Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review.

WU LYF
Go Tell Fire To The Mountain
PIAS
Roberts has a voice that could be described as a Homo Antecessor howling at the moon, a possum clinging to life after being run over by a car, or Tom Hanks in Castaway as Wilson bobs out of his grasp. These unintelligible, scratchy groans are apparently grunted along to at live shows. (A cheat’s guide to singing along: recurring words are ‘crown’, ‘baby’, ‘father’, ‘gold’, ‘money’, ‘blood’, ‘animals’ and ‘home’)...

Beirut
The Rip Tide
Pompeii
An intriguing blend of serious and sweet, this short album sounds like a dirge for the funeral of a smurf...

The Nudge
Big Nudge Pie
Again the band mixes up the genres, beginning with a poppy sound that evolves into a Hendrix-style jam. Prebble is super snarly on It All Becomes Clear, where lines like “my fantasy is your catastrophe” sound as though they’re being spat and hissed by a pissed-off (but rather adorable) cat in a cage.

The weekend papers love to incite mass female anxiety by reporting on New Zealand’s man drought. This morning The Sunday Star Times ran yet another scare-mongering article on the issue: ‘She’s a hard road to find the perfect man’, by Nicola Russell. “Man Drought” is a pithy term for a huge social problem that has extremely negative implications for women and for society, but journalists have so far focused on sensationalism and failed to actually examine the issue. “Statistics New Zealand 2011 population estimates reveal there are more than 50,000 "excess" 25 to 49-year-old females living in New Zealand”, writes Ms. Russell. Excess? Statistics New Zealand might also like to check to see whether or not any excess female suicides resulted from this tactless reporting.

In a society where having families is so valued that people are paid to procreate, the plight of the twenty five percent of women of childbearing age* who are single has been paradoxically ignored. On a personal level these women are missing out on both romantic love and on creating families of their own. These factors must surely contribute to New Zealand’s high rates of depression among women*, who have been socialized to desire and expect a partner and children from an early age. Burdened by the financial costs of living alone and with limited family networks many of these women also face lonely, impoverished working lives and retirements.

On a social level the lack of men is also incredibly damaging. It’s a well-known fact that it’s the educated women, searching for equals, who are missing out on finding mates. As a society, we’ve lost out on all the children who could have been born to these intelligent, well-educated women – meaning we’ve lost out on the kids who would have been among our future movers and shakers, solving the leadership problems we’ve been hearing so much about lately. (The Ministry of Education's Competent Children, Competent Learners report reveals that "students whose mothers have high education levels are more likely to start school with high competency levels, and to maintain this high level of performance".) Anyone who’s seen the movie Idiocracy will see the writing on the wall for our economy and culture if we continue down this road. (Watch the opening sequence here to see why.)

Theoretically there is one plus side to the man drought. With our demographic dominance and highly-educated minds women should shortly be ruling New Zealand’s business world (though in the country that made Alasdair Thompson the head of the Employers and Manufacturers Association, it’s certainly not a sure thing). It’s clutching at straws, and no consolation for the huge numbers of women who are searching for nothing more than an equal but are being told that they’re “setting their sights too high” (that’s another eloquent quote from Ms. Russell).

Instead of writing unhelpful articles likely to drive Kiwi women to drink, how about offering some solutions? The man drought has been blamed on many things. Low male education, high male emigration, high female immigration, lower male birth rate and higher male mortality count amongst them. Here are some simple ideas that could surely have us raining men:

• If the problem is exacerbated by female immigrants, why not curb the numbers?
• Even better, why not proactively seek male immigrants?
• Let’s encourage our young men to enter tertiary education
• Let’s encourage our expats to return to New Zealand. Why not remove interest from student loans for those living abroad so that they don’t face massive debts upon coming home?

* “More than a quarter of women aged 30-44 are living without partners”, according to the Sunday Star Times article. This is the age where New Zealand women are likely to be physically and financially ready for children.
* One in five women, compared with one in eight men, will have depression over their lifetime.

Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review.

Thievery Corporation
Culture of Fear
Border Music
All this wrapped up in a digipak so sexy you might want to take it to bed...

Hollie Smith and Mara TK
Band of Brothers, Vol 1
EMI
Tattooed style chameleon Hollie Smith is as well-known for sporting urban street-wear as she is for rocking high fashion looks that make her look as though she’s a sexy alien from Planet Sphinx. Whatever she’s wearing, one thing’s guaranteed – you know the girl who’s been to Blue Note and back is going to look cooler than anyone else in the room...

