Demob Happy

Beak

Beak>- Beak>

6.5/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Subterranean bass throbs, some cod-ghostly wailing and vaguely arabesque improvisations on a rusty sounding organ … ’Backwell’ is the opener of the self-titled debut album by Beak>, a new band including Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. With its slighty nauseating retro synths fanning out mechanically over chugging motorik, ‘Blackwell’ signposts an album of happy homage. The reference points range from the familiar (e.g., Can, NEU!, Joy Division) to the more esoteric (Silver Apples, early proponents of electronica-infused psych who resurfaced on the critical radar after being named as an influence for Portishead’s ‘Third’).

While Geoff Barrow and co.’s 2008 comeback was characterised by rockier, notably more Kraut textures than the trip hop torch songs with which they made their name in the 90s, Beak> sees Barrow teaming up with fellow Bristolians Billy Fuller and Matt Williams to explore this musical terrain untethered to the song-form constraints of Portishead proper.

The results are mixed. Recorded over a two week period, with little post-production trickery, it has the air of a jam and sometimes feels unfinished or at least rough around at the edges. The textures employed by Beak> are not dissimilar to those rendered by Broadcast’s antiquated studio equipment, but whereas Broadcast sculpted these textures into a beguiling retro-futuristic pop, Beak>’s insistence on evoking a certain authenticity is not so much impressionistic as orthodox.

‘Pill’ begins with some arabesque violin that sounds as if heard from the meagre air shaft of some underground cell. Thereafter the track evolves into a Krautrock dirge as played by some po-faced BBC workskop technicians from the 1970s with rather too much creative freedom. Thus we have the kind of haunted house prog folly that might have scored one of that period’s spooky children’s tv plays that have been a rich source of inspiration to electronica and, of late, Hauntology artists.

‘I know’ begins with a buzzing synth that sounds like a mobile phone interfering with your stereo - you know, as if there were a bee stuck in your speakers, before developing into the album’s most satisfyingly complete Krautrock number - a linear Teutonic pulse embellished by some subtly emotive bass playing that infuses the track with an understated melancholy.

‘Battery Point’ is less defined by the strictures of motorik, but is a rather graceful cloud of shimmering guitar reverb that washes back and forth for some six minutes or more, underlined by some grinding, low-slung bass and peaking with a Mogwai-style, high-end crescendo.

‘Iron Action’ returns to more propulsive territory, the sighing, semi-decipherable vocal utterances instantly redolent of Ian Curtis’s bleak vocals. Finally a wiggling synth frequency unlooses itself from the rigid discipline of the rhythm section, presumably at the turn of a dial, to pleasing effect.

‘Ears Have Ears’ is cavernous, unhinged dub while ‘Blagdon Lake’ is informed by ominous, blacker-than-black goth-tinged early 80s post punk, and reaches a climax with impressively metallic stabs of synthesised guitar that could score a drama about a radiation accident or toxic spill.

Thereafter the album loses its focus a bit, the  metallic screeches of ‘Barrow Gurney’ recalling Broadcast’s occasional moments of wilful anarchy, while ‘Dundry Hill’ and the Can-on-a-bad-day of ‘The Cornubia’ are unrelenting industrial dirge-core that trundle along oppressively under slate-grey skies. 

Beak>, with its Edgar Allan Poe-like moniker, is the result of Barrow’s unchecked obsession with a certain period of (mostly bleak) music. But its aesthetic of distilled misery - only half sincere - will test some listeners’ patience: Beak> is faithful to its influences but isn’t often more interesting than a work of pastiche.

Homelife - Exotic Interlude

7/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

The last time Homelife surfaced on my radar was with the 2002 Ninja Tune release ‘Flying Wonders‘, a whimsical and varied hotch-potch of exotic styles that was more than much of the hipster muzak coming out of the label at the time. Whereas then the core members Anton Burns and Paddy Steer were assisted by a veritable orchestra of multi-instrumentalists, the first impressions of the aptly-titled ‘Exotic Interlude’ is of a much more stripped-down sound, but the shuffling jazziness and dreaminess pervade. The result of several years of honed-down jams in the spectacularly crowded Homelife studio, the DIY ethos is belied by the intricacy of the musicianship: with Burns and Steer demonstrating prowess on an impressive range of stringed and percussive instruments.  It is, rather predictably, a folkier affair, but stops sliding onto the bandwagon by retaining the breezy character and charm of their earlier records.

