CD OF THE WEEK: Martha Wainwright - I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too
****
THE YOUNGEST of the Wainwright clan has always had to sit in the shadows cast by her famous parents and attention-grabbing brother. In the three years since her splendid, self-titled debut, however, Martha has come into her own, stealing the limelight from her sibling with a show-stopping Stormy Weather on the live album Rufus Does Judy At Carnegie Hall and tasting the top end of the charts by guesting on Snow Patrol's single Set The Fire To The Third Bar.
Martha, it could be said, is the meeting point of family influences: a folky feel inherited from her mother Kate McGarrigle, a singer-songwriter confessional mode not dissimilar to dad Loudon Wainwright III, and a vocal theatricality that perhaps comes from years of fighting Rufus for the bedroom mirror. However, the new album is a few tracks in before Martha makes her own mark on proceedings. Aside from the straight pop of You Cheated Me (surely a future single, with Pete Townshend on guest guitar), it's all a bit countrified singer-songwriter rock until track five, when The Tower Song's more experimental backdrop leaves space for the cracked sigh-to-a-scream dramatics of her voice.
Like Alison Goldfrapp, she seems to have fallen under the spell of Kate Bush on the floaty folk of So Many Friends and Niger River, although she is her own woman again on the album's closer, I Wish I Were, which presents her at her best - out front, stripped of production gimmicks, vulnerable but strong.
DOWNLOAD THIS: I Wish I Were
Alan Morrison
Drive-By ArgumentDrive-By Argument (Lizard King)****
BEFORE this debut was in the bag, Ayr-based five-piece Drive-By Argument had played to a packed Madison Square Garden in New York. Okay, that's not quite true. Sex Lines Are Expensive Comedy, one of the album's highlights, was heard there after being adopted by ice-hockey heroes the New York Rangers as an unofficial anthem. On the strength of this record, the band might get there themselves one day. Describing themselves as "four-to-the-floor unhappy hardcore", they cross between the footstomping 2008 sound of ice-cool electro geeks like The Faint and the heartwarming classical grandeur of The Cure.
Frontman Stoke, who took the name of his hometown Stoke-on-Trent after moving up here for university, sings with a sweetly rasping Caledonian twang that says a lot about the unashamed strength of Scotland's music scene these days. Add to that a stage act that involves the wearing of beards, specs, mop tops, yellow jeans and black capes, and you've got a one-way ticket to international greatness.
DOWNLOAD THIS: Disco Stomp
Allan Burnett
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius PipAngles (Sunday Best)*****
MORE John Cooper Clarke than Jay-Z, Essex poet-rapper Scroobius Pip knows how to pass on a message without coming over like Ken Loach at the mic. Whether it's the alternative commandments of Thou Shalt Always Kill, the advice to a self-harmer of Magician's Assistant or the ingenious "don't judge a book by its cover" story twists of Angles, the concepts behind his words outshine the rhymes themselves. No less important, Dan Le Sac's musical landscapes fit the mood with whatever is to hand, be it bluesy acoustic guitar, bare classical piano or the messed-up sample of Radiohead's Planet Telex that fires the theologically cheeky A Letter From God To Man.
"Hip hop is an art/ Don't make another pop hit/ Be smart," says the polite-voiced Mr Pip on Fixed, but Angles is a five-star album precisely because of the chart-tickling tracks contained within, especially the neat hooks of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and the Moby-style electro-cool of current single Look For The Woman.
DOWNLOAD THIS: Angles
Alan Morrison
ParkaAttack Of The Hundred Yard Hardman (Jeepster)
**
A BUNCH of Scots based in east London, Parka graced a few Ones To Watch lists in January, rubbing shoulders with Adele, Duffy and Glasvegas. Well, you can't predict a Miss World winner from a baby photo, and you can't always talent-spot the year's best from a couple of tracks on MySpace. Sometimes the debut album comes along and spoils the party. Aside
from the tight indie funk of Disco Dancer, there's something faintly cheesy about the rest of Parka's longer-player.
Maybe it's the horn arrangements that drag everything back to the early 1990s; maybe it's the lowest-common-denominator choruses that would do anything to be up there with The Fratellis' mass singalongs. Parka toy with topicality on the electro-indie intro of opener Bosses And Bastards, but by the time they get to Stay Away they've finally given in and gone for a straight Oasis photocopy. A certain fan base will drink it up, but just because it's popular doesn't mean it's good.
DOWNLOAD THIS: Disco Dancer
Alan Morrison
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