Al bums 07/10
Cass McCombs Big Wheel + Others (Domino) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Oct 14 This is the seventh album from the sporadically prolific, classically troubadour-esque songwriter who nominally calls Baltimore his home.You don’t get as far as releasing this many records, especially in the crowded singersongwriter pool, without having a certain something about you, and so it’s proved here.‘Big Wheel And Others’ is a slow, languorous album – a record for a road trip on a sunny day, despite its several dark passages. ‘Sean I’ has a stoned, cloudy-eyed feel, with Dylanesque vocals and slightly country-ish lyrics sliding over a repetitive two-note riff, and ‘Morning Star’ has overtones of Elliot Smith in both sound and style, but the high point here is ‘The Burning Of The Temple’, which carries echoes of Leonard Cohen. It’s a superbly downbeat song, which if personified would be sitting in a basement bar, its hands cradling a triple whiskey, an inescapable melancholy consuming its soul. Another highlight comes in ‘Joe Murder’, a brooding rock epic with grandiose tendencies and vaguely hippy-ish lyrics, like,“I burn my wallet and purge my soul”.With such a strong set of influences so evident, you sometimes wonder where McCombs is in all of this, and yet while there’s nothing particularly startling about ‘Big Wheel and Others’, compared to McCombs’ output so far, it’s a record that exudes a quality from start to finish that will see his existing fan suitably pleased.
07/10
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Teeth of The Sea
Dan Avery
Master
Drone Logic
(Rocket) By Reef Younis. In stores now
(Phantasy) By Sam Walton. In stores now
If previous album ‘Your Mercury’ taught us anything, it’s that Teeth of the Sea aren’t afraid of diving into their churning, self-made gloom without an escape route. Content to muddle around dense melodies, electronic murk, foundation-shaking pulses and ragged Mariachi trumpet, third album ‘Master’ is another opaque collection of weighty, ever-evolving landscapes. From the static, dead tones and creepy spoken word interludes to the fragmented, hacked noise of ‘Black Strategy’, the dark mist regularly descends. On ‘Reaper’ it’s channelled into a rolling electronic storm of duelling robot guitar battles and stadium rock grandstanding but hits with a metal weight and dropped-chord drama on the shredded thrash of ‘Pleiades Underground_Inexorable Master’.Tense, intrepid and wilfully impenetrable, ‘Master’ is an album built on gargantuan guile and no end of grit, but buried amongst the tumult, ‘Siren Spectre’ is a titanic piece of music of a different measure. The brief oasis of calm in an otherwise violent sea.
Daniel Avery is a former record store clerk, current Fabric resident and clearly a man of refined taste. And now, discovered by Erol Alkan and hyped as a next big thing by Andy Weatherall, he’s trying to condense all his favourite records into his own debut. Accordingly, we get ‘Exit Planet Dust’-era Chemicals intermeshed with ‘Rez’-era Underworld, among plenty of other nods towards electronic greats, but sadly without the energy or intensity of either. Avery’s DJ sets are sprawling, trippy affairs, but while his debut has similar aims, the medium lets him down – where he can spend several hours in a club establishing a mesmerising acid house monster, the enforced brevity of an album, coupled with Avery’s magpie approach, means he never dwells anywhere long enough to build a head of steam. Individual tracks, particularly the insistent, darkly sexy ‘All I Need’, hint at his sharp ear for propulsive, addictive dance music but, taken as a whole,‘Drone Logic’ makes for a darting, restless listen.
06/10