72
Albums
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11
14 WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM Celestite Artemisia
EAUX Plastics ATP Recordings ANUSHKA Broken Circuit Brownswood Recordings
Eaux have a difficult-to-define quality that acts like The Field or Fuck Buttons possess in spades. It’s something to do with the pace, and the measured intensity of the transmissions they create. It’s something to do with an ability to change gear mid-song, and move from pulsing ambience to a punishing plateau. And, crucially, it’s about the almost addictive essence of the simple, sweeping melodies that gradually burrow into your audio memory bank until you’re fidgeting to hear them again. Plastics is characterised by the spooky, sensual, but disaffected vocals of Sian Ahern (not unlike the duelling voices in School of Seven Bells), set against a sombre electronic aesthetic. The gothic arpeggios of Movers and Shakers evoke Zomby or Illumsphere’s darker material, while layered eruptions of sound and texture are a regular feature. Pressure Points nails the industrial disco chug of Factory Floor, The Light Falls Through Itself is hypnotic and genuinely haunting, and the powerful, ethereal and majestic Peace Makes Plenty is perhaps the crowning moment: gently psychedelic in a muted, dark kind of way. The juxtaposition of the hymnal – almost operatic – vocals with the industrial rhythms and melodies could have been overkill: a Trent Reznor/Enya side-project no-one wanted to hear. But in fact the dynamic is perfect. Turn it up loud, throw on a hooded cloak and let the darkness in.
It wasn’t until everything felt so right on Ultraviolence that the missteps of 2012’s Born To Die became so clear. Lana Del Rey’s debut was a high-definition spectacular, where heartache was stretched out of shape for the sake of a deluxe edition and the nuances of her dreamt up persona were hard to find because ASAP Rocky was in the music video. By working so hard on trying to sound abandoned, Del Rey ended up sounding like half the industry was rooting for her. No such mistakes are made on Ultraviolence. The anguished falsetto on the chorus of Money Power Glory arrives with no armour. The lovesick wooziness of The Other Woman tells the story of the defeated rather than the saga of the fight. On Born To Die, desolation was the subject matter, but on Ultraviolence it is the method. This record is stark, isolated and at times unnervingly frozen. No track embodies this palpable hopelessness quite like Pretty When You Cry as Del Rey sings “I’ll wait for you babe / It’s all I do babe”, swinging her voice and hanging onto the luxurious production by a thread. Loneliness sounds good when you’re fighting against it, but it sounds totally devastating when you decide to let it stay.
Broken Circuit, the debut album from Brighton-based duo Anushka, plays out like the course of a turbulent affair with an incredibly-hot-butcapricious siren. It’s a frustrating business, but not without its ravishing moments. Song titles like Never Can Decide, Down in Flames and This Time hint pretty obviously – like an slow wink, scarlet lippie and a cleavage-revealing top – at the heady theme of this record: fractured romance. Taken in isolation, elements of the record are magical, like honied memories of water-high marks in love, or perhaps steamy lust. The first single from the album, jazz-inflected dance-floor killer Never Can Decide, is dreamily beautiful, for instance. And Atom Bombs should be a summer anthem with its soulfulness and flirty nod to drum-and-bass. As a whole, however, Broken Circuit is extremely cloying. While Victoria Port, the singer-songwriter (Max Wheeler deals with the production) undoubtedly has a wonderful voice, there’s just something lacking in her lyrics that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a teenager’s bad poetry. After letting the slightly childish lyrics slide, you may find yourself wanting to consciously uncouple, before going back for a dirty thrill and you won’t even be that disappointed. Still, here’s hoping for a more mature follow-up eh?
! Adam Corner
! Duncan Harrison
! Oliver Pickup
LANA DEL REY Ultraviolence Polydor
JUNGLE Jungle XL Recordings Since the once-anonymous collective Jungle released the firework of funk that was 2013’s The Heat EP, their bubbling presence across the UK gig scene and arsenal of infectious anthems has sent the hype machine into overdrive, raising the expectations for this debut album to outrageously high levels. But from feeding that flamboyant, tracksuit-clad illusion during those formative stages, the question still lingers: is the talent of Jungle a case of smoke and mirrors? The Heat, is a scintillating introduction, and as the already-familiar single Busy Earnin’ kicks in, the sky-high falsettos and oh-so-victorious trumpets make way for a beaming pop-filtered chorus that could plausibly be plastered over every celebratory BBC Sports package for the rest of the summer season. By choosing to keep these releases on the record, for better or worse, they are cemented as staples of the Jungle blueprint. Last year’s Drops is irrefutably their finest work, with its shaded, rich-ascoffee textures and “I’ve been lovin’ you too long” croons emulsifying into a sensual listen. Smoking Pixels takes on a twist of Western whistles, and at first it seems like it could take an eccentric turn, but when the two-minute instrumental section arrives, it just ends up sounding downright peculiar. Tracks like Julia and Lucky I Got What I Want feel like breathers between the hits, and if you’re not paying attention, they might just fail to land. Otherwise, urgency isn’t an issue. Primary album teaser Time is razor-sharp, and Crumbler attests they can maintain the groove even when they’ve turned the gas down. Overall, Jungle will melt over your auditory senses, and its highlights make for a bold package that will permit the producers to continue surfing the wave of hype for a little while yet. ! Leah Connolly
Wolves in The Throne Room have never really been a black metal band, yet somehow they’ve found themselves being stalked by that all too ambiguous tag. Celestite is probably their most genre-dismissive work to date; they’ve eschewed drums and vocals in favour of rumbling, low frequency dark ambience and grim, humming pastoral folk, all created on synthesisers and downtuned guitars to provide five lengthy tracks of theatrical meandering. The newly condensed line-up of sibling duo Aaron and Nathan Weaver bears one obvious comparison; Stephen O’Malley’s drone behemoth Sunn O))). There’s something brighter about Celestite though, sharing more perhaps with O’Malley’s rare moments of ecstasy like Alice than his darker more recognisable material from Black One et al. Crystalline synth pads and pulsing guitar drones provide an atmospheric depth that resonates and actually rings truer to the brothers’ frequently chanted mantra (to create “meditative, non aggressive” music) than anything they have released previously. Celestite isn’t a complete departure for the pair though, they have retained the brooding intensity that has always been a part of their sound and extended it to new heights of almost unbearably stirring tension. Horns ring out over Ever Turning Towards The Sun, evoking a military march before Celestite Mirror builds and swirls; landscapes appear and waves crash. Initiation at Neudeg Alm even opens with some none-too-restrained arpeggiator usage. OK, yeah, sonically it probably is a massive departure. The album as a whole though? Well it’s not welcoming and it’s certainly not like anything we’ve heard from WITTR before but it’s intense and arcane, nearly New Age; an absorbing exercise in pensive synth led ambience. ! Billy Black