KINGS OF LEON
Only By The Night
(RCA/Sony BMG)
In seemingly no time at all since the release of their third awesome album Because Of The Times, Kings Of Leon reach for the heights of superstardom with Only By The Night. Still having not really cracked their home turf, this record has a classic feel that seems skewed towards making it big in the States; it trades the country twang that has laced previous outings for big, stadium-ready rockers that not only display the band’s burgeoning dexterity but finds them ready to stop hedging their indie bets and be the grand stadium rock band of their own dreams. The voice of Caleb Followill is becoming more soulfully powerful and woeful than ever before, while his lyrics – aside from the slightly dodgy line here and there – have a potent poeticism.
Highlights are abundant: no, they’re constant. They already have one of the singles of ‘08 with the soaring ‘Sex On Fire’ and there are another handful to come. The spooky ‘Closer’ opens the set, preceding the deliciously swampy ‘Crawl’. Elsewhere ‘Use Somebody’ is an early-U2-styled rocker, while the power ballad ‘Notion’ is bound to have cigarette lighters in the air once thrown into their live set. ‘Cold Desert’ is the perfect end to this short, sharp album, revelling in just about every miserable blues cliché while threatening to head into a ‘Purple Rain’ territory.
Only By The Night is a pure and utter triumph for KOL. It seems now that they’re less of a southern band and more of an American band. Rock’n’roll comes naturally to the Followill boys like they’re time travellers from the golden age, only here they aren’t impersonating the greats, they’re competing with them on a level playing field. This is one of 2008’s most important records from one of the world’s most important bands.
HHHH½ Ben Preece

YOU AM I
Dilettantes
(EMI)
For a while now, a new You Am I record has seemed like a life or death scenario. What if this one was a stinker? Would that be the final straw, the death-knell that sent the band spiralling into sad solo careers and promises never fulfilled? We don’t need another Hi-Fi Way or Hourly Daily, just a record as good as this band can be, one where they finally get their proper dues.
Kicking off album number eight in unassuming fashion, the title track finds Timmy the troubadour manning his acoustic guitar while strings and lavishly adorned melodies usher in a brooding mood. This builds with ‘Disappearing’ and ‘Beau Geste’, the band showing so much restraint that a strange tension slowly builds. For those wanting the rock, sweat and swagger that the band tried to make the lifeblood of Convicts, well, it’s delivered here in carefully measured doses. The You Am I of 2008 are about the elegance of the songwriter craft as much as electrifying power chords.
‘Frightfully Moderne’ clicks its Cuban heels while still wearing a Terry Sullivan. ‘Wankers’ may have been penned by Rogers, but it screams of the mod styling of Russell Hopkinson and Davey Lane. Halfway through it finally sinks in that You Am I have actually created something that still smells of four lads from Sydney, but sounds completely new and fresh.
It’d be proper to shower hyperbole on all 12 tracks, but there’s just not enough space to cover all the surprises here. This is a band in full control of their music and their deep well of talent. Don’t let the dishevelled photos fool you: this album is proof positive of the band’s humour, continually refined vitality and the gaping hole that’d exist were they no longer here, knocking our socks off!
HHHH Alex Gillies

STEREOLAB
Chemical Chords
(4AD/Inertia)
18 years and eight albums into their quietly celebrated existence, Stereolab take on their first decidedly ‘pop’ release with Chemical Chords. With most tracks clocking in at three-and-a-half minutes or less and twee charm turned to eleven, it’s a change of scenery for these UK indie darlings. Sadly though, while the album makes for an easy, enjoyable listen, as a pop album Chemical Chords has some fatal flaws.
Perhaps the most notable is its consistent lack of hooks. Laetitia Sadier’s vocals tend to take up unusually bland, meandering melodies over the boppy and charming, but ultimately tiring, rhythmic backdrops, while Sean O’Hagan’s arrangements get overtaken by whimsicality. This consistency makes Chemical Chords and its tracks almost unwaveringly static and repetitive, perhaps due to an uneasy stylistic transition. It sees the group abandon their signature Motorik (see Krautrock) rhythms, favouring a faux Motown feel. While Motorik rhythms enjoy an intrinsic, primordial dynamism that only enhances with repetition, Motown’s halting, off-balance manner demands a strong melodic drive, and refuses to lend itself to repetition if that demand is neglected. This is where, in large part, Chemical Chords comes undone. That said, the album does have its redeeming tracks. ‘Pop Molecule’ comes from nowhere as album highlight with its heavy, straight-shooting post-rock intensity. Intro track ‘Neon Beanbag’ takes an inescapably toe-tapping, off-kilter jaunt into doo-wop, while ‘Silver Sands’ is impressive for the sheer snappiness of its instrumentation. If you love twee pop, then ‘Daisy Click Clack’ will have you dancing like a Muppet.
If not for these shining beacons, you might find yourself wondering if you’ve been listening to the same three tracks on loop. Mostly, Chemical Chords simply fails to be engaging – not in the appealing, “We’re not trying to be engaging,” way that Stereolab often wanders off into experiments though, just in a boring way.
HH½ Dan Lewis