Arguably ‘Exotic Interlude’ never returns to the heights of the two opening tracks: the folksy 60s psychedelia of ‘Circles’ and the lilting, Hawaiian-accented folk of ‘Along the Verge’.  Both tracks feature gently spiralling atmospherics and have an emotional resonance less evident in their earlier albums, particularly on the yearning second song. ‘Sunday Streets’ is a lonesome rustle of trees and dusky ambience, all twinkling atmospherics and steel guitar, world-weary but not quite desolate. This melancholic take on lounge gets a welcome reprise on the penultimate ‘Atlas’, which benefits from some reverb on the vocals that enhance the air of dreamy detachment.

Such creative vocal treatment is conspicuously absent on ‘Lincoln Square’ and ‘Lazy Man’, where the Afro-Caribbean rhythms and flutters of guitar might please fans of Vampire Weekend or even Dirty Projectors. However, both tracks deserve something less slight lyrically and melodically, and Burnside’s modest vocal range is rather exposed in the mix. ‘Everywhere’ is a more successful fusion of psychedelic whimsy and the exotic, while the darker, technically ambitious tabla ’n’ bass of ‘More Wine’ is a bit too busy.

With a theoretical side 1 and 2 book-ended by a couple of fine instrumentals - particularly the dark Hawaiian/Badalamente lounge of the title track - ‘Exotic Interlude’ is an atmospheric record and very nearly a low-key triumph but for a couple of lightweight moments that dilute, rather than compliment, the air of breezy effortlessness.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Yo La Tengo - Popular Songs

8.5/10

Perennial critics’ favourites Yo La Tengo return with an album that reigns in some of the magpie tendencies of 2006’s sprawling ‘I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass’ with a more focused set. ‘Popular Songs’ - their twelfth long-player - finds Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley getting the balance beautifully right between their experimental and eclectic urges and indie dream pop, with all the constituent parts pulling together into a satisfyingly evocative whole.

‘Popular Songs’ opens with some metallic drones which might prompt you to wonder if you had put the right CD on, before a thrilling swirl of strings, washing synths and tweaked vocals usher in something unexpectedly psychedelic. But despite the saturated bass and jazzy, distorted keyboard solos, ‘Here to Fall’ is still a smartly centred pop track. By contrast, ‘Avalon or Someone’ is perhaps more representative of what most people think is the Yo La Tengo ’sound’, a perfect slice of falsetto nostalgia pop, the fuzzily remembered and achingly felt.

‘By Two’s is a nocturnal mood piece of eerie woodland atmospherics: “Hush little Baby, don’t you cry … cross over to the other side’, whispers Hubley ominously. While ‘Nothing to hide’ is a more generic if catchy indie rocker, ‘Periodically Double of Triple’ is all geek soul with organ stabs and funky bass, with Kaplan bemoaning that he has “Never read Proust … sounds a little too long / Never used a hammer … without somehow using it wrong”. Before it starts to sound a bit daft there’s a wonky little breakdown of sorts before the track fades out on a Fisher Price organ wig out and playful harmonies.

While “If it’s true’ is more saccharine 60s chamber pop, ‘I’m On My Way’ is world-weary and fragile. “I tried to be brooding and dark but it all fell through” Kaplan murmurs on the latter while gentle tablas underline a romantic swell to the music that peaks with a lilting, almost Latin guitar solo. This consistent sequence of delicate melodiousness continues with the perfect Belle & Sebastian pop of ‘When it’s Dark’ and  dreamily mournful ‘All Your Secrets’, the latter’s ‘do-do do-do’ harmonies echoed by a poignantly fragile organ.

The final two tracks are longer, more impressionistic pieces. ‘More Stars Than There Are in Heaven’ is the stauncher of the two, building on fuzzy, low end guitars and repeated, interlocking harmonies (”We’ll walk hand in hand”). The tangled layers of guitar evolve and stretch out into an engaging and evocative epic - a warm blur of bleeding and receding shapes “right before your very eyes”.

Longer still ‘The Fireside’ is indeed the flickering grate of glowing embers the title promises, beginning with heavily reverbed acoustic guitar and ambient drones. Less linear than the preceding track, it very slowly gathers momentum with a little rhythmic strum about four minutes in, underpinning the track with (albeit meditative) purpose that peaks with a detached vocal.

