What Did You Expect From The Vaccines?- The Vaccines

Fat-free but shallow debut from indie’s “saviours”

Let’s get something straight: alternative music is not dead. You can hold off the wake, but away the black armband, because there’s still enough of it around to fight against cynical naysayers.

Music in this country comes and goes in waves and always has done- just because pop is the ascendency in the mainstream doesn’t mean others aren’t catered for. Dubstep continues to look like the future for British music, and let us not forget the only act to break Adele’s momentous run at the album chart summit were a rock band...

We’ve also been here before. For a while in the early 00s, OK Computer looked to be the last great alternative album, before The Strokes punched through, ushering in Libertines, Monkeys and Bloc Parties.

And it’s The Strokes that The Vaccines find themselves rather presumptuously compared to: the new white hope to bring guitars back to the chart. There's a point there in many ways, as Vaccines trade is excitable rhythms, uninterested vocals and vaguely angular guitar riffs. But while What Did You Expect...is a fun, life-affirming album in places, it is far from an Is This It masterpiece.

Instead, we get a collection of twelve singles and would-be singles. Opener Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra) along with Post Break Up Sex received substantial radio play before the album’s release and it’s unsurprising as the former zooms along at an exhilarating pace. It’s these moments that stand out the most, as the even more hyperactive Norgaard will attest, with added “ooh-ooh-oohs” as the hook. Both clock in at less than two minutes.

On the flipside, the album contains several moments to prevent it being too one-note. The likes of Wetsuit and Blow It Up slow proceedings to a woozy waltz, the latter providing a rarely engaged vocal from singer Justin Young, allowing his voice soar on the chorus. Best of all is the aforementioned Post Break Up Sex, showing the band of as highly effective songwriting, perfectly encapsulating the shame the title suggests.

As a whole, What Did You Expect...provides everything you’d expect from their high playlist value: this is a short, sharp indie-pop album that doesn’t waste a note. But in the quest for chart-bothering singles, it’s all rather transient, without much going on underneath. This album is designed to get you drunk, have a messy time with you then leave in the morning never to be seen again: it’s not going to make scores of teenagers pick up guitars and start bands, and it leaves a guilty feeling afterwards, but boy is it fun while it lasts.

4/5

Best Tracks:
Post Break Up Sex
Norgaard
Wreckin’ Bar (Ra Ra Ra)
Blow It Up

Mirrorwriting- Jamie Woon

Great voice fails to deliver on crossover promise

Ten years on from its inception in underground clubs, dubstep’s grip on inner-city youth is complete. Magnetic Man and their associated acts are edging the genre to the top of the charts, whilst feted artists like Katy B and James Blake have given us two great fringe records. Now Jamie Woon is set to give us a third...

Except he hasn’t. It’s barely even dubstep.

It’s all the fault of single Night Air, released earlier this year. It’s high on sensual atmospherics and produced by leading-light Burial, haunting and lingering as it moves, upping the stakes for dubstep to try something fresh. Beyond that, this is just a forgettable soul album.

What isn’t second rate is Woon’s voice- one of the most beautiful, soulful and unaffected male sounds to bother the charts in recent times. His heartbreaking lament to opportunities missed on Sorta is gorgeous, and shows why he gathered plaudits to begin with. The rest of the album’s songs just don’t match him. Middle has a great string arrangement at its core, but an overly fussy and clinical production spoils it, while songs like Spiral and TMRW sound like they belong on a late-90s R Kelly album; yes, they’re that bad.

The only other song to really have an impact is Lady Luck, an obvious choice for new single, and one that marries a more upbeat Woon vocal with a trippy and dark sampled backing. But you couldn’t call this dubstep.

His stripped-right-down version of Wayfaring Stranger is conspicuous by its absence here, and it’s a real shame: a great version with just that voice with the most simple of support. That kind of approach may have earned more plaudits, but what we’ve been left with will be forgotten the day after hearing it, as no amount of production tricks can hide a rather dull soul record by a great singer.

2.5/5

Best Tracks:
Night Air
Shoulda
Lady Luck

Let England Shake- PJ Harvey

WAR! What is it good for? Here’s your answer...

That Polly Harvey is a strange one.

That’s not meant as a slur on her fiercely guarded personal life or anything like that, more that the creative peak she hit with her 1992 debut Dry has never really ended. From her raw post-punk beginnings through hardcore, goth, polished pop and eerie ballads, every album has been greeted with endless critical acclaim.

She also isn’t one to hang around a successful sound, so she has again swerved dramatically from the creepiness of 2007’s White Chalk in favour of a protest album. Harvey has always had literary allusions in her music, but on her eighth solo album Let England Shake it comes sharply into focus,channelling the spirit of Siegfried Sassoon’s elegant anti-war poetry.

