Bon Iver - Bon Iver

What set Bon Iver’s first album apart from others was its ability to find a place deep in the heart of its listeners. It was music that reminded them of where they were when they first heard it. I was driving slowly past Fistral Beach in Newquay with a Swedish girl who is now my girlfriend. See it just happened to me! It begs the question…How can Justin Vernon/Bon Iver recapture this magic? Surely he couldn’t do it again…

Well all I can say is prepare for the best album you will have heard this year.

It begins with a pleasant reminder of the ghostly, layered harmonies and soulful melodies that was so synonymous with the first album. There is a heavier use of percussion in the first few tracks that sounds like a theatrical piece depicting a battle scene, not to dissimilar to PJ Harvey’s approach to ‘Let England Shake’. The military sound dies away beautifully on ‘Halocene’, intertwined with Vernon’s effervescent voice.

The album progressed into playful melodies that lean slightly outside of the usual, and touch on more ‘poppier’ hooks that have positive inflections. Michicant is the climax of the album, so full of emotion and enchanting sounds that it’s hard to continue through the album without restarting this track at least twice more.

It needless to say that album follows through to the end beautifully and as naturally as if the tracks have been destined to proceed one another. The music is timeless and I truly believe it will be preferred to the first album by many. It feels unbelievable to say that, but you have to hear this album.

10 

This weeks 3...

One of the better tracks from the new album, 'The Hellcat Spangled Shalalalal' or somethin. Look out for the line 'makes me wanna blow the candles out, just to see if you glow in the dark...'  nice.

Martin Kemp Welch! Five aside football rules! From new Art Brut Album.

aaand finally Big L, he would of been 37 last week, heres one of his classics....

Suck it and See – Arctic monkeys

Never have I ever experienced such anticipation as I did before the release of ‘my old favourite bands’ first album. I remember watching them support Maximo Park at the NME Awards Tour about a year before the record was in stores and everyone at the gig knew every word to every track they played. It was a hysteria I attributed to what my Dad must have felt like during early Zeppelin, or older mates with ‘Definitely Maybe’.

‘Suck it and See’ is the Arctic Monkey’s soon to be released new album (6^th of June), and it’s fair to say there’s not loads of hype. Maybe due to the heavier last album (Humbug) that took another direction and thus drove away from many of their fans (mainly the carling-guzzling, burberry clad bag ‘eds that made up eighty percent of their first album fan base). Now I’m not saying I’m a bag ‘ed, but it drove me away.  Guilt will be a feeling many listeners to the new album will feel if they can bring themselves to invest back into their old friends. Guilt because of how in love you once were and easily you dismissed your old flame. Although it wont hurt so much that you have to buy ‘Humbug’ to make up for your absence of loyalty, rather you will just stick on ‘Whatever people say…’ and reminisce of the good times.

‘Suck it and See’ is a frustrating album. Unfortunately for Arctic Monkey’s, as musicians, the revolutionary style of their first album will be what everyone remembers, and wants from them. It’s what I want. I want Fake Tales of San Francisco, I want ‘tracky bottoms tucked in socks’, I want new material that replicates the old stuff. It narrow minded and naïve, but its what everyone’s thinking.

Music Critics admire Arctic Monkeys for their experimentation with new sound, and rightfully deserved. This album seems to a culmination of the sounds they have worked on with all of their previous albums. Turners lyrics have an element of the playfulness they once had, especially on ‘Don’t Sit Down’ – ‘Do the macerena in the devils lair….but just don’t sit down cos I’ve moved yer chair…’. The guitars are hard rocking and distorted much like Humbug. Melodically, the album has the potential for some ‘choons’, but it’s Turners voice and lyrics that seem to be the only thing that is saving Monkey’s from being just another rock band.

Acknowledgment of the youthfulness they no longer possess is indicated in Turners lyrics on ‘All my own Stunts’, - ‘Put on your dancing shoes, and show me what to do’ – its seems they are even reminiscing of a time we’ve all forgotten.

The album will be a success, because there are still many Arctic Monkeys fans loyal to their progression, although they don’t sound like a bunch of mates putting songs together about girls and beer anymore. It’s all too serious and expressionist now. We want impressionist, say-it-how-it-is music for the impressionable. Nobody likes change, and everybody loves the early stuff Monkeys did. It’s just science.

It’s nice to hear what my old mates have been up too, but it’s like they’ve been to University and met new mates who I don’t get on with. I just want the old days back.

Now where did I put that first album….

4/10

Nothing to Envy – Real Lives in North Korea.

‘In the futuristic dystopia imagined in 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only color to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea.’

The book that led me towards Barbara Demick’s ‘Nothing to Envy’, was Jung Chang’s ‘Wild Swans’. Jung Chang’s document explicitly revealed the realities of Mao’s China, and the atrocities that took place during his dictatorship. The novel not only dealt with the political impact of Mao’s idea of communism brilliantly, but also the humanitarian impact in a way that is yet to be matched. The book’s success was astonishing.

Demick’s account approaches Il-Sung and Jong-Ils North Korea in a similar way; using personal accounts of refugees she has met during her life in South Korea, and from regular (and closely guided) visits to North Korea. Her vast knowledge of the Korean peninsular and the conviction of her accounts make for just as astonishing a read as ‘Wild Swans’, and could be the considered the first book to come close to Chang’s bestseller in terms of the portrayal of far-east totalitarianism and the impact it has on the people.

What it lacked in plausibility at times, (in contrast to Chang’s book, Demick used sources accounts instead of experience), it made up for in the sheer depth of the research and constant presentation of evidence that added weight to the claims. The use of personal stories so as to demonstrate the impact of Il-Sung and Jong-Ils reign on a wide-variety of people was a wonderful way to approach the book. In under 300 pages she fits in the life stories of six people. Her accounts are brilliantly poised before each continuation of another, and the whole book reads like a complex novel the plays out the lives of six people that connect in some way. Unfortunately, her sources connect through the turmoil of the totalitarian society they were born in, and the shared desire they all acted upon in escaping from their homeland.

Sometimes, it begs the question as to whether the sources may hold an underlying grudge against their country that have induced a certain degree of exaggeration, but I personally believe that even the most skeptical reader will be astonished by the accounts of these peoples lives. It’s a fascinating book that will surely have resonance when the inevitable happens in the near future and the North Korea ceases to exist under its current rule. (It only seems to be a matter of time.)

I recommend this book to everyone as it is a wonderful piece of journalism about the world’s most secretive country.