CMX - Aion (2003)

1) Pirunnyrkki; 2) Sielunvihollinen; 3) Melankolia; 4) Fysiikka ei kestä; 5) Palvelemaan konetta; 6) Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen; 7) Kyyn pimeä puoli; 8) Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta; 9) Nahkasiipi; 10) Ensimmäinen saattaja; 11) Hautalinnut

Where everything so far has lead to. The apex of it all - heavy, bold and stunning.

Key tracks: "Sielunvihollinen", "Palvelemaan konetta", "Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen"

By this point CMX had started to operate on a cycle of reactions and counter-reactions, each album indirectly acting as the opposite of what came before thanks to the band continuously looking for new challenges. Aion follows suite, and thus after the pick-n-mix Isohaara comes something focused - terrifyingly focused.

Aion is a loose concept album with the running lyrical theme of inherent evil everywhere - spiritual, human, literal or metaphorical. That's where the terrifying from the previous paragraph comes in, as that shadow seeps through its every crook and corner. Aion creeps like it's constantly foreshadowing something moving from the deep any moment now, like it's preceding the final days and we don't even know it. It's not a dark album - there's enough light around its shades - but it's heavy and foreboding. Its walls of sound tower high above and come crashing down, one showman-like centrepiece song at a time. The wry sense of humour CMX usually carry around them is nearly absent here, and the stern attitude found in its place enforces the idea of the band knowing they were onto something important and for once in their lifetime they took it dead seriously. The album's only real moment of levity is the atypically rhyme-happy chorus to the lead single "Melankolia", which rise from the ominously bubbling verses into a delirious singalong romp. But even its cheeriness is more akin to a madman's laugh

Aion's actual legacy as one chapter in the great tome of CMX's journey is that this is the pinnacle of it all, the crossroads where everything meets and the rest shoots out from. Aion wouldn't exist without the three albums before it, the trilogy of development following the band's creative reboot: the raw power of Vainajala, the progressive layers of Dinosaurus Stereophonicus and the experimental freedom of Isohaara are all parts of Aion's DNA. Following the line-up shuffle in 1997 CMX had reinvented themselves as a muscular rock band with a pronounced lean towards all things weird and "artsy", and the five years afterwards were really the band learning to fly again in ways they hadn't thought before. The tangled tendrils of Aion is the sum of the lessons learned, brought together with a single-minded concentration that the nature of the previous albums didn't lend to. The result is a record that not only peaks the evolution that had taken place but it distills CMX as a musical entity, as much as you are able to sum them up anyway; you can hear traces of Aion in every album since, just as the discography so far leads to it piece by piece. There's very few cases I've come across that are as clear definitions of a magnum opus for a group as Aion is to CMX.

The body of Aion is CMX at their heaviest to date. It's not like the former hardcore punks have ever shied away from coming across hard, but with the muscular riff-lead guitar work and Peippo's fiercely technical powerhouse drumming Aion is often ramming through with bulldozer force. The producer has changed from one long-time collaborator Gabi Hakanen to future long-time collaborator Illusion Rake, and Rake taps onto the dynamics of the band's playing more than the texturally-oriented Hakanen did, and it suits this new incarnation of the band. On top of the lead-weight volume CMX layer additional ideas that run through the album tying the songs together: time signature flickers that throw curveballs throughout ("Palvelemaan konetta" taking it as far as it can by restlessly shifting in its skin while still going full steam ahead), sudden swells of string orchestras that descend onto the songs with near-violent bombast, and the appropriately haunting atmospheric passages providing the occasional respite. It's these that offer the album's most diverse outings: the cold steel dread of "Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta", the hopeless march of "Viimeinen saattaja", the circling percussion of "Hautalinnut" which closes the album like a rushed exorcism, and the resurfacing of synth-CMX with the ghostly electronic shimmer of "Sielunvihollinen". "Sielunvihollinen" is a heck of a thing to drop as the second track, especially after the wrecking ball opener "Pirunnyrkki" that rolls through the speakers with no warning. The sudden dead halt slowdown to "Sielunvihollinen"'s ambient murmur is the real start to Aion, the rug pull that drops you to the middle of the album's concept, from where you then try to find your way and emerge song by song afterwards. It's chillingly eery and yet beautiful in its wistfulness, and in its strangeness it's one of the key pieces of the record.

Therein lies Aion's card in sleeve: its cohesiveness and how well it all works together. CMX are consistent but rarely in sound, their albums guided by their oddball sense of direction which finds them frequently taking side tracts that make their own weird kind of sense in ethos, but which most of the time leave the albums as "just" really solid collections of songs. Aion makes sense as a whole entity, even when it diverges from the general path. Its songs stand strong by themselves - even "Sielunvihollinen" and the palate cleansing "Kyyn pimeä puoli" with its Up-era R.E.M. textures - and throughout the record you are treated to some of the best CMX there is. "Melankolia" is the token single that pulls you in but doesn't lose any of the album's core identity with its hooks, "Fysiikka ei kestä" is aching, enormous and yet almost oppressively crushing, "Sivu paholaisen päiväkirjasta" is so tightly wound and constructed that it doesn't sound something a human being could have written, "Palvelemaan konetta" is both brutal and giddily pogoing at the same time. "Kuoleman risteyksestä kolme virstaa pohjoiseen" was considered by Yrjänä at one point the finest song CMX had ever written and it has every right to that title, sharply slithering between frigid acoustic passages and electronically distorted outbursts until the strings rise and fierily engulf over everything, the song burning to the sound of heavy guitars and orchestras: an anthem, but not as we know it. But these songs are still even more fearsome together as part of one pack, with the album's dramatic curves moving through multiple songs at a time. As impressive as the individual moments are, Aion's allure is in the whole journey to its abyss.

It's a superlative review with no ifs and buts, simply because it's an awe-striking album. Aion is CMX perfecting their trick and revealing their hand to clear out the table, in one frightening and dominant move. They never bettered it but they probably even couldn't have if they had wanted to - it's a lightning striking in one place for enough time to conjure together an album that doesn't sound like it was created or written, but that it had always existed somewhere in the universe and then it leaked into our reality through some arcane means. It's a bold and hefty record that everything so far has lead to, and it stands fearsomely tall.

