Alex Listens to Every Girls Aloud Album For You

So, Girls Aloud - the TV manufactured girl group of (I suppose) debatable talent, the majority of whose oeuvre has been written and composed by the sugar-pop-warlock-surgeons at Xenomania. Their songs being so good that they gave a "Get Out of Authenticity Free" card to almost every indie listener in the world. Myself, of course, included. But still you bump up against the ugly wall of prejudice: Girls Aloud? No! Manufactured! TV show! Pop music! MUST DISMISS!

Gah, some people can take no joy in life, can they?

Should I mention that I'm delighted that Rage Against The Machine got to Christmas no. 1? Putting aside every other issue and purely based on the fact that the song they chose for Joe McElderry single to sing was so utterly shit. If he'd been doing a Xenomania track I'd probably have been in his corner.

And while I'm digressing... did he fuck Cheryl Cole? Because the video seems to be narrating some kind of torturous love story between Joe and Cheryl, lots of eye contact, tearful hugging, begging for their lives in front of a massive audience and finally being granted a reprieve. I don't know, maybe I was misreading it.

Anyway, astonishingly they hit five albums this year, and I finally decided to step up my love from listening to The Show and Biology on repeat and actually listen to each of their five albums from start to finish. Many times over. Interestingly while I admit my love is mostly based on those unstoppable melodies I hadn't thought much about the members themselves. I mean, not being in the country for a couple of years means that I don't really get to see them perform or appear on TV, and my impression before I left wasn't so great - they were just the faces the songs I liked came out of. That said, listening to a lot of their music together... their voices don't sound autotuned or post-polished to death (I mean, not as much as some other pop artists), and that actually adds a lot to the whole.

Anyway, I did not regret my undertaking for one second, and I'm sure neither will you.

1) Girls Aloud - Sound of The Underground

What an oddly cheap looking album cover! Mummy, is that what the underground looks like? Is that the resistance? The first album was a strong start but is by no means the peak of their career so far. The singles are great, but my favourite track here must be Some Kind of Miracle, which didn't even get picked as a single. That, my friends, was the kind of gold I was mining for. It's worth noting now, early on, that while occasionally there are clearly different voices singing (as different girls pick up the mic for different verses) I have absolutely no idea who is singing what, and while there are five girls, there are only two or three different voices that I've been able to discern... I mean at least they aren't Exile though, where you have two singers and twelve dancers. Also worth noting that titling a song "Girls Allowed" on their first album really... wasn't necessary. We... we get it.

2) Girls Aloud - What Will The Neighbours Say?

Oh, now I see what they were going for with that cover but I'd say they probably failed in... everything? The type is quite nice I guess. The second album, featuring as it does The Show (one of my favourite Girls Aloud songs) and Love Machine (one of everyone else's favourite Girls Aloud songs), is where things get really good. The first album is solid, occasionally inspired, but wouldn't have been enough to make me a staunch defender, y'know. This one starts (with some assist from a couple of covers) with a straight five track blast of brilliance. And after that there's still Graffiti My Soul, which just... wow. A song so good that the tyros of youtube have been compelled to slap the music on top of every other Girls Aloud video in some cack-handed attempt to magic a Graffiti My Soul video into existence.

3) Girls Aloud - Chemistry

Probably their best cover, which tells you how shit their covers are in general. Honestly, making cover art for Girls Aloud should be like hitting the ground when you fall over, and yet time and again... Anyway this makes two classics in a row. It starts with a trifecta of ass-kicking, and still the structure and majesty of Biology gets me every goddamn time. So good. It's difficult to pick between WWTNS and C (hmmm... abbreviations not working quite so well there), because while I think the second album has better highlights - the lesser songs on Chemistry are greater than those on 'Neighbours'. Anyway, best non-single is probably the track that kicks the album off - Models. Wow, I should watch more Girls Aloud live stuff on youtube, then I can see who sings what!

4) Girls Aloud - Tangled Up

Ah, the classy album. Actually, probably just as good as the previous two now that I think about it. This was one of the albums they released after I'd left the country so I have no idea about the singles, the promotion or the videos - I just listened to the whole thing as an album and it was interesting to see that minimal (still crappy) cover art and hear the (slightly) more mature, restrained sound that they aimed for. The first track, Calling The Shots, is especially impressive for capturing a kind of longing that they had occasionally aimed for on previous albums but fallen far short of, landing in kind of emoticon territory. Close To Love could be an Annie song at the start (while the Xenomania tracks on Annie's last album could have been Girls Aloud songs) which is nothing but good. Sexy! No No No... is amazing, and even the slow single Can't Speak French is a killer on this album. Wow, and then there's Blackjacks and Fling and the insanely awesomely titled (sadly not all that awesome) Control Of The Knife... Let's just say that on reflection this one is up there with the previous two.

