release - the vaselines - sex with an x

type: album

released: 13th september 2010

label: sub pop

genre: indie rock, noise pop, indie pop

Hesitant to embark on a 'comeback' tour on the strength of just one album, The Vaselines give us their first in twenty one years. With not a song under two minutes on the thing, it's quite a departure from the charged twee pop of the early days, but as the title indicates it's very much the same band who gave us the likes of Sex Sux (Amen) and Monsterpussy.

The sound is much bigger and sharper now. The guitar has more of a kick, and the drums are meatier. It's stylistically a different group, and while it still has Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee at its core (both are visible on the sensuous and questionable cover), James Seenan and Kelly's brother Charlie have left and been replaced by Bobby Kildea and Michael McGaughrin respectively, with Stevie Jackson adding to the guitar sound. The rare forays into disco-pop are also now gone.

One thing that hasn't changed, however, is the sense of humour. The lyrics are impossible to ignore, and constantly entertain with charm and sardonic wit. I Hate The '80s is damning and funny, and it has a youthful bite that might not be expected from a duo now in their mid forties. There's something about hearing the 80s – the year the band formed – described as shit that's genuinely refreshing, and to be told that it wasn't all Duran Duran is certainly reassuring, though perhaps that isn't quite the desired effect. Having said that, they do need to be careful not to be seen to be writing their former selves out of musical history.

Though this is a mature-sounding album, the immediacy of the songs shines through, no more than in the opening seconds of Mouth to Mouth where Kelly begs "kiss me, I'm in season". The tongue-twisting chorus doesn't disappoint either. For the most part, it's the lyrics and vocals that are the real focus on this record, lest they attempt to recreate twee aesthetics that would sound affected and out of place two decades down the line. Luckily, the character of the songwriting stands out among the sometimes bland instruments which often serve only as backing tracks.

While titles like Sex With an X and My God's Bigger Than Your God prove that the band still has the ability to be silly and playful, it's moments like the shared vocals on Poison Pen and Exit the Vaselines that are moving, and which really justify the release of something new. These are songs that carry real weight and offer a great counterpoint to their previous work instead of simply trying to repeat its success. Sex With an X may not be as chaotic or exciting as their EPs or Dum-Dum, but it doesn't need to be for it to be worthwhile, and nor does it need the title to spice it up.

The Vaselines - I Hate the '80s

The Vaselines - Sex With an X

release - grouper - hold / sick

type: single

released: 6th october 2010

label: room40

genre: ambient, psychedelic folk, drone

This limited edition tour single is being released exclusively on 7" and is already proving near impossible to track down. It's no great departure from 2008's Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, the album which brought Portlander Liz Harris widespread attention and appreciation, but she does a fine job of recalling her sombre, reverb-heavy atmosphere over the space of just two songs, Hold and Sick.

The former is the real gem here, with a simple, brooding guitar melody based around four notes that mutates subtly over its five minutes, both eerie and quietly menacing. Sick feels like an extended outro, with no discernible beat or rhythm, a wash of claustrophobic ambient haze. It's gentle and meandering as tracks such as Tidal Wave from her last album, feeling like a song made out of pure acoustics. It's a worthy transition between two albums.

Grouper - Hold / Sick

release - no age - everything in between

type: album

released: 28th september 2010

label: sub pop

genre: noise rock, punk, noise pop

On their second album L.A. two-piece No Age have chiselled away at the harsher, fuzzier elements of their sound to create a record focused around songs in a more traditional sense. After the first two you could be forgiven for thinking they've gone a bit soft, but it's as far as they go in that direction, and for the most part they keep the best parts of their sound.

There's a lot less frenetic shouting in general, and the tighter production makes everything feel a little bit more restrained. You don't feel like a burst of feedback could hit you at any second, but that doesn't mean there's nothing to be excited about. The opening door-knocking drum-tapping of Life Prowler is reminiscent of Miner, and the consistent pace and rhythm of the first two tracks has a sense of the duo warming up, that they're storing the tension. Some of it can be heard being unleashed on the following track Fever Dreaming, where howling guitars compete for space with the vocals without ever betraying too much attention to detail.

