One Sentence CD Reviews

Album Reviews,

Alternative,

Country,

Dance - Electronic,

Folk,

Hard Rock - Metal,

Indie,

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Music,

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Punk - Hardcore,

Rock

Nuggets of rock'n'roll truth from Andrew P Street

First published on 21 Sep 2011. Updated on 26 Mar 2012.

	THE MAGNETIC FIELDS Love at the Bottom of the Sea The best Magnetic Fields album in a decade shows Stephin Merritt at his wry, romantic, bitchy best (cf: the perky death threats of ‘Your Girlfriend’s Face’, the doomed straight-man-on-straight-man romance of ‘Andrew in Drag’) welded to tunes that recall the band’s 90s classics.
	MA Dance Until My Heart Breaks Sophisticated electro pop – think late-period St Etienne, or Madison Avenue 20 years down the track when the pills don’t work quite as well – although tracks like the jangling, melodic ‘If That’s How You Want It To Be’ could sit comfortably on ABC evenings.
	THE SHINS Port of Morrow At first listen this melodic, poppy, synth-drenched disc sounds more like the second album by James Mercer’s side project Broken Bells than the fourth Shins album, but given that the Shins are now effectively Mercer and whoever he feels like hiring that’s probably to be expected.
	VCMG SSSS This collection of layered instrumental pieces proves Vince Clarke and Martin Gore – who haven’t worked together in 30 years, since the former actimoniously left their band Depeche Mode – still have a fierce love of 70s electronica.
	ROBERTA FLACK Let it Be It’s possible that you genuinely need to own jazzy, adult-contemporary versions of Beatles hits (and if so, this will do the trick nicely), but if that’s the case you should re-examine your life and make some dramatic changes.
	MACHINEMACHINE Mysteries This local combo bash out lazy indie rock that sounds familiar to anyone who’s heard Pavement, Afghan Whigs, Knieval, Archers of Loaf etc, but that’s mainly because they’re that just damn good.
	OF MONSTERS & MEN Into the Woods If you’ve been wondering whether Iceland would ever produce a bastard hybrid of Grouplove and Arcade Fire, then be assured in the affirmative on the basis of this spirited EP.
	FAIR OHS Everything is Dancing If you’ve never heard Cloud Control, Vampire Weekend, Jinga Safari and every other band that mixes up East African influence in their indie rock, this is going to be a revelation – and if you have heard any of the above, you’re not going to even remember this one.
	THE BIG PINK Future This A big, confident follow up to 2009’s A Brief History of Love sees the UK now-duo embrace keyboards and dance rhythms over their often anthemic pop songs (cf: ‘Stay Gold’).
	CLAIRY BROWNE & THE BANGIN’ RACKETTES Baby Caught the Bus These locals have made a disc of impressively authentic old school rock’n’roll and r’n’b, replete with punchy harmonies, honking sax and pounding piano – shown off to superb effect on the title track.
	ROBYN LOAU Only Human The former Girlfriend popstress makes a powerfully contemporary pop album, provided that it’s actually 2006 – although her vocal on her unexpectedly faithful cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is impressively bang on.
	SNOW PATROL Fallen Empires More epic grandeur from the Scots quintet – though more drenched in synths than hitherto – that is clearly made for the planet’s stadia, yet still somehow manages to be insidiously stirring.
	WITCH HATS Pleasure Syndrome They're the best Birthday Party that Australia still has, but the new full-length shows the Melbourne combo branching out in new (and sometimes terrifying) new directions, as on single 'Hear Martin'.
	BUSH The Sea of Memories Gavin Rossdale and (mainly) new hires make a perfectly serviceable, perfectly unsurprising comeback record that is, at the very least, a vast improvement on his stuff with Institute, who you don’t remember for very sound reasons.
	THE BON SCOTTS We Will All Die at the Hands of CGI Quirky folk-pop with acoustic instruments, brass and memorable lyrics that evoke the ragged Australian indie folk tradition of everyone from the Bedridden to early Alecks and the Ramps.
	AUSTRA Feel it Break If the last Ladytron album failed to move you, then this disc might be just the thing to reawaken your love for icy, female-sung retro-flavoured electro.
	WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS In the Pit of the Stomach The band with the best name of 2011 comes across as a better-than-average post-hardcore band, but repeated listens reveal a guitar-pop debt to the spiky likes of Franz Ferdinand.
	TIM FINN The View is Worth the Climb As with just about every Finn solo album there’s a frustrating sense of missed opportunities and lazy writing, made even more infuriating when he still comes up with sharp, gorgeous singles like ‘People Like Us’ that throw the rest of the disc into harsh relief.
	BJÖRK Biophilia Maybe it makes amazing sense with all the fancy iPad apps, but as a stand-alone album Biophilia feels like a soundtrack without a film.
	THE ANSWER Revival So, the question was “What Irish band does bog-standard blues-influenced rock’n’roll, presumably in the hopes that someone’s desperately looking for a new Thin Lizzy?”
	JANE'S ADDICTION The Great Escape Artist No-one was expecting a kick-arse return to form from the veteran alt.rockers, and in that sense they amply live up to expectations.
	MIC CONWAY & ROBBIE LONG Street of Dreams A jaunty collection of (mainly) olde-tyme covers with a ragtime/jugband focus, including another pass at Conway’s signature tune ‘My Canary has Circles Under his Eyes’.
	SUPERHEAVY Superheavy The supergroup of Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, Dave Stewart and AR Rahman waste their and everyone else’s time with a collection of uninspired songs performed by mutually unsympathetic talents.
	LOU REED & METALLICA Lulu It sounds like Lou recorded in an afternoon, Metallica did some demos at a completely different studio, and someone took the two second-rate recordings and plonked them on the same master tape without telling either party to create one of the least essential albums of 2011.

