Songs you may have missed: The nude edition

Sorry for the lack of updates this week - the real world has been getting in the way (plus there wasn't much to write about, to be honest).

Anyway, here's a rundown of the songs that floated onto the internet this week, most of which seem to be stripped-back, denuded, unclothed and generally acoustic versions of original songs. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

1) David Bowie - Sound And Vision (2013)
You've probably heard this on an advert for a mobile phone and wondered where it came from. It's Sound And Vision, and it's definitely Bowie's voice, but the only backing is a naive piano that sounds like it was recorded in a school assembly.

In fact, the mix is the work of Sonjay Prabhakar, who was given the original master-tapes and pared away all the production to leave the lead vocals, Mary Hopkin's backing and Roy Young. Yep, that's really there on the album mix. Who knew?

It's proved so popular that Bowie has given an official release his blessing. It's out now on iTunes.




2) Miley Cyrus and The Roots - We Can't Stop
Presented like the opening titles of The Brady Bunch, this a capella rendition of Miley's FU anthem actually makes the song tolerable. Easy to forget there's a great set of vocal cords hidden behind that tongue.




3) MKS - No Regrets
As well as the near-perfect cover of Lorde's Royals, which I posted on Tuesday, MKS performed an acoustic version of their new song No Regrets at their recent Reload Sessions recording. A ballad that could be a love song, it could also be about the girls' split and reunion: "Enemies, I hope we clear the air".




4) Foxes - Youth
Precisely one million years after it first appeared online, Foxes' beautiful Youth is finally getting a proper release. Radio 1 put it on their C-List this week, which augurs well. Foxes celebrated the news by playing the song in bed, for some reason.




5) Robbie Williams - Go Gentle
I was lucky enough to go and see Robbie record an episode of Radio 4's Mastertapes last night. The premise of the show is that artists come in and discuss their defining album - in Robbie's case, Life Thru A Lens. He talked about being booted out of Take That ("I asked them if I could take a pineapple with me") and how Gary Barlow rejected his first ever song.

"I phoned Gaz up and I said 'I've got this song - it's about a prostitute, in Manchester' and he said, 'it'd be alright for a rock group, wouldn't it, lad?"

At the end of the night, he played a couple of tracks from his new album, Robbie Williams Swings Both Ways, including this - Go Gentle, a sincere, but goofy, declaration of love for his one-year-old daughter. He was in tears at the end of it.




6) VV Brown - The Apple (live on Later)
OK - so this Jools Holland performance is as far away from acoustic as it's possible to get, but WHAT A SONG.




7) TLC - Meant To Be
Written by Ne-Yo, Meant To Be is the only new song on TLC's 20th anniversary collection. T-Boz sounds like she's been smoking 40-a-day for the last decade, but this is quite lovely in a 90s throwback kind of way. More Red Light Special than Waterfalls, but I can live with that.

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Stop everything. This is amazing.

100% guaranteed to put a smile on your face: Mariah Carey and The Roots perform All I Want For Christmas Is You on schoolroom instruments. Is there any song that can't be improved with a kazoo? (Hint: no).

Jimmy Fallon, The Roots and Mariah Carey - All I Want For Christmas Is You

How can we start a petition to get Jimmy Fallon broadcast in the UK?

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Temporary break in service

Hello there,

In the words of Boney M, "Hooray, hooray, it's a holi-holiday. Digge ding ding ding digge digge ding ding."

Normal service will be resumed on Monday, 12th March. In the meantime, here are John Legend and The Roots performing an exquisitely soulful cover of Dancing In The Dark. If you watch this once a day for the next week, it'll be like I never went away. Or something.

Cheers,
Mark

John Legend & The Roots - Dancing In The Dark

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Top 10 albums of 2010

A little belated, but here they are. Enjoy!


