★★☆☆☆
Two Stars

Hayley Williams’ January claim that her band’s new album was influenced by Alt-J, as barefaced an attempt to cling to the relevance of a nearby Mercury Prize winner as could be imagined, cannot have been taken very seriously by many. Furthermore, Paramore’s lacklustre performances at Reading & Leeds must have convinced most that Williams should have taken the hint in 2010 and finally disbanded this ageing relic of the pop punk era when founding members Josh and Zac Farro left, claiming that the singer was treating the band as her own solo project. It seems like a distinctly classless move on her part to make an eponymous album when the band is barely recognizable as the same group of musicians who produced hit album Riot! in 2007.

Perhaps we could forgive her that if Paramore was anything but a few professional musicians going through the motions while their flame-haired lead singer tries to delude herself that her dream is still alive. First single ‘Now’ was disappointing, with Williams noticeably doing nothing more than trying to sound the same as she always has and sounding completely at odds with the oddly grungy guitarwork. This is evident throughout the album, except during three inexplicable ukulele interludes which serve no purpose other than to confuse the sound of the work. The other supposed hit, ‘Still Into You’, seems to display a glimpse of self-awareness as Williams moans “I should be over all the butterflies” (the cover art for Brand New Eyes featuring a butterfly) and also makes a vague attempt to justify her Alt-J pretensions with some electronic noises jitter around in the background. But the song doesn’t even manage to provide a catchy hook, once a reliable staple in a Paramore song. Only on ‘Proof’ does Williams come close to the joyful choruses of the band’s past, injecting energy into the chorus as she cries out “the only thing that I need/Is you”.

For those who manage to make it through this astonishingly long album, ‘Future’ provides a more stripped down sound, and something of a glimpse into Williams’ true feelings as she moans “We don’t talk about the past”. It begins to look like this might actually be an interesting point in the album, with wide-ranging guitars and slowly building riffs extending to a massive soundscape at which a belted, heartfelt chorus from Hayley Williams, who if nothing else has seemed vocally proficient, would put a high note on a severely pointless album. However, somewhat predictably, Paramore aren’t really sure what to do with the cacophonous crescendo they’ve created and so instead it fades out, fades back in again as if desperately begging for us to give it more time and then stops.

★★★★☆
Four Stars

Right now, Peckham seems to be making a concerted effort to shed its sheepskin-wearing, chandelier-dropping reputation with a cluster of emerging artists. Hot on the heels of downtempo electro-whiz kid Deptford Goth, here’s Filthy Boy, whose debut LP Smile That Won’t Go Down dropped last week.

Filthy Boy’s shtick is an endearing brand of brooding post-punk which dwells on the sleazier side of growing up in one of London’s less glamorous neighbourhoods. While the anti-romantic vibe is undoubtedly a well-mined topic in rock music, Smile’s collection of sordid little ballads are performed with a panache that sit comfortably alongside, say, Franz Ferdinand’s first two albums, or even Nick Cave’s early solo stuff. ‘Waiting on the Doorstep’ is a window into an over-accommodating lover’s exclusion from his girlfriend’s lascivious sex-parties (“Don’t mind me fellas! / Here if you need anything!”), while ‘Jimmy Jammies’ is a hilarious romp through an older man’s ham-fisted seduction technique.

In each giddily carnivalesque vignette, frontman Paraic Morrissey’s drawled vocals carousel around dissonant, Joy Division-style guitars. Morrissey has a knack for a good line befitting a man burdened with a surname such as his; yet the wit in his turn of phrase lies closer to Last Shadow Puppets-era Alex Turner than to his namesake Stephen: “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking”, he snarls on ‘Naughty Corner’, not long after crooning “No matter how hard you try / You’ll still have my pupils dilated in size” on album opener ‘In The Name Of’. Best of all, though, is the menacing tone he takes on ‘Charm of the Dangerous Minx’ as his alter-ego salivates over a childlike lover “with spaghetti-hoop stains on her T-shirt” who’ll “thumb-suck her way around you”.

But all those name-checked influences are indicative of the fact that Filthy Boy struggle to be more than the sum of their parts; the lack of innovation in Smile’s rattling guitar-jabbing leaves the band’s sound feeling derivative, and rightly so. If you can get past that, however, the lyrical quality of the band’s songwriting richly rewards repeated listening.

Politics aside, if we can blame Margaret Thatcher for anything it’s anarcho-punk. That said, they unfortunately deserve inclusion in this playlist as Thatcher and anarcho-punk go hand in hand like an uncomfortably polemical version of the Chuckle Brothers. Other than a speech from the Iron Lady herself, the rest has very little to do with Thatcher. Just tunes from the 80s. Enjoy.