THE WILSON PICKERS
Land of the Powerful Owl
(ABC Music/Universal)
What an awesome album name. What a group of supremely talented songwriter/musicians: Brisbane’s own Danny Widdicombe, Ben Salter and Andrew Morris and Melbourne’s Sime Nugent and John Bedggood all come together here with electric chemistry.
Bluegrass gets a bad rap these days. No longer the exclusive realm of hillbillies with beards down to their knees, here it’s the forum for some amazing folk harmonies, some beautiful instrumental work and some entrancing lyrical work. If HBO ever gets around to making those promised movie-length episodes of Deadwood they’ll need not look any further than ‘Cold River’ as a new theme song (cue Al Swearengen cussing fit). Failing that, O Brother Where Art Thou? 2 – Soggy Bottom Boys on the Run. There’s also the potential for Tamworth style success with ‘Graves Or Gold’, except that the Australian country music scene seems much more interested in far less intelligent fare. This sure as henshit is no ‘Boys From The Bush’, thank God. The honkytonk ramble of ‘Country Fair’ (one of Widdicombe’s compositions) is a simple yet endearing piece, while the Brisbane contingent’s collective effort ‘I Won’t Tell’ is atmospheric magic – perfect drought music. The Melbourne team holds their own with ‘World Going Wrong’, and Mr Salter’s closer ‘Barman Blues’ is a perfect goodbye note, begging to be sung along to by rabble in country bars across the nation.
Land of the Powerful Owl deserves to be sought out and kept somewhere special, to be played on the lazy, sun-beaten Sunday afternoons of the upcoming summer, providing we don’t get gypped for scorchers again this year.
HHHH Tal Wallace

THE FAUVES
When Good Times Go Good
(Shock)
Do you wonder how all those Kingswood cars keep driving by, how after decades they still seem to chug along, their drivers frozen in time and oblivious? Well, there are many facets of Australian culture that refuse to go away or update themselves – The Fauves are such a creature, out of step with trends and belligerently frozen in their own superb pop-rock indie world.
Andy Cox’s nasal call sounds instantly familiar and well-worn, although now this quartet sound more instinctive with their whimsical melodies and circa ‘87 Sonic Youth guitar lines – ‘Back To Being Me’ and ‘Sunday Drive’ take the mundane and make it sound special through well spun wordplay. They might still “shop for clothes at Best and Less,” as eloquently stated in ‘Fight Me I’m 40’, but everything here sounds tailor-made. These 12 songs are more poppy and less rocky than the last few albums, sounding effortless and refined – this is definitely the successful articulation of what they have been trying to do but only hinting at in recent times. There are some elements to this band that have always stayed strong and the main one is the lack of gloss applied to their music – sounding dynamic and wonderfully produced by Jim Moginie and Wayne Connelly, the band simply have the knack of making everything sound homespun, this most prominent in the downtrodden ‘Get Me Through The Night’ and ‘Out On Your Own’.
Maybe at the end of the day The Fauves are just four nerds making gloriously nerdy pop-rock. If they were from the big smoke then maybe we’d have them and not Weezer adorning our glossy mags, but they seem happy down on the Mornington Peninsula and through them, suburban slacker life is still sounding pretty damn good.
HHHH Richard Alverez

