TICKLEY FEATHER

A nice rejoinder to not go to a gig based on disliking their Myspace tracks. Though to be fair, you could put up better songs.

TICKLEY FEATHER @ RETRO BAR, 15/1109

Annie Sachs, the name in which Tickley Feather receives pay cheques, is drunk. Not just your common-or-garden drunk either. Smashed on a molecular level. Hammered. Gone. The only surprise is that she doesn't arrive on stage with a traffic cone atop her Minnie Mouse-bowed head.



On record, TF's excursions are so way beyond the static rigidity of the pop format that drunkenness seems like the perfect distillation of her animus; besides, no one in the venue gives a hoot. It's funny. She's funny. Her banter often goes longer than some of her songs. She lights candles on her keyboard stand “because this place smells of toilets”. It really does.

Live, she's flanked by two dudes; one on guitar who flirts and laughs like a current lover, and one who broods over keyboards and samples like a lover spurned. They're winging it all the way; they grin and smile as if to say “I cannot believe we are getting away with this. This is entirely made of awesome.”

The average Tickley Feather tune is just like unearthing a damp, mildewed cassette of '80s pop hits to play back on a '90s cassette player: there's form and recognisable instruments, but it's warped and weird and a little bit sinister. Nostalgic too, if you're of the last generation of cassette mixtapes: lost sentiments buried in corruptible technology.



It's the unintentional comedic flourishes that linger longest; unaffected, a little bit vulnerable and completely human. The mindset of Tickley Feather may be related to the bottle of scotch she carries on stage, but the warmth she generates could never be faked. An original.

PORTICO QUARTET/JAY REATARD

Two live reviews of very different bands in very different environments. I'm probably at my least comfortable when reviewing live performances because I'm aware they change and mutate and sometimes the perceived badness is little to do with the band; bad sound guy, lifeless crowd, ill-chosen venue or promotional decisions. These were my excuses when I perform music anyway.

JAY REATARD @ THE ROADHOUSE, 12/11/09

It's Thursday. It's raining. Shouldn't have to mention it's windy and cold too. It's 7.45, so no one has had time to get even a halfway decent beer buzz going. There are about 20 people present, four of whom write for Student Direct.



To minimise any chance that this night will work on any conceivable level, Reatard's band quit on him a month ago (explained as such via Twitter: “Band quit! Fuck them! They are boring rich kids who can't play for shit anyways. Say hello to your ugly and boring wives”) so he's grabbed a couple of Danish punks to fulfil his obligations.

Thankfully, it works. Reatard's metier, at casual distance, appears to be fun/throwaway garage-rock nonsense. Look closer. There's a twisted pop magician trying to break out, hamstrung by his lack of resistance to coat everything in a dense layer of sonic miasma. Make no mistake, these songs are big hits...in a parallel world where noise and dissonance don't result in radios being turned off or smashed.

There are no breaks between songs either, resulting in a 20 song set being comfortably wrapped up inside 40 minutes. Reatard's famous bad mood surfaces (“hey sound guy, you working tonight? It's feeding back up here”) just once. Talk of highlights doesn't work in a set with no filler. Great songs Reatard has written include 'It Ain't Gonna Save Me' and 'My Shadow', nihilistic pop jams played here with breakneck defiance.



Given the circumstances, it's the songs that shine through. The best sets work on a confluence of atmosphere and brilliance. Though the former was in absentia, the latter worked overtime.

PORTICO QUARTET @ ROYAL NORTHERN COLLEGE OF MUSIC, 02/11/09

To be British and to be jazz is one of the sadder commercial constraints of modern times. It's a straitjacket worn by Portico Quartet, even though theirs is a jazz of signifiers: upright bass, non-linear movement and volcanic drumming. Mostly in 4/4 and solo-free, PQ's unique selling point; the hang, a bowel-shaped object sounding much like a gentrified steel drum.



