Album Review: Primary Colours - The Horrors

Having historically attracted a level of hype that can only be lead to disappointment the Horrors, as of album number one, were the kind of band BlackPlastic loves to hate. With gimmicks over style and absolutely anything over any substance it was easier to ignore their existence than analyse or comment on it.

The hype machine is in full motion once more but this time something is different. The Horrors' follow up album Primary Colours, produced by Geoff Barrow (of Portishead), Chris Cunningham and Craig Silvey, is not just not crap, it's actually pretty bloody spectacular. To the point that it's now become accepted hype to discuss how surprisingly not-shit it actually is.

Veering from the quite good to the brilliant the references are clear - there are the usual post-punk touchpoints, Joy Division, The Replacements, Neu!. What really separates Primary Colours from being another tired post-punk re-tread is that it sounds, and feels, totally uncompromisingly real. As the warm electronic waves give way to a lead bass guitar and bags of reverb drenched drums on opener 'Mirror's Image' this doesn't sound like a modern day take on post punk, or classic post-punk - it sounds like the band flicked through their record collection, stopped after Joy Division's Closer and just wondered... "What if...?"

Primary Colours is like an alternative version of history - what if the most exciting period of musical history had not simply turned into into New Romanticism and had instead evolved from the stripped back experimentation of the late 70s / very early 80s? Barrow and company's production work is sublime but there is more to this album than just that - there are real, proper, difficult songs here. From the weird sliding guitar sounds of 'Three Decades', the brutally cold selfishness of 'Who Can Say' and it's awkward spoken word bridge to the distorted krautrock of 'Sea Within A Sea' Primary Colours is better than anyone could have expected. It's harsh and beautiful and maginificent.

The pretenders just became the feel thing.

Available at Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3.

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Album Review: The Plot - WhoMadeWho

Much like Datarock, WhoMadeWho's début album was something of a cult record. A collection of interesting ideas stitched into an album that managed to leverage exposure mainly due to a couple of cover versions of dance tracks (Beni Bennasi's 'Satisfaction' and Mr Oizo's 'Flat Beat') that cropped up on a number of mix CDs.

WhoMadeWho's strength has, until now at least, been on a song-by-song basis. Taken all at once, as an album, their work can suffer from a lack of variety and flow.

The Plot is album proper number two (there was also a set of alternative takes on songs from the début entitled Green Versions in between that album and this) and is clearly an attempt to develop a more varied sound. The songs have all moved a little further away from the post-punk-disco sound of old and there are some more distinctive styles - the grimy garage rock of 'The Train' or the quickened beat of 'Office Clerk' together with it's electronic stabs for example.

BlackPlastic still can't help but find WhoMadeWho little more than a temporary diversion however. The problem is that, on the whole, the album suffers from a lack of consequence. It sounds like a band who have gone into the studio to knock out a record before they go home for tea. Most of the songs just don't have the gravitas, with only 'Ode to Joy' and 'Working After Midnight' demonstrating any emotion or depth.

WhoMadeWho definitely have the potential for a great album and indeed, though a little rough around the edges, their début was better than this. The Plot sounds like a band content with playing it safe.

Available to buy on Amazon.co.uk on CD , LP and MP3 .

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Album Review: LadyLuck - Maria Taylor / Light of X - Miranda Lee Richards

Female singer-songwriters are a bit of a tricky one for BlackPlastic... Whenever a new album drops on the doormat from one, and in this case we are tackling two, a little sweat breaks out because they are just such dangerous territory. It would be easy, but cowardly, to just write them all off - Jewel is just bland and Dido is enough to make BlackPlastic want to chew off our own ears, but then you also have the likes of PJ Harvey, Bjork, Kate Bush, Cat Power and recently Polly Scattergood, along with BlackPlastic's personal favourite, Gemma Hayes, whose combination of dreamlike melodies and stripped back production just lets the beauty of her voice shine through.

And out of these it is Hayes whom both Maria Taylor's third solo album and Miranda Lee Richard's Light of X are most reminiscent of.

Formerly one half of Azure Ray, the dreamlike quality of Maria Taylor's previous act's music is still present here. Miranda's album has a similar feel but also sounds totally sun-drenched. If you want a slow-paced, well considered, relaxed folk album then you could do much worse than taking a listen to either of these albums but it is worth pointing out that neither is reinventing the wheel. These are not particularly experimental albums.

Both albums have their charms though. As with Gemma Hayes' and Cat Power's work by focusing on doing something simple well the songs, and each vocalist's voice, are given room to flourish.

Maria recommends listening to the album on the horizontal and it is certainly a perfect soundtrack to unwind to. The album doesn't attempt anything groundbreaking so it is at it's best when the songs come together to make perfect pop music - the haunting melodies of 'It's Time', where Taylor sings "Careful I'm barely here..." and genuinely sounds like she may be disappearing, and the soaring '100,000 Times'. Best of all is the album's closer, co-written and featuring REM's Michael Stipe on backing vocals 'Cartoons and Forever Plans' captures a timeless feeling and brings the curtain down on the album perfectly.