A beguiling album full of rich musicianship and irresistable melodies that charm and haunt in equal measure, ‘Popular Songs’ will keep drawing you back for another listen.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Wild Beasts - Two Dancers

8.5/10

On their first album ‘Limbo Panto’ Wild Beasts got painted by some as peddlers of a contrived English eccentricity that was unfashionably arch, all barbershop harmonies and old world camp. While many were turned off by their falsetto front man Hayden Thorpe, whose gymnastic vocals always seemed to be accompanied in print with the disclaimer ‘deal-breaker’, a militant few argued that they were the modern heirs to The Smiths. The similarities are evident, Wild Beasts sing about modern Britain - chip shops and glottal stops - with a elegiac but humourous eye, while their sound is informed by the 1980s ‘Brit jangle’ of Morrissey and co. Very much a love it or hate it proposition, one could have been forgiven for doubting Wild Beasts’ chances of longevity in Britain’s faddish new music landscape. On ‘Two Dancers’, however, they will surely silence the doubters, having smoothed down some of the rougher edges without sacrificing their oddball spirit.  The falsetto is still there; tempered perhaps, but as much by tighter song structures than a reigning-in of their musical personality.

For listeners braced for pantomime histrionics, the album begins in quite low-key fashion. The jangling guitars and synth washes on the gently propulsive ‘The Fun Powder Plot’ and ‘Hooting and Howling’ recall New Order, although the vocals on the latter have the more fragile register of Antony Hegarty. Neither title quite prepares for the lush, elegant and expansive pop within, which in turn belies the wackier lyrics. “This is a booty call … my boot, my boot your arsehole!‘ coos Thorpe on the ridiculously monikered opener - a song that is more malice than mockery. Likewise, ‘Hooting and Howling’ seems to bemoan thuggish behaviour with a Morrissey-esque, outsider melancholy. This is not four-square, meat and potatoes rock (i.e., it sounds nothing like Oasis): there is a lot of space in the mix, the music awakens gracefully and evolves in a watercolour blur that also recalls Cocteau Twins.

‘All The King’s Men’ picks things up considerably and is both one of the albums catchiest songs and the most obvious distillation of the Beasts sound: marching rhthms, arch lyrics, modern British reference points. Deeper-voiced Bassist Tom Fleming takes the lead, with a tongue-in-cheek roll call to “Girls from Shipley …  girls from Hounslow … girls who need me … girls who feed me“, that is both funny and sinister. Equally brilliant is the lush, epic pop of ‘We Still Got The Taste Dancing On Our Tongues’, an elegy to youth and adventure that can stay in the head for days and has more than just a hint of early U2 in its choppy, shimmering guitars.

The two-part title track, fronted again by Tom Fleming, is more mournful and thus less immediate, but still instrumentally rich, with Thorpe underlining Fleming’s vocals with little falsetto flutters on the world-weary reprise. The propulsive Peter Hook bass of ‘This is Our Lot’ doesn’t really stop the feeling of the album’s slow descent into more sombre, achingly nostalgic moods on the second part of the album. This sense is only offset by the more redemptive - in atmosphere at least - ‘The Empty Nest’: a sashaying, dovetailing journey home that again encapsulates Wild Beasts yearning, romantic charm.

Overall, ‘Two Dancers’ is a satisfying, beguiling record that takes a number of listens to fully bed in. The sensual, appropriately dreamy ‘When I’m Sleepy’ and the twilight ghostliness of ‘Underbelly’ provide impressionistic interludes to counterpoint the more epic tracks elsewhere. Surely one of the year’s best albums by a British band, ‘Two Dancers’ has the blend of invention and pop sensibility that seems to have been largely lacking on this side of the Atlantic in recent years. The revolution starts here.

I never thought it would happen to me but finally I’ve succumbed to external pressures and have been unable to update this blog with any regularity. Firstly, I’ve been concentrating efforts on a new English-language website for my new home town, Grenoble, in south-east France. Secondly, I’ve recently become a father for the first time. Enough said.

Instead of the usual in-depth (and exceedingly hyperbolic) music, book and film reviews, I’ve done a little summary of my current listening habits.

