Single Review: Drive Your Car - Grovesnor

What would happen if one of Hot Chip broke away to focus on making kitsch 80s pop songs?

This would...

As far as BlackPlastic can tell this is the first debut single, proper. A cut and shut affair, it chops like a switch-blade from the melancholic and more delicate verses to a chorus that demonstrates a determination to drive (pardon the pun) away the blues. What makes this so catchy is that the chorus manages to sound like the theme tune to a TV quiz from the 80s where the taking part is more important than the prizes. Personally BlackPlastic is feeling Going For Gold.

Just when you thought the fun was over you discover you get a consolation prize of four remixes. The remix from Grovesnor himself ups the camp and kitsch and almost feels like it should be the main mix, boasting a nice samba sway and live instrumentation. A Hot Chip dub ups the darkness and them slams on the disco breaks for a ramped up disco quiz show breakdown - and it is lush. Meanwhile both Oliver $ and Bird Peterson's mixes turn it into squelchy tech-house murder of a song that seems to lack any respect for the original but if murder is your thing then here they are.

A whole album of this may well be too much but BlackPlastic would enjoy finding out.

BP x

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

Comment: Close to the edge...

The Roots are without doubt one of Hip-Hop's greats - principally a live band and when BlackPlastic says live, it means it: If you have never listened to a Roots record they are a revelation - live instruments stand in for the DJ that stands in for live instruments on most hip-hop records and the Things Fall Apart album is easily one of the best records of all time.

Please take a minute to read this article over at The Guardian - it basically sounds like they're getting fucked by the label. There's a first folks.

Please don't let a great band die - the new album Rising Down is out on Monday. Why not lay down a tenner on it and help sustain something great? And whilst you're at it pick-up Things Fall Apart and Phrenology - you'll thank us.

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

Mystery Jets - Two Doors Down

What's that?

It's the sound of Mystery Jets further proving their superiority over all other bands - the new Two Doors Down video is an amzing slice of ridiculous eighties retro chic. It's like be stuck in Top Of The Pops C. 1986 and if that isn't the perfect place to be, where is?

BP x