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18 February 2007

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Albums and Singles

This international release of the Swedish singer's 2005 debut (originally only released in the icy north of Scandinavia) is a joyous collection of gentle pop music. The music is quite retro sounding, harking back to the likes of Joni Mitchell but less cloying and with enough of an edge to set it apart from the thousands of other singer songwriters that have passed through my tired ears. Until Death Comes is not a perfect album but it is a perfectly good way to spend half an hour.

Secretly Canadian

Hyvönen’s music is jaunty pop with a little bit of a bite. Most of these songs could (and should) get radio play but with lines like "Once I felt your cock against my thigh," I think many stations will shy away from her. Well, radio tends to ignore what needs exposure anyway but I digress. What is important is that Until Death Comes is the kind of pop music I like: simple, catchy and with enough depth to make me want to listen to it again, as evinced by the opening song "I Drive my Friend," which sees Hyvönen playing a simple and percussive melody on piano, driving not only her friend but the song forward. Her vocals are nice, a country lilt giving her plenty of character.

Some of her lyrics are a little cumbersome such as on "Today, Tuesday," which features a couple of lines that stumble more than flow but Hyvönen manages to keep things going. The first few times I listened to the album these off-kilter lines irritated me slightly but now I think they added some much-needed texture to the songs. Without these minor aberrations the album would be audio wallpaper. Sometimes the songs do tend towards the kind of thing that would be played in the background of a restaurant but for the most part Until Death Comes keeps my attention.

Short and sweet, this album is a nice slice of pop. Hyvönen crafts good songs, most them interesting and pretty but with the odd speed bump along the way. I am interested to see where she goes from here, I think more of the same would be a turn off but there are times on Until Death Comes when I feel she has the ability to unleash more power.

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18 February 2007

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This collection acts as a fantastic introduction to Sally's solo work and fronting the Sumacs. A versatile singer and talented composer with work in various genres, Doherty's name shouldn't be unfamiliar with Sol Invictus fans and those who trolled the World Serpent catalogs ages ago. This disc compiles music from her albums from 1996 through 2002, mostly originally distributed by World Serpent, along with some previously unreleased material.

Shayo

Sally has performed with Shock Headed Peters, Richard Hawley, Planet Funk, and Sol Invictus; composed music for the BBC; and fronts a jazz band, Los Amores; but her solo work/leading the Sumacs is the bulk of her output. It's clearly the best too. Her voice shines bright and occasionally flutters delicately, reminding me of Caroline Crawley and how I miss Shelleyan Orphan. All of the instrumentation is classical—piano, strings, guitar, wind instruments—but the songs have a mixture of influences including folk, vocal jazz, and pop standards as well as some European folk.

The album opens with "This Is What She Said," a song from 2000's On the Outside, which, after nearly seven years remains her most recent album of all original material. It's no surprise that it is the album most represented here with five songs, as most artists will choose their most recent material over older songs. In this case, it's probably the strongest material, where the lush instrumental arrangements and multiple vocal parts are top notch. As most of her releases have songs of similar themes, mixing things up says more about versatility. The stunning piano gem "The Shore" follows, giving a great contrast from the lush opener and the following "La Llorna," a gorgeous Mexican folk song from her album of folk standards from 2002, Black Is the Colour. Doherty's arrangements of the folk songs are quite faithful, with Spanish guitar on "La Llorna" or an unoffensive tin whistle on Celtic love song "My Lagan Love" later on the collection.

It's hard not to find parallels to Antony and the Johnsons, from the name (Sally's more than likely paying tribute to one of her idols, Yma Sumac, but I can't figure out the origin of Antony's Johnson) to the instrumentation, as Antony's I am a Bird Now album is mostly drum-free as is nearly all of Sally's work.

Sally's arrangement muscles flex for two songs from the Empire of Death release, a score for a BBC documentary of the same name about discoveries made in the 1930s of an ancient African empire with "evidence of a bizarre death culture." The music of "Mourning 1" and "One Voice 1" are both eerie and warm and rich enough that I'm sure they worked perfectly, but also provide more variety on this 17 song collection. The oldest piece, "I Am a River," dates back to Sally's eponymous 1996 album, and I'm rather glad this is the only song from this era, as the congas and bongos mixed with the vocal harmony line are a bit too Dead Can Dance/Heavenly Voices-wannabe goth for my tastes. Luckily "An Open Boat," a previously unreleased song follows, similar in style to the other unreleased piano piece from earlier and equally as precious.

According to her Web site, in the five years since Black is the Colour, Sally has been busy with her band Los Amores, composing for more BBC programs, and working with another composer as she claims her "solo project isn't solo any more," so it's unclear if this disc is pretty much the history of Sally and the Sumacs start to the end. With any luck the next new material to surface picks up where this leaves off but I won't be holding my breath.

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18 February 2007

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Over two years after becoming the first dubstep producer to drop a full length album on a high-profile indie label, Mark Foster follows up his unshakably steady stream of vinyl-only classics with a sophomore selection full of explosive exclusives.

Planet Mu

Now that his grime project Virus Syndicate has been getting decent attention, the re-branded MRK1 leaves those emcee cohorts behind this time around, save for a sparse appearance on "The Underworld" by Poet Shado who appeared on the crew's surprising 2005 album The Work Related Illness. This allows Foster to cater to his dubstep fan base while also challenging them with exciting permutations of the evolving sound. Heavy hitters such as the previously released "Slope" and "Grit" fit perfectly with the head-nodding tempos that define this scene, yet Foster's work is typically a cut above to begin with. So it is no surprise that the Eastern vibes and tablas of "Trip Down The Nile" resonate with a particularly shimmering gloss encasing its soft bassy center. "Devils & Angels" blasts open the gates of heaven and hell for a halfstep war of filthy synths and some of the toughest, tightest drums ever.

Copyright Laws truly excels when drawing upon the artist's Jamaican influences. "Dr. Rudeboy" is a raw slab of amen-flecked breakstep with a gratuitously used DJ sample, while the stunning "Sensi Skank" rolls itself up in a next level steppers’ groove adapted from the roots reggae template. Of course, "I Got Too" takes this entire set into the fucking stratosphere, thanks to the vocal duties undertaken by the one-and-only Sizzla. In this paean to the stickiest of the icky, the Rastafarian megastar shouts down Babylon while obsessively extolling the sacramental virtues of the herb, all while caught up in a haze of haunting tones and bowel-threatening low-end rumbles.

In a bizarre twist, due to HMV's alleged shelving constraints for the holidays, Copyright Laws appeared in American record stores months before the anticipated February 2007 release in the United Kingdom. Antithetical to the status quo, its premature delivery to this market inadvertently acknowledged the global nature of what just a few years ago was a predominantly local sound. This should translate to a potential audience more receptive to the fantastic Copyright Laws than One Way, his debut as Mark One. Foster has made significant leaps and bounds here, and there's no telling what he might drop next.

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18 February 2007

Administrator

Albums and Singles

The duo of Manuel Stagars and Neil Carlill make strange but for the most part not very compelling music. This album has its genuinely great moments but there is a lot of dross to sift through first. Vedette may have the potential to make a truly brilliant album but they fall short on so many of the songs that it leads to a frustrating listening experience.

Stilll

It is hard not to think of cLOUDDEAD when listening to Vedette; the strangely spoken lyrics in particular make the connection substantial. Much like the former, Vedette's songs work brilliantly some of the time but leave me cold nearly as frequently. Even within a song I can go from hating it to loving it and back to hating it again. Generally most of the pieces on this album start formless and wander aimlessly for a while before all of a sudden coming together to floor me. Why Stagars and Carlill mess about so much flummoxes me; they have obviously got skills worth paying attention to but hide them throughout the album.

My main beef with this album is that there is so much filler. Songs like "They're Only Gardening" and "Targets in You" are tough to get through more than once. I must admit that the music of "They're Only Gardening" is quite nice but the vocals are dreadful and they are so far forward in the mix that it is impossible to ignore them. On the other hand, tracks like "Chessmaniaque" and "Martian Corn Circle" are excellent. Throughout the entire album, Stagars and Carlill combine elements of many genres and influences but it is only on tracks like these that their work gels together into something listenable.

Maybe I am just a miserable git but the more upbeat sections of the album tend to be the ones I skip. The slower and more depressed sounding the songs get, the better they sound. By far the best song is the dreariest, "On Canvas," which mixes beautiful slow melodies with recordings of the sea and tasteful use of effects on the vocals, gorgeous stuff. Unfortunately, it just cuts off abruptly which means the song ends on a bad taste.

Overall, while Vedette may have had high hopes for this album but it never stays together long enough to make it truly worthwhile listening to more than a couple of times. There are a few tracks that I will add to my MP3 library but as an album it will be shelved. I would not dismiss future releases by them without hearing them but this is a disappointing album on the whole.

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18 February 2007

Lucas Schleicher

Albums and Singles

Claudio Parodi is sitting in a room, different from the one you are in, and slowly dissolving the relationship between his instruments and the space they occupy. Alvin Lucier's famous I Am Sitting in a Room informs Parodi's recording, the natural resonance of a room used as an instrument just as much as the resonating instruments themselves. Parodi has complicated the process a bit, but the idea is the same and the outcome is captivating.

Extreme

There's little sense in being anything but brief about this: Horizontal Mover sounds fantastic. Its simplicity is part of its beauty. For nearly one full hour Parodi provides a continuous stream of metallic hums variously shrieking and cascading in long, warm breaths. The sound begins in media res, the Ohm of music already built into multi-faceted organism of various tones and textures. From there the music begins to build unstoppably, the constantly recycled sources of sound slowly layering over one another excitably.

It is, at times, uncomfortable to listen to because of the high frequency squeals that endure for seemingly unnatural amounts of time. Their endurance, however, somehow makes them more tolerable. As they are swallowed up into a larger and larger mass of sound, their qualities begin to bleed into other sounds, creating warbling patterns and unusual fluctuations in the presentation. At times the piece must have been edited for dramatic effect: the mass of sound sometimes fades away into near silence, but the complexity of the sound still seems rich and full with all the details present before the fade. Eventually Horizontal Mover becomes monumental: one, huge abrasive piece of sound occupies the final moments of the disc. It is obviously composed of various parts, but the effect it produces is that of a unity. Its presence is almost overwhelming, but also stunning. I found myself turning the volume up as the piece ended, just to feel the power of the sound. The sudden collapse of sound at the end is shocking and strangely pleasant, highlighting the intensity of the sound that came before and the impressive, intense build that constitutes the whole of the recording.

18 February 2007

Scott Mckeating

Albums and Singles

The project's name may have instantly rang a bell in my head as a nod towards the band Total, but I’m not sure that everyone lives in a world where that connection would have been made; sadly Matthew Bower is not yet a household name. Actually playing this vinyl took a step further in revealing a moderate debt towards Bower's drone projects. This debut release from Kevin Doria's (half of Washington's weighty Growing) extra curricular pursuit has been rescued from the 2005's graveyard of cassettes revealing two heavily gorgeous slabs of fucked modern prairiescapes.

Animal Disguise

This record seconds the idea that filthy buzzing feedback and high toned guitar like some windswept, ragged bagpipe can produce a comfortable satiety. The spiky hum of "A Thousand Lights" softens over time as it sinks into a great milky distraction or digital slough allowing a bed for heavily tranced rock-outs. FX pedals to the floor, seemingly heading for the metal white-out, neither side implodes into mere noise for noises sake.

The second side's single piece, "Peaks," is a little more open though with some mountaintop guitar work that squeezes itself flat through the record. There are plateaus of playing that feel thinned down due to lack of oxygen, the drones don’t sit still but are still the song’s unmistakeable root. Guitar notes are birthed like some immense multicoloured Simon Says toy. The simple blue sleeve artwork helps to spell out that this is no ride through stony despondency; no bleak handmade collages here.

15 February 2007

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Albums and Singles

artist: Valet
title: Blood is Clean
catalog #: krank105
formats available: CD
CD UPC Code: 7 96441 81052 9
Release Date: April 16, 2007

Content: Blood is Clean is the debut release by Honey Owens under the name Valet. The songs were formed out of a natural and spontaneous process as separate incidents of recording over a 5 month period from January to May of 2006. They were recorded by and large in single, live takes with minor additional tracking added here and there. The results are at once spare and expansive; exploratory, yet deceptively simple.

Honey wanted to make music that was not neccessarily of her, but rather “to be a medium channeling sounds from an unknown place, opening up and spilling out onto the computer-tape.” The cryptic, mesmerizing sound pallete was inspired by “lucid dreams and physical artifacts that appeared to me daily that hinted at a sound-world of Haitian Voodoo drumming, various shamanic dreamtime musics, the Velvet Underground, and the ‘Fourth-World’ concepts of Jon Hassell”.

We will just say that these are some of the most inspiring alien-psychedelic-blues-jams that we have heard in ages. And check out the absolutely fried guitar work from the outer edge of the galaxy on the title cut.

Context: Honey Owens has been an important figure in the Portland experimental music scene for more than 10 years, collaborating with an array of both oscure and well-known music projects including: World, Nudge, Dark Yoga and JOMF. Honey Owens lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Track Listing: 01. April 6 02. Blood is Clean 03. Burmajuana 04. Tame All the Lions
05. Mystic Flood 06. My Volcano 07. Sade 4 Bri 08. North

Quote: "Does Honey Owens aka Valet really sing 'My blood is clean/But the devil's in me' right before that percussion kicks in? Holy moley; that's too perfect. That guitar solo is the best we might have heard in years. It's a time-stopping guitar solo. Everyone else should stop doing that, right now; put down your guitars! Thank you." MikeMcGonigal-Yeti Magazine #4

15 February 2007

Administrator

Albums and Singles

artist: Deerhunter
title: Fluorescent Grey EP
catalog #: krank107
formats available: CD (enhanced)
upc code: 7 96441 81072 7
release date: April 9, 2007

content: Four new songs recorded while mixing Cryptograms. A snapshot of what direction the band might explore next? Probably not.

context: This EP arrives on the heels of a well received sophomore LP, 'Cryptograms'. While exploring themes not especially dissimilar, the EP functions in many ways as an epilogue to both the LP and the accompanying well-reported anxiety surrounding it's creation. The band now has a clean slate to explore something entirely new in the future.
track listing: 1. Fluorescent Grey 2. Dr. Glass 3. Like New 4. Wash Off
bonus: Video for Strange Lights from Cryptograms directed by James Sumner

quotes for the Cryptograms album:

'Deerhunter has really churned out a remarkable release, pulling together the best elements of pop, punk, experimental and psychedelic rock without being derivative.' other music

'..sounds at once radiant and terrified. ' pitchfork, best new music 8.9

'..realize deerhunter's true strength: a knack for shaping choice bits of sophisticated pop revelry while alternately dipping into liquid sojourns of ambient bliss.' the stranger

'Cryptograms is a thoroughly amazing listen, an early best for 2007, and a beautifully woven collection of stunning melodicism and sonic manipulation.' treble

'Cryptograms will either elicit a re-appreciation of pop in numerous bitter misanthropes, or completely acid-fry the unsuspecting songwriters who were already predisposed to these strange sounds that they’d been unknowingly waiting to hear.' tinymixtapes

"Cryptograms is the kind of record that should be played in every teenage bedroom in america." dusted

14 February 2007

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Albums and Singles

artist: THE MAJOR STARS
title: Portable Freak Factory b/w Can You See Me?
catalog #: IMPREC124
format: 7"

Limited edition of 500 w/ the first 100 on color vinyl.
Two brand new burners (including a Hendrix cover on the b-side) recorded during the same sessions for The Major Stars next full length album for Important.

14 February 2007

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Considering there are 14 different artists on this compilation it is surprising how little variation there is on offer. All the tracks are similar explorations of airy, glitchy, and formless ambience. Luckily, each contribution is quite good and the album flows nicely, which is not the norm for this sort of compilation.

Spekk

Small Melodies is like a gentle mental massage. The basic premise behind this compilation was for each artist to come up with a piece of music that would fit with the phrase “Small Melodies” and some other qualitative words like “warm” or “calm.” Despite the artists hailing from all over the world, they all had very similar interpretations of these words: minimalist glitches and soft ringing tones. With the vast majority of the music here all sounding like it has been cut from the same cloth, it is unexpected that the album is not boring. There are some delightful pieces by Sogar, Taylor Deupree and Oren Ambarchi; each of their contributions are beautiful, soft works that are a pleasure to listen to.

This is one thing I like about Small Melodies; it fits well for most moods. It may be best presented as a way of winding down after a hard day but it is very listenable in general. It is the sort of album I would reach for when I cannot make my mind up what to listen to. I may not be able to listen to all of it every time but as a handy collection of pleasant music it is wonderful. It reminds me of the Buddha Machine, music that is not designed for listening to like one would with a normal album but music to fill in the sonic gaps in your surroundings. The music may not be the most exciting in terms of action or originality but that is not the point here, the point is to relax and bask in the warm glow.

I have enjoyed this compilation a lot. While it may not be particularly remarkable it is joyous to listen to. I can see how it may be a bit repetitive for some people but I found the many variations on the same theme to be one of the best things about Small Melodies. More remarkable to me is that I know even if I put this on shuffle I am not going to get one loud track ruining my sleepy buzz.

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