Phonology

    Malcolm Middleton is obsessed with bears. His new album, Into The Woods, redolent with delicate arrangements and sonically adept, just keeps coming back to bears. It's no teddy bear's picnic though.

    An accomplished lyricist with conversational delivery and self deprecating humour, Malcolm Middleton has produced an album full of surprises. If you're put off by regionally accented vocals, don't discount this album as on repeated listening the strength of the songwriting breaks through.
 
    Despite the self absorbed melancholia of many of the songs, Middleton has his tongue in his cheek. The opening track Break My Heart proclaims I don't want to sing these shit songs anymore. There's a hint of Aztec Camera, a fiercely Scottish Roddy Frame in Devastation.

    But it doesn't stop there. Distorted noise and pop electronica add to the layers of sound and keep challenging the listener's expectations of what this album's all about. At times there are are so many twists that you think Middleton's tied himself in knots, but the songs and lyrics are distinctive enough to hold it all together.

    A collaborative work with a wealth of Scottish talent Into The Woods has contributions from members of the Delgados, Mogwai, The Reindeer Section and Aidan Moffat, also of Arab Strap.

    Having stated that this is a more positive album for him, the lyrics are uniformly bleak. Mentions of being knifed for Christmas (Burst Noel) and realising I hate myself (A Happy Medium) are cynically delivered on a cushion of soothing sound. Often funny because it's true, and riddled with puns, he wears it well.

    What are the bears all about? Maybe he just wants a cuddle.


Brought to you in association with the reservoir.

Oops, This has been hanging around on my HD for months. Better late than never...

Mercury Rev hail from a land of twinkly dreampop where everything shimmers. Following the release of The Secret Migration,this tour demonstrates that they are still at the very top of their game. The set consists mainly of songs from the most recent three albums, the most accessible and successful of their catalogue being Deserter's Songs.However, the show is a sounding board for The Secret Migration and shows they can really cut it live. The album suffers from overproduction but in the live setting they can carry off the pomp and psychedelia. In a Funny Way, the stand out track from the album is earnest, upifting and sweet, held together with a 60s pop beat. Throughout the set Jeff Mercel's drumming is outstanding and holds the often ethereal experience together. In fact, during A Secret for a Song his skill is so effortless it looks like he's drumming in slow motion

Mercury Rev are certainly a band of great contrasts, with thunderous expansive soundscapes topped by fragile vocals and wistful lyrics. They love to put on a great show, with psychedelic visuals, inspirational quotes and theatrical gestures. During Black Forest (Lorelei), vocalist Jonathan Donahue looks and sounds as if he might just float off.

Opus 40 (from Deserter's Songs)is accompanied by its strangely beautiful video shot in black and white. It seems like this is the moment that the crowd has been waiting for and suddenly the spacious hall is filled with love. From this moment on, we're swept up into the psychedelic dreamworld of the Rev,and no-one, least of all the band, want to leave.

    M.I.A. swoop onto the stage with a wash of tiger graphics as a backdrop. It's a well publicised fact that Maya Arul comes from a Tamil family in Sri Lanka, and her visual art rarely lets that drop. The music, however, is a fusion of exotic and dancehall rhythms with some great, energetic rapping. A bass heavy drone fills the room accompanied by whiny grimy girl rapping. More melodic than most rappers, the intricacies of the programming and subtle grooves of finger piano are lost in the poor acoustics of the venue. But the groove won't stop. The lyrics are topical, feminist and sometimes political. The debut single, Galang whilst suffering from feedback, remains the stand out track with its infectious rhythm and quirky groove.

    Roots Manuva has grown up. He's still as funny and bombastic as ever, but tonight's show proves that he has some hidden depths. Imagine having your very own cheerleader, a man with the smoothest soul voice announcing your arrival on stage. And that's how it begins. With a full live funk band in addition to turntablists and boffins, Roots Manuva is in control of this whole shebang. And it is, to borrow his terminology, splendid.

