The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 1
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 2
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 4
Grabbed from the Sunday Times, linked up with Last.fm.
(Typos corrected where caught. Please let me know if you find any more)
Watch tracks from Culture's definitive guide to modern music
January 25, 2009
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene part III
Ambient I Alt-country I Americana I Anti-folk I Art rock I Blue-eyed soul I Conscious Rap I Electro I Emo I Fence Collective I Folk traditionalist I Folktronica I Freak Folk I Fridmann's Freaks I Gangsta rap I Garage I Grime I Hardcore I Heavy Metal I House I Hip-Pop I Indie rock I Manufactured pop I Montreal scene I Neo-Psychedelia I Nordic pop I Post-rock I Power-pop I Progressive rock I R&B I Second Childhood I Singer-songwriters I Slowcore I Synth pop I Techno
From Ambient and Anti-Folk to Garage, Electro and Power Pop: part three of our definitive guide to modern music
AMBIENT
Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie, Stars of the Lid, Tim Story
Back in the
1970s, when
Brian Eno came up with the idea of music that should be “as ignorable as it is interesting”, the genre seemed destined for a limited life in a world with ever-decreasing attention spans. Low-key instrumental music with no great ambition to get anywhere? Next! Yet
ambient music persists, in its own quiet way.
Aphex Twin’s
Selected Ambient Works and albums by
The Orb gave the genre a boost in the
1990s, and its influence spread throughout related areas: you can hear the influence of ambient on the likes of
Air,
Boards of Canada,
royksopp,
Sigur Ros and pretty much anyone who learnt from ambient that you could leave quiet bits in there and people wouldn’t stop listening. Pure ambient music is still heavily populated by the 1970s generation, with
Harold Budd,
Robert Fripp and
Hans-Joachim Roedelius all still making exceptional music, alone and in collaboration. Occasionally, newer faces appear, notably Norway’s
Geir Jenssen, whose albums as
Biosphere seem to reflect the fact that his home is in the Arctic Circle; the British duo
Marconi Union, who bring a darker edge to things; Japan’s genre-hopping
Susumu Yokota; the
drone-heavy Texans
Stars of the Lid; and the Ohio-based
Tim Story, whose collaborations with Roedelius are breathtaking.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Marconi Union,
Distance (2006);
Stars of the Lid,
and Their Refinement of the Decline (2007);
Robert Fripp,
At the End of Time (2007)
Classic:
Brian Eno,
Music For Airports (1978);
Harold Budd,
Luxa (1996);
Biosphere,
Substrata (1997)
Key track:
Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story,
Downrivers (2008)
ANTI-FOLK
Jeffrey Lewis, Emmy the Great, Diane Cluck
First of all, it isn’t.
anti-folk music, that is. In fact, many of its leading players make music that is, if not exactly
folk, then folky. The Hong Kong-born, London-based singer
Emma Lee Moss, aka
Emmy the Great, is a good example of what the genre is supposed to be about: the songs on her debut album,
First Love (due for release on February 9), combine intricate melodies, acute lyrics, intimacy, humour and candour. It takes its name from a dispute in mid-1980s New York involving a musician called
Lach, whose raw, punk-infused songs led to him being barred from most of the city’s leading folk clubs. To coincide with the next NY Folk festival, Lach launched his own anti-folk jamboree, and thus was a movement — if something as disparate and disputatious as anti-folk can be called that — born. To give you some idea of how disparate: in America, it encompasses everything from the haunting, laid-bare minimalism of
Diane Cluck to the slapstick and silly-costume-wearing of
The Moldy Peaches. To give you some idea of how disputatious: in Britain, scenesters tend not to use the hyphen, make music that maxes on a kind of amateurish absurdity and misfit performance-art anarchy, and have little to do with folk or, in some cases, music (which isn’t to say some of them don’t possess their own startling gifts). Emmy the Great belongs in the hyphenated camp, as, arguably, does
Laura Marling. They’re anti-folk, but not, you know, actually anti it. In fact, they rather like it. In an understated sort of way.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Diane Cluck,
Macy’s Day Bird (2001);
Jeffrey Lewis,
The Last Time I Did Acid I went Insane and Other Favourites (2002);
Emmy the Great,
First Love (2009)
Key Track:
Diane Cluck,
Monte Carlo (2000)
GARAGE
Geeneus, T2, MJ Cole, DJ EZ, Burial, Benga, Kode9, Skream
You may remember a time, at the turn of the millennium, when
uk garage was the big new thing, and acts such as
Artful Dodger and
So Solid Crew were scoring Top 10 singles. It had emerged from the
chillout rooms at
drum’n’bass nights and was originally a speeded-up version of the soulful
us garage style. As it evolved, the bass lines became more ruthless and the rhythms more disjointed — especially in the
2-step style, with its characteristic missing second and fourth beats. Sadly, with success came a reputation for violence; in 2001, the police started to refuse licences for garage nights and all but shut down the scene. Back underground, the music sent off shoots in many directions. In east London, young crews came up with grime, the British version of
hip-hop. In Croydon, a group of producers centred on the record shop
Big Apple stripped out the singing, ramped up the bass and created
dubstep. Within a few years, dubstep was being championed by a Radio 1 DJ,
Mary Anne Hobbs, then it conquered the world.
This atmospheric style borrows from
dub reggae its delay and echo effects, which create a striking sense of open space and a vivid atmosphere. Perhaps buoyed by dubstep’s success, garage producers set to work again, and the scene, with a strong element of nostalgia, is regaining ground, although part of the fraternity has moved into a lighter, supposedly more female-friendly style called
funky house, or simply
funky, which pretty much brings garage full circle. For those who like it raw, there is
bassline, an abrasive Sheffield-born style that is the most pared-down garage sound yet.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Burial,
Burial (2006); Various Artists,
Box of Dub (2007) (
Amazon UK); Various Artists,
The Very Best of Pure Garage (2008) (
Amazon UK)
Key track:
Benga & Coki,
Night (2008)
ELECTRO
DJ Hell, Aphex Twin, Kissy Sell Out, Soulwax, Daft Punk, Herve
Something big is happening in the clubs. Not for nothing did NME, the touchstone of young music-lovers, lead off its Scene 2009 roundup with the Dance & Electronic section. For NME, there was only one type of dance music to get excited about: a new
electro sound that, with a breathtaking lack of respect for boundaries, throws a bit of everything into the pot, including old-fashioned
rave riffs, a prurient interest in the
1980s and lots of threatening
bass. Some types of dance music are as easily defined by what they are not as by what they are, and that is certainly true of electro,
electronic music’s catch-all category. It began life in Detroit, descended from the stern rhythms of
Kraftwerk and
Throbbing Gristle and the
experimental funk of
George Clinton’s
p-funk project, and was the precursor of
techno.
Dave Clarke, a techno DJ-producer, has a healthy sideline in electro and defines it as “held together by left-field spirit and no 4/4 beat programming”. To that, one might add the fact that whereas
house, say, often aims for a smooth, organic feel, electro revels in the synthetic, the modern and the bumpy; often electro tracks have vocals and song-like forms, but you can bet the producer will have messed about with them irreverently. These days, the genre has three main strands:
breaks (often called
nu-skool breaks), the stop-start, poppy descendant of
The Chemical Brothers-style big beat; the experimental, acquired-taste variety, whose tart, curious tones are increasingly taking on the bass fixation and open rhythms of
dubstep; and the
glitch, or
fidget, style, the kind NME believes is 2009’s most exciting music — which is also developing a bass obsession. There’s a lot of it about at the moment.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Daft Punk,
Alive (2007);
FreQ Nasty,
FabricLive 42: Freq Nasty (2008) (
Amazon UK);
Bomb the Bass,
Future Chaos (2008)
Key track:
Hervé & Kissy Sell Out,
Rikkalicious (2008)
FOLK TRADITIONALIST
Kate Rusby, Karine Polwart, Roddy Woomble, Seth Lakeman, Cara Dillon, Eliza Carthy
While you will regularly hear tales of a “
folk revival”, the truth is that, in the rock’n’roll era, folk music has never gone away. Each generation simply reinvents it. Recent years have spawned several mergers between folk and other genres —
freak-folk,
folktronica — but they have also seen the emergence of a new breed of folk traditionalists, who, while they might not quaff real ale and wear Shetland woollies, sound as if they might know someone who does. The 1990s band
Equation never quite lived up to its billing as a “supergroup”, but it did unleash the talents of
Kathryn Roberts, Seth and
Sean Lakeman,
Cara Dillon and
Kate Rusby. Both
Seth Lakeman’s aggressively played music, which hovers between folk and
Singer-Songwriter territory, and Rusby’s gorgeous work, which stays true to its Yorkshire roots (brass bands and all), have been nominated for the Mercury prize — as was
The Bairns, the second album by
Rachel Unthank & The Winterset.
