EMA - The Future's Void

EMA, that is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of depressing experimental drug-rock duo Gowns, made ripples on the hipster sea back in 2011 with her solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which was an absolute stonker of an album; heartfelt in its distress, personal yet otherworldly, and packed with gloriously bold levels of variety, from the bonkers to the beautiful. Three years later, she’s back with The Future’s Void, a matter-of-factly polemic title which betrays this second album’s overarching theme of our exciting new maybe-dystopian lives in the Information Age and beyond. The new world order forming around us in the wake of the Internet Revolution has become an alluring concept for artists of all kinds across the globe, all of whom are undoubtedly hoping – as much as they might deny it – to be the ones to truly encapsulate the zeitgeist of this exciting and bewildering period of human history. The Future’s Void is an album that retains the exasperated angst of its predecessor, but throws it into a more ambitious thematic scope, with interesting and varied results.

I was faintly disappointed when I read the album title, saw the Oculus on the cover, listened to a couple of the tracks and realised that this was an album with a ‘modern life’ sort of concept, since I’d fallen in love with EMA on her last album thanks to her offerings of those more timeless and analog miseries like abuse, emptiness and self-harm, which made no attempts to be topical or generational, and were the all the greater for that. Immediately, on The Future’s Void, you can tell that the more personal side of Anderson’s songwriting has been compromised, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and second albums that fail to deviate from those before them run the risk of sounding creatively stagnant, for me EMA’s – and in fact Gowns’ – appeal was the personal touch that made all the heartache in the songs truly palpable. Not to mention the fact that writing any music about ‘the Internet’ is cause for alarm. Shit, my last review was of St. Vincent’s self-titled tirade about life in the Twitter epoch, and songs like ‘Digital Witness’ are a singularly rare success in this area.

But enough moaning about boring things like ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’, let’s talk about the music, shall we? Past Life Martyred Saints had a thrillingly eclectic range of sounds – folky guitars, thundering drums, graceless space-age synthesisers – and this continues in much the same vein here. However, the real warhead in Anderson’s arsenal is her voice – capable at performing a decent tune, sure, but also a material in itself to be manipulated and layered into a variety of forms. Unlike another Anderson, the one from The Knife with the extra ‘s’, EMA doesn’t mangle her voice or distort it beyond its humanity. Instead, all throughout this album, most notably on tracks like ‘Solace’ and ‘Satellites’, Anderson is joined by a choir of herself, creating vocal sections that are lushly put together, and make her raspy inflection all the sweeter to listen to. Whether she’s going grunge on ‘So Blonde’, industrial on ‘Smoulder’, or soft as a whisper on ‘3Jane’, it’s Anderson’s voice which really succeeds in drawing the emotion out of her songs, and every line is sang with conviction – cool, clamouring, disinterested and desperate all at the same time.

The opener, ‘Satellites’, is a marvellously apocalyptic call-to-arms with deranged movements from tragic choral interludes to whistling distortion and a death-knell bass tone. ‘So Blonde’ is plucked straight out of the nineties, awesome or derivative depending on your cynicism. ‘3Jane’ is a lost-sounding and reflective ballad that might just be the album’s highlight, misty-eyed and beautifully sung. On her blog, Anderson described ‘3Jane’ as the ‘lyrical centrepiece of the record’, and talks about trying to control her online image while living in constant worry of having a visible online presence now that cunts like me are finding out who she is. ‘It’s all just a big advertising campaign’, she bemoans wistfully on the record. ‘Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease’. It might all sounds a little preachy, but it’s sang with such bored surrender that it kills to listen to. ‘I get stressed out and I wanna get high / it’s cos I’ve seen my face and I don’t recognise the person that I feel inside’. Anderson’s lyrics are unrefined and directly talk about ‘selfies’ and ‘interwebs’ with an artistic-mindedness that might make some internet users a little uncomfortable, but I find them captivating. Some of the lyrics, apparently, didn’t even make it past being made up on the spot, and I like this rough-around-the-edges quality, as well as the imagery of lines like ‘we just smoulder where the flames went out’, even if the intended mondegreens of ‘earn/urn’ and ‘might lose some fur/my Lucifer’ are a bit befuddling at times.

EMA seems to be reaching for the bigger-sounding tracks on this album. ‘Satellites’, as mentioned before, intends to be as stratospheric as its title, and ‘Smoulder’ is slow and sweeping and satisfyingly grand. Perhaps the weakest effort on the album is ‘Cthulu’, which is appropriately aiming for largeness and impact, but its constant, repeated hook doesn’t generate the gravitas that its creator might’ve originally hoped, and its epic denouement would’ve been more effective had it been built on sturdier foundations. It’s not like EMA can’t write long, huge-sounding songs – ‘Grey Ship’, from the previous album, is a mind-blowing affair, as is Gowns masterpiece ‘White Like Heaven’, but ‘Cthulu’ isn’t great. ‘Neuromancer’ is better, with its stomping drumbeat backed up by machine-gun fire, but all of these big-arena belters, for all their volume, are missing the emotional impact that comes with EMA’s more understated material. Conversely, the ringing piano chords on ‘100 Years’ are as deathly quiet and sombre as a distant church bell on a misty morning, and although Anderson is singing about something as big and important as the state of the world at the moment (‘How it shudders from its expanding’), the effect is serene, yet deeply haunting.