Why do we excuse our writers their attitudes? This may seem like a strange question to ask, in an age in which the literary establishment is overwhelmingly liberal and cosmopolitan in its politics. However, it hasn’t always been that way, and it is these past attitudes that constitute our problem. Many of the great writers we revere held views that are repugnant to (most of) us now, yet we excuse them.

William Shakespeare’s writing may have produced magnificent speeches that any actor would happily debase themselves to declaim, but any person from outside of England who listens to half of Henry V recognises him for what he is – a jingoistic little-Englander with a thirst for foreign blood. If he was alive today he’d vote UKIP. When we read Dickens, we generally excuse his chauvinism, his racism and the anti-Semitism inherent in the character of Fagin. When we read Waugh we forget his enthusiastic support for the Third Reich.

Why is this? There is an argument for assessing people’s attitudes in terms of the context in which they lived. The social attitudes of the times in which Shakespeare lived are obviously very different from those we hold now. We cannot and should not hold Shakespeare et al to a standard that was nigh on impossible to attain in his surroundings and sometimes pretty damn difficult to attain in our own.

And, while we’re at it, should we not just offer these writers a free pass based on their genius? These are people with incredible skill, with brilliance that the rest of us can only dream of wielding. They are clearly not subject to the same standards as the rest of us – if Dickens was a racist, then so be it, but he was also the writer Dickens and deserves to be excused on the basis of the work he did as a writer.

However, novels, like all art, are valuable only in subjective terms – I like what I like, you like what you like, that’s simply the way it goes. That means that nobody gets a free pass. You may think that Conrad’s depiction of nautical life is an achievement to be trumpeted from the rooftops, whereas I may feel Conrad no more interesting than your common or garden scribbler. In this case you may find it easier to excuse Conrad his racist, imperialist portrayal of Africans than I would. I, in fact, may not excuse him this at all.

If we fall back on the argument from context, we still couldn’t give our authors carte blanche. Although it may be difficult for someone to espouse liberal views in a conservative age, it is not impossible. Take John Stuart Mill – a man who lived and died in the 19^th century, a philosopher and a civil servant, and, most notably, a proto-feminist. If he could espouse views that many in our own time are shamefully in opposition to, who is to say that his contemporaries couldn’t? Not everyone in Dickens’ time was an anti-Semite. Not everyone in Waugh’s time supported the Third Reich. If it was possible for others to dissent from these particular views, then why not hold these educated people, these ‘men of letters’, to the highest standard, rather than the lowest?

In any case, we may feel that it is inappropriate to criticise these writers in their capacity as writers rather than their capacity as humans. We may feel that we can separate their art from their personal views. As Andrew Motion put it when discussing Philip Larkin, the conflation of life and art “rest[s]on the assumption that art is merely a compulsive expression of personality.” This is clearly an unwarranted assumption. If we can separate the life of an artist and the art they create, then we may be able to love the creation whilst criticising the creator. This means that we no longer have to excuse our writers. We no longer have to say “they were a racist BUT their work was great”. If so, this raises an issue that has troubled me for some time – the reaction that most people have to that most hated of artists, Richard Wagner.

Why we revile Wagner’s work with a passion that we set aside when discussing other notable racists is beyond me. We certainly don’t have any justification for holding the man himself to a higher standard than any other artist and we can no more universally renounce his genius than we can for Verdi or Mozart or hundreds of more fashionable composers – its subjective. We also do not seem to want to excuse him on the basis of context. The honest answer is that his work was enjoyed by, even loved by, a group of truly evil people. That Hitler and his fellow National Socialists loved the work of Wagner is undeniable. That this alone justifies the hatred of Wagner’s operas is not. Plenty of evil people loved things that we do not hold under such contempt. Joseph Stalin was allegedly a huge fan of musical theatre and the lengths to which Kim Jong-il went in order to craft a tribute to his favourite film, Godzilla, are well documented. None of these things are hated with such vehemence as the work of Wagner.

Then again, there is pretty much no connection between musicals and the murder of millions of people. The work of Wagner seems to have a pretty strong connection to the anti-semitism and Germanic cultural imperialism inherent in the Nazi movement. However, I would say that this case has been overstated somewhat. The works of Marx have a pretty strong connection to Stalin’s murder of millions of people and yet we are sniffier about condemning them than the operas of Wagner – it is clear we don’t really follow this principle with regards to other works.

