Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT 7/10 Synth pop is apparently making a big comeback in 2009, I say apparently because I don’t listen to the radio, watch TV or live in an English-speaking country, so it’s easy to shield myself from the probably excessive hype surrounding artists such as, say, Little Boots, [...]

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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 [...]

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Conversational skills 7.5/10 Saint Etienne have occupied a particular niche in British indie, long flirting with the mainstream but never quite breaking into it, while maintaining a certain fashionable credibility. Marrying a 60s (French) pop sensibility to post-acid house dance beats, Saint Etienne were committed to the ideal of the 3-minute ‘pure pop’ song. ‘London [...]

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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‘, [...]

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New Goldfrapp shampoo 5/10 I had high expectations for ‘Seventh Tree‘ given some of the pre-release hype suggesting – falsely it turns out – that Goldfrapp had returned to the more ethereal landscapes of their first, and best, album ‘Felt Mountain‘. There had also been alot made of Goldfrapp’s musical magpieism – a trait only [...]

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Geek chic 7/10 If like I did you heard ‘Coming On Strong‘ after their second, break-through album ‘The Warning‘, you might be wondering where the big tunes are. There is nothing as stand-out here as 2006′s stunning double-wammy of singles ‘Boy From School’ and ‘Over and Over’. Nevertheless, ‘Coming on Strong‘ sets the template for [...]

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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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“… 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. [...]

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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 [...]

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“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 [...]

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