27 up her vocals over the multi-textured chorus, you’ll be negotiating the guestlist to join this wave of her uprising. Recent single ‘5AM’ follows with a cheeky, self-assured wink (“That beat’s so sick, that tune’s so ill”) as our subterranean raconteur searches for “a little loving like Valium” to wind down her evening. ‘Aaliyah’ (from the ‘Danger’ EP) is a garage re-imagining of Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ that shares verses with Jessie Ware. Now that’s genius, and that’s why we’ve been dancing to it since December 2012. There’s a sense of safe familiarity with ‘Little Red’, and a danger of top-heaviness. While ‘I Like You’ apes the slink-and-grate of Disclosure’s ‘Grab Her’, you’d be hard-pushed to get the crowd jumping to the downtempo, Joker-produced ‘All My Loving’. And then there’s the lull. Where her debut melded futuristic beats into Mediterranean grooves, ‘Little Red’ abandons variety for some forgettable fllers. The drum’n’bass euphoria of ‘Emotions’ and Jacques Greene contribution ‘Sapphire Blue’ pull things back, but not before revellers have dashed for the last train home. So here’s what happens when the life and soul of the party requests patience from an audience that demands constant entertainment. But like maturity itself, ‘Little Red’ is a grower, a record about learning to dust of heartache. We’ll see how this washes with Katy’s crowd, who don’t care for warnings about how they might get their dreams broken. Her toughest challenge will be to hold their imaginations until sunrise. ■ EVE BARLOW ► ►RELEASE DATE February 10 ►LABEL Columbia ►PRODUCERS Geeneus, George FitzGerald, Jacques Greene, Joker, The Invisible Men, The Arcade, Dream, Sampha, Moto Blanco, Fraser T Smith ►LENGTH 47:40 ►TRACKLISTING ►1. Next Thing ►2. 5AM ►3. Aaliyah (feat. Jessie Ware) ►4. Crying For No Reason ►5. I Like You ►6. All My Lovin’ ►7. Tumbling Down ►8. Everything ►9. Play (feat. Sampha) ►10. Sapphire Blue ►11. Emotions ►12. Still ►BEST TRACK 5AM the London suburbs, working with the sort of lush horns and strings that indicate a stab at maturity. Singer-guitarist Wesley Patrick Gonzalez immerses himself in sweetly poignant recollections of the 2011 London riots (‘Rain Ruins Revolution’), friendship fall-out (‘Opium Den’) and unrequited love (‘Always A Friend’). It’s their finest collection yet. ■ SIMON JAY CATLING 8 FEBRUARY 2014 | NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS ► Amid their debut album’s tales of mutually manipulative relationships, Speedy Ortiz singer-guitarist Sadie Dupuis asked the crucial question: “If I’m despondent, who’s at fault?” Sure, blame the shithead exes and cruel kids who teased her, but on the Massachusetts band’s new EP, Dupuis examines her relationship with herself for clues. The results aren’t pretty, but then unpicking ugliness is one of her greatest strengths as a songwriter. On ‘Real Hair’ she’s by turns crazy and paranoid, acting cruel as a cover for her inability to connect. Dupuis’ every sneer is mimicked by the lurch of Dupuis and Matt Robidoux’s careening guitar lines. Plundering the absurdity of hair metal and yoking its overheated adventurousness to the poppiest structures Speedy have wrought since debut single ‘Taylor Swift’, ‘Real Hair’ works like a Oujia board: dangerous, addictive fun with the potential for unwelcome answers. ■ LAURA SNAPES Speedy Ortiz Real Hair EP Four tracks of uneasy listening from the Massachusetts band ► ►RELEASE DATE February 11 ►LABEL Carpark ►PRODUCERS Speedy Ortiz, Paul Q Kolderie ►LENGTH 13:03 ►TRACKLISTING ►1. American Horror ►2. Oxygal ►3. Everything’s Bigger ►4. Shine Theory ►BEST TRACK American Horror 8 7 8 Lets Wrestle Lets Wrestle Fortuna Pop! For a group whose debut single revelled in the British wrestling scene of the ’80s, Lets Wrestle’s Steve Albini-recorded 2011 album ‘Nursing Home’ brought a surprising American influence to their sound. Now the group’s third LP finds them kicking around Cheatahs Cheatahs Wichita Wonderful thing, retrospect. Looking back at the early ’90s, Cheatahs – from London via Dresden, San Diego, Alberta and, um, Leicester – can cherry-pick hints of MBV, Dinosaur Jr, Lush and Kitchens Of Distinction to create a fuzzadelic miasma that efortlessly merges shoegaze and grunge. Gru- gaze, if you will: the more UK-slanted accompaniment to Menace Beach’s wobbly Sub Pop reinventions. Like many nu-shoe proponents (Radio Dept, say), Cheatahs’ debut neatly avoids the old shoegazing pitfall of drowning weak melodies in oceans of shimmer. There are patches of sonic soup (‘Kenworth’) but overall, ‘Cheatahs’ is a gleaming pop wrecking ball taken to the sonic cathedral. ■ MARK BEAUMONT Illum Sphere Ghosts Of Then And Now Ninja Tune You may remember Illum Sphere as one of the up- and-coming producers on Radiohead’s ‘King Of Limbs’ remix album in 2011 – he added one of his psychedelic washes to ‘Codex’. Three years later, he’s still making sure you won’t forget him. ‘Ghosts…’ winds together techno and house, garage and jungle, hip-hop and Brazilian rhythms, reflecting the colourful sonic palette of Illum’s Manchester club night Hoya:Hoya, but filtered through a crackling record player instead of a club soundsystem. It’s at its best when it mixes Badu-style soul vocals and apocalypse bass (‘The Road’, ‘At Night’), but there’s also the sort of jazzy tribal stompers that Gilles Peterson would approve of (‘Ra_Light’, ‘Near The End’). ■ KATE HUTCHINSON 7 8 KATY B ON... …feeling sexy “I love it when a song makes you feel sexy. When a song has that tension, it makes me want to write about feeling sexy or fancying someone. On some of the songs [on this record] it was the instrumentals that made me want to write like that. Beyoncé’s ‘Drunk In Love’ has had that efect on me.” …staying true to her dubstep roots “My beats are still a mixture of house and dubstep, and I’ve done a track with Joker so there’s still dubstep on this album. I’ve always been influenced by R&B singers though, and that comes into my lyrics and delivery.” …settling down “[The album is] about working out being in a relationship and the trials and tribulations of that, and also the amazing feeling of falling in love.” …writing songs from scratch “On this album I wanted to write at a piano and think about chord structures rather than approach it like a rapper and just write over a beat. Both ways have pluses and minuses but I’ve been in bands since I was a teenager so I’ve written songs from scratch before. It was nice to go back to that.”