The Subways
Money and Celebrity
Shock Records
With liberal use of cowbell, harmonies, hand-claps, classic rock riffs and pop punk melodies, this band may not win any points for originality but there’s something very endearing about them..

Incubus
If Not Now, When?
Sony
The next songs traverse pop, punk and hardcore before the very odd In The Company of Wolves, which begins as a ballad, but halfway through turns into… an embarrassing cover of Porishead’s Sour Times? After this, the simple and up-tempo Switchblade is a welcome respite, before Tomorrow’s Food brings things down a notch with its ill-advised foray into philosophy (“we are all tomorrow’s food… today”)...

Trembling Bells
The Constant Pageant
Border Music
The cover art, which features a castle, a greyhound’s head, a bull-dragon and a rooster-swan does little to hint at the lunacy within. Sounding as though they’ve been influenced in equal parts by The Pogues, very early Marianne Faithful, The Last Night Of The Proms, Jefferson Airplane and Morris Dancing...

Imaginary Cities
Temporary Resident
Shock
Temporary Resident is an astounding and diverse debut of considerable depth. Keep your eyes and ears on Imaginary Cities...

Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review.

The Vietnam War
The Vietnam War
Round Trip Mars / Universal
Auckland-based five piece The Vietnam War is an incongruous little band. From their name (are they referencing war or peace? Internal conflict? Drug culture? 60s music? Or did they just think it sounded cool?) to the blinking, flower-festooned owl on the cover of their self-titled debut album...

Nicky Minaj
Pink Friday
Universal
Even on Right Thru Me (which appears to be some kind of love song) the phrase “how do you do that shit” is repeated unromantically throughout. Other lyrics make you suspect that Minaj has made several poor relationship choices. Elsewhere she rhymes “terminator” with “terminate her”, at once displaying poor rhyming skills and a very bad attitude...

Tom Vek
Leisure Seizure
Universal
Sounding like the punk, British younger cousin of Luscious Jackson and the more sophisticated older brother of Pikachunes, Vek waited six years to unleash Leisure Seizure after the release of debut album We Have Sound...

Battles
Gloss Drop
Border Music
the album occasionally tries too hard, but is mostly as fascinating and shiny as the complimentary poster of pink paint entrails.

Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link to read the full review.

Skying
The Horrors
(XL)
Faris sounds like a sexy boyfriend who’s going to break your heart. “When you wake up you will find me”, he croons, as though he’s still lying in your dirty and disheveled sheets. Somehow you don’t believe him...

City and Colour
Little Hell
(Border Music)
On final track Hope For Now you are treated to Green singing over a gentle piano riff, sounding like Stevie Wonder on downers until the screaming guitar and heavy metal cello take the song off on a journey down Led Zeppelin lane...

In Dread Response
Embers in the Spiritless Void
(Deadboy)
A quick glance at the song titles reveals the obsessions of this band – Apophis is the name of an asteroid that was predicted to strike the Earth in 2029, Kerith Ravine references the canyon that God told Elijah to rest in to find peace, and La Fin Absolute Du Monde translates to ‘the absolute end of the world’. In fact this track is one of the absolute highlights of the album – an evocative instrumental, it’s reminiscent of Eric Clapton’s score for the Edge of Darkness miniseries...

Reviews for The 13th Floor. Click the link for the full review.

Unkle
Only The Lonely (EP)
(Surrender All)
Each track has an entirely different flavour at its centre, but the different voices and ideas are unified by their coating of silky synths, creamy programmed drums and secret ingredient of bitter dark chocolate intensity. The Nick Cave flavour is certainly the most moreish on opening track Money and Run...

All Time Low
Dirty Work
(Interscope)
The album also features vocal harmonies that sound like tortured Tasmanian Devils scraping their claws down blackboards while playing out of tune violins with their teeth...

Chad VanGaalen
Diaper Island
(Sub Pop)
Indie king VanGaalen has already released three acclaimed albums, illustrated and animated music videos for artists including J Mascis and Holy Fuck, and recorded albums for art rock band Women. With the release of fourth album Diaper Island, he cements his status as one of the coolest kids in Calgary...

The last of the home-made Jonnie Rose music videos.

The film is also groundbreaking in managing to make Madmen’s Jon Hamm seriously and deliriously unattractive, particularly when he tries to exert his powers of seduction over Annie by kneading her breast like a demented fifteen year old....

Read the full review at 13th floor here.