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New album reviews: Dr Dre, Frank Turner and more

13 August, 2015 — by Christopher Ratcliff0

dr dre compton album cover

In the mid 80s when Mr Dre decided to adopt the title of Dr, what do you imagine he wanted to be a doctor of? Endocrinology? Microbiology? Rap music? Maybe he wanted to be a vet? Maybe he actually does have a doctorate and I should just shut my mouth. Or maybe he bought one off the internet like Dr Gillian McKeith, in which case he should definitely be struck off from the fake internet medical practitioners board (FIMPD).

Unfortunately this question isn’t resolved in Dr Dre MD’s new and apparently career-capping album Compton, which is a shame, as I was hoping to get in touch with him about a mole of mine that has changed shape. Not on my body, I mean my pet mole. He’s called Cedric. Cedric has changed shape. He’s now a cube. I was hoping Dr Dre might be a vet and that he could be of help. I only trust billionaire celebrity vets. All in all it’s been a disappointing week for bands with medical sounding names failing to help me with my serious mole problems.

Well I’ve rambled on enough, here’s a round-up of some of them most interesting albums to come out this week, including of course…

Dr Dre – Compton

Nobody forgot about Dre, it’s hard to forget about a billionaire rapper at the centre of a business built on extorting morons by using terrible headphones. Even as I type this, there’s an advert on the television where a pair of Beats headphones are magically gifted by eerie witch Myleene Klass to an unsuspecting Littlewoods model. That poor Littlewoods model, I imagine Klass will send her an invoice for £180 later in the week.

Compton is an album made quickly in a burst of creative fury, inspired by the soon to be released NWA biopic, which has clearly reinvigorated the 50 year-old man responsible for some of the most pinnacle moments in the last 30 years of rap. This puts it in direct contrast with the 15 year gestating follow-up to 2001 that Dr Dre mercifully scrapped in the same breath as announcing Compton last week. And you know what? It’s pretty fucking good. Perhaps way better than it has any right to be. It has more in common with the wild complexity of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (Lamar unsurprisingly delivers some of the best verses here), than the latest bloated extravagances of Jay-Z and Kanye West. Sure it’s a victory lap, in which Dr Dre himself takes a backseat, giving a platform to the deserved proteges he’s most proud of, but the coup this pulls off is in managing to sound so fresh and vital, while delivering so much nostalgic reflection. Where else could Ice Cube invoke ‘Today was a Good Day’ without sounding cheesy as hell and Snoop Dogg can deliver his best rap in decades? The answer of course is nowhere. 8/10

Dr Dre wears a pair of Beats headphones
“You know, i still have to buy these myself from Littlewoods using my own money just like you”

Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss

Bowel-loosening drone guitars and a buzzsaw bass form the backing for Chelsea Wolfe’s spacey vocals, which float on top like a balloon bouncing on a pit full of spikes. Much of Abyss is centred around the Wolfe’s own experience with sleep paralysis, a condition that leaves your body temporarily paralysed even though you’ve just woken up. If I were better at metaphors I would tie this neatly into describing Wolfe’s equally hypnotic yet emotionally devastating album, but I’ve already spunked my metaphor load on the balloon.

By the way, ‘metaphor loads’ and ‘metaphorical loads’ are two very distinct things, but describing the difference between each one is as difficult as spunking on a balloon.* 7/10

*My wife has informed me that I could just hold it down.

chelsea wolfe
“Let me just crush your face for a while”

The Mynabirds – Lovers Know

Laura Burhenn’s smoky, battle-hardened vocals tower above stripped-back electronics and minimal percussion. It makes for a cooly detached listen; the expansive, spacious production. undercutting Burhenn’s plaintive lyrics and impassioned growl. It’s fine, but it’s difficult not to compare this to Lana Del Rey’s similarly sultry evocations of small-town America. So I won’t bother… It’s not as good. 7/10

the mynabirds
Twiggy.

Mac Demarco – Another One 

Hazily thrown together songs with lazily strummed guitars and laconic vocals make this album from Canadian multi-instrumentalist Mac Demarco sound like music for those who have given up. Sorry that sounded awful, let’s rephrase that… Music for people who no longer give a shit about how they look and behave in public. People who say “fuck it, I’m going to the corner shop in my dressing gown, shorts and flip-flops at 4pm in the afternoon.” Except even then, saying “fuck it” sounds like too much of a conscious choice. This is for the people who don’t even think of going to the corner shop in a dressing gown, shorts and flip-flops at 4pm in the afternoon as a ‘thing’. 6/10

mac demarco cigarettes
Benson and Hedges severely reprimanded for new ‘Joy of Ciggies’ campaign.

Deaf Wish – Eyes Closed 

What the dour Australian punk-rockers lack in joie de vivre they make up for in having a clever name. Each track is an ode to a different period or band in the history of punk, from the oppressive wall of noise of The Stooges, to the hardcore fury of Minor Threat to the more melodic charm of The Replacements, this is a neat history lesson, but thanks to Deaf Wish’s desire to ‘sound-check’ their heroes so loyally, they lack a character of their own. 5/10

deaf wish
Nap time!

Frank Turner – Positive Songs for Negative People

Painfully banal lyrics, unimaginative melodies, straining unpleasant vocals and an unearned bombast that comes out of nowhere are not the worst things about this album. No, no, it’s the lyric, “We used to fit like mittens but never like gloves”. Pulse stopping crap. 2/10

frank turner at a festival
“I should be on the main stage right now, but I thought I’d check out some falconry instead”

Well I think my work here is done.

Check out all the latest music releases in our new album reviews section, including Telepathe’s Destroyer.

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