EP Review: Dreams Are Like Water - A Sea-Spell (2017)

Of all the local debut releases I've been exposed to over the past couple of years, few have made as big a first impression (on me) as A Sea-Spell, the highly polished first outing for Wellington three-piece Dreams Are Like Water.

I suspect a small part of that is simply down to a personal genre preference, with Dreams Are Like Water specialising in the sort of dark post-punk your reviewer reserves a real fondness for. But by the same measure, my love of that sound just as likely means I'm going to listen with a far more critical ear than I perhaps otherwise would.

In fact, it's virtually impossible to listen to the EP - which traverses four tracks - without spontaneous recall of early Cure, Kaleidoscope-era Siouxsie, All About Eve, or the ethereal dark beauty of the Cocteau Twins’ best work. Incidentally, the band name is the title of a This Mortal Coil tune, and TMC was, of course, a precursor act and 4AD label-mate of the Cocteau Twins.

So that’s the general template offered here, or at the very least, the band – Rosebud Garland (vocals, piano, bass), Michel Rowland (vocals, guitar), and Jamie Scott Palmer (synths/keys, guitar) – is able to offer up its own variation on those rather terrific touchstones. While the ethos is perhaps a little derivative, the execution here is distinctly original.

There's a lightness of touch and an unhurried charm about proceedings, best demonstrated on the title track and opener, which features a gentle melody and shared vocals from Garland and Rowland. There’s an immediate sense that this is going to be dark stuff, yet Garland’s almost saccharine vocal gives it a lift, and her voice offers the requisite shard of light amid the wider sense of gloom. It really is a wonderful early example of the subtlety and balance at play right across the duration of the EP.

‘(Thrice) In Blood’ is of a higher tempo, slightly edgy, with swirly post-punk guitar, and intermittent use of piano. Those somewhat haunting keys feature again on ‘Ineffable’, an atmospheric brooding equivalent, which is perhaps best appreciated after several plays. That way you can digest the extra layers of texture, and fully appreciate the way the band is able to skilfully master the delicate art of repetition. Which is key, a hook in itself, and quite a powerful thing.

I initially thought ‘(Thrice) In Blood’ was the best track on the EP, but it turns out I just needed to be more patient with the closer, ‘Feathered Infant Bells’, which becomes an exercise in slow-build and tension; we’re nearly a full four minutes into it before Garland's vocal finally kicks in and the whole thing starts reveal itself in all of its fluorescent multi-layered glory. There’s some superb vocal FX on offer as the powers of light and dark once again start to caress and bounce off of each other, and this nine-minute epic is a perfect finale to what is a truly intense listening experience.

The whole thing is lovingly mixed and produced by Bryan Tabuteau (Molière Recording), and if there’s an EP or album with more fitting cover art this year – a painting by 19^th century artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (called A Sea-Spell, naturally) – then I’ve yet to discover it.

You can pick up your copy of the EP at the Dreams Are Like Water Bandcamp page (here) …

 

And here’s ‘Feathered Infant Bells’:

 

 

 

EP Review: Alice Glass - Alice Glass (2017)

When ex-Crystal Castles vocalist Alice Glass was asked what she finds most surprising about the release of her self-titled debut solo EP, she replied … “that you can hear my voice clearly.” She says this like she believes it's a good thing.

In truth, it's also a bit of a porky. Or at least a stretch. Sure, we get to hear her voice more clearly than we did when her mostly chopped up vocals were key to three terrific Crystal Castles albums, but what she really means is that on this EP we get to hear her very heavily autotuned voice more clearly. Which might be a different thing altogether.

Because that voice is weak. Thin. And there's clearly a good reason Ethan Kath opted to bury Alice's vocal deep in the mix on much of that Crystal Castles work. On those occasions he wasn't slicing it up into tiny little strips and making an instrument out of it, that is. That worked. This doesn't.

