There was allegedly a leak of the new Dirty Projectors album a couple of days ago, which means that yet again my dithering has robbed me of blogging exclusivity. The thing is, as I’ve mentioned a few times over the past month, I’ve been finding “Bitte Orca”, like its predecessors, somewhat intriguing and uncrackable. Today, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it. The initial problem with David Longstreth and his band, I’ve always suspected, is that they’re so concerned with the cerebral innovations of their music that they sometimes privilege complexity, regardless of the effect it might have on their potency. I’m obviously not against cleverness in music, but with the Dirty Projectors it can be hard to see beyond that cleverness, as if the act of being clever is an artistic end in itself. I had a similar problem with “The Drift”: I like Scott Walker – and latterday Scott Walker – very much, but that record seemed stymied by such an ostentatious display of intellectual chops. “Bitte Orca” is, clearly, nowhere near as difficult a record as that. Listening to it again and again in the Uncut office, we’ve heard traces of Yes, Polvo, Scritti Politti, XTC and Talking Heads (two bands, actually, I’ve never liked quite as much as I’ve wanted to; a clue, perhaps), African hi-life, contemporary R&B, post-rock and Prince. The last song, “Fluorescent Half Dome”, is a diaphanous, ambulatory slow jam that’s more or less midway between “Nothing Compares 2 U” and “The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker”. There are some pretty amazing things here, for sure. “Temecula Sunrise”, for instance, starts off with some acoustic fingerpicking but, rapidly, it seems as if the player is channelling Toumani Diabaté as much as John Fahey, before sliding into the sort of dislocated post-pop which used to be the trademark of The Sea And Cake. Two songs in the centre of “Bitte Orca” stand out, though. One is the first single, “Stillness Is The Move”, a brittle and inventive reconfiguration of Aaliyah songs like “One In A Million” or “We Need A Resolution”; a comparison that resonates all the more thanks to Amber Coffman’s calmly soulful lead vocal. Straight after comes “Two Doves”, a gorgeous chamber folk-pop song, sung by Angel Deradoorian, that isn’t a million miles from a Joanna Newsom piece. It’s the immediate pleasure to be had from these two songs, however, which reveals something more about my response to the rest of “Bitte Orca”, and to the Dirty Projectors’ work in general. They’re the only two songs where Longstreth doesn’t take the lead – which suggests that my difficulty with the band might not be because of their theoretical rigour, but is down to one of the simplest, and hardest-to-explain, negative reactions you can have to music; I just don’t like the singer’s voice too much. Ironically, Longstreth is probably more reined-in here than on previous albums, and on paper his voice – a mix of Green Gartside and Jeff Buckley, crudely – should be appealing. Longstreth, though, has a capricious way with a vocal melody, and sometimes it can sound like Antony Hegarty improvising to a slightly different tune than the one which we’re hearing. I don’t doubt Longstreth has brilliant reasons for singing this way, perhaps rooted in his rare academic understanding of how music and composition works - or can work. But while it’s undoubtedly interesting, and often compelling, I’m not sure how much I actually like it. This is the recurrent issue I have with the Dirty Projectors: however much I struggle, there’s something about this band and their music that makes me want to play it again and again, to try and get to the bottom of it. Maybe I need, like all the evangelists tell me, to see them live?

When I was writing about the Lindstrom & Prins Thomas album a while back, I mentioned there was more Scandinavian electronic goodness forthcoming from The Field. “Yesterday And Today” is Axel Willner’s second album in this guise and, risking one of those winsome climatic references, it works great walking to work on a bright spring morning like this one. Lumping The Field and Lindstrom & Prins Thomas together is a bit lazy, of course – perhaps a result of me not writing about techno that regularly here. There are occasional vague affinities: “Sequenced” on “Yesterday And Today” has a certain kosmische gleam to it which you can also detect on the new Lindstrom & Prins Thomas. But whereas that duo tend towards a sort of euphoric noodle, The Field’s music is predominantly tidal, gauzy, rich and linear. At times, you could just about align Willner’s music with that dubious neo-shoegazing school of electronica, epitomised by people like Ulrich Schnauss, that I’m always so suspicious of. There’s a vocal loop in “The More That I Do” that could conceivably be sampled from the Cocteau Twins, for instance, but its aligned to a fiercely propulsive rhythm. Mostly, this is aestheticised dance music rather than ethereal whimsy, both transporting and meaty. “I Have The Moon, You Have The Internet” opens the album, and has a sort of rippling, saturated quality which reminds me of how M83 are often described, but rarely sound to me. “Leave It”, meanwhile, is 11 and a half minutes of what, in more innocent times, we might’ve called ambient trance, with twinkling bells that evoke Glastonbury dawns of the early ‘90s, Megadogs, and various other events which have long lost their hipster cachet. Sounds great, nevertheless. Even Willner’s soppiest conceits are successful. A cover of The Korgis’ “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime” is initially glitchy and gaseous, a Kompakt relative of 10cc's “I’m Not In Love”, before the frail vocals and soft-focus edits are overwhelmed by vast synth waves. Epically pretty, virtually to the point of absurdity, but still compelling. At the other extreme, once the necessary whooshing is done with, the title track ends up as a comparatively tough breakbeat workout, with Dan Enquist on bass and the mighty John Stanier from Battles behind the kit. Maybe that’s the greatest strength of “Yesterday And Today”: whenever there’s a danger of everything becoming too fluffy, Willner remembers to hit the gas.