Rating: 9/10

The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)

1) Kissing the Lipless; 2) Mine’s Not a High Horse; 3) So Says I; 4) Young Pilgrims; 5) Saint Simon; 6) Fighting in a Sack; 7) Pink Bullets; 8) Turn a Square; 9) Gone for Good; 10) Those to Come

Mercer's posse graduates into a proper band, but struggle with presenting anything that really sticks this time around. All very pleasant though.

Key tracks: "Mine's Not a High Horse", "So Says I", "Young Pilgrims"

Chutes Too Narrow falls in that awkward category of albums where I struggle to think of anything to actually criticize, and yet it still fails to click with me. The early/mid-00s indie sound so wonderfully represented by the album is close to my heart, it retains everything I enjoyed about Oh, Inverted World and appreciate The Shins for in general, and at various points during my lifetime I’ve called James Mercer a melodic genius (sometimes with hyperbole, sometimes dead seriously) and he's up to his usual tricks here too; but no matter how many boxes I check as I go down the list of things I like about the album, this is still the Shins album that’s remained the most distant for me. What am I supposed to make of that?

The Shins are a livelier bunch on this album than on Oh, Inverted World, having graduated from Mercer’s bedroom solo project-come-band into an actual group of sorts, and the more vibrant full band arrangements throughout the record reflect this. There’s fewer cosy acoustic bedroom strums and there's a lot more electric guitars and pep in the backbone: some parts even rock, or at least what passes as rock in The Shins’ world. The best parts of the songs are still Mercer’s vocal melodies which make his unintelligible word salad lyrics come to life as well as the quirky keyboard parts that are all over the record, both of which were also the best parts of Oh, Inverted World and just sound as great when they’re texturing more energetic tracks. Chutes Too Narrow isn’t a million miles away from the debut despite going more electric, but it’s a step towards the more characterised Shins sound that comes to mind when thinking about Mercer's merry bunch.

 

Still, this whole album somehow leaves me largely unaffected about it even if I do enjoy it in purely objective terms. I guess my main issue here is that there aren’t any real stone cold stand-out songs. “Mine’s Not a High Horse” is the closest the album has one, which in its chorus hits that special Mercer zone where the best parts of the album are distilled into one snappy section, the whimsical keyboard melody climbing around Mercer’s voice and the rollicking rhythm. “So Says I” is another standout but I’m honestly hard-pressed to say whether it’s because I genuinely think it’s a great song, or if it sticks simply because its manic pogoing and twee glam rock attitude distinguishes it so much from everything else around it; the whole album is a caffeine shot into the Shins formula and “So Says I” is its most hyper-awake part. Once the pretty acoustic debut throwback “Young Pilgrims” has had its turn, Chutes Too Narrow settles into a comfortable loop of pleasant and perky indie pop ditties that strum, jangle and frolic in a similar manner over and over again - the country twang of “Gone for Good” is about the only time the album pulls a new trick out of its hat - and it shortly comes to a close after the half hour mark. It all passes by a little too quickly and without stirring things too much: itt doesn’t outstay its welcome, and yet after it’s finished it doesn’t feel like it ever really made much of a visit in the first place. Chutes Too Narrow is a little too unassuming for its own good, and not enough of it really springs to life.

The Shins at their best are a genuine joy and at their worst Mercer throws out overwrought treacle and calls it a song, and Chutes Too Narrow falls so squarely in the dead right middle that it doesn’t tick the reaction off in either direction. It's an accomplished record, I'll give it that - I've been enjoying its presence in my rotation in the weeks preceding this review and so it's not like I can really say a bad word about it. But in the group's chronology it’s the phase between the intimacy of Oh, Inverted World and the full bloom of Wincing the Night Away, and both of those albums offer more distinguished (and distinguishable) takes on the ideas presented on Chutes Too Narrow. This is like a little appetiser to give you an idea of what you can expect from The Shins and to pique your interest towards the courses to follow, but you’ll forget it the moment the next dish comes along. 

Rating: 5/10

M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (2003)

1) Birds; 2) Unrecorded; 3) Run into Flowers; 4) In Church; 5) America; 6) On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain; 7) Noise; 8) Be Wild; 9) Cyborg; 10) 0078h; 11) Gone; 12) Beauties Can Die

Cold and harsh winter landscapes set to crescendos of discordant guitars and swirling synths. Both an evolution and a sidestep in the wider picture, but also the most atmospheric work from an act famed for it. 

Key tracks: "Unrecorded", "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain", "0078h"

The cover for Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is probably meant to come across serene - a group of children spending time together doing nothing at all like small town kids do, and probably making snow angels on that field. But there's something unsettling about it to me, though. It's weird to say this from an image but it looks almost too quiet, like everything has paused to an unnatural still around the frame of the picture and you have this disquieting feeling that there's something creeping in the background, right out of sight and there's something stranger about those kids who've fallen on the ground. And the music associated with that cover probably has a lot to do with that 

Dead Cities etc is musically anything but serene - it's loud, sometimes close to even harshly so. It's primarily because of the guitars and how they are wielded throughout the twelve songs. M83's debut was an atmospheric electronic album with an edge, but for the second album the still-duo have started utilising guitars as a core element of their sound, but abstaining from treating them as a melodic instrument. Dead Cities is full of jagged, distorted guitar walls, mixed high above the other elements: fuzzy synthesizers which sound like they're defying their date of obsoletion, loud crashing drums, almost-industrial sound effects - all sounds that have a similar hard hit. It's similar to how guitars are used in shoegaze, which Dead Cities takes some influence from, but in this case the effect is as if the guitarist had hit the wrong pedal and gone for sharp distortion over echoing reverb. If you can call guitars stabbing, it's the perfect way to describe them here. Just their tone enough is to make the album sound slightly ominous: there's something in them that twitches the reflex to run and never look back no matter what you hear right behind you.

