Album Review: Independent Dancer - Kalabrese

Kalabrese's Independent Dancer saunters in like a lazy lover on a too-hot day - cocksure, smooth and a little hard to resist, turning up late after a full six years have elapsed since his debut. Sacha Winkler's music (to use his proper name) has a little of the warm electronic funk that made Kindness' World You Need A Change Of Heart one of my favourite albums of last year.

The opening track, Purple Rose, is a sensual, bluesy funk track. Cowbells tinker, some country guitar gently strums and sultry confident female vocals from Sarah Palin (presumably not THAT Sarah Palin) form a duet with Winkler's own.

View fullsize

Independent Dancer - Kalabrese

Let The Good Times Roll - another duet, this time with A.C Kupper - keeps the pressure up. It's a dubby disco number, sassy falsetto vocals bumping up along a tidy bass line and sly muted guitar as the listener is implored to get down.

And it's clear, just a few songs in, that Kalabrese can make really good music. It manages to be lean and yet still feels alive and full of detail, applying the focus of minimal to a creative and chaotic funk record.

The moods throughout the album shift, creating moments where the hot sunshine gives way to chilling rain. Stone On Your Back is a troubled acknowledgment of the stresses of ambition and the resentment it can create in those waiting for you by the sideline and it isn't clear which side Kalabrese is on. The music creates a swirling fear, like storm clouds brewing, as a piano melody shifts uneasily.

Unfortunately the album is plagued by it's generosity, straining under the weight of its 13 tracks. Almost half of these are over six-minutes in length and the album totals 80-minutes. It means Independent Dancer peters out rather than crashes to a conclusion. The gentle, jazzy Find A Place is a suitable close - contemplative and surreal - but it follows a section of the album that has a clutch of similar groove-led numbers.

With all the exciting pop numbers up front it just feels like hard work. Why did we get to enjoy Let The Good Times Roll and Palin's other duet, the beautiful Fresh And Foolish, so early and then have to do all the work to earn them without any such pay-off coming?

Independent Dancer has some genuinely fantastic moments, but it's wrapped in a difficult to consume package. It's brilliant and challenging and frankly a little irritating, but a album you should hear all the same.

Independent Dancer is out now on Rumpelmusig, available now on CD and MP3 from Amazon.co.uk [affiliate links].​

Album Review: 333 - Double Dagger

Double Dagger's latest and final album 333 comes alongside a curtain call documentary, If We Shout Loud Enough, that portrays the band at their end and their position within the Baltimoor music scene. With Shut Up And Play The Hits it seems like LCD may have created a new micro-genre - the rock band break-up movie.

SUAPTH focused on the simultaneous, somewhat divergent parallels of the impact the band (and its demise) had on its fans and the impact on the band itself - celebratory and sad but cathartic in the release that splitting up brings. Tears are shed, but good times celebrated.

View fullsize

​333 - Double Dagger

In contrast If We Shout Loud Enough is messier, the lines between fans are blurred here on screen, with local musicians within Baltimoor acting as mutual fans and a close-knit community forming around the group. It reflects a starck physical reality where lead singer Nolen Strals jumps off of the foot high stage at whatever small to medium venue they are playing at and mingles within the crowd, shouting at the crowd and tying them up in the knots of his microphone cable: physically tearing down the boundaries.

Where SUAPTH had catharsis in the ending of something, If We Shout Loud Enough clearly portrays a band for whom the music itself, especially the playing of it live, IS the catharthis. Playing live grinds some bands down and ages its individual members, but does the opposite here.

Strals suffers with a stutter and struggles to get his words out in person, yet on record and in concert rattles through songs and announcements with precision. It's something that has been tackled lyrically within Double Dagger's music, as are his flashbacks to an early concert that was preceded by a particularly gruesome experience, and here within the film.

What comes through in the music on this album, and even more with the documentary, is that the rage exposed through Double Dagger's music releases something. It seems to help, creating distance between Strals and these topics whilst also acting as a catalyst to the listeners, who simultaneously address their own demons.

333 has elements where it sounds like the wound soothed. It may start with the intense, punctuated aggression of The Mirror, a record dealing with the aforementioned stuttering, but there is more range here than on any previous release.

Just 25-minutes in length, 333 is almost too short to be even a mini-album, with three tracks clocking in at under 3-minutes. Two instrumentals, Space Dust and Figure Eights feel content and almost playful. It's like an experimental last session rather than an album.

What it lacks in drama and stature in structure 333 closes with Heretic's Hymn, and it comes through on that record how the band have grown over the course of their career, reassured and rewarded by the feedback of years of intimate gigs.

The film and record are a fitting tribute to the end of an incredibly spirited group, highlighting what being in a band has done for those within it and those that loved them. It will be sad to see Double Dagger's great release end, but exciting to see what the members do next.

Both 333 and If We Shout Loud Enough are out now in a combined release, you can order it now on Amazon.co.uk [affiliate link]. Check out the trailer for If We Shout Loud Enough below:​

Double Dagger - 333 LP and If We Shout Loud Enough DVD - available on Record Store Day http://thrilljockey.com/thrill/Double-Dagger/333 Hear "Heretic's Hymn" from 333 https://soundcloud.com/thrilljockey/double-dagger-heretics-hymn If We Shout Loud Enough will show at the Maryland Film Festival, May 8-12, 2013 http://www.md-filmfest.com/ A Folk Hero Films Release

Album Review: Seven Lies - Djrum

Seven Lies is the debut album by Felix Manuel, who goes by the name Djrum (pronounced "drum") and on it he creates a sound collage of genres and influences.

