Bit disappointed when I got the vinyl that the band has gone for that whole ugly guys at the back/pretty girls at the front look. In fact the whole sighing teen girl pyjama party sleepover vibe I find mildly objectionable. Not sure why; just seems a bit silly. It's such a poseur (or poseuse) version of sex. And I'm assuming none of those involved are still teenagers, skinny as they are.
Musically though, I like it. I think. Indie pop it is, a little ponderous in pace. Plenty of space in the music - to give it a pleasingly amateur edge, perhaps. Several touchstones are set off - Blondie, Madonna: teen poster fodder for both boys and girls. More of this indie romance. My year seems to be closing with these warmer tones when it entered in a blizzard of faded emotion and witch house.
"I'm His Girl" is disturbingly retro (to put it politely): it makes Lana Del Ray come across like Bikini Kill. Or am I reading too much into this pop lark? It's all bike shed sexual politics, am I right?
"Proud/Ashamed" is an interesting title. I don't have time to listen to it closely enough. (This is snatched from the possibility of having to go and feed my infant lad any minute.) The bell tolling gives it a sense of "Do They Know It's Christmas?". There is gang strut to "Va Fan Gor Du" that fits in with the Double Dutch playground attitude that oozes from the record. And a bit of Swedish rarely goes amiss. Double Swedish, mebbes.
"I can't compromise my concept of truth/Just to make myself more comfortable/To hide inside my youth."
Big words, little lady. Big words.
Rating: Teen Bedroom Posters out of Bike Shed Sexual Politics
I listened to this a couple of times with my brother. It was on vinyl and it was his Christmas present. I wasn't able to make many notes - mental or otherwise. It was disorienting at first, as per usual, until it's own idiosyncratic rhythms start to assert themselves.
It seems a bit weird that he doesn't quite the handle on Cockney right on "Guv'nor", seeing as he lived in London as a kid. Maybe he's looking to integrate himself, as he mentions Cockney again on "Banished" and I don't remember him ever mentioned it before*. The tune has that sense of being scribbled out as a sketch of an idea that many of his tunes do. He seems to make minimum effort to maximum effect.
"Dawg Friendly" dawdles at a dirty pulse.I think "Viberian Sun" was another one that stood out, phased noises and small levels of chaos. "Wash Your Hands" was about germs, perhaps, or trying to get off with a woman in the club - "a sex machine/That makes bacteria...The real enemy is microscopic".
We listened. But there were tiny nephews for us to keep eyes on and my ears wandered. Still, I did listen to it, so I add it to the albums of the year. Thanks.
Rating: Overlistened out of Nephews
* Just found out, he moved to London two years ago. A-ha! He wasn't let back into the US because of having a UK passport and despite living in New York for over forty years.
This was chosen by Piccadilly Records as the best compilation album of the year. You can imagine it ticking a lot of boxes amongst the dusty denizens behind a record shop counter. Obscure, of course; genre-splicing, nice; a bit of vintage helps sweeten the process too. My receptors were tickled in similar fashion and I picked it up.
Listening to it got me thinking about country funk. The best example I can think of where the two streams are crossed, Ghostbusters-style, is Parliament's Little Ole Country Boy, which in a further act of genre skipping was then used by De La Soul for Potholes on my Lawn (their debut single, best known in the UK as a track on Three Feet High...). It is maybe not as genuine as the stuff on this album though, more an act of cultural tourism. Unless they were country boys themselves... It's so dizzying! So I guess it should be a fertile border for sweet, sweet music.
In fact, it's a little hard at time to pick the threads apart. I'm not sure in a way why I should feel the need to; but it may be because country music is so white and funk so black, country so rural heartland and funk so urban ghetto. Right? But it's all music made by poor people at the beginning, eh? Before they moved from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago and New York or got their rhinestone stetsons in Los Angeles. Poor people themes are evident - injustice in love, economic migration and harsh lifestyles. Clumsily put, but I'm a clumsy thinker.
The first few tracks seem to be the stories of boys having to make the move from the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama, err.. Texas) to Los Angeles. It would have been the white hot centre of country rock in this period, Eagles hanging out in desert canyons, drawing in ambitious pickers and jug blowers with heavy gravity. So the tunes packed with this hiraeth sound like country tunes with some funk-tinged, string-boosted backtrack: Johnny Adams' "Georgia Mountain Dew" perhaps stands out the furthest.
Other tracks are more like more straightforward readings of funk with a bit of a country lyrical theme, or maybe just a stab at some homegrown funk with no back country trimmings. Link Wray's "Fire And Brimstone" barely seems to qualify as funk as there is virtually no low end to the music at all. Yet the fast-picking, rattling mass of hoarse screams seems to sneak in under the wire. Mac Davis' "Lucas Was A Redneck" has the swooping strings of Across 110th Street and tight wah-wah loops that you'd expect to be heard on some blaxpliotation flick. But it's a gravelly white Texan singing about a mean, doomed redneck in terms that could be describing some loser mid-Seventies pimp. Blurred, blurred.
The last couple of tracks perhaps point to where funk and country mingle together more regularly, suggesting again that the opposition of line-dancing rednecks and hustling brothers is pretty artificial. Music from Louisiana - Gritz's "Bayou Country" (which has a heavy Clapton feel to these ears) and a cover of Dr John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" replete with steel guitar and a drum pattern that sounds like Beck's Loser.
Great sweaty tunes and an excuse for me to crack open the A-level sociology, which never goes amiss, eh?
There was an album that I had planned to listen to for a while on my iPhone version of Spotify, but hadn't got round to it. Then I carelessly moved on from that album, and I'm not sure what the album was now. This was possibly it. And whether it wasn't the actual one or not, I'm glad of the chance to hear it. It's a bit like house-ier uptempo Boards of Canada, crackles and pops on every surface.
This album is actually from 2010, but I liked the cover better than the one for Galaxy Garden this year. Perhaps because it also evokes BoC more cleanly. It fits the title too - there's a feel of the sea here. Or the seaside, more specifically. Somewhere between sunrise in Ibiza and family sandwiches on the beach at Trearddur Bay.
"Re-Schooling" shatters along - a glass disco, bouncing from one wall to the other, lurching about in its own Nineties soup. I really like it. It almost rehabilitates that mixed bag of a decade for me. Everything sounds good for fifteen minutes sooner or later, I guess.
"Rissotowe_4" is pushed on by an internal clockwork logic that keeps a simple pattern very interesting. The album is full of fizzing and popping, where in so many other albums there is slump and drift. This might make them a bit wearing to other listeners; but I really like it. At times the motherboards really seize hold and the music fractals off into some very beautiful spaces, dragging me along with it. Like A Guy Called Gerald at his most delirious.