 
Besides shoegaze, post-rock tends to get thrown around a lot as a descriptor for Dead Cities and though it's not a perfect comparison, they both share the same emphasis on dynamics. Most of the songs here are centered around vivid shifts in scope and size in the sound: from how "Unrecorded" melts away its loud alternative rock guitars for its synth-filled second half, the looming organ of "Church" flicking into the high-speed chaos in "America", the constantly growing "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" that sticks to its basic loop but keeps building it louder and more crushingly towering. Vocals aren't really a thing yet for M83 and they barely feature here apart from a few brief and usually wordless appearances and some sample work, and so many of these strictly instrumental works have a cinematic quality to how they build themselves, with a vivid scene set to each song that you can comfortably envision with your imagination, simply on the evocative strength of the music. A cheekier way to describe it would be that it's the crescendos of post-rock with all the minutes of predecessing noodling chopped out; though together these 12 songs do form a greater whole even if it rarely segues from one song to another.

Even though it's only the second M83 album, in retrospect it's already a peculiar detour in the otherwise fairly linear evolution of M83 and it does tie itself together to the main timeline by its emphasis on big, epic moments that M83 are so fond of, but there's little of the euphoria or exhuberance that they normally bring to the table. Only "0078h" sounds genuinely upbeat, with its sampled and cut vocals bouncing around brightly across the atypically positive backdrop: it's a genuinely welcome breather after the dramatic multi-song mountain before it that it gleefully rides down from. Dead Cities isn't a dark record but it's a cold one - something out of a dark winter night, where it's forebodingly quiet and pervasively cold in a way that gets to your bones. The sharp sounds flare up a constant sense of unease, and the contrast between the violent metal cutter guitars and the deeply immersive analog synth sounds is wonderful, and my favourite songs here are the ones where M83 really emphasise that juxtaposition: "Unrecorded" was the first M83 song I heard and it was absolutely arresting from the very first moment, and the switch from its intense first half to the contemplative, stargazing second part never sounds any less inspired, while "On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain" is an exercise in pinpointing a particularly striking mood and then digging deeper and deeper into it with each loop of swirling synthesizers and textural guitar chords. And while it is a slightly different take on the usual M83 traits, there's still overlap: "Run into Flowers" is a look forwards towards Before the Dawn Heals Us, "Gone" gives the great final scene crescendos they're famous for and "Beauties Can Die" is the traditional gentle near-ambient closer, and this time it's also the one song on the record where all discordant elements are gone and what's left are simply the twinkling melodies gently falling from the sky like a peaceful if wistful snowfall.

Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is a great record. It's arguably the most atmospheric M83 have ever been - including the albums that directly leaned towards ambient or movie scores - and if the mood they've picked is the unnerving first 40 minutes of a thriller film right before things begin to escalate, then so be it and they've pulled it off excellently. Throughout it's a captivating, entrancing record, and it really highlights just how great Gonzalez and (on this record) Nicolas Fromageau are at creating stories out of just music because it's those visual images, a lot of which are hard to jot down in writing without coming across a little too self-indulgent, that come to my mind first and foremost when I think of the record. It's a strange, barren record that's continents away from the verdant summers of their biggest albums and while I prefer some of those overall, there's a kind of wizardry here they've not touched since. There's a world within these songs that I'm cautious to explore, but which I'm absolutely compelled to.

Rating: 8/10

Manic Street Preachers - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of... (2003)

CD1: 1) Prologue to History; 2) 4 Ever Delayed; 3) Sorrow 16; 4) Judge Yr'self; 5) Socialist Serenade; 6) Donkeys; 7) Comfort Comes; 8) Mr Carbohydrate; 9) Dead Trees and Traffic Islands; 10) Horses Under Starlight; 11) Sepia; 12) Sculpture of Man; 13) Spectators of Suicide (Heavenly Version); 14) Democracy Coma; 15) Strip It Down (Live); 16) Bored Out of My Mind; 17) Just a Kid; 18) Close My Eyes; 19) Valley Boy; 20) We Her Majesty's Prisoners 
CD2: 1) We Are All Bourgeois Now; 2) Rock 'n' Roll Music; 3) It's So Easy (Live); 4) Take the Skinheads Bowling; 5) Been a Son (Live); 6) Out of Time; 7) Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head; 8) Bright Eyes (Live); 9) Train in Vain (Live); 10) Wrote for Luck; 11) What's My Name? (Live); 12) Velocity Girl; 13) Can't Take My Eyes Off You; 14) Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel; 15) Last Christmas (Live)

The greatest of b-side bands finally gets a compilation of their secret glories, and as great as this is you still can't help but feel it's a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Key tracks: "Prologue to History", "4 Ever Delayed", "Valley Boy"

As a heads-up, the below text is written by someone who’s devoted a lot of hours of his lifetime to hunting down, listening and compiling Manic Street Preachers b-sides, and is probably pretty obnoxious about it. My rating of this compilation is overall positive and if you’re just looking for a quick evaluation whether this is worth it, the answer is yes. But oh, what it could have been...

It was Manic Street Preachers who made me obsessed about b-sides. I have a wild attraction towards b-sides as an art form - far from the discards, hasty throwaways and mediocre chopping board leftovers that many consider them to be, I think non-album material is often a barely touched treasure trove full of exciting off-beat could-be classics, interesting experiments and underappreciated gems that have every right and chance to become special if you let them. I lament the death of the single, simply because it’s inadvertently also meant the death of the b-side. The Manics are in my books the greatest b-sides band there has ever been: their hidden back catalogue is full of immortal hits, powerful secrets and fascinating curios, where I genuinely feel that only paying attention to their albums is restricting yourself from the full extent of what makes the band special. Even their weakest eras have featured non-album songs which really should have found a place on the albums they represented, instead of what actually ended up on them. And that’s why I think Lipstick Traces, the band's first (and in 2020, only one to date) b-sides compilation, is a bundle of missed opportunities.

