The Good …
This isn’t an easy record to listen to. Some will find this too fierce and intense for their liking. The title – The Calcination of Scout Niblett – is a clue as to what to expect. Calcination is a process of using intense heat to burn down metals. Here Scout Niblett, the English born singer songwriter who took her stage name from the girl in To Kill A Mocking Bird, turns the heat on herself, burning through flesh and bone to reveal the emotions and the spiritual essence within.
Her voice is raw and bluesy : the best comparison is with early PJ Harvey. What her voice can’t do she cajoles out of her guitar. Her guitar playing which is inspired by bands like Nirvana is both powerful and expressive. The only other instrument used is drums : you can’t miss the massive drumrolls on the title track. Again and again the guitar and drums give the songs a sense of drama, as in the epic nine minute track which ends the album, Meet and Greet.
Buy The Calcination of Scout Niblett on Amazon
The Bad …
Rebirth is the follow up to Tha Carter III , an album which won two Grammys and sold in the millions, so let’s begin by crediting New Orleans’s own Lil Wayne for not sitting on his laurels but bravely exploring new musical ground. For Rebirth is the jailbound rapper’s rock album, his much heralded crossover, where he plays around with some heavy rock riffs and chords.
Bottom line though is that this is a complete dog’s ear of an album. Make no mistake : Lil Wayne is not the genius that some have made him out to be. He’s a competent but unappealing rapper with a distinctive vocal style who’s benefited from the enormous Cash Money publicity machine. But even critics who admired his earlier work are ripping the new album to shreds. Instead of the elegant production to which we’re accustomed on his work, the overwhelming impression here is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He rips a few different sounds, but achieves only loudness. On several tracks his voice is pointlessly mangled by use of autotune. The lyrics on many of the tracks are embarrasingly poor for someone of his reputation (see for instance American Star and Prom Queen), his language is hideous, and in The Price Is Wrong he has created an exceptionally crass and unpleasant song.
Lil Wayne, who has just fathered two babies by the two beautiful women pictured above, is currently awaiting trial in Arizona after being busted last year with a bus full of drugs, and is about to be sentenced in New York for criminal possession of a firearm. He’ll hope to take comfort from the sales of Rebirth, and of Tha Carter IV, which is due out later this year. We say save your sympathy for the real victims of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area : don’t buy the album, but donate to the relief effort instead.
Donate to the hurricane relief effort
And the Outlandish …
Don’t watch this video over your pizza ! In one continuous 3 minute take we see band member Angela Seo vomiting repeatedly, while sat beside her and totally ignoring her Jamie Stewart munches away at a bar of chocolate. As for the song, it could be good or it could be terrible, we honestly don’t know because the video so gripped our attention ! But we can tell you that the song is from the album Dear God, I Hate Myself, out later this month on the Kill Rock Stars label by the experimental Californian art rock band Xiu Xiu. Meanwhile the band are offering us the chance to buy one of only 100 deluxe editions of the album. These come with homemade chocolate and, for a few dollars more, a very special t shirt on which “Xiu Xiu for life” is written in actual human blood. But get in there quick because they say on their website “it is taking more blood than I thought” !
