Album review: Music For An Accelerated Culture - Hadouken!

Some bands can be defined by good taste and burgeoning record collections and geeky knowledge of their predecessors - LCD Soundsystem would be an obvious example - whilst others rely more on attitude.

Most bands fall somewhere between these two extremes, yet the debut album from Hadouken! very much positions them as the new extreme in the later category. Whilst their taste in music may be good (indeed a guest spot on Radio 1 earlier this year suggests it is) their actual sound derives little from it. To describe Hadouken! is to describe nothing anyone with any taste would like - Mike Skinner style raps and thick garage basslines combine with Euro-pop melodies to create a wide- boy nu-rave soundtrack Channel 4's Skins would kill for.

Yet it's the attitude that saves it. If its opener 'Get Smashed Gate Crash' is too loud you're at the wrong house party whilst 'That Boy That Girl' sets a commentary on modern day micro-cultural groups to a industrial backing. More than anything Music For An Accelerated Culture sounds young... It positively reeks of modern-day teen spirit and whilst you might think you've got better taste H! sound like they truly don't give a shit what you think (Grandad).

Music For An Accelerated Culture is difficult to assess - in places it gets so close to cheese that it's not worth worrying whether it is cool or not and it sounds so 'now' that in two weeks it will probably be passé. This time is theirs however and if, in several years, you wish to recapture 2008 then the synth lines of 'Decleration Of War' and the aggression of 'Crank It Up' just might do it.

If you don't like it you're too old: Music For An Accelerated Culture is an up middle finger to today's washed-out pop mainstream.

BP x

Album Review: Saturdays = Youth - M83

The cult film Donnie Darko contains a scene where the camera films the occupants of a school going about their business in slow motion to the sounds of Tears For Fears' 'Head Over Heels'. The combination of the extraordinary sounds and camera work in combination with the somewhat ordinary subject matter to lift this small section to a place that makes it rank as one of BlackPlastic's favourite scenes in a film, ever. Saturdays = Youth as an album feels the same, like a slow-motion dream of your teenage years observed with the benefit of hindsight.

Given that this is the very thing M83 sought to capture it is instantly clear, in one respect at least, that their latest album is a success. Don't let BlackPlastic undermine the beauty of the songs themselves though - 'Kim & Jessie' is the closest M83 have come to being a pop band yet and has single all over (SebAstian remixes please!) whilst 'Skin Of The Night' is eighties shoe-gazing at its best.

The excilerating rushes of Before The Dawn Heals us may have gone but in their place is a delicate, refined and somewhat melancholic sound. Cinematic in nature, Saturdays = Youth sounds not just like Donnie Darko but is reminiscent of all those eighties teen movies... This album is your own Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, even exhibiting touches of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It is the feeling when you are 15 that nothing is more important than whether you get laid next Saturday at your best friend's party. Combine this album with the Teenagers' recent Reality Check and you have two superb albums to soundtrack a youth that carry a sense of wonder that trancends the moment of youth itself, capturing what it felt like to be young no matter how old you may be now.

If Tears For Fears had taken over the world rather than writing 'Woman In Chains' it would have sounded like this.

BP x

Album Review In Ghost Colours - Cut Copy

If 2007 was France's year then 2008 already looks like it belongs to the Australians. With a good album from Muscles already plus a forthcoming one from Van She, Modular are rapidly looking like the new Ed Banger.

One of Modular's best loved then, Cut Copy are back with their sophmore effort. Where Bright Like Neon Love was all pop hooks, crackle and sheen however, In Ghost Colours is immediately more considered:

Bright Like Neon Love had moments of introspection - the superb 'Zap Zap', with a delicate "This heart is breaking" refrain, for example. The difference here is that these make up the main emotional currency of the album and, quite simply, they are combined with a more layered, sophisticated sound. In Ghost Colours features co-production of Tim Goldsworthy and it shows - this year seems destined to see Goldsworthy and Erol Alkan continually challenge each other to see who can better who.

So the vocals on 'Out There On The Ice' are backed by a fairly typical Cut Copy bassline, but this is in itself enveloped in shimmering touches of synths, snatches of samples and the odd subtle use of acid. Once it melts away into lead single 'Lights and Magic' with its hook-laden chorus it all combines to create something that sounds far more mature. Whilst it references older material it sounds unmistakeably contempory.

Just as this year's other best albums, Hercules and Love Affair's self-titled debut and Mystery Jets' Twenty One, it's the subtle touches that elevate it to greatness. The live drums on 'Unforgettable Season' for example, the fuzzy guitars that open 'So Haunted' before the chorus blows them away with its swirling synths and gently picked melodies, the sax that breaks through the 90s house of 'Hearts On Fire'.

