STEVE MASON: Boys Outside (Just Music)
Former Beta Band frontman Steve Mason left the cult band in 2004 with massive debt and in a state of severe depression. While his former band mates went on to form the psych-rock outfit, The Aliens, Mason slipped into anonymity, intermittently releasing music under the monikers King Biscuit Time and Black Affair.
When his 2006 King Biscuit Time album, Black Gold, was released, Mason disappeared for two weeks and later revealed in an interview with the Guardian that he had spent the time driving around Fife “marking out trees that would be good to crash into at high speed”.
So this Richard X-produced new solo album, the first to be released under his real name, is a substantial moment in Mason’s musical career, and fans of the Beta Band will be rightly overjoyed that it is actually bloody good. The album harks back in part to the folktronica sound that the Beta Band did so well, although Boys Outside is a lot more electronic than Mason’s former band’s output and the music is completely stripped back when compared with his King Biscuit Time work.
“I suddenly realised I was bored of pissing around with drum machines and all that stuff,” says Mason. “Just that immediate thing, where you can actually perform a song with a guitar – it seems really obvious, because I’ve done it loads in the past — but I’d forgotten it was possible.
You can actually create some really beautiful magic with just that instrument and a voice. So I started writing lots of stuff like that again.” Idiosyncratic electronic pop music is what you get or, as the music website Drowned in Sound so aptly described it, “pastoral G-funk”. As Mason says: “This album is the one I made where I was actually fixed as a human being”. Welcome back Steve Mason. — Lloyd Gedye
SOUNDGARDEN: Telephantasm (Universal)
If you can get your hands on Soundgarden’s two-disc retrospective, Telephantasm, good for you. Unfortunately, all I had was the anorexic single-disc version to go on, sans the partner video game, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, whose sales ensured the disc instant platinum status, or the DVD and various other add-ons the album’s other packages involve. Stripped of the gimmicks, the album isn’t entirely worth the buy, in my avowed Chris Cornel-devotee opinion.
A 14-year, five-album career can’t be compressed into a 12-track journey. The double disc would doubtless better serve as the homage the album is meant to be. It’s worth the listen though, as much for the new single, Black Rain, a previously unreleased track smacking of the old grunge magic, as it is for the trip down memory lane.
Like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and, of course, Nirvana, Soundgarden was spewed forth by the genius that lighted on Seattle in the early Nineties, spawning the grunge scene that has haunted alternative rock since. It never really got much better than this. — Verashni Pillay
CLINIC: Bubbelgum (Just Music)
Clinic’s sixth album in 10 years sees the band reaching for a new, softer psychedelic sound. “What we did this time was say, fuck it, let’s take a more laid-back approach,” reveals their leader, Ade Blackburn. “I guess we’ve mellowed, while keeping some of the edge.” This is quite clear when you take a listen to the album opener and first single, I’m Aware, which is layered with strings and vocal harmonies — hardly things you would associate with Clinic’s music, which has veered towards a murkier psychedelic/punk sound.
“In the past songs would normally start from rhythms and we’d build it up from there, always keeping an eye on what the drums were doing,” says Blackburn. “What changed this time is that we approached it more in a songwriter way — what the chords were and what the melodies were — and put everything on top of that.
We’ve probably been more purist in the past, sticking to that Velvets/Stooges sound,” says Blackburn. “So, in a tongue-in-cheek way, it’s almost like we’re branching out from the Sixties and getting into the Seventies with the wah-wah thing.”
There are still hints of the old Clinic sound on Lion Tamer and Sapphire, but then delicate acoustic guitar moments, such as Linda and the psych-pop of Milk and Honey, highlight the new sounds that Clinic are experimenting with. Liverpool’s post-punk stars are in rude health on Bubbelgum, reaching for a new sonic palette, which is something that should be applauded. — LG