Returning to the idea that this is an album that’s ‘about things’, I’m relieve to say that for all the stumbles that EMA seems to be making in creating an album with a whole lot more ambition than her previous effort, mostly concentrated in the more anthemic offerings, there’s plenty of good shit here, and Anderson’s talent for interesting sounds and lyrics hasn’t diminished since people started learning her name. ‘Solace’ is an absolute triumph, for instance, soaring and cathartic in a way that the grander songs on the album never manage, pulling your ears to attention with a catchy chorus, a bubbling synth hook and its madcap percussive debris. The album ends with its most evidently ‘of the times’ effort – ‘Dead Celebrity’, which could’ve been a whole lot more trite if it wasn’t for its bastardised riff on the Last Post, its climactic fireworks display and lyrics like ‘we wanted something timeless in a world so full of speed’ – all awesome. Songs that reference the controversial selfie and clicking on links might still be hard to get used to as the Internet envelops our lives more and more, and as far as trying to make a topical statement on this generation of avatars and statuses goes, EMA hasn’t quite cemented a totally coherent point anywhere here, but her songs are still as excitingly bold as ever, and her style and lyrics as simple yet affecting as in her masterful debut. It’s not as good as Past Life Martyred Saints, but maybe nothing will be.

EMA - Satellites

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

A track title like ‘Birth in Reverse’ doesn’t create the most appealing mental image, but such is the surreal wonderland of Annie Clark’s imagination, where darkness hums beneath a colourful lustre of charming and cheerful eccentricity. Historically, St. Vincent’s sound played like a neurotic Disney soundtrack; beautiful and stargazy, even angelic, but harbouring a real edge, like a razorblade buried in a bowl of sherbert. In the five years since then her confidence has an artist has skyrocketed, and she continues with the magical strangeness of her unique musical personality, only this time with a heightened sense of awareness and self-assurance. While her previous albums always had a youthful shyness about them, the St. Vincent we have with us here today is her same recognisably oddball self, but the coyness present on her previous releases has vanished. It’s all there on the album cover – staring confidently out at you from her throne, with her majestic gown and her snow-queen hairstyle. This is a self-titled album, after all, and all of this seems to indicate a bold new direction for gorgeously-minded superstar St. Vincent, and here, after four(ish) long years since she last haunted the minds of every hipster in the Western world, she's back with a pink, kitsch dreadnought of an album.

Upon immediate first listen, then, this album signals a change of course in Clark’s artistic trajectory beyond the classically wistful coffee-shop insecurity that we all fell in love with from the Marry Me era onwards, and instead seems to have moved definitively towards a new frontier of futuristic kitsch, a retrofuturistic combination of the 1980s, the 2010s, and god knows when and what else. After all, here in 2014, the world is in the throes of a particularly futuristic-looking and breakneck-fast transition into god knows what, and this album’s standard-bearer ‘Digital Witness’ is probably the most apparent instance of St. Vincent looking outward as opposed to inward, as the entire song sounds, at least from one interpretation, like a sarcastic diatribe about our newfound obsession with validating our own lives in the abstract world of social media: “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The spreading tendrils of the internet have been the cause of immense social and cultural upheaval amongst the human race for the past twenty years or so, but so far St. Vincent is the only musician I’ve heard who has managed to address this revolution directly and effectively, as if she’s not even trying. “Pleasure.loathing.huey.newton” she coos in the song where the late Black Panther is “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones” – and she’s right; he’s staring out at me from his Wikipedia page as we speak.

I’ve never given her much credit for this before, but Annie Clark is an incredibly nuanced lyricist as well as a musical prodigy. There’s a lot being said in her metaphor-laden verses and choruses that I dread to think has gone unnoticed by my own self, but the depth of lines such as “a smile is more than showing teeth” and the syllabic revelry of lines like “summer is as faded as a lone cicada call” reveal a St. Vincent as dextrous in the brain as in her guitar-slaying fingers. Her collaborator and friend, New Wave Grand Duke David Byrne, says that “despite having toured with her for almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least on a personal level”, so as a mere musical civilian I expect that trying to find a path via this album into the machinations of Annie Clark herself and all of her possibly intended meanings may end up proving fruitless, but imagery like “headless heroes heaped by the pylons as a careless sun sets on the West” is semantic dynamite, and this album is as lyrically dense and ferocious as Strange Mercy, if not impressively superior. The world that these songs inhabit is bright, colourful, and uncannily strange in its representation of the modern life of its creator.

Annie Clark’s always been talented, there’s never been any doubt about that, but it’s instantly apparent that on the musical side of her fourth album, she’s upped her own creative ante. Her Renaissance-woman arsenal of abilities is sharpened to divine levels; this album is an absolute wealth of sounds, instruments, moods and movements, all arranged, performed and produced tightly and with a clear embrace of the buzzing-metal-and-plastic sound she’s built out of the synthesiser love carried over from the last album. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is a stomper; the sound of St. Vincent thrashing around a chaotic chamber of whirrs, crackles and hisses, sounding as far removed from her human side as she’s dared to stray yet. ‘I Prefer Your Love’ is a stopping-point halfway through the album, a break from the laser-light synths and roaring guitars, it’s a ballad dedicated to her mum where she tells her “all the good in me is because of you” (how bloody sweet is that, aw); soft and shimmering and lovely in contrast to the track formerly mentioned. ‘Birth in Reverse’ is noisy and shrill but somehow St. Vincent has this ability to find beautiful melody in the sharpest and strangest artificial sounds, tied together with her voice that is part desperation, part confidence, part siren. The mythological kind.