This is an undeniably London-orientated album, full of the kind of urban decay coupled with muted bass and raw beats. Djrum's label cites influences including Portishead, DJ Shadow and Cinematic Orchestra, jungle, minimal techno, house and broken beats. These have all been combined to create a filmic, atmospheric soundscape.

Djrum's music sounds more like Machinedrum than any of those individual reference points, and there is a hint of Andy Stott's mature bass-orientate techno to the deeper moments on Seven Lies. In essence Manuel has created a dubstep album that casts a net over a number of dance-related genres - house, techno, hip-hop and soul - and pulls them all back into the boat.

Seven Lies therefore captures much of the apprehension and isolation of dubstep but plays it to a less rigid, more human rhythm. It's ultimately familiar in style yet still feels distinct from much of the dubstep influenced material I've heard of late - less coffee table than James Blake and the XX, yet more experimental than the dubstep of purists.

Arcana (Do I Need You) builds strings, tight drum loops and a growling bass line around a soulful vocal, creating a heady mechanical groove that still feels like it has heart. Lies, in contrast, is slow moving and fragile, filled with vinyl static and harps and space that encircle vocals from Shadowbox.

It seems that Djrum isn't afraid to step more directly into other genres and disrupt those either. Final track Thankyou is a fluid track of drum 'n' bass rhythms where the drum patterns gradually merge into one another before a final cinematic climax.

There is a sense of the jazz-like experimentalism in the way Manuel's music moves, locking into a moment and playing with it until it gradually changes form whilst painting a series of momentary feelings for the listener.

Seven Lies will be released next Monday through 2nd Drop Records, it is available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on MP3 [affiliate link]. Preview via the album Minimix below:

Album Review: Confidence - SIS

View fullsize

​Confidence - SIS

As SIS, Burak Sar has been on the IDM / minimal scene since rising to fame in 2008 with releases on Cecille and Ricardo Villalobos' label Sei es Drum. And it's the latter that SIS most resembles on his sophomore album, Confidence, out on Wednesday through his own Cocolino label.

SIS takes much of the jazz influenced timing of Villalobos and the tear-stained soul of Nicolas Jaar and sticks them through a well-oiled manufacturing process, making tight capsules of deep, throbbing music.

Confidence has neither the at times barking mad tendencies of Villalobos nor the moments of left-field reprieve of Jaar, but he manages to conjure a number of well-worn moments here that feel both mechanical yet still used and scuffed. On Mangalarga SIS plays with looping Eastern melodies, bluesy sax and thick slabs of bass across a nine-minute-plus tightly wound experience. It pulls the listener in and out of bustling streets and buildings, between traffic and people, a picture of a busy foreign land.

Confidence is complex and full of detail, meant to be consumed multiple times to uncover subsequent detail. That unfortunately means that sometimes it just feels like the good stuff is hidden away behind too much filler... I might have come away with a more instant sense of satisfaction if I weren't initially confronted with ten tracks that stretch Confidence out to a length of 76-minutes.

It feels like at least part of Jaar's success is due to his ability to edit - Space Is Only Noise was a mere 47-minutes long and as a result it eschewed the sense of being slow moving. Live, Jaar often dispenses with such control but on record at least each new song he gradually drip feeds feels new and revelatory. In contrast SIS's strongest moments here - the soaring Misaki, or the taught yet Japanes Zen garden sounding Messara - sound a little like consolation prizes.

Forcing the listener to deep dive into oceans of sound looking for pearls is often par for the course for the genre, and something that the Godfather Villalobos himself is equally guilty of. In a sense it's a part of the experience, and gives Confidence a journeyed and hypnotic feel. It's an approach you will either warm to or you won't, and much of your relationship with Confidence will depend on how deep you are prepared to go.

​Confidence is released through Cocolino on 17 April, preview via Soundcloud below:

Album Review: Another - Crimea X

Hold tight for some fresh incoming cosmic house music on Italian duo Crimea X's second album Another. Out on 28 March through Hell Yeah Recordings it embraces an experimental electronic sound but applies it to post-rock production techniques.

Whilst Crimea X never feel quite as tongue in cheek or upfront about it, the pop influence audible on Another echoes Hot Chip in an adult-orientated 80s sense. The album's opening tracks set much of the tone and pace. Essential layers a series of analogue synths together with flutes and gentle, reserved vocals whilst Floordance Track is more upbeat, complete with flamboyant drumming and lots of atmospheric space flecked with acid.

View fullsize

​Another - Crimea X

There's a balance at work between the tracks and moods Crimea X have created on Another. The pace changes but the album never deviates too far from a central point. There's also a consistent, Mediterranean sound throughout that conjures up visions of cooling white villas dotting the glistening shoreline, much as Panda Bear achieved with his Spanish sounding Person Pitch. Another may not be as risky or quite as rewarding as Panda Bear and his bandmates but it still feels like a dip into the pool on a scorching hot day.

On Another Crimea X are experimenting and pushing out at the edges of their sound - instruments wilfully thrown in up against analogue synthesisers, giving the duo an improvised, experimental sound. Under the watch of Norwegian producer Bjorne Torske, who spent 10 days in the studio with them before returning home to mix, the duo have managed to do this without sacrifing pacing or consistency, and that's a testament to the vision if nothing else.

​Another is our now on Hell Yeah Recordings, available for pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on MP3. You can preview the album via the Soundcloud player below: