SINGLES/EPS
WITH TOMAS FORD
cd reviews
ON THE RECORD
SINGLE OF THE WEEK EL GUINCHO Bombay
Remote Control It really depends when you listen to this track as to how it feels. Right now, I’m in a really grumpy mood, so its chirpy steel drum riff and feel-good summery pop feels like somebody applying a cheesegrater to my ears and testicles. Yesterday, I listened to this song eight times in a row, driving with the windows down and with my head out the window like a happy Dalmatian. This will be the soundtrack of a thousand house parties this summer and it is a mood enhancing track: if you’re in a bit of a “can’t really be arsed going to this fondue night” kind of mood from October onwards, maybe just stay home.
THE WITNESS Bonfire
Fremantle Records This track is the complete opposite. Yesterday, in the middle of my El Guincho sugar buzz, I was turning my nose up at this track as sounding too much like The Cult. Today I’m really psyched about that similarity. I accidentally left this on repeat this morning. Listening to it in the background, I’d assumed it must have been an EP, such is the songs’ dynamic range. Reverb-laden instruments making psychedelic spirit fingers around a vocalist having the most melodic nervous breakdown ever. Just don’t listen to it if you’re in a good mood.
SIA
Bring Night Sony Music Which brings us to a song designed to annoy the listener no matter what their mood. This track is so twee it will make your happy mood feel lacking by comparison. If you’re depressed, you’ll be more inclined to mentally compare this arrangement to Bertie Blackman and your least favourite tampon ad soundtracks. If you’re in a good mood, you wouldn’t want to worsen it with this.
ANDREYA TRIANA
BLACK MOUNTAIN
BULLETPROOF
Ninja Tune/Inertia
Jagjaguwar/Inertia
Bulletproof Music
It’s no wonder this lady attracted the attention of Ninja Tune, Bonobo and Flying Lotus with her seductively smooth vocals. She joins the long list of quality Ninja Tune artists such as Mr. Scruff, DJ Vadim and The Cinematic Orchestra.
Three albums in for fuzz rockers Black Mountain and these Canadians are aiming for commercial success with Wilderness Heart. Employing big name producers Randall Dunn (Sunn O) and Dave Sardy (Rolling Stones, Wolfmother), the five-piece have recorded in LA instead of their bedrooms and have opted for more concise tracks, doing away with their old 17-minute prog-rock epics as only two songs here crack five minutes. This doesn’t mean they have sold out though. Far from it, this is a fun party album that gets top marks for enthusiasm even if originality isn’t their strong suit as their rock influences are pretty clear.
Kiwi drum’n’basser Bulletproof reduced the tempo of his production for debut album Soundtrack To Forever. He opens with the title track, a very Pendulum inspired electronic-rock ballad featuring Tiki Taane on vocals. The album then moves onto a mellow tip – a down-tempo remix of Boh Runga’s track Airwaves. Bulletproof choose wisely on this one when looking for tracks to remix and include on the album.
Lost Where I Belong
Wilderness Heart
Lost Where I Belong is the debut album from the self-taught singer/songwriter. Originally coming out of South East London, her multicultural upbringing shines through with the tinkering sounds of many world music instruments. After releasing Black Sands earlier this year, Bonobo produced Lost Where I Belong. Triana was also the sole vocalist on that album, which adds a bit of clout. His presence in the studio is obvious from the first track, Draw The Stars. Soft multi-instrumental percussion opens with Triana’s soulful vocals slowly introduced, the melody sounds suspiciously similar to Britney Spear’s Toxic though. Title track Lost Where I Belong optimises summer grooves, the strings gain intensity but the beats remain laidback to create an interesting contrast. A Town Called Obsolete is a highlight with tight snare hits and funky horns.
Soundtrack To Forever
Soundtrack To Forever features many purely instrumental numbers; Realtime and Last Laugh both are fairly dark rollers while Imagine is delicately atmospheric, with grinding bass and space-like echoes. There are also several instances of tracks with a fusion of rap, hip hop and grime like Back In The Day featuring PNC & David Dallas and Step To you featuring Rugged Tekniques, to boot. Bulletproof had much support on production with the album. Fellow Kiwi producers Truth and Optimus Gryme both collaborated, with one of the smoothest MCs in the game, MC Stamina, was also involved.