The age I am, I don't hear about fucking scenes or collectives these days until they're a Sunday Times article away from being on The One Show. So I know nothing of Los Angeles group Black Hippy. I get all hopeful of a Native Tongues of the West Coast with blunted angles. But there are plenty of niggas and bitches strewn everywhere. Is it just me? Or does he sound a bit like Westwood? Also his actual surname is Duckworth, which tickles me alright. Doesn't found very Compton, do it?
However sweet the sounds behind, however much Kendrick positions himself as a "sinner", a lover in the cosmos not a fighter, it's hard to warm to a track title like "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe". Sounds a bit like G-Funk, the South Central genome is evident. There are snippets of dialogue and phone messages that could have come straight out of "Killer of Sheep".
"I pray my dick get big as the Eiffel tower/So I can fuck the world for seven-two hours".
I like the number 72, one of my favourites. Even when he says about sending "a lead shower" to those who don't respect his mind, I don't know if I'm fearful of him. "I never was a gangbanger/ I mean, I was never stranger to the folk either" he explains on "The Art of Peer Pressure" over a track that rumbles and clicks on like a brooding locomotive.
"Money Trees" has a beautiful treated background that could've leaked out of a My Bloody Valentine recording session while he spools out more observations about Compton life. "good kid" has an electric, jazzy feel to it - like a version of Kanye that is able to add something to the R&B heroism he samples rather than just trying to give himself some depth. Then "mAAd city" gives the Hitchcock-staccato, grime-infused flipside to the sunnier brass sounds before MC Eiht steps out of the Nineties Compton to lend some historical heft.
"Sing About Me, I'm Dying Of Thirst" sounds like it is a big opus sitting across the album. I can't give it the attention it deserves right now; but there is a Grandma bit at the end about redemption after all the baller stories up to that point. "Compton" closes it off with Kanye brass stabs and an appearance from Dre, a man who's haunted a couple of the tracks anyhow. Kendrick fits in quite neatly.
A melding of New Order and Jesus and Mary Chain here. They should be called the Chromantics, as they pull all those big shades and emaciated cool shapes across the first few tracks. Right down to a track called "Candy". "The Page" shares roots with "A Forest". There's a murky lurking about in those areas where Hookey's bass looms in the shadows or goth teen heartache mopes about.
As it progresses, there are other more Balearic moves: "These Streets Will Never Look The Same" are drizzled with soft techno rain, traffic hissing past with those radials that Tom Waits likes to mention every now and then. It's nice, it pulses with abandoned style. Sometimes it goes a bit too limp - as with "Running from the Sun" - but then there are some curly guitar noises to send the ears swooping again. On "A Matter of Time" the Balearic bliss gets a scary undertow, as though the coke was catching up and grinding on that weakest of the nerves.
With the fuzzy electronic washes and the pale-skinned gothy musical themes running close to the surface, this feels a very 2012 album. I can hear why it's being doing so well in the end of year charts. It is also pretty good. It sets a terrific mood that could go in almost any direction: wistful, paranoid, blissed, hungry... I can hear a Ibizan version of Bladerunner sprouting from the sounds.
The closing track "The River" brings everything together in a neat, shivering place. Synths burble with romance, guitars slice into the air with notes like baby fingernails. Michael Mann writes a script for a short film.
Looking at the promotional pics, I'm a bit worried it's one of those pretty girl does the singing, ugly dudes in shades do the music situations, which is always a little depressing. But maybe she plays instruments too. It's just that the headshots don't suggest she mucks in on the shopfloor too much.
Something is not quite on-beam about this album. I feel as though I should enjoy it, that there ought to be something in it for me. There are some layers of sophistication, a varnish on the music, that seem to move it away from something vital. "Oh Yeah" is somehow too lush, which is not something I ever expected to imagine - too cold. Too Jools Holland.
The tension within the music seems more resolved, or at least makes more sense on "Laura". Though I'm not entirely sure what it's about. "Your name is tattooed on every boy's skin." The brass is more pleasing and fills in the gaps better than the synths had done. On "Marilyn" her voice soars up into its older form again. But stuff is missing somehow. The warmth or magic or fear that was in the middle. That was present in "Daniel", her opening gambit from the previous album three or so years ago. She seems inspired by people's names.
The self-mythology is still there. I imagine her transmogrified into all manner of beasts and birds. The cover picture would be arresting, but it's a shame she's in the nuddy. All too easy to market the feminine when its tits are out. "Rest Your Head" has a pleasing rattle to it, that propulsion. "Winter Fields" builds up from a chapped flute sound to muscular timpani and ancient-sounding keyboard. Heavy brush strokes of Kate Bush, as she's been coloured by since she first arrived making these lush, bruised noises.
I first heard this, dipping in and out of consciousness whilst feeding my little lad Jasper. Turns out it was released on his birthday, which is a neat turn of events.
The cover is of some sci-fi imagined 'scape. The music sounds like it would fit. They are a band (according to their Last FM bio) that "spend most of their time in a van". I suspect them of being a bit posh: one of my enduring themes this year. Although it's not like Pink Floyd were exactly secondary modern lads, eh?
It is hushed epic guitar, brushstroke drums and near-absent keyboard sounds. And there is brass. "The Grove" in particular has a nicely eviscerated feel, brass noises hang in the air in the space where there was other music. That My Bloody Valentine thing. They're from Vancouver, so I imagine there's a lot of space out there west to hang things from.
"Moonwalker" has a touch of the Major Toms: "I'm signing off in space/Remember me this way." There are minimalist touches, orchestral fragments gliding out of the water like dolphins. "Revelstoke Dam" has an eddying mass of them bunched up behind it. There's an air of Badly Drawn Boy that comes through too in the vocal delivery; but the hairy Christ child alone knows why I get that impression. "Hymn For Huxley" has an almost Bond-like guitar riff snaking through the long oboe grasses.
Why would this album have a track called "Falklands" on it? The lyrics seem to be a much more tropical seascape than the images from Goose Green in 1982 would suggest. Dreamy lyrics about diving and swimming and feeding from their hand. Even finds space for a tinkling piano disco stomp in the middle. I like it.
It's like "Mawrth Oer ar Planed Neifion" at the end of Mwng. And I love that track.
Massive Beatles overhang. That whiny, overdubbed Lennon vocal, echoing against the walls of his lysergic Primal Scream capsule. Sounds as though George Martin has been tinkering with the timpani - and I like it.
