60
Albums
16
05 13
13
15
PARQUET COURTS Sunbathing Animal What’s Your Rupture? BEN FROST Aurora Mute
Coming on like The Fall if Mark E Smith and his rotating band of eccentric scruffs had been soused in Pabst Blue Ribbon rather than Tenants Super and swapped the grim environs of outer Manchester for the parched-porches of Texas, Parquet Courts seem set to be one of those bands happy to release the same record over and over; a manifestation of the innate joys to be found in repetition. If you fell for the hyper-literate cow-punk of 2012’s Light Up Gold or last year’s scratchier, bolshier, slightly weirder Tally All The Things That You Broke EP, then you’re likely to find a huge amount to enjoy in Sunbathing Animal. As time marches ever onward and we run the risk of being sucked into the vortex mistakenly labelled progress, there’s something refreshing about a band happy to become masters of their craft – in this case marrying Modern Lovers style Velvet Underground chugging riffola with a dose of The Feelies' nervous energy and then stuffing that combo with a garbled lexicon of engaging non-sequitur and multisyllabic intonation – without a self-conscious desire to be seen reinventing the wheel through self-conscious genre-hopping. Sunbathing Animal tears along all spindly and sunburned, 46 minutes of leanly-ripped lead guitar lines splattering like Jackson Pollock with the shakes, a solid hit of wiry joy. That its only the slower outliers – Instant Disassembly, Up All Night – that linger in the memory is no bad thing; Sunbathing Animal works precisely because it’s a blur. Don’t change boys, don’t change.
By now we’ve come to expect a certain sound from releases on Berlin behemoth Ostgut Ton. The debut album by Patrick Gräser delivers this. But unlike previous albums from the label, Code is not simply a collection of dance tracks (although some straight up movers would have been appreciated here). What is this then? Well, aside from being an exercise in techno production (in which it scores well), unfortunately there is better break beat, steppy, and loopy material out there at the moment. The beat-less soundscape pieces are good (Odyssey Sequence and Spin Off really stand out), but again, others do this better. The album is held back by a sense that we’ve all been here before (Jeff Mills’ Something in the Sky anyone?). What’s more, the album doesn’t help itself with its token breaks on By the Bay and naff vocals on Axif. Still this assessment is harsh and the album is generally good. It’s a shame however that it doesn’t add anything new to the Ostgut catalogue apart from a few more references to the milestones of dance music. If you purchased previous Ostgut releases then, like we have, then you’ll get it and you'll probably even like it, but you almost certainly won’t love it.
! Josh Baines
! Gareth Thomas
When visiting my old school a couple of years after my GCSEs, a year ten I didn’t recognise spotted me, saying “I know that face!”. As a moment, it has always stuck with me. We didn’t know each other. Maybe he had seen me in an assembly or perhaps we’d passed each other in a corridor, but we had never spoken. His familiarity was redundant. “I know that face!”. Yes, that’s literally all you know. As I began listening to Sheezus this moment came rushing back to me in Proustian fashion. Lily announces “I’m going in”, but as she climbs through the ropes and enters the ring, it becomes apparent how boxing only works if both opponents know the date, time and venue of the fight. “Ri Ri isn’t scared of Katy Perry’s roaring, Queen B’s gone back to the drawing”. Did you hear that Katy Perry? Rihanna? Queen B? Guess who I’ve got on the phone – it’s only LILY BLOODY ALLEN. Hello? Oh, it’s gone to voicemail. It’s a shame, because Sheezus isn’t totally devoid of melodies, but as soon as anything borders on remotely enjoyable, the experience is suddenly and prematurely ruined by her terrible lyrics. It’s a feeling not unlike being caught masturbating. Just as things are looking up, Allen will drop some banal musing like “Did I ever tell you my uncle’s monkey ran away from the zoo?” No you didn’t tell us that. By the way, is the uncle in question Kevin Allen who directed Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London? The ninth track URL Badman probably serves best to sum up what has gone wrong here. With references to trolling and A$AP Rocky and Vice, this is another album in a string of recent efforts (see Childish Gambino and Jay Z) that have attempted to ‘engage’ with the millennial generation on such clumsy terms they sound like they’ve been written by Angela Rippen. It ends up sounding like a Whose Line is it Anyway? round called ‘songs based on hashtags’. Maybe naming the album Sheezus is the ultimate symbol of this misguided attempt at relevance. When Kanye released last year’s Yeezus it was brash, sure, but crucially it was also focused. In taking his name Lily Allen may have intended to turn Yeezy’s focus against him and his industry, to satirise him, or even to patronise him. But she didn’t, and more to the point, even if she had – he isn’t listening. There is no focus and there is no beef. It is all profoundly pointless.
It’s unlikely anyone has ever been puzzled by Little Dragon’s success. While the Gothenburg band’s 2007 debut album (essentially a collection of demos released by a label without their full consent) was something of a false start, for 2009‘s Machine Dreams Yukimi Nagano absorbed 90s RnB influences into her smoky, honey-coloured voice while the band channelled the spirit of Tom Tom Club’s Genius of Love with flashing-neon synth hooks. Seriously addictive stuff. Nabuma Rubberband follows 2011‘s Ritual Union – the breakthrough album packed with sultry, moonlit synth-pop anthems that we’ve all heard a thousand times – and on first listen, it’s incredibly pleasing on the ears. But Little Dragon seem to have decided it’s time for their ‘mature’ album, and while it’s a pleasure to hear Nagano ride the tranquil, phased-out synths of tracks like Cat Rider and Pink Cloud, you’re going to have to dig deeper this time around to uncover the melodic earworms. Overall, Nabuma Rubberband provides a gorgeous soundscape to bury your head in, but for a band who’ve reached such stellar heights by balancing innovative production and instant gratification, releasing an album full of slow-burners is a risky move.
If you find the dark, swirling, tribal atmospherics of Fuck Buttons just that little bit too twee, then glug deeply from Ben Frost’s metallic goblet. This is not an album to make friends with; no surprise, given that previous releases have sounded like a slow-motion, dystopian, robotic mugging. This is a man, lest we forget, who last year composed an opera based on Iain Banks’ seminal celebration of darkness and debasement The Wasp Factory. But grit your teeth, because there’s a sinister darkness at play that can singlehandedly destroy your blissful end-of-party early morning glow if it accidentally arrives on your iPod shuffle at an inopportune moment. Snaking into life with a shuffle and an electronic wail, Aurora showcases a typically brutal aesthetic. But there’s actually a (relatively) melodic lilt to lolloping scorchers like Nolan. In fact, compared to 2009’s ghoulish By The Throat, which came layered in wolf howls and other assorted musique concrète, this is positively chirpy stuff. The abrasive but euphoric Secant, for example, suggests the star-gazing invoked by the album’s title, and even the more introverted moments are punctuated by synthetic bursts or electronic pulses. Ben Frost is respected by the best in the business: Brian Eno has anointed him, the Boomkat oddballs adore him. And if you’ve not yet let him into your life, you should – because this is rich and rewarding electronic shamanism.
! Angus Harrison
! Davy Reed
! Adam Corner
ANSWER CODE REQUEST Code Ostgut Ton
LITTLE DRAGON Nabuma Rubberband Because Music
LILY ALLEN Sheezus Parlophone