Harry Styles ’Harry’s House’ – Review

We all know that boys in bands are aggressively marketed as types – the cute one, the weird one, the dangerous one, the one who stands at the back and dances – but even in his 1D days, there was the sense that Harry Styles could fill all those roles by himself. Harry has always been anything and everything you want him to be. That affable pliability extends to his solo output, which feels designed to please the entire human race. While this makes Harry a wide reaching and very popular star, it nonetheless leaves his songs with the texture of lukewarm water. On third album, ‘Harry’s House’, he continues on his quest to make absolutely everyone feel just a bit happier.

There is a sense in which Harry wants to have his cake and eat it too. And fair enough. He writes conventional songs with universal themes yet his production is relatively esoteric. He blends rock star preening with pop star like-ability. He’s artful yet accessible. Stylish but fun. Cool yet unpretentious. In a world where we agree on very little, we can all agree on Harry Styles. Above and beyond everything else though, Harry is, and always has been, the nice one. His most recent tour was called ‘Love on Tour’ and the main set often ended with an eye wateringly earnest performance of his track ‘Treat People With Kindness.’ Recently he has created a range of gender neutral beauty products such as nail polish and body creams (brilliantly marketed by none other than Mick Fleetwood) while his recent headlining performance at Coachella featured an unexpected duet with the lovely Shania Twain. Every Harry Styles news story is basically a good news story, and ‘Harry’s House’ is no exception. 

Here Harry sings about food and drinks (track titles include ‘Music for a Sushi Restaurant’ and ‘Grape Juice’), he makes dad jokes, and offers sage, empathetic advice to women (condescendingly, perhaps). He exudes niceness. For some people this will feel almost cloying (case in point: ‘If I was a bluebird/I would fly to you/You’d be the spoon/Dip you in honey so I could be sticking to you’) but a lot of people are here for it, as his popularity attests to. ‘Harry’s House’ is his least offensive, and easiest to swallow, album to date.

it’s telling to me that Harry grew up at a time in the U.K when spiky guitar music was topping the charts. When I hear lead single ‘As It Was’, I primarily hear the influence of The Wombats or Bombay Bicycle Club. And I can’t hear ‘Late Night Talking’ and not think of the mostly forgotten and very short lived band The Golden Silvers. These connections might seem tenuous until you consider that Harry Styles’ co-writer and producer is none other than indie-landfill also-ran Kid Harpoon, who shared bills with all those groups. Thus we get simple yet effective guitar hooks hidden among MGMT shaped synths. And you can go back further; Harry has a soft spot for the easy listening sounds of the 1970s and 80s that manifests in often unpredictable ways. Few people ever talk about Wings’ underrated ‘London Town’ but Harry has sung its praises in the past, and It’s hard not to hear the influence on album highlight ‘Grapejuice’. Elsewhere, smooth Laurel canyon vibes filter through the record’s acoustic ballads ‘Boyfriends’ and ‘Matilda’, both of which are pleasant to the point of insipidity. A Brothers Johnson sample adds flesh to the otherwise bony ‘Daylight’ while ‘Keep Driving’ features the kind of VHS-warped synth sounds that nostalgically harken back to the days of chill wave and Glo-fi. By the end, the songs mostly blur into one. I can’t tell you the exact difference between ‘Daylight’ and ‘Satellite’ and ‘Cinema’ (even their titles feel somewhat interchangeable) but they all sounded… nice?

Harry Styles isn’t ready to dine at Pop’s top table just yet. As stylish as his music is, it lacks the substance offered by, say, Adele or Taylor Swift. ‘Harry’s house’ is fizzy and refreshing, like a bottle of coke poured generously over ice, but it’s full of empty calories. In the moment of consumption that doesn’t really matter but after the fact you’re left you feeling a little unfulfilled. This is the kind of record you can stick on and feel good about, then completely forget within minutes. And so while ‘Harry’s House’ doesn’t quite display the range or vulnerability of his debut or ‘Fine Line’, it is an impeccably stylish – if paper thin – pop album that will no doubt cheer the world up for the duration of its 42 minute runtime.  