"Apocalypse Dreams" has a lung-bursting pair of legs running through the middle, ideal for exploration of the woozy cosmos. The walls of the middle eight also slide uneasily. Towards the end, some hoarse afterburners are kicked into action - and they spiral down into the sky. "Mind Mischief" also has a bendy Yellow Submarine rainbow bent through the middle of it, curved round a delicious crusty guitar line.
The pony may have the one trick - and a well-worn trick at that. But it's still a powerful one. Even though "Why Won't They Talk To Me?" loops over and over on itself, the bubbly flute works nicely underneath. The heavy drums stake it apart from the less-rooted product from the likes of Ariel Pink. And "Elephant" is beefier yet, steroids mixed in with the acid. It's one of my favourite singles of the year, which helps. Big, shredded keyboard/guitar claws run through the juice in the middle. All good gravy. Afterburners also set to disco; astral skinheads doing headbut ballets with thumbs tucked in their belt loops.
A minor gripe, which I may even quite like, is that a lot of the titles ("She Just Won't Believe Me") reflect that the words don't always match up to the appetite of the music. But the music is so sweet, that it seems churlish to expect more of the words. "Nothing Has Happened So Far..." is falling over itself to paint the ceiling with colour and light. Some nice close-up piano on the closer "Sun's Coming Up" before it dissolves into some reverb-laden guitar wanking. In a nice way.
In some ways, this works as an antidote or something more palliative to counteract the increasingly samey electronically-tethered version of pop that is scattered across all the airwaves these days. But it too makes many of the same moves, glides across the same frozen surfaces. "Black Noise" is a slippery case in point: nothing really gets going, stuff about switching on the radio. Is that still a legitimate trope? We're hardly in the days of radio representing freedom - either of the highway, bedroom transistor or Free Europe varieties. What does radio represent now? Just noise. A cacophony of shock jocks and empty-headed breakfast banter.
The three "Activity" tracks are quite nice - in a swirly PSB manner. Chris Lowe at the heart of the controls. The other tracks lack some lyrical pinch ("Over My Head" and "Close", for examples) to tug the music in a different direction. One track that stands out is "Wild Palms", arpeggiated strings flushing out like ferns. I don't know if there's a David Lynch reference in there somewhere - but it has the same dense seethe as the opening shots of the lawn in Blue Velvet.
"Laketop Swimmers" is nice, but suffers from the same problem. Nothing to distinguish it from what is going on everywhere. Images of swimming. Not inspiring.
The biological imperative has kicked in and a 7lb 20z bundle of joy made his presence felt on 6th October, when waters were broken almost five weeks before his due date on 8th November. Since then, it's been hospital stays, dazed days and nights at home and large amounts of parental panic. They have needs, these little critters, and these needs do not include their Dad maintaining blogs of dubious worth.
However, I will try and sneak out a couple more as the year peters out over the next couple of months. If I can get to 365 it will be an achievement, but the Babber is king - so don't be surprised if there are no more than a handful, if that. And what I do will lack depth and insight to an even greater degree than before B Day.
I was listening to this album in those tricky times while my wife was stuck in hospital waiting for Babber to emerge, and it is pretty classy. The lead track in particular, "Ye Ye", is full of swollen, acid menace and low-grade shuffling genius. It has spilled out of some garden shed at the back of dance culture. Dan Snaith is responsible, who has also put together some great tunes as Caribou (and before that Manitoba, before Dick Manitoba became such a ..well, dick about it). It's fantastic and the peak of the album by some distance.
"Light" goes for a walk in the park, ping pong balls of sound bouncing from here to there. Babber has his usual thoughtful face on, not sure what to make of the arpeggios reaching upwards and outwards. "Pairs" is an exercise in artificial congas and cowbells, a motherboard carnival template. There are some satisfying arcade shoot 'em up crunches on "Springs", some more vintage junkyard legacy reward. The sounds get a bit less scratchy and fill out on the closer, "Long". I read the word "granular" in another review and think how clever it is.
So the hot band get nothing but hotter. Tracks leaking out, every now and then. And now a live EP - two tracks from a show in Nottingham and two from Bristol. That seems a strange move. That's more of a contractual filler of a move of a band much further on down the road.
They sound pretty intensive and fiery. The oddness of their single in the summer has been subsumed by big flames. It sounds like watching Snub TV footage used to feel: lively and theatrical and essential. "I Am Here" is big on the drums, heart-quickening drums. The whole spirals up and up. Then "Husbands" closes proceedings - sounding more like Jello Biafra. Far less sleek than the single. That's all I really have to go on.
There is some area of the imagination that this music prowls about in - like Pixies or The Slits. A part where sex lives and there is blood and full, dark colours and things outside the window. I'm not sure what they are about lyrically on "Give Me A Gun"; but they are hanging around in those dark garages of the soul. All "ill at ease". There's more of an atmosphere than a structure exactly. There's less for me to latch on to; but it's powerful.
Sad pop business. A hint of defiance in the downtrodden voice. Low-key production; the sound of a few instruments quite close up. I think you get the picture. Nothing really to set it aside from a crowd of similar folk, writing their emotional songs with sparse lyrics and sparser drama. Not enough tension.
After five tracks, I looked down the overlong list of 15 titles and thought that both my evening and my life were too short, so I pulled out. A song called "Shiver" reaches the lyrical peak of considering how different she felt when she was in love. Titles like "Be Alright" and "All I've Got" and "Scar" do nothing to encourage me to change my mind. I think she uses bikes as a kind of a metaphor on "Bikes", which could as easily have been called "Rollercoaster", I imagine - or "Teacups".
In years to come, I may sit bolt upright in bed, stiff with the realisation that I missed my big chance to get in on Lucy at the ground level. Until that time comes, I shall try and sleep as easy as I can.
Opening track, "Ocean's Eye", has a big epic feel to it, guitars spiralling out across nebula and funky congas rubbing seductively against snaky bass. But it's only two and a half minutes. What's up with that? Someone's not been reading their epic cosmic rock handbook probably.
It slides on into "Bloodshake", which has some of that Afro-flavoured indie shuffle while keeping the atmospheric Eighties U2 guitar in position.
"Here's one for all the diamonds in the dark/..for the amblers in the gloom" could be the beginning to a great tune, but it becomes about a girl that "tastes like sunlight" or being "born to live". It's called "California Daze", which is probably a pointer to a bit of an imagination vacuum. The same empty moves performed over and over again and printed on the covers of NME over and over again; the undying loop of acting like a rock star should act in order to be a rock star and reinforce the same empty postures.
The final track expands to fill the ten minutes that you might expect of a grander scale, "1998 (Delicious)". But it doesn't really take me anywhere. It probably needs some dub in it, to get me into a spiritual spiral. This just kind of plods. This EP just makes me even more impatient for the Tame Impala album. Dammit!!