With this album, St. Vincent has gone nuclear. Marry Me and Actor were sparkling drops of acid wistfulness, Strange Mercy was sadder, sharper and better, and while I’m not saying that this newest effort is definitively better than Strange Mercy in any way, shape or form, it has a clarity in its construction – the observant internet-age futurism, the blending of usual art-indie songwriting with weirder sounds and elements, the swift and effortless transitions between notably different but consistently vibrant moods. You can tell that this is an album that’s going to cement St. Vincent’s place in the pantheon of this slice of history’s acclaimed musicians. She’s ferociously gifted, in weaving her music, in sculpting her own image, in making songs from the (don’t vomit) ‘art-rock’ side of the playing field that can be beautiful, ferocious, uplifting, tense, abrasive, soft and electrifying all at once; exciting to witness, and so uniquely St. Vincent. I’d be surprised if there was an ear on the planet who didn’t find something joyous to step to in this LP, which has proven that if you’re searching for a modern-day musical idol to venerate, you could do a fucktonne of a lot worse than Annie Clark.

St. Vincent - Digital Witness

Xiu Xiu - Angel Guts: Red Classroom

Xiu Xiu are a bizarrely eccentric little enclave of a band, and as such they are an entity which can only cater exclusively to a certain type – and I don’t mean that in some sort of exclusively superior hipster-generation sort of way, mainly because the ‘certain type’ of crowd who get the greatest genuine thrill out of Xiu Xiu are probably not the kind of people who anyone would want to be, and it most certainly isn’t the sort of music to impress your friends with. I’m sure that you can figure out within seconds of listening whether Jamie Stewart and company’s sometimes mystifyingly nutty blend of nightmarish soul-stripping and unapologetically avant-garde weirdness is right up your dark, dingy alley or not. I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of Xiu Xiu, both for their wacky experimentation that makes every album salted with novelty and for Stewart’s ability to create works of absolute harrowing genius; frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly bleak.

Saying that, however, despite Xiu Xiu having produced some of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and suffocatingly desperate music I’ve ever heard, it isn’t all darkness, they’ve always had a playful side, even if it is a mental one. How else would you explain track titles like ‘I Luv Abortion’ and videos like this one? In recent releases they’ve even sounded fairly, well, jovial (at least musically if not lyrically), as with ‘Chocolate Makes You Happy’ and ‘I Do What I Want, When I Want’. But on this latest release, all those possible instances of not-necessarily-suicidal music have been totally extinguished from consideration. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the most overtly grim Xiu Xiu album in years. Every track is a lights-off, reverberated, doom-laden sadness exercise. This isn’t a collection of songs to be enjoyed so much as to be endured, decorating their strange and experimental soundscape with impassioned screaming, rumbling bassy synths, chopped vocals, ear-splitting electronic dissonance and squealing pig samples. Make no mistake, this is pure serial-killer territory, and the focus isn’t so much on the sad side of things as on creating a genuinely disturbing, viscerally haunting, terrifying experience, which has always been a common characteristic of Xiu Xiu, but here that beloved element is bolstered to a thousand degrees.

Sounds good, right? I mean, I love dark music, as do a lot of people, and in the past Xiu Xiu have gifted me with music darker and more uniquely fucked-up than much else I could think of. However, just because something’s pushing itself as far down the well of darkness as it can reach, it doesn’t necessarily produce stellar results, and to be frank, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, while it did leave me adequately disturbed, it also left me - spoiler alert - ultimately a little unimpressed. It’s not that the crew aren’t trying or aren’t putting as much creativity into their zero-rules method of experimental song-crafting; by all means, there’s still plenty of successful bouts of madness. ‘Stupid in the Dark’ is probably the one song most resembling an actual song, though it doesn’t lose any of its raw appeal by any means, and as a result it’s one of my favourites – it’s hard not to love the gothic hum of the synthesisers. Meanwhile ‘Adult Friends’ has some joyously fucked-up psychosexual issues (The line where touching breasts ‘is like a lobster crawling over my arm’ is delivered so straight that it works), and ‘El Naco’ is frightening to the point of nausea, leading me to believe that whether or not you take pleasure in listening to this sort of thing probably says a lot about you as a person (It probably says plenty about me). There’s nothing here that reaches the perfection of classic songs like, say, ‘Apistat Commander’ (although that is a difficult one to beat for sheer suicidal brilliance), but fans of horrific sounds will be treated and then some.

In terms of Xiu Xiu’s more quotation-marks ‘artistic’ dalliances, my feelings on this facet of the band’s avant-garde sensibilities are just as ambivalent as ever. A band called Joy Division created similarly dark, cuttingly sad music, but did so with an air of absolute dignity. Xiu Xiu spit out dignity. Part of the joy of listening to Xiu Xiu as a group who express dark feelings (to put it mildly) is that Jamie Stewart and his transient entourage have never held back and have never reined it in – their music is bold and it’s ridiculous and it’s so melodramatic that it almost seems perfectly pitched, and all this is why they manage to reach naked depths of the human soul inconceivable to other bands. This is also their biggest problem, of course, as to anyone who isn’t all that into it, the bewildering artiness that comes with this mentality probably looks like that episode of Spaced, and even to a fan like me, it can get tiresome to have your otherwise beautifully despondent piece of heart-skewering spoiled by the occasional lyric that just pushes it too far for you to go along with it. Here, the lyrics are so overshadowed by the screaming presence of the music that it’s not such a gigantic problem, but in a sense it’s gone the other direction – now the music is so batshit insane that it’s more pulverising than satisfying, though I guess Xiu Xiu have made no pretences of being easy listening.

