Luke Haines could sing "Mary Had A Little Lamb" and make it sound threatening, so masterful is he at imbuing even a relatively light-hearted romp with a sense of foreboding and menace. Here - back at the helm of everyone's favourite malcontents The Auteurs - Haines spits out half-whispered homages to listening to the top ten "underneath the covers with the lights out", coupled with a "sugar baby love" girl group pastiche chorus that shimmies up to you and slaps you with its beehive. In anyone else's hands, "The Rubettes" would have been a joyous "Brimful Of Asha" style celebration of youth and the seven-inch single; instead The Auteurs take a quite innocent little song behind the bike sheds and show it some puppies, resulting in something far darker - and far more interesting.
"Breaking Up" does away with all pretence of pleasantness, sounding as it does like the voice you hear inside your head that tempts you to do bad things. The lyrics take an ultra cynical stance on terminating a relationship ("Said you'd leave by Christmas, said you'd leave by June, breaking up is hard to do, especially with you") whilst the music marches along with funereal grace and morbid seriousness. Let's just say it didn't want to make me go out and boogie.
"Get Wrecked At Home" mopes along a similar path, extolling the virtues of locking yourself away from everyone and, well, doing what the title says. A hymn to loneliness and solitude ("long dark night, I can never go to bed, long dark night, rearrange the furniture in my head"), the song is carried by Haines faltering yet piercingly effective voice. No-one soundtracks depression and misanthropism quite like The Auteurs, and here they manage to excel themselves.
Maverick, innovative, uncompromising, frightening - and that's just the cover.
Rating: 10/10
The Rest
Lurking in not too dissimilar shadows to The Auteurs, dEUS are quite skilled at coaxing out the dark insides of a song, and this they do with shiver-inducing style with "Sister Dew", a blues-ish, deceptively laid-back track about love and death ("and I enjoyed to see her being idle, she never had no worries, nothing vital, from the day I met her til the final afternoon"). Theremin and distortion play off strings and lush production to create a song of two sides: one the welcoming enveloping warmth of a hot bath; the other the razor blade sitting on the side.
Two tracks from a Dutch TV show follow ("Gimme The Heat" and "Little Arithmetics" - the latter still intoxicating the most), and the single is completed with the video to "Sister Dew", which does nothing to detract from the gothic mood of the song itself.
dEUS - again similarly to The Auteurs - are never going to be blessed with chart success (hell, even critical success seems to have eluded them), but you could do a whole load worse than hitch a ride with their muse. Just don't expect to come out smiling at the other end...
Rating: 9/10
More blues now, but this time to a different beat. "Ends" is very similar to Everlast's debut "What It's Like" in that it lyrically paints a picture of big city life gone wrong ("some people'd rob their mother for the ends, sometimes kids get murderd for the ends, so before we go any further I want my ends"). Everlast's voice is satisfyingly rich and seen-it-done-it experienced to carry off singing material like this, and the backing is equal parts Beck and Neil Young. By taking the street blues style and putting it to a beat, young Eric has succeeded in creating something that sounds quite new, and a million miles away from the hooligan rapping of House Of Pain.
B-sides are the LP version of "Ends" and a live version of the aforementioned "What It's Like", not making this bargain of the week. However, the a-side is of sufficient quality to warrant a high mark.
Man, all this seriousness - I'm looking forward to the new Steps single...(but then, who isn't??)
Rating: 6/10
You know it's a "serious" week when Suede effectively provide light relief. "She's In Fashion" was a highlight from "Head Music", with its eastern-tinged sounds and languid summer rhythms. Still unmistakably Suede (due to Brett's voice more than any other recognisable "sound"), it is nevertheless something of a departure for the London glamour boys; less arse-slapping than usual (more like sit on your arse drinking gin and tonics...), and is all the better for it. Suede are one of those bands that run the risk of self-parody due to every song sounding the same (and every one of them sounding like David Bowie), but "She's In Fashion" wafts in past the velvet curtains like a welcome cool breeze in a heatwave.
"Bored" is back in more familiar Suede territory, but still has a harder, Stooge-ier edge than their usual glam stomps. "Pieces Of My Mind" is an Eno-like slice of prog pie, melting its way through the stereo with synth sounds and liquid vocals.
Rating: 7/10
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