Vecktamist - Grizzly Bear

This one weighs heavily under the burden of its own hype for me. A very accomplished record with many delights but its sometimes perhaps a bit too over-wrought production-wise, the result of much handringing in the studio I supect. Thus on one hand there is a greater lucidity and pop sensibility than on ‘Yellow House‘, it’s predecessor, but arguably less of that album’s perculiar bucolic charm. There are a few more ponderous tracks where lightness of touch is foresaken for bombastic gravitas. Listening to it right now, some of what I am writing seems rather churlish give how great tracks such as ‘Two Weeks’ are. But while it’s clearly one of the year’s better records, is it really better than Grizzly Bear member Dan Rossen’s album of last year ‘In Ear Park‘ under the Department of Eagles’ guise? Time will tell.

Wilco - W’ilco (the album)

This one won’t please fans of the band who had been hoping for an about-turn to the more impressionistic dissonance of ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot‘ and ‘A Ghost is Born‘. Others, like me, will be temporarily peeved by the thowaway in-jokery of the album title and opening track ‘Wilco (the song)’. Not a concept album this, but while it continues in the vein of the more conventional alt-country pop of ‘Sky Blue Sky‘, the overall effect is arguably more satisfying: great pop songs embellished with the band’s typically intricate musicianship. The devil, as always with Wilco, is in the detail; and while this is unabashedly up-beat, at times joyous stuff, there is plenty of sonic invention to marvel at throughout.

Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue

Have to thank Robert Pisani for putting me on to this one, out on Warp. It’s a curious mix of Boards of Canada’s tape-fuddled nostalgia, Californian psych and filtered Baleric synth pop, just right for these sweltering July days.

The Field - Yesterday and Today

Axel Willner, follows his acclaimed ‘From Here We Go Sublime’ with another album of pulsating, blissfully shimmering techno. Whereas Sublime was a touch too minimal for my tastes, ‘Yesterday and Today’ is more richly textured but equally epic - with an fuzzy, shoe-gazey quality that welcomes listeners normally alienated by more orthodox techno.

Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas - II

The Norwegian producers return with an album that is as much groove-based psychedelia as cosmic disco. An album to get pleasantly lost in; a lusciously produced, multi-instrumental pleasure from start to finish. Epic and evolving but always human and accessible, this couldn’t categorically be called ‘dance’ music - some of this sounds like German psych pioneers Can. A label-defying treat.

Solaris- Steven Soderbergh

Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 version of Stanisław Lem’s science-fiction novel Solaris was a film I liked to pretend I enjoyed and understood as a wanabee film-buff adolescent. With hindsight the film remained largely obscure to me then, bar some strikingly illusory imagery, particularly those in the memorable final sequence. I haven’t had the opportunity to re-view the film since my old Connoisseur Video copy - remember them, art-house film nerds? - went mouldy in my mother’s garage, having befallen whatever fate is meant to befall the VHS cassette, that most fallible and obsolete of recordable media.

I missed Steven Soderbergh’s take on Lem’s novel, and was horrified to realise that it was released in 2002. Naturally, I was interested to see it when it came out and the fact that seven years have passed since then had me pondering the kinds of unanswerable questions about the perplexing nature of time and adulthood that might make a fitting theme for some interminably long Tarkovsky film. Some brief forays into the internet tell me that the Soderberg film followed in the footsteps of Andrei Tarkovsky’s acclaimed 1972 film epic by focusing largely on the human element of the original story, even if it consumes almost an hour less viewing time. Marketing problems (George Clooney! In space! Pondering the nature of self with an alien replica of his dead wife?! It’s gonna be a hit!) contributed to the film’s grossing well under budget. I might never have seen it had it not been for my old friend Dan Morelle, who sent a copy of the movie - like a true gent - along with a package including presents for my newborn daughter. Thanks again Dan!

It is not surprising that Soderbergh’s ‘Solaris’ wasn’t a blockbuster, being both a film about loss and the fallibility of memory. As in the Tarkovsky version, Soderbergh focuses on the mind-expanding philoshophical implication in Lev’s novel, that the memories which nourish us are often deceptive or even erroneous. Clooney’s dead wife is cloned, by an alien presence, from memories that have warped and deteriorated like old VHS. This 2002 version also retains something of the mood of unnerving isolation and menace that pervaded the original, which was fittingly dubbed the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey, if not for its running time then for its depiction of humanity out of its element in a universe of rules and presences far beyond its comprehension. “We don’t want other worlds, we want mirrors”, says one character; and it is mirrors they receive, but otherworldly mirrors with mind-altering reflections.

