could quite reasonably be summed up as the precise midpoint between the Klaxons' Myths of the Near Future and the Rapture's Pieces of the People We Love, and given my freely-admitted affection for both those records, I don't have it in me to tell like-minded spirits to give this one a pass outright. The record does a more than capable job on that front itself.

The problem with Kingdom of Fear, I guess, is that for an album released by a band called "Shitdisco", there's precious little of either actually on the record. It's arguable that Kingdom of Fear represents the apex of indie-rock production this year, given the raw material out of which it shapes itself; songs like "Another" echo the Shitdisco I used to know only insofar as that it moves at breakneck speed and Joel Stone and Joe Reeves' signature yelps probably couldn't even be wrangled into submission by Phil Spector. Everything else about the track is sweetened and smoothed to the point where it might as well be serve in a cone - I mean, even my little sister could probably differentiate between the layers of sounds on this track and point out lots of cool little moments where they come into collision. These songs actually sound like disco songs now - three-and-a-half-minute disco songs for the Paul Epworth set, sure, but disco songs nonetheless.

And therein lies the problem: everyone already knows what those songs sound like, so there's little incentive to try to introduce them around to people. Kingdom of Fear is full of finished products utterly immune to frivolous deconstruction, which is a perfectly admirable accomplishment for a band except for the fact that sitting around and frivolously deconstructing music is a substantial part of the point of getting way too into music in the first place. I stopped being interested in movies right around the time when those insufferably tedious Lord of the Rings movies became the lingua franca for discussions of the virtues of the art of filmmaking among my friends, mostly because I'm exponentially more interested in how people interact with those virtues than the volume of their presence. Compared to the Shitdisco with which I grew acquainted a year and a half ago, Kingdom of Fear is kinda like that - its artistic successes have absolutely no bearing on anything outside the confines of its running time, up to and including the actual band themselves. They may have made a real, no-foolin' record, but they've done so at the cost of their enthusiasm for (a) making music and (b) finding a way to turn that music into songs, and while the tradeoff might seem fair on the surface, in the long run it's just nothing to get excited over - or rather, nothing which promises to foster excitement for any period of time past the end of its tracklisting.

Look, I'll be honest: I'll probably end up keeping Kingdom of Fear on my iPod for a good minute or two if only to see how well it fares popping up randomly when I throw on shuffle mode (and I'm guessing it'll fare a lot better like that than as a contiguous experience). There are going to be a lot of people who like this album a lot more than me, and I can't fault them for doing so, although my guess is that across the board they'll be both younger and less interested in having good taste (or being gleefully supercilious about having bad taste). It is not - repeat - not a bad album, and the band has enough of a gift with a hook and an innate grasp for how a song should flow that it's wholly conceivable that they've got a for-realsies good album in there somewhere (although with a bandname like theirs, the window of opportunity before the real world sets in may be pretty small). But it's not a compelling album, no matter how closely or for how long you've been tracking the signifiers it draws upon, and anyone who could imagine themselves listening to it in fifteen years with the same doe-eyed admiration it'll most assuredly draw from some quarters upon their first listen is without question kidding themselves in a sincerely hilarious fashion. Hell, in fifteen years, do you even think the members of the band are going to be talking about how Dad had some minor chart success with a band called Shitdisco? Fun though it may be to listen to, there's simply no other way to describe Kingdom of Fear as anything other than an abomination; if they'd stayed the course of releasing singles whenever the spirit really and truly moved them, they might have cultivated an earnestly enthusiastic fanbase, all while refining their sound into something with little (if anything) to do with conceptions of being au courant. Now the most they can hope for is to stay just far enough below the radar to avoid being mentioned on VH1 Scotland's I Love The 2000s. (Click here to pre-order Kingdom of Fear from Amazon.co.uk)

Strange Idols, "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" (single mix) - Of course, if you want to hear how to put together a song so immaculately that you probably won't be able to help but tell your grandkids about it, look no further than Strange Idols, this year's early frontrunner for my springtime Britpop fixations. To say that "She's Gonna Let You Down" again is impeccably formed would actually be a pretty gross distortion of the truth; the reality of this magnificent little pop gem is that it's in dire need of another verse or two (ironic considering the way it clocks in awfully close to the mythical three-minute mark) or just some sort of gentle rreintroduction to the sonically hostile world known as Everything Else I've Heard Since This Song Suddenly Showed Up In My Life. They're already working with Gareth Parton, quite possibly the ideal producer in light of his work with the Pipettes (war crimes committed against "Dirty Mind" excepted, of course) so they've clearly got a future ahead of them; as anyone who's come into contact with the songs from their demo which made the rounds last year can attest, they already have an undeniable knack for songcraft even before they started steeping themselves in the dark arts of auteurist production. And if that is, in fact, what's happening, you couldn't ask for a better first step on this kind of journey than "She's Gonna Let You Down Again", a remarkable concoction of in-your-face brassiness and painstakingly arranged layers playing off each other to come up with something with the patina of an instant classic, something I can't even imagine haters being able to deny. Non-haters, of course, are in for a serious treat. I urge you to give it a shot and see on which side of the fence you end up falling. (Click here to order the "She's Gonna Let You Down Again" single, which is backed by the also-quite-kickass "Berlin" from Rough Trade)