I understand that certain compromises must be made if you want to try to appeal to an audience beyond your most obsessed fans. By 2003, you could have filled a five-CD box set with the amount of b-sides the band had released, and that’s just counting the original studio material alone. So, making a more palatable product by selecting the best of the best to fill just a standard double-disc compilation makes sense from that perspective. What makes much less sense is the slapdash way the band have gone about the whole project, while fully knowing just how much people wanted something like this at the time. The song selection is completely haphazard, where fan favourites and songs they voted to be on the compilation on an official poll were ignored in place of choices that seem completely random. Making matters worse, only a single disc of the compilation is devoted to the original studio material, and the second disc is made entirely out of the band’s covers. That selection doesn't even include all the covers the band had officially released by this stage, leaving you with a 45-minute disc with so much empty space that you could have used to include more of what people actually wanted.

The covers disc is my main gripe with Lipstick Traces. For all the praise I heap on the Manics, they’ve never been a particularly interesting band to interpret other people’s songs. Nine times out of then the cover sounds largely identical to the original, just with James’ voice and usually a slightly beefier production; the tenth case only tends to be different because it’s just James all by himself on an acoustic guitar. The most out there of the lot is "Been a Son", where Nirvana's original punk rocker is made into an aggressively acoustic romp-and-stomp. There’s good material on the second disc - “We Are All Bourgeois Now” (McCarthy) is actually quite great (and technically not a b-side as it was a hidden track on Know Your Enemy), the newly recorded version of “Take the Skinheads Bowling” (Camper Van Beethoven) is good rock and roll fun and a marked improvement over the rather anaemic version they originally released in 1997, and James’ acoustic live version of Wham's “Last Christmas” is warm like a cosy fireplace on Christmas Eve. The only real weak spot is the early live rendition of Guns n Roses’ “It’s So Easy” where the band try to be more macho than they can pull off, with a shoddy recording quality to boot. But none of it feels even remarkably essential; you won’t find any revealing re-interpretations here, just recordings of a band faithfully playing songs they like. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever feel like revisiting the second disc outside the intent of giving it another spin because you feel guilty about neglecting it.

For all my moaning about what isn't on Lipstick Traces, the first disc where all the originals lie is still largely golden. The live version of "Strip It Down" is superfluous and unnecessary, "Bored Out of My Mind" and "Socialist Serenade" are fine tracks but definitely not songs I'd weigh over several others, and there's generally a bit of a bias towards the Everything Must Go period, presumably because that was the big success era and the new fans who bought the singles back then probably became very familiar with the respective b-sides. But taken as simply a selection of songs, this is really high class: it could very well be a mirror realm greatest hits record, because so many of the songs could have comfortably been singles in their own right. "Prologue to History" is such a massive anthem full of quickly unhinging anger that its lead position is quite possibly the best possible way to indicate this isn't just a selection of scraps (it was only ever taken off This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours because tonally it had no place on the album), and the gorgeously dreamy "Valley Boy" features one of James' greatest guitar solos and is an epic penultimate piece that could have rightly closed off a proper album. The tender "Sepia", autumnal "Just a Kid" and jovial "Mr Carbohydrate" are all rock solid big hitter rock songs with hooks of diamond. The early Manics' glam punk fury is perfectly represented through "Sorrow 16" (with its iconic spelling lesson), the ridiculous gatling gun vocal hell of "Sculpture of Man", the ugly-tearjerker "Donkeys", the jagged proto-The Holy Bible "Comfort Comes" and the original Heavenly Recordings version of "Spectators of Suicide", which has a raw, unpolished rock charm to it that the near-ambient album version would drop. For all my whinging, it's definitely a representative collection in terms of style and breadth.

There are also two previously unreleased tracks on the first disc, both of which befit the "secret history" angle quite neatly and which manage to tick both the early and later Manics boxes. "4 Ever Delayed" was originally intended to be one of the new songs for the Forever Delayed hits compilation but fell through the cracks for unexplainable reasons (the liner notes on Lipstick Traces are completely non-existent outside basic production credits, which is a tragedy) and only ever found a place on an obscure Japanese EP: it's made of the same ethereal synths and glistening keyboards as all the other new tracks of the era, but punching through with guitar walls in a most befittingly Manics-esque fashion, bridging between the classic Manics sound and the new ideas to come. It's a great, great song and giving it a proper spotlight here is one of Lipstick Traces' best graces. "Judge Yr'self" is a brand new recording but the song itself traces to around 1994-1995 when the band wrote it for potential inclusion on the 1995 Stallone-lead Judge Dredd film - the plans were buried when Richey disappeared and the song was forgotten, until the band decided to finish the job for Lipstick Traces. And it crunches - it's one of the heaviest songs Manics have recorded, veering close to metal at places. It's all visceral aggression and hard guitar riffs, James screaming his lungs out like he hasn't in years. It, too, is an excellent song.

I mentioned Lipstick Traces acting like a mirror realm greatest hits compilation earlier down the line, and it makes the most sense to consider it as a companion piece to Forever Delayed: The Greatest Hits released in the previous year. Both are compilations of great songs marred by slightly eyebrow-raising selections, both have two token new songs, both have second discs of less essential material (if you get the deluxe edition of Forever Delayed with the remixes) - and both should act as a taster for the world of riches that awaits those who choose to dip further. Lipstick Traces is the furthest thing from comprehensive and if you're a more casual listener it probably does a decent purpose, but what I hope it does to anyone who listens to it is to light a yearning to hear more of Manics' hidden treasures. It may take a little effort these days - the anniversary re-releases have almost consistently included all the b-sides from their respective periods which helps - but it's worth it. Lipstick Traces represents the tip of the iceberg: the tip already shines bright, and it only gets even brighter further down. Don't let my fanboy whinging get to you: this would be a 9 without the covers disc bringing the party down.

Rating: 8/10

Travis - 12 Memories (2003)

1) Quicksand; 2) The Beautiful Occupation; 3) Re-Offender; 4) Peace the Fuck Out; 5) How Many Hearts; 6) Paperclips; 7) Somewhere Else; 8) Love Will Come Through; 9) Mid-Life Krysis; 10) Happy to Hang Around; 11) Walking Down the Hill; 12) Some Sad Song [hidden track]

Happy-go-lucky troubadours run out of luck, get less happy. The most inwards-looking Travis ever got, and they got my full attention at last.

