Album Review: Built On Glass - Chet Faker

I have long had a thing for slacker music. Pavement, Weezer. Bands whose best tunes seem to appear out of the haze of a hungover or stoned funk. Music that overflows and spills out of the speakers into the room like it would be more effort to turn it off than it was to create it in the first place. It is the dripping tap, the squeaky wheel. It feels effortless, yet intimate...

I am at my most emotionally transparent and open during the moments I emerge from a hangover. Missives of adulation applied to friends and loved ones in an insistent and rapid-fire fashion.

That is what Chet Faker is. These days on this blog I'm much more likely to be evangelising the latest indie R&B than anything you would find on a dancefloor... That is mainly because this music connects with me in a way not much else has in a while - lyrical depth combined with production chops. Chet Faker excels in both of these areas.

Chet Faker, real name Nicholas Murphy, is an Australian who applies a weird wonky folk sensibility to R&B. If Justin Vernon (best known in his Bon Iver guise) got in on the R&B game (not in itself unlikely), it might sound something like this.

Built On Glass is a lazy, funky, hungover in the morning kind of record. The meandering jazzy brass and stuttering rhythms of Lesson In Patience are seemingly thrown down as freestyle, despite the care and attention lavished on the overall (overtly-electronic) production here. There is a massive nod to the chaotic and off-kilter syncopated rhythms of D'Angelo's Voodoo  throughout much of this record, and that is a glorious thing.

There are also brilliant songs and brilliant song-writing. Talk Is Cheap is sweet and endearing yet frank - the heart-felt words of a man three-beers down whose tongue is set free by the booze in his gut: "I wanna make you move with confidence, I want be with you alone" sings Murphy.

Track 1998 lays smooth electronic melodies in place amongst a bumping house beat to make an angsty post-breakup song short-skirted and sexy as much as it is heart-breaking. And Built On Glass peaks with the sparkling honesty and third-wall defying Cigarettes & Loneliness, a near-eight-minute folk-funk song about unrequited love. It's exactly the sort of genre-defying moment that highlights what a talent Faker is: blood pumping raw inside, funky on top.

Built On Glass is out now, listen via the Spotify player above or purchase on Amazon.co.uk on CD or MP3 [affiliate links].

EP Review: Bad Guys Won / Hummingbirds - Titeknots

There's a lush Classic vibe to this latest double A-side single from London house producer Titeknots, the third in quick succession coming out in Tru Thoughts. It also reminds me of the kind of sound Swag were pushing back in the early noughties, but it still sounds just as fresh today.

Expect heads-down house music with plenty of jazzy flourishes, in other words. Up first, Bad Guys Won is a swirling flurry of keys and looped live bass, together with sharp drums and cut-up vocals.

Hummingbirds is even fresher in my opinion. Taughtly wound bass creates a looping sensation throughout the track, set against shuffling rhythms that give the track a real basement jazz vibe. Quality.

Bad Guys Won / Hummingbirds is out now through Tru Thoughts. Stream all of the Tru Thoughts Titeknots singles on Soundcloud below. You can purchase the single on MP3 through Amazon.co.uk [affiliate link].

Titeknots is currently in the midst of a run of quick fire single releases on @tru-thoughts Here they are all collected, with the latest release at the top. All singles can be bought here: http://titeknots.bandcamp.com or here: http://shop.etchshop.co.uk/artists/titeknots

Album Review: Like A Machine - The Emperor Machine

Andy Meecham's new album as The Emperor Machine follows a slew of slinky singles featuring his new vocal partner and it mostly delivers on the promise of those releases that led us up to this point.

Meecham has specifically highlighted his love of the album format, paying tribute to the fact that albums enable you to get 'weirder' in a way shorter forms of music do not... That combined with that new (still curiously unnamed) vocalist gives Like A Machine a left-field analogue component that certainly benefits his sound.

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Opening with the evil bass-heavy sounds of Theme From Magical Ring, Like A Machine initially sounds like a bad-ass sci-fi funk exploitation flick. It screams out for someone to create a version with some rhymes dropped on it - the thick and sinister and slow melodies the sickest hip-hop track you never heard.

Theme From Magical Ring is quickly followed by a stripped back, more raw and punk influenced version of the title track and lead single. It is another similarly aggressive and foreboding piece, full of the sensuality it always had but back here with added vitriol. At three-and-a-half-minutes it will leave you wanting, but perhaps that is a statement in itself.

The first six-minutes of Like A Machine are almost certainly its best, but that says more about  how electric they feel than it does of the rest of the album. Current single RMI Is All I Want introduces a disco swagger that re-occurs a couple of times through the album, particularly on the Todd Terje featuring So.Ma.So - expect plenty of analogue synth and bass lines that make your backside bounce. Both are playful yet grimey.

Free from the constraints of the single format The Emperor Machine concept benefits in exactly the increased expansiveness Meecham has alluded to. That rework of the title track would never lead a single, and there are moments of psychedelic weirdness - as on the slow and cosmic Sonique. Varied and assertive, Like A Machine is a weird, but enjoyable, trip.

Like A Machine is out on May 19 through Southern Fried. Pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]. Preview RMI Is All I Want on Soundcloud below:

Buy on Beatport: http://bit.ly/RMIBeatport Buy on iTunes: http://bit.ly/1f9OP2v Buy vinyl: http://bit.ly/RMIvinyl Taken from the album 'Like A Machine' coming soon: http://bit.ly/EMLikeAMachineAmazon http://www.facebook.com/theemperormachine

Stream: Reunion - Still Parade

FIELDS EP - OUT NOW: VINYL/CD: http://stillparade.bandcamp.com/album/fields iTunes: http://snip.ftpromo.net/epfields www.stillparade.com www.twitter.com/stillparade www.facebook.com/stillparade

Another nice track from Still Parade, AKA Niklas Kramer, whom I featured back in March. Both tracks come from the Fields EP, out now and available from Amazon [affiliate link].

EP Review: Just Come To Me - Joost Kumtome

Joost Kumtome (pronounced "Just come to me" apparently... See what they did there?) are a pair of electronic producers who are currently keeping their identity a mystery. The Just Come To Me EP marks their debut release, out on ALiVE on 12 May.

The concepts surrounding the release feel about as tired as the EP format itself - a stunted and meaningless name, purported anonymity likely to conceal little beyond names most people won't have heard of anyway...

Yet the music itself deserves ears. Everyone Knows opens the EP with a rough bass line led track that melds bruised vocal inflections with rave-y electronics and reverb drenched drum patterns. Better Believe It is the biggest track here - piano scattered across more heavy bass, synth strings and soulful vocal hooks like shady afternoons dappled with sunshine. Final track Release Valve follows a straight up deep house template, sounding like early 90s Masters At Work via the London orbital.

It feels like an insistent and catch-up collaboration between basement London and bumping loft parties in New York... Just Come To Me is enjoyable when consumed without the baggage that comes with the EP's desire to differentiate - you are better off just enjoying it for what it is.

Just Come To Me is release through ALiVE Recordings on 12 May, purchase the MP3 on Amazon.co.uk or preview the EP on Soundcloud above.