A sprawling debut from McGuinness

Eugene McGuinness – (Domino)

THE debut album from 22-year-old Eugene McGuinness is a sprawling, schizophrenic effort that skips between boundaries with gleeful abandon and an acidic sense of humour.

The follow-up to last year’s ‘Early Learnings of…’ is a genre-hopping gem that touches on everything from post-punk to skiffle-beat and thirties-style balladeering.

And while songs like ‘Those Old Black and White Movies’, ‘Knock Down Ginger’ and ‘God in Space’ have a melancholic feel, others on McGuinnesses sophomore album come across like The Kinks or even The Pogues, giving it a truly eclectic and delicious flavour.

From the raucous skiffle sound of opening track ‘Rings Around Rosa’, to the freakbeat psychosis of ‘Nightshift’, the sweetness of ‘Wendy Wonders’, and the croonerish flights of fancy of ‘Knock Down Ginger’, it’s a beguiling musical scrapbook that defies easy classification as anything other than brilliant.

The songs are etched in a refreshing level of musical freedom that leaves you wondering where it will scattily dash off to next. It veers from unabashed, starry-eyed romance to pre-coital forked-tongue come-ons via a sound that’s simultaneously cinematic and yet endearingly ramshackle.

The album is bathed in a Jekyll and Hyde-like split personality that makes it joyous verve and unpredictability all the more appealing.

The la-la-land chamber pop of ‘Disneyfied’ is a track that best sums up McGuinness and his music for its unrealistic optimism. This record is gloriously out of time and yet at the same time, thoroughly modern, with one foot in reality and the other somewhere where every silver-lining has a cloud and one unexpected turn of phrase can lead you down a new musical rabbit hole. A delight from start to finish.

(4/5)

Ladyhawk at top of their game

Ladyhawk – Shots – (Jagjaguwar)

CANADIAN indie rockers Ladyhawk return with their second album, a record that evokes Neil Young in his darkest hours and Dinosaur JR at their devilish best.

If you like booze-soaked rock’n’roll made for getting naked and howling at the moon then this is the record for you. Think The Rolling Stones circa ‘Goats Head Soup’ and you are on the right track.

Recorded in an old farmhouse in their childhood hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia, ‘Shots’ is very much a nighttime record.

Ladyhawk are in their best vampire pose throughout as they get loose, raucous and lustful of blood. This is an album alive with the same cold creaking and ghostly echoes that haunted the likes of Rocky Erickson and Neil Young in their prime.

Ladyhawk are rockers and dreamers. Like all the best rock’n’roll – the devil’s music – there is a dark voodoo boogie and stomping sweaty heathenism to this record that shakes you to the very core. Primal is the word. The core of their sound is bracing rock. It will be hard to find a more hauntingly beautiful set of rock songs this year.

Singing songs about girls, life and love, ‘Shot’s captures a bottleneck frenzy as Ladyhawk reach into the fires of hell to create something that growls and snarls in all the right places. If you put Tom Waits and Black Mountain in the same room this is the kind of record you would expect them to deliver. One of the year’s best rock records.

(4/5)

No dimming of Hatfield’s pop instincts on 10^th solo album

Juliana Hatfield – How To Walk Away – (Ye Olde)

BOSTON rock chick Juliana Hatfield returns with her tenth solo album ‘How To Walk Away’, which once again proves she is an uncompromising artist with impeccable pop instincts.

‘How To Walk Away’ finds Hatfield sing on top form. The album also features guest appearances by two other distinctive vocalists: Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler on ‘This Lonely Love’ and Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws on ‘Such A Beautiful Girl’. Other guest musicians include Fountains of Wayne guitarist Jody Porter, Jeff Hill of Rufus Wainwright’s band on bass, and Ethan Eubanks of the Grey Race on drums.

‘How To Walk Away’ is evocative, layered, and unhurried yet producer Andy Chase has managed to retain Hatfield’s essential rawness of spirit, smoothing out some rough edges but not all.

Hatfield’s biting sense of humour comes out in ‘Just Lust’, a post-feminist anthem that turns the idea of women as the emotional, needy sex on its head. The bittersweet ‘Shining On’ exhibits a hard-won resilience in the face of disappointment and betrayal. If there is still a slightly tragic air about Hatfield, it is balanced by this sensibility.

(3/5)

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