Posts Tagged ‘Album Review’

The Wake – Perfumes and Fripperies

Posted: 20 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

Blaylox Records – 30th October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

My ignorance of The Wake clearly blows every last one of my goth / post-punk credentials: where have I been all my life? Pitched as for being for fans of all of my favourite bands from my teen goth period – which I never really left – namely The Sisters of Mercy, Peter Murphy, The Mission UK, Tones on Tail, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Psychedelic Furs, The Cure, the band emerged in the so-called ‘second wave’ of goth appearing on myriad compilations and extensive touring with peers including Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails, The Wake secured their place in goth and roll history.

‘Everything’, the second single lifted from the new album – their first in a quarter of a century – features Red Lorry Yellow Lorry’s Wolfie providing additional guitar, which further bolsters the release’s heritage credentials.

Not that it needs it: it’s a solid album in its own right. ‘Daisy’ is a daringly bleak, low-tempo opener that may not be quite Reptile House EP barren, but is nevertheless a spectacularly dark, atmospheric trudge through oppressively dark terrain, and at nearly six minutes long, it’s hardly an easy entrance.

Things go very Sisters circa ’85 with ‘Marry Me’, and the guitar work is clearly heavily influenced by Wayne Hussey, as are the vocals: this is their reimagining of the Sisters’ ‘Garden of Delight’ demo and it’s taut and murky, and they’ve got that heavily-chorused / valve sound nailed, and it’s that circa ’85 / ’86 vibe that drifts like a creeping smog of dry ice from every corner of Perfumes and Fripperies, aided by a dense production. While the swirling guitars are most obviously the defining aspect of the sound, the bass is thick and boomy, to the extent that you don’t so much hear the basslines as feel them, and they fill out the sound without being able to specifically separate the bass. Said shuddering bass is welded in a tight 4/4 to the mechanised drum tracks, which are pitched relatively low but are relentless – precisely as they should be.

There’s inevitably an element of comparing the motifs with precursive signatures: the tunnel-like vocal reverb is a Sisters signature that’s become a trope that so many bands have tried to emulate, with varying degrees of success.

The aforementioned ‘Everything’ is a hypnotic mesh of shoegaze that draws together early Lorries and All About Eve’s ‘Phased’, and Troy Payne’s vocals are treated with a steely metallic edge that replicates Chris Reed’s sound. Elsewhere, if the drum sound and overall structure of ‘Emily Closer’ is a Sisters / Rosetta Stone / Suspiria lift, the atmosphere is more Curesque, which the title kind of implies is the aim, and ‘Big Empty’ is hollow, brittle, a blanks pace of flanged bass and claustrophobically intense reverb.

‘Figurine’ marks a lurch into Fields of the Nephilim, and with the bombastic layers of female backing vocals wafting over some icy synths and a bassline that’s pure Simon Gallup on the last track, ‘Rusted’, it seems like The Wake have got all the goth bases covered. On the one hand, I should be irritated, as these things perpetuate the sameness of goth bands that’s been a bugbear of mine for years, largely because it feels self-limiting, like a genre trapped in time. But when it’s this well executed and the songs and production are this strong… you just can’t knock it.

Perfumes and Fripperies isn’t a great title, but it is a great album.

AA

a3729666156_10

Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full

Posted: 18 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Sacred Bones – 30th October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

This collaborative release is as interesting as it is unexpected. Coming from the heavier and of the guitar-driven spectrum, it isn’t that the coming together of Emma Right Rundle and Thou is entirely unfitting, but it is unquestionably intriguing. The coming together of two such powerful forces has, unsurprisingly, yielded a work that is yet more powerful still.

As the press release observes, ‘while Emma Ruth Rundle’s standard fare is a blend of post-rock-infused folk music, and Thou is typically known for its downtuned, doomy sludge, the conjoining of the two artists has created a record more in the vein of the early ‘90s Seattle sound and later ‘90s episodes of Alternative Nation.’

Needless to say, it’s pretty heavy in places, and not just sonically, although the guitars – more of which shortly – feel heavy enough to shatter rocks, and again, to refer to the liner notes is to reaffirm this as they note how ‘The lyrical content of the album is a marriage of mental trauma, existential crises, and the ecstatic tradition of the expressionist dance movement. “Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.” Melodic, melancholic, heavy, visceral.’

The grunge influence in this album is apparent and significant, and it’s nearly all in the riffage – but this is an album with rang and depth as well as some serious heft.

