Panda Bear "Person Pitch"

Artist: Panda Bear
Album: Person Pitch
Label: Paw Tracks
Release date: 20 March 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Freak Folk/Psychedelic Folk

---

Tracklisting:
01. Comfy In Nautica
02. Take Pills
03. Bros
04. I'm Not
05. Good Girl/Carrots
06. Search For Delicious
07. Ponytail
Total running time: 45' 36"

---

[Panda Bear - Bros [6:13 Edit] - Video Clip]

"The artwork of Panda Bear's third solo album is full of clues. The front sleeve is a paddling pool fantastically packed with children and animals (tiger, seal, gorilla, leopard, koala and, yes, panda). Inside the booklet, there are further brightly coloured photographs: kids on stilts facing a sky mad with fruit bats and flying foxes, a boy in a kilt and a crocodile head-dress dancing a jig, a pigtailed girl riding a gondola through a sky swirling with feathers. These images set you up for music that's tribal, ecstatic yet eerie, brimming with child-like wonder. And that's exactly what Person Pitch delivers.

In Animal Collective, Panda Bear (real name, Noah Lennox) plays drums and sings. Here, he builds a unique and refreshing sound almost entirely out of percussion and his own multi-tracked voice, influenced by teenage years singing in a high school choir. Opener 'Comfy in Nautica' sounds like the Beach Boys if they'd joined Hari Krishna. A billowing vocal roundelay interwoven with looped bell-chimes, 'Bros' starts as a mellow canter, then plunges into a spangled surge of acoustic guitars. The song sustains its rhapsodic pitch for 12-and-a-half minutes that leave the listener drained and dizzy. 'Good Girl/Carrots', another 12-minute tour de force, kicks off with bubbling tablas and baby talk, moves into a section where Lennox gently upbraids some uptight, know-it-all adversary, then skanks out under cascades of glistening sonic confetti. 'I'm Not', a skyscape of sighs and shivers, and 'Search For Delicious', braided from wobbled vocals and found sounds, both merge experimentalism and euphony. Like Animal Collective, Lennox pulls off the trick of being simultaneously poppy and abstract, winsome and deranging.

Lennox's previous album, Young Prayer, was a eulogy to his father, a literally glowing tribute recorded in the room where Lennox Snr passed away. It doesn't take much of a leap of insight to twig that Person Pitch is inspired by love and (re)birth: Lennox married a Portuguese woman, moved to that country ('a European California,' he says, laid-back and sun-kissed) and had a daughter. It's actually quite hard to imagine Lennox as a dad, though, because he looks and sounds so young. There's a boyish buoyancy to the sound of Person Pitch, a pure-hearted nobility. The album's core emotions - awe, curiosity, rejoicing, tenderness - are precisely the things that age and experience tends to erode.

At once Sixties-redolent (specifically Dylan's 'I was so much older then/ I'm younger than that now' and 'he not busy being born is busy dying') yet timeless and perennially applicable, the album's open-hearted spirit is crystallised in the chorus to 'Ponytail'. Lennox sings: 'When my soul starts growing, it gets so hungry/ I wish it never would, never would, never would stop growing.'" [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

El-P "I'll Sleep When You're Dead"

Artist: El-P
Album: I'll Sleep When You're Dead
Label: Definitive Jux
Release date: 20 March 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Hip Hop/Rap

---

Tracklisting:
01. Tasmanian Pain Coaster
02. Smithereens (Stop Cryin)
03. Up All Night
04. EMG
05. Drive
06. Dear Sirs
07. Run The Numbers
08. Habeas Corpses (Draconian Love)
09. The Overly Dramatic Truth
10. Flyentology
11. No Kings
12. The League Of Extraordinary Nobodies
13. Poisenville Kids No Wins / Reprise (This Must Be Our Time)
Total running time: 55' 06"

---

[El-P - Flyentology - Video Clip]

"There’s a moment on “The Overly Dramatic Truth,” the ninth track of El-P’s brilliant sophomore effort, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, when the Brooklyn-born Jaime Meline doesn’t sound like any of the writerly influences critics typically pigeon-hole him with. It doesn’t remind me of Philip K. Dick. Or George Orwell. Or Aldous Huxley. Or [insert your favorite dystopian chronicler here]. It reminds me of the classic work of another great Brookyln-reared artist, Woody Allen.

In particular, “The Overly Dramatic Truth” and its warning to an unnamed younger woman kept reminding me of the scene in Manhattan where an already 40-something Woody Allen lectures a teenage Mariel Hemingway about how she’s absolutely forbidden to fall in love with him. And it’s not beyond a simple stretch of the imagination to picture the bespectacled Woody, flailing his arms around a well-decorated but small apartment, stealing El-P’s words verbatim, claiming: “This is not my ego talking / I know I’m no perfect draw / And I do love the way you lay there / I like the way we talk / Maybe I’m just condescending / Maybe this thing isn’t wrong / Maybe you should lay right there.”

