58
r
e
v
i
e
w
s
B y T om Howells , Duncan Harrison , Jon C lark , J oshua Nevett, A lex G william , J osh B aines , G eraint D avies , D avid Reed, James T. Balmont, Philip James Allen, R ich T. Bitt
NO AGE AN OBJECT Sub Pop
GAUNTLET HAIR STILLS Dead Oceans
18/20
16/20
“Who do you think you are? / Who do you think I am?” ask No Age on No Ground, the opening track from the duo’s excellent new record. Three full-lengths (sorta) in for a band who’ve so stoically honed their brand of lo-fi, noise-laced punk, it’s an easy question, right? Almost, though on this it’s the more abstracted, prettier and quieter compositions that are the key successes. The punk numbers are great of course: C’mon Stimmung layers guitar squeals over a snotty vocal, coming on rather like Nervous Breakdown-era Black Flag; while Lock Box and Circling With Dizzy factor insistent pattering drums and a bitchin’ sax line, respectively. But as I Won’t Be Your Generator takes a left turn into a pretty, plaintive smear of guitar, it becomes clear Dean Spunt and Randy Randall have shifted focus. Humming synths, field recordings and buried textural noise underpin many of the tracks, and the percussion in A Ceiling Dreams of a Floor and Commerce, Comment, Commence is often subtle to the point of fading completely. An Object’s clear peak, though, is An Impression, arguably No Age’s finest song to date. A simple percussive bass riff chugs along elegantly, before breaking into an unexpected and totally incandescent
Waxing nostalgic and reconciling with their affection for post-punk nihilism and gothic industrialism, avant-noise-pop duo Gauntlet Hair’s sophomore LP is imbued with the vestiges of a band at ease with penning the influencers of their formative years. Notable namechecks from the duo include Marilyn Manson, The Durutti Column, White Zombie and Beyonce, which, aside from providing an insight into their record collections, confirms that Stills is one pretty fucked up tea party. Primed with angst from the get-go, bilious grumbles surface from Andy Rauworth’s scorched lips on lead single Human Nature for a brooding introduction to a record that comes at you in bouts of intricate minimalism and waves of colossal, melodramatic choruses. Cantankerous highlight Heave is a medieval battle axe to the cerebrum, spewing guttural croaks alongside a reverb drenched guitar romp that doesn’t quit. But once Stills breaks into its stride and takes its cues, it peers into a looking glass that’s more angled towards 80s synth-pop. New To It sneers along a path of broken snares and lightly sprinkled electronics, while on tracks such as Spew and Bad Apple, incoherent, gargled vocals take the lead role in harnessing the
EBow/string flourish. Heartbreaking stuff. TH
debauched romanticism. If only tea parties were always this awesome. JN
BATHS OBSIDIAN Anticon
BASS DRUM OF DEATH BASS DRUM OF DEATH Innovative Leisure
16/20
15/20
Cerulean, Will Weisenfeld’s first outing as Baths, was the kind of slow-flowering, word-of-mouth success story rarely witnessed in today’s hype-hungry music scene. Three years later, and its follow-up is no less worthy of dissemination. Having contracted a debilitating case of E. Coli in 2011 that left him bedridden and helpless for months, Weisenfeld’s return to music comes from an altogether darker place. Gone, for the most part, are the amorphic chopped vocals, replaced with a far more overt style of singing – one in which the recurrent themes of frustration, anger, worthlessness, and sexual callousness are given room to breathe. The unapologetically brazen lyrics are a far cry from the naive positivity of Cerulean, although the hooks are somehow even catchier than before. While that might seem contradictory, it’s this plainer style of songwriting that helps each track burrow deep into the mind long before the import of the words has had time to percolate. Once they have it becomes fully apparent just how much of an intensely personal project Obsidian has been. The fact it emerged from the murky emotional miasma every bit as polished and playable as its predecessor is testament to his enduring
“All of my friends, they’re all gone” snarl Bass Drum Of Death on Fine Lines, a line that sums up the band’s slacker garage rock perfectly. On their second, self-titled record the band lean away from the ferocious punk on their first LP, making the transition to a more garage and grunge-based sound, the adolescent cynicism and disillusionment inherent to the genres firmly intact. On Fine Lines, as well as Such A Bore and Bad Reputation, the band make a firm declaration never to do anything firmly again, the tracks messy, incoherent and completely exhilarating. The entire record is laden with fuzz and feedback, the drums barely holding things together as they crash relentlessly through the tracks. This hardly matters, as the songs themselves are concise and well structured, snarling and bratty but concise and effective throughout. Ramshackle to the point of derelict, Bass Drum Of Death is nonetheless a fine album – one that puts them on a similar yellowing, dusty playing field as their contemporaries The Black Lips, Wavves and Thee Oh Sees. A riotous, smash-and-grab of a record. JC
talent as an artist. AG
BOARDS OF CANADA TOMORROW’S HARVEST Warp Records
FLOORPLAN PARADISE M-Plan
12/20
16/20
Tomorrow’s Harvest doesn’t get off to a hugely promisingly start. The faux-ident squelches that ease us into Gemini fade into juddering pirouettes of organ that bring ambient master Tim Hecker’s stunning Ravedeath 1972 to mind. That’s a problem. You’d hope an album which has taken this long to emerge, that’s come bundled in this much hype wouldn’t immediately sound this similar to another album nearly contemporaneous with it. The feeling of familiarity is off-putting. We’re versed in Tangerine Dream and Emeralds and Ambient 4: On Land. We’ve listened to Boards of Canada before. Your enjoyment of Tomorrow’s Harvest largely lies in your willingness to submit to the duo’s third-joint-of-the-night wisdom and ease into the uneasy drift of their spectral rambles. Want creepy-crawly arpeggios spiderwalking over hazy pads? You’ve got them. Fat phased-out synth leads twostepping with leaden percussion? We can do that. How about songs that strive that bit too hard to sound like something you’ve buried deep in the abyss of a summer holiday lost to the sands of time? You’re in luck. For the rest of us who were craving
Swapping the machinistic, mesmeric minimal of his own name (including last year’s sublime Motor: Nighttime World 3) for churning, choppy Chicago-inflected house, Robert Hood’s Floorplan alias is an exercise in the joy of repetition. The scene’s set with opener Let’s Ride – stiff, unswinging snares clatter over a heartbeat 4/4 and a vocal snatch pips up over and over at the same unquavering pitch. Rarely deviating from this template, sidestepping occasionally to throw in the odd anthemic classic piano chord sequence (Confess) or gorgeously chunky, Kompakty synth stabs that come on like Wolfgang Voigt on steroids (Altered Ego), there’s a feeling of unity and dedication to an idea. Yet the highlight comes in the form of the only outlier. Never Grow Old – as heard on Ben Klock’s Fabric66 – is a yearning number that drops its huge vocal sample with such precision that you really don’t want it to end. Even if nothing quite matches the majesterial invocation of We Magnify His Name from 2011’s Sanctified EP, Paradise is a wonderful collection of the kind of tracky house that doesn’t normally work satisfactorily in the context of an album; Hood’s
a pioneering record, Tomorrow’s Harvest is a let down. JB
obvious understanding of the genre shines through. JB
www.crackmagazine.net