6.5/10

Kendrick Lamar ’Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ – Review

Kendrick Lamar has been gone for a while – 1,855 days, he tells us – and he’s been processing some things. He’s been unfaithful. He’s been betrayed. He’s been indulgent. He’s splashed out on Rolex watches he hasn’t worn, infinity pools he’s never swam in and jewellery he’s never taken out in public. He’s angry, which manifests mostly in petulance. Grieving, and indulged enough to repeatedly articulate that he ‘grieves different.’ All of which unravels in the first four minutes of Kendrick’s new album, over quiet-storm piano and a splintering vortex of a beat that drops in and out discordantly. ‘United in Grief’ is a thrilling, spiralling introduction to Kendrick Lamar in 2022; an artist with nothing left to prove twitching like he’s got everything left to prove. 

The album never really settles down after ‘United in Grief’. For a double record ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ is relatively cohesive, but Kendrick himself practically sweats with nervous energy. He’s prickly. He’s defensive. He’s provocative. Time and time again he lays out perceived injustices and lays into those responsible. Lead single ‘N95’ is a embittered attack on a world of perceived fakery and false virtue. Its title refers to the type of face mask introduced in the pandemic and there are numerous references to ‘the new world’ and a world ‘in panic.’ In a scathing tone, Kendrick calls out the ‘false flag’ wavers and ‘fake woke.’ He calls out designer brands and a fraudulent President. ‘Can I vent all my truth?’ He asks. ‘I got nothing to lose.’ It’s a theme he picks up on ‘Count Me Out’, which opens the second disc, where he fluctuates between repentance and defiance. ‘I’m a complex soul’, he rightfully decides.

It’s a little jarring to hear such a critically lauded rapper bristle so easily. Kendrick calls out cancel culture with more venom than you would expect from someone who’s been given more free passes than just about any other artist I can think of. It’s not a great look. Perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye, and in his more vulnerable moments there are hints of the darkness that throws shade over Kendrick’s worldview. On the brilliant ‘Crown’ he paraphrases Shakespeare and the Bible: ‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown / to whom is given, much is required now.’ That same expectation is acknowledged throughout the record and Kendrick never seems certain about how to handle the burden. Being a Pulitzer Prize winning writer comes with its fair share of baggage, it would seem. Throughout ‘Mr Morale’, he swipes through stages of self-criticism and self-affirmation. On ‘Worldwide Steppers’ he admonishes himself for everything from writers block to poor diet. But in the the album’s beginning we are instructed to see past ‘black or white, wrong or right.’ Kendrick is knotted; on ‘Rich Spirit’ he compares himself to an ‘aloof budah’ – a contradiction in terms. On the album’s cover he is wearing a crown of thorns with a gun in his back pocket. It’s as if he doesn’t quite know who he actually is, let alone who to present as.

We get a sense of that through the album’s production as well, which haphazardly throws us between styles, moods and genres without every really surprising us. The avant-grade experimentation of the opening track is a red herring – in many ways ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ is the most conventional sounding record Kendrick has put out since his debut. The likes of ‘Die Hard’, ‘N95’ and ‘Count Me Out’ feature the sort of vaguely trappy hooks and sugary pop melodies that you would expect to find on the recent Drake album. Elsewhere there are sly nods to the boom bap variety of early 90s Hip Hop (‘Father Time’, ‘We Cry Together) and chamber pop (‘Crown’, ‘Mother I Sober’). The alluring jazz and soul vibes of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ are generally diminished to occasional musical flourishes – the strings that swell like a memory on ‘Auntie Diaries’, the choir of demented harmonies on ‘Crown.’ Generally though, ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ continues ‘Damn’s trajectory down to Earth from somewhere up high.

