Music nowadays!

GRIMES ~ OBLIVION

When it comes to new(ish) pop stars to get excited about, it doesn't get much better than Grimes and her freshly dropped third album, VISIONS.

Having been around releasing ethereal, detached, bedroom productions for a while now, Grimes, real name Emily Bucher, from Canada, has exploded colourfully into a wider audience's visibility with a giant stomping piece of dance pop, which also somehow manages to maintain that low-fi DIY atmosphere that made her earlier work so charming, despite the lavishly shot HD video.

Understandable comparisons with the Knife may be made but this is in no way derivative or unoriginal. Perhaps the similarity is that Grimes has taken retro 80s/90s sounds and stark atmospherics and made them into something intimate and dreamlike while still making a song that makes you want to dance. Harmony and dissonance mix to make something brilliantly wonky and unique.

It's incredibly hard not to be whisked away by this song, or beguiled by Grimes and her faded rainbow hair...

TOTALLY ENORMOUS EXTINCT DINOSAURS ~ TAPES & MONEY

Another emerging electropop artist who has been hovering around on the border between left field and mainstreamland is 27 year old Oxford born producer cumbersomely titled Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. A name which hardly rolls off the tongue (although it is definitely hard to forget) which would explain why he's shorted it to T.E.E.D., not that that's much better to be honest but with a name like Orlando Higginbottom it's clear this is a man comfortable with large amounts of syllables. Anyway enough about the brilliantly odd name, the music is really good! This is a light-as-a-feather club hit that pushes all the right buttons of the genre (upbeat, catchy, pumping) without falling into the pitfalls of the majority of other contemporary club songs (banality, mindlessness, migraine-inducing cacophony) so get's a big thumbs up from me. There's something of the Tough Alliance to it, or a general Swedishness that makes it hard not to love.

AFRIQUOI ~ KUDAUSHE

The boys from Wormfood London, Andre Marmot and Nico Bentley, are stepping out with a new project which successfully combines some of the sounds of UK bass and the London club scene with the instrumentation of West Africa, on this track featuring the skills of Zimbabwean musician Kudaushe Matimba. Here is their first video that shows some live footage from the awesome and award winning Brixton venue Hootenanny's. The track is a wonderfully uplifting dance anthem that deftly melds the basslines of soukous with the beats of an electro DJ, making this a true piece of 'world' music. Expect much more from them very soon soundcloud.com/africquoi

UNITED VIBRATIONS ft. CONRAD THE SCOUNDREL ~ LONDON BRIDGE

Quite a fair few acts have attempted to sum up the post-riot sense of detachment and political exasperation that so many people in Britain are feeling, but few have done so as eloquently and prophetically as United Vibrations. Filmed in and around the Occupy St Paul's protest camp and featuring some Chomsky-esque lyrics of socially awakening brevity, this is a visceral multi-genre torch song for 2012. The lines between hip-hop, funk, reggae, soul, afrobeat and ethio-jazz are blurred seamlessly here, and the lyrics make you want to punch the air in agreement. Righteous grooves!

ALAA WARDI ft MOHAB ~ WAHASHTENY

Everyone's favourite middle eastern multi-tracked one man band is back with another vibrant video that separates all the different ingredients it takes to make a densely layered song and lays them all out for you to stare at in awe. This isn't quite as kinetic or infectious as some of his previous efforts but it's still further proof that he is an amazingly talented individual not only musically but also at video editing. Make sure to download his stuff over at iTunes where you can now legally get hold of his tracks.

WARNING

I'm afraid the mood is about to change...

CONOR MAYNARD - CAN'T SAY NO

Proof that people will literally listen to anything if you get someone young enough and pretty enough to sing it, dress them in current fashions and film them posing inanely in a glossy enough video. Which by the way looks like Justin Bieber meets Skins (yes it IS as bad as that sounds). Don't even get me started on his incessantly 'cool' finger wagging and hip-hop posturing, gurning away like an 80 year old man who's just quadruple dropped the strongest ecstasy tablets known to man. And why is he trying so hard to sound, and act, like an American? Desperate to conquer the other side of the Atlantic much? I don't know, the actual song isn't as sonically offensive as a lot of the stuff in the charts is at the moment (watching music TV these days induces a feeling that must be close to the pain of water boarding) but that said it's still pretty much dreadful. The verse and bridge have a feeling of crescendo towards what must be a really catchy chorus right? Wrong! The chorus is so gapingly devoid of melody that it's any wonder a sentient being could be able to sing it without experiencing profound shame.