5) Girls Aloud - Out Of Control

Well, I don't want to be too damning here, after all it might be a grower, but this still feels like their worst album so far to me. I guess it's tough (as a chart pop act) to keep up the insanely high level of quality that they'd displayed until this point in this career, but whereas before their songs had stomped you to the ground and demanded your attention, on this album they're just kind of... ok. The album cover is even not-bad, in a hideous way, but the music... I was disappointed. In a way, despite the title, it's even more classy and restrained than Tangled Up, there are no truly up-beat singles even! Love is the Key is worth a listen, but feels pieced together from bits of other, better songs. I'd probably pick Miss You Bow Wow as my favourite track on this rekkid (the live version behind that link is actually better than the album version), and even then it only really sparkles in the chorus, and thinking about songs like Biology where every part individually shines... that's quite a step down. I don't know, the whole thing sounds... a little lacking.

But still! I have hope and they might have a new album "Back in Control" next year? Not sure about that but... that might be a return to their previous standards? Here's hoping. In the mean time Girls Aloud are awesome and if you find you don't agree with that, I can only encourage you to check yourself... most thoroughly.

J-Pop - Yuki

Well, I went through JUDY AND MARY and also their guitarist Takuya's solo stuff, all of which I like; but I'm kinda feeling a bit dumb that it took me so long to get to their singer, Yuki's solo stuff. The one album I got so far is amazingly fun. And check this out:

She's awesome, she has a fat drummer, and considering that's taken from MUSIC STATION, it's proof positive that it's ok to swear in English on prime time Japanese TV. Not just the end of shit mind you, the end of shite!

Need more Yuki albums. Must feed hunger.

Greatest Living Englishmen #17 : Luke Haines

I'm currently reading, and enjoying the good goddamned hell out of, Luke Haines' "Britpop" memoirs Bad Vibes, in which he comes across as something of a cunt, but a glorious one, and cements his position as one of the greatest living Englishmen.

On David Gray:

"Gray also has a nasty tick for lengthy onstage guitar-tuning sessions. Deoowwwing. String goes down. Boowwang. String goes up. Time passes, somewhere a life flickers out, and somewhere a new life begins. Yeah, strum a chord, see if it sounds OK. Murwaaang! No improvement then. Christ"

On The Boo Radleys:

"I didn't think it could get worse than Gray. I have a lot to learn. Tonight we are sharing the bill with the Boo Radleys."

On Pulp's early albums:

"Pulp's career has run like one of those silent movies showing man's early attempts at aviation. Each Pulp release is like a preposterous flying machine trundling toward the cliff edge, only to break up like balsa wood as it flops into the sea."

He's clearly well aware that he was an absolute bastard for a lot of his career, and a lot of the vitriolic, splenetic ranting can be picked apart, or treated as one man's snooty opinions I'm sure, but he still makes a great many good points about all the shit that was released under the banner of Britpop. And it's great fun to note how many people he takes to just because his hated cellist doesn't like them. For me his best album might be the one as Baader Meinhoff, but I like his entire catalogue, and because I'm only a third of the way through the book I'm on an Auteurs kick at the moment.

Here they are playing a song about Lenny Bruce dying of a drug overdose and dreaming that he's in Rudolph Valentino's funeral motorcade on Jools Holland (who now has two shows a week? sign of the end times people, I swear):

Grand song, and as Haines points out, releasing it as a single made it a great record too. And here's a pretty fantastic video for Rubettes from their last album:

Love the way he's integrated into the video there. And finally he makes the excellent point, that I have seen made before, that deep in every Englishman's heart there is a gaping whole that no love can fill, and a hunger that can only be sated by conquering an empire.

Englanding #7 : No Good Music

Oh, this is horrible man. I live in Japan for two years with a massively diminished connection to Western pop, rock and indie music and when I finally come back and watch a few shows on MTV2 that are about kinda popular new music I'm just... really, really disappointed.