In addition to this, there is a great deal that can be said for these operas. Of course, is a good deal of evidence to show that they support an anti-Semitic, German imperialist view of the world. However, this is to miss two powerful objections. The first is that Wagner was in no way a German imperialist. He was a socialist for quite some time and, throughout his life was dedicated to sweeping away the old certainties that were perpetuated by the German establishment at this time. Only a fool or a zealot could watch Das Ring Der Nibelungen and think it a call to arms for German dominance. The destruction of all of existence occurs because of the corruption of Gods and men. Every character who lusts for power in Das Ring… is destroyed. This is hardly a ringing endorsement for imperialism.

The second objection is that the character that is most usually portrayed as a Jewish stereotype, Alberich, is far from the only stereotype in the literary world, yet he is held up as if he is the be-all-and-end-all. Ask people to name a stereotypical Jewish character in fiction and you’ll get a thousand Shylocks and Fagins before someone says Alberich. The impact that these characters have had on popular conceptions of Jewishness has far outstripped the harm done by The Ring Cycle, yet we don’t seem to hate Dickens or Shakespeare with the same fervour we reserve for Wagner. It is clear that we are holding Oliver Twist to a different standard, and demonising the work of Wagner without any real justification.

I am perfectly happy to separate the artist from the work. I think Wagner was a disgusting, arrogant and misguided fool. I cannot read his personal writings without feeling this way. It’s like spending time with a racist relative you’ve never particularly liked. His music, on the other hand, is beautiful. The same goes for Dickens’ writing and Waugh’s novels. However, we should hold all of these to the same standard. Not to do so is to risk sacrificing art on the altar of prejudice and losing some truly fantastic works to those to whom they do not belong. 

An average of 6.24 million viewers. That’s how many were watching the new series of BBC 1’s The Voice UK on its first Saturday night back on our screens. And with its return, it looks like the battle against the mighty ITV is set to recommence. Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway averaged 6.7 million viewers, so for now it’s ITV: one, BBC: nil. This could get significantly worse with Britain’s Got Talent’s return on April 13^th. Last year’s BGT final saw a peak of 13.8 million viewers watch Pudsey the dog win £500,000 and the opportunity to perform for the Queen. This glittering Goliath of entertainment is definitely not to be underestimated. So with The X Factor all but buried and the talent show format stamped on by variety-filled, family fun BGT, is it all over for The Voice before it has even begun?

After last Saturday night, it’s not looking good. The fantastic four (Sir Tom Jones, Jessie J, will.i.am and Danny O’Donoghue) opened the show with a group performance displaying rather varying vocal abilities including songs by Little Richard, Lulu and Chuck Berry. ‘A strange song choice; who were they targeting with that?’ I hear you cry! It seems the producers have switched tack somewhat, forgetting the younger audience in favour of piquing their parents’ interests – but how many people’s parents would know will.i.am if he walked past them in the street? How many parents know that Danny O’Donoghue is in a band called The Script? No wonder everyone got to the end of Saturday Night Takeaway before any suggestion of reaching for the remote.

Already The Voice is showing symptoms of the most common cause of expiry on any entertainment programme’s death certificate: predictability. It’s all so very predictable, first the sob stories (somehow every decent singer in the UK has one), then the really uncomfortable-looking red chairs and will.i.am speaking fluently using ridiculous noises. It’s semi-entertaining to begin with, but after a while you feel as though you’d give anything to see a man juggle with fire using his feet or a large woman get stuck in a hula hoop.

The problem is that there’s no chance of anything going wrong. It’s so cleanly executed, so controlled, that it feels more like a publicity broadcast for the four judges than a quest for mind-blowing talent. The hunt is supposed to be for ‘The Voice’ so why are we subjected to a judges’ performance, video clips of the judges every five minutes and rambling speeches about how successful they all are? Even poor Holly and Reggie are nowhere to be seen! Despite the title of the show, it seems the button-pushers are taking centre stage.

The most frustrating thing about The Voice is that the talent is good. The likes of Ash Morgan and Leanne Jarvis lead the way for a tough competition, the judges are experienced individuals, and there is potential to provide a fresh take on a format which is not only tired but exhausted. Executive producer Moira Ross left Strictly Come Dancing to become Head of Entertainment at The Voice’s production company Wall to Wall. If anyone knows how to make the sofa the Saturday night destination of choice it’s her, but so far she hasn’t quite managed it. Unfortunately for The Voice, the day of reckoning is coming and my bets are firmly placed on Simon Cowell.

Catch The Voice on BBC 1 Saturday 7pm.