This album’s undoubtedly another treasure trove for Xiu Xiu fans more dedicated than I am, but for me it’s hard work, and for light listeners it’s probably way too much. ‘The Silver Platter’, for instance, is like watching Suspiria in the dark, on acid, whilst being gently molested. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is guaranteed to be a difficult listen, and not just in the ‘how-much-can-you-handle’ sort of way. There are just a few lulls in its aggravated despair, particularly the moody but almost quaintly beautiful ‘Bitter Melon’, and although I can heartily commend its invention and the sheer breadth of its fuck-it-let’s-just-do-it horror, it’s patchy and it’s a little tiring and all its terrifying elements would probably sound a lot more powerful if there was a little more variation from its unremitting atrocity-diving. Whether you respond to ‘Black Dick’ with unimpressed laughter or paranoid horror is a good litmus test for whether this stuff’s for you. If you’re looking for something upsetting, then by all means, you’re in luck, but even though it’s arguably Xiu Xiu’s darkest and most psychotic album yet - which really is saying something – I can’t help but feel that it’s not one of their greatest.

Xiu Xiu - Stupid in the Dark

M.I.A. - Matangi

I like M.I.A, I like her a lot, and while she brings a wildly varying maelstrom of opinion breezing in wherever she goes, you can’t fault her for a lack of conviction. There’s been a many number of controversies that’ve made waves since we last had an album of hers on the scene - her spat with the New York Times, her ostensibly vicious marital difficulties, and of course that step on the landmine of American puritanism during her Superbowl appearance, but it would be cynical to see the torrent of media coverage, which has become an important pillar of the M.I.A. brand, as making up for a lack of substance on her part. At least, that’s the kind of thing I would automatically assume if I weren’t an M.I.A. fan (I’m bitterly untrusting like that). On the contrary, to me M.I.A. is all substance, and while her outspoken antics are part of the whole reason I do really like her, the oft-forgotten feature of Maya Arulpragasam, her music, is always excitingly newsworthy as well.

While it’s generally agreed that M.I.A.’s first two LPs, Arular and Kala, were solidly impressive slices of original bricolage electronica, not everyone was overjoyed with her last album, 2010’s Maya, particularly for its inclusion of dubsteppy grittiness (I mean, Rusko was brought in as a producer) that I don’t think gelled comfortably with most people. Pitchfork certainly didn’t like it. People were also quick to lambast M.I.A. for her then-ridiculous intro track The Message – ‘connected to the internet, connected to the Google, connected to the government’ – as being on the same intellectual level as nutty, chem-trail conspiracy theorists. I think that was probably the first conclusive victory in M.I.A.’s war against the world, for how wrong they were. But despite its position as a definite step down in quality, Maya was still really fucking good, even if its creator’s melting pot of creativity didn’t boil so sweetly as with the still-numinously-awesome Kala. In Matangi, M.I.A.’s still ranting, still raving, still making batshit crazy genre-bending worldbeat belters, and hasn’t lost a single shred of her magnetic confidence. The grimy aesthetic she took on in Maya still lingers, and will divide listeners as much here as it did then, and she’s still dabbling with currently-fashionable genres (giving a trap beat her best in Double Bubble Trouble), but her schizophrenic beat-hopping, supported by her ever-sarcastic rap-ranting, is still as bewitchingly unique as ever.

In getting everyone hyped for the new album, M.I.A. described it as Paul Simon on acid, as decent and concise a review as you’re gonna get, and the emphasis should be placed on acid. M.I.A. has a varied roster of producers at her command on Matangi, including longtime collaborator Switch as well as Hit-Boy and Doc McKinney, who produced the two best Weeknd albums. There’s even a track here – Exodus – which is simply Lonely Star with Abel Tesfaye removed and a rarely melodious vocal from Maya laid over the top, in a mildly unsuccessful and baffling decision on her part. But the production retinue all tow the line of M.I.A.’s unified sound of audial bric-a-brac, which from what we can ascertain from M.I.A.’s uncompromising public image, is understandable. I love to use the word ‘bricolage’ when describing M.I.A.’s tracks, and I think Come Walk With Me is the best example of this on this record, with its Apple Mac volume clicks and camera sound effects – it’s rough around the edges and completely bonkers, but I can’t help but be swept up in its pure creative enthusiasm. Warriors is a similarly bizarre but successful piece of work, with M.I.A. putting the wild variations from her vocal chords to good effect. I can fully understand the people who are turned off by the indulgent zaniness that this album’s built out of, but for me this is the most exciting thing about any new M.I.A. release – you really never know exactly what you’re gonna get.