A video on YouTube sounds better than the EP. More baggy, in the early Nineties indie dance sense. The video recalls Fools Gold (or was it Made of Stone; I've never really worked out which tune that was shot for) and there are grungey crashes at the start of the choruses. But the lyrics are just about living forever, so No, thanks.
This might be a Kanye presents... type joint rather than an album as such, but his chunky chipmunk face is written all over it.
But this is not a classic soul regurgitation with chat about thrones and platinum arse scratchers. Hefty slices of newer sounds buckle the template - "Mercy.1" is squashed with cheap, heavy bass noises and generous helpings of Giorgio Moroder Scarface samples and vocal hooks that sound like Ragga Twins. Sweetly claustrophobic. Nothing that deals in Moroder can ever go wrong. ("You don't just walk into Moroder...")
"I believe there's a God above me/But I'm God of everything else."
"New God Flow.1" rattles and booms in a great many of the right places. "Higher" (featuring Ma$e and Pusha T) sounds like a Flight of the Conchords pastiche of itself, vocals pitched so high they look down on parody. John Legend crops up on "Sin City", as do a lot of dodgy rhymes with "-city" at the end. All the action takes place over Miami Vice synth stabs and an almost motionless bassline. So a bit like being in GTA San Andreas.
Plain gloopy is "The One", slow, saccharine Auto-Tuned bilge. A sampled "One" from Public Enemy Number 1 rips and bares its teeth over and over, showing up the standing-up-off-the-bar-stool sludge that is going on atop it. "Don't Like.1" sees Kanye compares himself to both Christ and Michael Jackson, which is nice. And the sky rains with the n-word until I can't tell where the clouds stop and the brainfilth begins.
Kanye's out of touch, but not in a cool Roky Ericksen kind of way. My bad vibes towards his bland grandiose wealthiness continue.
This was the shit I was after before! I must have overlooked it.
Field Music have already knocked out one of the albums of my year. At least one of the top 300. (I kid. "Plumb" is ace and I'd love to see it win the Mercury Prize.) So I'm expecting steepling melodies, clever time signature changes and some classy, warm motherboards lending their support. A touch of Northern wit too perhaps.
"Snow Watch" has a really nice unfestive, warped feel to it. Wintry psychedelia with pianos floating in the cold air and every instrument treated to within an inch of its very existence, spilling out from that inch and discolouring the space around it. "Higgs" shakes a funky chunk or two. But there isn't the swoop, the delicateness I'd hope for. I'd hoped for a brittle contrast between the Brewis Brothers swerving pop sensibility and the more geological instincts of The Digits. Instead, they meet somewhere less exciting in the middle.
There's a fractured early-Pink Floyd feel to the guitar on "Elements of the Sun" and "Travelodge Blues" opens with a typical Brewis set of progressions, choppy and purposeful. (The title I also like.) But it's not the cross-germination I was hoping for.
Even by my own obtuse standards I'm not sure what I'm getting at here.
Saw that there was a collaboration between these guys and Field Music, which I thought needed to be heard. However, it didn't seem to be available, so I moved in this direction instead. Backwards in time to 2011.
I'd heard a couple of tracks before and had formed the impression of a friendlier Add (N) to X - vintage synths buzzing away while a live drum kit keeps things on their toes. Or something. "Warm Welcome" is the opening half-track, which is bursting with positivist scientific bubbling noises and happy feelings. No robots having sex with cartoon women anyway. "Trans Pennine Express" starts with a steam locomotive like grind, slowly picking up momentum - as though Kraftwerk had started in Darlington.
The pace continues, picking up a cowbell en route by the time of "Weapons Destruction", the electronic pulse now giving it a Holy Fuck momentum. It's quite musicianly, I hear jamming in the past. Chances are there is hair. Although the band are from different spots in the North, so that might not happen too often. Handclaps appear in "Grapefruit", slightly phased perhaps, which gives the track a woozy tang. Like off of a grapefruit.
"The Surplus of Seeing" is a bit more swampy and Quatermassy. Noises like pots and pans. "A Warm Front, Coming from the North" is back in the Kraftwerk space again, fanfares and metronomes. The stately progression of the Shipping Forecast, everything in its place. The slightest hint of a kids' drama series from the early Eighties.
The last track "Here Come the Warm Digits" seems such an Eno tribute that I suspect the band name was struck with this title in mind. There's something so gentle and un-rock'n'roll about the sound of Warm Digits; it gets me thinking about lab technicians and Rich Tea biscuits and afternoons. It's music for afternoons. This may be doing the pair a huge disservice. They may well consume half a Colombian hillside of recreational powders before breakfast and brush their teeth with lysergic-infused Jack Daniels. But somehow I suspect not. We need music in the afternoons most of all - to soundtrack staring out the window and wishing work was over.
This was another album I had to have on in the background while I was doing other things with my mind and fingers yesterday.
The most persistent thoughts I had while listening were COLDPLAY and A-HA. Maybe it was the Nordic twinge in the vocals, seeing as these boys are from the Denmark, that got the Morten sensors activated. But there's something about the structures that suggest a more laid-back Coldplay. His voice is of a very similar pitch but there isn't the cloying bombast.
The music chimes tastefully throughout. It has a classical jazzy shuffle of sorts; "The Ghost" in particular mixes the soft-brushed drums, avian guitar lines, warm brass and the musicianly air in a satisfying way. I read in the NME that there aren't enough choruses, which I can understand. It's quite a lateral album. "Black Summer" wanders too far into the detective soundtrack territory - a great many notes hanging in the air. Suspension in musical aspic.
I like it more when he sounds like Morten and less when he sounds like Chris Martin. I also read the description "adult pop", and I'm not sure about that. Is it the idea that it's adult in the sense that all the explosive, effervescent joy had burnt away and the shapes left behind in the dying light somehow represent adulthood. The sober surveying of the leftovers. I don't think I agree. (I don't think I agree with the idea I just made up myself based on reading two words.) But this album could fit that description: shapes made music that were left behind in the absence.
And on to the debut album. Named for one of the more irritating signs of the zodiac and with an appropriately weird, double face made of photos of two women on the cover.
The introduction is so Johnny Marr, it's bordering on the hilarious. I imagine an updated version of Hank Marvin striding across some Stretford pavement, Rickenbacher in hand - all the way from Virigina. "I'd rather live in dreams/Than I'd rather die," he says, vocals a bit higher up the mix than the later albums. "Summer Holiday" has some full-on shoegaze background "aaah"'s that could've been cut out of a Ride record. After three albums full, I'm still not getting tired of the sound.