Hordes of morons who are too young to know who Lady Gaga is are saying he is the new Justin Timberlake, a claim so ridiculous it begs belief. For whatever you think about JT, he is a performer who has etched out his niche over an entire lifetime in the business, can sing, dance, write, produce, play instruments and act to a level that has made him one of the most famous people in the world over the course of many years. A 17 year old kid releases a couple of (frankly terrible) songs and people are acting like it's the next big thing. Is it really the next big thing? Or have some publicists just told heat magazine to say it's the next big thing? Does anyone care?

LMFAO ~ SORRY FOR PARTY ROCKING

While I am obviously aware that LMFAO's tongues are firmly within their cheeks, I can't help but find them astoundingly cynical. Since when did it become acceptable to have not one, not two, but THREE different product placements in your video? And not only that, but these brand names are even worked into the lyrics of the song, the most heinous name dropping ever surely? People laugh at them and their crazy outfits and mad antics, while grooving to their infectious electropop-on-steroids music, all the while unaware that their brain is subconsciously being told to go out and buy stuff. We have to put up with enough invasive adverts plastered all over youtube as it is, we really don't need them hidden within the music as well. Fuck this.

MADONNA ~ GIRL GONE WILD

What's that you hear? Oh, it's the sound of a barrel being scraped...

Madonna's questionably titled album MDNA is forthcoming (Madonna disapproves of her collaborator M.I.A. raising her middle finger on stage, but advocating drug use when you know you are popular with young children? Oh, that's totally acceptable.) and let's hope it has something better to offer than this awkwardly staunch attempt at a dance anthem.

Of course, the gays will love it and so will her many fans who have patiently ignored the fact she's been making less than impressive albums for a good decade now, but there's no escaping that this is clammy, unimaginative, secondary fare. It has all the ingredients of what should make a truly epic club banger, but when you assemble such a piece of music as systematically as this must've been, the end result is wooden and boring, despite the recruitment of the Benassi brothers. The likes of Roisin Murphy, Robyn or Katy B have been making this kind of music to much more encouraging effect over the past few years, and it just seems like a failed attempt to emulate the hands-in-the-air euphoria of something like Rihanna's Only Girl in the World, yet as has been the case for a while now, Madonna seems to be desperately chasing trends rather than setting them...

The constant M.I.A. controversy rages on...

...but who does it say more about?

If you've been connected to the internet recently you have no doubt heard about M.I.A. for one of, or probably all of, three big reasons; Firstly, on the 2nd of February she unveiled her new video, directed by renowned (and equally controversial) French director Romain Gavras, via the new Vice youtube channel, Noisey. It depicts a remote Gulf desert location of stunt driving women in leopard print burkas and gun toting breakdancing Arab males in Kaffiyeh head dress, while burning oil wells fume in the background and cars drift on two wheels, screeching rubber across tarmac. Since is release the video has been garnering around a million hits a day and the mirror upload on her Vevo channel is doing similarly well, and like her last outing with Gavras, the uber violent, allegorical Born Free, people can't stop reacting to the video in many different ways. Some people find the video comical, others find it offensive, it has been accused of exoticism, using Arabs for cultural decoration. However, given M.I.A.'s own background this is unlikely. Very few people in the west had previously been aware of the phenomenon of Arab stunt driving, after all, they are all terrorists right? That's all you see of the arab world in the news, endless war or massive street uprisings, always backed by bloodshed, gunshots and military violence. M.I.A. has shown a different side to Arab culture, and stunt driving is a real past time enjoyed by many males in Gulf countries, known as Tagwalah or Tafheet, with the two wheel stunt specifically called Shaal. Search on youtube and you will find dozens of amateur videos of said stunts, proof that M.I.A.'s video is no fictional creation, as many commenters have accused. It can also be seen as a very clear statement about US ally Saudi Arabia's discriminatory driving laws that forbid women from sitting behind the wheel. Plus it remains that if this video had been set in America for example, no one would be saying, or thinking, very much about it at all, yet the very fact that her choosing to set it in the Arab world and cast it with middle eastern people has got the public and media so worked up, says so much more about our perceptions and cultural prejudice than it ever could about her.

