2015: an alternative review (part 1)

2015, eh? It’s been a year of ups and downs, and all that… blah, blah, blah. You’re probably sick of reading about the highlights of 2015 by now, so in keeping with my own personal tradition, here’s a slightly different take on some of the year’s events in the world of music and popular culture in general, with a tiny smattering of politics (but not too much) thrown in for good measure. Part 2 to follow very soon.

Adele

To be clear, I have no issue with Adele as a person. I’ve no idea what kind of human being she is but I’m more than willing to tolerate her continued existence. What I do have an issue with, however, is the hype which surrounded the damp sleeping bag of a third album she saw fit to unleash on us this year. I don’t think anyone was expecting a radical change in direction (a psychedelic jazz-funk opus, for example) but surely the most hardened Adele fan (I’ve no idea how such a concept would even manifest itself) was hoping for more than a tepid regurgitation of EVERYTHING ADELE HAS EVER DONE IN THE HISTORY OF ADELE BEING A THING? Everything about this album smacks of a total lack of imagination, from the uninspiring title (looking forward to ’86’) through to the same lazy preoccupation with trying to patch up shitty relationships. And that’s before we even get to the music, which is basically the aural equivalent of the bitter disappointment experienced on discovering that the cup of tea you’d be looking forward to has now gone cold. It’s a truly sad indictment on the British music industry when this utter puddle of whinge breaks all sales records. She’s getting away with murder and we’re all letting it happen.

Sam Smith

Maybe I just hear things differently to other people. I remember having a conversation with someone at university about M People caterwauler Heather Small and how her voice really grated on me – an opinion met with genuine surprise from the other party who genuinely felt she possessed a perfectly fine voice. History is now repeating itself in the form of Sam Smith. A work colleague agreed with me that his songs were dull, dreary and largely forgettable and then added “but what a voice though, eh?”. See, where a lot of people are apparently hearing the saviour of British soul music, I’m just hearing the incessant whining of a child about to break into a full scale tantrum because his mum won’t let him go to a family wedding dressed as Spiderman. His voice is not only unremarkable, it’s also downright unpleasant to listen to, like a shrill, never-ending apology for wetting the bed. Sometimes, if you listen hard enough, the sounds he emits form actual words. He also has the distinction of making a Bond theme worse than Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’, something anyone with ears had hoped wasn’t physically possible. Like I say, maybe I just hear things differently, but there are times when it would be preferable not to be able to hear at all.

Donald Trump

There was a time when The Donald was little more than a figure of fun because he didn’t really understand how hair worked and, let’s face it, Trump means fart (if you’re British). And fart jokes never stop being funny, right? In short, he was seen as an eccentric but ultimately harmless character, a bit like Simon Cowell, Lord Sugar or Mr Bean. Somewhere along the line, however, he’s turned into some sort of bright orange bouffant Hitler, spouting the type of venomous rhetoric which ended in old Adolf lying face down in a ditch, on fire. I don’t know whether Trump actually means it, whether he’s just saying what he thinks ‘his’ kind of people want to hear or whether he’s just trying to see what he can get away with, but one thing is clear: if you were standing next to him at a urinal, you’d sure as hell splash the fucker’s shoes.

NME

Yeah, it went free and, in the process, defied accepted science by actually being worse than it was before. Cover stars since they stopped expecting people to pay good money for the ‘pleasure’ have included Sam Smith and that gimp from Twilight who went back for seconds when they were handing out eyebrows. Inside, the magazine is so dumbed down that its few remaining staff may as well come round to your house and act out its contents using brightly coloured sock puppets. As a product, it’s clinging on for dear life but as the go-to music magazine of record, it died a long, long time ago. What a shame it wasn’t allowed to float off to the great newsagent in the sky with at least a modicum of dignity still intact.

TFI Friday

Admit it – if you had your own TV show, wouldn’t you just fill it with your mates and things you like? That’s basically always been the formula for TFI Friday, which made a long-awaited and much-trumpeted return to our screens this autumn following a successful anniversary special in June. But now the dust has settled it’s becoming all to clear that the new series has failed quite miserably to live up to expectations. The format remains largely unchanged and all the familiar ingredients are still there, but it no longer seems to work. Evans grates in a way that he didn’t back in the ‘90s (even when he was in the grip of his very public meltdown) and the whole ‘look at me, I’m rich, I have famous friends and can get away with anything’ vibe no longer feels like good-natured, laddish banter, but now has a distinctly vulgar tone. The music has been dire (U2, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, James Bay, Texas, to name but a few), making Later With Jools Holland look like the Bangface Weekender in comparison, while the celebrity interviews feel stilted and awkward, punctuated by pointless little skits and routines shoehorned into the show for the sake of it. In the 90s, TFI Friday worked perfectly because it captured the alcopop-fuelled lad culture of the Britpop era, but in the 21^st century it just feels like you’re listening to a particularly embarrassing speech full of jokes which fail to land given by an obnoxiously inebriated relative at a family party. Come in TFI Friday, your time is up.

Transmission: incredible

Sound Advice #2: 

Klaxons – Surfing The Void (2010)

Go on, admit it. You’d written them off as another novelty act, hadn’t you?

You probably remember Klaxons as the leading (disco) lights of the short-lived, media-fuelled and, to be honest, largely non-existent ‘nu-rave’ scene of almost a decade ago.

If you think hard enough, you’ll probably also recall that there wasn’t really anything particularly ‘ravey’ about them (they didn’t properly venture into electronic music until last year’s ‘Love Frequency’) and that they were only really lumbered with that albatross of a tag because they emerged at a time when any band with a keyboard player was immediately branded a ‘dance-punk/indie-dance crossover’ act by lazy music critics.

Okay, they famously covered Grace’s ‘Not Over Yet’ and Kicks Like A Mule’s ‘The Bouncer’ and they (perhaps reluctantly) became synonymous with glowsticks and the kind of dayglo fashions not seen since Fat Willy’s was clothing our nation’s children in the early 90s, but if we really must pigeonhole them then Klaxons were, at heart, a psychedelic band – and a great one at that.

There’s no denying debut album ‘Myths Of The Near Future’ was a great record and, yes, it did capture a ‘moment’ in British alternative music history, but I put it to you that the band’s real piece de resistance was, in fact, second album ‘Surfing The Void’.

While ‘Myths…’ was a playful, multi-coloured patchwork quilt of an album made by a bunch of wide-eyed whippersnappers who you suspected couldn’t quite believe their luck, its follow-up was a much more mature-sounding record produced by a band who were no longer simply ambitious – they actually walked the walk, sounding confident in their own abilities.

Polydor apparently made the band re-record large chunks of ‘Surfing The Void’ on the grounds that what they had presented to the label was ‘too experimental’ (that’s major label speak for ‘not mainstream enough'). However, at no point does the finished product feel like the work of a band who’ve had to compromise (even though it is), instead sounding like a fully rounded album by a band (and they WERE a full band by now, with a full-time drummer and everything) who had trusted their instincts and found their direction.

Lyrically, the fantastical, futurist themes are still present and correct (the frankly fantastic album cover art alone should provide a glaringly obvious clue that they’re not going to be singing about going to the chip shop on the way home from the pub) and musically, the ludicrously catchy choruses are even more, erm, ludicrously catchy than before (from opener and lead single ‘Echoes’ right through to adrenaline-pumping closer ‘Cypherspeed’), but everything just sounds bigger, better, more complete.

Crucially, it’s the sound of a band who’ve managed to throw off the shackles of that whole embarrassing nu-rave nonsense and turn in their strongest work to date.

What’s really baffling, however, is that while around 350,000 people bought ‘Myths Of The Near Future’, a significantly more modest 30,000 (still enough to spend a week just inside the top 10, admittedly) thought it worth parting with their hard-earned cash for the follow-up. Despite generally favourable reviews, it seemed the record-buying punters had other ideas.

Okay, so they probably took a bit too long to release a second album (three years can be a long time when you’re riding the zeitgeist, even if your nasty major label makes you re-record it), but maybe some people just didn’t ‘get’ Klaxons now that they weren’t part of any so-called scene. Maybe some people still associated them with nu-rave and the whole NME-instigated ‘hey kids!’ approach to music and consequently felt the band had nothing new to offer and bought another Kings Of Leon album instead ‘cos that was REAL music, right? Maybe some people just bought the first album to look ‘with it’ in front of their chums (y’know, the Nathan Barleys of this world).

Losers.

Written off?

If the uneasy relationship between the internet and the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that too many people today believe they shouldn’t have to pay anything (or at least any more than they think they should) to listen to the music they love. Equally, it seems these same people believe they shouldn’t have to pay to read about the music they love either.

While pretty much every music magazine is seeing a rapid decline in sales, no one seems to be feeling the increasingly painful pinch more than NME, once that bastion of cutting edge new music eagerly awaited each week by the faithful and now little more than a flimsy, overpriced shop window for the online version (which, incidentally, attracts around seven millions users a month).

Having enjoyed six-figure circulation figures at the peak of its success, the magazine struggles to entice more than around 15,000 people a week to part with their hard-earned cash – and at £2.50 a pop for something that can be read cover to cover during an average toilet visit, who can blame them?

Something’s gotta give and that something, it seems, is the cover price. Having realised that they can’t sell it anymore, the people at NME have now decided to see if they can literally give it away. Yep, from September, NME will be free, moving from the newsstands to railway stations, shops and student unions instead – an indie Metro, if you will.

It’s hardly a surprising move, although what IS surprising is that NME has managed to cling on for dear life for so long. In its heyday, it was the first port of call for anyone eager to find out when their favourite band’s next album was coming out or whether they would be touring nearby. It was also THE place to read about exciting new bands you wouldn’t see in the mainstream press.

Today, thanks to the old information superhighway, your favourite band have just used their Facebook page and Twitter feed to link to a brief YouTube teaser for their next album. As a loyal fan, you’ve received advance notice of their tour dates via email (no more filling in and sending off those postcards inserted into the record or CD cover so that you can then receive more postcards) and you can even tweet the band directly to express your delight at the fact they’re playing at the Dogger’s Arms in Kettering or to vent your frustration because they’ve wisely given your hometown a wide berth yet again. Oh, and you’ve probably already discovered enough new music online to fill five issues of NME before its writers have even thought of an opening line for an article telling you why Rustic Scrotum or Panda Pop Holocaust are the future of all our lives.

In a digital age, no one wants to wait until next Wednesday to find out when Damon Albarn’s concept album about sandwiches is going to be released. They want it now, dammit.

But there’s another issue – granted, not one that will have had a huge impact on their already plummeting sales figures but which I believe is still an issue all the same.

It’s fair to say that the quality of the product has decreased significantly over the past decade (if not longer). Gone are the days of in-depth critical analysis of this week’s new albums – now everything feels dumbed down and diluted, like it’s been written by an excitable work experience kid (and from what I’ve heard, that’s probably not too wide of the mark). Everything is brief and to the point (whatever that may be), but without any depth, personality or genuine passion. Where’s the individual writing style? Where’s the sense of pride in your work? Nah, the industry just wants short, punchy phrases it can plaster across adverts, posters and stickers on CD covers. Don’t try to be too clever or creative – we can’t fit it on the sticker, not with that five-star rating we’ve included from The Sun and Heat! And no, you can’t give this one a bad review – we’ve already decided as a publication that we like this band because they might be the next Arctic Monkeys.

Also, considering we live in an age where the media have never had more research tools at their disposal, a little basic fact-checking wouldn’t go amiss here and there, NME. That includes your website and its relentless stream of ’25 albums you just HAVE to hear before you turn 27’-type clickbait.

As part of its ‘rebranding’ (and why is everything just a brand these days?), NME’s distribution will be increased to 300,000 copies, presumably because increased circulation means they can not only attract more advertising but also charge more for the privilege of advertising in a magazine you’re now more likely to find lying face down on a sticky train carriage floor.

Will this additional advertising revenue be invested back into the product? Will they employ quality writers who actually understand the music they are writing about, rather than simply picking up on the latest generic white male guitar four-piece because they’ve got the right hair and clothes? Will they resist the urge to create more double-page spreads out of the fact Noel Gallagher has said SOMETHING CONTROVERSIAL AGAIN? Will they stop writing articles about Muse with lazy headlines such as ‘Apocalypse Wow’? Will they just stop writing about Mumford & Sons altogether?

We can but hope – but we probably shouldn’t hold our breath.