Rhombus
Future Reference
Sony BMG
4/5

Future Reference sees Rhombus return with a follow up to 2002's Bass Player. The musical core of Rhombus remains the production team of Thomas Voyce, Simon Rycroft and DJ Koa (Roots Foundation) laying a down tracks for Imon Star and Antsman's conscious raps, and MC Mana's rougher dancehall delivery. Future Reference adds the soulful vocals of Deva Mahal and Ebb's Lisa Tomlin to the mix. It's an accomplished, eclectic affair that doesn't disappoint. The disc begins with a handful of tracks on which Rhombus show off the pop sensibility that saw their debut go platinum: witness the rolling, funky 'Mile High' and the excellent, Fat Freddy's-ish 'Together'. Later, the album veers into Michael Franti territory on 'Pocket Full of Seconds' and 'Love Spreads', and on to classic roots reggae with 'True Rub-a-Dub Love Style'. Tomlins' stunning vocal performance on 'Scorching Bay', a beautiful anthem to cutting work to go drink on the beach, is an absolute highlight. It's also great to hear the band branch out into more unconventional territory. 'Cloudkicks' apparently layers a koto sample over Pasifikan drumming and programmed breakbeats. Closing track 'Sojare' sets a Rajastani lullaby against delicately programmed hi-hats and gently skanking bass line. Very impressive.

The Rainy Days
Facework
Gestalt Information Communications Systems Network
5/5

Having released just a handful of singles and albums since forming way back in the early nineties, Auckland's Rainy Days are hardly prolific, which is a pity, because the diverse and uniformly excellent Facework shows what a brilliant, original band they are. The album covers a lot of ground within in a loose garage rock paradigm, from the raw Stooges romp of the title track, to the indie-folky Go Betweens sound on cuts like "The Photographer", to the gently trippy "Liquid Oxygen". The banjo on "It's a Way Out" recalls Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones. In short, absolutely bloody fantastic.

Jamie Cullum
Catching Tales
Universal
2/5

The third album of saccharine pop jazz from British singer-songwriter prodigy (he released his debut album at age 19) Jamie Cullum. Cullum and his dully proficient backing band of musicians work their way through a diverse set of crooning ballads and uptempo numbers (like opener 'Get Your Way', driven by a funky Lee Dorsey break). Billed as a kind of Sinatra for Generation Y, it's hard to find Cullum's patina of smoky sophistication convincing, given his youth and the calculated, sterile sound of the disc. Still, there's no questioning his voice is gold. Liner notes, lyrics and a 'making of' doco DVD are included.

Joanna Newsom and Smog at Indigo a couple of Tuesdays back was a cracker. I'd been listening to The Milk-Eyed Mender pretty heavily since a friend introduced me to it just a couple of weeks before the show was announced. (The name rang a bell at the time, I think Newsom was mentioned in a Robert Christgau best of 2004 thing on the Village Voice website). I kept being ready to lose patience with her cutesy coo-ey Bjorky/Kate Bush voice and start hating, but it just didn't happen. And every time I listened to and this didn't happen, I liked it more and more.

Bill Callahan's stuff I've known for a while, and I've definitely got a soft spot for Knock Knock, and at least half of every other album of his that I've heard. His set was super-minimal - just his slow, simple songs, his deep voice, and nuthin' fancy on the guitar. This worked kinda okay and everyone I spoke to loved it, but for me he DEFINITELY needed to give it up a little more for the audience, or at least have some kind accompaniment. Like a couple of lines of speed. At the very least, you could say his onstage persona was consistent with the picture of him you get from his recordings - straight up, and very down.

Joanna Newsom pretty much left everyone totally floored. Her talent seems prodigious - or else maybe she was raised in some hippy commune by poetry obsessed parents who forced her to learn the harp. Stranger things have happened. She performed a lot of the great tracks from Milk-Eyed Mender (Bridges and Balloons; The Sprout and The Bean; Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie; Peach Plum Pear; (if you've heard the album you'll know I'm not kidding about the song titles); The Book of Right On), and a number of EPIC new tracks, which were pretty much open-ended, structure-wise, at least 20 minutes long, and each of which must have contained a small notebook full of her manic, pseudo middle English yrics.

