My Robot Friend - Dial 0

The Soma Records website describes My Robot Friend's album, Dial 0, as a "hyper electro-pop opus that plays out like a party jukebox for the 21st century" and likens it to Devo, Talking Heads, and Kraftwerk. Consisting of New York electronic artist, Howard Robot, My Robot Friend has opened for the Scissor Sisters and Le Tigre and his live multimedia shows are apparently something to be seen. Okay, so there is the record company hype, but what is the album really like?

"23 Minutes in Brussels", the opening track, wakes me up with a throbbing dance beat. Okay, it's late at night and I'm half asleep...so making my arse shake is an achievement! The xylophone effects are grin inducing and create the feeling of sunshine on my skin after swimming in the ocean all day. Lying on the sand, smile across my mug. Yes, very feel-good vibes in this song.

In the title track, "Dial 0", I see the references to Devo; mechanical, jerking vocals with some hyper-produced guitar. "The Cut" sounds like something I danced to in a dominatrix club in Berlin once; it has a dark edge with a slightly sinister sexual vibe. "Waiting on the corner generating germs...Filthy little fingers want to be your friend...Fingers never stop touching you touching you". I've never heard fingers sound so downright nasty before! The lyrics in this song are brilliantly disturbing and the sharp dance beat combined with layered effects makes this song my standout track for the album.

Third track and I'm already impressed. An artist who lives up to the hype?? Incredible. "The Good Part" shows muted guitar moods a la Depeche Mode. "One More Try" features vocals by Antony Hegarty from Antony and the Johnsons and sounds disturbingly similar to songs by '80s band Yazoo. While very accessible, this song is not one of my favourites.

"City Sounds" features alien robot vocals, a myriad of sampled machine sounds and seems to symbolise the cacophony of living in a busy metropolis like New York city. "Problems" has seriously Freudian lyrics and is quite hilarious: "Everything you do is a reaction to the way your mother combed her hair...Everything you do is a reaction to the day your father wasn't there".

"Swallow", featuring rap by Crasta Yo, is musically unimpressive and a little predictable, however once again the lyrics -- "Oral, anal, overdose, fuck you 'til you're comatose" -- crack me up. "Dead" lifts the game with violin effects and a glitch vibe, and is an indictment of the apathy of youth. This is another of my favourite tracks on this album. "Diarrhea, gonorrhea, we smoked in our beds, got crushed by the books we never read, dead".

"Rapture" is an interesting remake of Blondie's classic hit, replacing Deborah Harry's vocals with machine-like voices, the lyrics sounding as though spoken by mechanised, global corporation answering machines. Some additional lyrics make a scathing comment on current pop culture. "Electric Pants" features classical guitarist Jay Kauffman and is an ode "to the bizarre act of wearing electric pants" and what it means to be human in a troubled world: "The world that I live in is like an ambulance".

The thirteenth track, "Untitled", sounds like the Beach Boys on acid...wait...they WERE on acid, weren't they? Well, maybe it sounds like the Beach Boys in slow mo...with hand-eye coordination issues...

This is a very clever album, lyrically and musically, and just maybe lives up to the hype. Now, I'd like to see My Robot Friend's live performance...

This review was written for The Dwarf.

Diable Amoreux : Horns Used for Butting

A scream from the bowels of hell opens Horns used for Butting from Tasmania's Diable Amoreux. Forced to come up with a succinct description of this sound, I believe the scorned child of Rob Zombie and Nick Cave with some mothering from the Dresden Dolls might come close and yet...their self description of "gnomic gothic folk from Van Diemen's Land" is possibly more appropriate.

Theatrical and ghoulish, the effect of this album is similar to that of a circus clown. Some people love clowns and they fill people's hearts with glee and wonder. Other people have nightmares of clowns with little pointy teeth and glowing red eyes, ready to tear their hearts out in their sleep.

A little afraid of clowns myself (only since 'Poltergeist', a word ironically used several times in the lyrics) this album both frightens and enlightens me. The music is very creative, using myriad delicate instruments and haunting melodies to create a complex narrative of love, death and history. Tin whistle, ukulele, violin, and "dog lifting" (?) combine to weave musically intricate tunes that warp into a crazy half cabaret-half circus tale of woe and darkness. I especially appreciate the vocals on "In Van Diemen's Land" by Vicki Brooke, and the guitar in this song is spellbinding, dramatic, mesmerising.

"It's all in my mind that it's all in her mind, if she hates herself then together we'll bind
To get inside her when no one else has dared, the fact that I exist will have her quite scared". Yes, this is a love song and typical of the darker qualities of desire highlighted throughout the album.

On many levels, this music actually touches me artistically. I find that, when I listen to it, I feel the desire to paint, to write, to create. And to me, this is quite an achievement. I'm uncertain as to why I am so impressed with "Horns used for Butting", but I can highly recommend this album to anybody with an open mind willing to try new sounds and dark scapes. Sometimes darkness is quite chillingly intoxicating.

This review was written for The Dwarf.

Paul Weller - Catch-Flame! Live at the Alexandra Palace

Paul Weller - known for his involvement with The Jam and The Style Council —must be one of the coolest customers in the music industry. The man has style, panache and flashes of musical brilliance. In mod terms, he’s a ‘face’, yeah? From ‘A Town called Malice’ to ‘Shout to the Top’, everything this man touched in the ‘70s and ‘80s turned to sold.

However this album – Catch-Flame! Live at the Alexandra Palace - is on first listen, well, dominantly mediocre. Recorded live at Alexandra Palace in December 2005, disc one chugs out the blues with monotony until a brief moment of inspiration with the song ‘Peacock Suit’...which unfortunately seems to run out of energy toward the end. The musicians supporting Weller simply seem to be lacking in enthusiasm and skill to make the song really fly.

Aha, now here is the Weller I love! Voice crisp and sharp like a knife, he spits out the lyrics to ‘From the Floorboards Up’. The soul man arises from beneath the designer threads to infuse ‘The Changingman’ with enough spirit to give me goosebumps.

Unfortunately, Weller seems mostly weary of the songs he’s performing. It’s tedious to listen to the first disc, and I’m afraid I can’t say anything more than that.

On the second disc, the standout songs are the beautiful ‘You Do Something to Me”, and the poignant ’The Pebble and the Boy’. The crowd goes wild when Weller strums the opening chords to ‘That’s Entertainment’, but I was secretly hoping these old Jam songs wouldn’t appear here, because the originals were so sharp and angry. However, the Style Council songs come across well, with ‘Shout to the Top’ packing more punch than it originally did. Lastly, ‘A Town called Malice’ predictably gets the crowd excited again—it’s one of my favourite songs – and encouraging the crowd to sing the chorus while he takes a break creates a feel-good sensation. This is pretty good actually, and I might even have gone to this gig for this song alone.

I despise it when people criticise musicians who had their ‘heyday’ decades ago, because it is like saying someone will never be as beautiful as they were when they were young; it’s a void point. People can never be the same as they were, but their spirit can still be imbued with positive qualities. So I will say, I’m glad Weller is still performing and writing, but I’m sure a dvd version of this recording would be much better, just to see the gig. The crowd sounds enthusiastic, so maybe something’s missing in the translation. Because there’s live, and then there’s LIVE, and I like my gigs a little edgier than this. However, the second disc alone may well be worth the price of entry. Like all gigs, the second set is the best.

This review was written for Faster Louder.