THE WRONG PEOPLE SAY IT OUT LOUD, BUT IT CAN BE BETTER IF WE SAY IT: 2025 IN REVIEW

 

Thurston Moore appears to have been the straw that's broken this particular camel's back. Three days ago he posted a list of the "350 Best Records of 2025" on Substack - note, records, not albums. I had to go down to number eleven to find a choice that I agreed with but that's neither here nor there (his top record was the E.P. Fundus by the Antwerp-based harpist and composer Laura de Jongh, very much a recital that summons a respectful nod rather than a passionate embrace).

This exercise has provoked a fairly virulent response, best summed up by one Bluesky poster in the words: "shut the fuck up old man nobody cares anymore." All of a sudden, as 2025 hiccups to an unseemly close, nobody indeed does. I don't claim that Mr Moore was inspired by my list of the 550 (or so) best albums of 2024 from twelve months ago, but last year mattered musically in a way that this year has not.

Speed-checking my own records, I find at a charitable best about 250 albums from this year, all of which I have listened to thoroughly, that I once might have wanted to convert into some sort of order - and I probably only liked about a third of those enough to want to get them physically. To that I could add about fifty more that are either really not very good or plainly unremarkable - and most of the latter are the ones which appear to have cropped up in so many end-of-year lists, lauded and applauded. We have to ask ourselves why this has happened.

I think the root lies in the likelihood that music criticism is fundamentally run on a very wrongheaded basis. In the early days of music magazines, which until the mid-1960s, and in many cases well into the 1970s, were essentially trade papers servicing the industry, reviews of records were utilitarian and to the point. The new Beatles or Rolling Stones discs were generally summed up as "another solid effort from the boys" and their reviews told you exactly what the records sounded like and what you might reasonably expect from them.

Whereas I can search through reams of reviews of, for example, Lily Allen's West End Girl, and find acres of lyrical analysis but practically nothing that tells me what the record actually sounds like. This is in huge part to do with the fact, as Charles Shaar Murray pointed out half a lifetime ago, that most music critics are disillusioned English Literature graduates who view the text as paramount and know little, if anything, about musical theory. Added to that is the knowledge that readers are dissuaded by musical analysis, which is usually too technical for them to understand, unlike the Good Story promised by the lyrics.

Pretty much all of this type of thinking is undermined by the fact that, as I have lately been reminding myself, the late James Hamilton ran reviews in each week's Record Mirror packed with simple information about what records sounded like, down to beats per minute. It is true that his were specialist pages tailored specifically for professional disc jockeys. Yet he was easily able to communicate his deep love of music in clear and simple terms which hit with laymen such as myself. As with anyone, he had his likes and dislikes, but always kept an open mind and happily welcomed new developments in music; Arthur Russell was on an equal footing with Five Star (although Mr Hamilton rightly thought the former much better than the latter!).

And there was never a trace of sentimentality in Hamilton's writing. Unlike James Murphy, he was there, in the late fifties when discotheques had become the new fashion in Paris, in the early sixties when the Beatles and Motown were emerging; he spent most of my birth year, 1964, visting the Harlem Apollo on a weekly basis. Yet he understood, as so few writers do, that living in the past was really camouflaged dying. In his words, he'd much rather hear next month's hit than another dredged-up oldie, and I am in complete concordance with that philosophy. He was banging the drum for what would become House music in 1984, had little time for Rare Groove which he rightly viewed as the province of superior-feeling spivs.

All I see now in music writing - and to a huge degree also in broadcasting, but that's another story to which I'll come shortly - is what the aforementioned James Murphy might have described as borrowed nostalgia for two or three unremembered decades ago (as far as "Losing My Edge" is concerned, I myself would call it "the misremembered eighties" but more about that anon). Bands and artists whose records the critics bought when they were at university and to which they remain sentimentally attached; how else to explain the unmerited approval of Pulp's almost wholly unremarkable More, as opposed to relatively-unheralded but excellent albums by Suede, Stereolab and Ash which quite clearly are not content to dwell in the past?

Or the fortysomething columnists who sang along to Alright Still a generation ago and are happy to cheer on good old Lily fighting the good fight against her celebrity actor bastard husband because sisters are doing it for themselves (if not necessarily for anyone else). West End Girl stands as one symbol of this misapplied thinking; ravenously hyped up - and therefore streamed out of curiosity - by these same columnists (and no one else) at the time of its release, it spent four weeks in the album top ten (peaking at a reluctant number two) before going into commercial freefall. On actual sales it peaked at number eighteen and was gone after a fortnight. In Ireland it charted for just over a month, while in Scotland it didn't chart at all. A forthcoming physical release might revive the record, but fundamentally it is commercially dead. The fish didn't bite at the bait. I listened to it in full twice and couldn't remember how any of its songs went, even while I was listening to them, only knowing that I wasn't really bothered who "Madeline" was. In the meantime, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms Kitchen Disco herself and just over six years Allen's senior, returned virtually unnoticed with Perimenopop, a genuinely brilliant and eminently danceable examination of what it feels like to be a woman in your mid-forties who is treated by society with patronising contempt.

There is also the residual and seemingly unshakable nostalgia for polite mid-late nineties guitar-based indie music. Listening to the new and umpteenth releases by Big Thief and Wednesday, it is hard to shake the feeling that the sand is well and truly running out in that hourglass and that this type of music has about as much to say to people in 2025 as. well, the music of Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen would have had to say to Prodigy fans (notwithstanding the actually rather tangible thread of Essex-based all-night raves that connects the two). It's a bit like Jazz Journal voting for a Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven box set as album of the year in 1980 (which they did). The world today is a miserable and hellish place and sitting about pondering and wallowing in that misery isn't going to improve it. This music is the equivalent of New Yorker fiction, tales for melancholy centrists about ageing philosophy lecturers nearing the end but still having affairs with students young enough to be their grandchildren (see also the normally excellent Divine Comedy's really dreary new album with its soporific reflections on ageing, bereavement and other things I already know about; cheer me up, Neil, and stick to the comedy character studies at which you're so good).

Or the urge for something, anything, to fill that gap in the ageing music writer's mind. You know that feeling, or at least Hornby summed it up in High Fidelity, about the Saturday lunchtime record shopper who mooches gloomily around the shop for half an hour only to come back to that blues compilation he saw when he came in, which probably isn't that great but at least it's something? That's much the case with Geese (the band, not the waterfowls). I liked Cameron Winter, alone with his piano, on Later With Jools Holland, then found his Heavy Metal album samey, overproduced and irritating. Writer Phil Freeman best described Geese as "Timothée Chalamet in The Thom Yorke Story." I've listened to Getting Killed on three separate occasions and can find nothing in it save utterly generic "alternative" rock music sung by Rufus Wainwright with a bad cold and questionable politics (I refer you specifically to the song "Taxes"). But there's no real U2, Radiohead or Strokes any more, and obviously no more Smiths or Stone Roses (you can't resurrect the bass player), so...they will do.

I'm aware that by saying this I'm potentially placing myself in the same camp as boring old sixties heads who looked at the Pistols in 1976 and sighed, "I've seen this all before with The Who." But what the Pistols were doing, and more importantly how they were doing it, was entirely new and different. They tore a new gap in the market, whereas Geese should more properly be called Polyfilla.