MATT PRYOR
Confidence Man
(Vagrant/Shock)
Confidence Man is a long way from Matt Pryor’s past musical projects, namely his time spent as frontman for emo rock band The Get Up Kids. Pryor has gone entirely solo – writing and producing this LP in his home studio – and taken the folk path whilst creating this acoustic, slow and heartfelt album.
The album is not musically complex, with Pryor favouring simplistic chords and easy rhythms, yet this somehow adds depth to the complex emotions that he explores over the duration. The 15 tracks guide you through daily human emotions of lost love and friendships, new hope, selfishness and disappointment and evoke sentimentality, nostalgia and optimism. The songs are both moving and pleasurable, containing lyrics that highlight the absurdity of many relationships, such as, “We were square, without a care/But then you had to go and steal my car” (‘Loralai’), or which shed light on self-discovery like, “We all have a dark side that is ours and ours alone” (‘We’ll Be Fine’). Elsewhere tracks such as ‘Still, There’s A Light’ are affirming and fill one with hopefulness. Yet it’s all very repetitive and by the end the acoustic guitar and Pryor’s distinctive voice become tedious. The tracks become slower and increasingly downbeat and the lyrics towards the end are depressed and monotonous. Having said this, listening to the album start to finish highlights the clever way in which the album is strung together: opening track ‘A Totally New Year’ and closing track ‘It All Ends Here’ provide perfect bookends for the emotional journey encompassed in this album – you have been loved and burned, lost hope, felt excited and by then end regained self-confidence.
While Confidence Man is not an overly exciting or powerful album, it does exhibit an honest, melancholy charm which helps it stand apart from the endless amounts of acoustic music currently being released.
HH Emma Heard

DAVID BYRNE
Big Love: Hymnal
(HBO/Shock)
There have been recent songs and albums by David Byrne that have taken on spiritual and contemplative themes – songs such as ‘Like Humans Do’ and ‘Walk On Water’ from Look Into The Eyeball, or the soundtrack to Lead Us Not Into Temptation quickly come to mind. So it should come as little surprise to find that Byrne spent a large portion of 2006 and 2007 scoring the television series Big Love, of which Hymnal is the summary audio document.
Given that this album… well, isn’t an album or a soundtrack per se, its 21 tracks are mostly short interludes and mood pieces strung together. All orchestrated, played and produced by Byrne himself, the sensibility and air that has defined his songwriting is instantly recognisable here – but that’s also where the similarities end. Byrne has a penchant for the overt, soaring melody and that’s usually not what underpins tele-dramas, so while you’re going to find that Byrne has brought some strings in here and there, the majority of what’s here is small on structure and narrative. Most tunes scarcely make it to two minutes and Byrne himself doesn’t even sing until the very last track.
If you’re a regular viewer of Big Love then this might be a nice reminder of the peaks, dramas and tragedies in the second series. If you’re unfamiliar with the soap then there’s definitely going to be a hint of background elevator music to what’s here. Long-time David Byrne fans will enjoy its quirks and regal mood, but for the Talking Heads fans out there, save your pennies for the next jaw-droppingly amazing pop statement that Byrne is sure to have hidden somewhere up his sleeve.
HHH½ Jo Hill

BLACK LUNGS
Send Flowers
(Cortex/Shock)
Wade McNeil – better known as lead guitarist of Canadian screamo, post-hardcore outfit Alexisonfire – has embarked on a new solo project Black Lungs and in the process delivered what is effectively his first solo album, Send Flowers. Following the success of fellow Alexisonfire band member Dallas Green with his side project City And Colour, McNeil is primed to show the world what he is capable of.
The project differs from McNeil’s work in AOF as it delivers a more gentle sound, although it remains true to his punk and rock’n’roll background by employing simple punk sounds combined with barroom acoustics and remnants of the 90s grunge aesthetic. Members of Alexisonfire, Cancer Bats and Attack In Black make guest appearances on the album and provide a solid yet unobtrusive backing band, but it’s the sound of McNeil’s vocals and long-term friend Sammi Bogdanski’s melodic and cascading piano that rolls through the tracks, which take centre stage.
Send Flowers attempts to engage us into Wade’s world with insightful and honest songwriting. Each track blends into each other, a hypnotic trance where each song passes without too much notice, while McNeil is true to form with the soft growling, soulful vocals he is adored for. We are introduced to a very repetitive first track ‘A Blessing And A Curse’ that has no climatic hook, but it’s ‘Hold Fast’ which is the highlight of the album, while ‘So it Goes’ takes us close to McNeil’s heart. ‘Timeless’, unfortunately, sums up the album in its introduction, “This is nothing original, identifiable”.
All the ingredients are here for a delicious side project, but it ultimately ends up being a bit bland. Having said that, if you are an Alexisonfire fan then this is something you should definitely check out for yourself.
HH½ Alexandra Tilbury

