Pop/Rock

Latest releases reviewed

VIVA VOCE
Get Yr Blood Sucked Out
 Full Time Hobby
****

Track Six on Viva Voce's fourth album handily sums up their musical outlook: We Do Not Fuck Around. Indeed, they get straight down to what they do well, pegging indie garage to alt.country folk and grinding psychedelia. Husband and wife Kevin and Anita Robinson handle drums and guitars respectively, rotating the vocal duties and teaming up for the occasional harmony. The 12 tracks are peppered with everything from handclaps and guiros to piano, but their sound is driven by a basic drum/guitar set-up. Despite multiple hat-tips to as many genres, Get Yr Blood Sucked Out returns constantly to the sleepy pop seam that runs through it. Whether it's the epic roll and stomp of Believer, the guitar drawl of When Planets Collide or the hippy love song Special Thing, Viva Voce blur the edges between stolen Pixies riffs and the noughties folk of label mates Tunng. Bloody great.

www.vivavoce.com  - Sinéad Gleeson

KASABIAN
Empire
Sony BMG
****

Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger loves Kasabian. He listens to Club Foot, the Leicester four-piece's breakthrough track, as he works out. It makes sense. The band have frequently been posited as the ultimate new generation Lad Rock band, easily uniting dance and rock, and there is no bigger lad than The Terminator. On this, their second album, they have much of the crowd-pleasing roll of Oasis in their pomp, but there's a darker undercurrent to their chin-jutting swagger and rumbling basslines. In frontman Tom Meighan they have a singer who sounds as conflicted and magnetic as Shaun Ryder. There are echoes of New York art-experimenters Suicide - Last Trip (In Flight) - and, naturally, Primal Scream (Shoot the Runner) while the whole thing is shone to a glorious Glam lustre. In short, it's a brilliantly OTT record that sits as one of the top Britrock releases of the year. It'll make them stars. www.kasabian.co.uk  - Paul McNamee

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
Get Lonely
 4AD
**

Misery, it turns out, doesn't always love company. The title of John Darnielle's umpteenth album sounds like a doleful imperative and his new songs glumly follow suit. Representing the most lugubrious, minor key laments of Darnielle's career, Get Lonely abandons all trace of his usual fire and wit. Instead, his adenoidal tones are tamed into a brittle whisper, his normally unkempt acoustic guitar limited to clean strums and sensitive arrangements of tip-toe cello, sparse piano and softly sighing brass. This all counts as a technical advance and, for longtime fans, a massive disappointment. True, compositions such as Get Lonely and Maybe Sprout Wings are exquisitely sad, offering occasionally incandescent lyrics. But the majority are just plain sad. For Darnielle there is an ironic defeat in this exercise in isolation: a songwriter who has long stood apart from the self-absorbed cliches of American indie rock now seems lost in the crowd. www.mountain-goats.com  - Peter Crawley

ELECTRELANE
Singles, B-Sides & Live
Too Pure
***

Here's a round-up of various loose ends in the Brighton space-rock ensemble's cupboard while they write their next album in Berlin. Singles, B-Sides & Live is an interesting exercise in charting the sonic swings and roundabouts experienced by the often overlooked 'Lane. While previous album Axes was a rich and evocative wash of diverse sounds and influences, all collated neatly by producer Steve Albini, the all-girl group's earlier releases stuck more or less to a post-Stereolab way of walking and talking. Those early singles, which appeared on Skint off-shoot Indenial, Fierce Panda and Let's Rock, are the sound of a band both learning to play together and formulating a way to articulate the sounds they're hearing in their heads. A spiky, sinister version of Bruce Springsteen's I'm on Fire shows they're quick learners, the band unlocking the song's menace and danger. The best album you will hear this week by four Cambridge philosophy graduates. www.electrelane.com  - Jim Carroll

THE YOUNG KNIVES
Voices of Animals and Men
Transgressive
****

LA has spawned We Are Scientists, but middle management England has created these three earnest-looking types from Leicestershire, who do syncopated, supremely clever tunes about mundane lives and quiet desperation. Singer/guitarist Henry Dartnall, drummer Oliver Askew and bassist The House of Lords may dress like marketing executives, but in Part Timer, Here Comes the Rumour Mill, She's Attracted To and Hollow Line, the trio dissect the viscera of ordinary life with the skill of neurosurgeons, inserting a killer line into every verse. The album is produced by Gang of Four's Andy Gill, so any passing resemblence to that band's classic album Entertainment is probably intentional. But there are also Andy Partridge-levels of songwriting smarts on display in The Decision, Mystic Energy and Weekends and Bleak Days (Hot Summer), and a wire-taut sense of musical dynamics. www.theyoungknives.com - Kevin Courtney

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART AND THE MAGIC BAND
Live London '74
Virgin
**

Anyone can drop Don Van Vliet's name in cool social circles, but only a brave few would go so far as to actually listen to such classically obtuse albums as Trout Mask Replica or Lick My Decals Off, Baby. Beefheart's abstract musical constructions were often incomprehensible, but that didn't stop him from becoming a huge cult figure. When he took to the stage at London's Drury Lane in 1974, he was greeted by devoted followers wearing Trout Mask Replica hats. But if the crowd were expecting odd-time signatures, free-jazz breaks and sudden bursts of discord and cacophony, they were to be sorely disappointed. His original Magic Band, featuring longtime sidekick Zoot Horn Rollo, had walked out on their boss in a payment dispute, leaving Beefheart to cobble together a new touring band at short notice. With no time to learn the intricacies of Beefheart's music, the pick-up band went for a straighforward blues-rock approach; instead of a brain-frying blowout, the crowd got a competent but dull jam session. - Kevin Courtney