This is a classic case of a performer sounding bloody awful on paper - the affected voice, the medieval poetry, the harp - but in fact being the complete opposite. Thing is, it's not what she does, so much as how she does it, and the fact that when she does it, it seems thoroughly natural, even as she sings some highly literate but insensible stream of consciousness rant (yes, Dylan-esque) about cockles and ledgers and little robins and, for all I know sealing wax and brown vinegar all tied up with string. I mean think of Will Oldham for a minute - he sings in a crazy voice and obviously fetishises Depression and Civil War era American life and music, but he's so completely convincing and great at what he does, that no one (well, none of his fans) barely bats an eyelid at all his 'thees' and 'thys'.

And, for the record, a harp is a cool instrument - it seemed to have the range of grand piano and the timbre of a classical guitar. And, as Ross pointed out, looks like a gigantic chess piece.

A friend lent me a bunch of stuff, including The Editors, who sound more like Interpol than Interpol, which must make them the Stone Temple Pilots of the current crop. Maybe that's unfair - but regardless, it seems the 'postpunk revival' has officially begun to eat itself.

This has no doubt been expressed better elsewhere, but there is often a kind of aesthetic/conceptual poverty in stylistic revivalist movements. It's like thethinking has already been done, and all that's left to do is wait for the cycle of fashion to come round again, caricature the relevant aspects of the clothes, themes, sound. It's there on a plate for the exploitation.

When Martin Hannett was working with Joy Division, I think they would have been hyper aware of aesthetics of what they were doing, and they clearly had strong influences, like the Velvets, but they don't actually sound anything VU, even when they cover them. They radically transformed their influences, added their own perspective, and at once were a part of, but transcended, a contemporary scene. By way of contrast, the Stone Temple Pilots 'complete shit' factor is, to me, where bands appear to fail to do anything but ape some other band that is already leaning pretty heavily on their influences - where they're a copy of a copy, if you like. And what the hell's the point of that?

Maybe I'm being nostalgic/idealist but it always seemed to me the postpunk era was at its core about experimenting, NOT ABOUT BEING POP. i.e. it was not a bunch of bands whose raison d'etre was to cash in. (Note wryly that there are no major label acts making a living by revisiting the more 'difficult' Throbbing Gristle or Cabaret Voltaire - although these two acts ARE enjoying a revival in the sphere of dance music).

Of course there are always plenty of great bands which are able to avoid this vacant revivalist copy-of-a-copy trap, maybe through hyper selfconscious music nerd eclecticism, (LCD Soundsystem), or bloody-minded purism and a decadent/savant/premonitionary vision (Royal Trux), or some combination of these. And jesus, there's absolutely nothing wrong with re-exploring old forms of music - in fact, it seems that that's completely central to pushing music to new places.

I do find it a little weird that the current postpunk trend thing involves a cross-fertilisation with emo-punk. I'm just observing this, not criticising it. It's something that's present in a heap of good bands - like Interpol and our own Mint Chicks and Die!Die!Die! I suppose (the totally great) Fugazi are probably a pretty obvious bridge between a kind of terse, spare, funky postpunk and the emo movement. Its just that one thing I really like about Joy Div, Go4, Au Pairs, Wire, and Fugazi for that matter, is their very un-emo-ness - they're so cerebral, but absolutely NO LESS HUMAN for it. After all, we all have brains and think abstract thoughts as much as we have lingering teen angst.

On that note I'm looking forward to the day when my name finally comes up on the library reserves list for Simon Reynold's postpunk history Rip It Up and Start Again. Incidentally, if nothing else, the title reminds us that the well-known and long since completely crap NZ music rag used once to be the shizz.

Anyway there was also remastered Gang of Four best of, which I had mixed feelings about, having lived with and loved the original versions on wax for many years. The remasters are all super shiny and phat and transparent, and while the songs still kick the ass of anything that's come since, the updated production values to me kind of cheapened them, or at least robbed them of their original character, as did the largely pointless dance-remixes-by-trendy-rock-bands on disc 2. But in saying this I freely admit to being a snob. I seem to remember a Go4 best of/retrospective coming out just a few years back - "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" - or some other vaguely inappropriate revolutionary Chinese title. Why do we need remasters as well? They're not Led Zep. Yet.

I have to also mention a great collection of prepunk and postpunk and punkpunk stuff complied by Jon Savage for a German label, called England's Dreaming (the collection is not limited to English bands - it's just the name of Savage's book) which they have in the Wellington Public Library. Some of it's pretty hard out, but it's freakin' great.

Anyway, the same friend lent me Arcade Fire's Funeral, which sounded pretty damn great to me, almost a midpoint between a kind of Interpol sound and alt-country (maybe it's just the violin?) - though that's probably a glib and crap way to describe it. Point being, it's a great album.