So the much anticipated (for some) Alice Glass return, a full two years after her first solo release, the one-off single, 'Stillbirth', is something of a minor let down. Despite production assistance from Jupiter Keyes (ex-HEALTH), who adds the electro-pop flourishes Glass fans will be most familiar with.

But he's not Kath, this feels a little bit like cheap imitation, and there's something missing. It’s just as likely a lack of tunes, and this six-track EP is all a bit ordinary. Even that feels like high praise. The highlight is the pre-release "single", 'Without Love', which opens proceedings. From there, it just becomes a slippery slope.

Miromiro

A few weeks back, I sat down to chat with Ashok Jacob, an 18-year-old Wellington-based arts student who releases music online under the guise of Miromiro. It was for the purpose of writing a NZ Musician/Fresh Talent feature, and it's fair to say I've never before encountered a more articulate or quietly assured teenager. His music has a certain synth-wavey retro-electro appeal to it, and he has a couple of full-length releases available on Bandcamp - the latest offering being Kembe Falls, which was released in June of this year. It's well worth checking out ...

Miromiro/NZ Musician feature here

Miromiro on Bandcamp here

Magazines of my time Part 3: The 1980s … NME, Smash Hits, & Rip It Up

By 1979, my life as a high school student was all but over. I was sitting School Certificate and putting in just enough effort to scrape a “pass” in all five of my subjects except History, which I passed with some aplomb, simply because I loved that subject way more than any of the others. The plan was that I’d do 6^th form, my University Entrance year, in 1980, but there were a couple of stumbling blocks in my path that I’d eventually fail to overcome.

The first was that, at 15, all of the things that had shaped my world up until that point, suddenly started to seem less important. I’d more or less lost interest in playing football, and while I was still involved with the school team, I was no longer being looked at for representative team selection. I was off the radar, and in truth, I lacked the physicality to play at any higher level. Shoot! magazine (see Part 2) had started to lose its appeal, and things like Paul McCartney’s Wings, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and this crazy thing called punk rock – an unfathomable mix, I’ll grant you – became far more important distractions to fill my head with.

It was probably around 1979 when I first bought my first music and pop culture magazine. I’m fairly certain it was an Australian publication called Popscore, which enjoyed a brief foray into the New Zealand market around that time. It was a glossy, and I can recall cutting out pictures – one of McCartney stands out – and plastering them all over my school books. I’m still doing something similar on Facebook, and on this blog, today.

I’d started doing after school jobs, and started buying music with my hard earned dosh. I had also started saving money for what would prove to be the second major stumbling block in a forlorn attempt to complete my education (by passing University Entrance) – a family trip to the UK and the USA for several months smack bang in the middle of 1980. The plan had changed, and I was supposed to study from a distance, but it never quite happened.

What that trip did however, was cement my burgeoning relationship with popular culture. Lifestyles, tribes, music, and fashion in London, Brighton, and Glasgow – the places we stayed or visited most while in the UK – were a huge eye-opener for the recently turned 16-year-old me. Punks, Mods, Skinheads, Rude Boys, tartan bondage pants, DMs, the music of The Specials, The Clash, The Jam, and The Police, blaring out from shop doorways and pub jukeboxes … this was all very different to the world I’d known in Palmerston North. And it was at this time I discovered a music newspaper called the New Musical Express, which I started buying as often as I could.

 

 The late '70s, through the 1980s, was a special time for the NME, which found itself at the vanguard of music criticism during the rise of punk and post-punk. Exceptional writers like Paul Morley, Tony Parsons, and Julie Burchill, were all plying their trade at the paper during this period, and the NME was streets ahead of Melody Maker and Sounds, which were its two main rivals in the market – at least in terms of non-glossy UK-based weekly newsprint publications. In the second half of the decade key writers included the equally entertaining likes of Adrian Thrills, Stuart Cosgrove, and Paolo Hewitt.