Key tracks: "Quicksand", "Love Will Come Through", "Mid-Life Krysis"

Travis - the harmlessly inconspicuous, squeaky clean, la-de-da sing-along guys mostly known for earworm fluff like “Why Does It Always Rain on Me” - aren’t the sort of act you’d ever expect to be moody, but the borderline self-consciously dour, gray-tone cover of 12 Memories speaks for itself. This should have been a victory lap for Travis, given the worldwide success of the preceding album The Invisible Band, but then everything hit. The post-9/11 years were a mess of global anxiety, the UK was dragged into a war no one wanted to partake in and on a more personal level, Travis themselves almost reached their end when drummer Neil Primrose nearly died in an accident, suffering significant injuries instead. 12 Memories was born out of a tumultuous period where things started getting a little too heavy to handle and no one really wanted to make another upbeat pop album. Instead, the sessions started producing catchy tunes about civilian war casualties, violence and general downbeat introspection. 

Travis can’t escape themselves - there’s still plenty of hummable melodies and catchy choruses - but they couldn’t be any different from their usual selves. It’s most clearly audible in the album’s tone, dominated by a constant sense melancholy and frequent moments of quietly bubbling frustration breaking through. When the results are more familiarly Travis-like, there’s still a twist there: “Quicksand” and “Somewhere Else” are punctuated by their pessimism and ache respectively, “Re-Offender” could have probably slotted neatly within the past albums if it wasn’t for its depiction of domestic abuse and “Love Will Come Through” is a Travis love song as sung by someone who knows they’re lying through their teeth just to keep a semblance of hope around. “Paperclips” - a simple acoustic-based song - is a bleak dark night of the soul and completely devoid of any light, and it’s actually effective. It also makes it clear that Fran Healy’s voice can in fact be a very effective thing - his soft-spokenly frail tone finds its natural habitat in a moodier context.

But while 12 Memories is largely characterised by its mood, what makes it at times downright exciting is the band’s decision to move somewhere different sonically while they’re at it hacking away their past reputation: it is - by Travis’ standards - an adventurous album. Who would have thought you’d hear something as abruptly violent as the guitar breaks on “How Many Hearts” on a Travis album? Later on “Mid-Life Krysis” backs its verses with a constant drone that gives it an unsettling tension, “Happy to Hang Around” is freezing cold much thanks to its sharply mixed drums and other sudden production tweaks that make it sound ever so disjointed, and at the very end the band move their instruments to the background and layer the restlessly dreamy “Walking Down the Hill” with a near-electronic soundscape that takes it into a world of its own. Travis explore new sounds and elements throughout the album’s length and not only does it keep the listener on his toes, but through doing so they manage to beat away one of my personal complaints of Travis’ catalogue, i.e. that they’ve rarely offered anything new to the table. 

So when a band who is perfectly able to knockout a dang good tune but suffers from frequent stagnation ends up making an album where they very decidedly avoid repeating themselves, you get to the juicy center part of the Venn diagram. Besides a couple of slightly lesser tunes (”Peace the Fuck Out” wastes a great bridge to an otherwise passable ditty where the most embarrassingly memorable thing is the awkward swearing, and “How Many Hearts” only ever comes alive when the guitar walls come crashing), 12 Memories combines Travis’ best melodic elements with really neat arrangements and a tangible emotional weight that does its own great job carrying the album. It’s especially apparent after the halfway point, because starting from “Somewhere Else” the album really transforms from a nice excursion to actually great. “Love Will Come Through” and “Mid-Life Krysis” are the album’s absolute highlights, “Walking Down the Hill” never stops being mesmerising in its passive brooding and even the hidden track “Some Sad Song” is a secret success - its solo piano melancholy is a perfect full stop at the end of the tracklist. The awkward notion that a serious tone indicates good music is obviously hanging about, but whether it was because the context drove the band this way or they were heading towards a change anyway after reaching one apex point, it’s undeniable how inspired 12 Memories sounds at its best. If Travis’ main issue always was how intangible they could be with their happy-go-lucky dittiness (to the point that titling one of their albums The Invisible Band is almost ironic) then here’s both the emotional resonance and the consistently good songs that break through that. 

This seems to be the album that tends to get brushed off when Travis fans discuss the band, but for the same reasons it’s the record that those who’ve never been that bothered by the Scottish quartet might find worth their time. What 13 was to Blur, this is to Travis. 

Rating: 8/10

Arcade Fire - Arcade Fire EP (2003)

1) Old Flame; 2) I'm Sleeping in a Submarine; 3) No Cars Go; 4) The Woodlands National Anthem; 5) My Heart Is an Apple; 6) Headlights Look Like Diamonds; 7) Vampire/Forest Fire

Hard to call this the meager beginnings given how big this sounds at times, but in the AF scale of things it's the humble beginnings. Everything you like about the band can be found here, just with a cosier tone.  

Key tracks: "Old Flame", "I'm Sleeping in a Submarine", "Headlights Look Like Diamonds"

You can already hear it on this humble debut EP, which likely wouldn't get half the attention it's received if it wasn't for the album that followed, that Arcade Fire operate on Big Ideas and they were reaching for a Big Sound to go with them from the get-go. As far as low-key debuts go, the Arcade Fire EP (or Us Kids Know, as I've sometimes heard it called) is more ambitious than most, and certainly one of the more bombastic. Part of what makes Funeral so special and Arcade Fire such a force overall is the combination of personal songwriting with a decidedly anthemic sound you can sing along to with your brethren crowds; that goal has been there from the start, and in a lot of ways this is like a prototype for Funeral. Just cosier and less dynamic.

At this stage the big ideas are coming from a relatively inexperienced band who sound like they're recording this at their own home, and the general recording aesthetic matches this. Where Funeral would feature a quadrilogy of songs about a neighbourhood getting snowed in, the cuts here sound like what you'd expect from a band holed up inside a room during the cold winter. The tip-toe shuffling and piano-twirling "I'm Sleeping in a Submarine" and the world-weary"Heart Is an Apple" are natural born torchlight moments with an "(Acoustic)" tag tacked onto them, and "The Woodlands National Anthem" is mostly built around just vocals, an acoustic guitar and some assorted handclaps and random percussion, but it still sounds like there's an intent to fill the entire room with its sound. It's a band dreaming to be big yet not quite having the setup to go all the way, but they're doing the best they can with what they do have and that will goes a long way: even with the stakes lowered there's still a kind of grandeur to these could-be anthems.

