Ian Sherman, the Lester Bangs of Chinese rock. So was he described in an invitation to a memorial do for Ian Sherman, music critic for the (English) Beijing edition of Time Out magazine. I was away on June 5 but there was reporedly a big turn out at a Dos Kollegas gig organised by Tag Team Records, for which Sherman wrote pithy press releases and band bios. There aren’t many following China’s rock/indie music scene who can write as well as Sherman could. One was an acquaintence and Sherman contemporary at Time Out, now a financial journalist at the China Economic Quarterly. There's also the writing musician-impressario, Jon Campbell, and wit/columnist Kaiser Kuo, a veteran of the local rock scene of even greater vintage (he played guitar in breakthrough 1980s/90s metal band Tang Dynasty). Other than that rock writers in Beijing tend to be students who become enamoured by local bands during a passing-through time here.

Sherman wrote with verve and passion and knowledge and without putting the boot in when a CD was rubbish, as many are among the avalanche of records which started to come out of local studios in the early 2000s. I’m currently trying to read the local back issues of InMusic and Rolling Stone – it’s slow work, given frequent recourse to my Chinese-English dictionary.

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A review of the album 'A Journal For Plague Lovers' by Manic Street Preachers

Review Snapshot:
Fourteen years ago Richey Edwards, the then lyricist and rhythm guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers, went missing at a well-known suicide spot on the Severn. And despite a handful of alleged sightings of the former Manic, was in November of last year announced dead. And now in 2009, A Journal for Plague Lovers adds another chapter to the legacy of one of Britain's great songwriters.

The Cluas Verdict? 8 out of 10

Full Review:
For those of us inclined to sentimentality, the Richey Edwards saga has been an ongoing source of enchantment, never allowing us to stray too far from Manic album releases, on the admittedly slight chance that the tragic lyricist might return. Sadly, since it has been well over a decade since his disappearance, it would seem unlikely that such a scenario might arise and so A Journal for Plague Lovers serves as the next best thing.

The use on this album of a folder of poetry left by Edwards is a source of controversy that has split opinion amongst even the most hardcore fans of the Manic Street Preachers. For some it is a worthy homage to the band member who supplied so much of the content that made 1994's 'The Holy Bible' such a mesmerising and quintessential rock offering. For others, the folder of poetry left behind embodies the most intimate of details written by the troubled icon in his darkest moments and question whether it is advisable to put these words to music after so much time has passed. According to the band themselves, the lyrics were simply too good to be left unreleased.

From the instant that the opening track 'Peeled Apples' kicks in, you get the impression that this is the Manics back to their best. There are the movie snippet sound clips that have become a common feature of their albums, followed by thumping bass lines and the familiar grungy guitar riffs of James Dean Bradfield.  On this album the Manics are typically outspoken and meddlesome. The first track explores the role of brands and consumerism as Bradfield roars out:
"The levi jean will always be stronger than an uzi" and "A series of images against you and me trespass your torment if you are what you want to be".

And without time for so much as a breath, the second song on the album kicks off. 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' is arguably the strongest track on the album, combining the various elements that over the years have merged to define the Manics, such as the anthemic guitar riffs, caustic lyrics and the inimitable vocals of Bradfield.

A Journal for Plague Lovers has, in parts, an uncomfortably overwrought feel to it. The lyrics are that of a confused, emotional mind struggling to get a grip on the multiplicity of mysteries in modern society.  'She bathed herself in a bath of bleach' for example, is a fairly cynical insight into the pitfalls of love and lust.

Despite the gritty and often forlorn nature of the album, it enthralls from start to finish. Undoubtedly there is enough quality on the album to whet the appetites of the now almost famished Preachers' fans (their last album 'Send away the tigers' wasn't all that great) and enough to re-ignite the interests of those who were often sitting on the fence in relation to the Welsh band. With the ominous sounding riffs and frenetic vocals, A Journal for Plague Lovers sounds more like a follow up to The Holy Bible than any other Manics release.

Kevin Boyle

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A review of the album 'Break Up The Concrete' by The Pretenders

Review Snapshot: Though it leans more towards blues and country than its predecessors, the ninth album by Chrissie Hynde et al. is still recognizably safe classic rock. But slipping it into a Greatest Hits package feels needlessly defeatist.

The Cluas Verdict? 4.5 out of 10

Full Review:
This is odd: our review copy of the new album by The Pretenders comes in a double CD with a Best Of. What’s more, the hits compilation is Disc 1 of this set and the new album is Disc 2. You’d think it’d be a brave record company exec who’d propose this to Chrissie Hynde.

Do you really need us to review The Pretenders’ hits? Surely you already know from constant airplay those smart late-‘70s rockers, radio-friendly ‘80s poppers and blustery ‘90s stadium ballads. (We’ll only point out that this compilation doesn’t include a catchy 1999 cover of The Divinyls’ ‘Human’, which is a pity.)

So, the new album, then. For the most part, ‘Break Up The Concrete’ is unremarkable blues-tinted MOR rock. Hynde, forever in skinny jeans and black t-shirt, still pulls the same rawk chick shapes but with a hint of nostalgic wistfulness on gentle country rock numbers like ‘You Didn’t Have To’, ‘One Thing Never Changed’ and ‘Love’s A Mystery’ (“Lovers of today/Aren’t like lovers of the past”). It’s strange and slightly sad to now associate Hynde, one of rock’s great icon(oclast)s, with concepts like ‘nostalgia’ and ‘gentle country rock’. But then, you can hardly expect iconoclasm from someone who subordinates her new album to a Greatest Hits disc in the same package.

