Panic! At The Disco- Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die
★☆☆☆☆
One Star
It is easy to imagine the flipchart in the corner of the studio where Panic! At The Disco recorded their fourth album, Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die! Across the top, the words ‘What Is Cool And Relevant To Young People In 2013’ are underlined twice. Bullet-pointed below, we can read “Skrillex. Dub Step. Autotune. Imogen Heap. Trap Music. Vocoders.” Pop punk is conspicuously absent from this list. In a misguided attempt to stay relevant, P!ATD have bolted these contemporary chart staples onto their usual formula of cheesy sub-Killers whingeing. Charitably, this can be seen as a deliberate attempt to replicate the artificial hedonism of the city they name as a key influence, Las Vegas. However, the result is a mess. P!ATD are neither rare nor weird, they’re just desperate.
Moby- Innocents
★★★★☆
Four Stars
Moby told Time magazine back in August, “My goal is to make music that affects me emotionally, I don’t really care if it’s innovative or what genre it’s in.” This pretty much sums up Innocents: no gimmicks, no nonsense. Moby places you in a trance-like state and watches you glide off like driftwood downstream, very rarely going under or gasping for air, just enjoying where the journey’s heading – which remains enticingly vague. With piano arpeggios, airy synths and a gentle unearthing hum of percussion, Moby and his smattering of high-profi le friends (Wayne Coyne and Mark Lanegan feature) let you float away: b-e-a-utiful.
Anna Calvi- One Breath
★★★★☆
Four Stars
Anna Calvi’s sophomore effort is a step forward from her debut but she’s still wearing the same boots: it works. Her music has been refined, tweaked and touched up to produce an excellent piece. Her eponymous first album was filled with menace, but this one is even darker. It’s more experimental, but it’s also more delicate. The emotion swells gently, before bursting into life and then repeating. Though Calvi more often sounds emotionally bruised, she still fills the album with stirring calls to arms on this magnificent rollercoaster-ride which veers violently between love, lust and death.
