ALBUM: "Accelerate" - R.E.M. (Warner Brothers, 2008)

Generally speaking, the accepted history of R.E.M. goes like this:

Liked by critics and musos:
Murmur (1983)
Reckoning (1984)
Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)

Liked by critics & punters:
Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)
Document (1987)
Green (1988)

Liked by pretty much everyone:
Out of Time (1991)
Automatic for the People (1992)

…and then? That’s when things start to get a little murky. 1994’s Monster was a huge seller but regarded as something of a clever-clever misstep by the critical community. 1997 travelogue New Adventures in Hi-Fi initially flummoxed the fuck out of everyone but gradually gained enough of a following to take its place as the last ‘officially’ great R.E.M. album. From the point of Bill Berry’s departure, however, it’s been widely suggested that the band may as well have not even bothered. Each successive LP has been trumpeted as the long-awaited return of one of the world’s greatest rock bands, only for it to underwhelm, disappoint or frustrate in equal measure.


I’ve never gone along with this interpretation of events. Despite its occasional forays into Stipe’s deeper subconscious (I Don’t Sleep, I Dream being the most notable example), for the most part Monster was great fun: a knowing cartoon parody of rock & roll which swaggered into view daubed in eyeliner and popping bubblegum. Yet beneath the wall of noise lurked some of the band’s most plaintive recordings to date. Strange Currencies, Let Me In, Tongue - try as they might to play around with convention and perception, R.E.M. are simply too smart to be able to mask the esoteric leanings that lurk beneath their flashiest surface. New Adventures in Hi-Fi pushed the arena-rock template into darker, more mysterious territory, filtering the band’s widening vision through the vast expanse of the American highway to deliver their most diverse collection to date.


Then there’s Up, the album I still regard as their greatest achievement. R.E.M.’s first LP to be written and produced without the input of Bill’s mystical eyebrows (apparently the source of their true power), Up is the sound of a band attempting to find its feet after having the rug pulled out from under them – as Michael Stipe memorably put it at the time, “a three-legged dog learning to walk again”. The resultant album – a shuffling amalgam of inter-band tensions, chronic writer’s block and a compulsion to reformulate their sound from top-to-bottom - is utterly remarkable, not just for the quality of its songwriting but for the fact that somewhere within the painful regenerative process their essential humanity is laid bare. For the first time the band sounded broken, flawed even uncertain: in other words, as hesitant and stumbling as us mere mortals. Daysleeper, The Apologist, Diminished, Walk Unafraid, Falls to Climb – on any other record these would be regarded as career highs, yet for some reason the album has been all but written out of the history books, as if any R.E.M. record lacking foot-to-the-floor stadium anthems could never be deserving of their status as rock royalty. Ditto 2001’s summery Reveal, an album which was initially heralded as something of a revelation but later curiously demoted to the rank of intriguing misfire.


Indeed, for all its flaws - bloodless production, non-committal orchestration and several songs that are the very definition of half-formed (The Worst Joke Ever, anyone?) – even 2004’s much-maligned Around the Sun is actually a pretty good listen, and certainly undeserving of its reputation as the ginger-haired stepson of the R.E.M. canon. Like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 before it, the record perhaps fell victim to the weight of expectation which accompanied its release, as if one album or film could ever alter the course of history. In reality the album was a far more subdued, restrained and intimate affair than initially trumpeted - the fraught response of a liberal conscience caught in a whirlwind beyond comprehension. Oblique references to 9/11 abound, in tandem with a sense of dignity and compassion which suggested that the band’s collective response to the events of that fateful September were rooted in shock and withdrawal rather than direct anger. Nevertheless, its two most potent protest songs - The Outsiders and Final Straw - were classic pieces of R.E.M. politicking: quietly intense distillations of offence and indignation which suggested a gathering sense of momentum to a nation’s fury. Ultimately though the album was considered a weak response to the times when apparently what most people wanted was a fire-spitting retread of Document (then again, it did also contain Wanderlust, so the criticism wasn’t entirely unjust).


Predictably, for all those with Stand-sized attention spans these last three albums went down about as well as a fart in a spacesuit. Now, call me a complete bastard (many do), but I’ve recently stopped going to see the band live because I just can’t hack being surrounded by clueless windowshoppers who go nuts for Orange Crush but chat all the way through Sitting Still because the only R.E.M. albums they own are Automatic, Monster and In Time. It seems to me that perceptions of the band fall squarely either side of what I call “the two R.E.M.s”: the first, a guitar-driven, stadium-conquering rock act; the flipside, a steely art collective with a knack for a killer tune. When the two sides of this equation butt heads (Losing My Religion, Drive, The One I Love), the results speak for themselves. However, whenever the band departs from its trademark formula of Rickenbacker jangle, catchy chorus and sparring Stipe-Mills vocals, there seems to be an infuriating perception that they’re “just not R.E.M. anymore”.


My own personal take on the band has always been influenced less by their songwriting style but by the air of cool, considered mystique that’s underpinned much of their output. What criticism of the post-Berry albums seems to have conveniently neglected is that the essence of the band never actually disappeared - it simply metamorphosed into a form compatible with their evolving sense of inner calm. It’s there in The Lifting, Walk Unafraid and I’ve Been High: songs whose emotional truth arises not from empty platitudes but their innate sense of poetic interplay. Indeed, despite the occasional clanger in the midst, from this point of view R.E.M. have never once departed from the intellectual and artistic template established by Murmur back in 1983.


Ever the band’s unofficial historian with one eye on their legacy and the other on its critical standing, it can’t have escaped Peter Buck’s attention that his boys have come in for a bit of a pasting of late. Indeed, despite his repeated protestations that public perception has never influenced the direction of their work, I suspect that it’s Buck who’s responsible for the band’s vigorous return to guitar-driven rock after three albums of exhausting his musical toy-box. I must admit that when it was announced that the new album was a return to the brash, ballsy style of Document and Lifes Rich Pageant – for my money, actually the two weakest LPs in the band’s back catalogue – I approached Accelerate with caution. R.E.M.’s most recent attempts to recapture the carefree days of the early work have invariably sounded clumsy, forced or - in the case of the best-forgotten Animal - just plain crap. Frankly, I was bracing myself for Accelerate to be the sound of a band foundering in the depths of an irrevocable mid-life crisis.


The good news first, then: it’s actually pretty solid, and at least not completely naff as initially feared. Following the wishy-washy production job that threatened to skewer whatever grace was exuded by Around the Sun, Accelerate is crisply produced by U2 alumnus Jacknife Lee and really benefits from an overall boost in volume. Unlike the lush, structured soundscapes of Up and Reveal, it’s cranked out with a smart ear for detail in the sparse instrumentation of each track: witness the crackling jabs of organ and discordant picked-harmonics which enliven Houston and Sing for the Submarine respectively.


Politically it’s forthright and agitated where Around the Sun was ponderous and preoccupied: lyrically-speaking, more Bad Day than The Outsiders. Michael Stipe has finally cast off his earnest boots to emerge as the ranting political commentator we so yearned for back in 2004, lashing out barbed witticisms left, right and centre to bait everyone from Congress to the mass media. Musically it’s like the last twenty years never happened as Buck and Mills dash off several songs reminiscent of These Days and Swan Swan H (indeed, the album’s best straight-ahead rocker, Horse to Water, would easily sit alongside It’s the End of the World as We Know It and Finest Worksong on Document with its piercing feedback squalls and explosive melodies). Accelerate features Mike Mills’ best bass-playing since Murmur and his most prominent vocal presence since the tail-end of Green; on the whole, it delivers exactly what was promised - a sort of Life's Rich Document in perfect sync with the zeitgeist.


Let’s not forget though that for all the bullish posturing, R.E.M. haven’t been that band since picking up the mandolin for Losing My Religion, and as such their gradual retreat into a progressively more dignified form of musical expression over the past decade has always seemed wholly in step with their standing as the rock world’s weathered conscience. To this end, Accelerate’s opening trio of songs immediately sets alarm-bells clanging. Living Well is the Best Revenge is marred by the kind of strangulated diatribes which sounded so uneasy on similar outings like Departure and suggest that Stipe really is getting way too old for this shit - it’s got a kicking chorus, but that isn’t enough to redeem the nagging sense that its themes and intentions are ill-served by a band that’s become too innately restrained to rev straight back into overdrive. Even worse, the happy-go-lucky Man-Sized Wreath is faintly embarrassing, quickly directing itself towards the commode of R.E.M. history with some dreadful funk chords, a few misplaced shouts of “Ow!” and that eternal unspoken sin – a wavering, ever-so-slightly off-key Mills backing vocal. Abominable title aside, lead single Supernatural Superserious is inoffensive enough but possibly the band’s most by-numbers outing to date, offering up the kind of casual toss-off you might get if you gave a guitar to a 10-year-old and asked them to write you an R.E.M. song.


By this point my heart was suffering the same withering palpitations previously reserved for the moment you realise that the stupid bitch stood next to you at the Hyde Park gig is going to talk on her mobile all the way through Nightswimming. However, just when it seems like the band’s revitalisation sounds more like a desperate scrabble for former glories, they turn things around with the simplest about-turn. Drifting in on the subtlest of melodies, Hollow Man quickly bursts into life to deliver the kind of bittersweet, major-minor chord-run that the band does so well. From hereon in, it’s encouragement all the way.


At its best, Accelerate marries Fables-era songwriting to New Adventures bombast. Its title track finds Stipe raising his head and clenching his fists to deliver R.E.M.’s grittiest song since Walk Unafraid. The album’s undoubted high-point, it’s propelled by a skittering drum-loop with gives the track a sense of movement notably absent from the band’s last three records. Lyrically it plays like World Leader Pretend for a Bushwhacked America, articulating a startling recognition that feelings of powerlessness can always be eclipsed by the duelling forces of belief and reckoning. It also contains one of the band’s best-ever soundbites in the form of its blazing central refrain: “Where is the ripchord, the trapdoor, the key / Where is the cartoon escape hatch for me?”


The album’s other two standouts offer similar harks back to past triumphs. The elegant Mr Richards is a switched-on political tract whose liquid guitars and mellifluous double-tracked vocals evoke strong memories of Be Mine. Weighing in equally late in the game, Sing for the Submarine is nothing short of a minor miracle, progressing seamlessly from the tangled claustrophobia of its verses to a giddying waltz before Buck throws down his most inventive piece of guitar-playing since he first e-bowed the letter back in ’97.


That the record closes with the throwaway glam-rock skit I’m Gonna DJ (a daftly likeable track which just about stays the right side of all-out silliness) says much for Accelerate’s admirable couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Whereas Around the Sun failed to deliver on its much-vaunted promise of challenging America’s current political standing, Accelerate does exactly what it says on the tin, putting its best foot forward and hoofing it out the gate full of piss and vinegar. It’s an album hinging on the axis of history, determined to stuff the past firmly in a tin-can and drop-kick it out to sea: whereas they’ve spent much of the past decade looking inwards, here the band open up and stare skyward once again as if ready to lead us all into the future. As an album it’s cocky, confident, witty and defiant – the rousing call-to-arms we so wanted them to deliver last time around, and an indication that R.E.M. are still one of the world’s most vital and important bands.


At a mere 35 minutes though it does have a tendency to feel rather slight, and often lacks the light and shade which gave the last three records such depth and intrigue. Equally, its determination to remind listeners they’re still the same band we once fell in love with occasionally deflates the album’s momentum (Until the Day is Done, an otherwise strong track whose lyrics bear comparison to Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come, is basically a chord-for-chord retread of Try Not to Breathe). Consequently, Accelerate is a good R.E.M. LP, but not a great one – as intended, it’s exactly the kind of thing they used to knock out every year or so when they came back off tour in the mid-80s. Whether you see that as a virtue or a step backwards very much depends on which side of the two R.E.M.s you fall.

ALBUM: "To the Teeth" - Serafin (Our Rekords, 2008)

Chance pitches the freakiest curveballs from time to time. Just a few months after corresponding with Ben Smith about my original Serafin article back in 2006 I bumped into him moonlighting as a roadie for hapless electro-wazzock Ali Love. It was an odd experience, to say the least - clearly more surprised by the fortuity of the encounter than anything else, we chatted briefly for a few minutes before swapping e-mail addresses and going our separate ways. Last week he got back in touch with heartening news: five years after Warner Bros’ acquisition of Taste Media stuck the knife in their original plans, Serafin have finally regrouped to deliver the long-awaited follow-up to No Push Collide.


The hiatus has clearly not been without creative endeavour, with each member having indulged in a number of musical excursions whose diversity weighs heavily on To the Teeth. Shorn of a major production budget, the album is a scuzzy, down-and-dirty affair - musically and sonically it’s more off-kilter than their debut, and certainly a great deal more unhinged. The band’s trademark chunking guitar stabs remain intact, newly augmented by the hollow clatter of Christian Smith’s urgent drumming. Rhythms chop and change mid-phrase and there are several striking flourishes, most notably when an organ solo partway between medieval rhapsody and Ray Manzarek’s work in The Doors unexpectedly bursts to life. Interestingly, for the first time since his days fronting Stony Sleep, Smith’s world-music influence returns, with Bones adding Egyptian-flavoured strings to the mix and Lord opening with a quasi-religious chant that wouldn’t appear out of place in the catacombs of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.


Opening track To the Lost and Found establishes the album’s erratic tone with eerie intent, its skeletal melody descending tenuously like a spider on a thread. There’s definitely a feeling that the sense of purpose that characterised their early singles has been jettisoned in favour of a freer approach in which ideas are left to slowly coagulate rather than uniting from the outset. Consequently, To the Teeth ripples with uncertainty, fluctuating between desperate pleading (“Keep me like a brother / Please don’t treat me like any other”) and vitriolic defiance (“Screw you, and screw your friends”) within the space of a few songs. As a singer Smith sounds distracted throughout, his indolent vocals meandering over the melodies as if traversing some kind of scattered cerebral landscape; the album is littered with idle ruminations left casually strewn around like post-it notes - “I must remember to stop breathing”; “I think I’m going round the bend”.


Whereas No Push Collide was an album of full-frontal attack, oftentimes the songs here are drifting, non-linear affairs lacking a notable centre. Oddly, the record it reminds me the most of (in design if not sound) is the Arctic Monkeys’ Favourite Worst Nightmare – though in no way musically comparable, they share a sense of woozy disconnection, as if wandering giddily through a sickly daydream. Smith has always exhibited a fragmented perspective in his writing, but on this record he weaves a web of riddles and thought-patterns so complex that the cumulative effect is akin to emerging from a bad drug-trip: we arrive just at the moment of waking, unsure as to whether the feeling is one of muted euphoria or insufferable hangover.


Its standout track is Arms, a song which best embodies the album’s psychotic push-pull and also one of the finest things Smith has ever written. Haunted by a sad, almost Joy Division-esque synth line, its liquid chords drift aimlessly as they attempt to bring form to the singer’s evident resignation, before finally stuttering to attention to deliver a stark warning partway between violence and despair: “You’re in danger / in my arms”.


To the Teeth doesn’t always make for comfortable listening, but its languorous rhythm is certainly hypnotic and it’s an album that rewards perseverance. It’s occasionally pretty (Scars), often mesmerising (as in the wandering see-saw melodies of Snake), and frequently exhilarating (News is a pummelling beast of a track that would easily slot alongside Day by Day in the band’s live set). It’s an album that leaves questions dangling rather than seeking to provide easy answers: an unstable mistress who wins the heart then runs away.

SONG: "Tiny Vessels" - Death Cab for Cutie (Transatlanticism, 2004)

This song, the undoubted highlight of Death Cab’s magnificent fourth album, is deeply personal to me for reasons I shan’t embellish in gory detail. On a superficial level the listener is able to take what they will from its naked emotional candour. We’ve all been there – lying awake in the dark next to someone and wondering what the hell we’re doing. We’ve all cheated and manipulated another person’s emotions at the expense of our own. We’ve all had our hearts broken, and then gone and done the exact same thing to someone else.


Tiny Vessels almost didn’t make it onto Transatlanticism; Benjamin Gibbard’s bandmates initially questioned the validity of the exercise and tried to warn him away from releasing it at all. As an act of catharsis, the song is callous, cruel and utterly devoid of human feeling. However, their frontman was adamant that it should stay, and he was right: just because the things he’s saying are appalling or reprehensible, that doesn’t make them any less true. The impulse still exists - denial leads to nothing more than a viral infestation of its seed. Painful though its articulation may be, there is no other way: it simply has to be said.


Tiny Vessels is a kind of void; it haunts you with a soullessness that is difficult to place. It’s there in the way Chris Walla’s guitar lines continue spiralling aimlessly once the turmoil has subsided, and the way its final bars fracture into a thousand pieces before fading to a ghostly echo. The whole recording hums with an eerie sense of disquiet that’s impossible to shake. As with all the most challenging art, it’s uncomfortable and uncompromising, but always true to itself. That the song manages to retain a sense of dignity and compassion in the face of such atrocity is testament to its author’s refinement of language and phrasing - ultimately its vicious prose becomes an apology of sorts: an admission of wrong-doing for a hurt that can never be erased. However, for better or worse, by committing his feelings to tape the singer at least had the conviction to see events through to their bitter conclusion.


Richly orchestrated yet devastatingly sparse, Gibbard’s despondency is tangible throughout; though he knows that time will heal the wounds and repair the damage he has caused, at this moment Tiny Vessels was the only available outlet for his grief. And by virtue of his confession, he is redeemed.

GIG: Slint performing "Spiderland" (London Koko, 23rd August 2007)

Generously awarded “Ten fucking stars” on its release by the band’s former producer Steve Albini, Slint’s second album Spiderland was so far ahead of its time that it basically created the genre known as post-rock (or ‘math-rock’, to cite its latest permutation) single-handedly. Fittingly for such an enigmatic work - the band’s wry smiles on its iconic cover are as inscrutable as that of the Mona Lisa - Spiderland became shrouded in mythology from the moment of its conception. Aside from insisting it be heard on vinyl, the band were apparently so drained by the writing and recording process that they promptly disbanded, selling off all their equipment and swearing that they’d never play it again (when they later decided to reform for a series of one-off performances, they had to buy back all their gear to enable them to recreate the original sounds).


Picking up where their abrasive debut Tweez left off, Spiderland is an album of mechanical riddles: its rhythmic patterns twist and writhe while spoken-word narratives of alienation and discord unfold in a chilling whisper. Its alternation between crashing hellfire and menacing hush took quiet-loud dynamics to greater extremes than had ever been previously attempted: the album’s fifth track is so slight that it’s at times almost impossible to make out what’s going on. Though only 50 000 copies have been sold to date, it’s a solid bet that most of its initial purchasers went off and formed a band themselves.


ATP’s annual Don’t Look Back season invites artists to perform a seminal album in its entirety – a bold move in an age of dismembered tracks and file-trading. Indeed, the experiment seems especially interesting tonight, with the static positioning of the band within a defined performance space creating the illusion of a session which the audience is looking in on, rather than actively participating with. It’s as if the music is there to be admired objectively from afar - a conceit that Walter Benjamin once dubbed “the unique phenomeon at a distance”. Ultimately, as on shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test, it’s hoped that this approach creates a greater longevity: as Whistle Test presenter David Hepworth suggests on the show’s DVD anthology, “the sparer the performance is, the more it lasts down the years”.


I mention this because it’s clear from the offset that we’re here to witness something of substantial import. As The Lemonheads’ joyous romp through It’s a Shame About Ray two years ago suggested, Don’t Look Back ought to be a celebration, but tonight the atmosphere is foreboding and claustrophobic. There is little-to-no communication between the band and their audience, to the extent where it’s difficult to tell whether they’re loathing every second or simply immersed in concentration. I suspect it’s a little of both, though ultimately it doesn’t really matter: the uncomfortable silences that linger between songs simply add to the intensity of the performance. From the moment Breadcrumb Trail’s ringing harmonics give way to sinewy arpeggios and blow-torch distortion, you can’t take your eyes off them. Hearing the album in its entirety at decibel-shattering volume, you’re able to detect complexities hitherto unacknowledged: tonight, Nosferatu Man makes the chunking polyrhythms of Tool sound like a child bashing a toy drum. By the time the album’s towering centrepiece Good Morning, Captain slithers forth to mount its slow-burning sensory assault, you’re absolutely spellbound.


While the band themselves may rue its unlikely standing, there’s no questioning that Spiderland has become one of the most important rock albums of the last few decades - even a casual glance at tonight’s setlist confirms where Mogwai got most of their ideas from (frankly, the similarity between Hunted by a Freak and Washer ought to be a matter for High Court discussion). To think that Slint created such an accomplished and forward-thinking piece of work when they were still in their early twenties is remarkable; that it still sounds fascinating seventeen years on affirms the mark of true greatness.

SONG: "Porcupine or Pineapple?" - Brakes (The Beatific Visions, 2006)

I’ve got to give props to this track, which crept up on me the other week to deliver the musical equivalent of a brisk drubbing.


Like Maynard Keenan’s Tool offshoot A Perfect Circle, Brakes are a side-project whose work stands equal to that of any of its constituent parts. Comprising various members of UK indie stalwarts British Sea Power, The Tenderfoot and Electric Soft Parade, the quartet marry the latter’s melodic sensibilities to BSP’s barking eccentricity. Best-known for the indie dancefloor stomper All-Night Disco Party, their recent LP The Beatific Visions was named Album of the Year by 6Music and XFM despite slipping by virtually unnoticed. The band has an eclectic, anything-goes approach that makes them impossible to wrestle down from track-to-track - if the LP’s title song sounds like a homage to summery 60s popstrels The Apples in Stereo, Spring Chicken is a classic rock’n’roll barnstormer in the mould of Eddie Cochran and The Cramps. Equally, for every driving thump-along like Cease and Desist there’s a disarmingly gentle hymn lurking just round the corner: check out touching album-closer No Return, which uses the image of riffling through old blues records in a Birmingham thrift-store as a poignant metaphor for a failed relationship.


In keeping with the general air of stylistic irreverence, this appropriately spiky effort sounds like absolutely nothing else on the album. A deranged, minute-long blast of throwaway nonsense, it comes across like Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster molesting an Arctic Monkeys number while sloshed on Sunny Delight. With a structure apparently lifted straight out of Folk Implosion’s Daddy Never Understood, the rhythm section rattles along with a total disregard for public safety while vocalist Eamon Hamilton yelps out the question on everyone’s lips: “Porcupine or pineapple? / …Who won the war?! / Who won the war?! / Who won the war, and was it worth fighting for?!”


One of the most utterly pointless songs ever penned (as Hamilton later pertinently ponders, “Who won the war, and what the fuck was it for?!”), I’ll bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in yours that the idea for this song arose from a drunken Celebrity Deathmatch-style conundrum on the tour bus one evening. Either that or their thinking’s naturally this skewed - I wouldn’t put it past them. From the sound of things, they’re absolutely fucking nuts.

SONG: "Golden Skin" - Silver Sun (Silver Sun, 1997)

If there were any justice in the pop world, Silver Sun frontman James Broad would reign supreme. I’ve always been utterly mystified by the travesty of his band having never made the big-time – along with fellow guitar-pop practitioners Fountains of Wayne and The Lemonheads, they always seemed the most likely candidates for mainstream acceptance. Arriving at the tail-end of Britpop with a rash of equally great bands who never found the recognition they deserved (Out of My Hair, Blameless and Livingstone to name just three), Silver Sun’s blueprint was a simple one: The Beach Boys + Cheap Trick = instant pop perfection. If the immediate influence of these two acts wasn’t exactly difficult to discern (Scarecrow, one of the standout cuts from their second album Neo-Wave, is I Want You to Want Me), neither was the quality of Broad’s songwriting. Pitched partway between the fun-time bubblegum bop of The Monkees and the more classical approach of girl-groups like The Ronettes, he perhaps emerged three decades too late – had they been around in 1963, Silver Sun would’ve had teenage girls in pigtails squealing round their bedrooms.


Predictably massive in Japan, the band’s trademark multilayered falsettos were augmented by a glossy, radio-friendly sheen which saw the band equally loved by Chris Evans, Saturday morning TV and Kerrang! magazine. In an age of Weezer, Ash and Joyrider, the horizon was looking luminous indeed for Silver Sun; inexplicably, however, following brief flirtations with the Top 40 through radio favourites Last Day and I’ll See You Around, the band scored their biggest hit with an arbitrary cover of the Johnny Mathis standard Too Much, Too Little, Too Late before vanishing off the face of the earth.