The quality of the writing – insightful analysis of ever-changing and quickly evolving scenes, and all of the context around that, plus witty album and gig reviews, etc – from staffers was one thing, but the letters-to-the-editor page (or ‘The Big Bad Read’) was something else entirely, and probably where I spent most of my time. It was clear NME readers also held firm opinions and weren't afraid to share them. Often at the cost of a scathing reply from said editor. I also loved browsing the classifieds, and the charts page, with a special shout out to the history-nut-centric ‘Lest We Forget’ charts of years/decades past. And of course there was always Fred Dollar’s ‘Fred Fact’, a tiny morsel of weekly musical eccentricity to ponder and/or marvel at.

For whatever reason, or reasons, the NME has fallen away badly over the past couple of decades and it no longer commands the same level of reach or influence. If anything, for readers of my generation say, the (now) magazine is something of a joke and a sad pale shadow of what it once represented.

While the NME was the champion of all things indie, political, and cutting edge, fans of straight up unadulterated pop music could get their fix from Smash Hits, a magazine that catered for the pop charts. And that meant for much of the first half of the 1980s, it was very much a synthpop-centric type of publication, which is where I came in.

 

Published fortnightly, Smash Hits was a colourful glossy crammed full of posters, lyric sheets, and digestible tidbits. It was almost tabloid-esque at times. Something to be consumed and tossed away, rather than studiously pored over and/or collected. It had its own little niche corner of the market. For a while it did have a specialist indie page, and one dedicated to disco, but mostly it was a rock snob’s nightmare and it concerned itself only with whatever was happening on top 40 radio at any given time. To its credit, the magazine survived for nearly three decades before market forces and falling advertising revenues saw it close in 2006.

My relationship with Smash Hits was only ever intermittent, that whole early 80s synthpop thing being its main draw, but I was still buying it as late as 1983, because I recall having a Tears For Fears poster/lyric page for ‘Pale Shelter’ (removed from the mag) pinned to a bedroom wall in one of my first flats. I can laugh about it now, but at the time it all seemed so deadly serious.

Trivia Fact: Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant was once an assistant editor at Smash Hits. Then he released ‘West End Girls’ and the rest is history …

By the time I’d left school, found a job, left home, and established a set of like-minded gig-going companions (let’s say by 1983, for argument’s sake), I had become aware of Rip It Up, a local music paper, a monthly, that was free to pick up at “record shops” (quaint term) across the country.

Rip It Up started life in 1977, the brainchild of local music identity Murray Cammick, and while it wasn’t New Zealand’s first rock/pop culture periodical, it was the first of any real significance for my generation. It wasn’t exclusively about local music – interviews, album reviews, gig reviews – but it was the only place, beyond token coverage in mainstream newspapers, we could read about local bands, local gigs, and everything else to do with “us”. That said, it had a balanced mix of the local and the international, and was fairly widescreen in scope and genre.

 

Initially, it was quite rudimentary in its design and layout – it was advert-dependent and free, after all – with one-word section headers – “records” (reviews), “live” (gig reviews), “briefs” (short news snippets), and “letters” (self-explanatory, and only occasionally NME-standard for hilarity). It had a genuine fanzine quality about it.

I’d usually start at the “rumours” section, which took the reader on a tour around the country, covering odds and ends, news and gossip, with focus placed on each of the four main centres. It offered a summary of what had been happening in each location, and what we could expect in the way of releases, tours, and events during the month ahead.

From 1977, through the decade that followed, Rip It Up was a newsprint publication, mostly black and white, with a splash of colour reserved for the front cover and the occasional advert. But in 1991, the title underwent a facelift and a change in format, morphing into a glossy magazine, with a sale price attached. And while that’s all fair enough, and perfectly logical, something that ensured its longer term survival, it’s fair to say my own interest in the paper/magazine had fallen away by this time. Not because there was a cost associated with it, but because it had become less concerned with the grassroots, and far more mainstream in its approach.

