Entries tagged with “reviews”
Thirty five years into their musical odyssey, Cluster return with their latest collection of gentle beats, bleeps and beeps. Qua, released on Klangbad / Broken Silence on February 15th is, according to the sleeve notes, ‘like a toy caravan of dark, fast camels, loaded with alien and precious drams’.
Having been unable to track down such a toy caravan of dark fast camels etc, Suitcase Orchestra is unable to verify this claim. We are able to state however, that if you like your electronica a little left of centre, this may well be an album you ought to investigate further. Like the Orb meets Steve Reich. Or like a toy caravan of dark, fast camels, loaded with…oh, let’s not go there again.
Cluster’s Myspace is here.
Charlotte Gainsbourg’s 2006 album 5:55 saw her collaborate with Jarvis Cocker, Neil Hannon, Air and producer Nigel Godrich. This time on IRM she chooses only one muse, Beck. IRM is the French acronym for Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the equipment used to save her life after a brain haemorrhage following a water skiing accident.
Musically, Beck introduces loops, strings and syrupy treated vocals while Gainsbourg switches between a breathy French whisper and nervous English recital. One suspects that the Beatles White Album is high on both protagonist’s playlists, with double-tracked vocals, reverse loops and glass onions.
At its best, the collaboration yields delights such as the poppy Heaven Can Wait, remixed by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor for its single release, and Time of the Assassins and the delicious waltz In The End.
Who wouldn’t want a robot friend? Who wouldn’t want to be a robot for that matter?
I would, and so would Howard Robot which is why he calls his solo music project My Robot Friend and why he performs (and lives?) in the cool home made electronic suit pictured here.
I had read somewhere that My Robot Friend’s third album, the recently released Soft Core sounded like The Pet Shop Boys. Breathe easily, it doesn’t. Not in the slightest. It is a bit difficult to pin point exactly what it does sound like though, being such a varied collage of songs.
It kicks off as you might expect an album made by someone called Howard Robot to. Robot High School bleeps and buzzes around a heavy synth sound and an effects laden vocal. Misfits Fight Song is a lighter more poppy version of the opener but then we’re off down some unusual avenues. The album features several collaborations. Dean Wareham contributes the skittering By Your Side and the outstanding Astronaut which has his trademark somnambulant wooziness and sounds not unlike Spacemen 3 at their most mellow. The Short Game, a collaboration with Zombie Nation, sounds like a lost New Order classic and Waiting appears twice – first as an 80’s electro dance track with Alison Moyet on vocals then reprised as a bluegrass folk song with Jay Kauffman on finger picking duties.
Sandwiched between all that are two songs, Boyfriend and the wryly observed Failure, which could easily be Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston songs, albeit performed as a duet with Metal Mickey in the case of Boyfriend.
This is a curious and ridiculously catchy mix of playfulness and sensitivity, classic pop and modern electronica. Hopefully by next Christmas, we’ll all be able to have our own My Robot Friend Suit to dance along in.
Visit My Robot Friend here.
Static Moves is Belgian group Sukilove’s fourth studio album but somewhat unlikely, given the soundscape it contains, this impressive slab of noise-pop benefits from being recorded almost entirely live, its rough edges failing to detract from the immediacy of the sound. Lead by Pascal Deweze, the band wrote as they recorded and while in places the songs meander and lose focus, overall it feels fresh and spikey with a big wall of sound acting as a backdrop to prettier guitar and keyboard melodies.
Vinyl junkies should be pleased to note that Jezus Factory Records will release a vinyl version of the album on November 2nd and the band play two London dates at Fighting Cocks and the Hobgoblin on December 1st and 3rd respectively. On this basis, they should be well worth investigating.
Sukilove’s Myspace is here.
Bradford Cox: Behind those eyes...
Named after the karaoke machine on which he made his first recordings while still at school back in 1994, Atlas Sound is the solo project of Bradford Cox, better known as the frontman of the mighty Deerhunter.
Cox describes his Atlas Sound output as the ‘ideas that I can’t make work with a five piece rock band’ and Logos definitely has the feel of a stripped back Deerhunter album. Retaining the slightly disturbing psychological lyrical content of Deerhunter, this is a much sparser and dreamy affair – the kind of dream that gnaws at your subconscious without ever revealing its content and leaving you feeling unsettled for days afterwards (fittingly, the album artwork depicts the faceless emaciated figure of Cox himself– enough to give you a disturbed night’s sleep itself)
The undoubted highpoint is Cox’s collaboration with Noah Lennox, Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, on Walkabout, a dizzying piece of pop in which wouldn’t have been out of place in Brain Wilson’s head during the recording of Pet Sounds. The rest of the album proceeds at a much slower pace as it goes about its business of worming its way into your brain.
It’s an unsettling but brilliant album. It’s also a debilitating album – it is impossible to listen to as background music, you simply have to stop what you are doing, lie back and listen. Really Listen.
Logos by Atlas Sound is available now on 4AD Records.
Visit the Atlas Sound Myspace here.
One day I’ll make a film – just so I can have Andrew Morgan write the score. A proper score, like they used to make. His beautifully cinematic music will trail our hero through an autumnal Paris as he outwits his enemies and gets his gal. In the mean time, this will do just fine.