‘Killing Floor’ sees the trudging guitar riff emerging from the swirling fog of an atmospheric instrumental intro that borders on shoegaze, Rundle’s voice rises majestically from the thickly distorted power chords and Earth-like picking, and never has she sounded more commanding, more subtly powerful, and never has she come closer to sounding like Chelsea Wolf. And yet, never has she sounded more unique: Bryan Funk’s strained guttural vocal snarls are utterly gut-ripping and contrast with her majestic, emotionally-rich intonation. It’s one of those songs that suck you straight in, and instantly, you’re drawn into the maelstrom.

The album’s shortest song, ‘Monolith’ is a raging beast of a tune a skull-crushing battering of overloading guitars that comes on like a grunge juggernaut, balancing melody with a density that you feel batter against your chest. ‘Ancestral Recall’ swings between brooding ethereality and raging metal, grace and abrasion, but for the most part, it’s little short of absolutely fucking terrifying, a banshee scream howling into a wall of churning guitar noise that’s utterly punishing.

In contrast to the full-on barrage, there are hints of the goth-folk of early All About Eve on the slower, more sedate ‘Magickal Cost’, and once again, the rich, lilting qualities of Emma’s voice comes to the fore. But when the levee breaks around the midpoint, all hell breaks loose, as multi-layered guitars swerve and bend through a tempest of raging noise and a deluge of percussion. The contrasts, cast simultaneously, are stunning and pack all the impact.

The album’s final cut, ‘The Valley’ is deep, a slow-builder with supple violins teetering hesitantly behind rolling drums and soft swell of clean, echo-soaked guitar. It’s by far the most conventional-sounding song on the album, with the folk-infused rock flavour of Fleetwood Mac being more to the fore than anything remotely alternative – but then the last minute and a half is unbridled sonic annihilation as all of the pent-up fury is unleased.

It’s a fitting final to an absolutely stunning album, an album which explores a broad sonic and emotional range to hit hard in the delivery.

AA

489981

Gintas K – Sound & Spaces

Posted: 18 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
1

Powdered Hearts – 15th October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Gintas K releases albums more often than I change my clothes. That’s of course intended as a comment on the prolific nature of his output, rather than a confession about my personal hygiene post-lockdown, although not going into the office or being around people – or ever within two metres of them – has meant I’ve maybe made slightly less effort of late.

The same clearly can’t be said of Gintas K, at least in terms of his work, since I don’t know if he’s been tweaking away at his circuitry in his pyjamas or the same jeans for a week and a half or if he’s been bothering to shave or deodorise daily. I don’t need to, either, of course.

Anyway: Sound & Spaces explores what’s become established as familiar territory for Gintas K, with gloops and bibbles, froth and foam, squelchy bubbles of sound rising up randomly against the crackling burrs of electronic distortion. Sound & Spaces is less attacking and less abrasive than some previous outings, and is les intense and intensive in its interrogation of microcosmic space than some of his previous microscopic, microtonal explorations.

The first track – the thirteen-minute ‘Sounds & Spaces #1’ is a challenging mess of stammers and jolts, fizzing and crackling in a swampy slosh of analogue synth soup. It very much sets the tone, but in context, it’s a comparatively gentle start to what ultimately unravels to be quite a brain-shredder of a set.

‘Per aspera ad astra’ is a brief interlude of tingling, jangling dissonance before ‘Sounds & Spaces #3’ brings a bit of low-end grumbling, whining, and distortion, yawning undulations whizzing and popping all over.

By ‘Sounds & Spaces #4’, it’s almost impossible to differentiate distortion from percussion, and what originates where, although there are distinctly snare-like cracks in the feverish melting-pot of contrasting textures and tones, which become increasingly fragmented, fractured, and overloading as the album progresses. As an album it’s a frothy foment, and while some may find it simply uninteresting or a wash of so much noise they can ignore, I’m unlikely to be alone in finding the experience quite tense and uncomfortable – and nothing more so than the twenty seconds of silence at the end of the overwhelming chaos of ‘Sounds & Spaces #5’

If disorder offends your sensibilities, avoid this recording: once again, Gintas K has captured metal turbulence in aural form. It’s hard to process, but well worth enduring the turmoil for.