You can find a fascinating archive of classic early Rip It Up content online here.  

So far, all of the titles I’ve covered off in this series – with the exception of Rip It Up – have been UK-based publications, but in the next post I’ll expand those horizons just a little. Still looking at the 1980s, but taking a short detour into rather more exotic climes …

Read Part 1 here

Read Part 2 here

 

Atlas Shrugged ...

I was going to write my own blurb for the release of The Prophet Motive’s second album, Atlas Shrugged, but somehow the words on the artist’s own Bandcamp page (italics, below) seem more than adequate. I’ve had a quick listen to the album and reckon it’s every bit as good as the debut release of 2014, if not substantially better. I profiled The Prophet Motive (here) when that first album came out, but it’s worth noting that since then, James Fox-O’Connell has been replaced by Matt Billington. Main dude Mitch Cookson is still in place, and the agit-folk-punk duo's modus operandi remains almost identical ... this is acoustic-based political and social commentary which seeks to challenge the collective complacency of a nation raised on the "she'll be right" mantra ... when quite evidently, things are far from right. But don't take my word for it, have a listen for yourself …
 
***

The Prophet Motive is back, with the release of their second full-length album, ‘Atlas Shrugged’. After the successful reception of their first album, 2014’s ‘Manifest Density’, and the addition of Matt Billington (Myth of Democracy, Future Theft, 5th Threat, Cheap For A Reason) to the band, Mitch Cookson has relocated Rotorua’s 4th best Political Folk-Punk Duo deep into the ragged heart of the housing bubble in Auckland, paying exorbitant rent and dealing with the harsh realities of life in the precariat/working classes after 9 long years of National-led Governments.

With another Douche Vs. Turd Election upon us, The Prophet Motive release 12 tracks which cast a spotlight on the ramifications of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy on the people and the planet, from the perspectives of two working-class New Zealand men – one Maori, one Pakeha – both of whom are coming to grips with the failures of Western Democratic Institutions and the two impending worldwide disasters created by human beings – Climate Change and Right Wing Nationalism. Atlas Shrugged is a continuation of The Prophet Motive’s fight for progressive, socialist change for all nations and peoples on earth.

Film Review: Swagger of Thieves (a film by Julian Boshier)

As per my previous post, last Thursday evening I attended the local Film Festival screening of Swagger of Thieves at the Lighthouse Theatre in Petone. Let’s call it the “Hutt Valley Premiere” for the Julian Boshier-directed documentary, which focuses on the life and times of Wellington hard rock band, Head Like A Hole. It was all at once equal parts confronting, sobering, and exhilarating …

I’ve stopped short of calling it a “rockumentary”, because that would imply that the film traverses a standard formula or cliché path. It doesn’t, and it’s all the better for that. And for all that it will be regarded as the definitive story of a “band”, it’s really the tale of the two key protagonists within the band, the two Nigels, vocalist Beazley (aka Booga), and guitarist Regan.

The mostly black-and-white film is essentially something close to – on and off – 15 years’ worth of fly-on-the-wall footage condensed into a digestible form, with Boshier’s first cut of some six hours eventually being reduced down to a rather more manageable 110 minutes. There’s no voiceover narrative or any real obvious timeline as we skip back and forth between archival footage from the band’s earliest 1990s incarnation(s), to the 2009/2010 “comeback” period, with a strong focus on the recording of the band’s fifth – and most commercially successful – album, Blood Will Out, and the national tour that accompanied it.

And yet, while so much footage will have been discarded along the way, the documentary wasn’t over edited to feature only the most obvious stuff (the performances, the few successes, etc). There’s a lot of focus on the broken individuals, the lost dreams, the sweet souls, the fights and internal personality clashes, and the resilience of those close to the band – most notably that of Beazley’s partner, Tamsin. All the dirt and raw grit – including sequences of graphic intravenous drug use – is left in there unedited, with no feelings spared, and no attempt to gloss over any of what Regan himself calls the “bad decision-making” along the way.

