PICK OF THE WEEK
Aisha Devi
Conscious Cunt EP (Houndstooth)
Aisha Devi is an avant garde electronic music producer based in Geneva who describes her EP as about “sluts, awareness, death, and women in a patriarchal society, enlightenment, violence, resistance, mothers, daughters, consciousness, Guy Debord, Vedas and eternity”. Which might sound like being stuck with a first-year from Saint Martins but Devi follows through, with a weird and uncompromising wander into industrial electronica that is heavy with the weight of the world’s injustices without ever having to lyrically spell them out.
Aston Merrygold
Get Stupid (Warners)
A brave song title for a former member of JLS – a band who had to use a system of primary-colour coding to help them remember which of them was which. As it goes, Get Stupid is probably a bit too smart for its own good, as it calculatedly tries to jump on the Uptown Funk bandwagon, including a video where Aston darts in and out of horn players decked out like a TM Lewin Bruno Mars. The problem is that Ronson is a meticulous student of classic 70s funk, whereas this is a co-write between a guy who produced two album tracks for the Wanted and a woman who wrote an S Club Juniors B-side called Sloop Upside. It shows.
The Vaccines
20/20 (Columbia)
It’d be nice to live in a world where each new era of music is a pronounced disjunction from what’s gone before. But in reality, there are always going to be bands who dwell on the past, repurposing old sounds for the next generation because, frankly, teenagers aren’t going to get that excited about seeing Chuck Berry live. No one is better at this than the Vaccines: 20/20 sounds like the Clash, Devo, the Ramones, and a hefty chunk of the Cure’s Close To You have gone into the proverbial Nutribullet, and what has come out is pretty delicious. Basically, I feel about the Vaccines wearing their influences on their sleeve the same way that liberal parents feel about their children having underage sex: it’s going to happen anyway, so at least they’re honest with us about it.
Slinger
Caribou Sundays (Island)
Just before Skepta got cool again he made this song that sounded a bit like La Roux, where he sang, “I just wanna be your Dev Hynes, you could be my Jessie Ware.” He probably thought he’d cornered the market in lyrics about Guardian-friendly alternative pop artists. But here comes Slinger with a song that I can only assume is about collapsing on a futon the morning after, curling into the foetal position with the cold lamb shish you apparently brought home with you, and letting the Canadian producer Caribou drench you like the warm shower you so desperately need. A great idea: shame, then, that this is literally the least relaxing song ever recorded.