There are two particularly soaring triumphs on this album – the first is Bad Girls, which we’ve all heard a billion times at UK nightclubs for nearly two years now, and it sounds just as shiveringly fantastic here as it did there – but the real killer app on this device is Bring the Noize. It’s just as much of a full-frontal assault as her other romances with volume, but where most other M.I.A. tracks are a hit-and-miss result of crazed experimentation, Bring the Noize is a track in which all its elements come together to create a cohesively awesome result. The tribal kick drums, the jelly-kneed vocal distortions, the distant chant, the rhythmic creaking sounds, I mean it’s just as crazy as ever, but it all works beautifully. Maya’s reverb-drenched rapping is at the forefront, and it actually sounds like she’s trying to rap here, which is a risky move considering that M.I.A. isn’t much of a rapper, despite what her befuddling Wikipedia page designates, but luckily, she pulls it off, and resultantly proceeds to exude pure concentrated coolness. And it all builds up to a terrifying crescendo, followed by a darkly paranoid ending, where ‘choose’ becomes a portentous syllable. It’s horrifyingly good. While we’re on the subject of club bangers, Y.A.L.A. has a shouty vocal hook that I originally found just the tiniest bit irritating, but as the swagger-stomping beat kicked in, I found myself falling for it. If M.I.A.’s having fun, I’m having fun, and Y.A.L.A. has M.I.A. at her piss-taking, crunk-as-fuck finest.

But probably the most interesting track here is Lights, a comparatively humble-sounding, laidback and drippingly psychedelic oasis from the rest of the album’s thumping energy. The girl who sings the moon-eyed chorus sounds like M.I.A., but can’t possibly be M.I.A. When did M.I.A. ever sound this relaxed? The sensation of the track is dreamily childlike and a hard-shouldered deviation from what we’ve all come to expect from its creator. In it, M.I.A. leaps between personas, alternating between shroomed-up and awestruck, chilled to the edge of cool, and frustratedly snarky, complaining brazenly to someone about something, the context of which escapes my understanding, but her exasperated, down-to-earth lyrical waxing through a leafy-green kaleidoscopic backing track forms one of the most surprising and startlingly different offerings from the old girl that any of us have witnessed in a while. I’m not sure what the mandate of the track is (except simply to blow off some important steam), but its invention sounds terrifically lush, especially coming after all that noisy electronic rug-cutting, and it’s worth a paragraph of its own just for its sheer uniqueness.

As with its predecessor, Matangi has its flaws. Double Bubble Trouble isn’t great; the beat is passable in its way, but the whole trouble/bubble rhyme slinging is pretty inane. The title track’s alright, but it’s rather on the uninspiringly dumb side of things as well; Only 1 U’s better solely for that bell sound effect, otherwise it’s proudly loud but unsatisfactorily dull. Also, M.I.A.’s lyricism isn’t her finest asset, and even for a fan like me, the manifesto/presto rhymes, the Lara Croft reference, the Drake references, the country-namedropping, yeah, it’s not fantastic, and these missteps are damaging, especially since I know she can do better than this. Even on this album, I can get behind the audacity of lines like ‘my blood type is no negative’ and the ridiculous entirety of aTENTion. But it’s interesting to note that, as an artist whose music will forever overlap with the world beyond it, and her own personal image, you can’t help but admire the fact that even when there are moments of failure, it never hurts M.I.A.’s rock solid image as an icon of no-fucks-given badassery. The illusion is never shattered. And even when she’s not at her best, M.I.A. will always be cooler than you. Matangi isn’t a brilliant album, but it’s a solid piece of work, with some really spectacular highlights, and even when she’s not hitting the seminal highs which brought her superstardom with Kala, she still has the distinction of not sounding like anyone else, and continues to concoct tunes from a mindset that is uniquely her own.

M.I.A. - Bring the Noize

Burial - Rival Dealer EP

Since releasing the unforgettable Untrue all the way back in 2007, enigmatic entity of genius William Bevan has satiated our cravings for his genre-defying and tearduct-assaulting brand of music with a collection of EPs, all brief in track number, but heavy in content. 2011’s Street Halo was a sedatedly rhythmic continuation of his famously dark atmospherics. 2012 saw the release of the religious experience of Kindred, as well as the cobwebbed night terrors of Truant / Rough Sleeper. Now it’s the end of 2013 and we devoted followers have finally been blessed with a new Burial release, and it’s as emotive and fascinating a piece of work as all that has preceded it.

Burial’s never stuck to one particular template, and if his music reflects anything apart from a kind of urban wistfulness, it’s the producer’s own mental fluidity, switching from one soundscape to another with a rewardingly experimental sense of structure. While it would’ve been just as critically appreciated for Burial to continue building tunes with the chopped-up garage beats that shot him to superstardom, thankfully Burial has taken it upon himself in these recent releases to flex his creative muscles, particularly in these long and varied extended play tracks, and in dabs of experimentation, like the sudden drops into absolute silence dotted throughout his previous EP. He’s trying a few new tactics here, too, heading in a more oldschool musical direction that I’m sure will be met with mixed opinions amongst Burial’s ever-faithful listeners, wherein he mixes things up with thunderous big beat in the title track, and dares to sound at his most un-Burial in the 1980s drum cascade at the denouement of Hiders. But I couldn’t be happier over all this experimentation, it’s interesting to hear how Burial’s been trying his hand at new sounds and new ideas without bankrupting that instantly recognisable sound of his; he’s continuing to change and grow at the rate of a continually relevant artist.