Their compositions have as much in common with post-rock, ambient and krautrock tropes as they do in jazz. 'Clipper' erupts into a cock-fight between cubist sax, all gung-ho Ornette-inspired octuplet flurries, and a rhythm section tighter than PVA glue leggings.

Exploratory it may be, but there's direction to their tangents. Only a few bars after some chaotic mutual scraping of instruments, they'll drop into comfortable grooves and moods as easily as an old man getting into a warm bath.

It's this hand-holding through the murky waters of free jazz that makes Portico Quartet accessible to newcomers, and it's their melodic and rhythmic invention that makes them the darling of aficionados.



Token jazz nominee of the 2008 Mercury Prize they may have been, but they've come on in leaps and bounds since then. Imagine how good they'll be next time.

IN THE CITY

In The City is an annual industry showcase for about 150 bands on the edge of industry-readiness (in theory) which takes place over three days every October in Manchester. Yours truly had one of the £350 delegate passes which allows entry to any show or panel (not that I was terribly interested in the idea of listening to dudes jerk each other off about the industry in extremely boring terms.)

IN THE CITY: SUNDAY

Pen? Check. Guide? Check. Industrial quantities of cheap energy drink? Check.

Identically coiffed and dressed London duo MIDIMIDIS attempt to shake the Electric Boogaloo with their warmed-over cyberpunk. At times they're frenetic and splenetic, but mostly they're lost in their own mannered poses. Get 'em off!

Down the road at Studio, the twelve-legged genre-disregarding misfits Asakusa Jinta flail and twirl like a Japanese Gogol Bordello; enthusiasm becomes an Olympic event and the wackiness dial clocks 11. Continuing the international theme are French trio The Tatianas, whose diet-Strokes filth should have stayed in the garage, possibly with a running car.


Asakusa Jinta

At Cellar Vie, hushed appreciation greets the post-modern folk wanderings of Sweet Baboo, a solo set laced with humour and consummate ease. Fellow Welshmen Dirty Goods receive muted plaudits back at Boogaloo, an apt venue for their Patrick Bateman-approved coke-pop. Problem is, it's all a bit knowing and slick. Where they could rock out and give some catharsis to their tightly-wound tunes, they cop-out with the '80s synth crud.

Sophie Madeleine and her ukulele are badly cast against the echo-doom of Bar 38; the soft wispy matter that makes up half of her material is lost in a cloud of chatter, but she battles on bravely. “This is a song I wrote about knitting” she says, placing her firmly in Camp Twee before a note is plucked. Sparse and lovely, with a backing duo every bit her equal, it's the first discovery of the festival.


Sophie Madeleine

The first existential crisis arrives during Fangs' set. They chase the zeitgeist too hard. They are both flap and doodle. They both fluster and bluster. Their electro-sex-attitude shtick looked a joke on C4's MobileAct Unisgned; up close it's a complete sham. MAY68 patrol a similar musical territory, but their motorik-meets-Heaven 17 jams work for all the reasons Fangs' don't; they look like they're having fun, they bothered to finish writing beyond the first hook, and they're all much better-looking.

Whilst In The City brings together the up-and-coming talent from around the UK and beyond, Sunday night belongs to Mancunian talent. Envy is a fearsome young rhymer with a dizzying, kaleidoscopic flow and adroit stage presence born out of brutalising MC battle opponents. Her put-downs are lacerating enough, but its the sweetness between songs that really disarms. A distinctive production is all that separates her from glory.



You could lob an anti-tank missile in front of Kong and they'd still slay. Their masks make them look like sex tourists and their scathing rock-on-steroids is more divisive than the monarchy, but they couldn't care less, crushing mercilessly all the while. 'Leather Penny' is a punch to the abdomen. 'Blood of a Dove' is a knee to the face. The rest of the set works you over with sadistic delight. By the end, you've either left the venue screaming as if your hair is on fire, or you're a committed masochist.



