The New Cue #352 January 26: Liam Gallagher & John Squire, Sleaford Mods, NewDad, Joy Orbison, Gruff Rhys, Fat White Family, Drunk Mums, Justice, Oisin Leech, The Smile
"A lot of the kids called me Mr K..."
Good morning,
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Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
An Album To Blow Your Mind
As selected by Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson: Australian post-punks go back to the ‘80s.
Last year, Sleaford Mods released their 12th album, UK Grim. Far from finding the pair’s anger and frustration at post-Brexit Britain cooling off, it was one of their most vital sounding records, drawing guest appearances from Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw and Perry Farrell…
Just before Christmas, Jason took some time out to recommend one of his own favourite records of 2023 for you, the third album from Melbourne’s RVG…
RVG
Brain Worms (2023)
“It’s their latest album and it’s really good. We’ve played with them a few times, but they’ve really come into their own now and this album displays that. They might kill me for saying this, but it sounds like a cross between The Waterboys and every listenable ‘80s artist. It’s got some serious 80s vibes to it. You know you used to get that string of artist that used to be in prog rock bands but then went solo in the ‘80s and released really good pop singles? It’s not quite got that production to it, but it’s got that sort of energy and aura to it. It’s quite a lonely album as well, it’s a sad album but it’s good. They’re almost like underdogs at the moment but I think that’s going to fast change for them.”
Recommender
Ted Kessler
Scrolling through social media in the days after the first Liam Gallagher and John Squire single Just Another Rainbow was released a couple of weeks ago, I was struck by some of the disappointed comparisons being made. Sounds like The Beatles, people sniffed. It’s just like The Stone Roses, others complained, or Oasis…
Well, OK. Liam Gallagher and John Squire making music together that sounds like The Beatles, Stone Roses and Oasis – Just Another Rainbow has quite a bit of late-60s Rolling Stones in there too - is the very best possible outcome for any collaboration between the former Oasis singer and the Stone Roses guitarist, whose work in the late 1980s was the primary influence for Noel Gallagher wanting to be a guitarist in the first place and, consequently, join Liam’s earliest version of Oasis. Liam, as everyone knows, only wanted to be a rock & roll singer because he’d been to see The Stone Roses in 1988. This collaboration is meant to be. And let’s face it, it’s a much more appetising proposal in 2024 than Noel Gallagher teaming up with Ian Brown.
Let Liam Gallagher and John Squire be Liam Gallagher and John Squire. These are the very best versions of themselves. They are not avant-garde auteurs. Neither is Brian Eno. Liam Gallagher is 51, John Squire 61: the biggest surprise they can pull on listeners is the collaboration itself, which feels kind of miraculous anyway given the paucity of music Squire has released since that landmark first Roses album in ’89. Nobody wants Liam Gallagher to make music that sounds like Thom Yorke, Jack Harlow, Dua Lipa or Lankum. He is a one-in-a-generation rock singer, an instantly recognisable voice that sold out two nights at Knebworth belting old Oasis songs in 2022, thirteen years after that band had split. He is at his best singing aggressively plaintive vocal lines over groovily heavy guitar licks you think you may have heard before but probably haven’t.
That is exactly what Squire gives him on Mars To Liverpool, the second single he’s written from their soon-come self-titled debut album. It starts off a bit like The Faces, then turns into a Roses-like terrace-chant jangle for the chorus which Liam delivers with powerful yearning. An anthem about surviving a heavy hangover or come-down, possibly, or maybe a long tour in a distant country with people you no longer speak to. Perfect. If you’ve ever enjoyed the early Oasis and Stone Roses albums, as well as the music made by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Faces, then you are going to absolutely love the first album by Liam Gallagher and John Squire. And if you expect anything different, then you’ll be disappointed. Liam and John will probably survive that.
Besides, the best artists always sound like themselves. Take Gruff Rhys. In the Super Furry Animals he made electrifying psych-pop, singing whole albums in Welsh, reaching the higher reaches of the charts backed by steel drums and fuzzed-out guitars. As a solo artist, he’s travelled from North-West Wales to Patagonia, he’s made records with Tuareg rockers in the Saharan Desert and with the Mandan tribe of the Great Plains in North America. No matter who he works with, though, or which instruments and players he employs, as soon as he strikes a melancholy Gruff Rhys melody and opens his doleful vocal chords you know exactly with whom you are spending time. The fabrics may change. The body’s contours do not.
