Demob Happy

‘Central And Remote’ 8/10 I came across Grizzly Bear via Dan Rossen’s brilliant – but wholly different – earlier project Department of Eagles. I was initially underwhelmed and bemused, but I persevered and can back previous reviewers who have labelled this a grower. If like me you have come to Grizzly Bear via Department of [...]

Grizzly Bear - Easier [ 3:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Without Walls 8/10 Despite his reputation as arch studio boffin, producer Sascha Ring – aka Apparat – makes unapologetically beautiful music. Unlike some of his IDM peers, Ring is not interested so much in abrasion or near-mathematical deconstruction, but with music that swells and soars with classical grandeur. Among current producers, he bears a resemblance [...]

Apparat - Headup [ 5:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Another View Point 7/10 Keigo Oyamada – aka Cornelius – has a curious sound that is at once lush and acoustic, but proudly synthetic and occassionally a little sterile. Point‘s mix of funky house, beach boy harmonies, garage rock and other electronic ephemera feels somehow both spontaneously breezy and painstakingly intricate. The digital production is [...]

Cornelius - Brazil [ 3:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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’4AM At Toumani’s’ 8/10 Damon Albarn’s Mali Music project is an overlooked album of beautiful mood and texture that barely belongs to the hideous ‘category’ of world music. This is very much a subjectivised, western account of African moods and musicianship, taken largely from muddled field recordings and mixed down in London. Mostly the range [...]

Spoons - Mali Music [ 5:19 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Overland But Underwater 7/10 Kelpe sculpt the kind of dense, no-nonsence electronic soundscapes popularised by Warp stalwarts Boards of Canada. Whereas BOC have come to sound like a parody of themselves, heirs-apparent Kelpe revisit the BOC template without the restraint and obsessiveness displayed by their forefathers. ‘Sea Inside Body’ is a massive, cavernous album awash [...]

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Scandinavian Dark Star 6/10 Much has been made of the atmospherics and wintery mood on this album but for me this was a dissapointment. The marriage of classical music and electronica is always an uneasy one – countless clinical, po-faced concept records have been made in this mould. What is missing from many of the [...]

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Featherweight 5/10 This was a massive dissapointment to me. I took a gamble on this after buying (and loving) ooioo’s album from 2000, ‘Gold and Green’, which was only released in the UK in 2005. Oddly, that older album is far superior to this in every way. Of course, ‘Gold and Green’ has its moments [...]

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Animal feelings 7/10 This should have been the Collective’s crowning moment. The return of the full ‘line-up’ so soon after last year’s Avey Tare and Panda Bear-orchestrated masterpiece ‘Sung Tongs’ heralded great things, and many early reviews agreed. I’m not so convinced. There are moments on this record where they genuinely seem to push the [...]

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Eastern Block Electro 4/10 TBA – aka Tusia Beridze – hails from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Anullé is her second album. I bought this album on the strength of a glowing review in Uncut that compared her sound, bizarrely it seems, with the Cocteau Twins. I may be missing something, but there is [...]

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Shock waves 7/10 Minotaur Shock’s second full-length will surely raise his reputation to the level of some of his more overrated peers, namely Four Tet and Manitoba, both of whom seem to have been unjustly hogging the electronica limelight for the last couple of years. ‘Maritime’ take a naval theme as its core imagery but [...]

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