2008 is already shaping up to be a vintage year for music and In Ghost Colours could just be the best of the best. As 'Strangers In The Wind floats away it becomes clear what makes this album so great: it sounds like waking up from a great dream - it's a shame it has to end but you're glad it happened. From Kratwerk to New Order, In Ghost Colours sounds like every great electro-pop record of the past thirty years.

BP x

Album Review: Moshi Moshi Singles Club - Various

BlackPlastic heart Moshi Moshi for the following reasons:

1. They are independent.
2. They have previously signed and released records by such greats as Bloc Party, Hot Chip and Hot Club De Paris.
3. Their name sounds like something innappropriate an Eskimo (sorry, Inuit) might say to a member of the opposite sex.
4. They have a little 'club' they use to release great breakthrough 7" singles through and then they go and bundle these together in one great CD for the slow or the lazy.

The first Moshi Moshi Singles Club therefore consists of 14 pretty consistently enjoyable songs, some of which will be from people you know, some of which won't. Yet.

Matt & Kim's 'Silver Tiles' sounds like it is being banged out on a three-year-old's toy drum with vocals that match. It's so infectious resisting it would be like trying to solve all the world's problems with a sit down protest: pointless.

'Caroline's A Victim' continues to please in the fact that it not only sounds like the Kate Nash song most likely to upset your mum but is also a pop reference to The Killers (whose fans are apparently called Victims). Lykke Li's 'Little Bit' is the opposite - a delicate, loveable reverb heavy plea for love.

Meanwhile The Slow Club's 'Because We're Dead' is ramshackle, laid back and effortless. It sounds like a spurned lover you can't resist any more yet also knows they are too damn good for you.

Late of the Pier represent one of the better known bands here and their single 'Bathroom Gurgle' still sounds fresh - wonkey basslines and 80s vocals helping to generate excitement for the Erol Alkan produced debut album this year. The breakdown halfway through prior to the dancing bit is still pure pomp and is all the better for it.

Of course you already know Friendly Fires' 'Paris' but it is perhaps the singles clubs biggest catch so far... This track does more for French tourism than you'd get out of one-hundred monkeys chained to one-hundred Macbook Pros locked in L'Office De Tourisme for eternity.

What's great about the Moshi Moshi singles club is not so much what has come before but what might be up ahead.

BP x

Album Review: Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

With the scale and the sheer duration of the hype that has surrounded them you'd be forgiven for thinking that this must be Crystal Castle's third album rather than their first and yet after all this time it is still good to finally get to grips with their sound in an album format.

Any band that manages to tip a hat to Death From Above 1979 whilst recontectializing the sound of one of their few recordings earns respect from BlackPlastic, particularly when it is done as
convincingly as on album opener 'Untrust Us'. It does well to encapsulate the melancholic 8bit derrangement of the Crystal Castles sound and yet it is blown out of the water by what follows: 'Alice Practice' is already known as the track that got accidentally picked up on MySpace and lead to the band's fame and yet it retains its status as a call to arms. At once evoking the feeling of a scorching summer's day whilst simultaneously operating as a platform for both Alice's vocal freak outs and the aural stuttering that acts as the counterpoint to the melodies. It doesn't care about songs or albums or genres or even you very much... 'Alice Practice' does as it pleases and you can either tag along or get off the bus.

So a good start. Yet the pressure, whilst maintained gradually wears off. Crystal Castles is uncompromising in the same way Death From Above were uncompromising and the same way Test Icicles were uncompromising. There are plenty more good tracks - former single 'Air War' still shines, a glittering stomp that sounds like your cell phone transforming into a hand grenade. 'Vanished', a spooky reimagining of Van She's 'Sexual City' is also a standout.

If anything the problem is that the audience may not be ready - as when a listener experiences a new genre there is a danger that the subtle differences that mark out each composition are list in the noise of their similarities. Crystal Castles' grinding 8bit punk begins to segue into one when stretched out over an hour as it is here. One can't help but wish for perhaps a little less or the introduction of anoter artist or two for the duo to play off, indeed their early remix of the Klaxon's 'Atlantis To Interzone' remains one the best things they have done.

And yet... BlackPlastic cannot help but think the listener is the one at fault here. Crystal Castles are just doing what they wantand staying true to their vision and it almost feels wrong to judge so soon: one to revisit over the coming months.

BP x