So it is on his magnificent new album, Sadness Sets Me Free, the follow-up to 2021’s Seeking New Gods – which snuck into the charts for his first solo top ten – and, amazingly, the 25th album he’s released since SFA’s Fuzzy Logic in 1996. It was recorded swiftly in three days at a mansion just north of Paris called La Frette, where Arctic Monkeys made Tranquillity Base Hotel & Casino. Like that record, Sadness Sets Me Free reverberates with a weary, somewhat satisfied desolation, filled with the resignation that a long, final conversation with a partner can leave one with. It is a record that flits from pop-soul to country twang, from honky-tonk to piano dirge, but in each room we find Gruff, standing arms apart, listing his failings, his regrets, what he could’ve done better. He’s dealing with things, in public, to lovely melodies. Letting the sadness set him free.
Throwing in Joy Orbison’s flight fm to cleanse the palate after listening to LG & JS’s album twice, then Gruff’s midlife crises another time and a half, and consequently needing to change the channel. Peter O’Grady’s one-off track doesn’t sound like those records. Instead, it’s like being strapped to the top of a BMW being whisked around Charlie Browns roundabout in Woodford at 2:00 am for four minutes while the bottom-end bass pumped from the car rattles the ribcage. Lovely.
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Chris Catchpole
Being a fan of both Justice and Tame Impala, I was naturally excited to see that the French duo’s new single was a collaboration with the Aussie psychedelicists’ cosmonaut-in-chief Kevin Parker. I’ve got to say though, One Night/All Night is actually a bit disappointing. Parker’s short and over familiar-sounding melody drifting over a serviceable but fairly non-descript electro thump. Much, much better is the other track they stuck out with it, Generator. A demented chop-up of hardcore rave and chrome plated robo-funk, it somehow manages to pivot into an orchestral disco section that sounds a bit like Isaac Hayes or The Love Unlimited Orchestra. If you pitted the two tracks in a fight against one another, Generator would hospitalize the other one. Not that I condone that sort of thing.
I noticed a few Fridays ago that Fat White Family’s gap-toothed musical general Saul Adamczewski was conspicuous in his absence in the video of the band’s last single, Religion For One...
Well, a press release put out earlier this week announcing FWF’s new album, Forgiveness Is Yours, has cleared that particular head-scratcher up, stating that Saul “permanently and acrimoniously” left the group during the album’s recording. It’s not the first time the band have soldiered on without their co-founder and despite the creative loss, Bullet Of Dignity sounds like a good omen, its queasy marriage of sex dungeon electro and Turkish disco mopping up the spills from 2019 career high Serf’s Up!.
I am frequently dismayed by the standard of new band names these days. Too often, I’ll get sent a new song by some up and comings and then see what they’re called and think, ‘Really? This is the defining artistic statement of your lives so far and you’ve decided to call yourselves something like Ctrl+shift^sigh^?’
Be still my beating heart, then, when earlier this week I got an email asking if I’d like to hear the new song from an Australian punk band called Drunk Mums. OF COURSE I want to hear the new song from an Australian punk band called Drunk Mums. I’m even happier to report that Livin’ At Night is ace, a riotous volley of noisy guitars and call and response shouting that sounds like The Hives’ Pelle Almqvist jumping on stage at a Replacements gig.
Sticking to the theme of nomenclature, the new song from garage rock fetishizers Japanese Television is called Typhoon Reggae Police. Haha! Brilliant! Sounds like it could be the title of a Fall song, doesn’t it? Well, turns out it actually is the title of a Fall song. Or a demo at least that the band saw listed in the late great Mark E. Smith’s autobiography. Mark was a Link Ray fan so presumably he would approve of the growling surf guitar rumble duelling away against a wobbly Vox Continental organ on this excellent retro sci-fi instrumental. Plus, as it’s an instrumental you can have a go imagining what Smithy might sound like on it, too. “Typhoon reggae police-sahh!!
OK, this week we’ve had a great band name and a great song title, so I’d say that’s the perfect opportunity to introduce what might be the best album title of the year. Coming out in May on Mogwai’s Rock Action Records, Arab Strap’s eighth album is called “I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a fuck anymore 👍” Apparently, the title was inspired by a text their drummer sent Aidan Moffat, who describes the record as loaded with “quiet anger”.
While there’s nothing particularly quiet about the pounding electronic throb of its musical setting, Moffat sounds positively seething on Bliss, growling his contempt for the cesspit of online interaction like an angry misanthrope at a student club night.
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Niall Doherty
January and February are historically the premium months for debut album releases, new bands getting their moment in the spotlight whilst all the established stars holiday in the Maldives /hunker down in the country pad/go to rehab, a period when the charts are like an all-inclusive hotel during the school term. Dublin quartet Sprints got in there mega early, releasing their very good debut album on January 5 (maybe a little bit too eager?), whilst The Last Dinner Party, whose huge success seems about as inevitable as me making this paragraph about three times longer than it should be, release theirs next week. In between, though, is my favourite of the lot, the debut by Galway’s NewDad.
