Rock Cake
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David Sylvian: A Victim of Stars, 1982-2012 (2012)
With the impending release of a new compilation of his works – A Victim of Stars: 1982 – 2012 – and the promise of an accompanying European tour (although this now sadly postponed due to health problems), it seems an appropriate moment to take a retrospective look at the career of David Sylvian so far.
If, like me and many of my age/generation/predilections your first encounter with Sylvian was with Japan, the band that he fronted (with brother and continued collaborator Steve Jansen on drums, Mick Karn on bass, Richard Barbieri on keys and – in the earliest stages – Rob Dean on guitars and backing vocals) then you will have experienced one of the late 20th century’s most remarkable musical evolutions. Although never quite the straightforward pop pin-up proposition that their early fame and Sylvian’s reluctant idolisation suggested, if you take the band’s first album, 1979′s Adolescent Sex as the starting-point-of-reference, rather than key late-Japan track ‘Ghosts’ (the first track to be included on A Victim of Stars) then the distance travelled seems all the more remarkable.
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School of Seven Bells: Ghostory (2012)
Although ostensibly a concept piece based around the theme of a young woman (Lafaye) and the ghosts that she encounters, this third album from School Of Seven Bells is one of those records whose appeal and surprises are significant enough to render any interwoven plotline almost incidental. For a band usually pigeonholed as dream-pop, these surprises include the pleasing discovery that School Of Seven Bells – now reduced to the core duo of Benjamin Curtis and Alejandra Deheza following the departure of Claudia Deheza in 2010 – can produce driven, rousing music that is often as upbeat as it is moreish, and very much of the waking hours.
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SoKo: I Thought I Was An Alien (2012)
French actress and musician Stéphanie Sokolinski may have broken through with the confrontational ‘I’ll Kill Her’ (a song she has since disowned) from her 2007 debut EP Not SoKute, but there has always been something curiously fragile about her. Her famously erratic and meandering live performances of a few years back neared Cat Power proportions of car crash viewing (at a London gig Wears The Trousers attended, one fan received a SoKo soaking for having the temerity to request the aforementioned song), and for a time it seems that this follow-up full-length would never come to fruition.
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Julia Holter: Ekstasis (2012)
Julia Holter’s debut solo album Tragedy, released only last September, demonstrated the LA-based musician’s thoroughly arresting capacity for creating music as artwork, her reimagining of Euripides’ Hippolytus both artful and oblique. Now she returns with Ekstasis, a more loosely-connected sequence of songs that highlight a softer side to her fiercely creative vision.
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Internet Forever: Internet Forever (2012)
This debut album from London trio Internet Forever is both self-consciously of its time and blithely insouciant. Tracks like the space-age ‘White Light Collision Course’ and ’3D’, with its “refresh your page” and message board references and ponderings on our online identities, look knowingly to the technological present, while elsewhere the band ruminate on youth and age as only the comparatively young can still do (“I’m only two years older than you”). Served up on a bed of electronic glottal-stop-indie-pop, Internet Forever is appealingly ebullient, from the handclaps of the cheery ‘Happy New Year’ to the shouted! exclamations! that pepper that and several other songs. Crucially, though, it’s also smart enough to keep the charming:irritating ratio well above the required level for sustaining interest and repeated plays.
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Memoryhouse: The Slideshow Effect (2012)
Memoryhouse was originally conceived as a multimedia outlet for the combined creativity of composer Evan Abeele and photographer Denise Nouvion, and something of this provenance remains in the title of their long-in-the-works debut album – a reference to a cinematic zooming and panning technique through which a static image is given movement and apparent animation. It’s a neat metaphor and one that captures something of the band’s essence, while not entirely flattering them. Despite the new swagger and jangle evident on tracks like ‘Heirloom’ and ‘The Kids Were Wrong’, The Slideshow Effect is an album whose overall reluctance to take flight at times more closely resembles a frozen frame than anything more dramatically paced.
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Beth Jeans Houghton and The Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose (2012)
This debut album from Newcastle’s Beth Jeans Houghton certainly feels like it’s been a long time coming. Houghton’s first EP emerged, together with endorsements from Devendra Banhart and Andy Votel, all the way back in 2008, and for a while it seemed like Houghton might be one of those artists who simply peaked too soon, destined to quietly become a half-forgotten name with just a handful of tunes to cherish. Her perseverance paid off, though, and just one listen to the enchanting procession of “Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose” makes clear precisely what a loss she would have been had the A&R crowd let her slip through their fingers.
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Chairlift: Something (2012)
Brooklyn’s Chairlift might have strayed a little from their original remit to “make background music for haunted houses” since the departure of co-founder Aaron Pfenning in 2010 (replaced here by Patrick Wimberly), but album number two is all the better for it. Nimbly treading the line between airy cool and immediate accessibility, Something is more than just an exercise in poise; there’s a streak of deeper concerns beneath its many pure pop moments. Starting with a rumble, ‘Sidewalk Safari’ reintroduces Caroline Polachek’s commanding, effortless vocal over synths that bear a hint of the Orient and the appealing sense that the track could take off in any one of a series of directions or tangents – witness the sultry spoken-word bridge in which Polachek asserts (with possibly threatening intent) ”I do know how to drive in a car / faster than a man can run.”
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Tennis: Young and Old (2012)
The swoony romanticism of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley’s 2011 debut Cape Dory – a musical travelogue of their Atlantic sailing adventures – was all the more appealing for the presumed authenticity of the emotions being expressed. But if that album was (almost literally) like an extended honeymoon, where have Tennis gone now that the adventure is over? The answer, as far as Young & Old is concerned, is not especially far. Retaining much of the magic of their earlier exploits, with the ’80s influence still discernible in tracks like ‘Traveling’, Tennis have nonetheless extended their reference timeline both backwards and forwards to embrace the 1990s (more forcefully with the ‘Lovefool’-era Cardigans indebted vocals on lead single ‘Origins’) and the naïve pop of the ’50s and early ’60s, appealingly evoked by ‘Take Me To Heaven’ and ‘Robin’, the latter recalling old-timey singers in the Doris Day mould.
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Doe Paoro: Slow To Love (2012)
Brooklyn’s Sonia Kreitzer has undergone quite the transformation in the process of ‘becoming’ Doe Paoro. Her latest musical guise may be far from the “neo-Motown slash rap” of her former band Sonia’s Party! & The Everyone’s Invited, but her debut album Slow To Love shares some of that outfit’s outlandish tendencies and rebellious approach to the songwriting process. Seemingly inspired by a stop in the Himalayas during a six-month globetrotting sabbatical last year, it’s a heartfelt, if sometimes perplexing, album that attempts to fuse ordinarily clashing musical styles into some kind of palatable whole – with mixed results.