I know it’s fairly cliché to call Burial a true ‘artist’, but it’s such an apt way of describing his particular style of pensive musicianship. Burial tracks feel sculpted and abstractly pieced together like an audial collage, and he’s keeping to his own inimitable style in the broken, unpolished, dust-in-the-cracks veneer of his tracks. The rolling beat of opening track Rival Dealer, for instance, splutters into life, awkwardly finding its footing in empty space which is devoid of a rigid beat. There are several instances in which the beat fumbles out of time completely, which would be an obvious cardinal sin when discussing any other musician, and there are strange elements like the snare in Come Down to Us which sounds jarringly lo-fi, but with Burial’s distinctively fractal sound it only adds to his tracks’ crackly collage aesthetic. The moments in his tracks rise and fall with the fluidity of thoughts and feelings. Maybe that’s why Burial gets under your skin more than most, but it’s also probably got a lot to do with his choice of absolutely beautiful samples and synths. The choral synth that’s the main meat of Hiders is like the warmth of a church on a winter’s night. The autotuned lament that closes Rival Dealer provides tranquil respite from the dark urgency it trails off from. There’s the oriental loop that dances over the dubstep swing of Come Down to Us, and the gorgeously impure vocals that run throughout all three tracks. I don’t know where he finds these samples and sounds, or how he decides to integrate them, but considering the amount of time since Burial's last effort to release just these three tracks, they certainly sound like the result of real, painstaking care and effort.

We also have the unusual pleasure of being provided with a mission statement to go alongside this release, in the form of a surprising text sent by Burial to Mary Anne Hobbs, where he clarifies that there’s an ‘anti-bullying’ message behind this release, which is something I would’ve never expected and is actually a pretty awesome gesture on the bloke’s behalf. Although Burial has a landscape sound that can, at times, feel strange and dissociative, you can hear this theme of ‘everything’s-gonna-be-okay’ embedded here and there throughout the EP – in the triumphant cadence of Come Down to Us and the loving glow of Hiders, there’s clearly something inspirational going on. One of the first samples you hear before the EP fires up is a voice exclaiming confidently that ‘this is who I am’, and the album closes with a speech about believing in yourself despite times of hardship from transgender film director Lana Wachowski (of The Matrix fame). Taking all of this into account, even though the EP begins in the harshest darkness and the whole thing has an edge of night required in all Burial releases, there’s a lot more light shining through this EP than has maybe ever been witnessed in the mysterious tunesmith’s back-catalogue. While I, and a lot of people, adore Burial for his brooding atmospherics and revel in the cathartic grimness of the majority of his tunes, all his forays into new sounds and directions have so far been wonderfully fruitful, and the more positive shade of emotions which he evokes here are just as heart-shudderingly sublime here as in anything else he's made. Rival Dealer is a three-track EP that nonetheless feels packed with a truckload of finely-crafted emotional depth, and continues to show how Burial is one of the most fascinating and uniquely talented musical artists of this or any generation.

Burial - Rival Dealer

On the VMAs, Miley Cyrus and Selling Sex to Children

The VMAs, if you’re really not aware, is MTV’s yearly celebration of pop music in all its glorious banality. It’s a ceremony of universally fake smiles, constructed personalities, broad, simple, thoughtless entertainment and a who’s-who of dead-eyed products disguised as human beings. I paid an unusual amount of attention to the show this year, and while flicking through the coverage online thanks to a curious and overwhelming boredom, I found myself in an uncomfortable world of American superficiality that, now I don’t watch TV anymore, I’d almost forgot existed. It reminded me that, as much as I’ve tried my hardest to be an apologist for pop music as a necessary evil in the capitalist culture that Western history’s sailed into, the sheer banality and obnoxiously shallow direction that pop music has taken is undeniable. And it just seems to be getting worse.

The main walking, talking sack of money that everyone’s talking about is Miley Cyrus. Miley Cyrus is part of a long trend in the dark and mysterious pop culture machine to get ‘em while they’re young, like a Colombian drug cartel – creating a pop superstar from a disgustingly young age to bring in the younger audiences and then unsubtly sexualising them later on in order to cater for everyone else; because the ‘sex sells’ mantra has never been more obsessively taken to heart than in the music industry. If you talk about Justin Bieber with the anti-Bieber crowd, most of them tend to say that all they’re waiting for is the inevitable ‘fall’ that comes to any child star when the onset of puberty, megalomania, intense media scrutiny and a thousand other weights of intense pressure crush them to breaking point. People love that narrative. Miley Cyrus hasn’t lost it just yet, and there’s always an outside chance that she might never properly ‘lose it’ in a Michael Jackson or a Britney Spears kind of way, but nevertheless her journey from simple child to an 'adult' adult is looking gently misguided to say the least.

If you’re a female pop star, the general expectation is that you have to be hypersexualised. After all, to put it cynically, you need something to get people talking about you, and it’s not gonna be the talent. Beyoncé is the most obvious exception here – she’s mastered using her talent alongside her sexuality without coming across as crude and exploitative. Katy Perry would be the opposite of this, embodied as she is by some seriously terrible music and a complete lack of intelligence and integrity, while constantly pandering to the childish sexual mores of her audience as the basis of her whole career (Remember that Perry shot to fame with the song ‘I Kissed a Girl’). This is the route Cyrus has chosen – or rather the one that the clandestine marketing panel behind her persona has chosen. It was most apparent in the ‘We Can’t Stop’ video, which appeared to me like a post-gangsta-rap Less Than Zero, and revealed the brand new finally-legal-now sexy Miley Cyrus in the same way you’d reveal a new iPhone generation. Cyrus smacking other girls’ bums and writhing around in the doggy position is a vision of the other great mantra of any big entertainment industry in the last decade or so – ‘subtlety doesn’t sell’.

Chucking some unsubtle sex appeal onto Cyrus’ act when she reached adulthood wasn’t particularly shocking or at all surprising in itself, but this year at the VMAs that unimaginative marketing strategy hit a new level of OTT in Miley Cyrus’ performance and her new general demeanour. For one thing, she couldn’t keep her tongue in her mouth, slapping it out at the side every now and then like an escaped slug in order to remind the thousands of onlookers that she’s ‘feisty’ and ‘raunchy’ and ‘up for it’ in the most horrendously creepy way possible, also stopping to wipe her fanny on a giant teddy bear and unskilfully twerk every now and then (because the mainstream media has discovered twerking in the same way a mum discovers the word ‘cool’). She sings ‘We Can’t Stop’, of course, which sounds like all the obnoxiousness of a single generation concentrated into a boring pop hit, but then just when I think I’ve seen enough embarrassment for one night, Robin bloody Thicke waddles out of the darkness, and the two creepiest examples of everything wrong with the sexual attitudes of Western culture collide in a head-cradlingly cringe display of retrograde stupidity.

To take a minute just to talk about Robin Thicke, ‘Blurred Lines’ is a song I can’t fucking stand and will never forgive the world for accepting as part of the fabric of human culture in this day and age. The song itself isn’t bad and is actually pretty interestingly made and decently produced and sticks in your head like a skewer, but the lyrics, its message, its approach and of course its video, only appear to represent something a lot ‘darker’ than the simple ‘joke’ that Thicke (who himself is an imbecile, by the way) tried to pass it off as. The word that me and most other critics of the song like to use in relation to it is creepy. It’s so creepy. It reeks with the stench of the male gaze. It drips with the excited sweat of the rapist. ‘I know you want it’, ‘you’re a good girl’, ‘do it like it hurt’, eugh, it’s enough to make you shudder. Guys singing about wanting to have sex with girls and girls wanting to have sex with them isn’t cause in itself for the feminist alarm bells to start ringing, but the attitude in what’s possibly the biggest song of the year sounding like the mutterings of a masturbating sex offender has aggravated me more than anything else pop music has shit into my stream in the past eight months.

So seeing Miley Cyrus, who performs with the style of an ignored stripper, lech herself shamelessly onto Thicke, who looked like a dad with a guilty boner, inflamed a conservative part of my brain that I beforehand never knew existed. Alice Glass said once in an NME interview that the mainstream media ‘sells sex to children’, and she’s right. Girls are being taught to be used and guys are being taught to be users. Sex towers above all other values. Miley Cyrus is trying so hard to be ‘raunchy’ because that’s what the established pop music culture requires of her. The status quo at the moment is for men to be almost obsessively perverted and sex-crazed and for women to be shamelessly objectified, norms which instead of appearing to be moving past, we as a culture all seem to be encouraging and pushing to undignified levels. Criticism of this kind of shit isn’t prudish, or against free forms of sexual expression, because there’s nothing sexually liberating about any of this crap. It’s all restrictive and mindless and cheap and basic and catering to an audience of backwards-minded sex-obsessed simpletons which I hope doesn’t exist in as massive a chunk of the population as watching the VMAs would lead you to believe. Also, I tend to think that trying to manipulate your base urges to get you to buy into a product is an insult to you as a human being.

There is hope in the fact that Cyrus’ performance absolutely bombed; as far as I can tell from the online reaction and the awesome viral Smith family reaction screenshot, everyone found it fucking hilariously awful. But, although using crude sexuality in order to cynically grab attention is nothing new in any form of pop culture, Cyrus’ failed attempt last night seemed indicative of something really fucked-up in the modern mindset of North America and its cultural compatriots here in the UK. The almighty power of the pop music industry is infusing younger generations with a depressingly immature and shallow sexual attitude, and upholding and absolving these attitudes where they’re already present. And of all the things that depressed me about watching a small fragment of the VMAs – the shit music, the vacuous coverage, the self-centred brown nosing, the repressed congeniality of the employees of the mainstream – I think it was being reminded of mainstream culture’s pernicious championing of perverse sexuality and gender attitudes that depressed me the most. The VMAs is a parade for the Nazis of culture.

Kanye West - Yeezus

Kanye thrives on contentiousness – if he wasn’t as renowned for his arrogance and pigheadedness as he was for his music, he sure as hell wouldn’t be the behemothic superstar we all know and love to hate. On his last album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he took account of his now-legendary dickishness by making his dickishness the album’s central theme. This artistic direction led to Kanye attempting to balance his persona’s unashamed hedonism with a sort of penitent sensitivity towards how this could be perceived as not entirely commendable of him and how he was actually a good-natured and troubled individual underneath all the sickeningly garish displays of wealth. Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually another critical success for Yeezy, though I debated constantly as to whether it was the bona fide magnum opus that Kanye intended as well as a piece of pure devilish entertainment value. Three years on, here comes Yeezus, where the post-Taylor-Swift-incident navel-gazing continues.

However, before we get into the ins-and-outs of Kanye’s infamous delusions of grandeur, let’s talk about the parts of the album which don’t involve Kanye speaking his mind, because let’s face it, it’s the production on Yeezus that’s got everyone talking. The vibe here is similar to his aforementioned previous effort – a big luxurious-sounding mishmash of synths, pianos, horns, as well as the twisting of Kanye’s own voice through juttering self-samples and autotune. But as everyone’s pointed out, the tracks are noisier, harsher, abrasive and just a little unhinged in places where the production on his previous album was softer and had a more dignified feeling of composure, and the album sounds all the fresher because of it. The beats really do sound like the work of a madman – or at least producers on the commission of a madman, considering the V.I.P. list of auxiliary talent that Kanye brought in to assist in giving the ten tremendously demented tracks the stylishly mangled treatment they deserve.

