review
Flame - Ronya
This one is a little steamy, but I'm digging the early 90s sound and soft, warm production of this new single from Finland's Ronya, out now on Coca Music. Good synth work, a pounding beat and those sultry vocals.
Wild Beasts, Credit: Klaus Thymann
"Don't confuse me for someone who gives a fuck” asserts vocalist Hayden Thorpe on Wanderlust, the opener of album number four. It is a moment that defines just how much Wild Beasts have become their own animal.
Present Tense is an album not simply recorded but meticulously planned and crafted. Rather than simply going into the studio to record songs as they apparently did on their previous albums, here the band started by planning out the songs and the album like a strategy. Pieces were assembled on computers first and they abandoned concerns about pre-defined roles within the band in terms of the instruments they played - anyone could contribute whatever they wanted. It sounds like a dangerous game that cold lead to a cold and clinical album, but the result is anything but.
As the first single from Present Tense much has been made of the baiting of an unnamed British band's attempts to Americanise their sound (it's not label mates the Arctic Monkeys apparently) but to focus on the target of the barbs perhaps misses the point... Wanderlust also has Thorpe delivering the line "It's a feeling that I've come to trust". The point is that this is a band confident in their own path, and the two lines highlighted here attest to that. Self-acceptance is key.
Present Tense - Wild Beasts
This album is a much more heavily produced one than any of their previous, with co-producers Lexx and Brian Eno protégé Leo Abrahams helping to grant the band more focus and confidence. It is overtly more electronic than anything else they have released and yet it comes without any cost when it comes to the effectiveness of the band themselves. They remain tight, in-sync and limber.
The songs are all just as athletic, lyrically tackling that growing confidence that often comes with masculine maturity, and Thorpe's vocals for the first time not over-playing their hand. In amongst the warmer electronics and restrained playing he feels more at home, less flamboyant. A baritone vocal delivery on Nature Boy add an element of malice whilst that trademark Thorpe falsetto provides a emotional femininity on tracks like the confessional album closer Palace.
And it can't really be overstated - the production work just glitters. An elastic bouncing rhythm on A Dog's Life punctuating the words "So throw the ball up into space...", a line otherwise delivered in near silence. It is a moment delivered seconds prior to a crescendo of synthesizers. The final quarter of Sweet Spot (posted recently here) still makes the hairs on your arms stand up, a series of clean harmonic synth chords stab through the song clinically and beautifully... The kind of moment you wish would never end.
Present Tense is a considerable achievement - it easily represents the best work the band have released and it does so with confidence. This is a band that have figured out what they are doing and appear to know they are good at it.
Present Tense is out now on Domino, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]. Listen to Wanderlust on Spotify:
Koen Holtkamp
Koen Holtkamp is one half of Mountains and this solo album - a standalone four-track release - reflects his work within that duo.
Motion is cinematic and somewhat overwhelming - the kind of blissful music that will surround and envelop you in warm electronic bliss, seemingly full of nothing in particularly and yet simultaneously constructed purely out of detail.
Motion - Koen Holtkamp
I've recently been conducting guided meditation on my morning commute - the idea is that by clearing your head of distraction and focusing only on 'the moment' you become calmer and less distracted generally. Listening to Holtkamp's music feels a little bit like taking part in one of those sessions - you reach a point where through concentrating so much on the detail you can end up is a strange heightened state. This is music to become lost within.
Holtkamp's synth work is quite mesmerizing, the spectral syncopated melodies of Between Visible Things underscored with a contemplative series of bass line chord progression to offset complexity from some full of emotional resonance. It is in this chaos that the album's title makes most sense.
Vert is a similarly shifting moment of frenetic chaos fronted by aggressive electronic guitar work that placed here amongst all the other noise feels strikingly raw, and yet ultimately make from the same stuff: all this electricity. Crotales is a little more relaxed than anything else on Motion, placing 'pure' synthetic noise alongside synthetic versions of real instruments (those titular percussive crotales, an upright bass).
The entire second side of this release is taken up by Endlessness, a track more than 21-minutes long on which Holtkamp allows his mind to run riot and yours to expand. Expect a cacophonous and layered ambient piece that somehow still manages to remain somewhat listenable. It is unlikely to get much radio play but as a experimental and sensory experience Motion delivers.
