This track Dreidel is really nice, a big latin dance behind the float feel. Big call to arms voice, features Jules Brooks and MC Y love whoever they are and has been put together by Erran Baron Cohen (the brother of Sacha Baron Cohen). If there is any sibling rivalry, Erran you have way more class.

Seems to be off an album ‘Songs in the key of Hannukah‘ bunch of hipsters making Hannukah songs.

Do you have to buy presents at Hannukah? Maybe I will convert.

So it if it isn’t too obvious, what is Good Times about?
“It’s about nostalgia, which is a feeling I really enjoy; when you get a connection to all the good things that have happened to you, or even not so good things. All those things are part of you, and it’s important to feel them. Music does that for me and helps me get clear my head of any cloudy, stressy, numbness that might be in my head from everyday life.

“The track ‘Good Times’ is about me and my friends sitting in the sunshine in our old age, after all the business of life has ceased to matter, looking back at our youth when we didn’t give a shit.”

There are numerous references to alcohol on the record - do you have something that you want to tell us?
“Good alcohol helps me to get in touch with what’s important in life. It’s not the alcohol that I’m referring to, it’s the urge to suck up life and make the most of it while you can.”

Good Times, are you sure you are qualified to be a blues singer?
“No. I’ve never claimed to be a bluesman. I’m coming from a different place in a lot of ways. If I was to go around trying to be a bluesman, it would be really embarrassing for all involved. I haven’t really got the blues, I’m really pretty happy. If something bad happens, I don’t tend to dwell on it. But I’ve loved blues since I was a boy, so the influence is bound to be there.”

Your album cover proudly displays your influences, citing Professor Longhair, Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits and Howlin’ Wolf among others. But the album maintains a pretty unique style throughout, despite the range of influences.
“I was really exciting about all these artists at the time I recorded the album and I wanted to bring it all together. On the other hand I didn’t want it to sound like a Sol Hoopii cover followed by something by The Band, for example.

“I knew that the dobro and double bass were pretty distinctive. So as long as stuck to this format and didn’t mess around with backing vocals, percussion or other instruments, I could allow the influences to flow strongly and still create a valuable, clearly defined sound of my own.”

Good Times is very laid back album, are you that laid back day to day?
“The album sounds like how I felt when I was recording it; by myself, snowed in, no-one to talk to, but with all the time in the world to write, play and record. I was emotional, nostalgic, excited, inspired; I had a supply of whiskey and I was relaxed.

“But at the same time I was very focussed on what I was doing. It felt good and right to be putting down these recordings.”

There’s an effortless quality to it despire the complexity of the playing. Did the parts come easy?
“Definitely, songs that had been bothering me for months came together easily. I recorded all the vocals in one three-hour drunken session, most are first takes. They came out croaky and a bit sloppy, but the recordings captured a feeling that I’d like to remember. I knew that if I went back to it afterwards, I’d risk losing that.”

Who would you like to work with?
“A lot of the people I’d really love to work with seem to have died recently, like some of the original calysonians and blues players. But a great piano player would be good - Pinetop Perkins is still playing, I hear.”

Where can we see you next?
“Well, I’m currently re-wiring and plumbing my house and deciding if the bassment is going to be a flat or a recording studio, and musing on the next album. So first I need to work out how this boiler is going to fit under the stairs.”

For more info on Naughty Jack, go and check out his official website.

Good Times

Wang Dang Doodle 2008, Audio CD, £17.99

Anyway, fans of avant garde electro rackett listen up. Actually, non-fans of bristol based electo racketts listen the hell up and get experimenting. They don’t seem to have a real video, but if they did I would expect it to have massive space ships colliding.

Street Horrrsing

Atp 2008, Audio CD, £10.99

Is there any dance move, stage gesture or physical act of defiance, more rock’n’roll, than the pelvic thrust? You can keep your devil horn throwing, your crowd surfing, your stage diving, your head banging, your mosh pit’ing – the pelvic thrust sums up everything about rock’n’roll. The ill-restrained sexual desire. The disregard for what others may think. The fact that if anyone other than a rockstar attempts it anywhere but on a stage in front of an audience, it looks totally fucking stupid.

If records were dance moves, then Chinese Democracy would be a pelvic thrust. If anyone other than Axl Rose had made this album, it would sound totally fucking stupid. Despite holding the lion’s share of ex-GnR members, there’s no way Velvet Revolver could’ve made this album. It’s over-wrought, over-the-top, over-budget and completely, unequivocally, a Guns record.