Surprisingly, the band recently re-emerged from the wilderness after a six-year hiatus to release not one but two self-produced albums: Disappear Here (on which Broad allegedly plays every single instrument) and last year’s Dad’s Weird Dream. You’d think that six years of bitter reflection would herald some kind of misanthropic Kid A­-style reinvention – however, like The Ramones before them, it’s a comforting testament to the singularity of Silver Sun’s vision that their formula never changes. Despite not having any kind of major-label backing, they still manage to make their albums sound like the most expensive records ever produced. Their kitsch B-movie comic-strip artwork remains as endearing as ever. And the tunes are still top-notch.


Though I’ll See You Around was a much catchier song, for me it’s former single Golden Skin which always best captures what Silver Sun are about. A joyful, carefree skip built around an ascending day-glo riff, the song’s sugar-sweet exterior offers the perfect firewall for Broad’s slyly acerbic observations on the illusion of celebrity. Silver Sun have always been suckers for a massive chorus, but this one is more restrained: heralded by a rolling crescendo, the melody hangs teasingly in the balance before bursting into a resplendent refrain which sounds like the perfect call-to-arms for anyone unfamiliar with their futuristic sunshine aesthetic: “Open the door, and let the light in”. Come the song’s gloriously overblown finale, the band pile on vocal harmonies in the grand tradition of Twist and Shout before thundering into the final chord with gleeful intemperance.


Fads come and go, but great pop lasts forever. I suspect that James Broad knows this – it’s one of the only ways to find solace from the disappointment of almost cracking the mainstream and then being cruelly slapped back into obscurity. To this extent, the image which forms part of the artwork for Disappear Here (that of the singer standing alone on a beach staring at the ocean, one man against the world) seems to me an apt metaphor of his refusal to let the bastards grind him down. The man is a hero to be saluted – and not just because he once sneaked a song onto daytime radio which contained the lyric “All of my ex-girlfriends, they were shit”. Against all the odds, he’s still here. His band’s still out there doing their thing. His fans remain as loyal as ever, and the next record can’t come soon enough. We’ll see you around.

ALBUM: "Nevermind" - Nirvana (Geffen, 1991)

In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994, Nirvana’s second album has assumed a near-mythic status which renders it untouchable to all but the loftiest of social commentators. One of those ubiquitous titles which pops up time and again in the upper echelons of 'All-Time Greatest' lists, so much has been written about Nevermind that its status now precedes it - often to such an extent that its actual content is unfairly undermined. Since I bang on about the band so often on these pages, I thought it was time to offer my own appraisal.


Given the album’s casual omnipotence, it’s easy to forget precisely what Nirvana achieved with Nevermind: whether you dig its artistic accomplishments or fail to see what all the fuss is about, there’s simply no disputing the enormity of its impact. Nirvana’s emergence at the start of the last decade paved the way for every major rock act to have followed. Call it a blessing or a curse, but without Nirvana there’d be no Green Day, Rage Against the Machine, Weezer, Muse or Radiohead - in fact, the entire cultural landscape itself would be radically different (Quentin Tarantino acknowledges Cobain in his screenplay for Pulp Fiction, a film he offered the singer and wife Courtney Love key roles in). The album hit a nerve which struck deep into the heart of a generation struggling to find its own identity, causing a wounded soul to emerge kicking and screaming in all its pent-up fury.


Indeed, beyond its immediate musical influence, the success of Nevermind revolutionised the way the industry thought, in turn opening the door to a world of possibilities for musicians previously considered too much of a minority voice to achieve cultural recognition. Sub-genres like post-rock would never have been given the opportunity to develop and flourish as freely as they were ultimately able to, and even leftfield acts like Death Cab for Cutie owe the band a clear debt of gratitude (frontman Ben Gibbard recently composed the score for About a Son, the upcoming documentary narrated by Cobain from hours of unreleased audio footage). Predating the equally-significant explosion of online music dissemination by a good ten years, Nirvana’s revitalization of the rock market brought passion, intelligence, attitude and integrity back to music.


It’s obvious to any casual listener that on a fairly basic musical level Nirvana were far from revolutionary, basically tacking together a series of key influences (Pixies, Melvins, R.E.M., Sex Pistols, The Beatles) into one dirty great roaring package. However, if you’re able to strip away all the window-dressing applied to the band and listen to the music afresh, I challenge even the thorniest critic to remain unmoved. It still lights a fire in me every time I hear Very Ape or Radio Friendly Unit Shifter, just as Breed makes me want to shove the nearest person to hand and get shoved right back – one can only imagine how it must’ve felt hearing Teen Spirit for the first time in a world full of C&C Music Factory clones. Hell, a fair proportion of Nirvana’s output wasn’t even that special (Dive and Been a Son being two examples which immediately spring to mind), but the reason their catalogue will continue to endure is down to the sheer passion, drive and intellectual savvy which underpins it. You simply can’t exchange illusion for substance when it comes to achieving longevity in rock’n’roll - G.G. Allin died for the cause, but he’s unlikely to be revered fifty years from now because he never had any fucking tunes.


One of the charges that I hear consistently hurled at Nirvana is that they were an overrated teen-angst group peddling immature rants against the world when they ultimately had it pretty cushy (personal discontent aside, let’s not forget that this was a band who sold 10 million records and once knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard chart). However, to adopt such a narrow perspective does, I feel, rather miss the point. Of course they’re overplayed and unduly deified, but that’s hardly the band’s fault - any more than the fact that their aggression resonates with young people or that Smells Like Teen Spirit has now become an excuse for 12-year-olds to ruck at school discos. Kurt Cobain’s own relationship with success may have been complex and evasive, but the simple truth is that both he and Nirvana never asked for any of it: the hype, the fortune, the pressure or the mantle.


