The 2kDozen 500: #48 - Cate le Bon, "Cyrk"

I've been waiting a while for this to come on Spotify, but the powers that do have yet to oblige - so I'm listening to the stream again instead - which is here http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/av/2012/01/video-premiere-cate-le-bon---fold-the-cloth-2.html.

The missus and I really enjoyed the cool, perpendicular strut of her last/first album, "Me Oh My" in 2010. And "Cyrk" is in a similar vein - pop from an angle. She describes it herself as "Cut a remote island in two and place one half to your ear…" and "a time travel travelogue which continually returns the sea. I mostly write about the sea, matters of the heart and animals – or a mish-mash of all three". So it's nice to know that people can have ideas as impenetrable as I do about their own music.

A kitchen table psychedelic feel of birds in the garden and mushrooms in the tea. Domestic scale. "Falcon Eyed" gets stuck straight in with a poptastic approximation of a Velvets groove - but a Velvets with a Syd or Nick Drake tugging at the melodic strings. "Puts Me To Work" sounds a wonkily upbeat theme from a Seventies sitcom about a dysfunctional married couple - "You kill me with empathy." Cate's voice is so crisp and playful she could be doing Jackanory. She seems to mumble and trill at the same time. "Greta" tumbles into tumbledown honky tonk piano and solo Salvation Army trumpet and military snare.

"What I hoped for most/Was to be his greatest host/He'd make my hands his home" Cate sings on "The Man I Wanted" before a spooky recorder interlude. There's a lot of off-kilter chat about men. That would be the matters of the heart, I suppose. "Through The Mill" has a Bronte Country feel of moors and sea voyages and isolation.

As a follow up to the 2010 album, there may not be as many immediate hooks; but her path will carry on a while longer yet.

Rating: Mish Mash out of Travelogue

The 2kDozen 500: #47 - Blondes, "Blondes"

Courtesy of a stream on Drowned in Sound/Soundcloud here - http://drownedinsound.com/news/4144408.

"Psychedelic and throbbing", they said. Yes, please. Like a transcendental headache on an astral projection to the seaside.

It's intense, but it doesn't drone or growl. Just liminal menace and low-slung rhythms. The track titles pair off nicely as well - "Lover"/"Hater" followed by "Business"/"Pleasure", "Wine"/"Water" and "Gold"/"Amber". It even has a touch of The Orb or The KLF's "Space" album in its no-nonsense exploration, lights winking and scanners sweeping. "Pleasure" in particular has a gorgeous, crabby Ming The Merciless electro-thunder, crackling out across the artificial horizon.

 

"Wine" intoxicates as you might expect, were you as cloddish of the imagination as I am. Maybe if I had a clearer idea of the means of production, I could work out why this is quite so good. I could better understand and describe the effects. It bubbles as it slinks as it moves. It's a Willy Wonka caramel starcruiser with twin Soda Stream engines. (It isn't.) It's the sound the TARDIS should make when it dematerialises. (Or at least it should be.) The sound propulses.

Reading a bit more about this release, it's a compilation of three 12" releases plus "Gold"/"Amber". And the last two (at least) were almost entirely improvised and each recorded in one take. So there's the energy, there's the forward motion. It finally dissipates on "Amber" with all the oceanic ebbing metaphors I can muster. Expert.

Rating: Pulsar out of Quartz

The 2kDozen 500: #46 - Errors, "Have Some Faith In Magic"

Back in the land of the electronic blizzard.

Epic math-rock electronic bombastic business. Music with which to explore the stars. Powered by motherboards and pieces of plastic with ghost voices of the crew in suspended animation and the distorted guitars they hear in their dreams. Ulysses 31 with proton packs and even cooler beards. (Though I'm sure it's actually possible to have a cooler beard.)

"Tusk" doesn't have an obvious Fleetwood Mac connection, but there is some wailing guitar and swooping keys. "Magna Encarta" carries a big suitcase, stuffed with Fuck Buttons-like tension, distant vocals and a mini-Radiophonic workshop of other bits and pieces, doodling and oozing in and out. "Pleasure Palaces" cracks out the hand-claps and some hedonistic pulses - touch of that there New Order.

I feel the need to map out all these keyboard onto some kind of chart, drawing out all the connections they make until I have a tube map of my understanding of these beautiful, electronic noises. But I have no idea where to start. Would it all pour out of Kraftwerk, squidly and sleek? Or would it be a messy Gordian nest of intertangled wires, new threads cropping up all over the landscape?

"The Knock" could be an extended theme for an Eighties semi-supernatural cop shop - Bergerac meets Sapphire and Steel meets Tomorrows World. "Canon" is a patient piece of terror. "Earthscore" has some Depeche Mode like vocals chopped into the mix amongst the fractals and surprise bongos. "Cloud Chamber" fills up with the kind of disco gasses you'd expect from the writing on the tin. Finally, "Holus-Bolus" skirts Koyaanisqatsi-like across the face of the home planet on its return trajectory.

This shares a lot of echo, fuzz and fog with a lot of that dream house/witch pop coalition that dominates huge swathes of my earscape at the moment. But it's reached this point from a different place and propulsed by Errors own steam. I'm not sure what the title is about though. I'm a believer, baby: but there's some spark missing that would move it out from the electro-mechanical to the magical.

Rating: Blasting out of Mathrockospheres

The 2kDozen 500: #45 - Colorama, "Llyfr Lliwio"

Following on from some of the listening I was doing last weekend in Sheffield, this is the more recent Colorama album, translating as "Colouring Book", which is more local, more low-key and more Welsh than its more psychedelic antecedent "Box".