Despite George Clooney and the slick visuals, Soderbergh’s Solaris is finally a low-key, if thought-provoking meditation on love, memory and mortality. If the ending lacks the stunning illusory sequence of the Tarkovsky version, the Soderbergh treatment is somehow simultaneously reassuring and profoundly unsettling: a love that will never die, but also a love that is a faded facsimile of the real thing. “I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong. That somehow I was wrong about everything”, says Clooney’s character, hinting at the absolute loneliness of living with one’s memories. The existential theme running through the film makes it a very human drama, like all the best science-fiction, and recalls comparable threads in Blade Runner. If in the Ridley Scott film we are left to contemplate our own mortality, Solaris deals with an equally dispiriting finitude: the finitude of memory. Both films, of course, also question what constitutes being human.

The mood of isolation and alien menace from both Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Kubrick’s opus is recalled here in no small part by the György Ligeti-esque score, while the rain-lashed metropolis of the sequences on Earth reminded me again of Blade Runner. In fact, the general slickness of the imagery brings Ridley Scott to mind, though the CGI-generated, gracefully orbiting space stations evoke little of the more tangible awe of Blade Runner’s model work (or indeed 2001’s rather suggestive spaceship embarkation to the Blue Danube Waltz, or even Star Wars’ awesome Imperial Star Destroyer). Incidentally a new film, ‘Moon’ starring Sam Rockwell, looks set to kick-start the model work revival, despite having a premise that sounds like the scripts of Solaris and 2001 accidentally mixed up and stitched back together. I’m excited to see it in any case, check out the trailer here.

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

White Denim - Fits

8/10

Such is the strength and depth (to borrow a football cliché) of music Stateside at the moment that I find myself with three acts on heavy rotation at the moment from Austin, Texas, alone. OK, so Spoon haven’t done anything lately but they’re a band I revisit frequently, while Bill Callahan’s ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle‘ is one of my favourites of 2009 thus far. White Denim is the latest addition to my Austin catalogue and some casual Googling reveals other familiar names that have breezed through my ipod shuffle at one time or another: The Octopus Project , Okkervil River, Explosions in the Sky, to name a few. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, Austin is the self-styled “Live Music Capital of the World’, a bold claim for only the 16th-largest city in the US (thanks Wikipedia). I haven’t seen White Denim live, but if ‘Fits’ is anything to go by, they must be an exciting prospect.

An exhilarating rush that channels garage rock, psych, hardcore, classic rock and much more besides, ‘Fits’ achieves what Crystal Antlers’ ear-splitting ‘Tentacles‘ didn’t quite: the spasmodic appropriation of multitudinous music styles into three-minute epics. Whereas on Tentacles the detail was often lost in a vortex of organ shredding, White Denim’s shape-shifting excesses are easier to track, despite their brevity. Far from being music for the attention-span depleted, White Denim are sonic adventurers who retain a pop lucidity while busily blowing your mind. There are outrageous Jimmy Page riffs, jazzy codas, bubbly skanks, lo-fi loops; seemingly no rules at all in fact on this restlessly inventive album.

The opener ‘Radio milk how can you stand it’ sets a ferocious tempo of sensationally OTT guitar soloing and a pummelling rhythm section before flipping the script mid-way through, as they have a tendency to do, to craft something wholly new out of chaos that preceded. The album remains at this volatile high tempo with ‘All Consolation’, which is like the distilled climax to some almighty jam, while the rifftastic ‘Say What You Want’ ends with some kind monster duel between guitar and sitar. By the fourth track, sung in Spanish, it’s all getting a bit much, even if the record is barely 10 minutes old, that the comparatively restrained - yet still frankly riotous - ‘I Start to Run’ is a freshener. Irrestistibly funky, ‘I Start to Run’ is equal parts White Riot and The White Stripes: shouty vocals, a rollicking, stripped-down rhythm section, and another mid-point parlour trick - this time being a dubby skank pulled out of an apparently invisible Rastafarian hat.

