Review date: 20/02/2004

14 track CD

Doncaster: the epicentre of Booze Britain, the UK capital of binge drinking and bad behaviour. It's from these streets that self-styled "Yorkshire street slanger" Lexis exposes the dark complexity of his soul on Eighteen18's debut album, Body Armour.
        This is not about firing Glocks from the hip and Kevlar vests, however - it's about stripping away artifice, to reveal the grimy truth of the British masculine identity. Lexis charges his way through relationships like a raging horny bull in a Faberge egg shop, stopping occasionally to curse his impulses, drink deep of his self-imposed solitude, before wiping himself down and charging headlong after some new unsuspecting "Spanish pussy".
        The album starts with the usual props, the self-aggrandisement common among MCs, although judging by what comes later, Lexis has his fingers crossed. The first sign of this appears in the track Carol Patricia Kilner. Where Eminem straight-out dissed his mother's dereliction, Lexis exposes a deep, though somewhat conflicted love for his own mother, and her troubles, in a respectful if somewhat regretful litany. It feels truly British. If Mike Leigh and Ken Loach had become MCs, this is what they would be doing. This is kitchen-sink hip-hop.
        The title track that follows is a classic ballad of intense self-destructive love, of a desperate plea and confession. Swelling strings and flutes counterpoint the frustrated lyrical content, describing the serial acts of emotional stunting that all men inflict on themselves, without ever resorting to self pity. This is just a bare statement of fact. One senses that there's no desire, or even possibility, of change.
        Later on, the subject matter turns to humiliating B-Boy vanity and hip-hop stereotypes, pouring scorn at naïve rap-battlers. Clearly Lexis has no time for those that lack his emotional depth and self-awareness. Eighteen18 are playing the game, and playing it well, while hovering knowingly above it.
        Both sonically and lyrically, Body Armour stirs echoes of Roots Manuva - the blood-and-spunk corporeality mixed with small town British mentality: the fact that booze, drugs a boredom lead only to thoughts of illicit sex, and inevitable heartbreak, but who gives a fuck, that's who we are. The beats are rich, complex and wide-ranging, and always perfect in tone, from the angular scratch-laden weirdness of The Meeting to the heartbreaking lilting piano riff of Ruth's Song. Lexis plies the mike in a solid, angry version of the trademark UK style, a kind of heavy afro-cockney swagger, but occasionally a peaty clump of Yorkshire works it's way into the mix, which makes for a powerfully authentic voice.
        Listening to this album is like being beaten up by someone you love. You are constantly off guard, reeling around your empty love-stained bedsit. The exquisite tenderness of Ruth's Song actually has you choking back tears, but just as you are digesting the sweet pain of the protagonist's magnanimity in loss, you are assaulted by the out and out thrust of testosterone-driven shock-tactic that is Dirty Sex Bastard, screaming "shove it in your mouth", showing you the other side of the story.
        Eighteen18 have made something very special, straight off the bat. This is not posturing, wannabe stuff - this is the real deal, an intense, amazing, painful, disturbing experience of an album, like nothing else that's ever come out of Doncaster, I'd wager. Mike Skinner, Eminem, Roots Manuva - get ready to feel the wrath of Yorkshire.

I felt the same after listening to this album as I did after reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for the first time. It sucks you up into its vortex, flings you around, then dumps you breathless, dazed, exhausted, in a place you used to know, but somehow now looks different.