Dutch Uncles


Band of the night: Dutch Uncles. Frontman Duncan Paton is the first person on stage all evening who radiates star quality; the ignorable smart kid at school all grown-up. His nervous tics and karate dances provide a visual hook for songs prone to tangents; 'Face In' is their version of a pop song, except the verse hook owes more to Steve Reich than Stevie Wonder. Anything difficult is tempered intelligently by Paton's ghostly voice, but no one is left waiting too long for the next rapturous pay-off. A rare find; and they're local. No excuse not to see them at the next opportunity, right?

Started coming down with an illness on Monday; battled through, but couldn't be arsed by Tuesday.

IN THE CITY: MONDAY

People are emerging from The Bay Horse toilets clutching their noses self-consciously at the rock'n'roll hour of half past six. Nonetheless, Dan Melrose ploughs through an intimate set pitched halfway between fearful, earnest blues and ornate folk guitar. Its in the latter mode he really shines; 'The Dove' displays playing chops, detailed arrangement and the knack for an earworm of a melody.


Graphic

A sickeningly hip young chap is hunched over his mate's laptop at TV21, awaiting the start of his set. He is Graphic. There's not much in the way of charisma, or even apparent enthusiasm. It all feels a bit Vice until the former Isaac Llewellyn Holman (ah, a fine working-class lad) rips out a few lines over his summery electro agenda and a star in the Just Jack mode is conceived, if not quite born.

Every song in the set of Copy Haho sounds like a potential winning hit, except the song they announce as being an actual single ('Wrong Direction'), which is brilliant nonetheless. For a band from a pedestrian griefhole in Kincardineshire facing the relentlessly dour North Sea, they've emulated taken great urban guitar scene since 1980 and refracted it through 1000 points of light and a deathless ball of energy. More please.



Culture Reject loops live percussion and does the singer-songwriter bit over the top, but it falls flat a heightened rate of knots. Up the road at Electric Boogaloo, Ed Sheeran does the same kind of loop/guitar/voice as Mr. Reject, but succeeds in every area he fails. An almost unbearably magnetic performer with a knack for a three minute pop job that would rival all of Xenomania. Sheeran's potential is practically criminal; he's 18 and you can sense he'll get better with age. The bastard.

JAMES BLACKSHAW INTERVIEW

They say it's hard to interview or meet a hero, but this talk with James Blackshaw disproved that theory. I've got an MP3 of the conversation that I might edit and post up, but here's the potted/tortured journalese version.

He's in his late 20s. He lives in Hastings, but used to live over in Levenshulme. He plays the 12-string guitar and piano. These are facts, but it's not the facts that are the most interesting things about James Blackshaw.



Here's the heavy editorialising; The Glass Bead Game, his seventh, is the finest record of the year – possibly the decade. So pitch-perfect and nuanced are its compositions, it's made some of my friends purchase 12-string guitars to emulate Blackshaw's deathless sound. As a long-time owner of one, it's made this correspondent completely give up.

“Generally, I'm more attracted to instrumental music.” His albums to date have voices on them, but they don't sing words. They humanise the gnarled, knotted emotive qualities in Blackshaw's work, but they don't reveal themselves completely. “If you add words, then to some degree, you're going to dictate the mood of the music.”

Ambiguity is central to James Blackshaw, not naked truths. You own the meaning as you listen. Take the gut-wrenching 'Key' from Glass Bead...; yes, there's ecclesiastical music there. There's definitely something of the '60s avant-garde and the folk-prodigies Blackshaw adores such as John Fahey or Robbie Basho there too.



To nail Blackshaw down as the sum of his influences would be myopic; there's an emotive quality that here can't be bottled or sentimentalised or replicated for Joe Public. Sure, he's soundtracked a couple of FilmFour advertising spots, but it was as much a surprise to him. “My mum called me up and said she swore she heard my stuff on an advert.”