	FUTURE OF THE LEFT Polymers are Forever EP The first fruit of the Welsh post-hardcore combo’s new-look four-piece line up proves that more can be more, with the rockin’ title track one of their best singles yet.

	COLDPLAY Mylo Xyloto It’s a lot more energetic than the last two albums but those insipid girl/world/love/above lyrics and big, empty-gesture stadium sounds remain, making this the perfect xmas present for people who like CDs but don’t much care for music.

	KASABIAN Velociraptor! It’s probably the UK combo’s most solid and varied album yet, with the odd clunky lyric or familiar chord progression overshadowed by the fact this record has 2011's best title.

	FEIST Metals The ‘1-2-3-4’ star presents a good, consistent album that takes a few listens to reveal its (many) charms, but one killer single would have turned it from good to great.

	BLINK-182 Neighborhoods This solid comeback by the reunited pop-punk trio continues the trend of their self-titled 2003 album: more darkly mature lyrical themes, more adventurous music, less references to their dicks.

	BLITZEN TRAPPER American Goldwing The US quintet completely embrace the 70s Americana that have increasingly been the norm on their albums: think Creedence, the Band and anything involving Gram Parsons.

	KIKUYU Hunter Gathered Sez Wilks’s intimately breathy voice and her trusty organ make for nine tracks of uncluttered pop beauty, sung in an immediately recognisably Australian accent.

	WAVVES Life Sux It might be an odds-n-sods mini-album of 7” tracks, download-only things and collaborations, but the rockin’ ‘Bug’ and ‘I Wanna Meet Dave Grohl’ are two of the band’s most joyful (and least surf-psych) tracks yet.

	ROYAL HEADACHE Royal Headache There’s a reason this is getting attention all over the world: this Sydney act is the best garage band that didn’t exist in 1966, and this is going to be your album of the summer, if only for the barreling closer, ‘Pity’.

	WILD FLAG Wild Flag When half your band used to be in Sleater-Kinney you’re inevitably going to get a Sleatery, Kinney-ery sort of a sound – but that’s hardly a bad thing, and Wild Flag do take things in some unexpectedly pop directions.

	MASTODON The Hunter After the prog-metal majesty of Mastodon’s last two efforts – Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye – this is a disappointing collection of droptuned riffs and joke songs about meth heads and space orgasms, which makes it sound better than it actually is.

	COBRA STARSHIP Night Shades That this band turned a gimmick single for Snakes on a Plane into a career is one of the great musical tragedies of the 00s, and this record proves there’s apparently a market for heavily autotuned vocals over the Bloodhound Gang’s rejected sequencer programmes.

	THE VASCO ERA The Vasco Era It may have (reportedly) almost killed the band, but Sid O’Neil wrings another album’s worth of raw tales of desperate losers and bad choices from his psyche, welded to some of the Victorian trio’s most unhinged rock’n’roll to date.

	LADY ANTEBELLUM Own The NIght If you like country music to be drained of all its raw emotion and rough honesty and given a soulless MOR makeover then this will be the perfect soundtrack for your next long, dull drive – or better yet, idling with a hose on the exhaust in a locked garage.

	SNEAKY SOUND SYSTEM From Here to Anywhere The electropop locals are back and sounding just like they never left – which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on whether you suspect Black Angus and Connie have more in them or if you’re just happy to have big 80s-aping pop singles like ‘We Love’.

	LOVERS ELECTRIC Impossible Dreams Titles like ‘Whenever’, ‘Without You’ and ‘One In a Million’ don’t suggest the once Sydney-based duo burned through a lot of inspiration in the making of this album, and the insipid pop inside the case does nothing to change that impression.

	THE PANICS Rain of the Humming Wire They’ve come close before, but the Perth indie quintet have now created a sweeping Australian classic in the mould of the Triffids’ Born Sandy Devotional and Midnight Oil’s Diesel & Dust.

	KANYE WEST & JAY-Z Watch the Throne Two genuine hip-hop superstars spit out an album that’s a whole lot less tortured than either of their own most recent discs – though Justin “Bon Iver” Verson’s vocal on ‘That’s My Bitch’ is the strangest thing you’ll hear this year.

	RICHARD IN YOUR MIND Sun It sounds like the bedroom-demo first album mixed with the groovy psych arrangements and songcraft of their second disc, which makes for an heady indie-rock brew.
	UPS & DOWNS Out of the Darkness: Sleepless, Singles and Other Stories A great 80s Sydney band gets a long-overdue career-spanning anthology, though it would still get four stars if the only song on it was the magnificent single ‘The Living Kind’.

	ESKIMO JOE Ghosts of the Past The ’Joe could have picked up Powderfinger’s “music for straight men to hug to” audience here, but instead they’ve gone a step too far into mid-period Coldplay.