AA

a0638906201_10

Reinhold Freidl – KRAFFT

Posted: 17 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

zeitkratzer productions – zkr0027 – 23RD October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

As the founder of one of Europe’s leading avant-garde orchestral ensembles in the form of zeitkratzer, whose releases include recordings of Metal Machine Music, works by Stockhausen, and two collections of Whitehouse ‘covers’, Reinhold Friedl is very much at the forefront of contemporary classical. Formed in 1997 with Friedl on piano (sometimes a ‘prepared’ piano, a la John Cage), they’ve established themselves a formidable force, incorporating elements of free experimentalism and drone.

For the recording of KRAFFT, the nine-piece ensemble came together with another respected musical collective, Ensemble 2e2m, a chamber group from Paris dating back to 1972, known for their unique sound and the first recordings of Giacinto Scelsi’s music.

As the press release recounts, KRAFFT for orchestra was composed in 2016 as a commission from the French State and premiered in Paris and Marseille. It was also the first meeting of the two ensembles – and yet the come together perfectly to create four immense, drone-orientated passages.

Being Friedl, there is a great deal of detail and precision behind the methodology: this is certainly not random stop-start hums and thrums or elongated notes played with varying – and usually increasing – intensity, and for this reason I shall quite at length: ‘KRAFFT is a minimalist maximal composition: all instruments play in rhythmic unison throughout. Only the sounds and their combinations change relentlessly throughout the piece. KRAFFT is spelt wrong on purpose to create an ironic-onomatopoetic rendition of the German term “Kraft”, meaning “power” or “force”. The listener is exposed to a sonic undertow. The notion of huge power and force is connected here to clandestine and unknown rules controlling the progression of sound; something is happening, but we do not exactly know what, when or how. KRAFFT is composed with the help of the computer program TTM (Textural Transformation Machine), developed by Reinhold Friedl to sculpture multiple random processes.’

The TTM formed part of Friedl’s Ph.D. at Goldsmiths University London, and was developed by the composer to sculpture texture transformations with the help of sophisticated random processes. As such, Friedl’s compositional methodology develops way in which John Cage incorporated random determiners within his work, and in using a ‘machine’ to make those random selections, he distances the ‘composer’ from the composition and increases the likelihood of true randomisation.

Returning to KRAFFT, there is a clear trajectory to the composition as a whole, namely an intensity and volume which increases incrementally as it progresses over the course of half an hour. The first part is soft, light, even playful, moving into somewhat darker, more discordant territory onto the second.

By part 4, immense booming low-end notes surge and rumble with such density as to have an almost physical force. Atop of this, the smaller strings scrape, squawk and twitter like birdsong and feedback. It’s an eleven-minute tidal wave of sound that swells and surges to a crescendo of truly enormous proportions. While it’s safe to say it’s unlikely to be aired on Classic FM, KRAFFT is as accomplished and powerful orchestral work as you’ll hear all year.

AA

zkr0027_front

COIL – A Guide for Beginners / A Guide for Finishers

Posted: 14 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Cold Spring – 23rd October 2020

The reverence for Coil amongst their fanbase – which if anything has expanded in recent years, and particularly following the death of Peter Christopherson – is quite remarkable. Emerging in 1982 following the demise of Throbbing Gristle, Coil became the primary vehicle for Christopherson and partner John Balance after contributing to the early Psychic TV releases. And perhaps one of the reasons Coil are held in higher esteem than PTV is that their output, while still substantial, was less in volume but subject to a higher quality control, as well as pursuing esoteric experimentalism while largely managing to avoid cringe-inducing indulgence. That, and the fact they pushed so many musical boundaries without being massive tossers in a musical field crowded with individuals whose creative genius was tempered by tendencies toward major-league assholism: P-Orridge should require no real qualification now, and similarly, the shady characters of the industrial and neofolk scenes, not least of all Boyd Rice and Douglas Pearce have long been exposed. And the fact that both members suffered premature deaths only compounds the way their work resonates with fans, who can only contemplate what cuold have been

Everything around the rights to the Coil catalogue is spectacularly complex, and the origins of this compilation aren’t even entirely straightforward, having originally released by Russian label FEELEE, featuring tracks from all their major albums (barring The Ape of Naples which was released after Balance’s untimely death). They were hand-picked by Coil to represent their best work and originally released to mark their first performance in Moscow in 2001.

Subsequently out of print on CD for almost two decades, this edition courtesy of Cold Spring spans Coil’s entire living career, with A Guide For Beginners – The Voice Of Silver and A Guide For Finishers – A Hair Of Gold being made available together in one deluxe set.

