BRETT ANDERSON - Brett Anderson (Drowned in Sound)

It is ironic that Brett Anderson first solo album comes out in spring. This is, without a doubt, a fall record. To be more accurate it is the winter of our discontentment. We have been the bravado and defiance of the early twenties, playing and heavy petting in rooms filed with feather boas and glitter, oblivious of anything but ourselves. Passed through glowing nights, filled with stimulation, flittering, swinging, among the most lavishly in-crowd, in a swirl of craze and fun. We believed in love, we challenged the world, our brightness so amazing, and our sweetness so candid. Mightier than a knight in a shining armour, we were there, battling everything and everyone, so together no one could tell us apart. Like Brett we would have aged, graciously and in fabulous style. But life caught us without warning, crawling in slowly but lethally. We were looking the other side, absorbed by this and that, the bits and the bobs, the dos and don’ts. In the morning the phone rings and love is dead. It is dead, gone, swept away and thorn. The resentment that has grow so high, the too many demands – baby needs the curtains, the carpet, the cars, the money to burn and be flashy -, intimacy turned into disgust, sex one more chore, even if fun. And there was nothing more for us there, the failure of a great love a disaster of gigantic proportions. Brett voice is in the back guiding us in the cold, allowing for the melancholy to set in. Here we are, still waiting for spring with autumn leaves in our hearts.

AMY WINEHOUSE - Back To Black (Island)

Having a bad temper and a short fuse, hit boyfriends and fans, is all just fine to turn up in the tabloids and those many celebrities web sites and magazines. Still, with Amy Winehouse, even if does help to put her name on the spot, the displeasure and the aggressiveness blends on her music, mighty soulful voice and lyrics. She’s the bad girl, the dame – from the old film noir, not the hip-hop male lady friend. The one that wants the entire catch and the spoils for herself and, one way or another (her way, most surely) gets it. Drinking problems, eating disorders, depression, insanity are just some more strong colours in Amy’s wardrobe, helping to forge a legend and placing her up there, along those mythical, tragic, bigger than life female jazz singers like Sarah Vaughn, Aretha Franklin or Josephine Baker. If Winehouse will go down music history as a rebel and a maverick it remains to be seen. “Back To Black”, her second album is certainly worthy as many praise as it is been getting. An astonishing voice, half soaked in disdain half scarred with sorrowfulness rises upon a blanket of cool, elegant music, piercing our hearts, making us shiver and painfully look inside. Albeit her countless problems it is always refreshing, in a kind of perverse way, in these over cleansed, übber sanitised, everybody follows the book and is hyper healthy and fit times to see someone, even if for the sake of fame and glory, to go exactly the opposite way, and crash in great (rock’n’roll&jazz) fashion.

OF MONTREAL Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? (Polyvinyl)

When reviewer and writer dwell in similar personal problems, it gets to close to home and heart. It is like watching what went wrong with our life under de magnifying lens of a microscope. The outcome of the writer’s tormented affairs, however, provide a strange, but much needed sense of quietness and of “it will work out just fine”. Kevin Barnes lyrics for “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?“, Of Montreal new album, come from the singer nearly completely breakdown in Norway - a subject he very openly approaches in “A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger” – and the separation from his wife, right after the birth of their first child. If not for the music, uplifting, dance oriented, pop, punctuated with an array of peculiar sounds an almost over the top hysteria, this would be a record to send us straight to the abysm and the realms of utter depression. The centrepiece of “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?“, the amazing spiralling and tormented “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal”, a nine plus minutes long song about love’s excessive weirdness, nearly gets us there, on the edge. We are quickly rescued by “Bunny Ain’t No Kind Of Rider” a popish and ironic song that makes us want to laugh and the madness of “Faberge Falls For Shuggie”. By the end of the record we have been taken through misery and pain with a disco beat and a grin in our faces.

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM - Sound Of Silver (DFA)

At first it was hate. I detested LCD Soundsystem, apparently for no particular reason. I just didn’t stand them. So much that I even went to see James Murphy & CO only to hate them more. But like so many other love stories, irritation and dislike turned into a crushing passion, so overwhelming that for the past weeks “Sound Of Silver”, LCD Soundsystem latest album has been often playing on repeat for hours on end. Looking back it is hard to say what I did abhor the most: if the cowbell, Murphy’s voice and appearance, the many 80’s references or just the all package. But the cowbell, Murphy’s voice and appearance, the many 80’s references along with the lyrics and the powerful musical mish-mash are exactly what turns LCD into a unique band. True, there are a million bands out there with cowbells and drowned in the 80’s and the post-punk, still, in the end, it all comes down to how one lays the foundations, the bricks and the paint. And LCD Soundsystem do it with sharp uniqueness. “Sound Of Silver” begins with “Get Innocuous” growing devilish groove and ends in a down-tempo schizophrenic lament for New York – “New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down”. Between there are seven songs of pure joy, sorrow, departure, love, party and disdain. All in all life full spectre in a singular danceable pop album. Sometimes, if for brief instants, there is more to existence than books, and this is one of those (long and lasting) moments.

Of Montreal & Scissor Sisters

ou de como hissing fauna, are you the destroyer? e ta dah! são dois miúdos separados à nascença em que um se perde nos mundos do indie rock (ou lá o que é) e o outro se arrasta pelos clubes de disco sound nova-iorquinos. depois encontram-se, por acaso, num bar mal afamado e descobrem que tem tantas muitas coisas em comum, acabando por perceber, que, na verdade, são irmãos. o miúdo de montreal, educado nos melhores colégios britânicos e dado à poesia e às belas-artes, por vezes pende para uma melancolia e uma introspecção quase doentia, que o levam a olhar para o passado e a constatar que entre este e um animal grotesco a diferença é pouco. ambos são ridículos, abafantes, doentios. já o mano de nova-iorque, crescido e educado por entre apartamentos camarários e empregos de uma semana, não liga a coisas profundas, preferindo o puro prazer dos sentidos ao pensar. mas isso são pormenores de somenos importância. juntos, o garoto canadiano e o fedelho americano são o terror das festas dos amigos, chegando mesmo a acabar inúmeras noites numa desconfortável cela de uma qualquer esquadra.

* written early this year for forum sons.