Review date: 26/03/2004

13 part HBO TV series

If you had to visualise the pursuit of watching TV, it would probably be Johnny Vegas, slumped on a couch, covered in nacho crumbs and dollops of dip, naked but for some soiled underpants and an unofficial Oldham football shirt stretched to the point of near transparency, eyes glazed like fresh donuts, illuminated by the flickering of a mindless game show.
Attractive as this might sound, this does not have to be the case. I've recently been treated to (and blown away by) The Wire, arguably the greatest television drama series in the world, ever.
It was born, as is most good drama, from real life. The driving force behind it is David Simon, a crime journalist who for 14 years documented the underbelly of drugs and crime in Baltimore. Ultimately he became disillusioned with the machinations of cranking out stories for the Baltimore Sun, and spent his time soaking up life on the street, enlisting the help of ex police detective Ed Burns. Two non-fiction books came out of this: Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets - which became the long-running NBC series, and The Corner a Year in the Life of an Inner-city Neighbourhood, which became an HBO miniseries.
Clearly seeing this book-to-tv process caused him to want to cut out the middle-man, and go straight for what he refers to as "the crack-pipe of TV". So he put together The Wire, again in partnership with Burns, and enlisting the help of hard-boiled crime novelist George Pelecanos as screenwriter.
The most striking difference between The Wire and other cop shows is that it concentrates not on the weekly bust, but, for thirteen 1 hour episodes, follows the chess-game of a single case; the quiet war between a Baltimore drug-dealing cartel and the police department, where each party tries to make some progress, by their own standards. This is all interwoven on one side by the politics surrounding the police department, the appropriation of warrants, the fallibility of surveillance, internal power struggles and general apathy, and on the other, by the complex lives of the drug dealers, trapped yet liberated, evil yet, for the most part, essentially good. This is not about the good guys beating the bad guys, or even the street kids fighting the man. It's just a story, written as far as possible from the truth.
Watching The Wire for the first time, you are dropped immediately into a complex web of characters all speaking in dense slang-heavy street-jive. This sensation of drowning in the Baltimore underworld is worth fighting through; the involvement is deeper, the credibility is ultimately greater because of it. After two episodes you are there, not just viewing, but part of it.
Visually, the surroundings are drab; not so much the drug ghetto (which is actually based around an airy green space within a low-rise housing development), but the dingy police department and the air of weary acceptance hanging over the cops permeates everything. We're introduced to Jimmy McNulty, the struggling homicide detective whose task is to find and pin something solid on Baltimore drugs kingpin Avon Barksdale.
And so it goes on. Every cop-show cliché is sidestepped, every opportunity for a wham-bang twist or contrived plot development is passed by without so much as a nod of recognition. Its unpredictability comes from its lack of sensationalism. That's not to say there isn't excitement, surprises and neck-cracking tension along the way. It's just that it gives you those feelings in a truly original, very believable way.
Coupled with the dense, heavily written, yet believable language, and the low-key action, it's the most like reading a book of any TV series I've seen. It's deep and satisfying and there's thirteen hours of it. And indeed there's twelve more hours in season two, which I am about to watch.
Frankly, I can't wait. I've drawn deep on the crack-pipe and I want it back.

Absolutely the best TV drama ever made.

HBO.com has plenty of stuff - including an interesting Q&A with David Simon in the forum.

Web links:

• The Wire - HBO website

Review date: 17/02/2004

11 track CD, 43 mins

Notus are Michael Jude Bergeman and Karl Kneis, making their noises out of Boston, Massachusetts, home to 70s rockers…er…Boston, creators of More Than a Feeling, destined to be the soundtrack to many a corporate video, and gracing every "Best Driving Music Ever" albums that are always definitive, and never available in the shops.
Notus, as their name might suggest, are certainly not them. This is art.
From the get-go, not even a driving electro breakbeat that starts the title track cannot hide Notus' uncompromising non-commercialism. The fleeting fragments of musicality are topped with unearthly sounds, like those used in films to represent tortured souls in some kind of agonising limbo, ultimately descending into a distorted migraine-inducing soundmash.
There are some hints of traditional songwriting here though; Breathe is a sparse, surreal Kraftwerkian meditation, and Salvation's Vendor, presumably a lament on the commercialism of Christianity, could easily be mistaken for an Elvis Costello side-project, marrying broken-down elevator music with stylophone loungecore & haunting 1950s melody reminiscent of a Dennis Potter musical interlude.
But these are blips in a very strange continuum. Some tracks are intensely rhythmical - though not in a foot-tapping way - the rhythms here are the esoteric, jarring hammerings of the building site. For example, Wayshape, which sounds like the cast of Stomp playing live in the fiery dominions of hell. And like most tracks it is obscured and interleaved with noise and ghostly apparitions of voices, like some demonic hand is twiddling the tuning knob of a broken radio.
Generally, Notus' inherent dedication to serious audio experimentation only occasionally threatens to descend into something like recognisable songwriting - their music resembles the soundtrack to most abstract art installations I've ever visited. Which is not a bad thing, by any means. In fact, I think I'd love it, if only I was clever enough.

Experimental jarring electronica with liberal coating of white and brown noise and haunting vocals; this is strange music, dark and full of ghosts.