The intensity that Arcade Fire are famous for is also present here already, and the best songs of the EP reflect that. Both "Old Flame" and "Headlights Look Like Diamonds" are high-speed and high-energy, the group putting their all into a couplet of songs that rush through with the joy and thrill of a new band finding their wings. "Old Flame" is a great way to kick off the EP, full of drama with its accordion and strings raising the wind in its pounding rhythm, but "Headlights Look Like Diamonds" is absolutely the highlight of the entire EP, Both guitar and glockenspiel riffs that are instantly imprinted in your head, a strong backbone of a thumping beat that explodes into a flurry as the vocals go crazy, and the inspired flicking between the tightening hook of the verses and the flood-like rush of sheer vibrant joy that is the chorus - it's the anthem the rest of the EP has paved the way for. At the end of the the journey the band lift off and become genuinely huge with the colossal crescendo of "Vampire/Forest Fire", starting out as a decisively moody americana ballad with synths and growing in intensity from thereon into a wall of sound where you get a glimpse of the furious show force the band would become famous for on stage.

That's kind of what you can expect from the EP - familiar traits but with a more grassroots tone. The anthemic heights are there, the expanded instrumentation beyond the usual rock band sounds rears its head frequently and both Butler and Chassagne's vocals have already found their signature tones (and Chassagne practically takes co-lead vocals throughout the EP). If you heard this before the band had released anything else, I imagine it would've been quite stunning; and even now, in a world where one will likely come to this after hearing most of the other releases, it's still plenty enjoyable even if the songwriting isn't quite the perfect sharpness yet. The only slight disappointment here is the somewhat flaccid version of "No Cars Go", a song that would go on to become one of the band's defining songs some years later when re-recorded for Neon Bible; and I guess that's likely the only reason it sounds disappointing because the version here already has many of the same ideas that would carry over to the re-recording, it just doesn't sound quite as regal and gorgeously gigantic as the later version does. It does beg the question if any of the other songs here would suffer from the same had they been recreated with a more refined touch later on, and I've definitely made amends with it over the years, but even acknowledging that it still feels a little off in that familiar-but-not-quite way.

Besides that, it's hard to really fault this, even if it's hard to praise it to high heavens either in the overall context of the Arcade Fire back catalogue. The Arcade Fire playing here are still an unrefined version of themselves, full of fire but occasionally uneven: as a first ever recording it's great and humongously inspired, but it's also obvious it's more of a launch board for future achievements than a completely realised work on its own. Still, the songs are good and occasionally honestly great, and you can detect traces of Funeral's magic throughout - it's almost like a more intimate flipside for that album. The band likely never imagined this would continue to have the kind of widespread release it does but I'm glad it's had the relative longevity, even if among the hardcore perhaps, because it's still a worthwhile listen.

Rating: 7/10

Physical corner: Gatefold with a fold-out lyrics sheet.

Electric Six - Fire (2003)

1) Dance Commander; 2) Electric Demons in Love; 3) Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother); 4) Danger! High Voltage; 5) She’s White; 6) I Invented the Night; 7) Improper Dancing; 8) Gay Bar; 9) Nuclear War (On the Dance Floor); 10) Getting into the Jam; 11) Vengeance and Fashion; 12) I’m the Bomb; 13) Synthesizer

Exuberant, infectious, dumb fun. Easy to underestimate - there's more here than initially meets the eye.

Key tracks: "Dance Commander", "I'm the Bomb", "Synthesizer"

Fire, Electric Six’s debut, isn’t one for subtleties. It’s very openly here to entertain you and to burn the disco down, figuratively or literally. The song trio that turned the album into a hit - “Danger! High Voltage”, “Gay Bar” and “Dance Commander” - are so ludicrous and screw-loose it’s hard to believe they actually existed beyond a Youtube meme somewhere (or time-appropriately, a Flash video on Newgrounds or alike). A music fan’s immediate approach would be to dig in to find some hidden meaning or nuance but there’s none here. This is plain and simple dumb fun.

It’s a little unfortunate that this was Electric Six’s only real hit with the general public because all those intricacies would follow later. Over the years Electric Six have blossomed into a dangerously smart and ludicrously fun band loaded with charisma and wit. During their debut however, all that was still under development. The core of the sound is intact but the quirks aren’t there yet, and likewise frontman Dick Valentine’s lyrics here rely rather exclusively on the power of their ludicrous topics (see the track titles, which state exactly what the songs are about) and crass punchlines (“I might like you better if we fucked together”, etc). One-dimensional is an ugly word but it’s pretty apt here: what you see is what you get, and what you get is effectively Andrew WK’s I Get Wet going to the disco.

On the flipside, even though they’d become an objectively better band later down the line Electric Six are hardly devoid of merit here. It takes talent to write a genuinely memorable hook, let alone so many the songs practically drown in them, and there’s skill involved in crafting genuinely enjoyable dumb fun that’s more than just a moment’s novelty. Fire has a single-minded focus on both and doesn’t beat around the bush with it: at under 40 minutes it’s one of E6’s shortest albums and also one of their most consistent. Most E6 albums stray from the path a few times down the tracklist but Fire keeps the quality control up throughout. Even the more obvious filler like “Getting into the Jam” or “Nuclear War (On the Dance Floor)” have the capability to be genuinely entertaining simply because of the sheer energy and fury they have, and given they’re over in a minute or two anyway they don’t even overstay their welcome.