In one of the best scenes in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's Randy and Marisa Tomei's Cassidy are propping up a bar, discussing the generally woeful state of modern music. They concur that Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Def Leppard set the bar astronomically high back in the day and, grumpy spoilsport that he was, "that Cobain pussy" pretty much ruined it all. The Nineties "sucked". And the Eighties? "Man, best shit ever!" Of course, a lot of what makes this scene particularly funny is how we're viewing it through the prism of Rourke as he is now, as opposed to how he was then, at his peak, in the same time period Randy is praising so effusively. More broadly, it also says much about how people develop a critic-proof love for the music that soundtracked their youth, when they were young, virile and carefree. For Hollywood, the Eighties has always been a Year Zero. It was the era of the high concept movie, a model that still governs today's blockbuster industry. It was also the decade where most of cinema’s biggest names found their mark: Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy, Johnny Depp. If any further proof were needed that the Eighties were Where It's At as far as the movies are concerned, look no further than The Expendables: an action caper that stars Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke (again), Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts and Arnold Schwarzenegger (sadly, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Kurt Russell turned it down). Quite whether The Expendables will be full of knowing winks-to-camera and heavy doses of irony, it's too early to tell (though, according to some pictures online this week, Sly's certainly gone overboard to pump up for the shoot). But one thing is certain, Hollywood likes the Eighties. Although, it's harder to tell what they think of Bret Easton Ellis' version of the Eighties. Ellis has already had films made of three of his Eighties-set books – Less Than Zero, The Rules Of Attraction and American Psycho. None of which, particularly, have been huge smashes; while preferring to touch on certain dark truths about Eighties’ America (the cocaine, the suits, the egos, the dreadful music), they’ve never come with the rosy-nostalgia that Hollywood likes to employ when looking back at the Eighties. The latest Ellis adaptation to come to the cinemas, The Informers, is based on a collection of loosely connected short stories. They were originally published in 1994, around a decade after Ellis wrote them, as an exigency because his next planned novel, Glamorama, was way behind schedule. As per Ellis, it's full of hardbodies, drug addicts, vampires, rock stars and other habitues of Ellis' shadow Los Angeles. It's now been made into a film – hey, that's why we're here – but what seems so interesting is how it's apparently provided a rehabilitation facility for several of (at time of filming) Hollywood's Least Wanted. What’s important to remember is that the film finished shooting in December, 2007. This was when one of its stars, Mickey Rourke, still figured he'd probably only be invited to attend awards ceremonies if he was first presented with a pair of rubber gloves and shown the way to the kitchen, a bowl full of soapy water and a pile of dirty dishes. It also stars Kim Basinger, who hasn't really made anything of significance since 1997’s LA Confidential. And then there's Winona Ryder. I admit, at this point, that the bit at the end of Edward Scissorhands when a heavily aged Winona tells her grandson that, in fact, Edward is alive and well and living in secret in the castle and the only reason it snows is because he's making beautiful ice carvings of her as she was in her youth can, on a bad day, reduce me to something close to tears. Snuffles, at least. All the same, it's with a hard heart that I say that the last time she hit the headlines was in 2001, when she was arrested for shoplifting. Still, it’s these three who pretty much topline The Informers. Here’s the trailer. Tell me what you think. [youtube]cj2e6D-SjkQ[/youtube]