If I haven’t made it clear yet, ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ is a flawed album from an artist whose output to now has largely been flawless. Genius is still peppered across the album but there is also a clumsiness, and a lack of clarity, that feels uncharacteristic of Kendrick Lamar. Songs are littered with causal misogyny – that’s nothing new – but Kendrick seems fuelled by bitterness and resentment this time which pricks against the smooth surfaces created by pristine beats and soulful samples. Even songs that ostensibly seeks to establish allyshhip and empathy are riddled with problems. On ‘Auntie Diaries’ he tries to unpack his relationship with trans relatives, and his narrative is unusually sloppy. Watching him stumble is still a novelty. But you have to admire Kendrick for tackling such a sensitive subject in a candid way – which other mainstream rapper could or would even attempt it?

I once compared Kendrick’s virtuosic skill to that of an Olympic athlete. Like any athlete seven years removed from their unparalleled peak, he still shows flashes of the technical, physical, skill that elevated him above other rappers. Let’s not twist it – Kendrick wasn’t just smarter than everyone else, he was also more imaginative and more technically proficient. He’s lost that stamina. Early on here discusses writer’s block, and there are hints of that manifesting throughout. The vivid storytelling of ‘Good Kid Mad City’ is by and large reduced to a handful of this record’s more engaging tracks (‘Mother I Sober’, ‘Auntie Diaries’, ‘Worldwide Steppers’). Elsewhere clarity is elusive. Songs string divergent thoughts together in haphazard ways. And Kendrick’s almost superhuman understanding of natural rhythm, internal rhymes and alliteration is less obvious. The tempos are decelerated. The fire and the flow are tempered. The imagination appears to be slightly lacking.

Even so, Kendrick Lamar on a bad day is still far better than most rappers on the planet. His oversight is still visionary. His performances are still captivating. If ‘Mr Morale and the Big Steppers’ is inconsistent then thank goodness. He is human after-all! At this point a flawed Kendrick Lamar album might be more fascinating than yet another flawless one. And, honestly, many things can be true at the same time. Kendrick Lamar is the greatest rapper of his generation. He concedes space to the worst (Kodak Black appears on a couple of tracks). He’s a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. He says some of the dumbest things imaginable. He is eloquent to a tee and yet not above using slurs. He’s made what is potentially the most captivating album you’ll hear all year and one of the most frustrating. It’s too early to say what exactly ‘Mr Morale and The Big Steppers’ is except that I’m sure it’s many things all at once. Good and bad. 

8/10

Arcade Fire ’WE’ – Review

At one point on their latest single, ‘Lookout Kid’, Win Butler tells us that ‘some people want the rock without the roll but we all know there’s no God without souuulllll…’ it’s a weirdly uplifting, weirdly affirming, and plainly ridiculous statement. It reminds you that Arcade Fire’s most memorable moments are often their least sensical. ‘Sleeping is giving in!’ They warned us on ‘Rebellion / Lies’. ‘Children Wake up! Hold your mistake up’ they implored on ‘Wake Up’. Arcade Fire are inherently daft; In its best moments, sixth album ‘WE’, reminds us of that.

Arguably though, it doesn’t GO THERE often enough. Arcade Fire used to be so thrilling. I know, i know, it’s difficult to believe now. Particularly difficult if you’re half way through the nine and a half minute ‘End of the Empire I-IV’ where Win Butler starts declaring ‘I unsubscribe. I unsubscribe. This ain’t no way of I life. I don’t believe the hype’ atop plaintive ‘Imagine’ piano chords. But turn back the clock to 2005 and revisit Arcade Fire’s prime time performance on Top of the Pops; observe the energy and charisma. Feel the electricity throb through those outlandishly dressed, pale, towering musicians. Notice the conviction in Win Buttler’s every word. Arcade Fire had something few other bands have ever been able to tap into. And I can’t really even describe what it was. ‘WE’, more often than not, feels like the product of a different band. Its assured and ambitious, for sure, musically accomplished and superbly produced. But fundamentally It’s laboured. Heavy handed. Joyless. Hard work. Listening to ‘WE’ felt like a chore second time around. By my third or fourth listen I was actively bored. Arcade Fire are no longer thrilling.