When that energy and the overall tight interplay between the band is combined with better writing, it gets real good. It’s all ridiculously over the top but everyone knows what they’re doing and what to focus on, so it all becomes very irresistible: you can’t help but smile to something as fun as “Naked Pictures” or “Improper Dancing”. Sometimes the band even reveal how surprisingly melodic they can get underneath all the macho riffs, leading to tracks like “Electric Demons in Love” and “I’m the Bomb” to become some of the best things on offer. A special shout-out goes to Valentine himself, who was born to front a band like this: he’s the perfect showman for music like this and a great deal why it works far better than it probably should. That said, for all the talk about Fire’s single-mindedness, its arguable highlight is its closer “Synthesizer”. It’s the sole occasion on the album that calms down and gets serious (relatively, given the context). It’s enchanting, suave and downright atmospheric, with the titular instrument laying a cool shine all over the hypnotic rhythm that reimagines the band’s dance rock as something far more exquisite. As the finale for the album you can approach it from many angles: you can think of it as the comedown of the party, as the full stop to end any hypothesised argument raised against anyone who would say Electric Six are just a novelty group without a real vision, or as an alluring glimpse to the future and the band’s development. Either way, it’s the perfect conclusion to the album.

The subsequent albums would offer more of where “Synthesizer” came from and are definitely better in that regard, but when simple pleasures are pulled off this efficiently and consistently it’s not hard to love the result. Fire is by far Electric Six’s most fun album, and that alone counts for a lot.

Rating: 8/10

The Cardigans - Long Gone Before Daylight (2003)

1) Communication; 2) You’re the Storm; 3) A Good Horse; 4) And Then You Kissed Me; 5) Couldn’t Care Less; 6) Please Sister; 7) For What It’s Worth; 8) Lead Me into the Night; 9) Live and Learn; 10) Feathers and Down; 11) 03.45: No Sleep; BONUS TRACKS 12) Hold Me (Mini Version); 13) If There Is a Chance

Rating: 9/10

Americana certainly isn't the first thing that would come to mind when thinking of The Cardigans, but it's the best guise they ever wore.

Key tracks: "Communication", "You're the Storm", "Live and Learn"

Five years went by between Gran Turismo and Long Gone Before Daylight. The international, pigeon-holing success of “Lovefool” had caused The Cardigans to radically re-invent themselves for the cold, electronic Gran Turismo in order to shed their novelty success, only for “My Favourite Game” to turn into another soundtrack success and the brush with fame to continue. Burnt out, the members took a break from the band and focused on side projects.  Nina Persson turned to americana with A Camp, Peter Svensson recorded an album of Swedish melancholy with Kent’s Joakim Berg and Magnus Sveningsson’s Righteous Boy released their single album of homely indie pop. Every release signaled a sizable desire to do something different from their main band, but by coincidence they all to shared themes and tones: a move onto something earthier and more personal. 

Those albums form a direct line to the otherwise another sudden style change that Long Gone Before Daylight represents, which is for all purposes concerned a complete reboot for The Cardigans: the only thing connecting it to the early twee pop records are the band members themselves. It’s a somber album by seasoned musicians where the arrangements are more elaborate and the songwriting more nuanced. Everyone had grown, learned new things and wanted to explore a more serious direction while still retaining the band chemistry. You could call it matured and it wouldn’t be a vague exaggeration. 

“Communication”, which opens the album, lays down the ground rules. The calmly moving but slowly unfurling ballad resembles nothing the Cardigans have done before in tone or arrangement. Persson has shed away her old girl-next-door vibes and become a powerful frontwoman, her voice now resonating emotional gravitas, while Svensson introduces the subtle guitar licks and less-is-more melodies that will define much of the album later on. It all comes together to form a song that hooks right from the start despite how unassumingly it begins, but turning into a gorgeous showstopper by the time it ends with Persson’s resigned desperation and the lush strings around her. It might actually be the best thing the band have put their names under. 

The point of “Communication” is to clear the table and re-set it, and once it has done so it paves the way for the rest of Long Gone Before Daylight to surprise, excite and hit the feels. The arrangements are rich and full of layers and intricate details, but the band understand the power of the space between notes and let the music - and Persson’s voice - have breathing space. Persson in fact is such an integral part of the album: Long Gone Before Daylight is an 11-song collection of romantic fatalism, of mistakes regretted and redemption plead, arranged into americana-twinged moodpieces that would be right at home in the wee hours accompanied by an emptying bottle of wine. Her charisma grew intensely during the band’s hiatus and her lyrics became more nuanced, and now they’re both key reasons why songs such as “And Then You Kissed Me”, “Lead Me into the Night” or “03.45: No Sleep” have the listener hang onto every moment and why they resonate so deeply. 

These moments of calm where the wistful emotions cling onto every note highlight most obviously what a gorgeous sounding album Long Gone Before Daylight is, but when it does shift gears all that pent up emotion finds a moment of release. The album can handle it classily (“Please Sister”, “For What It’s Worth”) or wildly (“Good Horse”) if it wants, but most powerfully when they let their new sound to simply soar with “You’re the Storm” and “Live and Learn”: the former is a yell of liberation against the tides as moves from its gentle verses to its colossal chorus, and the latter is all-around fantastically life-affirming but especially notable in the way how introduces a new backing vocal harmony for each part of the song, each one grander than the previous time around. “Live and Learn” actually gets so majestic by the time it reaches its most anthemic heights that it’s the one major challenger for “Communication” as the album’s masterpiece. 

Two such superlative songs and a whole group of consistently great accompaniments is wild when you compare it to the past albums. They were fine albums and had an assortment of great songs here and there, but were by no means the kinds of records that would inspire you to crave for more. I don’t intend to say that you can only create truly meaningful records when you go all serious and moody (let’s not forget that was the entire shtick of Gran Turismo, much more so than here), but it’s really evident that moving away from their established method of working and taking time off to re-discover and develop their musical selves helped everyone in the band to really focus on their craft. Long Gone Before Daylightis more than just a reboot, it’s a brand new start from scratch. It couldn’t have worked out better - the debut album by the New Cardigans is downright a classic album.   

My copy of the album is the standard UK edition that comes with a couple of bonus tracks. “Hold Me (Mini Version)” is a half-minute intro to the full song that was released separately as a b-side and its inclusion here without the full deal is questionable at best, and mainly acts as a bridge between the main album and the bonus cuts (alongside a gap of silence, which more bonus-featuring albums should do more often). Thus the main extra is “If There Is a Chance”, another lovely ballad-type that shares much of its traits and strengths with the main album. It’s more of the same, which in this case is by no means a bad thing. 