Moreover, to simply dismiss them as rudimentary angst-merchants is both ignorant and reductive, since any song Cobain wrote which pandered to this mentality was always endowed with a hearty dose of cynicism and irony (let’s face it, most sulky adolescents rather miss the point of Teen Spirit’s knowingly apathetic rhetoric). There’s little direct mention of adolescent malaise anywhere on Bleach, the only album of theirs actually written during the singer’s formative years, and Cobain always possessed an astute degree of reflexivity when it came to analysing his own position in the world (lest we forget, this was a man who was all in favour of naming the follow-up to Nevermind ‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die’). However, rather than kicking brattishly against the mould, his artistic response was considerably more subversive, opening In Utero with a sardonic track which satirised his own status as king of the outcast teens (Serve the Servants) and a musical lampoon of Teen Spirit that addressed the media’s intrusion into his life through savage metaphor (Rape Me). Cobain wasn’t any kind of genius, just as he wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t been said a hundred times before by infinitely more literate artists. However, he was a gifted, articulate and intelligent songwriter capable of disguising his own confessional intent under veils of imagery: listen to the indolent carnal entreaties of Come As You Are, which effortlessly eclipses the unsubtle bluster that nu-metal bedwetters like Papa Roach would later hold up as the last word in catharsis.


The moment which always best epitomises Cobain to me is the end of their MTV Live and Loud set, in which a baying audience whoops and hollers while the band destroy their instruments. Alone onstage, Cobain flings his guitar through the air before turning to the crowd and clapping rabidly in a vitriolic display of sarcasm. So far, so characteristic, but then something unexpected happens: he turns back, and – with an almost involuntary look of guilt – loiters apologetically at the side of the stage for a moment before disappearing from view. The image is eternally poignant: that of an angry, confused young man on top of the world but unable to view his achievements as anything but hollow - torn between conflicting desires for recognition and anonymity, adoration and respect; between the purity of his intentions and the bastardisation of his art for commercial gain.


The fact is then that myth-making has always been redundant in the case of Nirvana. Cast aside the cultural ramifications of their success and the romantic gloss of Cobain’s troubled psyche and you’re left with the eternally-befuddled perception of Everett True, the band’s unofficial man-on-the-floor who has remained perpetually unable to reconcile the myth with his own direct experience of the trio: a small-time punk band kicking against an establishment they had no affinity with (former NME scribe Keith Cameron once described the trio in equally delightful terms, deeming them “a beautiful waste of time”). As a teenager in the mid-90s, I grew up with the legend, not the people behind it - to this end, I’ll probably never be able to get as close to Nirvana as I’d ultimately like since it seems inconceivable to me that they were once just another touring band you could check out at your local fleapit. But I’m slowly getting there: as I continue to reach the same age as Cobain’s own personal milestones, the more clearly I’m able to view them in purely intimate terms.


Above all else though, I’ve discovered that for me Nirvana do exactly what they say on the tin: they take you to a place of absolute harmony. Nevermind is a record that beats you about the head until the damage is so profound it hurts no longer; just when it looks like you’ve finally been bludgeoned into submission, they spoon-feed you sugar ’til you drool like a baby. It’s no secret that Cobain used music as an outlet for his own internal conflict, or that the literal definition of the band’s name formed a direct correlation with his perception of punk rock (which he saw as a spiritual entity capable of taking you to a place of total freedom). This is why he was able to hurl himself into the drum-kit night after night with no thought for self-preservation: as long as he was in the throes of this perfect escape, nothing could ever hurt him.


There’s a moment on Nevermind which encapsulates this concept with effortless majesty. It’s during the middle blast of Stay Away, where Krist Novoselic’s bass just kinds of dips around in mid-air while Cobain’s guitar chimes in perfect melodic unity; soon after, a slashing refrain cuts across the vista accompanied by the words “I don't know why!”. It’s a total punk-rock freefall, a state of blissed-out immunity that’s neither here nor there: the sound of someone awash in a wall of distortion, flailing aimlessly in hopeless abandon. The same is equally true of Lithium, a song whose dopey smile is able to mask the pain inside because its author seems content to exist in his own protective bubble. As Nevermind’s penultimate track suggests, both songs are blissful sighs of resignation - a submissive shrug designed to leave you floating on air. Played loud, they leave me feeling utterly invincible, as if consumed by one overwhelming response: I’m on a plain. I can’t complain.


With this in mind, go put on Nevermind again, crank up the volume and just let it flood over you. Lose yourself in the fluffy cloudscape of Lithium and slam-dance like a loon to the all-out aggression of Territorial Pissings. Resist the urge to search for immediate meaning in the lyrics and appreciate them for what they are: a series of misnomers and non-sequiturs strung together in a specific order towards a certain effect. Listen to the chorus of In Bloom and laugh yourself silly at the irony of a thousand meatheads hollering along to one of the smartest refrains ever penned, never quite grasping that they know not what it means. Check out the hilarious middle-eight of On a Plain, where Cobain attempts to utter some profound rumination on life but ends up only confusing himself (“As a defence, I’m neutered and spayed / What the hell am I trying to say?”). And then go watch the wickedly demented video for In Utero’s lead-in single Heart-Shaped Box, which proves definitively why most of the band’s contemporaries failed to survive the hype of the so-called ‘grunge explosion’ - they were simply incapable of writing a song so artful in craft and brutal in execution.


Dying young seals the legend of an artist in a time-capsule - it solidifies their image in memory, ensuring they can never become anything less than their achievements in life. In short, they’re allowed to burn out but never fade away. Would Kurt Cobain’s output have sucked now if his life hadn’t been cut so tragically short? If the band’s MTV Unplugged set and prospective collaboration with Michael Stipe were anything to go by, I seriously doubt it. Cobain’s mass of wasted potential is that which has always left the sourest aftertaste, since creatively if not personally it’s always seemed like he still had so much left to give (if you’ve never heard Do Re Mi, his final recording which eventually surfaced on With the Lights Out, go hunt it down - it’s an astonishing song that offers an all-too-tantalising glimpse into the next stage of his ongoing evolution).


While In Utero perhaps remains a more accomplished album in strictly artistic terms (spare a thought for my other half, who was once forced to endure a drunken rant on why the album’s second side “could easily take any rock record of the last 25 years”), for these reasons Nevermind will always be the one that takes the cake. As Dave Grohl attests in Eagle Rock’s excellent Classic Albums documentary, the band’s intention was never to create any kind of landmark, just to make an album that sounded really good. It still does. It always will. Nevermind: the bollocks.

