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This Week's Album Releases

SADE | <i>Lovers Rock</i> MARILYN MANSON |<i> Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)</i> V-TWIN | <i>Free the Twin</i> RICKY MARTIN | <i>Sound Loaded</i> SATOSHI TOMIIE | <i>Full Lick</i>

Andy Gill
Friday 10 November 2000 01:00 GMT
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SADE | Lovers Rock (Skint) Sade Adu's last album of new material, 1992's Love Deluxe, found the singer making a brave, if rather ill-judged, attempt to bring more of a social conscience into her work, with songs such as "Pearl" and "Feel No Pain" clumsily signalling her fellow-feeling for the unemployed and underprivileged. Struggling to fit comfortably alongside her usual highly polished love songs, they seemed rather token and contrived - not that her fortunes suffered as a result: the album went on to spend 90 weeks on the American chart, selling untold zillions of copies in the process.

SADE | Lovers Rock (Skint) Sade Adu's last album of new material, 1992's Love Deluxe, found the singer making a brave, if rather ill-judged, attempt to bring more of a social conscience into her work, with songs such as "Pearl" and "Feel No Pain" clumsily signalling her fellow-feeling for the unemployed and underprivileged. Struggling to fit comfortably alongside her usual highly polished love songs, they seemed rather token and contrived - not that her fortunes suffered as a result: the album went on to spend 90 weeks on the American chart, selling untold zillions of copies in the process.

Eight years on, Lovers Rock marks something of a return to her forte, its 11 songs mostly evoking the warm, jacuzzi-ed afterglow of love or the pastel-blue melancholy of romantic fallout. Such social concerns as intrude into its candlelit ambience - in "Immigrant" and "Slave Song" - are more subtly woven into the fabric of the album, particularly the latter's light, spacious dub shimmer and precisely modulated harmonies.

More intimate than ever, it's an album marked by masterly restraint, testimony to Sade's sustained existence as a band, rather than just a singer with a backing group - it's no exaggeration to say that the heart and soul of these songs is to be found as much in the arrangements as in Sade Adu's voice and lyrics. Their prime objective being to set an unbroken mood of erotic languor, the band (keyboardist Andrew Hale, guitarist Stuart Matthewman and bassist Paul Denman) steer well clear of anything too abrupt or severe, rigorously eschewing unnecessary distractions. Instead, the pared-back, smooth-but- spartan grooves just seem to hang there as if transfixed by Adu's vocal, disturbed by only the most discreet of instrumental flourishes, everything pitched at a JJ Cale level of effortless subtlety.

Sade herself, meanwhile, has never sung better, with impressive performances that confirm her as the combined Julie London and Astrud Gilberto of her era. As with the band, she displays impeccable restraint throughout, from the folksy "The Sweetest Gift" to the slinky "By Your Side", in which her languid vocal lends a strange (but not inappropriate) mood of Stepford-Wives acquiescence to her declaration of devotion. And though tracks such as "King of Sorrow" and "Somebody Already Broke My Heart" establish the prevailing ambience of bitter-sweet melancholy early on, there's a pleasing resolution in the closing "It's Only Love That Gets You Through", a hymn to endurance and faith in the future whose gentle strength reflects the virtues of the album as a whole.

MARILYN MANSON | Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) (Interscope) The grandiose Holy Wood finds Marilyn Manson straining every sinew to live up to his hard-won reputation as the pantomime dame of the American moral panic. It's intended as his considered opinion on the state of a nation that rushed to judge him as scapegoat for the Columbine massacre, and it is consequently pretty ugly stuff. Much of the album follows the familiar MM path of atheistic libertinism, with lines such as: "Dear God, if you were alive/ You know we'd kill you" reprising the irreligious slant of Antichrist Superstar; but subsequent events have sharpened his satirical focus, with songs such as "President Dead" and "Disposable Teens" mocking a society hooked on violence and nihilism, "Love Song" stressing the links between guns, god and government, and high-school killers dismissed as "nobodies who want to be somebodies". But there's a blissful disregard of the beam in Manson's own eye as he sings, "Nothing's gonna change the world", and, "We sing the death song, kids/ Because we've got no future", weary rehearsals of old punk clichés some way past their sell-by dates. Perhaps it's the luxury of transatlantic distance, but none of it is remotely frightening - the ponderous glam-goth backings are just footnotes to Bauhaus and Black Sabbath, and as for his supposedly scary opinions, if America is as desensitised as he claims, the only real outrage Marilyn could rouse would be to come out as a Young Republican. You don't suppose... ?