Musically, this is miles ahead of its predecessors. The majority of Weirdo Rippers was charming for its irreverent structures and vibrant sound rather than its beautiful melodies, whereas here there is a blending of the two, giving the album a greater range. The cleaner riffs show off sincerity and thought rather than just raw emotion, but there is still plenty of energy. Depletion has a poppy groove that wouldn't sound out of place on debut full-length Nouns.

Katerpillar and Positive Amputation between them provide some gorgeous distortion that gives the album a bit of diversity in terms of the shape of the songs, and they also act as great build-ups to highlights Valley Hump Crash and Shred and Transcend respectively, the latter of which is noisy and chaotic, and true to their older sound doesn't get properly started until about halfway through.

They may have cleaned up their sound a little here, but they haven't lost their feeling. There is diversity in the way the songs sound and feed into each other, and there's a good mix of fast-paced songs such as Fever Dreaming, laid back ones where the line between singing and talking is blurred in idiosyncratic No Age style like Common Heat, and beautiful guitar-led instrumentals like Dusted. Some of the middle section feels a bit too much like filler, but overall it's an enjoyable listen.

The last song, Chem Trails, combines several signature elements of the band's sound, and might well be shining a light into their future. The meandering guitar and call-and-response vocals recall early Yo La Tengo, but the real catch of this song is that it builds in a linear way in the space of less than three minutes, something that most of their work hasn't managed to up until this point, and an obvious benefit of the slightly improved production.

Maybe it's because it was Weirdo Rippers, a compilation of their work up to that point that brought them fame, but Nouns showed that while they had lots of interesting ideas, they hadn't fully worked out how to structure an album. With Everything In Between it seems like they've nailed it, even if they've left the best until last. And while this isn't immediate as Nouns, it's just as exciting and well written.

No Age - Glitter

release - benoît pioulard - lasted

type: album

released: 11th october 2010

label: kranky

genre: dream pop, ambient, singer/songwriter

For a decade Benoît Pioulard has been dilligently perfecting his take on ethereal, accidental pop, and though Lasted gives the impression that everything is natural in its place on the album as if it's always been there, it is in fact an act of careful precision. His real name is Thomas Meluch, and in addiction to this curious francophone contrivance he has taught himself guitar and drums, the most prominent instruments on this album. Lasted is anything but accidental.

Though he's been signed to Kranky for five years now, Pioulard still retains the sense of being a bedroom artist, the songs occupying intimate spaces in a generally lo-fi sound. His alluring baritone voice is recorded expertly, and sticks out on highlight RTO without sounding out of place or disrupting the overall feel. Songs like Tie also seem to fit in, the vocals and guitar resting just above the almost watery sounds in the background.

Through all the field recordings and hazy production, he strives for simplicity in his structures. Shouting Distance is upbeat and melodic, a great pop song. But the real charm of this collection is that it doesn't need to be simply a pop album to work, instead gently coaxing the listener into appreciating it not just for its catchy melodies but also for the warm ambient passages and delicate instrumental backing.

Not just through the shimmering interplay of guitar and drums, and the less decipherable background noises, but also the track lengths does Pioulard manage to play with our perceptions of time. The 40 minutes and 14 songs seem to pass by almost undetected in their introverted beauty, save a few precious moments when you chance upon a forceful drum beat or surprising guitar line, such as the gorgeous playing in Tack & Tower. However, even such moments as these seem to reverberate naturally into the spaces where they are played out.

The longest song is closer Nod, five minutes of a simple but rich drone filled with interference that draws a distinction and in doing so a connection between the digested sounds the come from Pioulard's head, and their ambient origins in the real world that mostly go unnoticed. It also allows the album to be brought back to its beginnings, recalling gauzy opener Purse Discusses.

This is an album to fill up the empty spaces in the day with a glorious hum, to soak up the background noises and turn them into something necessary. This is an album that will continue to resonate, ghostly and lush, long after it has been switched off.

Benoît Pioulard - RTO

release - james blackshaw - all is falling

type: album

released: 24th august 2010

label: young god

genre: american primitivism, psychedelic folk, minimalism

James Blackshaw's latest presentation is a single piece that, in its eight constituent parts, further takes his sound from its folky, fingerpicked beginnings and matures it into a haunting modern classical suite, with simple arpeggios and clean production. The longer passages we're used to are left until the end – the final two tracks take up half the length of the album.