DVD: Reuben - "What Happens in Aldershot Stays in Aldershot" (2007, Hideous Records)

For a brief moment back in 2002, the commercial future of British rock looked incredibly bright. One of the more gratifying consequences of seeing nu-metal limp towards its inevitable demise was that the spotlight shifted onto the UK’s vibrant post-hardcore scene. While the likes of At the Drive-In were busy bolstering the genre’s critical integrity across the Atlantic, bands such as Vex Red, Hundred Reasons and Hell is for Heroes were being snapped up by major labels left, right and centre while being heralded by everyone from The Guardian to Kerrang! as the saviours of British music.


And then, almost as quickly as the process had begun… nothing. It’s as if the record industry didn’t know what to do with the wealth of talent they’d acquired – they’d taken a grass-roots scene and tried to market it to an audience completely out of touch with its values and ideals. The cull was swift and brutal; of that original crop of bands, only a handful survived and are now still operative. Hell is for Heroes dropped off the radar following a sterling debut release, dogged by record-label problems which dealt a severe blow to their confidence and forced them to retreat underground. Mismarketed and misunderstood by their handlers at Columbia, Hundred Reasons were also quickly ditched, eventually emerging revitalised with last year’s excellent Kill Your Own LP. The unfortunate likes of Jarcrew, Distophia and The Copperpot Journals never even made it to the party; perhaps the only band to emerge completely unscathed (which is as much a testament to their unwillingness to play the game as it is to their considerable ability) was Biffy Clyro, whose years of dogged persistence only recently started to reap commercial dividends.


Reuben - a band whose acerbic lyrics and natural insouciance never quite seemed to complement the more rigorous workmanship of many of these acts – were perhaps unlucky to arrive slightly too late to catch the initial wave, and too early to lead the emerging current crop (yourcodenameis:milo, Fightstar, Gallows et al). With one eyebrow perpetually raised and a sense of humour equal to their penchant for driving, meaty rock, the band quickly established themselves as firm favourites on the underground circuit. You know a Reuben song the moment you hear it: they have an unmistakable authority that arises from the band’s crushing, Kerbdog-esque rhythms and Jamie Lenman’s husky but articulate bark. Indeed, quite aside from the quality of the tunes, Lenman himself is a born showman whose commanding presence and relaxed onstage patter makes the band hugely endearing to watch. They’ve always come across like the Ronseal of touring acts: they simply get in, do the job and fuck off home again. No muss, no fuss.


What’s perhaps most fascinating about the band though is that despite having built up a loyal and devoted following, commercial success seems to have casually eluded them. On the underground circuit, everyone’s heard of Reuben - and yet they continue to fall through virtually every net that’s been cast in the last five years. Following two well-received albums for Xtra Mile (the brilliantly-titled Racecar is Racecar Backwards and 2005’s Chris Sheldon-produced chunkathon Very Fast, Very Dangerous), the band’s frustrating lack of forward-momentum led to them founding their own label, for which this is the first release.


As suggested by their D-I-Y approach (my copy of the DVD arrived in an envelope addressed by the singer himself), Reuben is a totally self-sufficient, home-run operation. Amiably put together by the good folk at The Leftside, What Happens in Aldershot… is a disarmingly frank and frequently uproarious portrait of the band’s attempts to balance musical aspiration with the daily monotony of earning a crust, and as such grants us access to their spectacularly unglamorous activities outside of the band. Between amusing monologues about his hairdo and showing off his impressive collection of Dr. Who memorabilia, Jamie waits on tables at the local chippy. Personable bassist Jon Pearce stacks shelves for Waitrose. Baby-faced drummer Guy Davis (who really is that tiny in real-life) works at Debenhams and still lives with his parents. Both onscreen and in-person, the one thing that consistently hits home though is how immensely likeable they are: as the self-penned liner-notes to Very Fast, Very Dangerous attest, they really are just the kids from the local rock club who happened to go off and form a band. (Indeed, I’ll always have fond memories of Jamie wandering over to where I was DJ-ing during their UWSU soundcheck a couple of years ago and saying, “Dude! Is this The Dismemberment Plan?!” before giving me an appreciative devil-horns salute and strolling off again.)


As the group’s principal creative-force, it’s their passionate frontman who emerges as the most driven of the trio, but even his own ambitions for the band are grounded in a modest sense of pragmatism. I have no doubt that they’ll get there eventually: if there’s one thing that the steady ascent of Biffy Clyro taught us, the most important thing is to just get out there and cultivate a following - if you shift a few units along the way, bonus. However, it soon becomes clear that there are bigger things at stake than mere commercial gain: ultimately it’s their bassist who outlines their true intentions when he says, “The music industry is all I’ve known for the last five years, and that’s all I really like doing; if the band ended, I wouldn’t go and work in an office for the sake of earning some money… I’d rather earn half the wage doing something I really want to do. Having an enjoyable life is as important as having a wealthy one – it’s more important to have a good time and leave the world happy”.


With this statement, he nets it in one: there simply is no other way for Reuben. The reason they’ve been able to survive so long in such a tough climate is by playing it smart rather than opportunistic: they divide their recording advances three ways and then use that as a living-allowance, subsidising any extra-curricular activities through menial jobs. As an aspiring writer in similar circumstances, it’s a process I can empathise with completely: tedious though the graft may be, the daily grind is just an unfortunate consequence of attempting to forge your identity as an independent artist. I’ve been plugging away for years and have only recently started to see monetary recompense for my work, but when it all comes down to it I wouldn’t have it any other way - it’s either that or surrender my independence and become like everybody else: lifeless, dull and complacent. Many people rag on me for having never moved beyond my immediate surroundings upon leaving University, but I’d much rather this than getting up every morning to work a crushing nine-to-five job, only to come home and find my every creative impulse stunted.


Above all else then, it’s just about enjoying what you do. The extras on this package are absolutely hilarious: aside from an endlessly watchable slow-motion dance-off on the menu, we’re treated to all kinds of entertaining asides from piss-takes of Rod Stewart to a deliciously surreal short film in which Lenman films a group of Chinese people saying “Michael Jackson”. As an added bonus, you also get a blistering live DVD which features a typically incendiary performance from London’s Mean Fiddler: check out the punishing Stuck in my Throat for an example of the band at their most ferocious.