There’s no point in even trying to review this objectively. Notwithstanding that this is possibly the most mystery-shrouded record release in the last twenty years, notwithstanding the fact that this review will make fuck-all difference in altering your decision whether to buy it or not, and notwithstanding the fact that this review is a result of a single playback in a record company boardroom, it’s impossible to listen to Axl Rose’s new baby without the dull ache of regret in the pit of your guts. For all the acres of talent used in it’s creation – the liner notes for this record go into exasperating detail – and the years spent making it, the crushing realisation hits you that this is just a capable album, not an exceptional one.

You’ll have already heard the title-track by now – opening the album, it feels more portentous than it did as a stand-alone track. Those Elton John urges he squirted out indiscriminately with ‘November Rain’ – well, they’re back with ‘Street Of Dreams’, only nowhere near as grandoise. The rumoured dalliances with industrial metal chug? See ‘Shackler’s Revenge’. “Don’t ever try to tell me how much you care for me / Don’t ever try to tell me how much you’re meant for me,” Axl sneers at us. Oh, if only you knew, Axl, if only you knew.

‘Better’, which is being lined up as a potential second single, has a pumping chorus, but its refrains of “Now I know you better / You know I know better” never quite get under your skin the way you desperately, fervently hope they will. As a fan you want this record to succeed, but as a fan you can’t really deny that it fails.

‘I.R.S’, played live at Rock AM Ring, 2006:

There’s one, huge, elephant-in-the-room problem with Chinese Democracy – bangers. Or rather, the lack thereof - the title-track is the fieriest bombast the album can manage. Oh, there are acres of solos, from the Bill & Ted excess of the guitar wanking in ‘Street Of Dreams’, to the big, stabby mentalism of the one that ‘Riad N’ The Bedouins’ indulges, but none of them have the soul-fucking, spine-ripping, raw gonzo genius of classic Guns. A few tracks like ‘Scrapped’ might come close to the cocksure riff attitude of old, but they can’t hide the fact that there’s not one true anthem of the ages here. No ‘Paradise City’. No ‘You Should Be Mine’. And certainly no ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.

If anything, Chinese Democracy goes to show that without Slash, Duff and Izzy to keep a stern rock’n’roll eye on him, there’s no-one to curtail Axl’s wanton musical excesses. The hired help just smile and do what they’re told, whereas the classic Guns would take their frontman’s wild ideas and give them that juiced-up wild-eye’d rock finish, and make them into the solid-gold genius that those early GnR records had in abundance.

When legends die young, they become cannonised as they’ll never tarnish their legacy with ever-decreasing returns. When Chinese Democracy was the joke of the industry – the album that would never come – then the legacy of GnR was unimpeachable. Now? Guns N’ Roses were one legend we wish had stayed dead.

‘Chinese Democracy’ is out on November 24.

Chinese Democracy

Polydor 2008, Audio CD, £14.99

How can we save the Music Industry? WE CAN’T - SEEK AND DESTROY. This is the Bloody Beetroots, playing London next on the far away date of February 27. Don’t miss it.

Rombo

Downtown/Dim Ma 2008, Audio CD, £4.99

Having just finished a tour with those over-hyped MGMT lot, Brooklyn-based The Amazing Baby wowed pretty much everyone who saw them. They make us want to roll around the office on our backs, playing ludicrous space-rock air guitar solos like the bastard spawn of Bill & Ted.

The band are bouncing back to the UK for Swn Festival tomorrow, before hitting The Lexington in London town on Monday. Who knows when they’ll be back in the UK, so if you’re in Cardiff or the capital, don’t miss your chance to see why we’re raving about these fellows.

‘Pump Your Brakes’ by The Amazing Baby:

You like? We like. So why not do what we do, and click click your way over to the band’s website, where they are giving away a free download of their Infinite Fucking Cross EP, which contains the above track and three other gems.

You want even more? Then head over to their MySpace page.

There’s something thoroughly irksome about Subliminal Girls. Their last single, ‘Burn KOKO’, was a shoulders-back, lip-curled sneer at London indie-culture. It simultaneously managed to pompously deride music fans who weren’t “hardcore” indie, and similarly turn their nose up at very elitist scenesterism, as if the band couild somehow transcend the entire spectrum and comment upon it from a big white high horse, perched atop the local peak of moral high ground.

