Duly London

My first Gay Pride in years, so naturally I completely overdo it and surface after three days with bleeding gums, cold sores, no voice, a huge dent in the coffers and an advanced awareness of myself as a member of a globally oppressed minority. Not. The only sensible way to recover is to go to London, which I duly do. There are several things in the world which make me absolutely have to smoke cigarettes; these include Camden Town, my friend Katie, cider and hot sunshine. Because I hate myself but I really want to quit smoking I choose a combination of all four to go cold turkey under. It works, I’ve been squeaky clean since September the 1^st. Feels good. And guess what? Tea actually tastes of something! In Camden we attend the launch of Everything Everything’s brilliant LP Man Alive which consists of a fantastic set at The Barfly followed by the boys DJing a load of filthy hip-hop 'n' r‘n’b which I duly nick half of for my next stint at Off The Hook. The next day is more Gay Pride, this time in Hackney, but a proper community affair, diverse beautiful queers marching in sunshine through their own streets, and me with them, as opposed to forlornly watching a Barclays Bank float in the rain from my window which is what I did in Manchester. Later I almost lose my new Fall vest in Vogue Fabrics. This part of the weekend is also the culmination of what I suppose is an internet romance. It involves eating hummus in a flat overlooking Hoxton Station, amazing tattoos, poetry, loads of brilliant music (but especially '100,000 Fireflies'), long lie-ins ... I guess if I cared about such things I’m sure I would say it was pretty special, or something.

Anyway, Kalimera Gleeko …

Hackney Pride

Everything Everything: Man Alive

If the past is a foreign country then Everything Everything are music’s arch-xenophobes. Man Alive arrives at last as the accomplished and relentlessly forward-looking debut we always knew it could be. This is genuine musical postmodernism: comprehensively informed, restless, full of mad juxtaposition. Where Radiohead’s postmodernism once came manifest as paranoia, alienation and technophobia, the Everything vision is a relentless thirst for stimulation, data, the ideas between other ideas.

The tracks you already know have new life breathed into them in the context of a full album. ‘Schoolin’’ is the brilliant earworm of white-boy r‘n’b meets X-Files theme. Old favourite ‘Suffragette Suffragette’ flaunts its dirty AC/DC riff like the bad tattoo you got in sixth form that suddenly feels cool again. ‘MY KZ, UR BF’, the greatest of four singles to date, takes its rightful place as album opener while ‘Photoshop Handsome’ spins addictive juddering Commodore 64 prog.

Jonathan’s Bowie-esque cut ‘n’ paste lyricism complements defiantly broad song structures, with their unexpected turns and eclectic layers of sound. It can sometimes seem like everyone in the band has at least two jobs, but blissful workouts like ‘Leave The Engine Room’ or the frenetic ‘Come Alive Diana’ can effortlessly give way to the tonal singularity of ‘Tin (The Manhole)’, which breathes four and half minutes of touching ambience through the album’s mad tapestry, or the sweet chamber harmonics of ‘Two For Nero’.

‘QWERTY Finger’ reminds you that, if they absolutely need to, they can, ‘rock’ in something like a traditional sense while ‘NASA Is On Your Side’ would make Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel proud, never mind any of their younger peers. ‘Weights’ is probably the greatest closing album track since ‘I Won’t Share You’ saw The Smiths go out in a veil of tears. Thank God this is just the beginning of it all.

Everything Everything have more than made good on a self-imposed remit to avoid cliché at all cost. The past is a foreign country after all, and modern life really is rubbish. Despite all that, Thom Yorke once proffered that you should ‘be constructive with your blues’. I would guess Man Alive is that record.