And the variety of expert opinions really shows in the quality of the tracks on this album, with each dark, steely composition pulling you further and further into the madness. And there’s method within the madness. There’s a lot of exciting shit that jumps out at you within the overall production, like the aggravating electronica that manifests itself in numerous zips, squeals and growls. Or the eclectic and strategically placed, as well as comparatively sparse, sampling picked up from all kinds of crazy places - like the jarring breakdown halfway through New Slaves into Hungarian space-rock - but the more notable samples are the dips into Jamaican dancehall every now and then, which I wouldn’t have thought would work well at all, but in fact work really, really, really well. Despite all the leanings towards descriptions like ‘noise’ and ‘industrial’, the whole thing is a very tight ship, bearing all the hallmarks of professionalism that we’ve all come to expect from Kanye – he’s still never made a bad album, and part of that is because he has an excellent ear for what sounds awesome and what can go into a track to make it grab your attention.

Yeezus is brimming with energy, and Kanye makes no effort to restrain himself, leading to hyped-up bouts of insanity like the Black Skinhead. Guilt Trip, especially, feels like what is in my opinion the album’s most resounding success, with its chiptune-and-piano vortex of trap where Kanye’s flow sounds particularly at home. Hold My Liquor also deserves a mention for its unnerving echoing-through-emptiness production and weeping synths, as well as another stirring bit of participation from Justin Vernon, who’s all over this album as he was in Dark Twisted Fantasy. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, the relationship between this album and Kanye’s previous is a fascinating one, as they both work in much the same way and show the same level of invigorating creativity – the most notable difference is that Yeezus lacks the throng of guest appearances that peppered Dark Twisted Fantasy, leading to an album that’s very noticeably more about the man himself – I mean even more so than usual. Which brings me to something that needs to be addressed, even though as you can hopefully tell from my enthusiasm, Yeezus is an excellently constructed album and as indulgent a piece of entertainment as his last effort, which was arguably one of his best, if not the best. But there’s a problem that dwelt within that album that remains with this one, and to really express what that problem is, we need to talk about the man himself.

First of all, Kanye’s not a great rapper; never has been, never will be. He’s had a few decent lines here and there, but it’d be lying to say that his more obvious presence on this album matches the quality of the more technical, musical side that runs alongside it. I never really know where I stand with Kanye – he staggers between toothless social commentary and an incredibly off-putting lack of maturity that clash awkwardly with each other. And a lot of his lyrics are just plain stupid. Here are a few examples:

“Hurry up with my damn croissants!”

“Your titties, let em out, free at last,

Thank God Almighty, they free at last”

“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce”

“I wanna fuck you hard on the sink,

After that, give you something to drink”

I mean that’s the kind of shit we’re dealing with here, and the problem is that I just can’t run with it, it just seems to display Kanye's inability to write with any sense of tone or feel or anything, and is mostly made up of uninspired rhymes and references. For a rap album, the rapping is noticeably poor. What's worse is Kanye’s poorly-concealed intention for the music he makes, and the lyrics he writes for it, to be interpreted as having serious artistic merit. I mean, I understand that he knew what he was doing naming his songs things like ‘I Am a God’ – for Kanye to lose his wanton arrogance is to strip him of his most effective marketing asset – but there seems to be an attempt at real heart on Yeezus that, to make another comparison with the sister album before it, falls weakly flat.

For a man who’s forever linked by fathering a doomed child with Kim Kardashian – the last person you’d associate with anything other than totally vapid philistinism – he seems to love writing songs that beg to be heard as heartfelt testaments to having a depressing time having meaningless sex with meaningless people with meaningless wealth, and he seems to genuinely believe that this constitutes an evocative critique or some sort of message other than vacuous descriptions of an affluent and hedonistic lifestyle with a depressing slant shallowly built into it. The world he evokes through his songs is surprisingly lifeless, and seems to be mostly built on bland misogyny. Blood on the Leaves, I’m in It, Bound 2 – these are all great beats, but despite all his trying to prove his artistic capability as a deep and complex individual, his lyricism comes across as the best he can possibly manage, which is shallow and directionless. Blood on the Leaves is actually a great song, but the decision to use Nina Simone’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in a song about a rich cokehead going through a divorce sits uncomfortably, and seems to be a good example of Kanye’s lack of any real sensitivity.

Kanye is many things – he’s talented, exciting, charismatic, consistently relevant, and I do honestly believe, good-natured, but it's an uncomfortable truth that he's not as intelligent as he thinks he is. Kanye may be skilled, and musically he has serious clout, but he’s clearly trying to reach greedily above the level of hip-hop beatmaker to be seen as someone with real depth, even though he’s a man to whom the world beyond the superficial universe he inhabits might as well be invisible. Yeezus is gripping on a musical level, but for an album that seems to be making attempts at being strongly personal, it all seems as shallow as ever. However, if you don't care about boring questions of artistic authenticity in regard to someone as preposterous as Kanye West, as I'm sure most people won't, then on a level of solid musical entertainment, Yeezus is bursting with vibrancy and filled with creative flashes, and is another worthy effort in Kanye West's impressive discography.

Kanye West - New Slaves