They’ve continued to maximise how objectionable they are with their latest single, ‘Self Obsession is an Art Form’. The vocals have an airy lilt of Pete Doherty to them, with lyrics more ruggishly literal than the guffish poetry of The Nation’s Favourite Junkie®. That doesn’t stop there from being something gratingly self-satisfied about these three minutes of post-pub sentimentalist beige.

The first B-side, ‘Posh Girls Names’, almost, almost makes up for it, with an Art Brut-ish twinge, a babbling stream of consciousness underneath an almost Eddie Argos anti-pop delivery. Which just makes it even more of a shame that the second extra track, ‘Electronic Hearts’, continues their prior hypocritical rants against hipster culture, rolling their music-eyes at “Clichéd bands and pointless art”.

Subliminal Girls play ‘Small Town Girl’ & ‘Self Obsession is an Art Form’, live at Selfridges:

Maybe it’s me that’s missing something? Maybe this is a joke that I just don’t get? Maybe it’s a big ironic statement that I haven’t been able to see an edge of in order to get a handle on the whole thing? Maybe I’ve had too many cups of coffee and I’m seeing masked contempt when there is none?

Oh, wait - the band have got a vinyl boxset version of this release out for £1200, because they’ve got Brit artist, Stuart Semple, to design the various gubbins that goes with the tunes (click here for the full deal). That’s not at all pretentious, is it? To use a phrase like “so far up their own arse they can’t see daylight” in conjunction with Subliminal Girls wouldn’t be too harsh, would it?

‘Self Obsession is an Artform’ is out on PopArt London on November 17. For more info, go check out Subliminal Girls’ official website.

1. The excessive amount of woo, whuh, yeah, ha, hey, and other superfluous extra vocals callbacks that litter ‘The Time Of My Life’. Listening to a single by Tah Mac is like having a conversation with someone you don’t know very well who is so uncomfortable in your presence he has to keep saying anything that comes into his head to avoid uncomfortable silences.

2. The random bursts of lyrical genius. The use of rhetorical questions! “Feels good, don’t it?” You don’t get enough of that in hiphop. “Every day’s like a Friday?” Which means I can eat a Crunchy Bar every bloody day of the week without feeling guilty.

3. The fact that everyone in the video (check it below) couldn’t be any less enthusiastic, except Mr Tah Mac himself. I’m guessing they didn’t exactly have too many auditions for those dancing girls, eh? Anyway, it makes for a much more entertaining video than your usual generic hophop vid:

3 Things We Hate About This Single From Tah Mac

1. It is only ever acceptable to have a remix as your only b-side if a) it is by The Chemical Brothers or Soulwax or someone like that, or b) you’re a faceless dance act and no-one really cares. But in this reviewer’s opinion, hiphop b-sides should be bombastic party songs, or unfunny comedy skits. Not bloody remixes.

2. Something about it sounds like the music at the start of an episode of CSI: Miami. You know – the bit just before they discover the body, and we’re treated to some ridiculous party montage of bikini models lounging about and frolicking in a swimming pool while gangster-types cut shady deals in the background. At least Tah Mac didn’t draft David Caruso in for guest vocal duties.

3. His name – I know hip hop stars love homophonic names, but Tah Mac? Naming yourself after the stuff they put on roads? That’s just…well….silly?

‘Time Of My Life’ is out on November 17 on Tah MC Entertainment.

Have a listen.

http://www.kolacny.com

One Winged Angel

Virgin 2007, Audio CD, £11.99

Those Guns N’ Roses lot have a new album due out in two weeks time, and in order to hype one of the most anticipated records of, well, forever, just that little bit more, they’ve rumbled up a YouTube competition offering the chance to listen to Chinese Democracy before anyone else. Well, we’re going to hear it on Friday (allegedly) with a bunch of other journalists, but everyone knows music journos barely count as human, so we’ll ignore them.

To be in with a chance of winning, you have to upload a video of your “craziest, most inappropriate air guitar” to this here YouTube group.

Things what you will win if you are judge to be the best:

1) Limousine pick up from winner’s house to the party at a local venue

2) Entry to VIP area for winner and 100 friends

3) The UK premiere public playback of the Chinese Democracy album

4) A presentation disc recognising the winners as the first person in the UK to own Chinese Democracy

5) Free drinks and loads of other goodies

Not bad for submitting a video of yourself acting like a prat, eh? You closing date’s next Monday, November 17. Get cracking.

In case you didn’t know, Chinese Democracy (the album) is out 24 November, Chinese Democracy (the single) is out now.