V-TWIN | Free the Twin (Domino) Based around the core duo of singer Jason McPhail and drummer Michael McGaughin, Glasgow's V-Twin features a constantly changing line-up of musicians drawn from such auspicious indie outfits as The Pastels, Royal Trux, Big Star and Belle & Sebastian. The band's music, too, changes accordingly from one release to the next, as neatly demonstrated by this catch-up compilation of their four singles so far, which lurches engagingly from Caledonian country-rock to Pet Sounds-scape instrumental to post-rock dub to fizzing space-rock, adopting each style with enthusiasm only to discard it a few minutes later. It's confusing stuff: the chugging rocker "Delinquency" opens proceedings with the psychedelic-punk sneer of Primal Scream (an affinity further emphasised on "Thank You Baby", which sounds like the Velvet Underground's third album viewed through bloodshot Gillespie eyes), only to be suddenly derailed by the stumbling piano and mournful cello of the sadcore lament "Derailed", itself replaced by the 10-minute film-music groove "In the Land of the Pharaohs". Though almost pathologically derivative at times - particularly the Wilsonian blend of vibes, organ, sleighbells and timpani in "Lunan" - there's a down-to-earth authenticity to the lyrics, particularly on the Burrito-esque lament "Sound As Ever", where unpaid bills and threats of utility cut-offs find McPhail admitting, "I'm popping green and whites just to feel all right these days." Recommended.

RICKY MARTIN | Sound Loaded (Columbia) Though younger, prettier, more lithe and sporting a better haircut, Ricky Martin strikes me as something of a Latino Manilow, a fey chap commanding the affections of millions of devoted women. His fan-base - admittedly, extrapolated from a statistically invalid straw poll of acquaintances - appears as exclusively female as Westlife's, the hip-swivelling hoofer offering the promise of romantic flirtation without the need for any messy fulfilment, where the only consummation comes on the dancefloor. For Ricky, the women in songs such as "Loaded", "She Bangs" and "St Tropez" (a place "...full of danger - not a good place for good girls"!) are wild, untameable beasts, to be approached with caution and eliciting approval largely with regard to how much they make him "feel like dancin' ". Which is fine, and fun, as far as it goes, though there's a limit to how many "Vida Loca" retreads a single album can sustain. When he wanders off his corporate salsa-pop path, things are less reliable: rarely has innocuity been elevated to such grandiose heights as in the formulaic shuffling of clichés that comprises wilted-flower ballads such as "The Touch" and "Come to Me", while the North African and flamenco flavours that spice up "One Night Man" seem strained at best. And where does he get off with a put-down like: "Jezebel/ Kiss and tell/ You ride the headlines/ Like a carousel of fame and glory"? I mean, it's not as if the gossip-columns are exactly bulging with Jezebels spilling the beans on Ricky, is it?

SATOSHI TOMIIE | Full Lick (INCredible) Japan's most successful club DJ export, Satoshi Tomiie has been a fixture of the international house-music scene since the late Eighties, when he scored with the Frankie Knuckles collaboration "Tears". Since then, he's been part of the Def Mix crew alongside Knuckles and stomp-meister David Morales, working on high-profile crossover remixes of pop acts such as Bowie, U2, Simply Red and Mariah Carey. In view of which, it's a surprise to learn that Full Lick is actually Tomiie's solo debut. The reasons why become blindingly apparent the further into the album one delves. Things open impressively with the abstract techno of "Big Bang", its beautifully rendered thunderclaps and portentous timpani chasing fizzing synth-lines from speaker to speaker; but it proves deceptive, as successive pieces struggle to impose a more "soulful" narrative on Tomiie's industrial-techno synthscapes, with ghastly soul-diva caterwauling of the kind that habitually dog UK club music - indeed, several such contributions, it transpires, are the work of Diane Charlemagne, previously known for her work with Goldie. The best tracks are those featuring the former Sneaker Pimps vocalist Kelli Ali, caught musing about "robot police" and their taste for "pornographic girls and dope beats" in the catchy "Love in Traffic". Elsewhere, matters deteriorate badly as it becomes clear that neither Tomiie nor his pointlessly showboating singers has much idea why the vocals should be there at all.

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