Roddy Woomble, the lead singer of
Idlewild, is the latest rocker to revert to folky roots, with great success. Both Scotland’s
Karine Polwart and Ireland’s
Damien Dempsey exemplify the ability of the modern folk singer to tackle current issues in a traditional format, Dempsey’s music, in particular, having an astonishing ability to move from the grim realities of today’s world to a state of transcendence.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Kate Rusby,
Awkward Annie (2007),
Karine Polwart,
Scribbled in Chalk (2006);
Roddy Woomble,
My Secret Is My Silence (2006)
Key track:
Damien Dempsey,
It’s All Good (2004)
MANUFACTURED POP
Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Spice Girls
At its most blatant,
manufactured pop (MP) is a puppets-on-a-string affair, with managers, producers and songwriters (and, more recently, stylists, make-up artists and designers) on hand to pull the levers and buff the product. Sometimes, the involvement of the actual singer or band can seem like an afterthought. Bands such as
Spice Girls,
S Club 7 and, further back,
The Monkees were recruited through ads placed in the trade papers, and
Girls Aloud were assembled on a talent show, lending weight to the idea that such acts serve merely as photogenic money machines for the svengalis behind the scenes. Today’s legions of gun-for-hire songwriters —
Xenomania,
Cathy Dennis,
Max Martin et al — and impresarios as canny and ubiquitous as Simons Cowell and Fuller have a strike rate that is so consistently successful, and targeted with such precision at national radio’s current requirements, it is easy to concentrate on the manipulation, as it were, and forget about the quality, and eccentricity, of some of the records they contribute to (and that acts including Girls Aloud and
Sugababes make their own, in some cases co-writing). A whiff of snobbery certainly attends perceptions of MP. Purists who doff their caps at the Brill Building greats — conveniently forgetting that the likes of Lieber, Stoller, Goffin and King often churned out songs to order — remain ostentatiously deaf to the pop perfection of singles such as
S Club 7’s
Don’t Stop Movin’ and Girls Aloud’s
Biology. Less uptight folk have no such difficulty. Pop as product, sniff the critics. Oh, relax.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Rachel Stevens,
Funky Dory (2003);
Girls Aloud,
Chemistry (2005);
Sugababes,
Taller in More Ways (2005)
Classic:
The Monkees,
More of the Monkees (1967);
Take That,
Everything Changes (1993);
Spice Girls,
Spice (1996)
Key track:
Girls Aloud,
Biology (2005)
POWER-POP
Fountains of Wayne, OK Go, The Feeling, Weezer, Jonas Brothers
As the word “
pop” became debased, essentially being used to describe the worst kind of manufactured pop, we needed a new way to describe pop that was actually good. Hence
power pop. Think of it, then, as anything that harks back to
The Beatles (up to and including
Revolver) and especially anything that brings in a little extra
new-wave energy — as typified by the dumb but infectious hooks of
The Knack’s
My Sharona, the slick, more-power-in-reserve coolness of
The Cars’
My Best Friend’s Girl and the driving riffery of
Tom Petty’s
American Girl. Power-pop classics of the 1990s, such as
Matthew Sweet’s guitartastic
Girlfriend and
Jellyfish’s incomparable
Bellybutton, failed to connect with a wider audience, but power-pop gained a new level of success this millennium when it was co-opted by the kind of boybands who protested that they weren’t boybands at all, such as
Busted and
McFly, and by American grunge-lite acts such as
Blink 182 and
Good Charlotte. The Disney popsters
Jonas Brothers are currently continuing this tradition, while a classier version of power-pop can be heard in the works of
Maxïmo Park and
The Feeling. The spring in power-pop’s step is neatly symbolised in the video for
OK Go’s
Here It Goes Again, where the band perform their YouTube-famous dance on treadmills.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent:
Busted,
A Present For Everyone (2003);
The Feeling,
Twelve Stops and Home (2007);
Fountains of Wayne,
Welcome Interstate Managers (2003)
Classic:
The Cars,
The Cars (1978);
Matthew Sweet,
Girlfriend (1991);
Jellyfish,
Bellybutton (1990)
Key track:
OK Go,
Here It Goes Again (2005)
(
Links not checked. Please let me know where amendments are required.)
Source:
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene part III
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 1
The Sunday Times guide to today's music scene : Part 2
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