The reason you're likely not to have heard any of his music has little to do with its accessibility or melodic nature; indeed, plays in the Student Direct office have been met with unanimously positive murmurings. Blackshaw is signed to US indie Young God; whilst good for critical credentials, it does nothing to impact the UK marketplace. “I make money by touring and living cheaply.”

So has he ever considered going for financial gratification, pushing his music under the noses of The Man? No. “I pretty much find that whole industry totally abhorrent. Obviously, I don't think something like X Factor as anything to do with music at all, nor any of the awards like NME or Mercury. It's all about the industry.”

Not that he's worried about his own long-term future. “There'll always be people who love music enough to put it out there without worrying about a profit. The internet is also amazing. We can barely comprehend life without it now, too.” Does he not worry that some people develop a sense of entitlement about music if they continually have access to music – more specifically, his music – for nothing?

“No, I think it's pretty low down on the list of things to get pissed off about. Of course it could be taking money away from an artist who needs the money to either make another record, or pay rent – or even eat – but I think in the long-term people will come to understand these issues better.” See: brilliant and trusting.



That week, some friends & yr corresp. decide to make the daunting journey over Snake Pass to get to Sheffield to see him play in a small vegan cafe. Much as his records, it's a tour de force of understated brilliance. In an October air icy with the oncoming winter, his circular melodies warm the hardest of hearts. Every note floats upward into the rafters and hangs tantalisingly, melancholy and reflective, not a single one wasted.

“I'm blocking November and December off to work on the new album.” There's a long, detail-heavy conversation, in which he documents what this might entail; playing electric 12-string for the first time. The sort of massed open-tuned guitar treatments made famous by Rhys Chatham and Glen Branca. Possibly even vocals, which he's worried about. He should trust himself. He's one of the finest musicians around and he doesn't seem to know it.

BASSHUNTER INTERVIEW

When the opportunity came up to interview the guy who has basically annexed my brother's ringtone for the last year, it was too much to pass up. I wish I had a transcript of the piece because he was genuinely nice, funny and engaging.

“Don’t go home with strangers and don’t forget your scuba gear.” This is how Basshunter (the nom de guerre of one Jonas Altberg, 24, chiselled, handsome) signs off our charming chinwag; with a timely piece of sex education. He’s also calling from his parents’ place on the west coast of Sweden, returning home after an intense bout of writing, record and touring.



We talk about the cranium-rattling new single ‘Every Morning.’ “It’s a true story; I broke up with a girl. On winter mornings I like a cup of coffee, and on one particular day I remember her standing over my bed and smiling, holding a cup for me.” The pair since broke up, and he channelled the wistful sentiment onto the wax that makes up the trailer for the upcoming Bass Generation LP.

His first global smash ‘Now You’re Gone’ told a similar tale of regret married to floor-wobbling bass and unpretentious synth madness. I ask if he’s aware of the clash between uplifting party vibes and sad personal content. “Oh, I guess because I just make music all the time, wherever I can, my personal life just becomes part of it.”

At this point you can see the gears ticking over in his brain. “Yeah, I can see it now. Heh. Yeah, people on the dancefloor having a great time and pointing at each other with smiles on their face singing 'now you're gone'. I suppose it is kind of funny.”



We talk tours; he's going on a nationwide jaunt this October. “There will be special guests, hot girl dancers, and, err, me.” His conversation is full of these slightly self-deprecating nuances, but they're endearing rather than mopy. Basshunter knows who he is, a self-proclaimed computer nerd (many times he speaks with authority on computational matters, keeping the interest of your technophobe hack) who plays on-line games with the same friends he had before the colossal fame.

That said, he doesn't actually like the fame game. “I really fucking hate the celebrity thing.” Wine, women and song – what's to hate? “I've been to a lot of these parties and I've never really had a conversation that interests me.” The tonal shift between talking about his friends, music and gaming (rapture) and the celebrities (purgatory) is pretty palpable. It's hard to feel that sorry for him though.

