What I was listening to last month: April 2013

Now we’re into May, with the sun shining bright and the barometer rising, I can look back on April through a rose-tinted lens.

What started out as a month fraught with uncertainty around Su’s job (and mine) ended with late evening bike rides on our new two-wheeled steeds, safe in the knowledge that Su will be employed in the newspaper industry for at least another year and that we have a long overdue trip to Scotland coming up in the very near future. In terms of music, it’s been a fruitful sort of month.

I completely fell for Charli XCX's debut LP and all of its android-pop glory, as well as Cayucas’s breezy Vampire Weekend-esque indie saunters. Steve Mason’s Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time was a slowburner for me; it took time to love but once it clicked I return to it almost every other day.

It’s hard to talk about April without mentioning the return of Daft Punk. The Pharrell fronted Get Lucky is already the impossible to resist single of the summer and I fully expect to hear it blasted from the rafters at house parties over the coming months.

 I also had the opportunity to hear the new Savages record for, oh, one whole play – trying to write a review based on one listen is not as easy as it sounds – and my final words were something along the lines of “a buzz band out-buzzing the buzz”.

 Jon Hopkins’ new record Immunity is a feast of glichy effects and kinked beats that is arguably the most innovative eletronica-record of the year to date. And while Wiley’s latest effort was a fairly inconsistent beast, a few tracks stood out – particularly the striding My Heart, featuring omnipresent pop harlot Emeli Sande.

So that was April. May sees the full return of Daft Punk, which will no doubt polarise opinion. It will be no Homework, that’s for sure. Actually, I’d be rather disappointed if it was.

Album review: Steve Mason - Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time

Given the perilous condition of the Western world, it's surprising so few modern-era musicians reflect this in their craft. Perhaps the general ennui that's set in since the global economy went into meltdown in 2008 has had something to do with it; after all, who wants to hear hope-bereft protest songs when the world around you actually feels like it's bereft of hope?

Thankfully, Steve Mason has other ideas. The former Beta Band man's third solo effort, Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time, not only addresses key societal issues but also confronts them, challenging the dominant political ideologies that, he believes, left us in such a mess in the first place. In other words, he's actually got something to say.

 Despite the hard-hitting choice of subject matter, Monkey Minds is pleasingly appealing. In between the looping clips of political unrest, Mason has created a collection of songs that nods its head to both the melody-hewn compositions and the dub-heavy experimentalism that have steered the Scotsman's career to date. The results tend to be impressive, with the shimmering gospel swell of "Lonely" and the equally compelling "Oh My Lord" representing a maturing in Mason's songwriting nous.

At 20 tracks long, it gets a little over-familiar. The meandering "Operation Mason" and "Never Be Alone" would have been best abandoned in the cutting room. But what remains is a buxom sonic treasure trove that serves up the brass-parping beatsmanship of "Fire!" alongside percussion-stroking ballad "Seen It All Before" and the savage hip-hop of "More Money, More Fire"—a furious MC Mystro-led tirade about 2011's London riots. 

As protest albums go, Monkey Minds is probably not a movement-inspiring rabble-rouser. But in an age of anodyne opinions, it's reassuring to know today's musicians can still take to their soap box and make such a persuasive stand.


First published here for Under the Radar