The first part of All is Falling is a stately and slow piano loop, the lower end becoming gradually darker and tenser as arpeggios at the higher end are brought in and out. It's a retreat from the virtuoso guitar we've seen from him recently, and the heavy use of atmospheric sounds on 2008's Litany of Echoes. This is something stripped down, and closer to modern classical.

Part 2 is quieter at first, his twelve-string acoustic guitar playing a slow and mournful melody as strings gradually accompany its cycle up to a cinematic climax, where romantic violins invite faster playing without fully abandoning that restraint set down in the opening minutes of the album. The next song is more upbeat, a swelling of strings and tinkling piano parts keeping an urgent pace. Part 4 continues this tension, with different rhythms working alongside each other and colliding to noisy strings and key changes towards the end, as Part 5 concluded this first half of the album in a similar vein.

The closing notes of the first half are continued into Part 6, which acts as a segue between the first five songs and the longer ones at the end. Here sparse and heavy timpani keeps time alongside two-part counting, feeling more like tribal chanting. All this is done with a simple guitar pattern playing to time with the beat and urgent strings beneath. By the end of this short passage there is only counting, and then silence.

The penultimate part of All is Falling is twelve minutes long, and while that would be normal on any of Blackshaw's earlier works, it's the longest here by some way, and starts with guitar and cello, played in a more enunciated way than most of Parts 1-5. After one and a half minutes a lone violin joins. The sound assembles into a drum-led crescendo at around the sixth minute and unfolds for a further three until harsh, dissonant strings take full control of the sound, cascading and falling around the diminishing guitar, and fulfilling the images suggested in the album title.

Part 8 is something of a recovery – an eight-minute drone that pulsates warmly in its ambience, free from the harshness of the previous track, but also the strings and piano that provided most of the sound on the album. It brings the concept full circle and shows off Blackshaw's ability to, without needing to play guitar at the level he's already shown himself to be capable of, create real psychedelic beauty.

release - pale sketcher - jesu: pale sketches demixed

type: album
released: 24th august 2010
label: ghostly international
genre: dub, ambient, electronica

Pale Sketcher is Justin K. Broadrick's latest project, and it's ostensibly a vehicle for him to explore what he calls "the Jesu 'electronica' sound", wanting to keep it separate from their guitar-orientated beginnings. So here he single-handedly demixes – the idea that the guitar elements are taken away from the songs – every track from the 2007 Jesu compilation Pale Sketches.

There are two problems emerging from this choice of source material. Firstly, the only real contributor to seven years' worth of previously unreleased Jesu songs was Justin K. Broadrick. He wrote it, he programmed it, he produced it, and he performed it all alone. So to put it cruelly he's simply rehashing an assortment of unwanted songs. And what's more, they're not anywhere near being the most guitar-driven songs he's written. While there might be scope for separating the works of Jesu from his own electronic flights of fancy, there weren't many changes to make to the songs here – it was more or less electronica to begin with. The second problem is that the songs just aren't up to the quality of Jesu's earlier work. Where Godflesh's guitar was biting and savage, and early Jesu's atmospheric, the sounds on Pale Sketches are shallow.

The separation of this from Jesu could be a blessing in disguise for the latter, who may return to the swirling soundscapes of old, but there is also some potential on the electronic side. However, while the different versions of individual tracks are easily distinguishable from each other, both albums struggle to find any coherent identity. It all feels a bit too much like variations on a theme, and two albums worth is too much.

The main changes apart from the guitars are that the Pale Sketcher versions tend to have a greater feeling of space and peace. And even though Broadrick can more easily convey emotion through heavy guitar than computerised drum patters, there are times when the layered textures of Jesu feel tired compared to Pale Sketcher's smooth and balanced listening experience.

Don't Dream It (Mirage mix) abandons the dirge-like repetition of its older sibling for a mild euphoria, where the Gone version of Can I Go Now doesn't change much other than pitch-shifting the original, leaving it inorganic and soulless by comparison.