Regardless of whether or not you’re a Reuben fan, you really need to buy this DVD - not just because it’s the funniest and most candid depiction of life in the trenches to have emerged in many a year, but because it represents so much more than that. What Happens in Aldershot… is a testament to three artists’ persistence and integrity in the face of considerable adversity - in a revealing later scene, the band holds an impromptu conference to discuss that night’s performance of a new song and we see their underlying ethos emerge: that of a hard-working, democratic collective always striving to improve, develop and better themselves. Whereas Ondi Timoner’s similarly-themed Dig! charted the destructive relationship between art and commerce with car-crash voyeurism, here the harsh realities of grappling with day-to-day inertia are handled with good humour and a carefree shrug. Consequently, like the band itself, the film is charming, self-deprecating and at times even quite touching: in its final scene, the band exchanges gifts at a 10^th Anniversary get-together and we see that above all else it is their friendship which has prevailed. For these reasons alone – not to mention the fact that chucking a few quid their way will help them carry on doing precisely that - Reuben are more than deserving of your cash. But much more importantly, on both a musical and personal level, they’re worthy of your respect.

SONG: "To the Sea" - Razorlight (Up All Night, 2004)

Like drippy daytime-radio staples Travis, it seems bizarre to think there was a time when Razorlight were considered one of the country’s most exciting young bands. However, back before Johnny Borrell bagged himself a celebrity girlfriend and started strutting round with his shirt off at Live 8, he and his cohorts were rightly regarded as British guitar music’s brightest hope. When I first saw the group supporting The Raveonettes in late 2003, they whipped through eight songs in practically no time, dispatching what were essentially throwaway numbers with a clarity and brusqueness that fully justified their pointed moniker. It was clear that Borrell was a hugely charismatic frontman being ably backed by a dynamic group of musicians: on tracks like Stumble and Fall, Bright Lights and Rip It Up the band was in its element, creating slicing indie-pop that remained fun and credible despite its obvious commercial intentions.


Nowadays of course such perceptions are a distant memory, eclipsed by the looming shadow of their mega-selling second album and its ubiquitous signature track (you know the one). Let’s get one thing cleared up before we go any further, lest there be any doubt as to where I stand on the issue: America is a crap song. It embodies everything detestable about that which Razorlight have now become: wafer-thin, pseudo-anthemic piffle characterised by horrible, U2-esque delay and supposedly impassioned bleating. Inevitably of course this was always going to be the track which brought them to the masses - it’s as if destiny itself had served up another cosy singalong for the Just Great Songs compilation (available now at your local supermarket for only £9.77). In a recent NME interview, Borrell earnestly described America as “a political song”; to be honest though, namedropping the world’s greatest superpower in the title seems less like an act of social subversion than a cynical ploy to help break the band overseas. The lyrical equivalent of an empty piece of sloganeering, the word “America” itself is largely meaningless within the context of the track – frankly, it could be called Superted and mean about as much as it does now. Worst of all – and this really is unforgivable - it sounds unnervingly like The Fray (though in their defence I suppose Razorlight weren’t to know that when they recorded the bastard).


It’s clear listening back to their debut album Up All Night and its ghastly follow-up single Somewhere Else that Borrell always had ideas above his station. At their core, Razorlight are a nifty three-minute pop band, pure and simple: the aforementioned Rip It Up is probably the best example of what they’re capable of when their formula is boiled down to its bare bones. However, when it came round to banging the tunes together for an LP, Borrell’s desire to create the World’s Greatest Debut finally got the better of him: whereas the tracks would’ve functioned more succinctly as individual stand-alones, instead we got fades between songs, drum solos and various pointless interludes designed to make the work more of a complete whole. Unfortunately for Borrell, it had quite the opposite effect – since the tracks bore little thematic relation to one another, the finished product played like a nearly-great album ruined by over-indulgence (witness the way the band make a spectacular hash of Don’t Go Back to Dalston, a great tune which gets completely lost up its own arse when they decide to have it implode midway through).


Amidst the frustration however there was one moment which bore the mark of genius Borrell seemed so keen to inherit. Arriving at the album’s tail-end with a riff cribbed straight from Television’s Marquee Moon, To the Sea is a sprawling breakneck stomp with lyrics scattered all over the shop. The song takes the gabbling stream-of-consciousness approach of their earlier ramble In the City and applies it to a frantic musical accompaniment which dips and soars with giddy zeal. Here, the ocean is an emblem of escape, a place of infinite possibility where the dreams of two restless souls will either be reconciled or simply washed away: “Just click your heels, turn around / We’ll get out of this old town… / We’ll leave it all to the sea”. However, despite brimming with optimism, Christian Smith-Pancorvo’s clattering drum-fills bring a sense of hesitation to the song’s relentless forward-march; by the time it reaches its beautiful, desolate conclusion (in which Borrell finds himself howling into nothingness before an expansive skyline), the singer’s wracked cries convey a longing far beyond his years.


To the Sea was the song which always stood out to me from the band’s early live set, and when I first heard the recorded version’s ludicrously overwrought ending I thought they’d properly chuffed it up. With hindsight though, it’s absolutely perfect: you can hear Borrell’s voice literally come apart as the closing chords slowly crash into infinity. During the build-up to its eventual fallout, Björn Ǻgren’s guitar weaves soulful melodies around the accompanying clamour while Borrell repeatedly pleads, “I know that your love lies somewhere…”; indeed, the song’s agonising deceleration is made all the more painful by its insistent early fervour. When it eventually dies away we are left with only a quiet piano accompanied by a stream of mournful feedback: just another broken promise in an endless sea of dreams.


To the Sea is a poetic whirlwind of a song, a true revelation for a band whose anything-is-possible rhetoric and youthful exuberance were unduly stifled by one man’s ruthless quest for stadium-sized grandeur. This is the moment when Borrell’s blinding ambition and appetite for excess butted heads with his actual ability and came up solid-gold. They’ll never top it; like so many bands that rise to prominence with their first album, by the time they attempted to recapture its strengths they’d lost sight of what it was that made them so exhilarating in the first place. But for five-and-a-half glorious minutes, the romanticism of Borrell’s lost-in-the-city shtick was transformed into something far greater than even he could’ve imagined.