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B Y ale x hall , A ndrew B roaks , J O S H U A N E V E T T, steve dores , anna tehabsim , josh baines , billy black , adam corner , philip james allen

TOY JOIN THE DOTS Heavenly Recordings

WARPAINT WARPAINT Rough Trade

11/20

16/20

Listening to TOY is a somewhat guilty experience. Like kissing your significant other while day-dreaming about the cute shop assistant in Budgens, it’s almost impossible not to be thinking of other bands while Join The Dots plays out. In the hazy, psychedelia-tinged indie that makes up their second full-length release, the dream-pop of Slowdive, the shoegaze of Ride, the post-punk of The Church, and the contemporary twists on these themes championed by The Horrors all poke through. They’re certainly a group that wear their influences like winter coats rather than simply on the sleeve. But where The Horrors’ psych and synth addled album Skying was a slick fusion of their heroes, Join The Dots is at best a touchstone for discovering the artists being channeled. That’s not to say it’s completely without merit. Opener Conductor is a brilliant soundscape which morphs an oriental refrain into a pummelling and rhythmic seven minutes of noise, a track which turns out to be the most original thing on the album. At the halfway mark To A Death Unknown fizzles along with a lovely lazy melody, but elsewhere, and in between, the songs meander past with little to recommend them, being too indebted to leave an impression. AB

Forget the oft-venerated pretty-all-girl-group-do-post-punk shtick, that’s just ingratiating bullshit. What’s far cooler and more interesting about Warpaint is their studied understanding of subtlety and its merits; when they segue – totally undetected – into those protracted percussive codas that gently spook you out of your own daydreams. When guitarists/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman sing, “don’t you battle, we’ll kill you, rip you up and tear you in two” it’s this canny sleight of hand that holds testament to Warpaint’s ability to remain cool. And interesting. Where their 2010 debut took its cues from slowcore revisionism, Warpaint is much less encumbered by the past, more informed by the Californian High Desert and A-list production dynamos Flood and Nigel Godrich. These thematic and geographical elements are scorched across its surface, with CC’s sludgy dirges nodding towards the no-fi desert rock of Kyuss as seen through Low’s narcotic haze. There’s sassiness too: a Beck-y hip-hop beat complete with shamanistic “boomshackalackas” (on Hi) and Revolver traced backwards guitars (on Go In). That said, this time around there’s method in the melancholia: a percussive arch on which the no-thrills hooks of singles Love Is To Die and Biggy can beguile, until those brittle parts bond in to become a fully-formed whole. JN

NILS FRAHM SPACES Erased Tapes

SKY FERREIRA NIGHT TIME, MY TIME Capitol

18/20

7/20

Attempting to capture the intensity of performed electronic-based music in an album format is difficult, verging on pointless. Few have had any degree of success (Daft Punk’s Alive 2007, Basinski’s Disintegration Loops performed at MoMA), but Spaces, the latest work from Nils Frahm, more than deserves to join that concise group. Much like the classical pieces that Frahm is inspired by, but not indebted to, Spaces unravels over a number of distinct movements, providing a cohesive structure despite each individual recording coming from a different performance across two years. The only pieces to contain anything resembling percussion bookend the album, with opener An Aborted Beginning sounding like a Rhythm & Sound record heard from the other side of an empty Trouw, while closer Ross’s Harmonium layers languid, arcing synth coos over the softest of kick drums. The filling between this percussive bread is some of the most explicitly emotional music we’ve heard in forever. The final act sees a return to the plaintive piano-solo pieces that Frahm excels at. In particular, the twinkling strains of Over There, It’s Raining feel like the weightiest winter comedown you’ve never had. Spaces could never hope to fully convey the experience of seeing Frahm in the flesh and ivory, but as a document of his expansive work, it’s the closest thing we have. SD

We’d love to love Sky Ferreira. With her po-faced attitude, angular aesthetic and knack for haphazardly speaking her mind in interviews, she’s industry gold dust. And with the recent drug-related arrest of her and boyfriend, DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith, they could be mistaken for a low-budget, tumblr-generation Sid and Nancy. Night Time, My Time, thrashed out in a two week period in response to a prior range of stylistic deviations and interference from various labels, is a solid enough pop record. Earworm hooks carry Ferreira’s cunningly self-reflective agenda throughout, with reflexive, controversy-embracing slogans – “nobody asked me if I was okay”, “I blame myself for my reputation” – rarely executed so well on a mainstream platform. But as a whole, the album feels shallow, the weight of stylistic influences whittled down to cheap, forgettable production. Maybe you’d enjoy it if you’re partial to a good old-fashioned Avril Lavigne chord’n’yelp, or you actually enjoy the music played in H&M. The striking cover sums it up quite effectively. A disheveled Sky’s dead eyed stare lingers into the void with her left nipple exposed, lumbered with the evocative image to continue her efforts to be anything but Walmart-friendly. On the surface, it’s a refreshingly forward-leaning statement of intent. On the inside, it’s Asda Price. AT

VARIOUS ARTISTS POP AMBIENT 2014 Kompakt

SEBASTIEN GRAINGER YOURS TO DISCOVER Last Gang Records

16/20

8/20

The new year, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, always fleshes out its hungover husk with a whiff of the inevitable: we’ll give the gym up, won’t quit smoking or being a prick on the internet, and Kompakt will serve up another platter of tastefully utopian rambles through the murk we know as ambient. The Cologne label know, after 20 years of magnificently melancholy big room techhouse stompers, that sometimes you’ve got to drag yourself out of the dark and stumble home, roll a desultory single skin and stay on the sofa for as long as you can before succumbing to sweaty half sleep in broad daylight. That’s where the Pop Ambient compilations come in. As usual, the big guns appear: Ulf Lohman’s Sicht sets the scene with its yearning chasms of wordless voices, Mikkel Metal explore something akin to Ry Cooder wandering round the desert on a dose of some horrible hallucegenic legal high on Patience. Hell, they even give us the dream team of Wolfgang Voigt, under his Gas alias, remixing The Field, which is as great as you imagine. Look, it’s a Pop Ambient compilation. We all know what it’s going to sound like. We all know it should be great. Luckily, it is. JB

Like other icons of the early noughties scene who’ve reformed in recent years, Death From Above 1979’s 2011 reunion was a short-lived blast of barely congealed nostalgia which has otherwise proved fruitless. Despite the promise of new music, eight years on from DFA’s glorious dance-punk maelstrom we’ve been granted Mr. Grainger’s solo LP. After a short (and skippable) instrumental introduction, the power pop of Waking Up Dead sets the scene, all rising and falling riffs, jabs of synth and a ‘big chorus’. This chunk of sugary rock sounds like it should have been released five years ago, and it’s a cruel irony that in a year awash with the sounds of the 80s and 90s, it feels so out of time. Things get even more cloying on the record’s first single, Going With You, when Grainger sings over a minimalist composition of synth, bass and drums of “forgetting your number and never listening to our favourite song”, which is a lesson in triteness if ever there was one. Is this really the same guy who once expertly used the word ‘dilettante’ in a lyric? There are moments of enjoyment – see the infectious chorus of The Streets Are Still A Mess – but Yours To Discover is largely an exercise in sterility. AB