Demob Happy

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 [...]

[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 →]

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
It’s not a shame about Fever Ray
8/10
I’d just finished mildly mocking Bon Iver’s Auto-Tune ballad ‘In the Woods’ from his recent ‘Blood Bank EP‘ when Fever Ray’s Vocoder-heavy debut album landed in my inbox with a mechanical clunk. Fever Ray is Karin Dreijer Andersson, one half of Sweden’s [...]

[Read more →]

“Will it just be like they’re dreaming?”
9/10
It’s definitely a funny time of year to be reviewing what could likely be the best album of 2009, especially one with such sunshine-drenched atmospherics, but Animal Collective may just have rescued us from the seasonally adjusted black hole that is January. Subject to pre-release hype not seen since, [...]

[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 →]

Gang Gang goes bang

8.5/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
Long-time darlings of New York’s ultra-hip, art-conscious underground music scene, Gang Gang Dance look braced to make a wider breakthrough with their new album ‘Saint Dymphna‘, released in the UK on Warp. Like their contemporaries Out Hud, Gang Gang Dance makes a hybrid of post-rock [...]

[Read more →]

Second poor album in a row for once-great psych rockers
6.5/10
FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
‘Snowflake Midnight‘ is a departure from previous Mercury Rev records in that it is almost entirely dominated by electronics and glacial synths. A digital wonderland as sonically rich as Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots‘, Mercury Rev’s latest [...]

[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 →]