As Nick Soulsby observed of Balance and Christopherson, writing for thevinylfactory.com, ‘As Coil they had embarked on a wild ride from industrial origins originating in the post-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, through a spell as dancefloor-channelling experimentalists, onward to their destination as the respected priesthood of pagan rite electronica’. And with a career spanning three decades and eighteen studio albums, it can be daunting to know quite how best to make inroads, so a ‘Best of’ makes sense.

Disc one (A Guide for Beginners) spans their later career, while disc two (A Guide for Finishers) delves deeper towards their origins, and together, in a slightly mixed-up reverse chronology, we’re able to trade their development, and what’s most interesting and apparent is their range and their willingness to explore.

Singling out tracks from a collection that spans twenty tracks and a monster running time, but emerging from the swathe of brooding dark ambience and esotericism, ‘Ostia (The Death of Pasolini)’ stalks brooding neofolk territory, dark, stark, and portentous, but without any of the nationalistic bullshit that often typifies the genre, while ‘Where Are You’ is the soundtrack to psychosis, an eerily minimal backing creeping uncomfortably behind a monotone monologue that’s unsettling and uncomfortable.

Brooding piano and shrieking woodwind and horns forge haunting soundscapes while elsewhere, minimal two-note organ and trilling electronic extranea provide the backdrop to mesmerising spoken-word narratives. Cut-up samples and fragments drift in and out (no surprise for a band photographed with William Burroughs, who had an album released on Industrial Records in 1981) and the thing that really comes across most powerfully from this compilation is that while so any ‘experimental’ and ‘industrial’ acts were – and are – pretty dull, Coil were consistently engaging, focuses on tone and resonance, and ever-evolving.

It would be hard to improve on a selection picked by the artists in terms of what can be considered the best representation of their output, and bias aside, this is hard to fault by way of an introduction.

AA

COIL A Guide For Beginners - A Guide For Finishers - Lo res album cover for web

Carl Stone – Stolen Car

Posted: 9 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
1

Unseen Worlds – 25th September 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Pitched as ‘the gleeful, heart racing sound of hijack, hotwire, and escape’, Carl Stone’s latest release of a remarkably lengthy career is a smash-and grab hotch-potch of percussion-driven pieces.

Writing on the album on its release, Stone comments, ‘These tracks were all made in late 2019 and 2020, much of when I was in pandemic isolation about 5000 miles from my home base of Tokyo. All are made using my favorite programming language MAX. However distinct these two groupings might be they share some common and long-held musical concerns. I seek to explore the inner workings of the music we listen to using techniques of magnification, dissection, granulation, anagramization, and others. I like to hijack the surface values of commercial music and re-purpose them offer a newer, different meaning, via irony and subversion.’

Stone’s purpose is integral to appreciating the album, because the sounds with which it I formulated are the epitome of derivative, and without that context, one may be inclined to consider Stolen Car a serious endeavour rather than a work of subversion and commentary.

It begins with ‘Huanchaco, is a hyperactive mess of undulating synth which duels with freakout freeform jazz horns, all propelled by some frenetic drum ‘n’ bass beats.

Stammering, overlapping vocal loops provide the fabric of ‘Auburn’. Cut and spliced in such short fragments as to bubble and blur, and as everything melts into a foamy soup, there’s a fast-pace indie tune playing on the radio in the next room, and this in turn melts into the r’n’b pop froth of ‘Au Jus’, a chopped-up summary of the sound of the autotuned contemporary mainstream – slick, stylised, and devoid of content.

As the album progresses, everything seems to accelerate, growing more dizzying as K-pop and Katy Perry are whipped into an out-of-control fairground. Each track feels – and sounds – like listening to the entire top 40 single chart for the last five years with each single playing simultaneous and 25% faster than recorded. With the quickening of the pace also comes an increasingly bubblegumminess, but also a sense that things are out of control. It feels like a metaphor for postmodern culture, its endless acceleration built on a perpetual recycling whereby surface substitutes depth.

Stolen Car is a disorientating rollercoaster of a ride – a joyride where the joy is edged with panic as the smile becomes a fixed plastic grin as the fun turns to fear that at any moment you’re going to flip off the road, meet head-on with a wall, or worse still, carry on going, ever faster, forever….

AA

a3719238387_10

David Toop – Apparition Paintings

Posted: 7 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
1

Room40 – 11th September 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

I struggle to keep up with the influx of material I’m sent for review, and have done for at least the last 8 years, which may or may not be coincidental with a) becoming a parent b) rapidly developing a massive network or PR and band contacts. It turns out that there comes a point when you don’t need to ask to be added to mailing lists, and people just find you. Anyway. Sometimes I just struggle, but that’s a whole other matter.

Apparition Paintings is a collection of oddly disjointed compositions that alternately soothe and trip the listener, moving between mellow melodies and rippling calmness – ‘All I Desire’ is a slow melt of chillwave, electronic post-rock and Disintegration-era Cure – and eerie weirdness – ‘When I first came here (I thought I’d never get used to the trains; now when it’s quiet I get nervous)’ is part chamber-pop, part deranged spookiness. None of this sits comfortably, in any context, and the deeper one delves into the eerie collage work that is Apparition Paintings, the more unsettling it becomes.

Toop’s notes which accompany the release are as disjointed and confounding as the music they accompany: ‘Don’t ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares? Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box. “’Things’ in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous,” wrote Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. Maybe sounds are melting ‘things’, tired of the monotonous real.’

Yet on a certain level it makes sense. In a post-Covid world. The monotonous real is the lived experience of the everyday for many – not that it wasn’t before, but now, without the commute, without being in proximity to the volatile colleague, the explosive tension or the whatever, the monotonous real is confined to the household and to within the head. It may not be immediately apparent, but Apparition Paintings is a sort of inside soundtrack of the now, with extraneous and unexpected noises pinging back and firth across the main sonic backdrops to each piece.

‘She fell asleep somewhere outside the world’ finds a disembodied female voice singing a quavering melody, hesitantly. It’s a popular trope, but the deranged, childlike singing against a spooky backdrop is an effective trigger for cognitive dissonance. Apparition Paintings is an album that very much speaks to the sounds of the interior.

AA

a2399192845_10

Eric Copeland – Dumb It Down

Posted: 5 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

Eric Copeland, operating outside of his main musical outlet of Black Dice, continues his understates solo career with the discreet release of Dumb it Down. It’s almost as if he’s on a campaign of anti-promotion, and would prefer his work to spread by word of mouth and osmosis. There’s a perverse logic in that, which corresponds with his unusual career trajectory: bursting onto the scene as an act with decidedly hardcore leanings, Black Dice released a slew of singles and Eps between 1998 and 2000 that charted their evolution towards abrasive experimental noise, before an unexpected swerve saw their debut album in 2002 present expansive pieces of an infinitely more chilled-out nature.

Having subsequently influenced – and crossed over with – Animal Collective who, they put in contact with the Fat Cat Records label back in 2003, Black Dice may have been somewhat eclipsed and Copeland’s solo work existing some way below the radar.

Dumb it Down isn’t exactly a hugely commercial proposition, to be fair: the title track is the first on the album and while it got a sort of bouncy feel to it, with hints of early Wire, Suicide, Stooges, and Cabaret Voltaire tossed together and blended with a psychedelic twist, most of it’s buried in so much murk: it’s fuzzy, bassy, and sounds like a demo recorded on a condenser mic. But then, it’s cool, because it also sounds like a lot of the stuff on the Pebbles compilation series. So yes, it sounds more like a lost gem than a contemporary work, and this is true of the album as a whole.

Across the album’s ten tracks, all of which are so swampy that they sound as if they’ve been recoded from underwater, or from the next room. There are some viable sabs of electro-funk, with hints of Taking Heads and dashes of 80s robotix all churned in together, but it seems to have been recorded and mixed to deliberately undermine any commercial potential. In the past, commenting on the likes of The fall, Pavement, and Silver Jews among others, I’ve suggested that lo-fi production or not, you can’t keep a good song down, but Copeland has seemingly gone out of his way to absolutely fucking bury an entire album’s worth f good song – give or take.

There are strains of Silver Apples’ analogue tripouts which emerge from the dark depths, ‘Motorcycles’ sounds like Suicide playing ‘Louie Louie’ in a basement bar three blocks away. And far from dumbing things down as the title suggests, this album presents a real challenge to the listener, namely ‘do you have the patience?’ Well, do you? Such patience is rewarded, however much frustration the audio levels may cause, because the no-fi primitivism is, ultimately, integral to the experience of the album.

