Tracks of the week reviewed: Muzz, MIA, Squid
Muzz
Broken Tambourine
Life is very long, isn’t it? Interpol blew up, guttered, one left, Paul Banks did two solo albums, Interpol got good again, and now Banks is off once more, toiling in a supergroup (if, by supergroup, you mean “a group with one of the Walkmen”). So why does this spin-off sound so fresh? In its spare, bare piano chords, its Iron & Wine-levels of rusty Americana, it’s as though he’s discovered where he always wanted to be.
Squid
Sludge
Rock bands who sign to Warp are an interesting subgenre. It’s the home of Aphex Twin but occasionally they sign a rock band, mainly just to make the press guess why. For Squid, I’d take a punt on: the James Murphy overtones. Made up of 80% that scratchy New Cross pub band energy that besmirched so much of the last decade, Squid weave in strands of DFA and Why?, so that rather than rasp and stammer, this one bops and wriggles.
MIA
OHMNI W202091
A free song, this, posted on Maya’s Patreon to advertise the fact that she’s apparently really into Patreon. If she’s picking social platforms, then I’d humbly suggest Twitch, a site whose existence she basically prophesied on 2010’s Maya. That album still sounds like futurology for today’s extremely online culture. Whereas her freebie is a nice-enough MIA jam: Indian choirs, machine gun samples and kuduro beats.
Disclosure
Ecstasy
This does that trick of sounding like it’s about to kick into the breakdown any second now, but in fact sits on the throttle for four-and-a-half minutes, like a pinger that never quite pings. Ravey, housey, Disclosure’s return is at heart club fodder that may confuse anyone who came for the indie-friendly thunk of their debut.
Melanie C
Who I Am
This is “a very personal song”, Mel C says. How personal? We learn, inter alia, that Ms Chisholm was “lost in the ruins of who I thought I should be”. If this is indeed her getting personal, then, in the same new-found spirit of radical honesty, I must tell her that this default mode Paul van Dyk-style pop-trance is duller than Dunstable.