I mean, I thought I had softened! I thought that I could just watch stuff now and it would kinda wash over me if I didn't like it. I check stuff out online and if it doesn't seem like it's up my street I kinda leave it in its box and go about my business. But I found myself getting more and more annoyed by the cavalcade of mediocrity, probably because I wanted to catch up and be turned on to things I've missed. But it turns out that Biffy Clyro, having briefly contemplated becoming half decent have gone back to sucking and have made a farcical pirate video.

There's this girl/band called Florence and the Machine who have just made an entirely unecessary cover of You Got The Love that sounds... well, like the original, but worse. I'm not writing them/her off coz I haven't checked out any of her self-penned stuff yet and that might rule mightily. I was more than bemused by the cover though.

After that there's loads and loads of bands mining the 80s for anything they can get their hands on, which is absolutely fine by me... but can't they make something interesting with their loot? It's like they're building this enormous stockpile of gems and gold and carved, jade pangolins with rubies for eyes and someone asks: "What are you going to make with all this stuff?" and they go - "Um, I dunno, maybe a coffee table?" A classy coffee table, of course. Christ everyone's trying to sound so fucking detached and "classy" all the time. The best thing I've seen on MTV2 has been Dizzee Rascal and he couldn't give three wise monkeys about being classy when it comes to nailing a track that you can actually pay attention to.

Of course as far from "classy" as you can possibly get, there's some new single from Cobra Starship who... oh man, I just want to grow as many arms as there are people involved in the making of that song so that I can punch all of them in the face at the same time. Even the girls.

EDIT : Oh, holy balls. I was just sitting here thinking - "Well, that's one of my weaker, whinier blog posts of recent times" when I realised that actually this is also my commemorative 500th blog post here. What a pathetic way to celebrate your anniversary. Well, at least this is motivation enough for me not to stop just yet, because this would be a sucky way to bow out.

Mark Mulcahy

Mark Mulcahy is one of the finest songwriters in the world, a personal favourite of mine and, I would dare to say, a genius of sorts. Thanks to the fact that every piece of news about Radiohead is headline news, I found out this week that he's having a hard time at the moment (his wife passed away suddenly last year, leaving him to raise two kids on his own), and that there's a tribute/benefit to him coming out at the end of the month.

The Radiohead connection is that Thom Yorke, smart cookie that he is, is a huge Mulcahy fan and often gives him little shout outs (I like to imagine a chain of fandom from Kanye West to Thom Yorke to Mark Mulcahy to ???). He's contributing a track to the album, among an impressive list of other artists including Michael Stipe, Dinosaur Jr. (J Mascis contributed guitar to his last solo album), Ben Kweller, Josh Rouse, Vic Chestnutt and most excitingly for me Frank Black. The rhythm section who played on some of Mulcahy's earlier records (late Miracle Legion I think, and the amazing one time band Polaris that lived in your TV) Scott Boutier and David McCaffrey (and how much of a Black/Mulcahy superfan do I have to be that I didn't have to look up either of those names) went on to be the spine of Frank Black's Catholics. Frank's gonna be doing Bill Jocko, which is one of my favourite Mark Mulcahy songs, and by chance I was just listening to it last week.


My band, Devil and Casey Jones covered the classic Pete & Pete theme Hey Sandy repeatedly and unapologetically, and I saw Mulcahy play live in the UK four times I think, one of those being a completely surreal endless gig in Nottingham where, because no-one stopped him he just kept playing long after the legal curfew. He's also one of the very few people for whom I've shouted out requests during his shows, only to have them refused both times. Here's some youtube "contentz":

I like the guy with the eyepatch in that one, and assume this next one is by the same team:

And now, a fantastic live duo performance:

So, the point being go and check out Mark Mulcahy's music (that's his label/site, here's his myspace). He's a scruffy guitar-pop God, and I myself am going to go drop money that I don't have at his web store and pick up the tribute album as soon as I can. I'm also crossing my fingers that they're filming the tribute concerts and footage of that will be coming out.

Comics Stuff : Gillen & McKelvie's Phonogram

The last issue of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Phonogram (issue 4 of volume 2) was just incredible. I've said it before and I will go so far as to say it again - if you're a fan of pop music you should be chasing after these books with both arms outstretched and your fingers kinda opening and closing, like you're already imagining them in your grabby little palms. That's the exact pose you should be adopting.


If you are British, and have a taste that originates in 90s indie and (dare we say) Britpop, that goes quadruple. It's a special kind of genius.

Greatest Bands Ever #751: The dB's

Sorry about all these "cultural" posts. Things are a little busy and stressful while I try and sort out my... um life. Anyway, virtue lies in the daily application of one's mind to a problem and blogging. Or something like that. Anyway, anyway...