One gets the feeling the album is only warming up at this point, though unfortunately it doesn’t move forward enough from here. Her past work with electronic artists, gaining critical acclaim for collaboration on Flying Lotus’s Tea Leaf Dancers, left the thought that weaving these elements into the album would’ve given it more of an edge. The combination of the electronic realm to create beautiful beds for vocalists like Triana seems like a match made in heaven, it’s just a shame it can’t be heard on this release.
First single Old Fangs has a Deep Purple feel to it as Jeremy Schmidt riffs over the top of their rock groove with some hard-hitting keyboards. The smashing Let Spirits Ride could have appeared on any early Sabbath album as the band deliver their heaviest song yet, while opener The Hair Song has a Black Crowes’ style acoustic-blues vibe to it. Deliberately combining the hard rock moments with acoustic tracks, the album sometimes loses momentum a little as they turn the amps down only to build them up again. This approach does prove its worth midway through as folk ballad Buried By The Blues, and builds into highlights The Way To Gone and the brilliant stoner rock title track. But, Wilderness Heart still needed to finish with a bang and instead closes on a whimper with two quieter tracks. These songs are good in their own right as Stephen McBean and Amber Webber nicely share vocal duties but when you can rock this hard, a fired-up finish would have rounded things off a little better.
JO LETTENMAIER
PAUL BARBIERI
ANGELA KING
CHILDREN COLLIDE
CHRIS ABRAHAMS
MOGWAI
Universal
Room40
Rock Action/Spunk/EMI
Following up 2008’s The Long Now, Children Collide have looked to pull out bigger guns and given it all with their second album, Theory Of Everything. Not straying too far off course, the band’s new material is a hit, for both older and new fans and credit goes to songs like Future Monks, Jellylegs and My Eagle which take after previous work, yet are catchier, harder and more complex.
By virtue of its moniker, experimental music carries with it certain intrinsic limitations. To fully reap the rewards the listener needs to submit fully to it and cast aside any assumptions of either sound or structure. In fact, its very boundlessness can sometimes be its greatest weakness, as there are no patterns on which to rely, no expectations which can really be met. Play Scar, the latest solo offering from The Necks’ pianist Chris Abrahams, certainly adheres to experimental music’s complete lack of boundaries, but is at the same time so deftly crafted that it’s rendered utterly dazzling.
Mogwai live doesn’t work on record – especially when you have control of the volume. It’s only when confronted with the music face-to-face does that sense of the air being sucked out of the room make you tremble. You need to feel like your heart is going to stop, like you do in the actual presence of the band playing Mogwai Fear Satan. Live, it’s powerful. Live, it can reduce you to tears and that’s an impossible proposition at home – no matter how good your stereo is.
Interestingly, noticeable similarities exist with this album and that of tracks by well established dubstep artists. For instance, the menacing vocal samples and stabbing wobble-bass in Risque is much like American producer SPL. It is, however, hard to decipher whether these are innocent coincidences, whether Bulletproof is paying homage to other artists. For the most part, Soundtrack To Forever supplies little we haven’t heard before. Undoubtedly Bulletproof has proven he can produce dubstep in its most well known configuration – heavy on the snare with generous helpings of wobbly bass – and lucky for him, the following for those beats are only getting stronger.
SUPER MELODY Worker Bee
Love+Mercy Records I don’t mind this song. Really, I don’t. But listening to it gives me horrifying visions of a world where Super Melody high rotation airplay on all the radio stations I like and... I don’t think I can live in that world. I mean, it’s fine. It’s white-boy soul pop electro stuff like Hot Chip and Chromeo make. But while there’s usually a vibe of knowing irony that gets those acts over the line, this is a little too earnest and cheerful. If Hot Chip’s Brothers doesn’t make you cringe, maybe check this out.