Titled Madra, it’s an album pulling from some of my favourite bands (and, I presume, theirs too), a rock record that doesn’t rock as much as it does glare solemnly across the room. There’s moments of Interpol-y epic minimalism where the spacious guitar lines sound like they’ve got an assembly hall to themselves, moody, Cure-style chord changes, bits that remind me of the era in Smashing Pumpkins when Billy Corgan decided he wanted his band to start sounding like New Order (NewDad pull it off better) and that age-old shoegazing-y mix of melancholic vocals paired with uplifting pop hooks. Just brilliant.
Also a new-ish band putting their latest record out but not really a new band at all is The Smile. The news that Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s new band were putting out a second record in as many years did raise a few questions for this diehard Radiohead fan, given that’s the same amount that Radiohead have put out in 13 years. Like, what do the other members make of it? Is that it for Radiohead? Have Radiohead become the side-project? After spending much longer than a 42-year-old man with 42-year-old man responsibilities should spend thinking about these things, I came to the conclusion that what I suspect will happen is that Radiohead will follow a late-career path similar to Blur, coming together once a decade or thereabouts for a new record and a global victory lap.
And the questions hazily dissipated the more I listened to Wall Of Eyes, the title of The Smile’s second album, anyway. It’s an excellent record that sounds looser, jazzier and more symphonic than their debut, the line between organic and electronic a little more fuzzy. It continues the established tradition of modern Thom Yorke recordings of leaving his voice unblemished, the calm centre of the sonic manipulation, tumbling grooves and frenetic guitar work. There are some outstanding moments: the mournful ambient-techno of Teleharmonic sounds like a distant, wounded cousin of the Yorke-featuring Mark Pritchard track Beautiful People, the warm strings that bring the otherwise hazy experimental piano ballad I Quit into focus, or the way the Krautrock rhythms of Under Our Pillows wraps itself around Jonny Greenwood’s dextrous, finger-picked guitars. It frequently reminds you of Radiohead, but then of course it does. It would be weird if it sounded nothing like Radiohead but reminded you of Papa Roach. Just checked its nine tracks again, definitely nothing that sounds like Papa Roach.
There’s nothing Papa Roach-y about the mesmeric new single from Oisin Leech, either. Those guys just can’t catch a break. I first came across the Irish singer-songwriter’s music when he was the frontman in the garage-rock quartet 747s. When that band split, the group’s guitarist went on to become the man who looked like a pirate in one of weird fake Razorlight line-ups Johnny Borrell put together when he wasn’t speaking to his real bandmates, but Leech went off in a more subtle direction, making harmonic Americana-influenced music as one half of The Lost Brothers. In March, he releases his debut solo album Cold Sea. It’s been produced by Steve Gunn and was recorded on the Donegal coast, its songs evoking the beauty and desolation of its setting. New single Colour Of The Rain captures everything that’s great about it, stark and contemplative but welcoming too. Take a seat by the fire and hunker down.
There are no campfires in the vicinity of the new pulsating new single from George FitzGerald - you think it’s a campfire but as you get right up close to it you realise it’s a load of glowsticks perched around a strobe light and a smoke machine. Titled Gleams, it harks back to the dance producer’s early days as a club DJ, an early hours house banger riding on a wave of atmospheric synths, cut-up vocals and heady beats.
And Finally…
Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig on his pre-fame career as a teacher:
“I was teaching eighth grade English. There were a lot of great kids. The average kid would be 13 or 14, some kids might get held back and be 15 and I really wasn’t that far away from the kids in terms of age, I was 22. That’s obviously very significant but looking back I didn’t feel totally prepared either. I had a student hit me up on Instagram cos I saw a comment where somebody referred to me as Mr K. And I was like, ‘What?!’ A lot of the kids called me Mr K.
It was hard for me to raise my voice. I think because I could never actually get angry, even when the kids were really causing a scene, every time I’d try to bring a disciplinarian vibe, it felt so fake. At that age, kids can be really funny, so the kids would say the wildest shit to me and sometimes I’d have to turn my head to laugh a little bit before I’d be like, ‘How dare you! Sit down! Go to the principle’s office!’
The kids were old enough to be wickedly funny but young enough that you couldn’t hold it against them. They would say the craziest shit to me and it never hurt my feelings but it would always make me want to laugh… ‘You do not talk to me like that!’.