"Drifter" even cracks open a couple of Peter Hook bass solos. Blissfully Eighties alternative, this stuff; so many boxes touched and bases ticked. Sigh. How many albums would carry a title like "O Lilac" with s straight face? Maybe Jack Tatum isn't either. Even when the drum patterns get a bit ironically Hi-NRG on "Bored Games", it's still about slurred lyrics and gaseous melodies. "Where are you going?/Can I come with you?" "Chinatown" is a bit livelier too, but Jack still sounds largely unmoved.
How long might have gone within hearing these albums?
So, having enjoyed Nocturne I decided to stay my hand as Spotify scrolled back through two albums from 2010. The flow from one to the next was pretty seamless on first listen. A touch of drum machine that was less strict on this year's album. But the guitar lines are identically sweet. It gives it a bit of a New Order touch at times, especially with the keyboard stabs on "Take Me In".
"Your Rabbit Feet" sounds like a Smiths tune that has been pulled inside out. Even the lyrics have caught a touch of the same debilitated fever. "It was the hungriest night I ever knew/I was so hungry for you...What do you want to know/I'll take you anything!" Some low-level, near-inaudible muttering sees me off the premises as the shoegaze riff fades into nothing. "Vultures Like Lovers" has some sturdier teeth under the candy floss.
Reviving memories of times when indie meant something more than feather cuts and designer anoraks.
Rating: Drum Machine Drifts out of Indie Manufactory
So this all worked out nicely too. Again, not much time to record my thoughts - and my expectations weren't very high. Not such a promising title somehow.
But from the off this was cloudy, classy stuff. Perhaps I've drifted away from the floaty witch house/ kindergarten indie end of things of late. It felt a bit listening to bits of The Smiths or The Cure from their Disintegration era, pedals swelling up into the sky. Something about the chord progressions of the bass rumble. I don't know music.
Lyrics couldn't really be listened to, but seemed to be about highness, love and forgetfulness - as you might expect. "She's flooding my bloodstream/Every time I close my eyes", for example. But as a Pitchfork review I read pointed out - there are entire music scenes and many labels that spend all their time trying to recreate this sound. Technically, Jack Tatum has pulled off something pretty impressive - a bigger voice and some trickier lyrics and it would be epic.
It's been another one of those days slaving away over a noisy laptop, listening to tunes as I go, but without the opportunity or brainspace to note any thoughts as they pass through my head.
This album has a handsome cover of a head shaped iceberg afloat on calm waters. It sums up the business within, I guess. He's a Brooklynite that's made his way to Berlin. There's that Burial feel shimmering under the surface - the dirty bubble and the fragil soaring vocal. You know what I mean. It's definitely a London sound. "Running Back" has a hint of LFO in the bassline. Deep and dreamy.
There's some noise about him being a bit of an appropriate figure for an R&B man. There may be a racial element to this, or it may be some anti-hipster resistance. Who knows? I'm just spitballing here. (No, I don't know what it means either. Yes, it does sound very dodgy, dunnit?) I like the crunch at the beginning of "Set It Right" and the choral swoop, but then it deteriorates into a list of dead people that he misses in a wobbly falsetto. That sounds harsh.
Is the whole album about death?
Rating: Wobbly Brooklyn Falsetto out of South London Pavements
There is a Chicago sound, isn't there? Maybe the rumbling trains full of cattle one way and sausages the other has inspired this kind of motorik indie. It lurks beneath the surface of Tortoise and Shellac. There is your John McEntire involved, of course. It's unassuming in the way you might expect Birmingham indie to sound, from one Second City to another. (What does Birmingham indie sound like? I want to say Broadcast, but I think that's Supersonic Festival influence somehow.) Maybe where they are they can hear everything...
"A Mere" picks its way delicately between classy basslines and a hint of Sheryl Crowe. It's indie like Zach Braff would make a movie around; a sigh runs through it. "The Invitations" has a fried electronic tone running underneath, sweet and salty like the sea and cake, before some bass music comes in and things kick on into space...
"New Patterns" sounds just like that. It chugs in a familiar fashion, but somehow sounds like a remix of Eighties sounds, something about that sparkling drone in the background. A bit like The Stranglers' Always The Sun. It sounds delightfully bright and trebly on top of the steady bass. "Neighbors And Township" sounds like a remix of Joy Division's She's Lost Control at first - all cramped guitar and crisp snare attacks - before it flattens out into something more Midwestern and sure of itself.
This is a mixed book of styles like you might expect from a band that has rounded a few blocks in its time. My heart doesn't soar at any point, which may be a telling indictment of my sociopathic tendencies. But it is solid work and could support several repeat listens and planted seeds would throw some powerful fronds.
I'm not sure what to make of this stable sound though. Human emotion is represented by the vocals which are pitched at a kind of cute sigh, which fits but doesn't connect. I don't catch many lyrics either. So I'm not sure where I place myself, as the listening human, as the closing track "The Runner" opens with a lazy shimmer.
From last year, but I've kept forgetting to give it a listen. Almost all in English, but with the traditional Spanish language track as a Fuck You to monoglots. Some top pop nuggets too.
"See What You're Saying" might be about arguments. It fizzes with poppy handclaps. "Besamel" has a nice pop drift, not unlike Metronomy's English Riviera. The weight in the voice reminds me of Gruff Rhys as well and the musical has the broad pop palette (or palate) that takes the elements of classical pop and inflates them into more interesting directions without breaking any of the physics.
There's a cheery Eighties keyboard on "Things In You" as though Wax were building another bridge to my heart or The Hoovers were back in business sending satellites. "In the Valley" has even more swirls and a deeply unfashionable sounds. Well, they could be unfashionable. The lyrics are a wee bit opaque, so I've no insight there.
"Un Grifo En El Mar" has squeezebox and acid squirts. It's all broad strokes, a smorgasbord of words to describe a selection of slightly different things brought together. "Used to be randy/Waiting in the bed at night."
If I was able to spend more time listening to it, there are more treasures to be found and polished with time. But for now, I have a good feeling about it.
Took a couple of listens this one. I had stuff to do in the house, clearing and moving things to make room for Babber Firswood. So I put Sun Kil Moon on, as they were someone I'd listened to before and never successfully formed an opinion on. Guitars and vocals alone aren't really my strong point.
So it was lovely listening, mellow and melodious. The blunter edge that was carried by the lyrics wasn't obvious straight away. This was probably because I hadn't read many of the song titles ("The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Woman vs The Extremely Talented Yet No So Attractive Middle Aged Man" or "Not Much Rhymes With Awesome At All Times").