He uses the same software any Joe Schmo could download in minutes to make his beats with, making his hits some of the most profitable music in history. On top of that he's as unaffected and unpretentious as they come, no more so than when telling a story that indicates where his real priorities lie.

“When a flight gets delayed I always say 'yes!' It means I can get my laptop out and play some games for a while.” It does get him into trouble though. “Sometimes I get too into it and end up shouting “DIE! FUCKING ZOMBIE! DIE !”at the screen, then I look up and realise I'm in the airport and not at home. People don't like that.” No!

We wrap up our chat with the aforementioned instructions to pop a hat on your chap when doing that. Basshunter leaves, not to go back to his latest buxom Eurodance girlfan to follow his own advice, but to welcome home his parents from work with coffee. Jonas Altberg; the new, respectful face of commercial dance music.

UNPUBLISHED

Or is that 'never published'? For whatever reason this article was excised from print; I think it's alright though.

Peter Broderick @ Academy 3
9th September 2009
http://www.myspace.com/peterbroderick

In retrospect, lying on the sticky floor of Academy 3 whilst singing accompanied only by sleigh bells is pretty unusual for a solo performer. After the show Peter Broderick delivered he could have driven a nail through somebody’s foot and still received a rapturous reception.



This genial American, an occasional member of Danish ensemble Efterklang, makes minor symphonies by looping delicate fragments of piano, violin, voice and guitar, simultaneously haunting and wistful. Stripped of percussion, and with minimal lighting, it is his effortless skill in deftly switching from instrument to instrument that provides all the showmanship necessary.

Comparisons to fellow wunderkind Final Fantasy seem not without merit, though Broderick is less whimsical and ornate; songs such as ‘Games Again’ break into Brian Eno territory: glacial, vast, with an undercurrent of foreboding. The songs, even when they break into violent conclusions, never feel threatening, always playful. Never indulgent and always inclusive, one song even loops spontaneous audience applause to use as its percussive base.



Peter Broderick has flown under the radar for some time now, but his easy charisma, boyish looks and – crucially – his arsenal of excellent material should put paid to this minor injustice. Shows like this certainly won’t harm his cause much either. A rare delight.

These two album reviews did run, however. From the sublime...

Converge, Axe To Fall

Generic conventions aren't transgressed by Converge; they're assaulted. They're smothered, strangled and maimed with broken glass. The fourth in a series of practically flawless '00s releases by the Massachusetts quartet - the seminal Jane Doe, the claustrophobic You Fail Me and the triumphant No Heroes - are now joined by the batshit insanity of Axe To Fall.



Converge cram into the 103 seconds of 'Effigy' as much ingenuity, emotion and surprise as U2 have in their career to date. The title track utilises instruments less for musical ends and more for a trench battle with the other dark forces of mediocrity, winning in an effortless crush. The victory song must be opener 'Dark Horse', an endorphin rush like no other, inducing spontaneous acts of leaping about to anyone within a 200-yard radius. There's no filler to be found; just head-melting precision. Slackness of the jaw is to be expected.

Sure, they're earnest. Some will be put off by the out-and-out heaviness and forays into discordance; that's the nature of complete artistic conviction. It's a record that lacks half-measures and compromises, placing a premium on surprise, integrity and passion. They're telling us they can't be beaten. Records like this make you believe them.

...to the ridiculous.

Fuck Buttons, Tarot Sport

The basic problem with 'noise music'? That it is practically impossible to differentiate between unappreciated genius and anti-social posturing performed by over privileged chancers. Make no mistake, Fuck Buttons are the latter.

The Skins generation's own noise band has the looks, the arms-aloft bonhomie and hipster credentials, but substance is in limited supply. Opening track 'Surf Solar' aims for shape-shifting hypnosis, but falls woefully short: a ten-minute track whose trajectory becomes apparent in as many seconds.