As Long As We’re Together is the first single taken from Morgan’s autumnal Please Kid Remember album, released earlier in the year, though with eight tracks it has more of the feel of a mini-album than an E.P. Presumably, these are the tracks which failed to make the final cut for the album. If that’s the case then Andrew Morgan is clearly a man who has hit his musical stride.
The E.P. picks up exactly where the album left off with a blend of breathless euphoria and misty melancholy, awash with sumptuous string arrangements. There isn’t a single moment on here which isn’t simply glorious.
As Long As We’re Together is released by Broken Horse Records on November 16th.
Please Kid Remember is available now.
To find out more about Andrew Morgan read his Suitcase Orchestra Q & A here or visit his MySpace here.
Two Sunsets: C86 Meets Japanese Minimalism
There are twenty two years and a million miles between the Pastels’ debut album Up For A Bit, a Daniel Johnston /Jonathan Richman obsessed affair, and this collaboration with Japanese minimalists Tenniscoats. Gone are the quirky lyrics and twanging guitars, replaced with soft melodies and a light jazzy feel added by Bill Wells.
Also on the record is Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love who surfaces most clearly on Vivid Youth which sounds like Astrud Gilberto joined the Fanclub.
Vocal duties are shared by Tenniscoats and the Pastels, with Katrina Mitchell’s breathy voice counterpoised by Stephen Pastel, a man whose singing voice continues to offer hope to those of us who dare only sing in an empty house.
Not speaking Japanese, it’s impossible to know what some of the songs are about, but on the basis of the lyrics sung in English and the almost tentative feel of the songs, they are unlikely to be about sacrificing virgins.
One word of warning though: Halfway through the brief instrumental Modesty Piece, there are some pan pies. What they are doing there is anybody’s guess; surely Stephen Pastel knows that the proper use of a pan pipe is for bored looking South American Indians to use to perform covers of Phil Collins songs in shopping centres around the British Isles.
A snowblink is a white luminosity on the underside of clouds, caused by the reflection of light from a snow covered surface. An apt choice of name then for Daniela Gesundheit’s band as her music is a kind of reflected and dreamy folk music which has the feel of being there yet somehow not there.
Long Live, the third Snowblink album (It follows two limited edition and now out of print home recorded albums), meanders gently through the landscape of its fifteen tracks in an unforced manner which is possibly a reflection of the fact that it was recorded in as wide a range of locations as it is possible to imagine – a studio in Sacramento, a log-cabin in Mammoth Lakes and an apartment in Toronto are among the places the album was put together.
Since the inception of the band Gesundheit has surrounded herself with a cabal of musicians and vocalists, which at one time included MGMT, to fill out her delicate arrangements and layer them with strings, glock, and a host of less conventional instruments. Despite the musical patchwork which makes up the album, it never sounds less than intimate with Gesundheit’s crystalline voice shimmering throughout. If you are looking for straightforward folk music look elsewhere though, there isn’t a moment of ordinariness in Long Live, everything is slightly off kilter and so much the better for it.
Sssshhhhh. Quiet. Listen – it’s beautiful.
Visit the Snowblink website here.
Joel Gibb: Cheer Up Sunshine.
At their best, The Hidden Cameras make joyous, infectious pop which rises and falls and in places that happens here. But, and it’s a fairly significant but, it doesn’t happen often enough on this album. Joel Gibb has gone serious.
The signs are there from the very beginning. No-one is ever going to convince me that starting an album with over two minutes of drone is the way forward. What remains of the opening track ‘Ratify the New’ does little to lift the mood – it’s sludgy and plodding and only Gibb’s voice, one of the best in pop, saves it.
Elsewhere the sombre feel continues on ‘Walk On’, a bombastic march which sees Gibb doing a passable Ian Curtis impression and title track ‘Origin: Orphan’, another early-eighties sounding dirge.
Thankfully, there is enough vintage Hidden Cameras tucked away in the album to make it a worthwhile affair. ‘In The NA’, shorn of the two minute intro that was tagged on to it when released as a single, is an immediate and infectious piece of pure pop while ‘He Falls to Me’, ‘Colour of a Man’, and the trumpet driven ‘The Little Bit’ retain the wittiness and exuberance of earlier albums.
A band shouldn’t stand still, but the Hidden Cameras music has always been fairly euphoric and playful and the moments on this album which match that show that Gibb still had plenty of room for manoeuvre in that area without getting all serious on us.
Well, they claim to be named after the street on which they grew up in Santa Monica but I don’t buy it. Princeton’s debut album, ‘Cocoon of Love’ has a very British feel to it. In fact, I can be more specific: It has a very Postcard Records feel to it. Everything about the band shouts ‘the sound of young Scotland’ from their jangling guitars to their literary references (they have already released The Bloomsbury E.P.)
What sets it apart from your average indie-pop album is the subtle application of strings, mariachi horns, southern soul styling and lyrical diversity. Featuring songs about herbal tea, a glow-in-the-dark monument, paperback writers, video arcades, graffiti, and cycling, the album is a baroque gem, from the knock about call and response of the opening ‘Sadie and Andy’ to the mournful closing waltz of ‘The Wild’. Alan Horne would surely approve.
‘Cocoon of Love’ is released on September 29th through Kanine Records.