I always think it’s unfair to compare a band to their older selves; evolution is commendable and change is necessary. But so much of the build up to ’WE’, the band’s follow up to 2017’s poorly received (but marginally better than you remember) ‘Everything Now’, is positioned around it being a ‘return to your roots’ sort of album. ‘Everything Now’ was a flawed record that at least had ambitious aims. It was their ‘Achtung Baby’. It was their major label debut. It got them on Radio A lists. It got them played in shopping malls. It was a clear risk. And, cynically perhaps, It has now set Arcade Fire up for the ‘comeback’, follow up. An ‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’ of their very own. Ostensibly that’s what ‘WE’ is – a return to the slightly ornate, slightly mad, certainly epic but emotionally electrified, indie rock and roll of ‘Funeral’ and ‘Neon Bible.’

Except it isn’t. Not really. Instead, I’m inclined to hear ‘WE’ as Arcade Fire’s entire discography in miniature; a shrunken tour of the divergent styles and motifs that have bled through the band’s various releases. Yes, ‘Funeral’s soul stirring uplift can be felt on the album’s best songs, ‘Lookout Kid’ and ’The Lightning’, while Neon Bible’s lofty prophesising and pontificating is revisited throughout the lyrics, but generally the songs here are far slicker and more refined than the ones found on those records. It feels deft rather than awkward. Studied rather than natural. Nigel Goodrich’s production is immaculate. The band sound great but slightly too rehearsed. Slightly too knowing. Slightly too distant. ‘Reflektor’s steely dance vibes are revisited on the enjoyable ‘Rabbit Hole’ and the less enjoyable ‘Race and Religion’. Even ‘Everything Now’ electro-pop energy carries over to opening track ‘Age of Anxiety.’ And yet, and yet… ‘WE’ never reaches the lofty standards set by those past records. Arcade Fire have said that this record joins the dots between their previous ones, and they’re right, but it never becomes their equals.

The best Arcade Fire songs are chaotic and swirling. The performances are breathless and unpredictable. The arrangements are dense and wild. Throughout ’Funeral’ Win Butler bellowed from below the chaos, imploring to be heard. This doesn’t happen at any point on ‘WE’. The most intense moments, even the supposedly ‘return to our roots’ combo of ‘The Lightning I-II’ accelerate lineally and build to predictable crescendos. The ‘Lightning’ is a galloping heartland rock number closer to the sound of The War on Drugs or The Killers than ‘Funeral.’ The ballads, including the multi-part ‘End of the Empire’ and the title track, are pretty but very polite and buttoned up. There are no surprises and no sense of risk. ‘I wanna get wild, I wanna get free,’ Butler pleads ironically at the start of ‘WE.’ I only wish he would.

6/10

Fontaines D.C ’Skinty Fia’ – Review

Fontaines DC take things seriously. Look at any press photo and that will be apparent. Not a smile in sight. Not even a hint of teeth. In a scene of bands trying to out-doom and gloom each other, Fontaines DC differentiate themselves by actually appearing to mean it. Listen to the group discuss their influences and they’re more likely to reference dead poets and vagabonds than the living, breathing and mind smackingly obvious lineage of post punk miserablists and Britpop superstars that they must aspire to join. Lead singer Grian Chatten marries Liam Gallagher’s snarl with Pete Doherty’s sloshed romanticism; Morrissey’s melodramatic flair with Shane Mcgown’s traditionalist streak. That he has an interest in the great 20th century stylists, Nabokov and Joyce, doesn’t particularly register beyond the song titles (‘Nabokov’ and ‘Bloomsdsy’). Of course name checking acclaimed writers is one way to ensure you’re taken as seriously as you feel you should be. 

Conviction alone does not a great record make (ask anyone who ever started a band – they all had buckets of belief). On album number three, ‘Skinty Fia’, Fontaines D.C aim to show that they have the songwriting chops to justify the hype. The album bloats beyond their caustic, tightly wound roots to provide something more widescreen and far reaching. To be fair, they skip their New Order phase and head straight to the mid 90s, where shoegazing guitars clash with jungle synths, industrial drones and break beats. At its best, Skinty Fia is musically adventurous and open minded.

