CD reviews
LADYTRON Ladytron
LADYTRON’S new album opens with a desire-filled electro-rock song called Until the Fire. About 15 seconds in it feels like the quartet — who have been MIA for the best part of a decade — never left. The spine-tingling, hooky melody, the shoe-gazing, fuzzy guitars, the building intensity: it’s a formula that has served the band well and continues to do so. The Island sees them put on their most fizzy, sunny, pop hat. It’s all about the synth melody and those ’80s drums teamed with a warmer than usual vocal performance. Bliss. There is a bitterness, a detached and icy coolness to Deadzone. When Helen Marnie spits “You ain’t got no right, you are not my saviour”, best believe you will feel it like a gut punch. The acidic Far From Home has a more sinister edge, and it’s not the only song here that revels in the shade while balancing out their sunnier moments.
Paper Highways stomps harder than most of the album with its bigger drums and hard, noisy blasts of synth noise.
You’ve Changed takes a similarly faster pace, but injects it with a more fun, nightclub-friendly bounce. In the band’s earliest days a sense of humour was key to their appeal, and this tune seems to have a little bit of that lightness in its DNA — a ray of sunlight.
The Animals is an example of how artful their take on electro and synth-pop music is. But the lyrics, whoa: “No law. No God. No. Heart. We are more like you than the ones you knew … to them, we are animals.” Kind of desolate messaging? Yeah. Towards the end of the album the sun really comes out in full on the Fleetwood Mac-ish, swirling, cascading The Mountain. In a nutshell, this self-titled album is a cracking return to form.
SASHA LNOE100
SUPERSTAR DJ Sasha launched his Last Night on Earth label with one goal: to release his own and his friends’ tunes. When it kicked off eight years ago, would he have thought it would still be going 100 releases later? To celebrate the milestone Sasha picked 11 favourites from the back catalogue and employed a bevy of remixers to put a new spin on the songs. The results pan from very good to not bad to not as good as the original. This is pretty standard for remix albums. Radio Slave’s epic 11-minute take on Cut Me Down, Vonda7’s surprisingly funky and melodic Henry Saiz remix and the broken beat bliss of Baile reworking Gheist are among the finest moments: each is guaranteed to impress. Strange for a collection of tunes built for dance floors, this album really should have included a continuous mix-set version of the material alongside the stand-alone songs. Either Sasha himself or an intern at the label could have knocked it out. However, two seconds of internet searching revealed a young Irish DJ named Reece Rodgers who has blended these tunes together into an hour-long set — cheers.