Blur - Think Tank (2003)

1) Ambulance; 2) Out of Time; 3) Crazy Beat; 4) Good Song; 5) On the Way to the Club; 6) Brothers and Sisters; 7) Caravan; 8) We’ve Got a File on You; 9) Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club; 10) Sweet Song; 11) Jets; 12) Gene by Gene; 13) Battery in Your Leg

Rating: 8/10

More Albarn and less Blur, but an impressive and captivating transformation that ends up becoming one of the band's essentials.

Key tracks: "Ambulance", "Out of Time", "On the Way to the Club"

Across the folded open lyrics booklet of Think Tank there’s a single sentence printed over everything else in bold red: “I AIN’T GOT NOTHING TO BE SCARED OF”. The same line is the first set of words heard on the actual album as well, repeated numerous times throughout “Ambulance”. It’s as obvious a statement as they come, a pre-emptive response to the situation Blur had found themselves in after guitarist Graham Coxon had abruptly left over creative differences. Blur were heading towards new horizons with a new sound and missing an integral member – sure enough they had something to be scared of.

But that’s exciting. Blur wouldn’t be as interesting as they are without having shed their skin and breaking apart from their past a number of times before already. The Britpop period had a limited longevity and appeal, and the band had realised that - ever since the self-titled album the band had been distancing themselves from it. The crunched-up guitars of the self-titled had transformed into the jam-like sound textures and introspection of 13 and where most bands would lead their hit compilations with an openly chorus-driven single to fit among all the others, Blur’s Best Of was promoted via “Music Is My Radar”, an erratically twitching rhythm monster that was more a seizure than a singalong. It’s Blur’s post-Britpop period that has cemented their place as more than a periodical footnote and Think Tank was going to follow up on it: its original “Darklife” concept was intended to depict the dark flipside of modern, urban British life that the band celebrated back in the day, a direct nod to their past but eager to brush it off rather than return to it.

Musically the band were already heading further towards where “Music Is My Radar” had come from, but Coxon’s departure flipped the balance. Him and Damon Albarn’s musical ambitions had been straying further apart for a while and with no countering voice, Albarn became the sole creative lead of the band - and at this stage Albarn was interested in anything but Blur. He had already been infatuated with Mali for a while (leading to the sneaky solo debut Mali Music) and thus Think Tank ended up being partially recorded in Mali, with extensive featuring of local sounds and musicians. The birth of Gorillaz and their slow shift into Albarn’s primary project also creeped up underneath the surface. The rhythmic elements of Think Tank borrow a note from Gorillaz’s hip-hop flavoured genre mash, tracks like “Good Song” or “On the Way to the Club” are direct relatives to the more subdued Gorillaz songs like “Tomorrow Comes Today” and the contemporary pop flirtations lead to the hiring of Fatboy Slim as a partial co-producer for Think Tank - a move that directly lead to Coxon leaving. Albarn was expanding his visions and reinventing Blur to go along with his personal projects, and the rest of the band went along with it. If Think Tank’s detractors ever say that it isn’t a real Blur album, there is a point buried underneath somewhere there.

There’s an element of a blessing in disguise there. Albarn’s toe-dipping into new waters was rather haphazard - Mali Music is a passion project that has little to offer to anyone who isn’t actually Albarn and there’s a reason why the first Gorillaz album largely lives on through its singles and not the rather hit-and-miss whole. Using Blur as his melting pot gave him a way to play around with all those new elements on a platform he was most familiar with, channeling the sounds through a songwriting style he knew how to wield effectively. So while Think Tank may not be necessarily the most Blur-esque album in the world, it’s one of their most exciting. A clearly inspired songwriter known for a good song utilising new interesting elements to create atmospheric, oft-melancholy mood pieces sounds like a winning recipe, and time from time again Think Tank comes off truly inspired and captivating There’s a reason why “Ambulance” leads the charge - not just because of its defiant opening line, but its phenomenal mixture of crashing drums, crystalline keyboards, shoegaze guitars and the deep, plowing bass makes it clear straight away that the band are still going strong without Coxon. On a good day I’d easily say it’s probably Blur’s best song: it’s a bold release of pent-up emotion that builds up into an evocative wall of sound, breaks down into a loose funk and then re-constructs itself again into an unraveling giant. “On the Way to the Club”, “Brothers and Sisters”, “Good Song” and “Sweet Song” are A-game as well, and “Out of Time” is such a beautifully swerving, haunting ballad that even post-reunion Coxon’s stubbornness couldn’t deny its strength. They’re not a million miles away from the inwards-turned soundscapes of 13 but the method of expression here is evolutionary rather than a retread. The increasingly more important rhythmic backbone of the album also gives the normally fairly invisible Alex James and Dave Rowntree a chance to finally shine. For once they’re pushed to the front and allowed to take an equal part of the sound, and particularly James’ crunchy bass contributes greatly to the album’s feel. 

Annoyingly the band hadn’t departed from their old self in the ways that it would most matter - they’re once again in grave need of an editor as the actually fantastic parts of Think Tank are muddled by the haphazard bunch of loose ends and half-baked sketches that keep cropping up. The punk blast of “We’ve Got a File on You” and somewhat aimless “Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club” are at least entertaining even if clear secondary material, but other areas are more misfired. “Crazy Beat” was obviously made to be a single and it clunkers out in the most awkward way, the thick groove of “Jets” goes for three minutes and a terrible saxophone solo too long and surely the only reason anyone ever mentions “Battery in Your Leg” is because it’s the only song on the album that features Coxon, because its bored slog certainly isn’t worth bringing up otherwise. With a little pruning and tightening Think Tank could have been even better than it is, both cohesive and consistent, but nevermind - even with its flaws it’s still among the best of Blur, lacking in the crowd singalongs but offering some of the most musically interesting tracks the band’s produced. It does the fantastic thing of revealing a whole different side of the band, which gets you to appreciate them in completely new way. Coxon’s re-joining and subsequent refusal to play the majority of the songs from the album has of course buried it deeper in the dusts of history than it should be, but maybe he’s just feeling particularly self-conscious about the whole ordeal. Blur certainly managed to cope pretty great without him.