    The fact that he's wearing a white baseball cap in Glasgow raises a smile as does his lucky waistcoat. The show kicks off with Babylon Medicine, a ragga style monster with a rolling squelchy wobbling bassline, accompanied by the best lightshow ever seen in Glasgow. Huge insanely bright LEDs pulsate behind the band and Roots is blown away by the response of the audience. Throughout the night his catchphrase is that it's Insania in here!

    Join the Dots is like playing catchup with the rhythm, bass booming, with technical vocal skill and the crowd completely swept up in the whole experience. Tracks from the new album Awfully Deep are on the whole less challenging musically, but lyrically and vocally more touching. Some of the artifice has been stripped away and this sounds like the Real Rodney. Thinking and Too Cold, in particular, are a departure from the macho posturing we expect from Hip Hop and Ragga artistes.

    The night finishes off with Dreamy Days and Witness (1 Hope), leaving the crowd mulling over what they've just experienced and screaming for more.

Brought to you in association with the reservoir.

    Anechoic are a young, white t-shirted 4 piece. Their sweet three part harmonies, swooping counterpoint and often sparse, light touches are faintly reminiscent of Crowded House. The crowd of Embrace fans welcome them generously to the Barrowlands. Surprised at the warm reception, the band mention their debut single release Just Like You on 14th March, to rapturous applause. The crowd at an Embrace gig are easily pleased though, and all seem a little bit overexcitable.

    As Embrace take to the stage to a brief intro of gospel and blues, it seems there might be something here to prove. Good Taste perhaps? They have a funny way of showing it. The capacity crowd practically drowns out the band from the first tune of the night - Ashes. Doubtless, Danny McNamara has a mostly effortless pop voice, but if he thinks standing with his arms outstretched, letting the audience do all the work is "working the crowd", he's sadly mistaken. They're at the top of their game, they have fans who love them. It's all too easy to just get plain lazy.

    Their uplifting style of pomp rock really is fairly solid, but churning out turgid anthems one after another seems a fairly pointless task. Music for allcomers? This bland melancholic tripe is music for people who don't actually enjoy music. It's music for chanting along with your drunk mates down the pub on a Saturday night, All You Good Good People being a prime example.

    Brand new material such as Contender gets a groove going, with a fuzz guitar riff, megaphone filtered vocals and ends up a stoned lazy wigout. It may be flawed, but at least there's less of the atonal dirge about it. The crowd can take it or leave it, as they don't know the words.

    If you like music, check out Anechoic, but leave before Embrace come on.

Brought to you in association with the reservoir.

Having formed in the late 1980s, it took Mercury Rev a good ten years to break through into public consciousness. Their moment of glory, Deserter's Songs (1998), was a critical and popular success, laden with ghostly soundscapes and the eerie sound of a musical saw. Now, seven years later, their psychedelic leanings have been drenched in reverb and lost in a wall of sound.
    The Secret Migration is in some ways a masterpiece of dreamy psychedelic pop. From the hallucinatory mothwoman artwork on the cover, to the fey lyrics and thin, reedy vocals it's trippy through and through. But not much more. The piano is often beautifully played, but the songs themselves only hint at the anthems they might have been. In fact, it's very much like a weaker Flaming Lips album.
The overdubbed vocal harmonies give a lightness in tracks like Diamonds and the too brief Moving On, but they're too light. There's some exceptional drumming on the album, particularly in Black Forest (Lorelei), but technical proficiency doesn't make up for the fact that the individual parts just never gel. The production is almost entirely made up of reverb and echo, but instead of creating a formidable wall of sound, it's overblown, like wading through a swamp with Tori Amos.

    The keyboard and synth sounds are stuck in the mid eighties, but not in a good way, and Jonathan Donahue's vocals, unique and unselfconscious seem to grate quite rapidly. The lyrics are acid washed love poetry through and through, and sorry, we've had our fill. The highlight of the album, In a Funny Way, is the only point where they really get it right. Here the drums take centre stage with a straightforward 60s pop rhythm and some meticulous jangly and twangy guitars.

    It would be a shame to see such obvious talent and musicianship go to waste, but with this album, it seems Mercury Rev have jumped the shark.

Brought to you in association with the reservoir.