RVW: AlunaGeorge – Body Music

Having entered 2013 on a surging tide of momentum and ever-growing hype, AlunaGeorge – the London-based R&B sandwich surnamed Francis and Reid respectively – are now finally coming to ground with their full-length debut Body Music.

They’ve timed their descent into festival season perfectly, characteristic of a carefully orchestrated gestation period. Dropping singles and EPs on an almost quarterly-basis for the last two years, they’ve given themselves time for their self-consciously 90s influenced – but distinctively forward-thinking – fusion of pop, garage and R&B to coalesce, suggesting a band with a clear sense of their identity and a desire to get things right. Armed with their music and lessons learned from having their fingers burned in their past, the hype is earned. Now all the pressure is on the final delivery.

RVW: Gold Panda – Half of Where You Live

When considered beyond its direct function as the mechanism by which a quantity of music is delivered, the album format has always lent itself to an array of interpretations. On his follow-up to 2010’s Lucky Shiner, Gold Panda structures his music as a compendium of scenic reflections on life and experience, each track a moment or vista, and the merits of such an approach to the format are immediately apparent.

Accommodating the pan-global production aesthetic and diverse explorations undertaken by the Peckham-raised and Berlin-based producer, the result is a record more akin to a photo-album, a stream of often incongruous particularities of time and space, all ultimately derived from the same compositional base.

INTRVW: GARY NUMAN

Thirty-six years down the road, Gary Numan is still the proverbial square peg, resolutely resistant to the music industry’s trade in round holes. From his era-defining The Pleasure Principle to October’s upcoming twentieth full-length LP Splinter, Numan has proved an innovator and survivor, traversing punk, synth-pop, funk, dark-wave and industrial, and creating a legacy that’s influenced everyone from Nine Inch Nails and Battles to Little Boots and Afrika Bambaataa.

Ahead of his gig at Leamington Assembly on Friday 7^th June, Chris Sharpe caught up with Numan, discussing everything from plans for the year ahead, to artistic identity, self-doubt, and the source of one of British music’s greatest outlier’s longevity.

RVW: The National – Trouble Will Find Me

Enervating blood ties, romances won and lost, marital adversities, fading bonds of friendship: perhaps more than any other contemporary band The National’s very artistic make-up is predicated on the nuances of human relations. Such a nexus of interrelational trials and tribulations once again rears its head on their eagerly-anticipated sixth LP Trouble Will Find Me.

RVW: Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires Of The City

 

Vampire Weekend have always been a band who thrive on articulate disarticulation, sophisticated binaries of occident/orient, mainstream/underground, jocularity/solemnity. The mishmash if you will. Even their name has a semantically discombobulating tendency; a relative once refused my recommendation of their first album because: “I don’t like your screamo music”.

They’re as comfortably capable of conjuring gloriously infectious nonsense-refrains that soundtrack Will Ferrell farces, as they are with delivering melodies and lyrics so heart-swellingly on-point that the frogs in your throat are singing the harmonies.

Consequently, it’s hard to go along with the tide of ‘mature third-album’ accolades heading their way with the arrival of Modern Vampires of the City. Instead, when listening to the record it’s actually harder to let go of the sensation that they got on this particular train back in 2006.