Demob Happy

“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, [...]

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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 [...]

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Beach boys in a blender!
8/10
I’m probably the last blogger alive to post a review of Panda Bear’s 2007 indie favourite ‘Person Pitch‘ so I’ll try to keep this relatively brief. It featured on the end of year lists of many music magazines and blogs and having resisted it for over a year [...]

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Intoxicating Man
9/10
Serge Gainsbourg is criminally underrated outside France. Listening to this comprehensive best of compilation it is evident that there was more to him than the sleazy Gallic rogue that is stereotypically presented in the media. By contrast, ‘Initials SG‘ reveals Gainsbourg to be a restless sonic innovator. While his lackadaisical, half-spoken [...]

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Cut and paste psych pop
8/10
If you like all or some of the following artists you might like The Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion: Caribou, Animal Collective, Panda Bear, Ariel Pink, The Go! Team, Avalanches, Deserter’s Songs-era Mercury Rev, Yeasayer, El Guincho, Flaming Lips or Grizzly Bear. Made by a Californian (Ryan McPhun) relocated to New [...]

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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 of instrumentation [...]

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The Autumnal Crush
7/10
Is electronica dead? Its certainly quite easy to trace the influences of Chris Clark’s Body Riddle. There are the tape-damaged keyboards patented by Boards of Canada; the rough jazzy breaks and dusty sampling of early DJ Shadow, whose influence over electronica has been understated; and the sped-up glockenspiels popularised by Kieren Hebden. Other [...]

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Feelgood by numbers
7/10
I resisted buying this album for a long time as I wrongly judged this to be a fairly unoriginal concept. In fact, on paper, it still is an unoriginal concept - a heady mash-up of 70s samples and breaks - but it is pulled off by a verve and audacity lacking in many [...]

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Music for scary documentaries
6/10
Dan Berridge’s third album proper is perhaps his most accomplished but also his least appealing. Whereas his debut ‘Compassion’ raised the bar for sample-based music with its haunted torch songs crafted from forgotten (and not-so-forgotten) vinyl, follow-up ‘The Vessel’ took a largely-unsuccessful gamble with a male vocal lead. The return to the [...]

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Cook the books
6/10
One of the most strangely overrated albums of recent memory, the release of Food for Thought brought such gushing press reaction that it certainly seemed worth the gamble. A low-key blend of manipulated found sound (people laughing, gates squeaking shut, sampled voices), cut ‘n’ spliced acoustic guitar, banjo and violin, and smatterings of [...]

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