SBTRKT- Hold On
SBTRKT, 2011
So I heard this on Made In Chelsea, a show that airs here in the UK that is totally awful but has great music- it’s a massive guilty pleasure of mine. The terrible ‘acting’ doesn’t matter to me when their music is so good. I’ve listened to this song about 300 times since I downloaded it from Amazon. If that’s not an incentive to listen to it I don’t know what is.
Leo Kottke | Watermelon
Kottke isn’t a new addition to the Page-Beck school of grating, hypertensive guitarists, as if you were expecting that. He’s an acoustic guitarist from Minneapolis whose music can invoke your most subliminal reflections or transmit you to the highest reaches of joy… anything in addition to his guitar would be superfluous.
- Rolling Stone, 1969
Theme Park - Milk
Wax EP, 2012
: Theme Park are a highly touted four-piece from London who have been top of the chart over at Amazing Radio – where, incidentally, we have a ridiculously entertaining and informative weekly show on Thursday lunchtimes, featuring many of the acts in this column – with their track Milk, for three consecutive weeks. This surely makes them the Adele of digital broadcasting. Three weeks! That’s quite a stint. Whatever happened to the stint? The stint is good. Theme Park are bringing back the stint, the long run at No 1, after years of it being missing, presumed redundant since the heyday of Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around, Meat Loaf’s I’d Do Anything for Love and Bryan Adams’s (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, if indeed that counts as a heyday. It actually looks more like one extended sojourn in hell now that we think about it.
Theme Park, we were just saying, are highly touted, with many of the, um, touts proposing them as fine and worthy successors to the funk-rock mantle previously held by Talking Heads. That is quite a claim. Talking Heads register higher in our own personal pantheon than the Beatles and Dylan combined, especially those first four albums – the 1977 debut and the three follow-ups produced by Brian Eno – so, naturally, we were excited to hear what these two brothers and their two schoolfriends, due to support Bombay Bicycle Club this autumn, could do.
They don’t sound much like Talking Heads, at least not on the first track, Two Hours. There’s a swirl to the keyboards and a goofiness to the vocals that vaguely echoes Once in a Lifetime, but really, the Heads were a once-in-a-lifetime band and they’re not easily mimicked, just as Stones-y raunch and Byrdsian jangle are harder to replicate than indie types ever imagine. The second track, Jamaica, has the calypso tinge and tropical flavour so popular since the emergence of Vampire Weekend (see also Givers), and although it’s nice, it’s no Stay Hungry orCities. Instead of focusing on the brilliant, radical early funk-noir Heads, Theme Park appear to have chosen Speaking in Tongues and Little Creatures – the milder, poppier albums they made between 1983-5 – as the ones on which to base their career.
Milk is their most Heads-like number, to an almost parodic degree. But it’s a bit light and polite. Not that David Byrne and co were rock monsters, but have you heard the three albums they did with Eno? They’re monumental. And they have mammoth heft. They weren’t the precursors of Vampire Weekend – and we really like VW – they were the godfathers of, well, something darkly rhythmic that has yet to be sired. New single A Mountain We Love isn’t bad, if you enjoyed second-album Orange Juice (we did), but the other track on this double A-side, Wax, is a groove in search of a song that just waffles on for several minutes. There’s something here, some intimations of greatness. They just need a greater sense of urgency, which we urge them to pursue.
