Lana Del Boy - Nicholas Fucking Lyndhurst!
In 2019 the artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant formed an exciting new superduo with Sir David Jason, a national treasure formerly known as funny. Just like in Still Open All Hours, there was no room for comedy here. In its place, Lana Del Boy’s debut album offered harmonious heartache and emotional sincerity aplenty, all anchored around an eye-opening conceptual portrayal of the life and times of Nicholas Lyndhurst from Goodnight Sweetheart. Nicholas Fucking Lyndhurst! was patently influenced by Lana’s appearance on last year’s Wanderer by Cat Power, but the idea that this was some cut-priced, knocked-off, second-hand LP from a mush in Shepherd’s Bush was as daft as a Trigger.
In fact, deep and meaningful engagement was made with the album’s muse, i.e. New Tricks star Nicholas Lyndhurst. The oblique efforts made by the album’s principal protagonist to negotiate the fault lines of working-class community spirit in a moment of hyper-individualism and his angular vacillation between traditional familial commitments and new patterns of cultural capital typified the cross-cultural relationships of late modernity. You plonker. Because of the lacklustre quality of the singing, acting and punchlines on display, Lana Del Boy has been associated with abject apathy. However, Nicholas Fucking Lyndhurst! ended on a more positive note than expected. “Hope is a dangerous thing for a Trotter like me to have,” went its lyrics, juxtaposing the capacity to thrive with the fear of survival. Crucially, on understanding hope more fully through the prism of Nicholas “Butterflies” Lyndhurst, Lana concludes, “But I have it, I have it, I have it. This time next year we will be millionaires. Mange tout! Mange tout! Lovely jubbly! Pukka! Pukka! Pukka!”
The Murder Capital – When I Have Furs
Definitely the most exciting band ever seen by anyone since the previous most exciting band seen by anyone. They move around stage! Can you imagine? I even saw the singer smoke a fag once. While the band were playing! Pow!!! Take that, nanny state! Stick it to the man! Which man? Not the man at Philip Morris International. The other man. You know, that guy. The person running an independent venue on extremely tight overheads who is worrying about losing their licence as a result of The Health Act 2006. That prissy bellend!
The Murder Capital wear clothes! But clothes on steroids! And have I told you how much they run around? But it’s like running around... on steroids! Much like the Olympics. And they have shiny boots to boot. Shiny boots on steroids!
When I Have Furs is a crushing reminder of the perpetual, circular crisis of masculinity, a predicament embodied yet ultimately contradicted by this collection of shouty, broody, swaggery men dressed as the cast of an ambitious but ultimately under-cooked youth theatre production of a Quadrophenia/Peaky Blinders mash-up who were hastily costumed in whatever could be found during a speedy trolly dash at a local
When these young men perform, they are gazed on lovingly by a similarly clad yet more sombre bunch of formerly shouty, broody, swaggery men who are imagining the time when they dressed more flamboyantly and watched previous shouty, broody, swaggery men in their youth, or were shouty, broody, swaggery men in their youth who in turn saw other generations of shouty, broody, swaggery men in their youth… As the man who didn’t dress cool has explained: “Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. There is no hesitation. This is your situation. Continue a blank generation. Blank generation. Same old Blank Generation. Grooving blank generation. Swinging blank generation. Repetition, repetition, repetition.” And as the bearded scruff Karl Marx told us: history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce, then as farts.
Amehnda Palmeh - There Will Be No Intermehssion
To make matters worse, Palmeh was so outraged that The Guardian neglected to cover her latest mehsterwerk that Her Mehjesty’s subsequent project is said to be a streampunk rock-opera based around Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe for home-baked brioche. Its working title is Let Them Eat Cake.
Janet Weiss would like to play the drums. Drums are important. They are part of the music. Drums are at least as important as the music, the words, the guitar solos, and that synth you just bought off a man with a mad haircut. Let Janet play the drums. The drums count. The drums are part of the process. We like the drums and the drumming. We like drummers. You can’t just force out a living, breathing human drummer. You can’t just replace them with an inanimate object that doesn’t possess any kind of brain or soul, like a drum machine or Tommy Lee. Where are the drums? St Vincent’s drums are rubbish. Let Janet play the fucking drums. THE DRUMS! THE FUCKING DRUMS! Remember when Janet played the drums? DRUMS! DRUM! DRUMS! DRUMMY DRUMMITY DRUM DRUMS!