This is particularly true of the record’s second half where the band flip from a modern spin on a traditional Irish folk song (‘The Couple Across the Way’) straight into the grungiest, grottiest track they’ve ever recorded (‘Skinty Fia’). Then comes the album’s highlight, ‘I Love You’, where Chatten traces his complicated feelings about his native Ireland. These songs are experimental to the extent that they don’t have any precedents in the Fontaines’ back catalogue; ‘The Couple Across the Way’ features an accordion and cyclical two note melody, while the title track makes a lot out of lurching, industrial toned instrumentation.

The album’s list of themes really does read like the contents page of an undergrad’s introductory guide to modernist literature: the Irish experience, toxic masculinity, alienation, addiction, dislocation… ‘Skinty Fia’ is partly weighed down by the heaviness of these topics but also by the joylessness with which Chatten tackles them. You can’t deep dive into jungle and britpop and remain as straight faced as Chatten insists on keeping throughout this record. If you learn anything from XTRMNTR era Prinal Scream, learn that you have to risk looking ridiculous to achieve transcendence. Chatten’s approach to subject matter is too thoroughly bleak, his scowl too deeply set, to allow for the kind of catharsis this kind of music is so capable of providing.

But he has always been a writer with potential – and that’s the word I return to again and again here. Potential. His imagery is often imaginative and poetic. The sun that shines on him is a ‘scrapyard sun’ while he loves Ireland like ‘a penny loves a priest.’ On the title track, a convincing portrayal of drug induced paranoia, his rib cage is prized apart like ‘a crackhead at the blinds.’ What these descriptions illustrate is that same irreplaceable enthusiasm for language that so enlivened Fontaines’ brilliantly exciting debut, ‘Dogrel.’ Frustratingly though, he also continues to display a proclivity for droning repetition, where stock cliches or banal proclamations are drearily reiterated to little or no end. The album opens with a swirling meditation on ‘gone is the day, gone is the night…’ and the final track ends with ‘daze ya, phase you…’ looping as the record fades (a particularly careless way to end a song that invokes the great Nabokov). 

But there is still something distinctive about Fontaines DC; something irrefutable about their stylish take on Post-Punk; something that I’m drawn to in spite of my reservations. Yes, I’m a bit put off by their self serious mannerisms and pretensions, and I find that as they broaden their sonic horizons they are increasingly minimising the anthemic qualities that once made them so genuinly exciting. It’s a trade off I’m not convinced plays to their strengths. And while the experimentation here is interesting, it’s frustratingly stifled – as if they dipped their toes in and were scared of the cold. There is a great band lurking within and there are hints on ‘Skinty Fia’ of a more genuinely weird and wild record just straining to get out.  Fontaines D.C mean it. I get that. But couldn’t they mean it harder or stranger or faster… or something? And please – smile a little. You’re young, talented and incredibly popular.

6.5/10 

Lets Eat Grandma ’Two Ribbons’ – Review

Lets Eat Grandma’s excellent ‘Two Ribbons’ tries to make sense of life’s strange and unexpected diversions. You find yourself in love with the wrong person. Your oldest friend begins to feel like a stranger. Illness takes away someone you love. Sometimes you feel like laying down and giving in, or as Lets Eat Grandma eloquently put it: ‘I want to shed myself and lay back in the earth sometimes / Surrender to the sky.’ Their similes and metaphors invariably slant this way. On ‘Insect Loop’ they contemplate sitting by the water and watching their drawings wash away. ‘We’ll haunt these Norfolk bays’ they decide pragmatically. They look to the mountains and moonbeams for familiarly on ‘Sunday’, as a relationship breaks down before their eyes. Elsewhere, they float like ‘lanterns through the air’, uncertainty feels like an ‘endless sky’ and they weave together ‘like waves’ while referencing growing wings and dropping feathers. On an album about big, overwhelming feelings, Let’s Eat Grandma search for sanctuary in the natural world.