Granted, El-P’s aesthetic isn’t exactly a laugh riot. I mean, the guy did once release a tour-only LP entitled the We Are All Going To Burn in Hell Megamix (which was outstanding, by the way). But onstage he’s arguably one of the funniest MCs around. The albums might be Woody Allen at his most Interiors-bleak, but get Aesop Rock and Mr. Lif around El, and you get something approaching Bananas. And if you wanna talk paranoia, these two heavyweights can go pound-for-pound. Sure, at dinner with Annie Hall’s family, Woody imagines that her Norman Rockwell-painting kin sees him as a bearded Orthodox Jew. But El-P’s double-vision approaches his landscape with images of “cars slidin’ by with the boomin’ system / Like New York is Fallujah with metal-gear-using Christians.”

With I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, El-P has created a masterpiece, a record both explicit and subtle, simultaneously political and apolitical, a record for a turbulent schizophrenic time where gruesome headlines from Iraq sit side-by-side with news of the Dow skyrocketing and Anna Nicole Smith corpse-raping (give them a minute). Heavily rooted in his NYC cityscape, El dips jittery, a “Brooklyn baby / Waterlocked, walkin’ nervous” with a “gonzomatic fear turning [him] Hunter S. Thompson.” Or to put it in the more Allen-esque terms of the fifth track, “Drive”: “I’m not depressed. I’m just a fuckin’ New Yorker who knows that sittin’ in traffic with these bastards is torture.”

The knock on El-P is that he’s the epitome of “nerd rap.” Or, as one of my Stylus colleagues described it, “fucking spaceship plinky plink sampling accordions and rapping about depression rap.” And granted, like many Def Jux records, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is monolithic and impenetrable on first listen. But with patience and time, its lyrical complexities and Bomb Squad by way of My Bloody Valentine sound grows increasingly more vivid. And in truth, those easy labels just aren’t true. At its core, it’s very much a hip-hop record, with its cavernous booming drums, golden-age worthy story-telling, tightly constructed rhymes, and schemes more intricate and refined than those found on Fantastic Damage.

Ultimately, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead displays a type of artistic growth almost alien to the genre. In hip-hop, artists rarely mature, they just get old and cranky, tossing off nebulous boasts about being “old-school,” or shallow braggadocio about making grown-man rap). El-P is too smart to let his evolution speak for himself. The younger, brasher El-P of five years previous said he’d rather “get mouth-fucked by Nazi’s unconscious” than sign with Rawkus. He titled songs “The Nang, The Front, The Bush, and the Shit.” Now he’s more apt to offer abstract images, like the sci-fi burner “Habeus Corpses (Draconian Love),” which paints an allegorical tale of El and Cage as Abu Ghraib-like guards on a futuristic prison ship.

Allen once said that “life is divided into the horrible and miserable,” and while his words reek of overstatement, it’s not hard to find them somewhat poignant at a time when you can’t open up your newspaper without reading about a never-ending war, a corrupt Attorney General, and a spy-cover-blowing Vice President. It might not be as silky-smooth as a Joplin soundtrack, but the poisoned purity of I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is no less poignant—a rhapsody in bleak." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

RJD2 "Deadringer"

Artist: RJD2
Album: Deadringer
Label: Definitive Jux
Release date: 23 July 2002
Genre: Electronic
Style: Hip Hop

---

Tracklisting:
01. The Horror
02. Salud
03. Smoke & Mirrors
04. Good Times Roll, Pt. 2
05. Final Frontier
06. Ghostwriter
07. Cut Out To FL
08. F.H.H.
09. Shot In The Dark
10. Chicken-Bone Circuit
11. The Proxy
12. 2 More Dead
13. Take The Picture Off
14. Silver Fox
15. June
16. Work
Total running time: 59' 12"

---

[RJD2 - The Horror/Ghostwriter/Smoke & Mirrors - Live @ Beta Lounge]

"“OK, this is the first record I’ve made under my own name...Some of the stuff I like very much...I can’t decide which piece to start with, so I won’t start with any of the pieces, I’ve already started, I hope you like what you hear.”

