Archive for March 29th, 2010
Kids in Glass Houses Dirt Review
March 29th, 2010 | Author: admin
“This is not the way we planned it.” So reads the first line of this second album from Welsh quintet Kids in Glass Houses. But despite the concession that the future looked radically different during the days before their debut left a considerable dent in the domestic rock scene, this young band can’t be displeased with where they find themselves in 2010. Dirt is poised to take them from support slots with Lostprophets and Paramore to headline performances at the nation’s larger venues.
Produced by Jason Perry – formerly of Old Folks-rockers A and a songwriter for McFly – Dirt takes the well-executed but ultimately generic pop-punk via post-hardcore racket of 2008’s Smart Casual collection and introduces the kind of choruses that will sound incredible when chanted by an arena-sized crowd. While opener Artbreaker I delivers impressively muscular riffs, it’s not long before the group’s more commercially viable influences – The Beach Boys, The Police – bubble to the surface. They’re not channelling these artists in a sound-alike sense, but these Kids have studied well the compositional phrasing of their heroes, the transitions from punchy verses to anthem-in-waiting central motifs. They display a discernable nous for crafting immediately catchy songs as acceptable to mainstream radio listeners as they will be to those schooled on the likes of New Found Glory and Glassjaw.
The latter group provided the band with their name, while long-standing emo-punks New Found Glory contribute guest gang vocals on Maybe Tomorrow. The following track, The Morning Afterlife, is something of a side-step. It’s a slow-burn ballad that, with the guitars turned down a touch, would have sat prettily on Boyzone’s latest. This is not to be read as a minus point, however: so unashamed is this band’s incorporation of pop elements that one can’t flag it as a fault, and so open are they about the mainstream artists that have affected them every bit as much as hardcore acts that the end results don’t feel insincere.
Dirt does feel a little top-heavy, many of its most striking numbers – Sunshine, Lilli Rose (Don Henley for the Green Day market), Matters At All – arriving within the first half-dozen tracks. But the overall progression from record one to two is impressive, and following a Lostprophets model fans can expect album four to be their career landmark. As another highlight sings: “the best is yet to come.”
David S. Ware Saturnian Review
March 29th, 2010 | Author: admin
Making an album from a free jazz concert seems something of a misnomer. Can music created as an event, an improvised performance, become a fixed object packaged for repeat listening? Indeed it’s difficult to know when – as a 40-minute, freeform, honks-aplenty solo saxophone recital – you’d turn to your collection and pop Saturnian on the CD player. Not first thing Monday, perhaps. But do so in the right frame of mind and the sound of David S. Ware hits you first time and gets better with ever spin.
It’s difficult not to equate the uncompromising urgency and emotion of the playing with Ware’s successful recovery from a life-threatening illness last year; this was a very personal comeback moment shared with an appreciative audience. The American’s prowess as an improviser – heard elsewhere in a fine discography of quartet recordings – is presented here in its rawest form, recorded alone on a New York stage with no colleagues or chords for company.
From the opening octave leaps of Methone, Ware’s soprano saxello probes and prods repeatedly at various intervals of pitch, reflecting a post-Coltrane interest in sound – timbre, tone, a uniquely-saxophonic-if-that’s-a-word flourish – rather than sense – clear melodic lines or phraseology. Overt jazz language is eschewed as Ware works with short thematic scraps which are repeated, mantra-like, varied and then thrown away with exciting spontaneity. There’s a good example of this in Pallene – the concert’s central piece for alto – in which a fragment from Thelonious Monk’s Straight No Chaser is stumbled upon, taken up and then cast aside.
As with similar solo ventures from saxophonists of his generation (Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Dave Liebman…), Ware’s skill is in sustaining invention in the face of utter freedom. The pieces form as peaks and troughs on a graph, moving between episodes of contrasting energies (fast to slow) and shifting through pitch-constellations (low to high, to Saturnian) towards the ever-ascending climax of Anthe.