What did come across first was that this was an album by a touring musician. There are plenty of references to places, travel and other performers, especially places. Two tunes about touring Europe ("UK Blues" and "UK Blues 2"), neither of which very complimentary about his time -moaning about a "fucking shuttle bus" on his way to Denmark ("Everybody's white/Everyone rides bikes) and about the riots in London ("As if this city isn't depressing enough/../It's all the rage/If your favourite colour's beige.") and about being heckled in Bristol. I'm with the heckler.
When he isn't complaining how ugly potential groupies are, he is aiming barbs at young, attractive women singers. "Red Poison" is about poisoning people with Chinese mushrooms and watching their skin change colour. He's exceptionally talented and underappreciated. A warm voice spilling out self-pity. It might be that he's an American Morrissey, arch and full of humour too clever for dull-minded listeners. But then I think Morrissey is a self-pitying eejit these days as well.
But he knows his way around a guitar, that much is plain. "Track Number 8" has a lovely classical role to it, while he sings about "empty Victorians that used to house whores". It's also about "how songwriting costs/It doesn't come free/Ask Elliott Smith" and how the song isn't too great and "will probably sequence at track number 8". You have to suffer to be a writer, see? - "It's hard to swallow your big, bright pills". He knows that they're "smothering something..eating at your guts". He has flow, but I don't much like the direction it flows. Even a song about a man that died who fixed his guitars has a hint of how inconvenient it is that he's not around.
My heart is not bleeding for him.
Rating: Vinegar Melodies out of Self-Pity And Talent
There are some portentous titles on this album - "Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse", "Winds of the 84 Winter" or "March of the Saxons". There are some brooding cooling towers on the cover as well. Phallic imagery, the lot of it. For men with horribly distended penises.
It's instrumental. It's a wee bit proggy. It was record of the week one week in Rough Trade apparently, which I find a little hard to believe. It doesn't tick so many boxes, but keeps on ticking the same box over and over until their hands are bloodied stumps. There are echoey drums and circling bass sounds. But they never really go anywhere and they get pretty repetitive pretty quick.
They're like Add (n) to x without all the robot sex and the live drums.Or the soundtrack for an Eighties cop drama in a very unglamourous city. Des Moines Vice, something like that.There is a track "Reno", which is slower but still not quite opening up. A slow night in Nevada.
Another band that have been spotted on more than one Rob da Bank playlist. I believe there is also a welcome Cymric dimension to them, a dimension I would do all within my power to stimulate and foster.
A curiously muted mist hangs around "Always Golden", due partly to the choir girl harmonies. When the rather stern drum pattern kicked in for "Be Alive" and the housey piano, I thought it might be about to launch into a tirade - but it's actually a question: "How does it feel to/Be alive?" "Sugarloaf" has the same curious mix of an insistent piano line (and even some electric geetarr) with icily somnolent lady vocals. It's an unusual mix - Marmite and peanut butter: one of my favourites. It's a curious voice to hear saying "We could start a war". Clouds drift about the mix, but bearing a rain of death.
On a side note, did people used to dress up to quite the same degree in the yoresterdays? It seems every one has to gun for eccentricity with such all-out ferocity these days. I take this as an example of the commodification of self-expression. There are so many bits and fucking pieces out there that folk can be endlessly styled in as many directions as they see fit. It shouldn't irritate me, but it do. Where are the cunts in basic leathers and tees, eh? Eh?
"Reconsider King" is perhaps the stand-out amongst the sweet things; all lightly-plucked banjos, shivering wordless coos and melodious heft. The closer "Restless Souls" reaches out for a medieval punch at the beginning before it flattens out into an old skool Belle & Sebastian like plateau of twee chugging. That sounds like I don't like it, but I've decided I like indie chugs. There's an element of Madchester in there that I can't quite pick out - the melodic swirl has a touch of rave cave underneath. Stately Wayne Manor with the Batcave looming underneath. "Be Alive" has some bassy sweeps along the bottom.
Eddying string sounds, lemon-scented vocals and a hint of the glo-stick.
Nathan Fake is a name I've never fully written into my cultural logbooks these last few years. Drifts about he does, popping up on a Rob da Bank playlist or in the brackets of some hyped remix. He has an album with a cover made from molten WH Smith protractor sets and I will listen.
Opening track "Paean" has some of that IDM feel from ten years or so, the sense of a new space being opened up in the electronic genre for all manner of musical genre to roam around in and browse into healthy shape. But that feeling dips by the second track, fades into a meh-ish mist. It drops into a groove of medium-sized machines.
There's a vaguely underwhelming Songs of Praise feel to "Iceni Strings" that I can't quite poke my finger through. "Old Light" has a lot of the crispy old sounds you might associate with prime Boards of Canada and some acid twinkle in the middle; but is still a faint shadow of better tunes. It sounds weedy. "World of Spectrum" might signify where the music chips have come from. It's music with a 32k RAM pack. (Stitch that, obscure Eighties computer metaphor fans!) "Harnser" tries to build up some staccato bass tension and toothy analogue synth noises, but the outcome lacks fibre.
The machines are blindly reaching to out to other machines on "World of Spectrum". I'm starting to wonder whether Nathan Fake is a man or some kind of digital anti-Asimov, creating fake humans with Three Laws of Music that they are unable to break. He's way too pallid to be human, right? Individual notes seem to undergo a lot of scrutiny, shivering and cracking under the strain on "Rue"; but there is some drama lacking, something missing that would push it over from distraction to compulsion and really get me on the podium.
With a genius name like "Sad Vember" the track should be majestic, but it merely fidgets. However, the good news starts up soon after. "Neketona" is more like it - motorik, shining with burnished rubbery arcs of sound, sails inflated with momentum. "Glow Hole" also has the sound of a fax machine being violently brought back to life and some busy drum patterns, both of which I like.
"Warble Epics" is a sweet, dark closer with the BoC warped noise soundbank turned to better use. Corrupted snatches of snare smear some urgency across the palette. It's tightly wound against itself with harmonic fronds reaching out from the sides. It is a lesson to us all. I can see now why some people want his steady hands at the controls, setting them for the heart of the nearest silent moon.
Rating: Some Urgent Smears out of Spectrum Of Distant Moons
This is what it sounds like when Swedes voodoo. Somewhere near Gothenburg there is a tiny bit of Haiti, broadcasting afro-kraut-global magic.
"Disco Fever" carries plenty of gut punch. Hot guitars lash about like Indiana Jones bullwhips. Keyboard wizardry fills the picture out nicely; The Doors dropped out of a plane somewhere in west Africa and forced to finger for money and victuals. The guitars are joyfully fuzzed out throughout, the air around them is thick with pollen - with a nice pastoral bit of interplay (with road traffic noises) at the end of "Goathead". "Golden Dawn" picks up the pace, congas smoking and guitars and sax coming in at unexpected angles.