1) Lissie - Catching A Tiger

In a year of grandiose 'masterpieces', this unassuming little record quietly became my go-to album. Illinois hippy-chick Lissie Maurus inhabits her material completely. Her ad-libs are so perfectly delivered that they become inseparable from the body of the songs. And what great songs: Torn from the Californian country-rock handbook, drawing on the best of The Byrds and Fleetwood Mac, and moulded for the 21st Century by Kings Of Leon producer Jacquire King. Stand-out tracks When I'm Alone and In Sleep could never claim to be original, but they were drenched in melody and so alive they had a pulse. A stunning debut.


2) Robyn - Body Talk

Six months, three albums, one Grammy nomination, dozens of five star reviews and only one bad song. It was the project that had everything except an audience. Still, those who sought out Robyn Carlsson's Swedish pop odyssey fell utterly in love with it. And who could blame them?


3) Scissor Sisters - Night Work

A glance through the tracklisting tells you what to expect from Scissor Sisters' third album: Sex And Violence, Skin Tight, Harder You Get. Back on filthy form after the vaudeville tripe of Ta-Dah!, Night Work is an album of sleek, hard, sexy disco. A celebration of the freaks who come out to play after dark, it allowed Jake Shears the chance to roleplay dozens of seedy characters, the timbre and cadence of his voice changing on every track like a method actor. Perfectly sequenced and eminently danceworthy, it also contained - on Whole New Way - the year's least subtle metaphor for anal sex. So that was nice.


4) Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

Like Scissor Sisters, Arcade Fire escaped the drab surroundings of their upbringing through music. But while the New Yorkers ran off to an "opiate utopia", the Canucks prodded and poked at their past, trying to make sense of it all. The Suburbs is about the geography of suburbia, and the impermanence of modern life. "All of the houses they built in the Seventies finally fall... It meant nothing at all," pines Win Butler on the title track.

The Suburbs is also the record where Arcade Fire discovered the spaces between the notes, the claustrophobic bombast of their first two records giving way to something more expansive and thoughtful. Having all that space to think gave the lyrics greater impact, too.

The top of most critics' end-of-year lists, it would have done the same here if it was just 10 minutes shorter.


5) Marina And The Diamonds - The Family Jewels

Its a tricky thing to be a pop singer with artistic aspirations. Too much of the throaty yelping and people steer clear of you like the shouty racist lady at the back of the bus. Too little, and people dismiss you as a disposable pop confection. Marina never quite got the balance right, veering wildly between bonkers balladry (I Am Not A Robot) and balls-out chartbusters (Oh No!). It didn't help that her lyrics often read like they'd been lifted straight out of "Opinions For Teenage Girls - For Dummies". Regardless, those who persevered - and thank goodness there were thousands of us - were rewarded with an album rich in melodic invention, musical dexterity and surprising vulnerability. The Family Jewels, indeed.


6) Vampire Weekend - Contra

Less direct than their debut, Vampire Weekend's sophomore album nonetheless had more heart. At least, I think it did. It's hard to be sure what Ezra Koenig is on about half the time ("fake Philly cheesecake but you use real toothpaste" - eh?). Still, the melodies, the trickling guitar riffs and - above all - the frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming are like nothing else. When they inevitably grow up and turn into Sting, let's remember them like this.


7) Sarah Blasko - As Day Follows Night

My heart, already a bit gooey from listening to Australian singer Sarah Blasko's third album, completely melted when I met her in May. Charming but fragile, awkward but funny - she's everything you'd expect from listening to this most intimate of heartbreak records. Captured in a secluded studio in the heart of the Swedish winter, it's an all-too-real exploration of the end of a love affair. What makes it poignant is that the break-up came in Blasko's mid-30s, raising the spectre of spinsterhood. What stops it being utterly depressing is the nimble arrangements, the delicate beauty of her voice and, ultimately, an all-pervasive sense of hope.