Tarot Sport has two kinds of track: songs that begin annoyingly and crescendo predictably, and songs that don't even build. The latter kind are especially indulgent; 'Phantom Limb' surely must be an art-school in-joke (like their song titles, their name) given its howlingly pretentious nature. Not even a millisecond passes which could be mistaken for a good song on a good record.

Great noise music is a physical experience, not an intellectual one. Genre predecessors Whitehouse and Wolf Eyes whip the body into a physical frenzy with blasts of white noise so cacophonous that the brain is coerced into retreat or acquiescence. Fuck Buttons' gravest error on Tarot Sport is their own calculating restraint, which comes across as predictable and patronising. The emperor's new clothes disrobe.

MORE ARTICLES WHAT I DONE

Here are my singles roundups for 2009/10's Student Direct: Mancunion Edition thus far.

SINGLES 21/09
Lady Gaga bolts out of the gate with the fourth single off The Fame, and gosh does it sound like it. The former Stefani Germanotta slides out the single crassest sex synonym since R. Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ (“I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”) - which would be eminently forgiveable were it not married to the same sort of anaemic 'future' R&B sludge that cruds up the third quarter of all Gwen Stefani full-lengths to date.  People compare Gaga to Madonna; Her Madgesty’s fourth single was the mercurial ‘Borderline’.  Just sayin’.



After ‘Now You’re Gone’ seized control of every teenager’s mobile phone on every single bus in the land, the Eurodance arena-shaker known as Basshunter  is out to prove he’s more than just a bloody huge kick drum in relentless 4/4 time. On 'Every Morning' his sonic palette also encompasses a sample of an acoustic guitar, and, err, that’s it. The story is pretty much the standard wishy-washy love gone horribly bloody wrong but forget that SHIT because this is Ibiza YEAH. It meets its design brief (“make a club of proles dance”) and clocks off with admirable brevity, which is the best anyone could have hoped for.

In the dumper: A-Ha return for the umpteenth time with 'Nothing Is Keeping You', which sounds grown-up and windswept and several other synonyms for 'profoundly boring'. Sloppy seconds on offer from The Veronicas, whose bland mall-punk '4ever' charted in their native Australia four years ago when it was still three years past its sell-by date. Rammstein show zero career progress, offering the same industrial-rock nonsense as ever on the not-as-funny-as-they-think 'Pussy'.

Finally we have local (well, from Wigan) chanteuse Nancy Elizabeth, who takes a quantum leap away from her pastoral folk beginnings with an immaculate and dark imagining of what trip-hop would sound like if it originated from the woods instead of the inner city. There's not a wasted note here and her 'Feet of Courage' single proves enough to take this week's crown.

---

SINGLES 28/09
Say what you like about convicted fraudster Lou Pearlman, but when he simultaneously milked and managed US pop behemoth Backstreet Boys, they'd at least manage a high quality single once a year. 'Straight Through The Heart' is conveyor-belt nonsense that straddles a bizarre line between Usher's version of what the future looks like and Ace of Base's conception of the past. One to avoid.

La Roux are so '80s that insiders at their label tell me their next LP will be a recreation of the Miners' Strike played entirely on an Atari ST. Until then we'll have to make do with 'I'm Not Your Toy', a CD so lightweight that when the hacks at the office jabbed it irritatedly out of the stereo, it floated out of the window. Forgettable.



Rudebox was the shame fantasy of his naysayers, but Stoke's version of a charm offensive returns with 'Bodies', which is not The Great Robbie Williams Comeback Single some may have hoped for. Instead, it's more like the boring middle-eight from twenty okay songs stitched inappropriately together. Thankfully none of these songs are 'Rudebox', indicating a positive step forward for all concerned.

Opposite ends of the spectrum represented in this week's British guitar bands; The Enemy return to patronise the working-class a bit more on 'Be Somebody', coming across like the pub-rock Paul Weller manning The Jam karaoke. At least their misguided rage offers some substance; Bombay Bicycle Club have the slender cheekbones, hi-slung guitars and artfully rumpled shoes, but their 'Magnet' single is the lyrical and musical equivalent to a zephyr.