There is also the sense that they have each other, in spite of the difficulties that growing up and growing apart can bring. Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth have been best friends since childhood. They released their debut album, ‘I, Gemini’ when they were sixteen and initially presented like identical twins, with their indistinguishable, high pitched singing voices and bushy brown hair that concealed their identities. They blended childish whimsy with gothic menace; reciting nursery rhymes about dead cats and radioactive fungi, while impressing with their musical virtuosity (they recorded everything from recorders to vintage drum machines, ukuleles to their own elaborate clapping games). Seven years on and Walton and Hollingworth have ventured down distinctly different personal paths while retaining that same intrinsic connection that made their songs so compelling to begin with. They no longer wear matching outfits. Their hair is styled and coloured differently. Their voices, while still similar, are just about distinct. But there is a sense in which Lets Eat Grandma aren’t so much growing apart as growing into themselves.They share a cohesive vision for their art, and that is fully realised on ‘Two Ribbons’, their best album to date.

At times, ‘Two Ribbons’ feels like ‘The Libertines’ for 2022. It’s a vibrant, brutally frank record about a friendship that is flagging. It begins with the House-pop banger ‘Happy New Year’, which acknowledges the past (‘remember when we built that igloo out in the park?’) while dealing with the realities of the present (‘It’s okay to say what you want to say / And that we’ve grown in different ways’). They are able to make revealing jokes (‘You said, “Just think if we’d have been together, we’d be breaking up” / I said, “I’d want the synth”) but there is ultimately a sad resolve. They revisit the subject on the stunning title track – an acoustic ballad that reads like an open dialogue between the pair. ‘These places, they stay but we’re changing / like two ribbons, still woven although we are fraying.’ The metaphor is an apt one, as it reminds me of the way in which their voices weave in and out of each other harmonically. It’s such a real, honest sentiment. ‘I haven’t thought for weeks of anyone but you, and I wanna find the answer, I just want to be your best friend.’ You can almost hear their hearts break.

The record never really lets up emotionally. Even when not dealing explicitly with their friendship, the duo remain concerned with relationships that feel inevitably close to the end. In 2019, Hollingworth’s boyfriend Billy Clayton died from bone cancer, aged just 22. His influence can be felt across the album (which is dedicated to him) but most explicitly on the grief stricken ‘Watching You Go’ which wrestles with trying to stay positive despite unspeakable feelings of rage and despair. It’s such a powerful song; one about holding onto feelings without being overwhelmed by them. Meanwhile, Walton tackles a more conventional loss on break up ballad ‘Sunday’ which describes a separation happening in real time. ‘I say I miss you even though you’re right here’ she sighs, voice almost breaking. The synths are silky, the melody is crisp and memorable. 

Just as they have moved away from the whimsical themes of their debut, so too have they rescaled their musical ambitions. Their sound has boiled down into something both more refined and intense. This is a far more musically straightforward album than either ‘I, Gemini’ or ‘I’m All Ears’ but it benefits from that clear sense of direction. Their ambitious psychedelic fantasia has bloomed into brightly coloured pop. The choruses are huge. The layered arrangements are carefully produced. It all serves to draw our attention to the melodies and the lyrics, which are where the focus deserves to be. 

Lets Eat Grandma could easily have allowed ‘Two Ribbons’ to become a dirge. Nobody would have blamed them; it is afterall an album mired in grief, separation and heartbreak. Instead, the record feels cathartic and ultimately uplifting. You can hear Hollingsworth and Walton actively wrestle with their feelings and strive towards resolution. This is most clearly exemplified on lead single ‘Hall of Mirrors’, the one song about the start of a relationship rather than the end. Here, the duo put reality to one side once more to re-enter the world of make believe: ‘I’ve stepped into a movie scene / Where my secrets are written on the bathroom walls.” It’s a song that is as apprehensive as it is enamoured by the possibility of opening yourself back up for another human. The beat throbs like a heart before stopping at the pivotal moment: ‘somebody tell me how I’m going to work this out?’ Let’s Eat Grandma are still wrestling with the answer. It’s a wonderful work in process.

9/10