The dB's

The first time I heard the dB's I was just utterly astonished that I'd never heard them before. The first two albums Stands For Decibels and Repercussion (which admittedly, having read that those are the best, I haven't progressed beyond) are staggering feats of power-pop genius. The melodies are so catchy, the arrangements and performances sizzle and pop, everything seems both tossed off and meticulously arranged at the same time. If you like guitar pop, I can't recommend them enough. Well, I can try obviously, but in the end you'd just get bored of me harping on about them and just stop listening.

Rising Sun DVD... FINDS! (File Under J-Pop)

So, I've gone through five DVDs of higlights from the Rising Sun Rock Festival in EZO that I went to last year. It's cool to see some tracks from the awesome sets that I saw, but it's also cool to get turned on to some of the artists that I missed because I didn't know who they were. A lot of the straight punk music was pretty interchangeable, but I would've liked to have caught Tha Blue Herb and Denki Groove along with these three pop spectaculars:

Ego Wrappin' - Go Action! (Website)

That's an awesome video too.

Low IQ 01 & Master Low - T.O.A.S.T. (Website)

Live from the festival itself no less. This next one sounds pretty shitty at first, but it gets interstellar almost exactly half-way through so hold out for it. Great video again too.

Sakanaction - Night Fishing Is Good (Website)

I tried the big sized embeddable video this time, hope it looks ok where you are. I'ma try and pick up some of this music sometime and hope that they come back to the festival next year. Pop!

"Pop" or "POP!"?

I'm posting this "Saturday" on a Sunday. Why? Because yesterday I got drunk and fell asleep without posting!

The end.

Kimura Kaela who, like everyone else in Japan, is a singer, model and TV presenter, released a double A-side single recently. One side was Moustache, an upbeat pop-rock number, and the other was Memories, which is from a new kids movie. To describe memories as "upbeat" would be like describing Scrooge McDuck as "kinda mean"; it's a virulently potent mixture of cute and sweet that may prove dangerous to western viewers note inured to Japanese cutismo:

Moustache



Memories

To be honest I'm not overly fond of either of these. Moustache isn't a great song, but it does have some great promotional images of Kaela with a moustache and shaving that I've been trying in vain to find on the web. Memories is better but man... it almost hurts my teeth. Then again, I like being hurt.

Stealin' from another man's blog, aka: If it's good enough for Kanye West...

You know who has a great blog? Kanye West of course! I mean, it's more like a link-log, he only pops up to talk about himself from time to time; but with his machine gun spray of design, technology, mostly naked girls, insanely expensive fashion items, and slightly less naked-slightly more famous girls - he has a pretty high hit rate.

And also a pretty high rate of almost naked girls.

Of course there's the spectre of ghost-blogging, something that he's thoroughly denied, but frankly I'm willing to let it slide anyway. He (or his online doppelganger) has brought a bunch of great things to my attention, and his blog's always worth a look. I know that almost everything he posts he's probably reposting from elsewhere, but frankly it's always nice to find a good digest.


The point being that I absolutely had to post about The Vader Project. It recently hit Japan, and now draws from a collection of over a hundred life-size Darth Vader replica helmets that have been painted, decorated, customized or otherwise mutated by "underground artists". But it's ok, because some of them look astonishing, and are unspeakably cool. A big ol' flickr set can be found here in case anyone hasn't seen these yet.

As one of the curators says: "This could not be a timelier event, the pop surrealist/ lowbrow/graffiti/designer art scene is exploding around us." which just makes him sound like an utter wanker, but there you go.

J-Pop Power! Perfume - Polyrhythm

Today I bring you honest to god J-Pop from last year, none of that J-Rock, J-Punk or J-Indies nonsense, three girls, some bad dancing and a whole lot of synths. And if you're listening to the start and you think: "This is just shit", you're right, but wait until the one minute thirty mark when the looping starts, and they start creating dinosaurs and dancing in front of bulldozers:

Perfume - Polyrhythm

Wasn't that great? And when it comes back in just after two minutes, it's like the producer fell asleep on the vocoder button and the video director's LSD kicked in.

It's not like Japan has the sole rights to awesome modern girl pop either, everyone knows Girls Aloud are awesome, and here's your bonus video to prove it:

Girls Aloud - Biology

Girls Aloud: can't sing, can't dance, I don't find any of them attractive - and yet they are avatars of pop genius. Goddesses.