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We round
up the rest of this week’s albums, including The Autumn Leaf,
Miss Kitten, They Might be Giants and Rush Hour.
 The
Album Leaf ‘In A Safe Place’ (City Slang)
The opening track on ‘In a Safe Place’ is a delicate
piece of musical texture that sounds like the inside of a glacier.
Though he hails from San Diego on America’s sunny West Coast,
The Album Leaf’s Jimmy Lavelle found himself electronically
reflecting the landscapes of Iceland on his third album (though
the first to get a wide release in this part of the world). He continues
to experiment with sounds and beat but ‘In a Safe Place’
is more ambitious and diverse than his previous work. Given that
it was recorded with the help of Sigur Ros and Mum it’s hardly
surprising that the results are similar to the work of the Icelandic
outfits. Though it may not match either for quirky invention, it
is an interesting and pretty outsider’s take on the land of
fire and ice.
words: Colm Larkin
Miss Kitten ‘I Com’ (Novamute)
The queen of electro-clash Miss Kitten finally bequeaths her debut
album upon the world. ‘I Com’s royal decree covers all
forms of electro from the hip-hop influences of ‘Requiem for
a Hit’ to the Kraftwerk-esque techno of ‘Soundtrack
of Now’ and the dub grooves of ‘Dub About ‘Me’.
It’s all very accomplished and stylish though the overriding
downtempo tones does hold it back. A couple of more songs like the
rip-roaring anthem ‘Meet Sue Be She’ (say it fast!)
could have made ‘I Com’ way more accessible. But you
sense Miss Kitten isn’t exactly enamoured with the hollowness
and duplicity of the music business. “I have to sing / I have
to tease / I have to kiss so many sheikhs” she sings on ‘Professional
Distortion’. So she’s made a record that’s often
dark and serious, far from the frivolous nature of the fashion-based
electro-clash scene. Admirable though this is, ‘I Com’
could still have been a lot more fun.
words: Colm Larkin
 They
Might Be Giants ‘The Spine’ (Cooking Vinyl)
News just in: They Might Be Giants continue to outstay welcome.
Twenty years, ten studio albums, each progressively more irritating
than the last – make it stop! That joke isn’t funny
any more. Endless musical parody, puerile wordplay and excruciating
liberal sentiments continue to permeate their every release. The
words ‘flogging’ and ‘dead horse’ spring
immediately to mind. The amateurish groove and punk brilliance of
‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ and ‘Ana Ng’ are
long gone, replaced instead with mind numbing studio production
and pointless vocoda effects. And songs about Jodie Foster and David
Bowie for Christ’s sake. But at least they’ve finally
decided to ditch the ever-present fucking accordion.
words: Shaun Macartney
Various ‘Rush Hour’ (Universal)
Co-opting the slogan of some pollutant-pumping, penis-enhancing
car manufacturer, ‘Rush Hour’, a two-CD collection of
dance music anthems, promises the drive of your life. You can picture
the scene the compilers of this album were trying to recreate: a
car-load of good time guys and gals racing up a motorway towards
some mythical club in a deserted quarry, glugging Red Bull and recalling
the craziest places they been raving, all the while the pumping
tunes exuding from the sublime speaker system come in the digitally
mixed classic dance hits package of ‘Rush Hour’. The
reality is a bunch of Burberry clad dead-heads stuck in traffic,
discretely toking on spliffs and not saying very much before queuing
for hours to gain entrance to the latest homogenised super-club.
While ‘Rush Hour’ does contain a number of classic tracks
from the likes of Basement Jaxx, Layo & Bushwacka and Leftfield,
there’s also William Orbit’s butchering of Barber (here
with some remix help from Ferry Corsten), some woeful rejigging
of U2 songs, and a whole lot more characterless dance outings. Remember
you never get anywhere during Rush Hour.
words: Colm Larkin
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