Video: Forget Me - Born Ruffians

Born Ruffians have just released the second track and video from their forthcoming album Uncle, Duke & The Chief and it’s absolutely beautiful.

Forget Me came into life after Born Ruffian’s band member Luke Lalonde sat down to write a piece of music the day David Bowie passed away. Appropriately the song talks to the universal experience of death, but the life affirming impact that concept can have. The song opens with the intense line “Someday, a white light will come for you, to comfort you”, a line Lalonde explains:

“It’s about how the light is something that you should embrace and feel okay going towards it,. We’re all doing this together, we’re all on the exact same path—it’s just that some of us are ahead of others.”

The personal sense of loss that comes with people we love passing away is one of the hardest feelings we face, but it also acts as a reminder. A reminder of the love we feel for the people that touch our lives. And a reminder that our time here is finite - a precious resource to be cherished and invested with care.

Forget Me is a beautiful, stark record. A bluesy, ramshackle record that bursts with life whilst it sings its guts out about how we will all die. It’s going straight on my playlist for days when I want to get lost in my dreams of being a cowboy (yes, that’s a real thing).

Check out the lovely video that goes with this track below. Further down you will find the video for the first track from Uncle, Duke & The Chief, the equally lovely Love Too Soon.

Album Review: DJ-Kicks - Various mixed by Apparat

The DJ-Kicks series appears to be hitting something of a stride... With several notable releases this year already in the bag, The Juan Maclean's being a particular highlight, here comes one more from IDM innovator Apparat.

And Apparat's entry certainly doesn't drop the ball. To a certain extent it does what you would expect... It's intelligent, electronic music that is built more for home listening than the dance floor, but the quality of the music and timing is good enough to make listening (repeatedly) a pleasure.

Things start off fairly heavily with Apparat's own 'Circles' - what feels almost like a trance track with a cinematic world-music guitar motif - before getting dubby on fellow IDM-ers Telefon Tel Aviv's 'Lengthening Shadows'. From there things spin out in multiple directions. This is a mix that is one moment cold, hard and clinical and the next warm and embracing.

The latter is best demonstrated by Four Tet's stunning remix of 'I Need A Life' by Born Ruffians... A track that manages to simultaneously feel like the heat of summer and joy of Christmas. It creates a neat centre for the album before things turn darker on Vincent Markowski's classic 'The Madness Of Moths' and Four Tet and Burial's 'Moth'. As Thom Yorke's haunting 'Harrowdown Hill' emerges from Ramadanman's 'Tempest' there is a stark urban feel to this album that shows the influence of Apparat's recent collaborations with Modeselektor.

The album closes on Tim Hecker's ambient melancholy drenched 'Borderlands'. Apparat's DJ-Kicks album is a serious business and that may alienate some, but it is a testament to how a good mix album can be much more than the reconstruction of a live DJ set. This is a mix album with more emotional punch and ambition than most electronic artists manage on their own studio albums, and for that BlackPlastic salutes it.

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DJ-Kicks by Apparat is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3.