LYKKE LI
Youth Novels
(LL/Warner)
“Love is a symphony” is one of the opening lines of Lykke Li’s debut and it goes a long way to defining this album. These songs are built upon emotions delicately and elaborately orchestrated, 14 tunes that are many faceted and yet still fragile in their depiction.
Li shares the same musical sphere as artists such as Tujiko Noriko or Goldfrapp (minus the dancefloor), a house of electronic cards built and kept sturdy by wide-eyed melodies and the angelic falsetto of Li’s voice. Essentially, these could be electro-pop tunes of a curious order, but there’s something amiss for that to be the case, and that’s laziness. Li’s tunes swing and gallop, her words cascade and scatter themselves across songs such as ‘I’m Good, I’m Gone’ and ‘Let It Fall’ – and it’s unusual enough to be totally captivating but not off-putting. The sweeping grandiosity of ‘My Love’ conjures up images of Tracy Thorn manipulating The Beach Boys, the song’s live instrumentation, cavernous percussion and brass sounding so bold. This is accentuated by the next track (and one of the finest moments here), the strings and wafting electronics of ‘Tonight’ leaving Li’s yearning Scandinavian English calling out for you to let her have her way, regardless of the consequences.
This album is completely spellbinding, one moment filled with a sensual mood and flirtatious nature, the next moment vulnerable and on the verge of breakdown. And it doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful storytelling or if it’s straight from Li’s heart, because Youth Novels draws you in like the sirens of Capri and these are intoxicating sounds that you’ll want to get drunk on.
HHHH Jo Hill

GLEN CAMPBELL
Meet Glen Campbell
(Capitol/EMI)
We’ve seen it done with Neil Diamond and we’ve seen the concept not only resurrect the career of one Mr. Johnny Cash, but send it to new heights of popularity. Now the Rick Rubin-patented formula has been applied to another country great: Glen Campbell.
The concept in question is getting a revered but now forgotten country singer in the twilight of his career and giving him a bunch of contemporary songs to cover, therefore reconnecting him to the current generation of music lovers. But there are two things that stop this concept from succeeding for Campbell: Rick Rubin had nothing to do with this album and whereas the other artists mentioned above were stripped back to their voice and a single acoustic guitar, all the songs here are full of big band country musos, string and brass sections and Campbell’s extended family as backing singers.
Still, this collection of 10 songs works for the most part and that’s because Campbell has lost none of the talent that first made him such a success. Taking on artists not too far outside his sphere provides the best results – ‘Walls’ and ‘Angel Dream’ are not one but two of Tom Petty’s songs; Jackson Browne’s ‘These Days’ sounds like it was written especially for Campbell, while The Replacements ‘Sadly Beautiful’ breathes new life into not only the song but the artist in question. However, U2’s ‘All I Want Is You’ is one of those rare and beautiful songs that no-one should ever cover and that definitely applies here (the banjo and overstated strings kills all of the song’s delicate features) and Green Day’s ‘Good Riddance’ is just wrong on too many levels.
This album certainly won’t resurrect Glen Campbell’s illustrious career, but will make a few older folk feel a bit hipper and younger.
HHH½ Richard Alverez

JUPITER ONE
Jupiter One
(Rykodisk/Stomp)
The new self-titled album from Jupiter One is reminiscent of classic science fiction in more ways than one. Using synths played to “futuristic effect”, Jupiter One draws on the tradition of the mood music of numerous sci-fi movies, adding catchy pop-rock to reflect the excitement of this genre. And the themes of the album are definitely human, as good science fiction should be. This formula works well and results in a cracker of an album – it’s tightly played, tightly produced and most importantly full of tight, well-written material with no obvious filler.
Yet within this formula there is a certain amount of diversity. The album drifts into being with a throbbing futuristic soundscape, replete with synths and violins. Opening track ‘Countdown’ is a catchy, staccato pop-rock tune, while ‘Mystery Man’ is more contemplative. On some tracks (including the aforementioned ‘Countdown’) the enigmatic “K” sings in beat, with his bandmates contributing harmony. His voice is high-pitched throughout, sometimes reedy and breathy, sometimes clear. When he sings with the beat (‘What Is Love?’)it sounds as you would imagine a robot trying to express itself, a trait used to particularly striking effect on ‘Turn Up The Radio’. ‘Platform Moon’ is the most obvious tribute to New Wave, although the whole of the album is quite influenced by this movement with the notable addition of rock guitar punch. Touchstones such as Talking Heads and The Cars are obvious, but the band has also drawn comparison to contemporaries like The Killers because of this rockier edge.
Good science fiction is not just about bizarre situations but about human beings in bizarre situations and Jupiter One have captured this with their mixture of the excitement of rock, the synth-driven sci-fi mood and their themes of the human condition.
HHHH Roberta Maguire