The MP3 age has made us snobbish about fidelity – and the trend for 180gm vinyl pressings likewise. And some may say that there’s no excuse for rough, sloppy recordings anymore, but anyone who recalls or has a taste for lo-fi, be it 60s psych, late 70s / early 80s bedroom 4-tracking will vouch for the way in which this kind of stuff can touch the listener in ways which resonate beyond the articulable. Ultimately, Dumb It Down is lowkey, lo-fi and low-impact, and I like it.

AA

a4244930402_10

elkyn – beech remixes

Posted: 4 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
1

2nd October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Back in July, elk impressed with the Beech EP, a magnificently understated work of haunting grace. The project of 22-year old Leeds based multi-instrumentalist Joey Donnelly, elk has now evolved into elkyn, which comes with certain connotations of what elvin is to elves, and is certainly easier to find on-line.

This first release under the new moniker features re-imaginings of the songs from beech by family and friends, including Miles. (brother Mikey), Mark Peters, S.T. Manville, Tim Wright, and others.

It’s not entirely surprising that the artists who’ve reshaped the songs have focused on their dreamy quality, and Mark Peters’ soft, soporific take on ‘yue’, which was aired in advance of the release is representative.

With the exception of ‘something’, which on this release is retitled as ‘here’ (which sounds like a Depeche Mode doing dreamwave), it’s the same songs in the same sequence, but such a very different record.

Although being twice the length of the original, ‘avenue’ is perhaps the least radically altered, at least in terms of the song itself between an extended intro and outro. Elsewhere, Miles. brings some stark synths and waves of ambience, not to mention sampled narrative to ‘Seventeen’, and it’s a radical transformation as the softly-picked acoustic song becomes a wistful dapple-shaded shoegazer, with Joe’s voice floating on a cloud above it all. Shed Seven’s Joe Johnson retains the brittle fragility of ‘winter’, and the last song, ‘stupid world’ sees Tim Wright introduce some grinding, wheezing organ drone and some stuttering to add more weight and tension to the cracked melancholic introspection.

What makes this release is just how sensitive and considered the reworkings are, completely transforming the songs – in very different ways – while preserving their essence and integrity.

AA

AA

a2856295865_2

Short-Haired Domestic – Short-Haired Domestic

Posted: 4 October 2020 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

2nd October 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Having been brought into Talk Talk to assist with remixing on ‘It’s My Life’ in 1984, Tim Friese-Greene became an integral contributor to the band on their subsequent albums. Short Haired Domestic sees Tim come together with his wife, Lee, formerly of 90s act Sidi Bou Said and currently lead vocalist and guitar player for Pavlova.

As the liner notes explain, the vocals for each song are sung in a different language, and ‘have at their heart a breakbeat loop, sampled fragments, scratching, insistent funk and Latin rhythms, surprising appearances of acoustic guitar and just about every sound it’s possible to wring from a WASP synthesiser’.

This manifests as a collection of songs with a quirky charm to their style, which has something of a mainland European, vaguely gallic feel to it, and their touchstones of Stereolab and Francois Hardy, among others, sit comfortably. It’s so not my regular bag, but sometimes I need something to chill to, and a complete change of scene by way of a pallete-cleanser.

The titles are helpful in their explanatory nature but disclose little about the stance on the subjects being sung about – but that probably speaks more of a global Anglocentrism when it comes to song lyrics than anything – and also highlights that you don’t necessarily need words to appreciate a song.

It’s a laid-back sashaying groove and swinging beat that sets the scene with ‘A song in Latin about the importance of comfortable shoes’, and without a lyric sheet and translation, it’s hard to be certain, but it sounds like they rather like them. And who wouldn’t? Who says you can’t have style and comfort?

They hit an insistent funk groove of ‘A song in Spanish addressed to men who drive big cars’, and work it hard, while ‘A Song in Bulgrian for Lovers of Gin; is positively loungey in its laid-back jazziness, a head-nodding groove as smooth as the silkiest chocolate. Things get a bit Prince on ‘A song in Italian saluting his mother’, and there’s even a dash of piano reminiscent of Talk Talk on the slower, sparser head-nodding A song in Hindi for insomniacs’.

For their sugared pop coating of sunny melodies, these simple-sounding and accessible tunes are layered and steeped in experimentalism, and they pull it off with a deceptive ease.

AA

Short-Haired Domestic (album cover)

Older Entries
Newer Entries