Or the desperation to find what critics can comfortably perceive as newness. I've already gone on about Rosalia's Sarah Brightman/Vivaldi tribute album/fashion show soundtrack Lux here and will only add here that in ten years from now, people will look back in wonderment at how we were so taken in by its arrogance, pomp and pretentiousness, and understand why the next punk explosion - whatever that turns out to be - needed to happen (it's apparently all really about Bad Bunny, except that Bad Bunny made much the better record this year).

And of course there is the disaster that is The Life Of A Showgirl. I said things about TS being the most important star pop has ever known in my 2024 summary, and it turns out that I was right, but in all the wrong ways. One awaits the radio commercial: "were you mis-sold a T*yl*r Sw*ft album that was marketed as wall-to-wall dance bangers but turned out to be the same old miserable acoustic shit as before? Call this number..." Or: were you mis-sold a Labour government at the last election?

Same old miserable acoustic shit. In 2025 I've listened to Tortured Poets zero times, but can't stop playing brat. Charli xcx responded to TS' platitudinous misreading of her song in the best way, i.e. by not acknowledging it at all and going off to work on a film soundtrack with John Cale. But even the reasonable TS stuff gets tainted by the smugness of Showgirl, a record whose sole aim is to game the charts, or whatever constitutes the charts these days - as with the profoundly ordinary "Ordinary," one cannot imagine people streaming "Ophelia" for more than a few seconds, as opposed to the kids at the back of the bus or the ladies in the office who sing along to "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" and "Golden," or anybody in Ireland, where "EURO-COUNTRY" has become a new folk song for the ages - a record which appears to exist for no other reason than to allow TS to continue being TS for another six months or so.

I can't remember any of the songs on Showgirl without prompting, and horrible songs they mostly are too, apart from the last one which is markedly saved by the intervention of Sabrina Carpenter (whose Man's Best Friend bears all the wit and inventiveness - and, if you listen carefully, also the spite - that Sw*ft once naturally possessed). The get-out clause that this is yet another persona, an imagining of the horrible character TS might turn into, doesn't work because T*yl*r isn't Bowie. Songs worshipping your fiancée's, um, attributes, laments for those who have been "cancelled," the singer's significant refusal to condemn what Harry Shearer calls the Felon-in-Chief's use of her music in his campaigns - this all points to an imminent Republican trad wife and the eventual horror that really this was what she, and therefore by extension all pop music, was about; just the urge to make money, devoid of all other considerations.

Oh, squeal certain critics, how dare you criticise a Pop Superstar for making a fun album about decadence - well, it has to sound decadent in order for that to work. And as far as both Lux and Showgirl are concerned - along with too many other things this year (Wolf Alice's thoroughly unconvincing this-is-what-we-always-wanted-to-do-honest schtick about their retreat into becoming a late eighties Fleetwood Mac tribute band) - they are assumed to be immune to criticism, especially when the person criticising them is a MAN, and you wouldn't be saying this about those records if they were made by MEN?

Which assumption, needless to say (if not to pun), is complete bollocks. If you do not worship Rosalia or T*yl*r you are by definition a misogynist. How does that explain Hayley Williams' astonishing Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, where she rages against not only what's happened to her throughout her life and career, but also at what those running/destroying her own country are doing? Or JADE's funny, furious and inventive THAT'S SHOWBIZ BABY!, the real sequel to Chemistry? Or savagely wonderful albums by, to name but four, Lady Gaga, Self Esteem, Marina, or Lorde? I could go on. Women are in control of pop right now, and that is really as it should be (since in history, from Connie Francis through ABBA to Madonna, they have always been). But we cannot overlook the fact that all of us, now and again and regardless of gender, are also capable of making not very good records.

So what, you ought to ask, was good about 2025's music - and would anyone even notice? I'm not sure anybody cares enough about anything any more to notice, and it certainly isn't helped, either by radio or television, or by social media. There exists this stranglehold of selective nostalgia which is actively suffocating newness. At the beginning of the year I had a little empire of musical blogs which, with two exceptions (this being one, and the other only has another five chapters to go before it finishes), I have allowed to run down. Lena and I agreed to finish Then Play Long the way we did because we felt that its story had been fully told without the need to take another (at the time of writing) 832 (!) albums into account (and in any case it is highly unlikely that I would live long enough to bring that blog up to date; furthermore, I concluded my piece on Mezzanine with a macabre alternate-universe twist so subtle that nobody seems to have got it!).

Uncorrected Bound Proof was an unpublishable spent folly. The Ogun Records blog didn't do anywhere near enough business to convince me that it serviced anything more than an extremely narrow niche interest. This one comes and goes. I'll be taking the Young Punctum blog towards its natural conclusion because if anything that's really blossomed and it's been a pleasure (if also something of a stress, having to do all that retyping) to run it (although nobody who doesn't already know about it or me is reading it or picking up on it).

What all of these blogs, except the one you're reading now, have in common is that they concern themselves with - rest in peace, John Miles - music of the past...and there's far too much of that happening now; too much looking back and missing the art for the trash. If the eighties meant anything to me musically it was in terms of newness and nowness - there was so much new music demanding my urgent attention that I had the neither the time nor inclination to revisit the old stuff. It was exciting and dangerous (but in a good way). Yet if I switch on the radio in Britain now - digital or online - all I hear are the same old bland chestnuts, songs I thought were boring at the time or good songs slaughtered by overexposure, whereas I still want to hear what's happening tomorrow. One would think that starting up an internet radio station would give you free licence to play what you like, except what people seem to like are gnarled oldies too crappy even to pass as camp that you can hear anywhere.

The exception that proves the ironic rule - given its history - is Radio One, which presentation-wise I find unlistenable for more than about five seconds before realising that the station isn't meant for people like me, but for the young, and they seem to operate successfully in a continuous present tense. Whereas 6 Music is a confused beast of a station which plays "new" music that its producers seem to think you ought to like, as opposed to what its listeners might actually want to hear, and cannot readily grasp the simple notion that people tune in to music radio in order to hear music, not guests "dropping in," droning away inarticulately for half an hour and killing any atmosphere, or that a radio station isn't school and that music fans don't tune in to be lectured at, like naughty children at the back of the class, or yelled at as though pop music were a boot camp (balanced out by endless "uplifting" and "calm" bollocks - great art is neither of these things - to appease the possibly imaginary demographic of fortysomething mood mums to which most BBC music radio stations seem to want to attract; sorry, but they long ago ran away to Magic FM and Heart). Radio One gets the idea, though, as to a slightly narrower extent does Capital Radio. Good for both.

Getting back to the Thurston Moore problem, though - I'd just mention in passing that Kim Gordon would never feel the need to compile a list of 350 albums; why should she, she's got a proper life to live? - makes it clear to me that in all ways we need to drag ourselves away from the security blanket of lists and putting everything in order. The gates, thanks to the internet, are all open now; we are our own gatekeepers without the need for intermediaries, can judge music for ourselves and do not feel any need to "rank" its individual components. And we need to come to terms with "the past"; not to deny it, or to airbrush it or cherry-pick from it, but to accept it and use it as a chassis to help drive us through the present. Young Punctum represents me trying to come to terms with my own past because I only have so much time left and need to start putting my affairs in order. But my primary concern, as always, is with now. So should it be for us all.

