| 1998 |
October.
I saw the Warm Jets
play (supporting Teenage Fanclub)
early this month and was impressed enough to buy their latest 7" Hurricane.
An excellent piece of work it is too! It's a simple enough pop song, neither
epic or unweildy but a very tidy tune and catchy all in one. A winner!
Courtesy of Stu I got hold of the Bentley Rhythm Ace
LP and was fairly impressed. There's some cool ideas jumbled amongst the
samples and wacky song titles (Why is a Frog Too..?,
Who put the Bom in the Bom Bom Diddleye Bom)
but overall I found most of it a little overlong - eleven tracks
weighing in at well over an hour!
It also took me until this month to hear Portishead
the album. It only takes one play to realise they've lost
nothing of the songwriting talent that brought such attention
to their first (in the singles Cowboys
and All Mine
especially) but they don't seem to have moved on much
in the long time since. On the surface at least it seems
the songs could have fitted on either album without breaking the
musical flow. Play the two back to back and you'll have a cosy
double LP. During it's preparation we were told Portishead intended
to create all their own samples to use on album two, but it seems
they've broken this rule on a couple of tracks. Surely "creating your
own samples" is a contradiction in terms though?
Single of the month goes to the rapidly rising Belle and Sebastian for their
3..6..9..Seconds of light EP -
4 of the usual delicately crafted melodic songs, my personal favourite of which is song 3,
Beautiful.
If they can carry on like this then their popularity is sure to rise even further
than it has in recent months.
Black Grape
returned this month with another funked up infectious groove, unsurprisingly
titled Get Higher.
It's much in the vein of their earlier stuff, but equally as catchy and shows the old
Shaun Ryder
humour will never die.
Early this month I landed myself a copy of Embrace's
Fireworks EP
and very good it is too. From one listen it's easy to see what all the hype is about. Their
next single, a re-release of the early rarity All You Good Good People,
came out at the end of this month. It's been receiving an unbelievable amount of hype in the
press for months now, with tags such as "best song out this year" stuck to it and glady
accepted by the band. Big surprise! It's actually not that good. Sure it's a good song and
well put together, but the pace is too slow and it fails to waken anything inside you like,
say, The Drugs Don't Work.
Single of the year it aint.
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