Demob Happy

Who put the fire out? 6/10 Manitoba’s follow up to Up in Flames, in the new guise of Caribou (owing to a bizarre lawsuit over copyright infringement) lacks the vivacity and capacity to suprise of its predecessor. Its largely tepid, plodding stuff, replete with the same swirling (but now overfamiliar) psychedelics and drum breaks but [...]

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Beats ‘n’ pieces 6/10 Boom Bip travels a fairly worn road with his blend of instrumental hip hop and electronica. There are some great moments but by and large this is fairly uninspired stuff. Opener ‘Roads Must Roll’ is blissed-out trip hop complete with tuneful scratching and violins, while ‘Third Stream’ is all clunking rythmns [...]

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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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Patchy debut 6/10 After four or five listens this album by the former Herbert (Bodily Functions) muse is still something of an enigma. Moments of brilliance are diffused by frustrating meanders into glitch territory and lack of structure both overall and in individual tracks. There is alot of positive things to say however, with Siciliano [...]

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Light as Air 6/10 Air’s third album proper is a cautious fusion of its predecessors, the much-imitated lounge classic Moon Safari and the plainly silly prog folly 1000 hz Legend. Despite the appallingly smug and unimaginative cover, Talkie Walkie opens with promise. Venus, Cherry Blossom Girl and Run evoke the kind of wigged-out, androgynous space [...]

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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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Fairweather view 7/10 A slightly tongue-in-cheek bohemia runs through this wigged-out collective’s latest LP. There is a lot of shoddy material released through Ninja Tune but this can certainly be placed in the context of the more interesting artists on their roster (see Amon Tobin and Bonobo also). Live instrumentation is pitted playfully against the [...]

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Sampledelica 9/10 This is unequivocably one of the best albums from the dance/electronica left-field in the last five years and rival to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing as the high-point in sample-based instrumental music. Remarkably lush and always greater than a sum of its parts, Dan Berridge developes an astonishing melting pot of sound: broken, jazzy drum [...]

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Album of 2003? 9/10 Goldfrapp’s second album ups the ante with an electroclash-tinged masterpiece of sleazy disco-funk and soulful torch tunes. Alison & co bravely embellish upon the icy swoon of 1999′s Felt Mountain with a braver, more upbeat and essentially more challenging record. The opener, ‘Crystalline Green’, sets the tempo with raw, swirling synths [...]

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Jazz Fug 7/10 In ‘Songs for my funeral’ Nostalgia 77 has produced a brooding, claustrophobic – if sometimes derivative – debut. To tick a few boxes, this echoes some of DJ Shadow’s sparser material, a more-reflective RJD2, ‘Meiso’-period DJ Krush, a less-lush Broadway Project, DJ Cam, Bonobo and latter-day Four Tet – to name a [...]

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