It is to a large extent a tale of contrast and extremes; Beazley, the hard living cocksure rock god who morphs into the somewhat insecure, yet extremely likeable “Mr Local” of Otaki, a window cleaning father of twin girls. Ditto, his relationship with Regan. One moment they’re the closest of old friends (they were schoolboy mates), and the next minute they’re falling out over what appears to be a little bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing. There are moments of pure hilarity, which are often immediately followed by moments of genuine sadness, but mostly there’s a real sense of frustration as the band continually seems to get in its own way. All the while, we (the audience) keep willing them to sort their shit out.

Nigel and Nigel ... in full flow

There’s understandable angst from Beazley as he contemplates the possible amputation of an infected foot (doesn’t happen, but a tour is postponed), acknowledgement of the key roles played by other band members (ex and current members alike), most of whom are desperate to keep the two Nigels off the hard drugs. And of course, there’s the story within the story, one that was also covered in the recent Shihad documentary – reflections and thoughts around the untimely drug-fuelled death of the otherwise inspirational Gerald Dwyer, who managed both bands.

There’s a fair amount of archival footage of the band in its early (naked and semi-naked) pomp, and coverage of the significant events like the Big Day Out(s) and Mountain Rock. This stuff is gold for grassroots historians/local music fanatics like yours truly.

I’m not sure where the independently-made/funded Swagger of Thieves will go from here. It’s difficult to imagine it getting a widespread/mainstream release in any format other than DVD, due mainly to its graphic content and the fact that the wider public perception will be that it’s a very niche sort of thing.

Which is a shame really, because while the principal theme is certainly fairly narrow on the surface (the portrait of a struggling local band, ala Spinal Tap even) it’s far from niche; it’s a close-up, no-holds-barred, intimate portrayal of the human condition. An honest, uncompromising, frequently very funny film about highs, lows, loss, and the continual struggle we all face when trying to overcome our personal flaws. With quite a lot of hard rock music thrown in for good measure.

Milkshakes, Malls, and Mobility Scooters

Last Thursday I went to a NZ International Film Festival screening of Swagger of Thieves, the extraordinary fly-on-the-wall doco about Wellington rockers Head Like A Hole. I'll write a short review of the film for the blog shortly, but here's something I wrote about the band for NZ Musician magazine in early 2015. (I can't find an online link but it appeared in the April/May 2015 hardcopy edition of the magazine) ...

***

I meet Head Like A Hole vocalist Booga Beazley and fellow band original Nigel Regan in the crowded car park of a suburban Kapiti Coast shopping mall. It’s a busy Saturday morning and the mobility scooter crews are out in full force. The sun is also out, so we all agree to relocate to a quieter outdoor spot for our chat. But Booga is restless. And he’s thirsty, so first we’re off to Wendy’s for a milkshake. Things don’t get much more rock n roll than this.

Only they do, and it’s not long before Beazley and Regan are regaling me with hilarious stories of death metal festivals in Warsaw, of choreographed showcased corporate metal, of meeting heroes, and of the delicious irony behind hoardes of stonewashed denim-clad bogans – “depressed Polish-looking ones” – chasing ex-drummer Mark Hamill’s autograph.
 

Booga Beazley, Rock God ... photo: Tony Barrett

But they were with me to talk of none of those things, because Head Like A Hole have a brand new album out. Narcocorrido is officially album number six, a fact that seems rather moot given the sheer volume of EP-length and non-album releases from the band over the years. It’s the second post-reunion album after 2011’s Blood Will Out took the reformed band into unprecedented top ten chart territory.

Narcocorrido has been self-released on Kickstarter, so I begin by asking Regan about the thinking behind that.

“Kickstarter was an absolute necessity. Without it there wouldn’t have been an album. We would have had to tour and save all of that money and even then I don’t think we could have done it. Kickstarter paid for it. We got more than we asked for.”

Beazley adds, “we have a distributor, it’s just that we don’t have a record label saying ‘here’s eighty grand, go and do a record’. Blood Will Out cost almost thirty grand all up so we had to do something (with Kickstarter). We asked for ten grand, and we got just over eleven, and it came in at around nine after they take some money and other costs out.”

The recording and production process was not without its issues, but each man seems happy with the final result, with Regan keen to acknowledge the role of producer Andrew Buckton.

“The production was a combination of the band and Andrew. He had quite a bit of input, the things he came up with were usually pretty spot on. Andrew actually pulled out the guitar, and played on some of the songs. He had really good ideas that actually fit.

“We went into (Buckton’s) Studio 203, did all the guitars and vocals, and mixed it. But then he shut his studio down in the middle of it, so we ended up doing some tracks at Roundhead, and some at York Street. Then we did some guitars and vocals with Jol Mulholland at the Oven.”

Beazley also notes that working with Buckton made perfect sense, but laments the lack of time spent together as a band.

“Andrew did Blood Will Out so that’s why we went back to him. We did say to him that we didn’t want the album to be a copy of that. But we knew from the songs we’d written that it would be something different.

 “Things have definitely changed, the song-writing skills have got better. There’s still room for a lot of improvement, if we could spend more time together as a band. If we can do Narcocorrido on the bare minimum of time as a band then what would happen if we threw ourselves at it?

“I had to do all the vocals in two days. And that bummed me out. I wanted to go back and do more. But because of time and going back and forth on the internet, all of the communication needed, it was too hard. It’s so frustrating. There will probably be a couple of songs on the album where the vocal levels could have been louder, and where we probably could have revisited that vocal and the mix, but it just came down to time.”

Regan wonders how fans will receive it.

“Because we took a lot more risks musically. I mean, one of the songs on there is called ‘Mexico’, and I wrote that about 15 years ago. I’ve been trying to get the guys to do it forever. I’ve recorded it about five times before. Booga had always been a bit iffy about it, but we thought maybe we could give it a go this time. It’s a bit slower.”

Both men then reflect on the perils of cleaning things up too much, and of the importance of leaving “some dirt in there”. I ask whether all of the band members felt happy with their contribution to the end result, whether or not they’d all been equally involved, and Beazley is quick to quip … “nah, I reckon Nigel (Regan) did most of it.”
 

Nigel and Nigel (Booga) outside the mall, early 2015

Regan responds, “I write the songs but I only come up with the skeleton of it in most cases. With this album one of the best songs on it is ‘Rise and Fall of the Sun’ and Andrew Ashton wrote that. He was pissed at one of the practices and started playing this riff, and it was one of those riffs that only happen from band practices. I remember it was funny because it changed each time he showed it to me, but it had this groove and then next minute, bam! … we had this whole song instantly.”

A regular Head Like A Hole party trick comes in the form of covers, and Beazley confirms that at some point “we’re going to do a covers album. There’s tracks I’d love to do.

“We talked about that (for this album) but it was just the thing about time really. We hadn’t enough time to play as a band, we had just enough time to bash out the ideas for songs and get them sounding good for recording really.”

Regan adds, “yeah, unfortunately we don’t usually end up with many more songs than we actually need. We come up with the album, where a lot of bands will have maybe 15 or 16 songs recorded, and then trim it down for the album.”

The band plan to tour the album shortly after its April 10 release date, with Beazley confirming that “May or June” dates are most likely.

“It’s gotta pay. We’ve gotta break even. Eccles is slapping it together for us. We’ve gone through a few booking agents, and you know, had a bit of history with other people, but at the moment we’re using Eccles Entertainment. Dave Munro did a really great job on the last tour. The band has confidence in him. It can be a little bit frustrating sometimes when things don’t roll along as fast as you expect, because everyone has to plan their life around the tour dates, and when you’ve got family it’s bloody hard just to drop everything and take off on tour.”

