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Boomtown Rats, The - Banana Republic - 24-Jan-08 04:34 AM
Saint Bob’s musical legacy has been overshadowed by his charity work and celebrity marriage. However the Rats were once essential and this intelligent slice of cod reggae was one of the most prescient pictures of an Ireland emerging from tradition into what? His appropriation of Police and Thieves as Police and Priests still makes me laugh and this is drenched with enough fake saccharine to disguise the bile from the inattentive listener. A great sucker punch to the establishment from a man who wasn’t always so subtle.

That Petrol Emotion - Big Decision - 24-Jan-08 04:29 AM
The creative team of the O’Neill brothers had been at the heart of the ever changing Undertones and it felt like the second coming when I first went to see them play over the chorus of diehards chanting for Teenage Kicks. This time they weren’t inviting us into a poptopia, they were crunching up the blues and inhabiting a darker musical landscape adapting the influence of Wire and Pere Ubu more successfully than anyone else. They could be fun too and this one was, big beats, loops and samples welded to a killer rock riff. And they did it many times - listen to Chester Burnette beside Firestarter. Eats it up, doesn’t it.

Fatima Mansions, The - Blues For Ceausescu / 13th Century Boy - 24-Jan-08 04:04 AM
With the voice of an avenging angel having a bad day and guitar chords like a firing squad this record was the only one big and angry enough to play at Nicolai’s funeral. If the Mansions had released more selectively they might have made the definitive album of their time. However that would have meant reining in Cathal Coughlans' rivers of anger. This is what The The might have sounded like if they weren’t faking it.

Billy Bragg - Levi Stubbs' Tears - 24-Jan-08 04:00 AM
Here is the ultimate white boy paean to sweet soul music, hiding Bragg’s social commentary in a bittersweet tale of a girl who ‘was married before she was entitled to vote’ and who finds her only comfort in a Four Tops tape. The first words ‘With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home’ drew me in like the words of a Raymond Carver short story. When I first heard this I was ignorant of the names of the people who had written and recorded classics such as the obliquely referenced Tears of a Clown and wondered if Barrat Strong, Holland and Holland and Lamont Dozier were the names of Caravan manufacturers. However this song led me to make many discoveries about music and the fact that an earnest white ex punk folk protest singer could write so beautifully about the shimmer of Motown’s greats seemed a lot less strange after I had made connections between Bragg and proto soul singers such as John Lee Hooker. If the song and the performance are right , one man can make as much music as an orchestra. And those opening slowly strummed guitar chords still send shivers of anticipation down my spine. In Leonard Cohen’s great Redemption he says ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in’. This is a song about how songs can be that light and it shines brightly. One of the most neglected masterpieces of the last 25 years.

Birthday Party, The - Mutiny! - 24-Jan-08 03:51 AM
Mutiny in Heaven. Here we have the Paradise Lost of the JUNKyard. The apotheosis of Cave's overwrought biblical gothic. Here is King Ink as Lucifer howling that there are 'rats in paradise', leading the titular mutiny, wings bursting from his back like cutting teeth. This muscular blues is truly anguished and few have painted pictures of such highs and lows before and since. You almost need a narcotic to sleep after listening to this.