Balancing between brittle noise and gauzy ambience, this album has a spacious atmosphere that stays even in its most clamorous moments. This lightness makes the album listenable throughout, but it saps the intensity of the music. The electronic arrangements are often engaging, but they dissipate into formlessness too soon to reach catharsis.
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Perhaps I am just not as well versed in my post-punk as I thought I was, or it is a direct result of their short career, but I must admit to have never even hearing of the Young Marble Giants until this box set, but now having heard them, it is safe to say their legacy should be appreciated, and their contributions to music should not be neglected.
This collaboration between cellist/electronics wizard Rawlings and percussionist/mixer Feeney lays out its agenda immediately on the first part: swelling, high pitched sine waves that pierce and barely relent. However, for the listener willing to endure the harshness, there is a vast array of subtleties to be found.
Devendra Banhart's fifth album finds him abandoning many of the idiosyncrasies that fueled his earlier work and instead adopting a variety of broader influences. As a result, he reaches neither the ecstatic heights obtained previously nor the jokey lows that plagued Cripple Crow. Apart from a handful of exceptions, Banhart instead settles for something in between for much of this middling effort.
Better known for his electronic rhythm and bruise work, Mammal's Gary Beauvais moves his project into loner doom blues territory. Not as radical as move as it first reads, Mammal may have changed their palette for a bass and guitar but it is still steadily brooding and unsettled work. The electronic ruts are gone in favor of stringed instrument grooves, his music channelled into a gloomy simplicity.
This one-man noise project opts to not lean on the more "rock" elements of some of his contemporaries such as Wolf Eyes and instead goes for an early industrial and vaguely krautrock vibe that sets this disc apart from others in the genre.
As dub techno continues its vibrant resurgence, there have been few releases in electronic music more anticipated in 2007 than this one. Having already achieved significant attention with Andy Stott's critically acclaimed Merciless and its accompanying singles, Modern Love, a recording arm of the magnificent online shop Boomkat, will only see its stock rise (or perhaps, in inventory terms, fall) with this release.
It is a long time since I have heard Vic Chesnutt, first becoming aware of him like I would expect many people my age did by way of a tribute album in the mid-90s bought on the strength of the artists covering him. That this is his 11th album is a big surprise and listening to it I lament not giving him the attention he obviously deserves previously. This album is filled with tender, witty, funny and heart wrenching moments of lyrical clarity.
The latest release from Kip Uhlhorn and Simon Wojan's Cloudland Canyon is far too brief which means that each precious moment on this CD is cherished more than ever. The two pieces on this EP are astounding; both are slowly evolving epics with a heavy hint of Krautrock under a very modern sheen. The end result can only be described as cosmic.
Akron/Family's best material can be found here. Their varied musical proclivities mingle with one another effortlessly; their songwriting is stellar and their performances even better. Their most outstanding record is this one and it's a cycle dedicated to the only mystery on equal footing with death: love.