AFTER ALL THAT, A LIST

But it isn't any old boring list; it's...THE 2025 DJ PUNCTUM AWARDS!!

Album Of The Year: what it should have been last year - The New Sound by Geordie Greep. Having not listened to it nearly enough in 2024, I came back to it last Christmas and have hardly stopped playing it since. It's my new Rock Bottom - that's how deeply I've got into it, and almost singlehandedly it examines in depth what it's like to be a man in the twenty-first century, for better or for, largely, worse. And it boasts more musical invention per pound than practically anything else made this century.

Single Of The Year: "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" by RAYE, who tops this particular list for the second consecutive year, not simply because the song's video was partly filmed literally around the corner from where we live, but because it's a Proper Pop Record with a tune, a hook, lyrics that tell a story in ways pop has not really managed before, imaginative production and arrangement, and hope for both our and the singer's future; she's escaped from the hell documented in "Genesis." and is ecstatically content simply to be herself. Honourable runner-up: "Golden."

Pop, Pop, Pop Music (In A Better World): Greatest Hits by Metronomy and Joy Of Repetition by Hot Chip. If this were 1982 every schoolkid would be singing their songs and you'd have probably seen both bands performing them on Cheggers Plays Pop. As Joe Mount says in his sleevenote, the world of pop has changed in the last twenty years, and it isn't his fault.

You've Heard Them All Before, But Now I've Done Them Better: Tower Block in a Jam Jar by Mozart Estate.

O Canada, Always There When You're Needed: Jane Inc, Debby Friday (probably the year's two best pop albums, in that order), Marie Davidson, Sloan.

Spokeswoman For A Generation: CMAT. 

Rock 'N' Roll Can Never Die: The Ex-Void, Sam Fender, 5 Seconds Of Summer, The Royston Club.

Music Hall's Still Going Too: Baxter Dury, Olly Murs.

I Made The Better Album, Deal With It: Bad Bunny. 

Remember Us? I Bet You Didn't: Ash, Amelia Barratt and Bryan Ferry, Dave, Franz Ferdinand, Mogwai, Songhoy Blues.

Remember Me? I KNOW You F***ing Didn't: Jamie Woon (sleeper of the year and possibly the decade!). 

We're Not Done Yet, Far From It: Stereolab, Suede. 

But You Love Us!: Sparks.

Let's Push Things Forward (Hip Hop Division): Danny Brown, Armand Hammer & the Alchemist, Mourning [A] BLKstar, billy woods.

Let's Push Things Forward (Country Division): Tyler Childers.

D'Angelo Memorial Award For Pushing Things Forward So Let's Celebrate Him While He's Still With Us: Miguel.

Tribute To A King: Cabin In The Sky by De La Soul, the best and most poignant rap album since We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service; "The Silent Life Of A Truth" might be the song of the year. Also, Traces Of You by Ivy.

And finally, but by no means lastly...

WOMEN OWN IT: Black Country New Road, Victoria Canal, Sabrina Carpenter, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Ms. Ezra Furman, Alison Goldfrapp, Haim, Mary Halvorson, JADE, keiyaA, Kesha, Lady Gaga, Lambrini Girls, Little Simz, Lorde, Marina, Melody's Echo Chamber, Ela Minus, QUAD90, PinkPantheress, Addison Rae, Renee Rapp, Gwenifer Raymond, Moonchild Sanelly, Say She She, Self Esteem, Sprints, tUnE-yArDs, Wet Leg and Hayley Motherf***ing Williams!

 

 

WHAT IS THIS RECYCLED SHIRT?

One thing I’m trained as a music listener to watch out for is the album that arrives – sweeps into the gilded ballroom of cultural discourse – to a reception of unanimous praise. When faced with that phenomenon, Mr Gut’s first question is always: “What’s wrong with it?” If a record is lauded so uniformly, directly and unquestionably, that is quite enough to render me instantaneously suspicious about its worth.

Such is LUX, the fourth album by ROSALÍA. That’s the final time I’m going to refer to either in “stylised” capitals since musicians were never intended to be brands, unless that’s what the music industry desires. We never had this garbage in the sixties. SGT PEPPER by BEATLES™ or, for that twee matter, pet sounds by beach boys. It was all proper names with capital initials. Laura Nyro. Frank Zappa. Engelbert Humperdinck. The 13th Floor Elevators. Norma Tanega. Peter Brötzmann. And guess what – the music was also better. Infinitely better and more imaginative and varied than what you get now, he semi-lied.

Yet so rapturous and applauding a reception has Lux received that it makes me wonder whether that’s all humans really want from art, or indeed life. A gigantic metaphorical ball of multicoloured string that can entertain the kittens for days on end. The big spectacle. Lights, drama, action.

Lena and I listened to the album on speed streaming scroll and were more nonplussed than baffled. Again and again we encountered potentially interesting ideas hijacked by the spirit of Dame Julie Andrews on a fortnight’s works holiday in Catalonia. To paraphrase Kevin Rowland forty years ago, it all sounded the same. To us.

Still rode the oncoming stallions of worship and hagiography. Oh, look – she’s using symphony orchestras (well, one – the London Symphony Orchestra, who, when faced with genuinely challenging music in 1972 in the form of Ornette Coleman’s Skies Of America, laughed at the composer, who was in the studio with his alto, ready to solo, and took the piss out of his music. Exasperated beyond endurance, the great Texan calmly stood up with his saxophone, illustrated exactly how each seemingly disparate element led to the next, and shut the orchestra the embarrassed fuck up) and choirs (boys’ choirs, no less)! She sings in thirteen different languages! She constantly trips the unwary listener up with sudden shifts into other styles – I won’t use the “g” word, and “styles” does seem a very fitting word in this context – of music!

This is all seemingly sufficient to entice music writers who really should know better to rhapsodise about “visionary avant garde (sic) mutations” – which phrase is, incidentally, tautological – or “megawatts of splendour” (I’m sure some people said the same of Tina Turner’s late eighties live shows). One writer got particularly carried away and drooled that "Rosalía leaves us in a place mentioned by no prophets and described by no poets. A place none of us have been before, imagined by no one but herself, and perhaps her God,” which makes me wonder exactly how many prophets or poets the writer has heard of since the answer that sentence suggests is “none.”

One particularly hilarious (if it weren’t so tragic) comment, on a message board which was once used and read by others, came from a hippy who opined “The ‘pop’ ‘song’ is not a form that holds much, if any, interest for me anymore; this feels like a movement from a larger piece, which it apparently is…and I'm all in and can't wait to hear the rest of the album.” How many long-haired bearded gentlemen said the same thing about, say, Brain Salad Surgery?

So what’s it about, this Lux? Why, it’s a four-part concept album – Tales From Hagiographic Oceans, no less – about various female saints, the duality of humanity’s struggle between the divine and the earthly, or maybe it’s just Rosalia pissed off about a scuzzy ex and using a lot of metaphors to describe him (“Olympic gold medal for the biggest motherfucker/You've got the podium of the great disappointment” she croons on “La Perla”).

Worthy of the Gibb brothers actually, that second line, but I relied on the English translation of the lyrics supplied by Genius, just as Rosalia relied on Google Translate to make sure she got all thirteen languages in. Because otherwise that would make her nothing more than a braggart, using her multilinguistic capabilities as a truncheon with which to bash people over the head until they bend and worship, rather than as a torch of guidance and shared wisdom. Or, more likely, she was keen to be successful in as many countries as possible.

Charles Aznavour – ask your grandmother – did that the hard way, painstakingly learning the language of every country he intended to visit then singing and performing in it. That was proper hard work and he was by some galactic distance the more talented artist. This, however, is a bit more like Céline Dion being given Spanish songs to sing because she wasn’t that popular in Mexico.

That is admittedly rather unfair to Sant Esteve Sesrovires' very own Rosalia, but Lux does sound like a project that’s had an awful lot of money, or perhaps a lot of awful money ha ha, thrown at it. I’m uncertain how many, if any, visionary avant-garde mutations can be wrung from Ryan Tedder, for instance, one of the many big names from arty centrist record collections of the noughties who contributed to the record, along with The-Dream, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Nigel Godrich, the inevitable Pharrell Williams – apt that this of all albums should be co-produced by the current Creative Director of Louis Vuitton – the other one in Daft Punk, half-hit wonder LunchMoney Lewis, good old Tobias Jesso Jr, El Guincho (check your local charity shop), the guy from Miike Snow, Winnipeg’s own Venetian Snares (ask anybody on Dissensus) on drum programming, and far, far too many others.

Anyway, and unlike nearly all other music writers, I wasn’t going to rely on just a speed-scroll listen to reach an opinion on Lux. I have listened to the album, in full, three times and taken notes and everything. This includes the four songs you don’t get on streaming (but are readily available on YouTube). So here goes.

There’s no question that Rosalia has done her research for the record. She sings songs about, or apparently inspired by, Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc, Miriam, Rabia Basri, Olga of Kiev, Vimala and many, many more female figures of note, including Simone Weil. She intersperses observations on their largely bitter lives with wider speculations on love, sex, the world, eternity, and life and death. All the big ones.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to go, since the thirteen languages that Rosalia wields like Pauline Campbell-Jones does with her pens do their best to close down most lines of direct communication, and reading the English translations on Genius does not convince me that they amount to anything more than undergraduate poetry.

Therefore I have to rely upon the immediate impact of the music being offered on Lux, and regret to announce that I do not find it sufficiently interesting to warrant further investigation of its background. I really don’t see what is supposed to be so radical or revelatory about it. There isn’t a nanosecond of genuine avant-gardery anywhere on the record. The chimera of radicalism lies in how the music is presented, rather than what it actually is, which is mainly in the form of intermittently breaking up, or as I call it interfering with, perfectly decent songs with gimmicks, mainly wiggy drum machine patterns (for those who liked Venetian Snares back in 2004) or vocal sample upsets with our old technical friend, glitch, that once-intriguing ingredient which Oval more or less initiated on their thirty-one-year-old record 94diskont. (yes, that’s how solvent hippies at the time “stylised” it).

One major handicap in being an old man who has seen and heard everything is that you end up boring The Kids to death with ceaseless unfavourable comparisons to music from the past (and I don’t mean that in a John Miles sense). Probably nobody under 35 gives a toss about Oval or the orchestral maximalism that dominated the British pop music of 1968 and helped inspire Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice to write all their musicals (I say “all” but they only ever wrote three together, and one of those had already been written and performed by 1968).

Then again, Lloyd-Webber has fulsomely praised Lux, which is unsurprising, given the record’s stylistic closeness to the music for The Phantom Of The Opera and its singer’s frequent trips to the Sarah Brightman Influence Clinic. In fact, Brightman’s been releasing albums of this sort of orchestral goth-prog stuff for the last two decades to no acclaim, and let us not forget (since you probably never heard of it in the first place) 2019’s Revelations by Daphne Guinness, produced in Paris by Tony Visconti, in great part in tandem with Bowie’s ☆ in New York.

These last two albums in particular display real adventure. But Lux seems to me to represent a facsimile of adventure, something which sounds bombastic and overblown enough (if that isn’t itself a tautology) to bowl people over and convince them that it’s The New Sound (ahem; more later). It’s grandiose muzak for fashion shows, pop as Vogue readers would understand it (in January 1985, that magazine’s hot music tip for tomorrow was…Julian Lennon).

Now, I’ve liked Rosalia’s previous work. El Mar Querer from seven years ago is vital and truly enterprising work; I rushed out to get that one. Not everybody liked Motomami from three years ago but I did; it seemed like a much more heartfelt, far less market-dictated forty-two minutes of experimentation, and pushed unexpected corners of music far closer and more (sorry for the word) organically.

Whereas Lux is Motomami on a bigger budget and with bigger pretensions, and suffers for both. What does it actually sound like? Well, like a bit of a mess.

The album begins with two alternating tinkling pianos, each faded up as though the cameras were tracking to their respective studies. These are followed by a sombre vocal, accompanied by a solitary ‘cellist. Then we have a glitch stutter leading into a portentous chorus – and there’s the orchestra, which invariably on this album sound cut and pasted into the music, rather than being integral to it (as was the case with Astral Weeks and Scott Walker passim). I did like the nice little Picardy third near the end, though.

Track two (doing it in a Climate Of Hunter fashion because frankly I can’t be arsed to look up or type out the actual song names – look, my life is in stoppage time already! OK, “Reliquia” - satisfied?) begins as a sort of “Sinnerman” fiddly jig, followed by some doleful crooning, part-Sarah Brightman and other part-Shakira, before more glitchy beats usher in a Kate Bush-y piano, which in turn is succeeded by a hammer-on-head four-chord coda. The lyric is a Goth variant on “I’ve Been Everywhere.” Track three – “Divinize” (which sounds like the title of a chillout album from 1990) - boasts more sensitive piano and voice in the Bush style, followed by yet further glitch, although the song’s 5/4 tempo is not too overstated. At times.

Track four “Porcelana” is lurching trippy-hoppy fodder for Late Lounge listeners and not as compelling as Moby’s “Porcelain.” “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” is a dull orchestral ballad with bouncy castle rhythmic interludes. This is not exactly Walker’s The Drift, which when released nineteen-and-a-half years ago welcomed little save bafflement and passive-aggressive mockery on the part of critics.

There ensues “Berghain,” the album’s big “hit” thus far. You’d think this was “Unfinished Sympathy,” “MacArthur Park,” “Life On Mars?” and “O Superman” combined, the way some people have been reacting to its supposed radicalism. Whereas what I hear is a sort of Spanish Gilbert and Sullivan-type ensemble piece or the soundtrack to a British Airways commercial, with chanting choirs, soaring soprano and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons/“Hooked On Classics” strings, topped up with two unnecessary cameos – the first from Björk, the most overrated artist of the last forty years, and the second from one Yves Tumor, who instantly puts me off ever listening to him because of his stupid name and is another one of those musicians that only music professional insiders seem to like, with a snarled loop of a Mike Tyson quote which was doubtless put there to scare people, as though people living or existing in this world today weren’t already scared enough. What does it all mean? It may or may not have to do with the political inclinations of the owners of a Berlin nightclub; Rosalia says it actually relates to a “mountain grove” which is the literal meaning of “berghain.” Like the song, it presumably means whatever you want it to mean. Myself, I’m with RAYE – let there be light (ALL the praise showered upon “Berghain” should have been given to “Genesis.” but you don’t need me to remind you of that, or maybe you do).

(“Whippets” by Holger Hiller and Billy Mackenzie from 1986. Now there was adventure, and all put together with Second Viennese School samples.)

Track seven, the aforementioned “La Perla.” Now this is quite good – a melodically pleasant waltz with vicious lyrics – or at least it is before Glitchman comes in with his sneaky tricks again. Look how subversive we’re being! “Mundo Nuevo” is dull sub-Hayley Westenra New Age bollocks. “De Madrugá” offers flamenco as the West End stage would know it.

I liked "Dios Es un Stalker," or at least the version of it that’s on the actual album. A proper song with quite a funny lyric and an actual groove (it’s one of the very few songs here to which you’d be compelled to sway, let alone dance). Unfortunately the one on streaming is a bitty-sounding remix and loses the crucial final verse. That’ll teach you not to give Rosalia money.

“La Yugular” meanders nowhere particularly interesting before culminating in a monologue which quotes the chorus of “Break On Through” by the Doors – oh, I see, it’s been sampled from an interview with Patti Smith! Of course she’d remember big Jimbo. Ah, good old Patti, whose Horses I pitifully asked my father to go and buy fifty years ago because (a) Charles Shaar Murray in the NME thought it was the greatest album ever (and Steve Lake in Melody Maker absolutely hated it, which for me was an added spur to get it) and (b) I was eleven, my hormones had just made themselves known and, since we’re in November 1975, you can guess the rest (with particular reference to its opening track).

(Poor old Patti, who never made a decent record after Horses except for “Because The Night,” which made her sound like a pop Carla Bley, the Coral Sea thing with Kevin Shields, and “People Have The Power” where she just rips through the corporate eighteeezzzz blandness of the music with her commitment and anger. These days she’s like Margaret Atwood, a respected and slightly crabby old-timer who’s rewarded just for still being around [quite right too, if you ask me].)

"Focu 'Ranni" is a pleasing miniature, at least until the Aphex Twin wannabe remembers where he’d put his Duracell bunny. “Sauvignon Blanc” in contrast is a bog-standard (i.e. Gary Barlow level) piano ballad. “Jeanne” is the one about Joan of Arc and is nice enough but hardly Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. In “Novia Robot,” Rosalia and the lads in the studio entertainingly muck about in a what-does-that-button-do-when-you-press-it manner.

The record plods on towards its underwhelming climax (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms). In fairness "La Rumba del Perdón" does at least attempt to get something going, but the simple fact is, as elsewhere on Lux, the beats simply don’t beat, as though they were somehow above such plebeian rituals as dancing. Affairs conclude with two melancholy ballads. “Memória" is a dreary ballad with a Goth choir coda which immediately recedes like the sun behind the shadow of the moon – or something like that.

(In fact, that’s what this is, isn’t it, this Lux – an attempt to be 2025’s Dark Side Of The Moon, a “monument” that considers itself above pop, both deeper and higher than it. A…statement. Like you get from the bank every three months.)

Lastly there is "Magnolias" in which our singer is ready to pass forth to the next world, and look, there be the London Symphony Orchestra again, with something that musically is highly reminiscent of the finale to…Evita! Before, of course, all fades towards the horizon and into…the infinite, yeah, ‘cos the mysteries of the universe are, like, bigger than any of us, right?

I should put down my Collected Philosophies micro-book with its foreword by Duncan Goodhew, shouldn’t I?

As with several other seriously over-promoted albums that have come out to inexplicable praise this year – The Life Of A Republican Tradwife and My Famous Husband’s A Bastard (none of which latter holds even the spent remnants of a candle to RAYE’s “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”) to name but two – Lux stamps its feet and demands to be taken seriously, with the implication that if you don’t, it’s your fault.

Wrong there, mate. It’s the ancient story of there being but two types of people in this world. One type, shall I say, listens to an album which is marketed as ambitious, doesn’t get it and wishes the artist had been clearer, possibly more concise and certainly funnier – Lux is stripped of humour - in saying what they had to say. The other type faints in admiration and devoutly wishes they weren’t so stupid and better understood what the artist was trying to convey.

Me? I’m of the first type. If something is too complex or abstruse or demanding too much of me, and if it’s my time and money that are being expended on it, I want it explained to me in easy-to-understand terms. I don’t have five years to waste searching for all the other MCU-type connections that would unlock the key to what is basically a fifty-five-minute-long album. Indeed, what is remotely great or even valuable about an album that you can only like once you’ve listened to another fourteen albums?

Furthermore, genuine aesthetic advancement doesn’t always – if ever – come with big budgets and good connections in tow. It seems to me that The New Sound by Geordie Greep (see? I TOLD you we’d come back to it!) is everything that Lux isn’t, all done on a much smaller budget with no superstar names. Now that IS an album that has pushed the boundaries, or envelope, or whatever you want to call it, and done so quite brilliantly. Its reward? To be patted on its head and quietly swept under the carpet.

(If anything, Lux carries a lot more Swift-isms [in Swiftian terms Rosalia is Taylor, whereas Geordie is definitely Jonathan] – see “And me, present in the place/Technically, that would make it a trio” from "La Rumba del Perdón.”)

My central problem with Lux is that it comes across as ambitious, whereas as a record it is profoundly conservative. There is nothing here, not even “Bergheim,” to scare the horses; just a glutinous, overegged pudding of a record which imagines that it walks the walk but cannot even talk the radical talk. It behaves precisely like any number of pompous, gatefold epics from the first half of the seventies – and it is my melancholy duty to report that the latter did not get swept away by punk, if you were waiting for that nice touch of an ending. But Lux is, in its essence and despite the unquestionable worthiness of its inspirations and intent, pretending to be a great album – and truly great albums generally don’t make themselves instantly known.

"That's me, darling. Unusual places, unusual love affairs. I am a most strange and extraordinary person."

 

Rebecca Lucy Taylor spent six months, not very long ago, playing Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre just off Trafalgar Square; the lead role in a musical about a time that once again might not be very far away from now. She stands and watches blunt dogmatic medieval bullshit slowly immerse humanity to the point of suffocation but Self Esteem isn't even an anagram of Sally Bowles. She's going to punish your bodies until you believe in her soul, or at least give her a chance to let us know what's in it.

 

The Mercury Music Prize isn't yet due for a few months but I would like to see the third Self Esteem album bite at it. A Complicated Woman is an extraordinary and righfully angry song cycle (in the way that Sgt Pepper and What's Going On weren't really song cycles). It begins like Sinéad O'Connor - oh, so much of Sinéad's spirit burns through this recital - hijacking an Enya session then plays as though the last quarter-century of pop has been rewired through Taylor's mind, flashing before her eyes and all craving improvement. Cleverly there are elements of both the Polyphonic Spree (the choirs awarding Heaven back to its rightful owners) and St Vincent, of Little Mix, Atomic Kitten and what Girls Aloud could have been, in fact what all those girls could have been if men hadn't told them what not to be in the first place.

 

Of course there are also elements of brat ("Mother," "The Curse") and more than a nod to Jade Thirlwall; both "Focus Is Power" and "The Deep Blue Okay" point to a slightly older and wiser pop exploitée. Over and over we hear what might be damnations of lovers ("Logic, Bitch!," complete with a hilarious yet frightening coda from Sue Tompkins, the lead singer of that other lost early noughties compass to the pop yet to happen, Life Without Buildings) or drink ("The Demon") but on closer examination tend more to be about Ms Taylor herself, or the image that The Poisoned Industry would prefer her to assume.

 

A Complicated Woman says enough is fucking enough. In the showstopping Nadine Shah duet "Lies" - Taylor, Thirlwall, Shah, it's far from grim up North - both singers nail the lie of pop patriarchy with formidable aplomb. "One step forward, ten steps back - and I'm to be grateful for that?" Enough of the inching compromises, of crying on ceaseless trains, of singing a third above or playing drums because that's allegedly cool. The Moonchild Sanelly duet "In Plain Sight" climaxes with them screaming "WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT FROM ME?" (see also the "HEY, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?" of St Vincent's "Broken Man"). No more nice dinner manners for grannies in Arbroath or Which-Was-Nice dinner party pudding-bowl jerks who'd secretly and smilingly shove you back down to the laundry basement.

 

She says it in "Mother" - "I recommend listening." She reiterates it later in the same song: "I don't need solutions, I just want to be heard." By the time of "Lies" the reserve of patience has run out: "I'll push through the fatigue...and make you fucking hear me."

 

Self Esteem doesn't care what you think, but cares very deeply about your acknowledging her right to think. And there is also redemption. "Turn into something new," Tompkins cheerly advises Taylor at the end of "Logic, Bitch!" "If Not Now, It's Soon" is a very moving reassurance that happiness and fulfilment will find us all in the end - far more affecting than the facile Play-Doh fortune cookie wellness homilies that recent pop has made only too familiar. Even at the record's beginning, Taylor admits hope - "Focus Is Power" was composed during the pandemic, the torn era that compelled us to rethink our entire reasons for being, and if you're not moved by "I deserve to be here/And every time I fall/I crawl back like an animal/My focus is powerful" (see inter alia "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba and "Happiness Is Just Around The Bend" by Brian Auger) then not even a gigantic bulldozer is likely to move you.

 

What does Self Esteem want you to hear? She knows what she doesn't want, what she really, really doesn't want - the priapic banger "69" - and as she nears the horizon of transcendence in the record's closing two songs, she knows that what she's reaching isn't perfect (tell me, Ms Thunberg, what is) but, as with Number 6 in the Lotus at the end of "Fall Out," closing the loop, is sorely aware that she's going to have to fight this battle over and over, chapter by chapter of her life, but really is fine with that. Her closing thought? "I guess I've got something."

 

A Complicated Woman is loudly and artily theatrical and of course I am fine with that, as should you be. Why murmur when you can shout? Why permit music critics to confine female artists to the kennels of despondency and damage (what good is sitting alone in your room)? If you're not going to say everything within the span of your allotted life then WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO SAY IT? In a lot of ways the record answers a lot of the questions posed by the various decrepit characters chronicled in The New Sound; Greep's protagonists, all specimens of impaled toxic masculinity, all perish at the font of perverse and unfulfillable dreams of what they imagine women are like. Taylor yells back, well this is the shit we have to deal with every second of our fucking imperfect lives! In "Mother" she seems to address the speaker of "Holy, Holy" directly - "I am not your therapist/You don't pay me enough for this" ("And I want you to look at me as if you're lost - HOW MUCH WILL THAT COST??").

 

Both records are hugely catchy and pretentious - and these are among the highest of compliments I can offer. The more pretentiousness, the better, since that is, by definition, what art is about. Both are exceptionally worthy of winning the Mercury, though of course that will not happen since acceptance depends on how playable they are in the reductive and pandering petrified doxa of daytime BBC 6 Music. But A Complicated Woman is spectacularly and proudly brilliant. It's the album Geri Halliwell should have been allowed, or should have allowed herself, to make.

 

"Oh God, how depressing! You're meant to think I'm an international woman of mystery. I'm working on it like mad."

(Sally Bowles to Brian Roberts, Cabaret)

 

"Men are fucking terrified that whatever they say, I’ll have a problem with — but that’s because they’re not listening. I’m not intimidating at all. It’s just that I’m not submissive.”

(Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Evening Standard interview, 9 November 2023)

IT WAS HIS OWN FUCKING STUPIT FAULT ANYWAY MAN KNOW WHAT I MEAN YE BLAB, YE: THE NEW SOUND BY GEORDIE GREEP

 

There are options for writing about this record and almost all of them involve making multiple references to other artists but the thing is I want you to keep reading and then listen to the bloody thing and the thing yes don't I bloody know it the thing is there are two main reasons for making multiple references to other artists when you're writing about a record, the first and by far more prominent one being to show off how many records you've got and how much music you've heard of and look at the size of my stylus hee-haw you bogus donkey, and the second and by far less utilised one being to help the reader get a grip on the music you're expecting them to listen to by giving reasonably intelligent suggestions of other comparison points rather than make them view this record which you think is so bloody great as some singular alien spaceship that's just daintily landed from the planet Artura, and these suggestions are based on your own fairly extensive if you may say so yourself shut the fuck up and tell us about the fucking record ok.

 

This record called The New Sound, as a lot of jazz and easy listening LPs of the 1950s and '60s tended to get called, almost as an afterthought although it was really a covert selling point for up-to-date hi-fi equipment, by this young man called Geordie Greep who used to be in a group called black midi but you can find out about them in four million other places, look you don't have to have heard any of that group's records to get this one, just get it is what I advise almost six months after the bloody thing came out, and I put it in the unnumbered but alphabetised 21-100 section of my 2024 albums list because let's be honest, what's the bloody point otherwise, I got stuck on "Holy, Holy" and hadn't listened to the rest of the album properly but better late than never as Neddy Merrill insincerely elides in The Swimmer and WELL

 

This record, called The New Sound, is the most extraordinary long-playing record I think I've heard since The Drift by Scott Walker. It arrives within its own fully-formed and furnished universe and hopes you'll be able to engage with it without laborious explanations, so why am I writing this for fuck's sake, but few albums of recent ages have worked so seamlessly as an album. Albums these days are usually much too long but even clocking in at 62 minutes plus you feel that every second is justified, and anyway it feels much more like forty minutes but don't try taping it onto one side of a TDK C-90 ask your parents.

 

This young man called Geordie Greep is twenty-five years old, comes from Walthamstow, speaks and sings with an accent somewhere between Bow, Soweto and Dublin, has been doing music for all bar six or seven years of his life since he was given one of those Guitar Hero PlayStation game things, ask your parents, and played "Take Me Out" by Franz Ferdinand you see that song gave birth to Geordie Greep the musician I told you it was important and you can immediately tell that in "Holy, Holy" since its staccato intro basically is "Take Me Out" at about 130% speed.

 

This record called The New Sound, though, I'd say like thousands have already done that it's an in-depth examination of masculinity on the point of curdling into toxicity, what it does or doesn't mean to be a man and Mr Greep makes his feelings rapidly known in the introductory "Blues" where, over a quietly galloping guitar-guided rhythm (Back Door x Tony Williams Lifetime ÷ the main recurring riff in The Tain by Horslips + Ornette Coleman's Prime Time with Mr Greep's voice on alto; use the brains and Google provided and find out for yourself; my knowledge is only a guiding torch, not a remonstrating truncheon), he meticulously skewers the man who thinks his dick will enable all magic - Brel would have got it and I'm sure Momus already has (the concept, I mean, not the dick) - into his sad frittered elements, wearying away at his pallid and purposeless life in some pathetic bedsit way down the wrong end of the Piccadilly Line plus elongated bus ride (it's Momus' gatecrasher!) and less than secretly looking forward to his eventual extinction when he will finally be able to do what he likes because humans have disappointed this disappointing prick and it's do you know what I mean first AND second favourite phrases KNOWWHATIMEANKNOWWHATIMEANKNOWWHATIMEAN over and over the knitting needle/Knitting Factory rhythms and I'm reminded of James Kelman's doss self-deluders but this is 2020s London where only howling pricks prosper I read in the Life & Arts section the other day.

 

Mostly the music on this record called The New Sound is Latin in nature which you can ascribe to the record having been recorded in several different studios in São Paulo and London, including RAK Studios where some of that other extended meditation on man and his fundamental misunderstandings, The Lexicon Of Love, was made, and it's Tropicalia as everybody misunderstands it, a far more complex and ambiguous form of music than ooh sunny sixties Our Kind Of Music hello there. Such songs as "Terra" and "Through A War" combine the guess-where-the-next-beat's-going-to-land tactics of Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso with the what-fucking-UFO-just-spotlit-my-siesta "otherness" (sorry!) of Arto Lindsay (The Subtle Body, Prize etc.) and the innate melodic facility of Ed Motta - and if you don't know the latter gentleman, drop what you're pretending to do just now and get a copy of his 2013 album AOR because it's genius.

 

Anyway it's as good as it is angry, this record that's called The New Sound. I wouldn't call it an extended study of the one character - although I think the protagonist of "Holy, Holy" and all the songs from "As If Waltz" onwards is the same person - but more an extended examination of the minutely differing aspects of hormonally acquisitive men. "Terra" and "Through The War" concern themselves with men of history and self-appointed destiny who march through the world and trample it down to dust, all because some woman in the past impugned his cocksmanship and/or passed a disease on to him. "Through The War" is splenetically hysterical with its escalatingly absurd comparison points fully worthy of a Vivian Stanshall or a Chris Morris. Until, that is, you remember that Mr Greep is singing about the kind of men currently engaging in trampling the world, and its contents, human and otherwise, into corrugated carbon.

 

These songs are about men who see sex as a primary function that usurps any potential foundation of meaningful life. In "Walk Up" it's the bored CEO with "fish fingers" who has it off with her in the office over the photocopier every lunchtime. In the brilliantly constructed "As If Waltz," abject crooning of a perfect world from which the man has exiled himself, the balladry becomes intentionally distorted as the protagonist, busy with a prostitute, again in the lunch hour, imagines the actual life which he can never hope to share with her ("To hear you sing in the shower," "To meet your parents," "To take you to see my favourite films") because of his penile fuckwittery (his ideations also include "To hide in your closet and see you at work" and "To watch you fuck other men") and because his need to become instantly turned on supersedes any desire to build and work on a genuinely fulfilling and lasting relationship.

 

Vocally this resembles Neil Hannon trying very hard not to werewolf into Cathal Coughlan - Fatima Mansions and Red-era King Crimson certainly come to mind in "Motorbike" where the venge-fuelled vocals are provided by the album's producer Seth "Shank" Evans - black midi's drummer Morgan Simpson also makes an appearance on several tracks) and the music excitingly explodes into a furious avant-fusion workout. "Bongo Season" is an all-too-brief fragment of fluid morbidity - Arthur Russell having taken some very inadvisable drugs; it fades with some free-form horn section scrummage but in concert has been known to last for up to twenty minutes. As with Miles Davis' eighties albums (Tutu, Amandla), it's easy to imagine The New Sound as a collection of draft guides, indicating where these songs could go live (which would be where the real business starts). The title track itself resembles one of those experimental pieces Roy Wood would occasionally summon up (e.g. "The Thing Is This [This Is The Thing]") and otherwise functions as a fairly straight-down-the-askew-line instrumental fusion piece that fans of John Abercrombie's Gateway should appreciate - both guitarists (Daniel Rogerson as well as Mr Greep himself) interweaving most alluringly; there's even room for a double bass solo (performed by John Jones).

 

 

 

I have left "Holy, Holy" and "The Magician" until last because I feel they are the most significant songs on this record called The New Sound. How great and determinedly misunderstood a pop song is "Holy, Holy"? It lasts just over six minutes and feels about half that length. In its duality it manages to get everything in - a fabulously-sketched character study of a thoroughly scuzzy, but importantly not quite irredeemable, individual, narrated with just the right mix of bravado and petrification AND NOT NECESSARILY IN THE RIGHT ORDER.

 

The song's first half, the one that starts with the "Take Me Out" intro before shuddering into a shockingly supple Santana Latin-rock-fusion groove, sees Mr Greep and his peerless (Brazilian) rhythm section deliberately veering off the straight 4/4 road, as though staggering around slightly drunk while he's chatting this hapless woman up. He tells her who he is - doesn't she believe him? Even the jihadis read my tweets (see Mr A Tate) and isn't she up for a dance or maybe something more?

 

This part of the song glides confidently through a tropical forest of Broadway clichés before the aggravated guitars build up again, opposite a choir of apposite holiness. The bassline is reminiscent of something from the eighties - most have already decided it's "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind and Fire, which is a perfectly reasonable guess, but I reckon it's "I Can't Wait" by Nu Shooz speeded up and reharmonised a little.

 

In all the while, Mr Greep's protagonist is becoming steadily drunker and drunker and he knows that he shouldn't say the "p" word (the one only women should use, in the same way that only Blacks have the right to use the "n" word) knows it in his bones - but now he can't help himself, with all the expectation that he's worked up within himself...and when he says that word he bites down upon it and crunches at it as though attempting to extinguish it. There's a pause as though to ponder whether he's gone one step too far. Then a howl as if he's just had his face slapped or worse.

 

One final chorus of boom-boom backing vocals and juicy lead guitar later, we are escorted into the song's disorientating second half, its disorientation made complete by the fact that it's being sung out of sequence. Here we have Mr Greep's protagonist outlining the conditions to somebody whom he's clearly going to be paying for the privilege of her limited company - he outlines them in minute detail, as though it were a film script she had to follow - and we realise this is actually happening the night before what happens in the first verse; she's been paid to act out a role and that is, accordingly, what she does.

 

Mr Greep's character proceeds to paint an increasingly humiliating picture of himself as somebody who just wants to be seen as cool. His intererst in this woman does not even extend to sex ("Don't worry, we won't do anything/We'll just loiter for fifteen minutes or so"). He desires only a picture of status, not the thing itself. His demands become embarrassing and pathetic ("I want you to make me look taller - can you kneel down the whole time? HOW MUCH WILL THAT COST?" - as if money will buy him a life). He drunkenly mumbles about meeting again at the same time next week, and the week after that, and the month and dot dot dot and the miasma of fairground music with its circle of ascending changes disappears into the ether.

 

Part of the reason why I mentioned James Kelman at the top of this piece, and also why the subject matters of "Terra" and "Through The War" properly belong in Alasdair Gray's pair of Axeltree short stories, is something nobody else seems to have noticed about Geordie Greep (apart from the harmonic influence of Chaz Jankel, which nobody has mentioned either) is a very pronounced Scottish and perhaps specifically Glaswegian aura, in that...

 

...he sounds exactly like Alex Harvey! Think about it; the theatricality, the character studies, the facility on guitar, the complete refusal to compromise or meet anybody or anything else halfway - some might say Mr Greep's a new Bowie in the making, but that has usually proved a curse in the past, so let's say he's the true inheritor of the Alex Harvey mantle:

 

 

And one has to grasp the fact that here is an extremely major new talent. Note also how Mr Greep has developed "Holy, Holy" in a live setting. Here is an extended studio take with a five-piece band; although it slightly suffers from not having a second guitarist to take care of routine bits of business, Mr Greep as a guitarist does a grand job, somewhere between Brian May and Ray Russell with touches of Sonny Sharrock in places:

 

 

 ...and if that weren't enough, here he and his full band are, extending the song out on the stage which was the only one to respond to his initial request for gigs - the Brixton Windmill:

 

 

Finally, here is none other than Justin Hawkins, frontman of leading British rock band The Darkness and a pretty astute music commentator in his spare time, getting to some admirable grips with The Greepness:

 

 

The twelve-minute effective album closer, or climax anyway, "The Magician," is about three train stops beyond phenomenal. In it Mr Greep's protagonist, who as I suggested above is the propositioner of "Holy, Holy" - and also materialises in "As If Waltz" ("To pretend I've more to say to you than, 'How much?'") - takes a stark look at his life and the million ways in which he has wronged it and despises what he sees, so despicable does he find it that he endeavours to blot out all memories, all reminders, again in the context of a circuitous middle-eight which with lambent patience reveals itself as the record's coda, realising that everything he has known and been misled (mostly by himself) to believe has been nought save a detailed yet finally spurious dream which is all leaking away from what remains of his memory. As the dream fades, so does the music's noise rise; one imagines a battalion of screaming improvisers but in fact it is the band augmented only by a string quartet (arranged in a mastery fashion by Felix Stephens) who build the song up and steadily smash its smug façades - not the first time this has happened on the album; see also the repeated smashing (in both senses) rhythms of "Motorbike"'s emotional climax - until the smoke from the fire has cleared, the incel storyteller's lies have evaporated, and then there reside mere sand and vacancy. As though "pop music" had been cleansed with the least merciful of scouring agents.

 

As though the lies that men and pop teach us have been detected, detonated and distilled from common memory.

 

Not unprecedented. Did I mention The Drift?

"What's up, Doc?" DONALD. He knew. Didn't he?

 

Yet one song remains, the oldest song on the record and the one not composed specifically for the record's purpose. "If You Are But A Dream" was composed, after an old Anton Rubinstein melody, in 1942; Sinatra recorded it with Axel Stordahl in 1944 and again with Nelson Riddle in 1957 and it is the latter version, coming midway between the emotional troughs of Where Are You? and Sings For Only The Lonely, where the singer sounds irretrievably bereft. In Mr Greep's hands, the song sounds sung by an emptied man who is fully aware of the illusion he has furtively conjured up but ultimately afraid to let it go. He will cling to this scorpion of superficial promise even if it ends up stinging him fatally because, hey, that's the way he was made, he can't help his nature.

 

Mr Greep sings this song, against a traditional small dance band arrangement, in the manner of a penitent orphan who knows he has asked for more at least once too often. He yearns for escape but cannot even penetrate the ceiling, let alone the heavens. Remember what the first song says about "That spirit that enters your room/Those arms that envelop poor you!/That carry you away/In those arms you escape - you dissolve through clouds."

 

And then the almost imperceptible other voice which materialises right at the end of the record, whispering "but a dream." Much like the "it's okay" that turns up in the last second of "A Lover Loves," the final song of The Drift.

 

Or what did George say about it being good to be free?

 

I don't know what constitutes genius - the word isn't in my working vocabulary and I've no notion of how its colours mix. But God help me, I listen to this record called The New Sound recorded by this gentleman called Geordie Greep and I see a glimpse of greatness.*

 

*this paragraph is a Difplag of an excerpt from Ian S Munro's radio monologue "The Artist In Search Of A City," performed by John Grieve as part of the BBC Radio Scotland series Clydesiders, broadcast in 1975. It concerned another artist - also named Donald - who ended up an inpatient in the mental hospital at Lenzie.**

 

**doesn't render the statement untrue, however.***

 

***what is truth, as Johnny Cash once asked; the song "Walk Up" culminates in a pile-up of people shrieking for the music to be turned down, only to be succeeded by a hilarious bluegrass pastiche ("I got two words: fuck you!"). This might be the record's most revelatory moment.

 

Envoi (Conventional Mix)

 

The New Sound concerns the tragic, self-inflicted fate of the epitome of a certain type of man who values visibility over depth, transitory thrills to lasting contentment. The album begins with the Greek chorus describing this man to us and outlining his squalid life and squalider fate in paingiving detail before switching the spotlight to the man himself, who is in a marriage that he considers loveless and endeavours to pass his expiring time by engaging spuriously with prostitutes. The irony of the lush music accompanying words describing the darkest and filthiest corners of the human mind cannot be overstated. The man imagines himself in spent history or in aspiring future, crushing the world to satisfy his insatiable and most likely non-existent libido.

 

Eventually his wife finds out about all this and casts him out. He has nowhere to turn except to several variations of a silver dream machine. He is incapable of compromising the two extreme sides of himself, which meet in the middle anyway, thus is left with abandoned and by definition non-existent dreams which evaporate in rough proportion to his existence. He can never let go. It's his nature.

 

Envoi (Punctum When Two Worlds Are Pressed Together And Explode Remix)

 

So the man stays where he is, and steadily diminishes, but that’s not the whole reason why things decline; Mr Greep has no problems with the idea of love, but when the reality happens, the picture becomes muddy and confused.

 

And so the record ends, Mr Greep remembering, remembering, that he is trapped in a fantasy of love, as he has been throughout the whole of The New Sound, too trapped to form any meaningful relationship. The whole scenario, when not told in melancholic rages of flashbacks, seems to amount to little more than one pick-up at a time, one meaningful exchange…but nothing further, nothing in the form of a commitment to what you and I would recognise as life.

 

We have nearly been here before.