GASOLINE INC Fuel The Sol
Independent/Firestarter Music Here’s a band that are doing ridiculously well for themselves. With probably the most well attended weekly residency ever rolling along at the Rocket Room, and this EP’s lead track Superstar all over AFL ads, the time is ripe for them to put out a killer EP. They haven’t fumbled the ball here, dropping a tight mix of ‘80s hard rock and AC/DC lifts. They back up their big, dumb rock music with absolutely top tier production for an EP that (befuddlingly crap title aside) is almost impossible to fault as a genre piece. If this were the late ‘80s, this band would be your life.
MAJOR LAZER
Lazers Never Die Mad Decent Major Lazer: you can only either love or hate them. Their beats take Jamaican dancehall riddims and dumb them down to cartoon extremes. Personally, I can’t handle them for more than a track at a time, so an EP is possibly stretching my patience a little. Thankfully, opener Sound Of Siren is the best thing they’ve done since Pon De Floor and the rest of the EP is packed with remixes that generally push deeper into dancehall sounds. The wildcard is Thom Yorke’s remix of Jump Up, where he does his best Modeselektor impersonation – luckily for him, his source material suits the pose and it’s not the disaster it could be. 26 • THE DRUM MEDIA 23 SEPTEMBER 2010
Play Scar
Theory Of Everything
Plenty of ‘90s influence ensures power chord riffage and a small dose of mumbled lyrics, as on Seven Forks. Along with fast, clean tone strumming verses, hitting walls of distortion in the choruses; it is a sound that should get old fast, but Children Collide’s brilliantly captured energy and variety between tracks ensures it doesn’t, at least not for now anyway. Continuing with space themed lyrics (this time Timelords even get a mention), and Crawley’s hot bass and Mackay’s lead guitar lines as good as ever, there is an element of difference which is noticeable as songs like Complacency No Vacancy give a stylish chorus and Fashion Fits deliver the humorous stand out lyric, “It’s just the way he rolls/it’s just the way he rolls dog”. This selection of 12 songs, filed down from a big 50, is impressive and a worthy cream of the crop. It may have been produced by two separate men in different parts of the world (Paul Annison in Melbourne and Rob Schnapf in LA) but, as a whole, this album is tied together nicely and will be on the playlist well into, and past, summer. SEBASTIAN D’ALONZO
Take the organ-driven beauty of The Same Time, for instance. At first listen it sounds like it could be a mere thoughtless meander across the keys, devoid of purpose and seemingly goalless. As it swells and pulses from austere beginnings to a deep finale however, it’s clear that Abrahams has a focus but refuses to be rushed. Birds & Wasps is the album’s most challenging track; its constant drone seeming to forecast a grave outcome before disappearing into a pitter-patter of electronic blips. On its own it’s particularly daunting to digest, but in the scope of Play Scar it justifies its place amongst the piano dribble of Jellycrown and guitar chord punch of Running Out. Like The Necks build and push during lengthy sets, Play Scar is more of an experience than something that’s listened to. Moreover, that artists like Chris Abrahams continue to refuse to comply with any form of convention, instead making records that revolve around musical expressions, is something that should also be celebrated. RICK BRYANT
twitter.com/drummediaperth
Special Moves
This live album is good and the 11 songs selected here are some of their best – Hunted By A Freak, Cody, 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong and Like Herod immaculately and beautifully captured to tape – but captured no better than they were the first time in the studio. Anyone who’s seen them live will know and attest that Mogwai are a physical experience and there’s nothing here that doesn’t fall short. The closest is the accompanying DVD. Burning is a live film from the same series of 2009 Brooklyn concerts. It’s creative and gritty and gives you insights you can’t get from the CD. Shot in black and white with a heavy grain, these eight songs do not follow traditional conventions of documenting music. The 40 minutes of footage is as close as you can get to the band – closer than the front row. You are literally seeing the drummer’s sticks rebound, the guitar strings flick off fingernails and a real sense of entropy due to the proximity. Mogwai fans should own this film – it works wonderfully because it’s not trying to ‘be there’, instead creating a parallel world where the songs become stories made anew. Special Moves, however, shows Mogwai are a force you need to feel in the flesh! ALEX GILLIES