And that brings us nicely onto the second point. The other reason you've probably heard about M.I.A. is because of her 'stunt' at the Super Bowl on saturday night. While onstage with Madonna to perform her role alongside Nicki Minaj on their collaborative track Gimme All Your Luvin', M.I.A raised her middle finger in place of saying "shit" as the song lyrics suggest. This has sent the internet and media alight with 'controversy' despite the fact that the offending gesture was filmed in a wide shot and barely noticeable (even in HD) due to it lasting a fraction of a second. And it is indeed true that if the media hadn't created such a shit storm about it, most of the 110 million people watching probably didn't even notice it. Yet controversy it has caused, with those bizarre parental family values TV lobbyist groups you always hear about up in arms in particular. It seems odd that these people have no problem with the fact that at the very moment M.I.A.'s middle finger was held aloft, a veritable army of faceless, hyper sexualised women were thrusting their barely concealed vaginas into the air like a sea of automated sex, yet the millisecond's image of a woman's finger has them all wetting themselves with outrage. It's a sad state of affairs if this sort of thing is considered offensive in the world of television, which is usually saturated with images of sex, violence, consumerism and obscenity. Children are constantly exposed to warping images in everything from the news to adverts yet the parent groups choose this to rally against. There are rumours she may have to pay a fine, which echoes the past super bowl controversy in which Justin Timberlake ripped open Janet Jackson's top, briefly exposing her breast. Jackson was slapped with nearly half a million dollars worth of fines despite it not actually being her fault, yet these were eventually dropped. Hopefully M.I.A. won't be fined for the same reason, there is a delay from the recording to the live broadcast and the millisecond of finger should have been cut. Apparently Madonna is furious about the gesture and is rumoured to have said she will never work with M.I.A. again, which if true, makes Madonna look very petty. She should stand by M.I.A., after all, it was Madonna's idea to get her up on stage to say the line "I don't give a shit" in front of millions of apparently very sensitive viewers. Remember when it was Madonna who used to cause controversy? Now, in the words of Jimmy Kimmel recently, "she's outsourcing it to foreigners".

Over ten years ago you would be hard pressed to find a single photo of Eminem (for example) in which he didn't have both of his middle fingers up, and he was a hugely succesful pop artist with children, much more so than M.I.A., who is more popular with teenagers, students and 20/30somethings. Yet while Eminem caused his fair share of controversy too, he is white and male and M.I.A. is female and from some weird country most of these people probably haven't even heard of. Just looking at the video and comment responses on youtube and news sites shows a genuinely shocking array of racist and sexist slurs. Which again, says a lot more about our society than it does about her. And this is what M.I.A. has always been really good at. Her unconventional approach to pop music and video, using political or ethnic images and radical groundbreaking ghetto sounds, has always succeeded in letting people's reactions do all the hard work. The fact her father was a Tamil rebel fighter when the Western backed Sinhalese government were wiping out Tamil people, resulting in her being banned from entering America, says more about America than it does about her. Just like the way the reaction to her finger waving says more about our superficial media and public blindness than it does about, er, middle fingers...

Tens of millions of Americans are struggling beneath the poverty line in what is supposed to be the most propserous nation in the land, where student protesters are being shot at, pepper sprayed and scattered with tear gas, while the government is readying itself to waste yet more millions on another war, and people care more about the Super Bowl, whining on about abortion rights or banning gay marriage? Well that definitely deserves a middle finger.

The third reason you may have heard about her is that she is rumoured to be breaking up with her fiancée, and this is a story the press have pounced on in the wake of her Super Bowl controversy in a desperate attempt to stir up hatred, which again, paints a pretty dire picture of our culture, in which we would rather discuss an artist's private life or make her a pariah because of a split second hand gesture, than discuss the social issues highlighted by her art.

A Separation

This morning I received this dvd in the post, much to my excitement. Few things entrance me as much as Iranian New Wave cinema, and this particular title has won so many awards that scrolling through the list on wikipedia will make you go cross eyed, so I was even more anxious to see this film than most. And it did not disappoint.