There are a couple of interesting moments on this record all the same. Opener ‘Boots Of Chinese Plastic’ is a rousing bit of rockabilly, a sound that suits Hynde’s attitude and voice. (Unfortunately, it’s let down by naff verses about Buddha, Hari Krishna, Allah and Jesus.) And ‘Almost Perfect’ is an acoustic bossa nova groove where Hynde sounds jazzy and (almost) fresh – could that be for her a new route worth investigating?

Anyway, Hynde would do well to heed her album title: please destroy that dull, grey rock. And next time let your new album stand or fall on its merits rather than hide it under the oldies.

Aidan Curran

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A review of the album 'Here Come The Vikings' by Astrid Williamson

Review Snapshot: One glorious lyric aside, a record of chugging ones, epic ones, book-smart lyrics and all the regulars of indie-by-numbers. You’re a busy person with other records to hear and other things to do, so this needn’t detain you.

The Cluas Verdict? 5 out of 10

Full Review:
The fourth solo album by former Goya Dress singer Astrid Williamson is more plugged-in and amped-up than her previous records. Unfortunately, while for her this might be a grand creative leap, for the listener ‘Here Come The Vikings’ is mid-table indie-rock of the sort you’ve heard many times before.

To be fair, there are brief flashes of personality on show here. When she rocks out, like on opening ‘Store’, Williamson has a strong and soaring voice similar to ‘The Lion And The Cobra’-era Sinead O’Connor. But a lot of the uptempo tracks here are unoriginal and unimaginative chuggernauts, while slower numbers like ‘Crashing Minis’ and ‘Pinned’ strain themselves to sound like epic heartstring-tuggers.

The blandness of the music is reflected in the lyrics, which mostly have a sense of being all craft and no feeling. The poppy ‘Sing The Body Electric’ shoehorns in fairly arbitrary references to Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Walt Whitman, as if Williamson desperately wants us to know that she knows who they are. And then at the other extreme, ‘Falling Down’ features the anodyne ‘insight’ and uninspired clichés of your average Celine Dion or Bon Jovi hit: “They say a little information/Can be a dangerous thing… Love is all we need/Why do we keep on falling down?”

At least ‘Shut Your Mouth’ features an innuendo-drenched couplet that even Cole Porter would have envied: “Please forgive my pursuit of you/But I have to get to the root of you.” (Keeping in that spirit, our spellcheck wants us to change Astrid’s first name to ‘Astride’.)

But apart from that tantalising flash of invention, there’s nothing new or memorable about this record. You couldn’t imagine real Vikings coming and going so unremarkably.

Aidan Curran

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The joys of Youtube have been denied lately in China - government didn't want any huamn rights themed videos showing  up in the a year of anniversaries like June 4: 20 years since the 1989 Tiananmen bloodbath.

This may not be such a problem: China afterall has copied youtube: most slavishly in youku.com and Tudou.com is a less blatantly copied local video sharing site. But neither is a great alternative to the original, I discovered with an experiment seeking video content for Bruce Springsteen. It's harder to navigate when your Chinese is scrappy -as is mine - but such is the similarity to youtube that it's only a matter of clicking where you'd normally click on youtube pages. Like youku, you get a lot of music videos, and the odd TV and film clip. I also found a string of videos uploaded by a real Chinese Springsteen fan - unlike Dylan or the Stones the Boss isn't a big name in China. But what the Chinese copycats lack is the sheer variety of music served up on Youtube. There's none of the videos from mobile phones and cameras at one-off concerts. But that's foreign (Western) music. Type in Carsick Cars, the name of China's best indie act of the last five years into the youku/tudou search engines and you get a trove of rare footage, concert clips and fan-edited videos. So they're not the place to go for western rock and pop, but youku and tudou are good outlets for local rock music - and for improving one's Chinese language skills.

Given that October will bring the big party for the Party - 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China - I expect to see a lot more blockages of Youtube. I'll keep an eye on the local clones.

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There was one thing I was conscious of when I opened the polling booths for the CLUAS writers to vote for their top Irish albums of the last decade - the possibility that the final results could be biased towards releases from more recent years, considering more recently albums could well be to the fore of a writer's mind when casting their votes.

The first chart below however testifies that the CLUAS writers are not such a fickle bunch. It shows the breakdown - by year of release - of the CLUAS writers' top 50 Irish albums of the last 10 years and it is encouraging to see their choices are nicely spread across the full decade (although memories apparently don't stretch too well back to 1999, with only one fin de siécle album making the top 50...).

One thing that is striking in the above chart is 2003, which saw the release of more albums in the top 50 than any other year. Before rushing to the conclusion that 2003 was, therefore, a vintage year for Irish music I thought it'd be instructive to check the average ranking in the top 50 of albums released in a given year (see chart below).

First up, it shows that 2004 does not appear to have set the writers on fire in terms of memorable releases - the five 2004 releases had a low average ranking of 38 in the top 50. The other end of the scale reveals that, while 2003 may have produced the highest number of albums in the top 50, the average ranking of the 2003 albums (8 albums with an average ranking of 25.3) was lower than the releases of 2001 (3 albums with an average ranking of 16.7) and 2002 (5 albums with an average ranking of 18.2).

Conclusion? It is clear that, without any shadow of even a micro-doubt, the real vintage period for Irish music in the last decade was 2001-2002. So that's one discussion laid to rest then (until someone asks a different 35 people for their fave Irish releases of the last 10 years and get a completely different answer...)

Annex 1: The albums in the top 50 released in 2001 and 2002, i.e. the "vintage period":

Annex 2: The albums in the top 50 released in 2004, i.e. the poorest performing year in terms of rankings:

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As an appetizer for the main event, Let’s French is putting on a pre-festival show: Naïve New Beaters (right) will appear at Twisted Pepper in Dublin on Saturday 6 June.

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