8) Tinie Tempah - Disc-Overy

Tinie Tempah delivered an entire Top 10 of best lyrics this year, from "I got so many clothes I keeps 'em in my aunt's house", through to "would you risk it for a chocolate biscuit?" Musically, he was no slacker, either. His morphing breakbeats lifted grime out of the loop-it-and-leave-it quagmire, as frequently as his lyrics showed up the dumb avarice of his contemporaries (Taio Cruz marked a new low for the genre this year when he sang: "I'm wearing all my favourite brands, brands, brands, brands, brands"). Stuffed full of ideas, Tinie's album equalled, but sadly never bettered, the promise of it's singles. Oh, and it earned an extra demerit for that AWFUL title.


9) John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up!

Inspired by Barack Obama's "yes, we can" campaign, and revisiting the classic ghetto protest songs of the 1970s, this was the best band of their generation, allied to the smoothest singer of his, making a rallying call to socially-concious America. Mmm-hmm. Whatever. Simply the best covers album of the year.


10) Kid Sister - Ultraviolet

Putting the fun back in funky and the rap back in... er, "not crap", Chicago's Kid Sister delivered a spritely party album for her long-gestating debut. It didn't set the world on fire, but it did heat up my living room by a couple of degrees. Inspired by electro, handbag house, rave and "boxes of doughnuts", it left me with a big, daft grin all over my face every time I heard it. OK, it probably doesn't deserve to be considered a classic, but it was either this or Kanye banging on about intense personal issues and and his penis. I rest my case.

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Totally lovely Regina Spektor performance

Here's a cute-as-a-button Regina Spektor performing Dance Anthem Of The 80s with the legendary Roots crew and a tuba.

NB: Stick around for the build-up around 2m40s.

Regina Spektor - Dance Anthem Of The 80s


That live DVD Jimmy Fallon mentions at the top of the video? You can get it right now on Amazon (other retailers are available).

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Chasing imperfection: Mistakes in pop music

"In painting, as in everything else, there is a fatal tendency to become accustomed to one's faults."

Those are the words of British author John Collier. They got me thinking about how musicians often become consumed by their worst personality traits. Sting, for example, will no longer record a song unless it's in an obscure time signature from the Byzantine era. His last album was entirely written in π+2(16/7²), and played on an Tambur owned by a Sumerian monk.

But it works the other way round, too. Once an artist grows accustomed to a fault, they can tame it and incorporate it into their music.

While recording You Really Got Me, The Kinks wanted to capture the distorted buzz of their live shows, so they slashed their amps with a razor blade. In doing so, according to musicologist Robert Walser, they recorded "the track which invented heavy metal".

The Kinks - You Really Got Me

More recently, T-Pain's entire career has been based on the deliberate mis-use of autotune. One mistake with the settings became an artistic statement, hugely distinctive and widely copied.

Nostalgia for the ramshackle technology of yesterday also affects the way music is recorded.

I'm not talking about Lenny Kravitz buying The Beatles' mixing desk so he can suck John Lennon's spirit out of it like a voodoo priest of tedious soft rock. Instead, listen to the way Norman Cook turns the crackle of a vinyl record into a percussion track on Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me.

Beats International - Dub Be Good To Me

My favourite example comes from The Roots, on their 1999 album track Step Into The Realm.

?uestlove and Black Thought say the song was inspired by their youth, when the only musical "instruments" they owned were tape recorders. They would tape the instrumental sections of their favourite songs onto cassette, several times over, so they could practice rapping. Often, the only suitable sections were on the fade-out, so the music would disappear into the distance when they reached the loop point - then jump back in at full volume on the first beat of the next bar. When they came to record Step Into The Realm, they recreated the effect by sampling and fading their own instruments.

The Roots - Step Into The Realm


In the words of Scott Adams: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep". But as the methods of creating music become ever more precise and digitised, I wonder what mistakes will inspire the artists of the future?

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Justin Timberlake's history of hip-hop

This is one of the best pre-rehearsed chat show moments of all time. Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake and the freakin' Roots with a four-minute hip-hop masterclass.

You would not get this on Graham Norton.


Now, Justin, stop mucking about AND GET BACK IN THE STUDIO.