The next four tracks seem to come in pairs: ‘Sex Prayer’ - a jazzy instrumental interwoven with skuzzy lo-fi loops - forms a cauldron of reverb-heavy psych with ‘Mirrored and Reverse’ , while ‘Paint Yourself’ (”You’re always looking at yourself, deciding what you do not want to see”) and the unjustifiably short ‘I’d Have it just the way we were’ comprise a couple of jaunty, tripped-out ballads. ‘Regina holding hands’ later resumes this mood before erupting into improbably brilliant power pop, while ‘Syncn’ ends the album on an impressionistic note: a hushed collage of loops and a fragile falsetto from James Petralli. Rousing, riotous stuff!

Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle - Bill Callahan

8.5/10

Just as I thought I was tiring of the alt-country/new folk revival, along comes an album - from one of the scene’s relative old timers - of such immersive beauty that I can’t get enough of it. While there is much about Bill Callahan’s ‘Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle’ that is rooted in well-trodden Americana traditions, there is no questioning his authentic, subversive spin on the genre. Callahan’s second under his own name having apparently abandoned the Smog alias (under which his albums must number in double figures). ‘Sometimes … ‘ is a sultry, richly atmospheric pleasure from start to finish. As Smog, it seems Callahan was often painted as some kind of miserabalist Leonard Cohen wannabe. but here the singer is found in pensive and reflective, rather than melancholy spirit. His ruminating, semi-spoken vocal delivery reminds me somehow of a less lascivious Serge Gainsbourg: the loose, the swirling orchestrations that complement these songs are as dynamic as those on ‘Histoire de Melody Nelson’ (minus the Gallic funk) and as richly textured as Lambchop’s ‘Nixon‘ (minus the southern-fried Soul).

According to the sleeve notes, ‘Sometimes … ‘ was produced by ‘Raven! Are you bleeding? Oh! Raven! I did not mean to cut you! Raven! I was only kicking as a cricket in your beak! Raven! I only want to live!’, who unsurprisingly does not feature on Allmusic or Wikipedia. However, Brian Beattie deserves maximum plaudits for the orchestral arrangements throughout the album, which are elegant, wistful, and occasionally even a little romantic. While lush they are never over-wrought, clumsy or over-literal, but hover instead, ebbing and flowing around the Callahan’s baritone. This proves the perfect counterpart to Callahan’s exploratory, unconventional songwriting, melding together into engaging mood pieces that flower and evolve unhurriedly rather than travel in straight lines.

The opening three tracks set an extraordinarily high standard for the album that Callahan almost, but not quite sustains. The opener ‘Jim Cain’ typifies the album’s mood of nostalgia and reconciliation, sounding like a man blissfully at peace with himself, even if the words do not always support this. The brilliant single ‘Eid Ma Clack Shaw’ recounts the singer dreaming the perfect song, awaking to write it down, only to find the lyrics in the morning to be the gibberish of the title. Both funny and somehow touching, it is also the closest the album gets to being radio friendly. By contrast, ‘The Wind and the Dove’ is dark, Arabesque trip hop, with a shiver-inducingly poignant chorus.

After the opening triumvirate, the breezier ‘Rococo Zephyr’ feels less substantial, while the yearning, locomotive ‘My Friend’ would be perfect for watching landscapes unfold. ‘All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast’ evolves from a hypnotically dicordant loop of guitar that reminded me vaguely of Boards of Canada’s cassette-warped abstraction, French Horns underlining the rises and falls in orchestral tension. Other songs revolve around economic wordplay. On Too Many Birds’, Callahan sings the touchingly oxymoronic “If only we could skip a heartbeat for just one heartbeat” in refrain, adding a new word with each repetition. Starting with simple acoustic strums, lusher instrumentation imposes itself as the sentence is completed, gradually embellished with violin and piano and increasingly assertive percussion. Similarly, each line in the hypnotic ‘Faith/Void’, with the refrain “It’s time to put God away … I put God away”, is finished with some beautifully low-end guitar notes in a delightful call and response. A heady, evocative album.

