PICK OF THE WEEK
Walls
Urals/Anything But Love (Ecstatic)
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Anglo-Italian duo Walls follow up last year's Coracle album for Kompakt with a double A-side on their own new imprint. Both tracks revisit the European electronics and muscular shoegazing of their previous releases, but here they push them up into the red. Urals takes nine minutes for a bubbling, Drexciya-like synth line to congeal into something hard, insistent and faintly glamorous, with echoes of early Chicago house. On the flip, Anything But Love pitches squelching acid synths against a pounding rhythm. It results in a thrilling racket, like Tangerine Dream writing an intro theme for an eastern European cage fighter.
A*M*E
Heartless (Sony)
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The voice of Duke Dumont's No 1 banger Need U is buried somewhere on this record, apparently. A*M*E seems like an interesting singer, but it's hard to tell from beneath the deluge of pounding kazoo-thud, rhythmic handbrake turns, voices that sound like synths, synths that sound like voices, slowed down bits and Discovery-era Daft Punk heavy metal guitar shredding. Presumably it was only budgetary constraints that prevented them from chucking in a drum solo, children's choir and a Stylophone workout just to be on the safe side. Still, this is going to be killing it in Fitness First for the next three months.
All Dom Wrong
Give Myself Away (Plant Music)
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Beefy, stripped-down, minor-key vocal house track that chugs along so effortlessly you barely notice how good it is, or just how loud you've turned it up. There's a few remixes (most notably by Ashton & Swift), but you can't really improve on the original. This kind of house music is basically the modern version of skiffle: minimal elements required, the same tune slightly reworked again and again, and absolutely no need to change something that works so perfectly from the word go.
VV Brown
Samson (YOY Records)
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If you were quite into that whole vintage-clothes-and-surf-guitars thing that VV used to do, you might want to take a swerve on this one. It sounds more like Fever Ray and the underbelly of M83, with an overly literal video that Trent Reznor would like. Bit of a left turn, then.
The xx
Fiction (Young Turks)
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Beautifully put together, tastefully produced, moodily artistic video, but … Oliver Sim's lead vocal makes it sound like something from a Michael Hutchence solo record.
Avril Lavigne
Here's To Never Growing Up (Epic)
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A joyless retread of Last Friday Night, Katy Perry's paean to alcoholism, amnesia and low-level criminality. The only thing I like about Here's To Never Growing Up is that Lavigne claims she and her cretinous, entitled friends will be "Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs". Ha! Suck that, Thom Yorke.
