Scans:
Texts:
Singles
New Musical Express: Yes
New Musical Express: Falling
New Musical Express: Bring It Back
Albums
New Musical Express: Bring It Back
Singles:
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS - Yes (Hut)
Single of the week
Forget, if you can, that the shy, skinny guitarist used to be in one the most preposterously brilliant bands of the '90s. Forget too - if you need to - that the tall, glamorous singer has made a series of fussy but dull records.
Think, instead, of this. Big, booming Motown drums. Wall Of Sound strings, whinnying and swelling. A voice like all the coolest hamonising girl groups channelled through one - male! - mouth. And, of course, justifiably flashy guitar heroics.
'Yes' is McAlmont and Butler's debut single. Every once in a whole, a record comes along that is knicker-wettingly exciting and fresh-sounding in spite of its essential traditionalism, summoning all the power, spirit and sheer top-of-the-world joy that pop can offer and compressing it into one four-minute strike. When, after that miraculously ascending voice has pushed the osong on to an even more exalted plane, David McAlmont screams "YehyehyehyehYEH!" with full-on orgasmic zeal, it becomes obvious that 'Yes' is such a record. Fantastic.
Four neat b-sides - woozy, bluesy, sly Prince-funk and show-stopping finale respectively - spread over two CDs (both worth buying, sadly) complete the impression that Bernard Butler should get out of his Marr-ish and unsatisfying guitar-slinger for hire phase and make the partnership permanent. Obviously, working with a genuinely gay man is much more satisfying.
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS - Falling (Chrysalis)
David MCAlmont was the extraordinary singer with Thieves. Bernard Butler was the no less talented guitarist/songwriter in Suede. Having fallen out with their respective bandmates, they came together in 1995 to produce two sublime singles, 'Yes' and 'You Do' before inevitably getting the hump with each other and flouncing off in opposite directions. The intervening years haven't seen either of them exactly set the world on fire, so they've got back together to give it another go. 'Falling' is cut from the same rich cloth as their original singles (strings, bells - and if you listen carefully, you can hear the kitchen sink) but sounds contrived and compromised - like they just got back together for the sake of the quids.
(AN)
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS - Bring It Back (Chrysalis)
The second single from the most underrated album of the year, and a timely ray of sunshine as the dark night draw in. 'Bring It Back' may not add anything new to the M&B songbook - it is, essentially, Suede meets Curtis Mayfield, a soaring, grandiloquent '70s soul tune; handclaps, humungous chorus and that voice all in place - but it is, nonetheless, a joy to behold. Like most of Mc&B's output, it is a song that carries with it such an urgent, surging sense of glamour, freedom and budding love that only the greyest of indie bores will prove immune. Now, if only we can get Morrissey and Johnny Marr back together again...
(TN)
Albums:
NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS - Bring It Back (Chrysalis)
taken from NME.com
rating: 6 out of 10
It's worth remembering just how much David McAlmont and Bernard Butler really hated each other seven years ago. Having had a massive collaborative hit with the awesome 'Yes' and a more modest one with the more modest 'You Do', the former Thieves singer and the former Suede guitarist parted company with the air around them blue with criss-crossing abuse.
However, with the bad memories fading - and the fact that both Dave and Bernie's solo careers have long since hit the iceberg in the frozen North Atlantic of the post-britpop years - they're back.
The usual amiable PR bullshit pack does its best to paper over the cracks, as Butler suddenly picks up the phone to call McAlmont after six years of awkward silence to invite him back into the studio. But whether his motivation in doing so was really because "he'd been writing songs David McAlmont had to sing" is a moot point. And in fairness, for the best bits of 'Bring It Back', it's not even important.
For just as 'Yes' provided the hitherto unfeasible link between white bread indie and Shirley Bassey torch singing - and brazenly flicked the rods at Butler's former Suede collaborator Brett Anderson in the process - the best bits of McAlmont And Butler part two are, in their unlikely way, very fine indeed.
As the self-mythologising opening track 'Theme From' demonstrates, with the passing of time, McAlmont sounds several times more like seventies falsetto soul genius Curtis Mayfield than Mayfield ever did himself.
The best, however, is yet to come. 'Falling' - the thinly veiled 'Yes' mark II - has much of the fist waving bravado of its predecessor and if anything, surefire next single 'Different Strokes' is even better than that - an intricately woven little southern soul pastiche with a chorus the size of East Anglia.
It's possibly telling that they could only stand each other's company for ten tracks worth of action for 'Bring It Back', and reasonably reassuring that the last five of them are fairly forgettable anyway. An unhappy reminder for both McAlmont and Butler that whatever they do best, they do best together, but there's no denying that, in the correct combination, as someone famous once sung: "It's like electricity."
Now who could that have been?