A separation is the sort of film that can keep you riveted to the screen throughout the most ordinary or domestic setting. This is common of many Iranian films, such as the White Balloon for example, where the viewer is simply watching a little girl trying to buy a goldfish for 90 minutes, or Ten, which is filmed entirely from the dashboard of one woman's car as she drives ten passengers around Tehran. Yet this simplicity never once seems boring, in fact it's the amazing realism that makes it so compelling. Like all good neorealism the film excels at making gripping drama out of the very ordinariness of life, because that's what we all know. This film has no chase scenes or special effects, there isn't even an ominous soundtrack, yet there are scenes in this film that are as enthralling as in any thriller.

For starters the acting is so totally real that it almost feels like a documentary, and in fact one of the film's two main settings (an Iranian divorce court) makes it very similar to the award winning and startling documentary Divorce, Iranian Style by Kim Longinotto and Ziba Mir-Hosseini. It's this total honesty and realism that makes many of these scenes so intense.

The story focuses on a couple filing for divorce, the reason? Because the wife Simin, does not want her 11 year old daughter to grow up under the current Iranian regime yet the husband, Nader, refuses to leave the country in order to look after his elderly father who has Alzheimer's. If this isn't a ripe enough bed for drama to develop, things take a major turn for the complicated when an accident in the home involving the father's young nurse leads to all manner of sticky situations, slowly unravelling both families, exposing the many tensions of a fractured Iranian society in the process. In this way it can be seen as a searing critique of the arbitrary judicial system and the inhuman laws of the country without ever mentioning politics. It shows the difficulties Iranians must face through their situations. No character ever even mentions the government. And it's precisely what this film doesn't say that has enabled it to be such a massive hit in its homeland, unlike the vocally anti-government Persepolis for example, which was banned.

And it's also this lack of politics that enables the story to transcend it's unique setting and become something more resonant in all cultures. Maybe this also helped it swoop the Golden Globe for best film not in the english language. Not to say it couldn't win simply on its merits as a film, because it truly is an exquisite drama, but given the current climate of hostility between Iran and the USA, it certainly was encouraging to see such a major award go to an Iranian film, which have usually been overlooked by American mainstream award panels.

Not only this, but visually this film also excels, using the framing and colour of images in a truly poetic way that is at times oddly calming and plaintive. Look out for the many symbolic ways in which the two main characters are positioned.

Consequently I would say this, along with The Artist, is definitely the finest film of 2011 that I've seen. A truly impeccable and refined drama that vividly depicts the pain and sadness of a family going through hard times, yet also the strength and humanity that hold them all together, making a lasting impression on the viewer. Unmissable.

The Hit List

Here's some new(ish) music. Some of it's good, some it's shit. Yay.

Sleigh Bells ~ Comeback Kid

Well well well! This has had me excited for a while. The prospect of a new Sleigh Bells album is the sort of news that makes me use gratuitous amounts of exclamation marks. I shall try to restrain myself as I listen to this song for the third time in fifteen minutes. Hmm, I like it, I really do, but I think my expectations and excitement are far too high right now to form my thoughts into words. Needless to say, it has some awesome noises and riffs and it's starting to take hold. I can imagine myself jumping around my house and endangering my neck to it. That's what Sleigh Bells is made for. I am literally pissing myself with excitement for the album now. REIGN OF TERROR. VALENTINE'S DAY!

Niki & The Dove ~ DJ Ease My Mind

Coming ahead of their imminent debut album, Niki & The Dove release a new song that further establishes them unavoidably as a sort of common ground between The Knife and Florence & The Machine. That's not to say they lack originality, their track Mother Protect is one of the most beautiful electronic pop songs Ive heard in a long time, but it is an arguable comparison. Their music isn't quite as angular and stark as that of Karin and Olaf Dreijer, but it also lacks the hystrionic shrieking of Florence Welch, making them a lovely combination of the two. Basically, this is the sort of music Fever Ray would make if she was ever in a good mood. Very much looking forward to their album.

Michael Kiwanuka ~ Home Again

Winner of the coveted Sound of 2012 prize, this refreshingly talented London born Ugandan singer songwriter is tipped for big things this year. This is a delightful song from a no doubt delightful album. It doesn't thrill me exactly, but music isn't always about being cutting edge or inventive, sometimes it's just about writing really good songs and being able to perform them really well, in this age of smoke and mirrors, it's easy to forget that sometimes. Also, he plays sitar, which is awesome, and brings us nicely onto...

