The Good …
The choice is yours. It’s quite simple. You can moan and groan about the band’s in-your-face name, and fret about what your buddies will think if they see it on your ipod. Or you can just dive in and treat yourself to one of the best electronic dance albums of the year. In Tarot Sport the English duo F@ck Buttons team up with veteran producer Andrew Weatherall to create a combination of noise and melody and classically structured dancefloor rhythms. Highlights include the anthemic single Surf Solar, Rough Steez with its rough percussive sound, the long and more ambient Olympians, and The Lisbon Maru with its soaring uplifting feedback in the second half of the song.
Listen to F@ck Buttons on myspace
The Bad …
We were smitten by their catchy and topical 2003 smash Where is the Love. We thought that the Yes We Can video made by will.i.am was one of the highlights of the Obama campaign. It was thoughtful and it was moving. Will.i.am agrees : he says “I’m more proud of that than anything else I’ve done.”
So what happened guys ?
The incredible success of the new Black Eyed Peas album The E.N.D. can’t mask the fact that it’s a real turkey. They’ve decided to go electro. But all this seems to involve is using a voicebox to crunch Fergie’s vocals and make them sound robotic while layering these over the dullest most uninspiring kind of synthesized beat. Most disappointingly, the sharpness and intelligence that we heard in Where is the Love has gone missing. Some of the lyrics to these songs are so dumb that they’re embarrassing. It’s as if they’ve been written by an adult for a teenage audience who is desperately trying to appear hip.
The one track where the Peas try to strike a serious note – One Tribe – is just banal : “Use you mind and not your greed, let’s connect and then proceed, this is something I believe, we’re one, we’re all just people. One tribe y’all.”
Listen to Black Eyed Peas on myspace
And the Outlandish …
The Dead Weather – I Cut Like A Buffalo
If Tim Burton and Johnny Depp made a music video it might look something like this. The music is from the new single I Cut Like A Buffalo by supergroup The Dead Weather (Alison Mosshart, Jack White, Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence). The black and white video is directed by Jack White and features White doing his weird Johnny Depp like moves and a belly dancer. We predict that you’ll either be blown away by it or you’ll dismiss it as pretentious arty nonsense.
