Demob Happy

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

[Read more →]

“… now you see it’s sucking you in!” 8/10 I found James Murphy’s first album a complete turn-off: the studied cool, the nods and winks to oblique musical references, the ‘tongue-in-cheek’ lyrics. LCD Soundsystem has even been described as dance-punk nostalgia for music journalists. The in-jokery and general calculated irony seemed like cold artifice, dispassionate. [...]

[Read more →]

The cutting edge of the knife? 7/10 Silent Shout finds The Knife trading in the industrial strength synths of Kraftwerk and sonorous clubland basslines that belie their origins in dance music rather than electronica. Some of the descriptions of the music on this album would have you thinking they might sound like Icelandic electronica stalwarts [...]

[Read more →]

“Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head” 8/10 Genre-bending Hot Chip have not only released some of the singles of the year but one of its best albums. As with Gorillaz and Gnarls Barkley recently, mid-way into the ‘noughties’ we are starting to see some real wit and invention in pop music [...]

[Read more →]

Deconstructed disco 7/10 One of the main men (alongside James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy) behind DFA and former member of Six-Finger Satellite, Juan Maclean’s debut is damaged electro with a dark heart. For all its inferences to robotic disco, this is not a Daft Punk album (despite the similarity in name to that band’s latest: [...]

[Read more →]

Never say never again 7/10 I was a bit wary of this latest album from the New York-based collective due to reports of cheesy female vocals being added into the mix. In fact, this album is a distinct and largely successful departure from the STREET DAD template, stripping away the post-rock inflections in favour of [...]

[Read more →]

Leftfield on the leftcoast 6/10 Electronic music for the Swedish Leftcoast is an accomplished collection of deep house tracks that never quite surpasses the tones and structure of its genre. Naively, I bought this on the strength of the customer reviews on Amazon. What the other reviews aren’t telling you though, is that this is [...]

[Read more →]

Unrelenting 3/10 I don’t really see the point of this. Jason Forrest – aka DJ Donna Summer – likes to cut and paste old disco and funk together in a kind of post modern mish-mash that is more IDM than Avalanches. It is click-and-cut of the most filtered, tinny variety, there is nothing of the [...]

[Read more →]

Creature Comforts 8/10 With ‘Songs for Creatures’, former Mo-Wax stalwarts Psychonauts proved themselves to be more than great technicians but also strong songwriters. From the psychodelic crescendos of ‘Circles’ to the fantastic dance-floor electro funk of ‘Empty Love’ and Depeche Mode-esque ‘The World Keeps Turning’ – The Psychoanauts excel at a rich variety of styles [...]

[Read more →]