Anoushka Shankar ~ Dancing in Madness

Acclaimed sitarist and fusionist, Anoushka Shankar has released another sublime album, entitled 'The Traveller' in which she masterfully blends classical Indian music with raw Flamenco rhythms and Spanish guitar. It's an amazing and hypnotic album, as this track shows, and not to missed by anyone who considers them a fan of 'world' music.

DJ Fresh ft Rita Ora ~ Hot Right Now

Someone should probably tell DJ Fresh that it's not summer for bloody ages yet! He's only gone and released a massive summer anthem in January! His last two big hits Gold Dust and Louder were on festival overkill in 2010 and 2011 respectively and it looks like he's probably gonna be everywhere again this year. It's about as mainstream as drum and bass can get without becoming too exploitative, but it's undeniably infectious and movement-inducing all the same. Big!

The Ting Tings ~ Hang It Up

The Ting Tings, after the riotous success of their monotonal hit 'That's Not My Name' back in 2008, obviously didn't feel like changing the formula too much. But listening to this, I can't help but think that they should maybe have thought about exploring the possibilities of using more than three notes... This song's complete lack of melody genuinely becomes painful after about 30 seconds. Avoid.

[update] Ok, i was a bit harsh, this song is kind of a grower...

Pitbull featuring Chris Brown ~ International Love

Sounding like they're rapping over an instrumental of a rejected Estonian Eurovision entry from 1995, Chris Brown and Armando Christian Perez (aka 'pit bull') unload a whole mess of tacky misogynistic lyrics about women all around the world wanting to have sex with them (as well as constantly reminding us of how much money they make in doing so) which is a bit weird given that Chris Brown has been arrested for beating a woman and that Pitbull has the sleazy presence of a man who traffics 13 year old girls out of Chechnya. Unpleasant.

Cher Lloyd ft. Astro ~ Want U Back

Cher Lloyd continues her meteoric rise to, er, something with this bouncy piece of urban bubblegum. She keeps shouting "UURRRRGH!" and then does an impression of a helicopter. It's annoying and has a child from the american x factor rapping in it (clever cross promotion there!) but unlike her jealous mentor Cheryl Cole's boring soulless music, this is actually a lot of fun as well, which would explain why she's doing so much better in the US than Cheryl did... It's still shit mind you, but it's a piece of shit that smiles at you and knows it's shit, rather than a piece of shit that pouts it's lips at you and tries to be sexy, not realising that it's a piece of shit. Ahem.

will.i.am ft. J.Lo & Mick Jagger ~ T.H.E. (The Hardest Ever)

I can't quite believe what I'm seeing or hearing. This is dreadful. A car crash from start to finish. And it's called 'THE'...?!

Does will.i.am actually believe all that stuff he says about himself? The fact that he's been employed by Pentium Intel as creative director suggest lots of people do, which is worrying when he's dropping lyrical nuggets of wisdom such as; "I woke up in the morning/hard like morning wood/in the morning" (insightful) and "I get stacks of cash/you get cashews" (hurtful will, really hurtful).

Although, maybe he's not as stupid as he sounds, the lyric "imma go hard like a mother fuckin boner/imma make a beat to put the people in a coma" suggests a level of self deprecation as yet unheard in his work; to finally admit that listening to his music repeatedly will leave the listener in need of a life support machine!

Anyway, Jennifer Lopez comes on and says some stuff but it's a bit boring really and she may as well not have bothered, pretty uninteresting video you might think but then, it gets weird. Mick Jagger appears, seemingly beamed in by will.i.am's patented intel htc sponsored blackberry lazerbeams that he invented with his super mind, and totally upstages them all, but only in that the words coming out of his mouth are mildly less idiotic than those that have preceded him. Well, apart from the bit about trigonometry.

"You can go hard, or you can go home" they all repeatedly chant. I know which I'll be choosing.

Alaa Wardi is awesome!

This is my new favourite musician! His videos are so well made; kinetic and exciting multi tracked awesomeness! Some people may say he is just an Arab version of Michael Tompkins, and don't get me wrong, Michael Tompkins is a very talented young man, but at least Alaa Wardi doesn't process and auto tune his voice to the point where he sounds like an army of evil Glee clones...

This is fresh, uplifting new music coming out of a generation of young Arab musicians, who have suddenly found themselves getting a lot more attention overseas after a year of uprising and global solidarity.

Check out his youtube channel and like his Facebook page for more cool videos, songs and remixes!