Motion is released through Thrill Jockey on 24 March. You can pre-order the album on LP, or the extended Motion: Connected Works CD, both on Amazon.co.uk [affiliate links]. Check out the video for Endlessness below:
Flowers & Sea Creatures, image by Edward Bishop
Flowers & Sea Creatures have previously released on both Compost and Buzzin' Fly but Afternoon & Afterhours is their debut release on My Favorite Robot.
Afternoon & Afterhours - Flowers & Sea Creatures
It is a release that boasts the kind of sophistication you would expect from alumni of such labels. The EP opens with The Very Next Day, which features Wrong Jeremy, and combines them with a throbbing, cinematic groove. The track packs plenty of menace - an alienated soundtrack that lets those vocals provide an additional lens of humanity, but it is the low rumble of the bass and percussion that provide much of the atmosphere. So Far The Star is similarly threatening, with cold and metallic music combined with a sparse vocal and some dark, distorted bass.
Alternate Endings is less busy and represents the start of the stronger half of this release - an ambient, beat-free piece that makes much of gently strummed guitars and vocals enveloped in echo. The EP's closing track, Citadel is a nine-and-a-half-minute long epic piece that takes the maudlin feel of much of that which it follows but expands into epic proportions. It is somewhere between the beat-led sound of the opening half of this EP and the minimal sound of Alternate Endings - shuffling rhythms provide a momentum that sees the introduction of rough synthetic melodies and ultimately some Latin guitar. It's an epic conclusion to a heartfelt EP.
Afternoon & Afterhours is out through My Favorite Robot on 24 February. Preview via Soundcloud below:
Sean Brosnan
The Future Disco series from Needwant has been running for so long now that it feels like it is reaching that difficult, slightly flabby middle age period on this, the seventh in the series. The label continue to put out decent material but the nu-disco scene feels a little less sprightly than it once did and it is difficult not to feel that coming through.
Future Disco Vol. 7
Future Disco Vol. 7 is cast in tribute to those that make it through to the end, the obligitory strap line this time proudly claiming "’Til The lights Come Up". It's a mentality Future Disco resident Sean Brosnan appears to take to heart, because much of the best material is saved for the album's close making the opening half feel like a bit of a slog. Ejeca's starry-eyed rave anthem Together still feels just as youthful but it is sandwiched between so much by-the-numbers female vocal house (H.O.S.H.'s Disc Jockey) and trance influenced groove (Mirror Mirror's Kaleidoscope) it numbs the ears. Even Benoit & Sergio fail to turn things around, Shake Shake still not delivering anything like their previous highs.
It isn't until the more considered second half that Vol. 7 starts to get interesting. The DJ Koze mix of Mount Kimbie's Made To Stray is unexpected and ushers in a more constrained and slightly melancholic atmosphere. Both Naughty, by Names In Lights, and the Outboxx mix of Clouds by Crazy P feel understated - tracks for those that really want to dance. When James Fox shows up with Holding On (NYC Mix) it therefore feels like the album has earned a moment of self-encouraging reflection, and it gets it.
Sean Brosnan
From there, as is often the case with Future Disco albums, things are seen to a close with a series of beautiful moments. Templehof's Drake is played as a soulful electronic bed to the looped vocals from Holding On, creating a wonderful momentary pause. Ada's cover version of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Maps, here remixed by Michael Mayer and Tobias Thomas, is similarly restrained, even if it will never make you feel as much as Karen O's staggering original. Downtown Party Network's goosebump-inducing 'Space Me Out' features in its Mario Basanov remixed form and it feels like a real end-of-the-night moment. The actual finale is Tale Of Us & Clockwork's subtler but equally introspective Lost Keys.
So in the end, Future Disco Vol. 7 brings it back, but that first half feels like this is a label compilation that could do with being more prudent with its own catalogue, looking afield more often for inspiration.
Future Disco Vol. 7 is released on Monday through Needwant, available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on CD [affiliate link]. Check out the album mini mix on Soundcloud:
