Demob Happy

Too long but It Still Moves me 8.5/10 The Louisville, Kentucky band’s third full-length is a whopping 75-minute set recorded in a grain silo and positively swimming in reverb. By eschewing modern recording techniques altogether they were taking a big risk on ‘It Still Moves‘, their first for a major label, but is with the [...]

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Feast of fun 9/10 Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (‘Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (‘Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. [...]

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Hail Radiohead! 8/10 It can take a few years to properly appraise an album by a band as great as Radiohead. It is important to shake off the initial impressions – distorted as they are by the weight of expectation – and allow the album time to grow on you. A band that has so [...]

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Forward Thinking 9/10 While ’13′ had some great tracks, there were two many square pegs being forced into round holes. The sonic experimentation seemed contrived and ill-matched to the album’s emotional thrust. ‘Think Tank’ rectifies this with an easier marriage of Albarn’s experimental tendencies and pop sensibility. It is an albun given levity by his [...]

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Nu-school electro 7/10 Scott Herron’s Prefuse 73 is a combination of Warp-label glitch and instrumental hip hop that has him adored by IDM merchants and headz alike. It is not nearly as abrasive and uncompromising as some writers would lead you to believe, but rather a heady mash up of new-school electro and (largely instrumental) [...]

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Kid You’ll Move Mountains 8/10 Manitoba’s ‘Up in Flames’ is a bold two fingers to the stale electronica scene and a glorious leap forward. Along with Four Tet’s ‘Rounds’ it has rekindled faith in the one-man-and-his-machine dynamic, dragging the laptop boffin kicking and screaming out of the bedroom and into a psychedelic love-in free-for-all (metaphorically, [...]

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Beautiful Otherness 8/10 No ordinary chill-out act, Bent have improved immeasurably on their debut, Programmed to Love, with an album of strange eccentric beauty and shimmering detail. ‘King Wisp’ opens things gently with ethereal gospel voices and aquatic strings. ‘An Ordinary Day’ pitches a heavily distorted soulful vocal sample over disco rhythms, pumping basslines and [...]

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Maximilimalism 8/10 French duo M83 (Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau) make sonic crescendos out of analogue synths to evoke the kind of electronic post-rock in the vein of Mogwai, spliced with the anarchy of electroclash stalwarts Add N to X and the shoegazing haze of MBV or Slowdive. It’s a dinstinctive and winning formula that [...]

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Love that haha sound 8/10 I was initially wary of this band and its art school contemporaries (see Stereolab) but this really is something special. Out of the often-abrasive acoustics and kaleidoscopic aural sludge evolves melodies that are sweet and eerie in equal parts. Combining live-instrumentation with fairly glitch-free but sometimes punishing and industrial soundscapes, [...]

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A cast of thousands? 8/10 Extraordinary album this. A vast cast of musicians and influences seemingly sculpted in the studio by careful, intelligent production. Not just for indie fans, this has a universal appeal with the added lure of subtle shades of electronica (Capture The Flag), jazzy post-rock (Pacific Theme), and borderline psychedelics (Shampoo Suicide). [...]

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