The recording sounds so close up. It's a wind tunnel swimming with psychedelic consequences; music with its blood vessels about to blow. Ecstatic noise building up to a crazed chorus of "Let it bleed" at the end of "Let It Bleed" and sounding a bit more urban and Sabbath on "Run To Your Mama". Cosmic winds blow their hair back as they ponder the best way to look ceremonially menacing. Goat bells start off "Goatlord": you can't go wrong with goat bells. Goat certainly don't.
Them crazy Swedes.
Rating: Afro-Kraut Confluence out of Sweden Campfires
As Tame Impala's new album is stubbornly refusing to be released until next month, I'm going elsewhere for my next listen - the Mercury Music Prize shortlist. I'm very wary of this being more Brit School "genuine" cachu. The title is not very promising: big enough for what, dickhead? But you know, my ears are open for now.
The opener "Don't Wake Me Up" has all the sleek emptiness that voice-based music seems to basically in, the shiny showcase ready for the execs to take a look. "Lost & Found" contains the lyric "You broke me/And taught me/To truly/Hate myself", which is a neat half-twist. The tune is shimmers glacially. But the emptiness echoes out like a Bond theme. There's a bit of wit here but it's smothered in tastefulness.
"Waste all your time writing love songs/But you don't love me," she almost snarls over a bare electric guitar on "Forget". This is much more like it. It feels like it could be from a genuinely good musical, with dancers throwing themselves around in a theatrical version of Costa Coffee in their office wear and doomed expression. It sketching out in big pop colours with room for some vocal gymnastics but not enough to turn the tune into a dog show. Lyrically, it comes from a slightly tricky place - obviously not a happy one. Don't like the fact the video has her smiling sweetly with posters for her album in the background. But this is commerce.
A whole load of songs about unreliable lovers gets pretty tedious after a while too. It's the Jack Black effect: if all the women in your songs are devil women, do you think you should be looking a bit closer to home for the source of the problem? That might disrupt the coffee table formula a little too much. "Gone" is about seeing through another guy, emoting over smooth piano. Yawn. It's one note Eastenders drama. If you're going to thrash away at one note, at least make it about snorting fun drugs and fucking into the sunset on endless repeat.
Sorry I couldn't keep my ears open for very long. But "Forget" was good, right?
This is literally an album with all bells and whistles blazing. Well, there are whistle noises on the opening track at least, "Her Fantasy". It's a hugely hypertropical, lush shuffle house version of a Hamlet solilquy: "Am I grown man? Am I not a great design?" It's fucking ace. I think.
He has a very deep voice. He is apparently from Texas, but he sounds dead European - Berlin, Paris or Rome. One of them gaffs. He acknowledges a debt to David Bowie. He has a cupboard full of wobbly, rubbery noises that he can pull out to scatter over this album goodness. "Fighting is Futile" in particular marches steelily with bouncey purpose. "Up & Out" has a lovely chewy disco and hand clap combo from the offset. The lyrics are about "fashion underwater" or perhaps "passion". Yeah, I think "passion". It is dark and warm and glamourous, which is all you want from disco tunes.
The handclaps are back on "Get The Rhyme Right" (what is this?? 2003??) along with some plaintive bass tugging. The tune arrives squeezed in through a tiny filter and it's all moody and atonal. The lyrics slipstream around me a little again. "Ahead of Myself" again fills me up with 2003 as it sounds like the kind of tunes my brother was making in his tiny, leaky bedroom around that time - bits of human noise churned up and washing against a confessional vocal. A wider reference would be LCD Soundsystem, I suppose. But it's less about being a record shop nerd; there's an extra frisson of something. Sex, perhaps.
The closer "Temptation" wanders into treble-wobble chill wave territory. I've come to fear that sound almost as much as the beatless ooze of current hip hop; the denial of rhythm's proper place in the centre of dance and rap, as the crucial hook that so much hangs on. But the beats slip in and his dark croak looms and the bells and whistles make a reappearance as the riff builds to a slinky conclusion.
Rating: Hypertropical Hamlet out of Dark Chewy Disco
I've read a bit about "Mourning In America And Dreaming In Color", but while I found I couldn't find it I found this. The newer album is presumably of a more political bent; this one is romance for the pants. Which cuts a little against the grain perhaps, as he's not handsome with his conventionals - an overweight, round-headed albino guy with a beard. A long D&D basement beard.
It's quite straight-laced though. No paranoid logorrhoea, no imaginative leaps to or from any great heights. The production is lush and dripping with soul arrangements, but there are no real surprises. Ali has some flow, but I'm more of a fan of the ODB school of crazy chat, arrhythmic in parts because brain fits don't make smooth patterns. There is nothing jagged here, but it is kind of sweet. Which I guess is the idea.
"Haunted House" seems to be about failing relationships, but there aren't any insightful metaphors. Just a dead female voice singing "Broken/Love foundations". Stuff about dawns and eyes and demons. Too straight, too strait.
His voice is smooth and full of self-belief but this is maybe not the best vehicle, it's no fun, "echoing a language from a long time ago".
Rating: Albino Dungeon Master out of R-Kelly's Closet
Pastoral Anglo quirk-rock. Tracing worn old thumbs out over antiquarian maps and listening out for legionnaires in the mist. A bit unexpected for the Mute label as well.
There's a lovely patience that underpins "From Nero's Palace". It puts me in mind of music from children's TV from a decade like the Seventies. Music to drink soup from a Thermos by. "Appian Way" pizzicatos the pace up a wee bit, spirals and fractals spilling off either side of the ordered Roman advance. "Portway" really stretches it out though, kicks in another gear: a gear with indie guitar-plucking and creepy progressions. In contrast, "Battle of Watling Street" starts out like some fuzzy felt folk piece, hiss in the foreground and a repetitive structure of mournful strings. It sounds very old - like campfires and rheumatism.
Very similar lines are sketched out as on the Drokk! album a few months ago. It's kosmische, it's a bit magical. But it's a bit flat too - like too many fields of grain on the horizon.
Wow! Now this lad sounds like a real deal. There are woozy noises, sick lyrics and all the Tweenties hip hip business we've come to expect from this murky decade, but he isn't afraid of beats either. Actual breaks, actual drum sounds! Head nodding business.
There's talk of "niggas" and gangster business and misogyny (seeming to settle on the metaphor "medusas"), which is par for the course too. But the rhymes are tight. "He made Black & Yellow/I'm a make Black & Emo" he spits on "Radio Song". He isn't too keen to play the radio game. Detroit seems to breed some acrid rap types. "Lie4" is a step back into the beatless ocean of the stuff that folk spit over these days; don't like it. Was this caused by a change in drugs? Or movement away from the streets? "I Will" is a blunt song of praise to the cunnilingual arts - "What he won't do/Bitch, I will". Which is nice.