Dirty Projectors -Bitte Orca

8/10

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT

Dirty Projectors are a band so singularly unconventional that I wondered how they had managed to gain so much popular attention - although their recent David Byre collaboration (the excellent ‘Knotty Pine’, from Red Hot’s much admired ‘Dark Was the Night‘ compilation) certainly must have helped. Dave Longstreth, we are told, studied classical composition at Yale University, a fact that informs his renegade time-signatures and the tricksy, rug-pulling complexity of his recordings. Moreover, he sings like someone doing an impromptu impression of Anthony Hegarty, or even Jeff Buckley, with dubious accuracy, and on ‘Bitte Orca’ is as at home producing lilting chamber folk as contemporary R&B, two genres not normally caught dead in each other’s company. In fact, these unlikely bedfellows form the album’s stunning centrepiece tracks featuring the female vocalists (presumably) adorning the cover artwork: the summery soul of ‘Stillness is the Move’, sung by Amber Coffman, which sounds like Aaliyah; and the lilting, orchestral ‘Two Doves’, which could be Joanna Newsom, but is in fact Angel Deradoorian. That’s right, Aaliyah and Joanna Newsom.

It is worth going back to David Byrne to gain a slippery foothold in describing such a genuinely unusual band. There is something of Byrne and Brian Eno’s Afro-pop infusion here that might please fans of, say, Vampire Weekend or Yeasayer. There is a hint of Toumani Diabaté’s Malian string pickery on ‘Temecula Sunrise’ and ‘No Intention’, and a distinctly African bent to the chanted melodies of ‘Remade Horizon’. Longstreth, however, exceeds even Byrne in his unadashedly intellectual, and often impenetrable, lyrical concerns. The album title and some of the track names (’Florescent Half Dome’ sounds like it was taken at random from an art catalogue, ‘Cannibal Resource’ sounds like the title of some unreadable essay by Foucault or Derrida) tell you all you need to know: Longstreth is probably cleverer than you, and he doesn’t care if you don’t understand what he’s talking about.

No matter, as if to prove Longstreth’s higher understanding of musical structure (or, just as likely, his knack for a good melody), Bitte Orca’s songs have a way of worming their way into your head. I woke up with the great ‘No Intention’ jangling around my head the other day. The day before that it was Elton John. While occasionally, as on the opener, things initially seem a bit too busy sonically, each listen reveals a new layer of brain-teasing intricacy. While sometimes the avant-garde posturing can make for a chilly listen, emotionally at least, and the fragmented song structures can jar, there is no mistaking the radiating pop sensibility running throughout, which makes Bitte Orca a more accessible record than their past efforts, but a no less inventive one. Compelling. confounding stuff.

Waltz With Bashir - Ari Folman

Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli TV show ‘Be’Tipul‘ - which became in turn the inspiration for the latest HBO phenomenon, ‘In Treatment’, currently championed in the UK by The Guardian - said of Israel that “one of our problems as a nation is that in our mind we are still survivors, and sometimes we think that we can do awful things to others because we are survivors.” Both ‘Be’Tipul’ and it US counterpart revolve around the psychoanalyst’s chair, each episode a single patient’s session. Psychoanalysis - both individual and that pertaining to Israeli national identity - also pervades Ari Folman’s ‘Waltz With Bashir’. The film is a cathartic act of self-therapy, conducted on and by the director himself, with the help of former fellow soldiers: unpeeling an onion of buried memories revolving around his participation in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. His need to recover and clarify the past is provoked by a deeply unsettling, recurring dream, which suggests a spectre of guilt regarding the events that lead to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres, a dark chapter in modern Israel’s short but troubled history - a history dictated perhaps by a national psychology of survival.

‘Waltz With Bashir’ is unusual because parts of the film derive from genuine documentary footage in which Folman meets again and interviews his erstwhile Israeli army colleagues in search of a forgotten past. The interviews, like Folman’s abstract, fallible memories and dreams, have been richly transformed into animation in a manner that recalls Richard Linklater’s visually-striking but emotionally vacant ‘A Scanner Darkly’. The noirish visuals are sumptuous to watch, sometimes almost distractingly so, especially during the interview sections when the sound is flatter, unadorned by dramatic devices such as music. Otherwise the line between fact and fiction, between the remembered past and documented present, is blurred by the consistently arresting animated imagery; up to a final, horrifying awakening. This climax, without playing politics, poses the ultimate question about modern Israel: can the nation continue to live with its nightmares in the all-consuming war for survival? With all the importance attached to remembering Jewish plight (particularly The Holocaust), can they really choose to forget the “awful things” done in the name of Israeli survival? A powerful, thought-provoking, beautiful film.