The conversation inevitably skirts around the periphery of Head Like A Hole’s indelible link with onetime label mates Shihad, the early years of touring nationally and across Europe, with Regan ultimately reflecting on the respective paths taken by each band.

“To a lot of average punters, when a band is overseas it normally equates to the impression they’re doing well, but then you watch the Shihad doco, and look at all the shit they went through at the time and you know, it didn’t actually look like it was all that much fun.”

Beazley has some fun with the topic, “we quit in 2000 and came back in 2011, or 2010, and you know that ten years was a great break and that did great things for us. And it probably could have done great things for Shihad too (laughs).”

He then notes that Head Like A Hole has its own movie-length doco in the process of being finished. A work-in-progress since the band reformed, it could be completed sometime in the “next six months.”

Beazley is relatively coy about details but is clearly excited by the prospect. 

“It has a lot of clips of us years ago, and heaps of live stuff, some wicked photographs of people, interviews, and it’s just a really great story of how we started and what we went through over the years.”

Near the end of our chat Beazley comments on how Blood Will Out had hit the ground running, climbing into the upper echelon of the charts almost immediately. I tease him a little, expressing my surprise that the charts or radio play are things that even enter the band’s collective psyche, before leaving it to Regan to have the final word …

“The thing is, we’re still the same guys we were when we started the band. If someone had told me then that I’d be sitting here now (25 years later) talking about our sixth album I wouldn’t have believed it. So when you hear your song on the radio we still get that buzz. It’s like, ‘wow, people like our music’. At the end of the day we do it for ourselves, and if people like it, that’s great.”

Porky Post ... Album Review: Goldfrapp – Silver Eye (2017)

I recently published a guest blogpost on punk’s legacy, which was written by Porky, a longtime friend of everythingsgonegreen. I enjoyed Porky’s surprise visit to my pigsty so much, I invited him back, and it turns out our porcine hero was keen to share a few more words with us … this time in the form of an album review …  

***

For the uninitiated, Goldfrapp is an English electro outfit fronted by the eponymous Alison Goldfrapp, who have been around since 1999, with several peaks and troughs experienced along the way.

Appreciated more in their native UK and throughout Europe, Goldfrapp have released an album, Silver Eye, that signals another change in direction, from the more laidback, even semi-acoustic works of the past few years, to one that delves into their heralded back catalogue (the peaks).

The term electro is, ultimately, meaningless. There is little music made today that doesn’t contain some element of synths, beats etc. The sound that may be still be associated with Gary Numan, Kraftwerk and the Human League is now ubiquitous; you’ll even hear it on a Katy Perry hit, should you ever wish to punish yourself.

But Goldfrapp are a breed apart. They have a cinematic quality, and an understanding of what makes the perfect pop song. As for the later quality, it seems only just that they soundtrack a future James Bond film. Their influence is tangible, and I can detect some notable touches in Lorde’s just-out second album, praise indeed for the London-based duo.

The album has a two moods feel: side one is the more upbeat, shake it all about disposition, beginning with the atmospheric ‘Anymore’, which is heavy with synth sounds against a steady, pulsating beat. It’s followed by ‘Systemagic’, which is two parts ABBA and three parts Kraftwerk, and the kind of tune you would want to have on the iPod for a long plane journey.

In a similar disco-meets-pop-gold vein is ‘Become The One’, which was inspired by a documentary about transgender children.

The second side (I’m listening on vinyl) sees Goldfrapp in more restrained mood, except for ‘Everything Is Never Enough’, a word of warning for those that live today with no thought for tomorrow, by which time it will be too late: “Insatiable perfect neon stranger/ All the money you need/ Watching nature on my screensaver/ In a wasteland”.

I think that is recommendation enough.

Want more Porky? …  Go here.