"Detroit187" is nice scatological brain dribble of the highest order. "Monopoly" begins with some blaxploitative dialogue before some more cracked couplets sound like a battle rap: "What you write is all vagina/What I write is Wall of China". "Blunt After Blunt" speaks for itself. "Outer Space" actually uses the word "mysogyny" - "No apologies/For all the misogyny/I just want some company/To watch my pornography". It sounds like it's all a bit more a ballet of equals, although he still isn't going to stop talking about where he's going to put his dick.
"Adderall Admiral" is about speed. It's quite chaotic, sounds cropping up everywhere, but slow. It's not Motorhead. It gets more documentary on "Nosebleeds" with a bit of soulful business looped over, ending with the image of "blood on her lips". Matched by "Party All The Time" - subject matter and downtempo sounds. So this melancholy strain - not too maudlin - nudges him further into the interesting territory. He says he was born "one day before St Pat", which would make him a Pisces, which would make a lot of sense. This sounds like Piscean hip hop. "EWNESW" is his biographical tune: "I'm living in the city where the weak gets swallowed/Belly of the beast". "Fields" too. It has a taut, twisted loop of tortured guitar and snares:
"Money talk/Only broke people listen."
Cataclysmic, prog musical mash at the beginning of "Scrap Or Die" - like the music Monkey would rap over. If he telling the story of how gutting houses keeps people in food and/or cash. There might be a clever metaphor to pull out connected with sampling and hip hop and what have you: I have not found it. He is apparently a fan of Grime and "Witit" sounds like it - very Playstation, staccato beats. Good for him.
So, it's not Public Enemy; there's no thrill of ideas and breaks marching together with power. But he's a guy worth listening to and some of the production innovates my think bulbs. But this album is too long, as almost every rap album in history has been. And it still fucks with people it shouldn't. In my long distance opinion. More listening to be done...
Rating: Gap Toothed Amphetamist out of Monstrous Detroit
Listening to Grizzly Bear, I realised I hadn't listened to Animal Collective's album yet. That's how slick I roll, you understand.
"Moonjock" is a joyful, gibberish-y burst as you'd maybe
expect. There are some space beeps as well, which are always a treat.
It's all electronic and explosive and drifts from one track to the next
in an ambient soup. The joyful yelps are all there. "Rosie Oh" is
relating a story of something or other with a sea reggae feel or
something. With squelches. There's that same Beach Boys-kind of joyfulness spreading
underneath the music, warm and wet. Is music that's based on certainty
or built up to cover the void of certainty's absence? It sounds very
optimistic, but then so did The Beach Boys and there was something dark
yawning open in the middle of that.
There is a woman at the centre of "Wide Eyed" as well. There are also goose noises. Or noises that sound like goose noises. "Father Time" sounds high Eighties like Howard Jones or something; not that I'm only hearing Eighties here. I seem to hear Eighties everywhere. "When I'm naked/Back home/Take my shoes off/Take my coat off" begins "New Town Burnout" and the music gives me the images of camels necking their way across the desert. Which sounds neither very Baltimore nor very Brooklyn. There are some cheap chiming sounds that bridge over into "Monkey Riches". The vocals go a bit Black Francis towards the end - maybe Americans always scream lyrics about monkeys, I dunno...
"Mercury Man" begins with bending noise and cheap electronics. "You always feel like mercury," he sings. Does that mean like poisonous? He has a rather accusatory tone. "Amanita" sounds a bit bassoony with Hounds of Lovewhoa oh oh's and lyrics about "misplaced futures" and "fantasy falling down" and missing storytellers.
"What are you gonna do out in the forest/I'm gonna out and remember my name/..I'm gonna bring back some stories and games."
Some primo beatnik supplement-reading business here, I should think.
"Sleeping Ute" sails in on a slightly pomp, wobbly guitar sound and majestic bass with antique, icy keyboard stabs. Louis XIV blues - "But I can't help myself" over the sound of slow, watery volcanoes. Verily, there's a handsome pop instinct running through the middle of "Speak In Rounds", wearing out shoe leather in an attempt to keep up with itself. Happier touches of Arcade Fire. "Yet Again" has me wondering whether they are a Coldplay it's OK to like; and by extension if it's OK to like them or not. There's a similar weedy-multi-tracked vocals bit and some dirtier, skittery sounds too. But I'm erring on the side of enthusiastic clemency.
More of a hushed and muffled drums feel to "The Hunt", and from the lyrics it doesn't seem too clear who is hunting whom. So perhaps the title is ironic, yeah? "A Simple Answer" is something about a "tired mantra/Goes ever onward" and it doesn't sound as though that title is ironic. Pianos are touched in a jazzy chamber. "No wrong, no right/Just do whatever you like" over some fluttering and looming noises. Damned hippies.
"What's Wrong" evokes Sunday night ITV crime dramas. The illusion of some moral slide pinned through with certainties - in a musical form. But the ending is sadder and more complicated and subtler. "gun-shy" smells of the Eighties, not like rotting slip-ons and queasy quiff-gel might smell. Like the scent of Miami Vice lemon trees on a summer evening, Michael Mann-ing itself with grace and neon up the nostrils to the brain. It has soft crunches in the middle, like a loungey Lennon/McCartney break. The melodies stack up sweet and substantial, a stack of smoky pancakes.
There's always a longing touch of gaucho in the songs too. "Half Gate" finds the gaucho riding into an echo chamber pop scenario and finds it provides exactly the sunset he needs to be silhouetted against. "Sun In Your Eyes" is quite the ambitious work, movements here and there, fading in and out, with quite a delicious acoustic guitar thread worked through the middle that makes me think of sunshine on water.
Brooklyn throws out another successful frond.
Rating: Louis XIV Pop out of Sunday Night Jazz Folk
I've liked a couple of Teengirl Fantasy tracks before now. They made their way onto some Insidious Junkbox podcasts back in the day. So I was keen to cast an ear over this.
It's all a bit sterile. Too many styles being tried on without any feeling of something new being germinated. "Timeline" has a bit of a feel of House and percolating happiness, but still too studio-bound. Opening "Orbit" has a touch of Croydon about it. But too much of the album sounds like a dry run-through of some ideas for a Beverly Hills Cop XIII soundtrack.
"Pyjama", the track with Panda Bear, contains more slow-moving shapes, musical manatees. Some drum patterns, but it's well, well worn stuff. Too many tinkling waterfalls of sound. Disappointing.