Review date: 04/09/2002

Collection of short stories – 26pp

This is a collection of intriguing short tales, surreal without being pretentious, a kind of off-hand magical realism, casually punctuated with shocking revelations. The main piece, running at some 19 pages, is Faust Returns to the Fatherland. It’s a refreshingly straight-forward story of bohos in Berlin, littered with dreams-scenes and lowlife imagery.
The narrative follows friends Hamish and Jack from bar to squat to the low-rent offices of an underground magazine, fuelled by a cocktail of booze, drugs and socio-political angst. Hamish as a character seems strangely rigid and detached from his surroundings, which combines with the seediness of the Berlin underworld to make for a dark tale indeed.
The remaining stories in the book are even stranger, and more like peculiar little monologues, or the diary entries of a schizophrenic Walter Mitty. Like an American dream-zine, personal yet strangely distant, they give the impression of a man reciting his life story from an autocue.

Depressing in parts, humorous and shocking in others, it’s definitely intriguing from start to finish, and worth every penny of the cover price of one English pound.

Review date: 23/04/2002

3 track CD from Steven Cox

With music, as with anything, first impressions count. The first track, “The Candidate” immediately commands attention. A lilting plucked guitar & piano backing track is overlaid with a female computer-generated voice speaking surreal poetry. The insistent, artificial voice tells a story of a man “one life ago” preparing for some unspecified political or religious ascension to power. Its futuristic flavour creates a powerful, bleak musical landscape, impossible to ignore. The computer-generated nature gives rise to wonderful rhythmic accidents; the phrase “always back and back” is repeated, with great effect, in combination with the simple, hypnotic music, creating an experience of ineffable melancholy.
According to the accompanying literature, the second short track is inspired by “the fabulously titled western pulp fictions from the local library.” It’s a short, simple acoustic alt.folk.country tune. Finally “I Flew with the Queen” is a sparse and touching tribute to the Queen’s first ever voyage on a scheduled flight. The brilliantly constructed lyrics describe “my inflight mag/a bottle of very cheap red wine/and a bag/all to keep my nerves steady.” Sadly it only lasts 2 minutes, leaving me desperate to hear more of Her Madge’s experince of flying with us peasants.

A brilliantly original taste of a master wordsmith and musical imagineer.

Review date: 23/04/2002

Five track CD (21 mins)

The three brothers that make up Vibrant Green are from North Carolina – quite how they found out about my corner of North London I have no idea. Anyway, they list U2, Weezer, Radiohead and Boston as their influences. Boston? Hmm. Happily this is the least apparent ingredient in their mix, which is lo-fi, guitar-fuelled, and no doubt small-gig-friendly. Singer/guitarist Stephen Tunnell has the definite free-associating drawl of a young Lou Reed, although he can hold a note too, from time to time. Musically they range from rocking out American-indie style a la Weezer meets Pavement, to a neo-Gothic navel-gazing simplicity. The most appealing track is definitely the opener “Sweetheart” – which weaves a yearning love song through a Pixies drum beat, with a vocal-chord stretching climax. Reminded me slightly of Semisonic’s “Secret Smile” of a couple of years ago, but with more variation.

Stateside indie sounds with plenty to savour.

Review date: 19/04/2002

Four track EP

Somehow I imagine Archie Bronson’s outfit to be cowboy boots, patchwork flares, and a Gomez t-shirt. They’re an enigmatic lot, this six piece from London. No title, no track listing; in the picture on the back, one of them even sports a beard. Stick the CD on, and for a few introductory bars, it’s all Cumberland Gap. When it kicks off proper though, the music blends a retro analogue sound with radio-sonic vocals, and it all fits together pretty darn well. Though it has its roots in prog rock, there’s little for the axe-worshippers, or drum solo devotees; Bronson are desert-prog, without the pretensions. The vocal style evokes Pink Floyd at their world-weariest, but without the 14 minute tracks: everything is compact and in it’s place. Lyrically, though, it could be straight out of Pete Sinfield’s notebook: “Now I am your enemy/Together we curse your King” is the stuff of medieval fable. The last track rocks out, everything distorted including the harmonica, but still the underlying control stops them from entering a nurdling frenzy – these boys know what they’re doing. The standout track is number three; all the magic is there, but in a room big enough to admire it. Guitars sputter and sway periodically behind a hypnotic melody, complex waves of drum beats and a swelling bass march out a rhythmical lament. It’s a sad sea-shanty of a tune: “Strike a light/With the last of the matches” the singer intones, later adding: “our light will shine on.” Let’s hope it does.

Thirteen minutes of wonderfully constructed, heart-rending melodies, but a bit seventies in the lyrical department.