| 1998 |
July is album month, officially! Except for
Radiohead, of course, one step ahead of the game,
putting theirs out a couple of weeks before. Firstly The Prodigy's
The Fat of the Land. How good this record is could
hardly matter less. We know it's going to sell millions here,
and we can count on the American populous to lap up the hype British dance music
is receiving over there and buy it by the truck-load too. It will probably spawn
2 or 3 more hit singles. Liam Howlett will be a
rich man. The album itself I was disappointed with. What does it sound like?
Exactly like you'd expect! The best tracks are the ones you have already heard,
there's very little else you could call new.
Next up, Vanishing Point, inspired by the old
road movie of the same name, by Primal Scream.
Their music now lies between their last, more rocky (and less good) album and
the dance influenced sound of the seminal Screamadelica.
The material is well mixed up on the record and comes across as a great summer
drive soundtrack. A due return to form.
An aside: I'm sorry too folks, but Oasis are back. They haven't changed either. Not content
with ripping off Beatles tunes Noel Gallagher
recently borrowed the very words out of John Lennon's
mouth and proclaimed his band as "bigger than God". This isn't a big deal, it's
just Oasis mouthing off again. People would care more about what he said if they
thought Noel was as intelligent as John Lennon, but his recent comment had just
enough impact to make the front page of The Daily Mirror. God sleeps easy.
While you're looking the other way, Teenage Fanclub
have sneaked back into the room. On the back of their biggest hit single yet,
Aint That Enough (number 16 or thereabouts) comes the new LP,
Songs From Northern Britain. It is, without being
flashy, a great record. While sometimes seeming outwadlly similar to their peers, there
are few vital areas that set them apart from others. While the likes of Oasis and
Ocean Colour Scene perform their frequent smash-and-grab raids on the tunes of our
old favourites, the fannies embrace the past and produce songs that instead of being
irritating are warm and friendly. They're kind of songs you like to have in the room
with you, particular charmers being Start Again and
I Don't Care. Good to have 'em back!
Good records are like buses. There's none for ages then a
whole stack of 'em comes along at once. Firstly, from perhaps
the most unlikely of sources comes Lazy Day by ex-Take
That squealer Robbie Williams. Apparently he writes all
his new tunes himself, and I can't be the only one thinking
he should have started sooner! U2's Last Night on Earth
is also a pleasant surprise, sounding more like a look back
than any new direction. The Seahorses Blinded By The Sun
sees them still proving the critics wrong as it hangs around
the top end of the charts for a while, accompanied by similar
performance from the album in the LP charts. Another you can't
help but notice is the Stones sampling Bittersweet Symphony
by recent reformers The Verve. Some have hailed it as 'best
single of the nineties', others as 'a bit annoying'. I'd just
like to know where all the people suddenly deciding to buy
their records were before.
Coolio has a song out called C U
When you get there.
It's not especially good in my opinion, but it is kind
of unique for a rap artist at the moment not to be dead, or
singing about someone who is. Nor is the song taken from a film soundtrack.
For some reason though it really reminds me of the brilliant
All That I Got is you by Ghostface Killah, which I
near-criminally forgot to give a mention to when it was
out as a single.
If all that weren't enough, a buoyant mood is
maintained by Teenage Fanclub's album defying their
track record by blasting into the charts at number 3! There's
hope yet for the youth of today! If it grows on everyone
else like it has on me it may just stick around for a while.
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