Millie & Andrea - Drop the Vowels

Millie & Andrea

Drop the Vowels

31 March 2014

Modern Love

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Manchester’s Andy Stott has had quite the year, releasing perhaps the greatest electronica album in a decade with Faith in Strangers in November, and Drop the Vowels under the name Millie & Andrea back in March with label-mate Miles Whittaker (the “Millie” to Stott’s “Andrea”). Where Faith in Strangers was about redefining what electronica is and could be about, smashing boundaries, and bridging the gap between techno and classical, Drop the Vowels is about having fun in the studio and being completely ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, Drop the Vowels is just as dark as anything Stott does, but one listen reveals that it was created in an atmosphere of carefree creativity without any pretence of making an important statement.

 

If you ever downloaded HammerHead Rhythm Station back in the day, the freeware six-track sequencer that let you create your own techno tracks (in stunning mono!), you’ll recognize about half the samples used here. As a tribute to late-‘90s techno, DtV is a blast. The tracks feel improvised but not directionless—perhaps the result of hours of jamming, then a quick two or three takes dedicated to tape before moving on to the next creation. Everything here is in start contrast to the carefully composed perfectionist pieces to be found on Faith in Strangers, but that contrast is what makes the latter album all the more impressive: Stott can function in settings both improv and non- and emerge as a master of each, where most other producers never come close to mastering one or the other.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

East India Youth - Total Strife Forever

East India Youth

Total Strife Forever

13 January 2014

Stolen Recordings

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

William Doyle adopted the name East India Youth in reference to the East India Docks area of East London, where he lived while writing Total Strife Forever (a pun on Total Life Forever, the second album by Foals). The album, a mixture of ambient works, techno tracks, and proper synthpop songs, was nominated for the 2014 Mercury Prize. Picture a more adventurous Owen Pallett without the control freak tendencies. East India Youth offers instrumental pieces as fully-fledged compositions rather than as bridges between the “real” songs on the album, something that sets him apart from his fellow art pop/one-man-band performers.

 

“Dripping Down” is a classic art pop song, one of the few tracks on the album to feature vocals, that at first seems incongruous given the two ambient tracks preceding it. But following it is the techno romp of “Hinterland,” making it clear that Total Strife Forever is no easily pigeonholed collection. “Heaven, How Long” is pure New Romantic, and while that might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it works in the context of the album. Doyle channels his inner Thom Yorke on the beatless “Song for a Granular Piano,” a piece that swells and rolls through waves of piano before falling apart into surface noise glitch.

 

TSF is one of those albums that does a very good job of mimicking an important and innovative album even if it isn’t actually one itself. Is the tradition of the one-man-band with keyboard and loop machine already so entrenched that several of its recurring motifs have already become crystallized tropes? If so, then Doyle (along with, perhaps, SOHN) is at the front of that first wave of imitators. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: some of the best music of post-punk, for example, came in its first wave of copycats. It remains to be seen if on future albums Doyle will forge a more distinct identity, but even though his present identity is still somewhat lost in the wave, the music of East India Youth is still pleasing nonetheless.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Goat - Commune

Goat

Commune

23 September 2014

Sub Pop

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Swedish psychedelic rock peddlers Goat claim to be from Korpilombolo, a hamlet of half a thousand people in Norrbottens Iän, the northernmost county of the country, although in truth they don’t even know how to spell the town’s name correctly. (It’s possible that there’s some basis in fact to the legend, but the band is currently based in Göteborg.) Masters of disinformation, Goat perform their highly improvised “world music” while wearing masks, for much the same reason as did compatriots The Knife: to divert attention from the individuals who make up the band and to put the focus on the music itself. Their music is a combination of afrobeat, psychedelia, and prog—picture Fela Kuti fronting Älgarnas Trädgård while covering Funkadelic and you’re starting to get the idea.

 

Despite the improvised nature of Commune, there are some highly memorable melodies present on the record, such those to be found on “Hide from the Sun” and “Talk to God.” Most importantly, this is improvised rock music that isn’t boring (because, let’s face it, there’s nothing duller than a twenty-minute jam by a bunch of stoned hippies). Goat bring to the table a lifetime of training in spontaneous composition, and they don’t fuck around—some of the tracks on Commune clock in at under three minutes, and they’re fully realized wholes rather than edits from longer jams. Goat make music that is simultaneously inclusive and uncompromising: it welcomes you into its world with open arms but doesn’t dumb itself down if you’re too slow to understand. One of the better bands of the psychedelic revival of the last half a decade.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Eagulls - Eagulls

Eagulls

Eagulls

3 March 2014

Partisan

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

If you’re like me and think that Pornography was The Cure’s best album, that Bauhaus never topped In the Flat Field, and fantasize about a love child between these two legendary LPs, then Eagulls is your go-to record of 2014. The record pays tribute to the post-punk/goth rock scene of London in the early ‘80s without sounding derivative; indeed, the band generates so much open-wounded anger and existential angst that even if they covered note for note the entire Killing Joke ‘80s catalogue they’d still sound fresh and new.

 

Eagulls show a sense of melody within their condensation-of-all-human-pain-ever-into-three-and-a-half-minute tracks that sets them apart from the Peter Murphys and Robert Smiths of thirty years ago. Tracks like “Opaque” and “Possessed” worm their way into your ear’s memory and have you singing them to yourself hours later, something you might find difficult to duplicate with “The Figurehead” or “Double Dare.” Eagulls avoid the slower tempos—the slowest things you’ll find on their debut LP are still very moshable, and I’m pretty sure “restraint” and “subtlety” are words that don’t exist in any dictionary the members of the Leeds quintet have ever read. Every track is a primal scream echoing through a deep cavern full of bats and toxic gasses, and as such is a thing of incredible beauty.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Gazelle Twin - Unflesh

Gazelle Twin

Unflesh

22 September 2014

Last Gang

 

4.5 stars out of 5

 

 

British composer Elizabeth Bernholz records harsh electronic music under the name Gazelle Twin, Unflesh being her second LP. The former medical student deals with themes of the human body, whether as a source of pain, anxiety, or grief. Bernholz manipulates her voice through various production effects, but these only enhance her emotive power, never obscure it. Somewhere between Pharmakon and Crystal Castles, the music of Unflesh is part techno, part industrial, but post-genre in both cases in that it’s the music that is created to serve the purpose of each unique song, rather than the songs being constructed out of various clichés of these genres.

 

In her more straight-forward compositions, like “Anti Body,” Bernholz shows a knack for using the pop song structure to build tracks that are simultaneously catchy and attractive yet creepy and unsettling. At other moments, such as “Premonition,” she is gentler, but still charged with fear and anxiety, recalling the tenser moments of Hundred Waters. The closer, “Still Life,” is a slow but relentless industrial voyage into the harrowing psychology of a miscarriage. Bernholz doesn’t shy away from discussing the open wounds of sorrow and anguish; indeed, her music thrives on it. One of the most vital records of the year.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Arca - Xen

Arca

Xen

4 November 2014

Mute

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Venezuelan producer Alejandro Ghersi composes some highly unusual electronic music under the name Arca. Having done production for four tracks on Kanye West’s Yeezus and FKA twigs’s EP2, one might expect Arca’s own material to be hip hop/R&B-centric, but in truth it’s on the fringes of the electronica avant-garde. There are no dope beats here—indeed, the majority of these tracks have no beats at all—rather, Ghersi’s flow is in his melodies, built from many disparate and fractured parts into a mesmerizing whole, and liable to change tempo and direction frequently and without warning.

 

While it isn’t high concept art-tronica, featuring grand themes and deep philosophical statements, Xen is experimental in the way that Autechre is: Ghersi gets right inside the sounds and pulls them inside out, turning the creation of new sounds into its own joyful goal. The title track is a good example of the Arca vision in full realization: every sound analyzed and questioned, every assumption discarded, every tradition tossed out, with the resulting music being completely new (although, granted, still using some tropes of the “normal” music, such as the chromatic scale). If you’re looking for a new way to hear music, Xen is a good place to begin your journey.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Sleaford Mods - Divide and Exit

Sleaford Mods

Divide and Exit

28 April 2014

Harbinger Sound

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Jason Williamson has been speak-rapping his shizzle over the course of more than half a dozen albums now, but it was with Divide and Exit that he and new co-conspirator (on the last three LPs) Andrew Fearn that Sleaford Mods broke through and became impossible to ignore. Williamson is a slam poet of the English working class, boasting about how he just jerked off into your toilet and dissing the bland music of yesteryear: “Chumbawamba weren’t political/They were just crap.” (While this is basically preaching to the choir, it’s refreshing to hear someone say it, regardless.)

 

Impossible to hear without thinking of The Fall, the music of Sleaford Mods is a stripped down post-punk distillation that consists mostly of bass and sampled drums. Fearn’s music—abrasive and groovy in equal proportions—provides a perfect accompaniment to Williamson’s contempt-saturated observations on bleak, poor, post-industrial Englishness. When Williamson snarls, “You scratch my back/I don’t scratch anything/Apart from my nuts,” he fucking means it, mate. Williamson’s rhymes derive from observations on life and the stream-of-consciousness wordplay that follows from them. He doesn’t construct elaborate narratives like those of, for example, Kate Tempest, but he doesn’t need to. Williamson’s power derives from his anger—not simply being angry and punching you in the face, but letting that anger blossom into the beautiful flowers of poetic rage, a lush garden of caustic social commentary… and then punching you in the face.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger