Demob Happy

First published at The Line of Best Fit.
If the words “German electronica” conjure images of austere-looking men standing motionless behind synths in mono-coloured suits, or the “nihilist” baddies in The Big Lebowski, To Rococo Rot might help you abandon the stereotype. Stefan Schneider and brothers Robert and Ronald Lippok are a Berlin-based electronica and post-rock trio who have been [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Four Tet - Ringer EP
7.5/10
I was once quite seasonally adjusted when it came to music. Spring and summer inspired me to listen to more notionally natural textures - let’s say alt-country, Americana or folk - while the onset of winter used to find me needing something more machine-driven. In recent years I’ve been rather unfaithful [...]

[Read more →]

Album Review: worriedaboutsatan - Arrivals

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
8.5/10
Will electronica make a comeback at the end of the decade? It seems that having gone organic in the 00s with folktronica, many electronica artists have been second-guessed recently by folk artists (from Bon Iver to Iron & Wine) augmenting their music with pro-tooled [...]

[Read more →]

Album Review: Dark Was the Night: Red Hot Compilation - Various Artists
8/10
Most posts of Red Hot Organization’s ‘Dark Was the Night’ compilation begin with a summary dismissal of compilations in general, and particularly those in the name of charity. If such projects are as bad as people say, ‘Dark Was the Night’ - one of [...]

[Read more →]

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Exile on ‘25th Street’
8.5/10
‘NYC‘ is Kieran Hebden’s (aka Four Tet) fourth collaboration with veteran jazz drummer Steve Reid and while I won’t pretend that I have heard the other three, the word in the blogosphere is that this is the most equal of their partnerships, with Hebden given [...]

[Read more →]

High and mighty

6.5/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Chicago post-rockers Pit er Pat’s latest for Thrill Jockey was largely recorded live in the studio, with raw production embellished by an arsenal of exotic instruments including a bobo balaphone (!), Burmese temple gong and a vibraslap - to cite a few favourites from the press [...]

[Read more →]

One day in Buneos Aires
6.5/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Juana Molina is a former Argentine television actress with an unlikely passion for making a kind of cut and paste folk-tinged electronica (look, I managed to do that without saying ‘folktronica’). Molina’s latest album for Domino comprises eight lengthy, carefully assembled pieces in which [...]

[Read more →]

Quite interesting, incidentally …
6/10
I have been a keen advoate of all things Damon Albarn post-Graham Coxon (i.e., Blur’s ‘Think Tank‘ and beyond) so was understandably quite excited by the album release of ‘Monkey, Journey to the West‘. I had not seen the Chinese opera-spectacular which this album scores but I didn’t let that dissuade me [...]

[Read more →]

Spaghetti westerns and pulp fiction
6/10
Calexico’s second album is a sprawling, doom-laden and cinematic work that draws heavily on latin jazz, mariachi, country and gypsy folk. Typically rich in the kind of malevolent desert imagery and border country narratives that suggest the novels of Cormac McCarthy, ‘Black Light‘ explores territory that is more fully realised in [...]

[Read more →]