[via the inestimable Hattie C]

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"No more sleeping in bed"

I spent a large part of the 1990s collecting the fabulous Blaxploitation compilation CDs. Subtitled "soul, jazz and funk from the inner city", they were a sublime introduction to the gritty, atmospheric soundtrack of 1970's ghetto America.

They're sadly out of print now* but among the highlights was Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes' Wake Up Everybody, a Philly soul companion piece to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, sung with croaky indignation by Teddy Pendergrass.

The song got a long overdue airing at the World Cup when John Legend (remember him?) and The Roots played it at the closing ceremony. The good news is that they've recorded it properly, too, and it'll be the title track of a collaborative covers album later this year.

The studio version features some beautifully heartfelt vocals from Melanie Fiona and a soft-as-butter rap by Common, who calls the track "a song as sweet as the Psalms".

Amen, brother.

John Legend feat The Roots, Melanie Fiona and Common - Wake Up Everybody


Kanye West has put the track on his website, should you fancy downloading a copy. Alternatively you can wait until Wake Up, the album, comes out on 21st September.

* Although Amazon has the final, three-CD roundup for a bargainacious £2.99

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The Roots & Public Enemy

I won't waste any of your precious time rhapsodising about these four-and-a-half-minutes of awesome. They speak for themselves.

The Roots & Public Enemy - Bring The Noise

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New Lauryn Hill track. No, really!

Lauryn Hill's follow-up to The Miseducation Of... has suffered delays of Guns N' Roses-esque proportions. But now, thanks to R&B supremo, we have the first new material from the tiny soul diva since that disastrous Fugees comeback in 2005.

The Roots drummer posted a download of an eight-minute opus, World Is A Hustle, on his Twitter feed last night, which I suppose makes it a semi-official leak.

And it's really, really good - a funky Fender Rhodes Blaxpolitation groove about the depressing mediocrity of the modern world and the crippled careerist politicians who run it at the behest of the multinational corporations.

While this sounds dangerously close to the tedious sloganeering of Hill's MTV Unplugged album, World Is A Hustle is rescued by a magnificent melody and a strong, soulful vocal from the reclusive diva.

Apparently, there's more to come - Hill's partner, Rohan Marley, recently said: "She writes music in the bathroom, on toilet paper, on the wall. She writes it in the mirror if the mirror smokes up.

"She writes constantly. This woman does not sleep."

If it's all as good as this, then it'll have been worth the wait.

?uestlove's Twitter feed
Lauryn Hill - World Is A Hustle (MP3)

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Legendary Roots Crew

Well, my faith in live music has been restored again after seeing:

A) Goldfrapp's short but super set in the London Oxford Street Virgin Megastore. I couldn't quite work out how a band of four people could make such an earth-shattering racket, until I discovered that reclusive synth genius Will Gregory was hiding off-stage making special noises with his electric playtoys.

Apparently, the signing session got a bit ugly, but I escaped unscathed, and Will even imparted a few words of wisdom to me: "Never throw away an old synth". I'm about to sell one on ebay - does that count?

B) The Roots - last night at Shepherd's Bush Empire. I cannot overestimate how fantastic this gig was. The band played for two-and-a-half hours, and covered every genre I can think of; from classical to reggae, soul to metal, doo-wop to drum'n'bass - all from a hip-hop band.



The guitarist, Kirk Hudson, did things with his instrument that are probably illegal in several countries. And ?uestlove is quite simply one of the best drummers in the world - even when he's opening a bottle of water with one hand!

Not to mention (yes, there is more!) the 15 minute tour of the best breaks and beats in music, where the band segued seamlessly between Afrika Bambaata's "Planet Rock" and Amerie's "One Thing" via "Push It", "Crazy In Love" and NORE's "Nothin'".

?uestlove has a DJ set at the Jazz Café on Friday and Saturday. It's hardly the full Roots experience, but I'd check it out if I were you.

The Roots: Official website

The Roots forum

Jazz Café: ?uestlove DJ sets on Friday and Saturday

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