'Save It For Someone Who Cares' is the new effort by The Leisure Society. It won't define any epochs, but will catch you off-guard as you find the work radio tuned to Radio 2. It's chummy, melodic and understated; a parallel world theme tune to The Good Life. The only problem you'll have with this slice of late-summer sunshine is whether you'll still like it when your dad tells you he does too.

---

SINGLES 09/11
If the singles round-up is a lovely party, then Drunkdriver is your pissed-up uncle whose wife just left him. He needs a place to crash, but not as badly as he needs to urinate or learn social graces. This NYC trio flay a cyclone of abuse and ear-junk on their 7” 'Knife Day', a molecular-level garage-rock band practising behind a man violently querying his phone bill. In short, brilliant.



N-Dubz continue their diet pop-hop for the ASBO generation agenda with the admittedly catchy 'I Need You'. Sure, the sentiment is pretty banal (dude needs girl/girl needs dude) but it does contain the line 'look for you on Facebook / will I get a Faceback? / lookin' for you is like a needle in a haystack.' Who says brilliance can't be completely contrived?

What treachery! Girls are all boys! They're burning up the blogs with their sunshine/heartbreak lo-fi but all this hack hears is a reverb-heavy Cast with the American Shane McGowan honking away on vocals. Elsewhere on Indie Boulevard, the brothers Jarman and grumpy cousin Johnny Marr (aka The Cribs), throw out their best effort yet on 'We Share The Same Skies'.

When Britpop was in its pomp, reinforcing ancient 'real rock' stereotypes, Weezer were the ones showing that Americans could do irony without being completely depressed. They were funny and clever and economic – but never at the expense of writing killer songs.



Nowadays they're as cloying as Michael McIntyre's full-bore gurn and a thousand times as irritating. There's a million decisions goes into making an album – literally - and since the turn of the century, they've made every single one wrong. 'If You're Wondering...' is more ham-fisted than Porky Pig. Forget the taxi, this band need a hearse.

NME: THE ALBUM 2009

A quick album review of state of the EDL-dream nation record, landfill indie comp NME: The Album 2009

V/A, NME: The Album 2009

When octagenarian smut-pedlar Ken Russell (ask yer dad) claimed that The Big Pink were 'Kerouac meets Cagney', every British alarm bell should have been sounded. Beacons lit. Emergency frequencies commandeered by the government. Every man on every ship semaphoring the message: INDIE IS FUCKING DEAD.

Nothing against Russell personally but judging by his films, his artistic sensibility lies halfway between a used copy of Razzle (ask yer dad) and one of those Diana plates they sell in the Daily Mail.

If a journey to the cerebral cortex of Jo Whiley sounds like fun, this is the stocking filler for you. The two discs overflow with chance-free identikit sewage. The only thing that differentiates Friendly Fires, Passion Pit and Temper Trap is the space they take up. Even their names are basically the same.

What makes this truly nauseating: in a year where Jay-Z and Dizzee Rascal annexed rock radio, it doesn't feel remiss to note that there is one black musician on this entire 40-track record. If we take the average members per band to be four, then out of 160 musicians then basically we've got ourselves a self-congratulatory white-boy skinny-jeans jungvolk circle-jerk that makes Caligula look like Jim Davidson.

Worse still, there's so much co-opting of ethnic sounds that it begins to feel like a deliberate up-yours to every ethnicity; afro-beat guitars, drum circles and tribal imagery. Talk about fetishing colonial times: there's even a band called Bombay Bicycle Club. Hand, staple, forehead.

The genre that used support the miners and smash down Babylon has become Scrooge McDuck, backstroking in its own affluence. This is the perfect soundtrack to usher David Cameron into power; youthful, white middle-class, devoid of substance and potentially cretinous.