One of the things wrong with Pale Sketches Demixed is that Broadrick allows a small palette of fairly simplistic drum patterns to guide the flow of the album, meaning that the welcome first ambient minute of The Playgrounds are Empty (Slumber mix) sounds starkly beautiful. It also acts as an interlude between the two halves of the album, the latter being the more varied and interesting. Tiny Universe (Interstellar) is haunting and edgy in the most minimal way possible, while Supple Hope (2009 mix) meanders for about five minutes before peaking into relaxing, unintrusive synths that are played out on the following track.

The last song here is also the best, and while the original version of Plans That Fade wouldn't sound at all out of place on the demixed album, the Faded Dub version takes it much further and suggests better things to come from Pale Sketcher. At best it verges on soulful, thoughtful dubstep and sets a dark tone for the end of the album.

Jesu: Pale Sketches Demixed is undoubtedly an improvement on the source material, but Broadrick doesn't go anywhere near far enough in differing from the originals or creating much diversity within the album itself. Nevertheless, I'd be interested to hear a 'demixed' version of Godflesh's Streetcleaner, or a full band Jesu album.

Pale Sketcher - Can I Go Now (Gone Version)

release - swans - my father will guide me up a rope to the sky

type: album

released: 23rd september 2010

label: young god

genre: no wave, noise rock, post-punk, folk, ambient

It could be argued that there was no call for this album to be made, as the last one under the Swans banner happened 14 years ago, and founder Michael Gira has been recording albums pretty much every two years since then with strongly neofolk directions under Angels of Light. Jarboe, who shared songwriting duties for over a decade is nowhere to be seen.

After the announcement of the so-called reactivation of Swans in January this year, certain questions had to be asked. Is it simply a way for an ageing musician to make money from a now-revered name? Is that an inherently bad thing? Perhaps more importantly, is it worse to reunite for the money alone and never enter the studio again - something we've seen a lot of in recent years - or to record another album and risk tarnishing the brand? It's clear that Gira is taking a risk here: the funding for the recording was found largely through Gira's limited run solo album and live DVD I Am Not Insane released earlier this year, many of the songs later appearing on this album. So if this isn't totally Swans, rest assured that it is sincere.

Here we have assorted members of Angels of Light, Norman Westberg from the original Swans lineup and a few wildcards, including Devendra Banhart and Mercury Rev's Grasshopper backing Gira up. But can it really work? How could this be a worthy successor to Soundtracks for the Blind, which totalled well over two hours across two discs, or even going-out live album Swans are Dead, with its bruising, tortuous opener Feel Happiness?

Opener No Words/No Thoughts begins with some rather ominous chimes followed by a bit of proverbial muscle-flexing of the kick drum and cymbals. It stands at a comparably tame nine and a half minutes, but it rocks as hard in that time as anything they've done. And what's more, it tells us that Gira is fully in the Swans mindset and fully in command of his band, their screeching guitars and pounding drums setting out sonic caverns for Gira to fill with his baritone diatribes, which hit as hard as ever. It's a lot to take in on the first listen, but it's probably the most exciting thing on here.

Reeling the Liars In is bluesy and folky and funereal, sounding much closer to the Angels of Light end of the spectrum, and it memorable for its damning lyrics. The rest of the album fits somewhere between these first two polar opposites and standouts. Inside Madeline even seems to cover the ground of both in a single span. You Fucking People Make Me Sick may have an ugly title and some novel playing of the piano but it's a beautiful song, featuring neo-hippie and New Weird Annoyance Devendra Banhart on vocals. My Birth has a punk vibe that recalls some of the more lo-fi Swans recordings of the 80s, while Eden Prison has a noisy crescendo that wouldn't have anything like as much impact if it had been attempted with those earlier recording techniques. Little Mouth is another folk song, both haunting and cinematic, and ending on Gira's dark voice alone to close the album. But as the backing band fade away and become irrelevant again we have to remind ourselves that this really is Swans.

So we have a brooding and schizophrenic album that, while showcasing a variety of sounds and styles that Gira has picked up over a career spanning four decades, is actually quite consistent in quality. It doesn't sit up there with the best of Swans' material, which at its height felt like a shocking burst of raw anger, but it has energy, and if its sole purpose is to set the band up with a great collection of songs to play later this year, then it's done a fine job.

Swans - You Fucking People Make Me Sick