Light of X is more like the audioequivalentof a sun trap - it's a little tricky to hear the wandering piano of it's opening track, 'Breathless', and not want to curl up on a blanket spread out on the lawn on a sunny day. Miranda received her very first bit of guitar tuition from Kirk Hammett of Metallica, and as someone that has collaborated with Tricky, Tim Burgess (of The Charlatans) and toured with Jesus and Mary Chain (and provided duet to 'Sometimes Always' and 'Just Like Honey' in the process) you could reasonably expect something a little edgy from Miranda.

On the whole however Light of X is a slow moving, yet striking, album. It's a perfect soundtrack to a lazy sunny Sunday. Things do get a little more edgy at the album's close however - stick around after the last track proper, 'Last Days of Summer', and the album actually descends into it's own dark winter on a ghost track that has Miranda perform a spoken vocal about standing naked in the snow to a moody, bluesy baking that sounds like it comes from the same world as David Lynch's brain. It's not often BlackPlastic gets to say this - the ghost track is not just worthwhile, it's fantastic - better than the rest of the album - and the contrast it gives the rest of the album makes Light of X a much more worthwhileexercise. If Miranda's next album includes more of such experimentation it just could be great.

Both albums are out now on Nettwerk. Available at Amazon.co.uk: LadyLuck - CDand MP3; Light of X - CD and MP3.

Miranda Lee Richards is on tour in the UK in May:

• 09.05 BIRMINGHAMThe Rainbow
• 10.05 NOTTINGHAM The Social
• 11.05 GLASGOW King Tuts
• 12.05 LIVERPOOL Academy 2
• 13.05 WINCHESTER The Railway
• 14.05 BRIGHTON The Great Escape
• 18.05 LONDON The Borderline
• 20.05 LONDON The Windmill

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Album Review: Red - Datarock

Following up on their début, one of 2007's most under-appreciated gems, Datarock's new album Red is a celebration of technology and culture.

From the opening track 'The Blog', complete with samples of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the World Wide Web) and Steve Jobs, one of Red's core themes is established straight away. This album is a polygamist's love letter, divided between this love of geek and the love of eighties culture, demonstrated through the music itself and much of the lyrical content.

Red is drenched in clever eighties references, whether they come in the form of the 'Heat Is On'-esque opening of 'Give It Up', the lyrics to 'True Stories', which are composed entirely of the titles to Talking Heads songs, or 'Molly', itself a ballad to the Breakfast Club's Molly Ringwald.

Last year's Saturdays = Youth from M83 dealt with similar inspiration and there is always a danger that an album that attempts to re-capture the spirit of another time can suffer from simply becoming tired regurgitation of the past or, even worse, an ironic laugh at its expense. As far as Red is concerned the juxtaposition of modern technology and eighties fanaticism has a point.  The album is an attempt to comment on the tendancy of our culture to be viewed through rose tinted glasses: the eighties and the culture from that period is often now placed upon a pedestal by our current culture. When it comes to appreciation of cultural periods it is the modern age that gets most overlooked yet, as the birth of the Internet and changes in the way music is consumed show, it is just as exciting and culturally rich. Unfortunately it is just much harder to forget all the bad things of the current age than it is with the past.

It's a viewpoint BlackPlastic certainly empathizes with.

Musically Red tones down some of the excessiveness of Datarock's début and the result is a little mixed. There just aren't the same level ridiculous pop records and BlackPlastic can't help but miss the exhuberence and fun of songs like 'New Song', 'Princess' and 'Bulldozer' off of the previous album. There is still a lot to like about Red - the standout being 'Fear of Death', with its spoken verse and vocals reminiscent of Morrisey it's as good as anything on the last album.

It is a shame after the dayglo execessiveness of the last album. Red is enjoyable, it just feels like it gets too caugh up in trying to be clever when sometimes all the listener wants is a bit of stupidity.

Red is due for release in the UK on Nettwerk on 8 June.  Pre-order at Amazon.co.uk on CD.

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Album Review: 'Em Are I - Jeffrey Lewis

From the tumbling opening of 'Slogans', Jeffrey Lewis' latest anti-folk album 'Em Are I is a starkly honest, battered and bruised album that does nothing but serve truth up on a platter, over and over.

Unsurprisingly, given their previous collaborations, there are traces of the Moldy Peaches (and Kimya Dawson's solo work) in Jeffrey Lewis' slower numbers, but this album is all his. It's unique because it is so heart breaking and it's heart breaking simply because it can't help be anything else. It's messy and complicated and scuffed, much like the artist and the listener, and at times it is staggeringly fantastic, as on the experimental muted-jazz-punk-fusion 'The Upside-down Cross'.

It all literally sounds like it can't help but paint a warts and all picture of life. 'Roll Bus Roll' is Jeffrey just too tired to lie. 'If Life Exists' is Jeffrey being lyrically too inane to be anything but telling the truth. 'Broken Broken Broken Heart' is Jeffrey still too grazed and too stung to be doing anything beyond recall the truth.

It might sound like a tough listen, but it isn't. At all. 'Em Ar I is so chipper about being through a rough and tumble it feels like a forward roll over a cowpat in your boss' favourite suit. It's all there in the scared-yet-spellbound-by-the-beauty-of-it-all in 'Bugs & Flowers'. It's being brave enough to just keep singing and singing and playing and playing until nothing else matters.

Available on Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3.

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