There’s a good line from James Petralli in the biog which accompanies “Fits”, the new White Denim album. “We set the tempos high,” he says, “and set off.” Something of a simplification, but you can see what he means. Like its predecessor, “Workout Holiday”, “Fits” rushes through a lot of ideas in its 35 or so minutes. Again, it’s ostensibly the sound of a more-or-less conventional rock’n’roll band pushing the form to its limits. Not experimental, as such; more adventurous, frantic and greedy for ideas. It’d be easy for them to be self-indulgent, not least because their drummer, Josh Block, looked like one of the best I’ve seen in years when White Denim played our Club Uncut last year (they're headling our stage at The Great Escape next month, by the way). And I suppose, in the way they integrate all their riffs – including incredibly punchy and memorable pop songs like, here, “I Start To Run” and “Regina Holding Hands”- into a sort of manic jam, they are. Music business types with an eye on sensible commercial presentation will, once again, roll their eyes in despair. But for the rest of us, it makes for a thrilling ride – and, actually, an anti-indulgent one, given how quickly and ruthlessly they spit up and dispatch idea after idea after idea. To try and give some vague sense of the exhilarating gush of “Fits”, I thought I’d try and write about it, track-by-track, as it plays. Hold tight, here goes - with explosions, distorted howled chants and then “Radio Milk How Can You Stand It”, furious drums and bass runs, hardcore guitar chops, a reverberant Hendrixy solo, some kind of catchy tune over frenzied rolls, and the first reiteration of the Minutemen vibe I mentioned in that live review. Oh, and a totally incongruous reverb-heavy coda that sounds a bit like an Austin power trio trying to sound like The Isley Brothers. Next up, a big clanging psych-rocker called “All Consolation”, Petralli lost in a vortex, a trademark nagging melody pulled apart by staccato rhythms and solos. It’s amazing stuff, a sort of vandalised reorganisation of classic rock. Echoing drum space into a brassy “High Time”-era MC5 soul rocker called “Say What You Want” (cousin, maybe, of “All You Really Have To Do”), in which the wanton way they obfuscate their genius – in this case the artful smothering of Petralli’s rousing pipes – is again apparent. After a minute or so, they get bored with the mighty riff and jam off somewhere else. Two minutes in, some kind of electric sitar effect serves to push up the tempo further into some molten jazz-hardcore jam. “Hard Attack” begins, again, with a memorable riff, then speeds into manic Latino – lyrics in Spanish – territory; like, perhaps, how I always hoped the evolution from At The Drive-In into The Mars Volta might work out. Track Five, “I Start To Run”; relatively logical, hairy, funky, incredibly catchy, and this album’s “Let’s Talk About It”. There’s some odd, almost dubby punctuation here, though, that would destroy the song’s momentum if most bands were foolhardy enough to try it. Again, there’s that sense of a formal song disintegrating halfway through, only to be replaced by something more interesting. “Sex Prayer”, up next, is bassist Steve Terebecki at the controls with more dub, Black Ark organ, and chattering guitars and textures that suggest, maybe, Tortoise if they’d stayed a shade closer to their hardcore roots. Halfway through already. “Mirrored And Reversed” is at once urgent and laidback, maybe Texan motorik, or maybe space-rock Canned Heat, or something by Black Mountain, with a fantastic pulsating bassline and some weirdly bubbling boogie breaks (apologies: I hate alliteration). It fades into the distance, then fades back in again for a drilled freak-out closing passage. Worth mentioning here, the incredible discipline of this band, as well as their eclecticism: “Paint Yourself”, next, is groovy and countrified, hearty enough to be a ballad but still carried off with the usual pace and gusto. It’s beautifully accomplished. As is “I’d Have It Just The Way We Were”, a feathery and fast, jazzy waltz that, again, has something of The Isleys about it. At just over two minutes, you could get annoyed at White Denim for tossing off such great songs like this, but there’s always something interesting coming along to compensate. In this case, it’s “Everybody Somebody”, a fractious workout that sounds like – bear with me – ZZ Top playing punk-funk. I may be getting carried away now. “Regina Holding Hands” is a crystallisation of some of the – it’s all relative – mellower ideas on “Fits”, being a gorgeous blue-eyed soul tune that could/should lure a few unsuspecting pop fans into White Denim’s deeply confusing universe. Finally, “Syncn”, is rippling and soft, tender even, but still imbued with the momentum – “the tempos high” – that makes the whole album so swift and compelling. Make sense?