Latest releases reviewed
8 BALL 8 Ball Lakota ***
Seven Irish friends pool their talents and come up with a nice, languid alternative to The Thrills. Drawing on influences ranging from West Coast folk, Americana, jazz and even hip-hop, this calm collective have come up with a bunch of slow-burning indie tunes, held together by gently strummed acoustic guitars, lazily dripping keyboards, soft-palate vocals and the odd sample, just for that extra otherworldliness. The amazing thing about such well-spaced tunes as Fear I'm Falling, Strange Boy, Bird and Which Ways Down is how the band manage to avoid sounding like a complete bunch of hippies - or worse, singer-songwriters. If Espers is too prissily pastoral for you, and Hal too sugar-rushed, then just cue 8 Ball up on your CD player. It's true bohemia in a bottle. www.8ballmusic.com
Kevin Courtney
DANDY WARHOLS Odditorium or Warlords of Mars EMI ***
The Portland, Oregon band, perhaps still best known for the mobile-phone selling Bohemian Like You, could have stayed on the straight and narrow garage rock track for sound commercial reasons, but here they have obviously taken a more rootsy Kings of Leon route. The oddly titled Love Is the New Feel Awful neatly displays the band's stoner direction, and they even pull in some trumpets to weird out the sound. The single, Smoke It, meanwhile, is adroit neo-psychedelia. Elsewhere, there are admirable flashes of Exile on Main Street, as some louche blues guitar work brings the band to places they've never visited before. It's not all too "experimental", though - and they do rein in the excesses with some sharp sonic attacks. Do you think they were smoking dope when they came up with the title?
Brian Boyd
BLOC PARTY Silent Alarm Remixed Wichita ***
For the remixer, a remix is a chance to make a name for him/herself using someone else's tunes. For the remixee, it's a new set of clothes without going to the bother of doing it yourself. For Bloc Party, this particular experiment is also a chance to remind people that Silent Alarm, which may seem as if it was released years rather than months ago, is still out there looking for business. As with any such collection, there are delights and duds. Whitey gives Helicopter a sparkling paint-job (and if you like that then you'll like his under-rated album, The Light at the End of a Tunnel Is a Train from earlier this year). Four Tet's So Here We Are and M83's The Pioneers are energetic and mischevious, while Automato turn Price of Gasoline smartly on its head. For Mogwai, Ladytron and Erol Alkan, this job was a little beyond them, all turning in various definitions of "lame". www.blocparty.com
Jim Carroll
RICHARD SWIFT The Collection Vol 1 Secretly Canadian ****
Oh my, but you're going to love this one: Swift is from Orange County, a singer-songwriter straight out of the stable that once contained a bucking Rufus Wainwright. In the States, they're calling Swift a "revisionist vaudvillean", which certainly connects with Wainwright's more baroque moments. What a description like this fails to highlight, however, is just how good a songwriter Swift actually is. Forget about the Davids and the Damiens, the Blunts and the Caseys; forget, even for a short while, someone as stylistically accomplished and slightly warped as Wainwright. Swift is rougher than them all, less clinical, more personalised, even tempered; the music a perfect balance between sonic schizophrenia and aural calm. The songs gathered here comprise two albums, 2003's The Novelist and the just released Walking Without Effort. One alone would be good news - a singer-songwriter arriving out of nowhere, bold, different and quite special. Two is spoiling us. www.richardswift.us
Tony Clayton-Lea
NADA SURF The Weight Is a Gift City Slang/ V2 ***
As we head into the darkening days of autumn, New York power-pop trio Nada Surf do their little bit to prolong summer. Their fifth album is as bright and breezy as CBeebies, full of three-minute pop ditties with instantly catchy tunes and hummable hooks. The downside of this All-American jollity is that the songs quickly become predictable and leave a distinctly cheesy aftertaste, while the band battle in vain to recapture the glory of their eternally well-known Popular. However, the highlights do make it worthwhile: there's the delicious soft-centred fuzz of Always Love, the bass-grooviness of Do It Again, plus the album's only genuine grower, What Is Your Secret, a very welcome serving of infectious restraint. All in, it's harmonic, danceable, saccharine, no-brainer pop music and certainly Nada the worse for it. www.nadasurf.com
Johnnie Craig
DAVID GRAY Life in Slow Motion IHT ***
After the massive success of White Ladder, David Gray faced a dilemma: should he strike on for greater artistic heights or simply churn out some more of those head-bobbing tunes that his fans know and love? His new album is a concerted attempt to shed the millstone; as he says in Nos da Cariad, he's had "a bucketful of Babylon". Recorded in his new studio (bought from Dave Stewart), Life in Slow Motion is more of a mood piece, its tone subdued, its tenor sober and reflective, its sound underpinned by plangent piano, rootsy chords, choral arrangements and wide open sonic spaces. Songs such as Alibi, Lately, Ain't No Love and From Here You Can Almost See the Sea are flecked with well-crafted musical detail; you may find it all a bit too, well, serious, but at least Gray is not - like Coldplay - pandering to perceived expectations. www.davidgray.com
Kevin Courtney
BRÍDÍN BRENNAN Eyes of Innocence MDM Records **
That doe-eyed look is disconcerting; Brídín Brennan, sibling of zillion-selling Enya and Clannad's Moya Brennan, is the latest member of that Donegal clan to launch an assault on the listening public. Brennan the Younger makes no apologies for sticking steadfastly to the middle of the road, with neither a nod towards Moya's Celtic affiliations or Enya's multi-layered vocals. Eyes of Innocence delivers exactly what it says on the tin: uncomplicated melodies floating harmlessly atop featureless lyrics that'll do little to offend and much to anaesthetise. With the strongest signature borrowed from Jimmy Webb's By the Time I Get to Phoenix, and a voice that's proficient if unremarkable, Brídín Brennan could be bound for either pop glory or immediate bargain bin relegation. There's but a hair's breadth in the difference. www.bridinbrennan.com
Siobhán Long