There are a lot of expert melodists roaming about Welsh pop, but few wield a melody more expertly than this. Some in Welsh, some in English, one in Spanish - I think.

"Lisa Lan" opens with words of love and a tinkling child-like sound. The vocals sound so close to the mic and so intimate, I imagine it being mumbled under the breath on a walk home from the pub after an exciting first date. That image may be because "Mas Ar Y Dre" begins about walking home in soaked shoes on a Friday night and makes it seem like the most beautiful thing that could ever happen.

"Eleri" sits in the middle of the album, its spaghetti-western majesty glinting in the desert sun. Mournful flute, rattling chains and a stirring melody, though my meagre Welsh can't make out much of the lyrics. Eleri sounds like a lucky woman. "Valley Song" is a sweet inversion of the hiraeth of the Welsh exile, with thoughts of home bringing simple warmth and promise of a happy ending. Before "Safara" ends with some bossanova swish.

"I want to end my days /In my family home/Then if I die I'll be/Happy to go."

Rating: Delight out of Understatement

The 2kDozen 500: #44 - The 2 Bears, "Be Strong"

Ah, yeah! This House revival is going places now. Back into the past. Bring on the First Winter of Love!

I'm also big fan of Hot Chip. "The Warning" is one of my most toppingest albums of all time. Joe Goddard seems a solid bloke as well - in more ways than one. (I refer to his burliness, stealthily and with great comic effect.)

Tongues are wedged wittily in the back of my mind. Ataris and Roland 808s for goalposts. "Bear Hug" sounds as though it has tumbled from yellow Smiley skies, acid rain straight out of 1988. The title track is a list tune - you don't get any more 1989 than a list song, eh Billy Joel? I'm looking at you, The Beloved. Some artists that would make my list - Todd Terry! The KLF! The Art of Noise! And the rumbling, pitch-altered voice could be straight off Shut Up And Dance's "The Bouncer".

"Warm & Easy" sets a summer scene of "Computer Love on the stereo" with "Test Matches on the radio", which beats Will Smith's idea of summertime to all Hell. I can't think of the last album I heard that was so unequivocally positive and affirmative and permissive. "Take A Look Around" lists out a whole stream of behaviour that is alright with them "if you want to" - and not in a Rihanna, bend-me-over-the-desk-why-don't-you kind of way. "Ghosts & Zombies" has some delicious, chewy bassline going on to draw the miserable undead outside on into the party.

I lack the technological vocabulary, so I can only describe the sound of "Increase Your Faith" as ZX Spectrummy. "Heart of the Congos" has a nice little parp of wobbly brass running through it. (And is also another great album.) "Church" has organ. Of course. And steel pans.

"I love your pretty face/And your tough determination/I love your body too/Let's mate and make a nation."

It may get a little tired with repeated listenings, as the four-to-the-floor is pretty relentless, cheerfully driving the good vibes and maybe choosing to ignore the greyness inside and out. And it's not quite as poignant as when Hot Chip really got their man/boy mojo working. But two furry ursine thumbs up.

Lovely.

Rating: Jacking out of Winter Blues

The 2kDozen 500: #43 - Crosses, "EP 2"

Chanced upon his one via Spotify. Liked the fact the band's name was three crosses (but I can't reproduce them here). It all looked quite Brooklyn and dark.

Then found out that it was a side project of head Deftone Chino Moreno. They were a band that I always meant to give a proper listen to back in the dark days of Nu Metal and the early Noughties. Even the support of Zane Lowe hasn't entirely kicked this idea in the head. But I've yet to remember a single tune of theirs.

This I like though. A bit. It's a bit Nine Inch Nails. A bit Depeche Mode. That moody, serious stuff that should be walked to in slow motion across either a black & white Anton Corbijn desert or some Mitteleuropa architecture. Music with big, bending chords for giants to strut to. Like the good bits in Stiltskin and Babylon Zoo records. There's a curious hormonal reaction to the business, a chill warmth. That Lana del Ray thing again.

I wonder quietly to myself whether "Prurient" isn't directed at a groupie fanbase: all about shutting up and "trying it" and "being excited". Kind of sexless, but fun. "Telepathy" has a nice nagging bassline, stretching out across a big plateau of keyboard. "As long as you play my game/I'll let you win." Is he being sexy again? No wonder he had to start a side project.

"1987" cuts off dead sudden, like. Which reminds me to dig out my cassette of "The Downward Spiral" and give it another go in the car on the way to work. I once put that as my favourite album on a job application: what was I thinking? It was a shadowy time.

Rating: Him out of Deftones.

The 2kDozen 500: #42 - Prinzhorn Dance School, "Clay Class"

Not much time to do this justice. Work early in the morning. 42 albums needing to be listened by the end of the month to try and keep on target for the Big 500 for the year.

Prinzhorn remind me of the lamented 120 Minutes that used to bleed out my TV from MTV2 back in them Noughties: the sinewy basslines, the home-made videos, the intensity on their faces. Usually some top notch animation as well. But MTV only has eyes for Hulk Hogan these days. Douches.

"Fuck-bruises on skinny arms" - that's a good line. There's a timely, late Seventies/early Eighties economic downturn feel, summoning up Gang of Four or The Fall or Young Marble Giants. "Skinny trees/Naked in winter/Britain in Bloom": are you sensing a pattern? Sparse and insomniac and wintry. Elegant strumming. And I absolutely love bassline-heavy musics.

And at the end, "Shake Your Jar" reminds us to "rattle their cages" and "let the fight back in". Sleek and to the point, yeah?

Rating: Slogans out of Necessity