PJ Harvey’s appearance on The Andrew Marr Show last year playing the title track on autoharp in front of Gordon Brown was a brave move that raised many eyebrows, and the album carries the same impact throughout. The conflicts she references (mostly Gallipoli- a conflict she researched in detail when writing- and the First World War) may be long confined to the history books, but it doesn’t take much to realise she’s applying them to more recent wars.

What comes across first is the power of her words: PJ Harvey has succeeded in writing dark, beautiful poetry. The Words That Maketh Murder talk of soldiers falling “like lumps of meat/Blown and shot out beyond belief/Arms and legs were in the trees”, and This Glorious Land argues that war is built into us, as “Our land is ploughed by tanks and feet”. The repeated cries of “Oh America/Oh England” in the chorus make it clear who these words are aimed at.

Despite the brutal and horrific words, this is an album filled with subtlety. It’s protest music that doesn’t rage like...well, Rage Against The Machine, the anger that is audible is bubbling under the surface, only really breaking through in the spat lyrics of Bitter Branches. Everywhere else, it’s extremely English in its reserve: it’s there, but it isn't shouted to be heard.

Let England Shake is also an album shrouded in atmosphere, thanks in part to Harvey’s discovery of the autoharp- an instrument that manages to be somehow delicate and be filled with power at the same time. There’s no need for choirs or orchestras to sound like a stampeding army: it does it on its own. The instrument is most keenly felt on the title track, as Harvey’s voice quivers softly as she sings that “England’s dancing days are done.” Elsewhere, Written On The Forehead uses soft reggae rhythms to explore the impact of war on civilians to damning effect, whilst the heartbreaking Hanging In The Wire and its quiet piano lines are filled with the ghosts of lives lost in warfare.

Credit has to go to her band too, including long-time collaborator John Parish, who help to infuse that atmosphere through the record. But really, Let England Shake stands as PJ Harvey’s masterpiece thanks to her words, which are utterly extraordinary. It’s an album that haunts, revealing itself slowly over time, as all great art should. This is one of those once-in-a-generation albums that will leave an imprint on future decades, it’s really that good. This is year zero for the future of protest music.

5/5

Best Tracks:

The Words That Maketh Murder
Let England Shake
Written On The Forehead
The Glorious Land
Hanging In The Wire

Last Night On Earth- Noah & The Whale

What happens when Nu-Folkers forget the folk...

What a difference a day makes. Or, in the case of Noah & The Whale, make that 928. That was the gap between their sophomore The First Days of Spring and their new record. It marks quite a shift- the former a heartbreaking, self-destructive lament to a lost relationship (that of frontman Charlie Fink and Laura Marling), high on fiddle and rich in strings, and definitely in the nu-folk club.

Only one concession to those darker moods can be found on new album Last Night On Earth. The Line chronicles the combustible end of a relationship (“Is this the line where you get drunk and yell?”) in low key fashion. Everything else finds NATW as the next band who decide they need to revisit the FM AOR from the 70s and 80s.

Alarm bells ring from the opening, with Life Is Life’s introduction featuring washes of synths and popping finger clicks that leave you feeling like you’ve accidentally put on an Enya record. The strained warmth of Fink’s voice soon catapults in to save the situation, but the damage has been wrought.

Tonight’s The Kind Of Night doesn’t greatly improve the situation by following the same pattern. Last Night On Earth really hits its stride with first single L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N- the song whose chorus will have found its way into your brain on repeat in recent months. The album’s lyrical themes of hope against adversity are all present and correct, with tales of “rock and roll survivors” such as Lisa, nicknamed “little Lisa, Loony Tunes/She went down on almost anyone”- people who’ve seen hard times, but who always recite the song’s title to get through. It’s a slightly cheesy idea done very well, with a swirling pop hook backing it all up.

The same can be said of Give It All Back, which manages to be memorable and lovely despite cloying self-referential lyrics about the formation of a band playing “a cover of Don’t Let Me Down” at school assembly, and marimba. The real gold is found at the end of the record: the aforementioned The Line, darkly drifting across the soul, before the hugely uplifting showcase that is Old Joy. A mood accompaniment to L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N, with added gospel choir, unironic and straight-faced enough to avoid pastiche.

Refusing to re-work the same ground covered in the past, Noah & The Whale must be praised for their determination to make three distinct, individual albums. However, the Tom Petty-meets-pop-sheen does varnish away many of the awkward edges that made them stand out as something impressive to begin with, and the near absence of Tom Hobden’s fiddle is a great shame. Despite this, Last Night On Earth, at its best, does what great music should by altering and affecting mood, this standing as one of the most uplifting records in recent times.

Just next time, can we just leave the 80s where they are please?

3/5

Best Tracks:
Old Joy
L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N
The Line