From the musical world. - Page 2

Love and some side-effects

Alanis Morissette has plenty of angst-filled songs in her next

Sean Michaels

We ought to have known: fresh from a break-up, she has once again found all the material she needs for a new album. "It was the perfect time for me to write,"Alanis Morissette explained to the Canadian press. She added, "The new record chronologises the rock bottom and then the phoenix rising and everything after it."

Thirteen years after Jagged Little Pill introduced Morissette - and her angst to the world, Flavours of Entanglement will be released this spring on Maverick Records.

This time she draws her inspiration from the collapse of a four year relationship with Ryan Reynolds, to whom Morissette was engaged in 2004. The actor has more recently been seen together with Scarlett Johansson. Hues ahead Morissette co-wrote much of the new album with Guy Sigsworth, the English producer/songwriter who has worked alongside Bjrk, the Sugababes and Madonna.

"I just wanted to surprise myself a little bit and stretch," Morissette said. The new music album is described as having electronic hues and Eastern percussion.

Last year the singer caused a short-term internet sensation with a YouTube video cover of the Black Eyed Peas' My humps that featured Morissette writhing and bumping in fauxchav regalia.

Though she has no plans to resurrect that style, she is considering self-releasing videos for songs that don't make to the final album cut. Big plans Add to this plans for a book and a role in Radio Free Albemuth, a sci-fi film due this summer, and 2008 is looking to be a banner year forAlanis Morissette.

"My orientation was always to look outside myself," she said. "And over the last year, especially, it's just so much been about an inward-looking journey and really applying the wisdoms that I'm learning, not just singing about them."

That\'s quite boring guys..
Arctic Monkeys accused of being dull, dull, dull
Rosie Swash

It could well be indie's own David vs Goliath dust-up, after up-and-comers The Enemy saw fit to dismiss the million-selling Arctic Monkeys as just dull on national radio.
The Monkeys have been showered with award nominations this week, something that cannot be said of the Enemy.

But the Sheffield band's LP favourite Worst nightmare has riled their counterparts from Coventry. In an interview with BBC 6 Music, the Enemy's frontman Tom Clarke discussed the Monkeys' seven NME award nods.

"They'll probably win it, because they win every thing, but whether they deserve to win is another thing," he said "That first video was out, You look good on the dance floor. I looked at that and I thought: 'There's a bunch of working class lads from a proper town playing a tune like they mean it,'" Clarke continued. Yawn, yawn "It was quality and I went out and bought the first album and I thought it was top, some really good songs on there. And then I was bitterly disappointed when I found the second just as dull."

Clarke went on to elaborate on exactly what was so yawn-inducing about the Monkeys: "Certain aspects of their music on the second album and certain aspects of their personae in the press are just dull."

Only time will tell whether the boring Arctic Monkeys will respond in kind.