I’m tired, I’m confused, I’m dirty and I’m hungry, and five yards away my girlfriend is trying to sleep… Guess I better review these demos, then.
Latest Reviews
13-08-2010 Demos – Issue 27
13-08-2010 Tom DiCillo, When You’re Strange
What can be said about the Doors’ back story that hasn’t already been covered? The truth, for a start.
28-07-2010 Wavves – King of the Beach
There could hardly be a more apt sounding death knell for lo-fi indie garage than Nathan Williams’ infantile pop farts. Both the genre and Wavves itself have been due a backlash for some time now.
27-07-2010 M.I.A. – /\/\ /\ Y /\
In another universe, parallel to ours but not too distant, Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam is the pivotal character in Pulp’s ‘Common People’.
27-07-2010 Sleigh Bells – Treats
Everyone seems to hear something different in the kind of piercing racket that only the pairing of a former hardcore guitarist and an ex-girl group singer could produce
Reviews
Mayer Hawthorne – A Strange Arrangement
A Strange Arrangement
Stones Throw
Back in your boxes you merchants of stern and deep bass-heads, because here’s a man with a deft touch - a lightness of stroke - and a slick sense of humour.
“I’m sorry, I have no idea what it is - old, new - it’s fucking great.” So said Mark Ronson when he first played Mayer Hawthorne’s debut single, ‘Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out’, on his East Village Radio show earlier this year. Quickly, the track went on to confuse the shit out of everyone else. It sounded exactly like a vintage Motown cut and it was almost impossible to tell whether a white or black dude was singing it. LA-based indie hip hop label Stones Throw had put it out... on a very limited red, heart-shaped vinyl.
Props from Ronson? Heart-shaped vinyl? So far, so yucky. But where the Ronster does the most inane, low-fat muzak, the Mayer delivers truly classic soul and doo-wop mixed rich with a drop of West Coast pop, a whole crop of Impressions-era Curtis Mayfield, and a stop to hear The Ink Spots sing in an Indianapolis barber shop. It’s a mid-sixties, pre-heavy funk sound and it makes for an album that has natural, affable swing and knowing, effortless grace.
Hawthorne told this paper that he stumbled upon his million-dollar voice and ability to write/play trad. soul songs by accident. But as a member of the Now On crew and native of Detroit, he has both a hip hopper’s obsession with music history and Motown in his blood. Of course, rap kids are nerds of the highest order and not only does Mayer rock the geek specs, he forgoes the Soul Stud Number 1 persona to revel in portraying himself as quite the dreamer and loser (in love, mostly). His lyrics are hilarious. “I may not drive a new Mercedes, but I’ll chauffeur my girl to the edge of the world,” he sings on ‘Make Her Mine’. ‘One Track Mind’: “My baby’s got a one-track mind, only crème brûlée and she gets her way.”
Completely ridiculous on so many levels but miraculously never a pastiche, this is a highly accomplished and deeply heartfelt eulogy to generations upon generations of 24-Carat American music. You really wouldn’t be able to take it seriously if it didn’t sound so sweet, and Hawthorne wasn’t so damn coy.
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