In a scene marked by collaboration and synergetic musical connection, Boyd’s Sons Of Nubya’s Collective Moses Featuring Theon’s Ezra’s Kamaal really exemplifies the energetic remoulding of jazz with its connections to the grime and afrobeat music that flow through the capital city’s veins. I think. I mean, I haven’t listened to it and I haven’t even visited London for a few years now because I live in West Worcestershire. But I like to think if I were there, and if I had listened to it, it would be exactly the kind of album and scene that I like to imagine is really exciting and thriving. It’s hard to tell when I’m just reading about them in the back pages of The Sunday Telegraph while waiting for space to clear around the reduced ready meals in a Waitrose in rural England.
“A song is just three chords and the truth,” as Howard from the Halifax adverts once said. He never asked for this much truth though, nor in quite so much personal detail. Ever since everybody started reading the autobiographical so-called novels of Karl Ove Knausgård and documenting their every brunch on Instagram, it’s been assumed that any thought that passes through any human’s brain is actually worth sharing with the public. In the music world, it was Mark Kozelek who pioneered the craze for singing-what-you-see, a genre now known as post-Catchphrase. Phil Elverum added tragedy and depth to the genre by singing of the death of his wife in intimate and uncomfortable detail. Now the bloke once known as Smog is at it as well, banging on for 20 tracks about everything that’s happened to him since the last album - birth, death, life, love, marriage, bicycles... - as if he’s the first person in history to experience such matters. He’s even written a song about writing, called ‘Writing’.
Have you ever seen Family Guy? It’s that cartoon for adults whose minds are too underdeveloped for South Park. Anyway, one early episode features a parody of Randy Newman. In this caricatured depiction, the famous LA musician plays his piano and sings words that merely describe exactly what is happening, in real-time, in front of his eyes at that very moment. We are all Family Guy Randy Newman now.
People who review albums and don’t make music themselves should be unemployed. People who discover a rotting hamster carcass floating around in their vegetable soup and complain to the waiter about its inedibility but haven’t established a restaurant empire themselves should be burnt alive in a pizza oven. With anchovies! People who express an opinion on the practicality of manoeuvring a transit van through Luton Airport multi-story car park and haven’t studied architecture for seven years in advance of their negative comment should be thrown immediately from the top of the building’s roof. Historians of the Second World War who write groundbreaking biographies of Joseph Stalin based on extensive research and previously unearthed documents that have only just come to light and haven’t served in a prominent position as a member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo of the 1930s should be exiled to the Siberian gulag. People who Lizzo glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
There once was a poet called Kate
To whose sanctimony we all could relate
Finally! A poet who’s cool
Unlike the ones learnt at school
Even your English teacher thinks that she’s great
Oh.
Wait...
Weezer - Weezer (The Imperial Purple Album)
Rivers Cuomo and his chums continue to work their way through the Farrow & Ball chart. This isn’t a paint-by-numbers covers record, though. Weezer prove quite the dab hand. Indeed, theirs is a brush with greatness. Of course, when they combine their blue album with a red album they will be marooned. But which colour-themed Weezer album is best? Lets call this one a draw. Forget the titles for a minute, because let’s face it they’re all beige. How many members of Weezer does it take to paint a wall? Depends on how hard you throw them.
Dave - Psychodrama (For the Record)
Every Prime Minister is expected to cash-in on their time in Number 10. Eschewing tradition, David Cameron chose to release his memoirs via the medium of his debut rap album. At first, the work appears smooth and efficient. The initial psychodrama at the heart of the piece is centred around the scrapes and japes of old school-chums gently ribbing each other. After a while, however, the record deepens to expose the inner thoughts of a chaotic, vain individual who is entirely lacking in principle. Once the psychodrama of the public school stutters and slips - almost whimsically or accidentally - onto a wider stage, a different picture unfolds. Here, the more traumatic and material drama of unrepentant austerity, structural violence and catastrophic delusion prevails, and it is documented by Dave in often harrowing detail. It makes for raw, tough and bewildering listening with a shattering fallout. After Dave has delivered this crushing state-of-the-nation address and the final track draws to a close after an exhausting six-year running time, Dave doesn’t so much drop the microphone as turn his back to it, walking into the distance and singing the album’s final, devastating words, addressed less to his captivated audience than only to himself: “Doo Doo, Doo Doo...”
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