It’s a British accent that speaks out on the second song of RJD2’s solo album, Deadringer, but it’s a voice that, like many on the album, speaks for RJD2. In fact, a better title for the “instrumental” album might have been Deadsingers — there’s a surprising Moby-esque reliance on large vocal samples taken from what sound like early blues and funk recordings that act as less as backdrop samples than they do as lead singers (though some voices fade-to-back on some tracks, as in the Soul Position—RJD2 and Blueprint-track, “Final Frontier,” which showcases a softer production than Blueprint has ever laid down for himself, one that works extremely well, and makes me excited to hear the complete project). This makes it rather hard to listen to the album as an instrumental piece, which is a surprising departure from the expectations created by the June 12” and his appearances on Def Jux Presents II.

However, that does not mean in any way that the album is lacking the signature RJD2 sound. Still present are the sweeping change-ups and near-flawless drums, as well as the epic scope in many of the songs. Indeed, Deadringer might be better understood as an introduction to a new (more complete?) RJD2, or at least a first look at other facets of his personality as a producer. Songs like “Ghostwriter,” with its quiet guitar loop and more understated drums, are certainly different than what we’ve heard from RJD2 before, but it is a track that will leave your head bobbing for hours afterwards as it seeps into your subconscious with a layered second guitar riff, horns, and a unadorned chorus of voices (though about three minutes in, RJD2 fucks with the drums in that way that has made him such a favorite amongst those in-the-know—and one of URB’s Next 100 of 2002— simple beautiful work that induces breathlessness if you listen closely).

Joining Blueprint as guest emcees are Jakki da Motamouth (on “F.H.H.”) and Copywrite, on “June,” (released earlier this year as a 12”). The original version of that song appears here, with its long delay between the two verses, which works well on an “instrumental” LP like this one. Overall the track continues to impress, more so than the Motamouth joint, which features a not-overly-imaginative Jakki talking shit about the internet heads and anticon-like kids in a way that has become just as played out in the last two years as the old anti-mainstream rants.

Towards the second half of the LP, on songs like “The Chicken-Bone Circuit,” RJD2 moves back more towards his signature sound, the darkly stunning samples paired with drums that seem to insist upon taking the lead rather than fading into the background. There is even an extended drum-solo on that song, reminiscent of (free-?) jazz improv, which for me at least is a first on a hip-hop track.

In the end, RJD2 comes full-circle, moving through the familiar “June” to the final track, “Work,” which returns to a leading blues vocal sample. The album manages to impress overall, despite an unexpected turn in RJD2’s production and a few lackluster songs. It will be interesting to see how the public reacts to this piece of music by RJD2, and whether everyone that’s been excited about his work since the June 12” will be pleased with the new D2." [source]

[Download[pw:www.bakburaya.net].Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Amon Tobin "Foley Room"

Artist: Amon Tobin
Album: Foley Room
Label: Ninja Tune
Release date: 5 March 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Breakbeat/Drum 'n' Bass

---

Tracklisting:
01. Bloodstone [Feat. Kronos Quartet]
02. Esther's
03. Keep Your Distance
04. The Killer's Vanilla
05. Kitchen Sink
06. Horsefish
07. Foley Room
08. Big Furry Head
09. Ever Falling
10. Always
11. Straight Psyche
12. At The End Of The Day
Total running time: 50' 33"

---

[Amon Tobin - Foley Room - Trailer #1]

---

[Amon Tobin - Foley Room - Trailer #2]

"For someone with such an uncanny aptitude for evoking a wide range of cinema-friendly mood music, Amon Tobin's potential as a soundtracker seems to have been largely unrealized. What he does have on his resumé-- the scores to stealth-kill video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a surrealist, morbid Hungarian film about taxidermy, and a car commercial in which a group of presumably nude silhouettes contort their way into the shape of an SUV-- hints at why. Since Tobin makes no distinctions between background and foreground music and tends to wring as much distortion, dissonance, and rhythmic unease as he can from his jazz and orchestral-skewing sample sources, his music tends to evoke a malevolent presence that, whether skulking or charging, easily overwhelms all but the most immersive and eye-catching visual accompaniment.

The irony in Tobin's The Foley Room is that his cinematic ear has spurred him toward different motion picture-derived source material. Paring down his repertoire of bop debris and Ennio Morricone/Jerry Goldsmith evocations, Tobin's assembled his newest album as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. It makes sense in that the only thing that separates the manipulated sound of a household appliance or the drone of machinery from an electronically generated percussive effect is the element of familiarity; given the way Tobin's samples tend to transmutate traditional orchestration into concussed unrecognizability, manipulating a non-musical effect into a similar state is an inevitable step, one that he initially took in 1998 with Permutation and has been creeping towards ever since.

But while other musique concrète specialists such as Matmos aim to bring specific messages to mind with their thematic choices of sound manipulation, Tobin's approach seems to aim strictly for the aesthetic-- like two slabs of raw steak smacked together to simulate a punch to the head in some 1930s radio serial, the meaning of the medium's less important than how the end result sounds. Some of the effects' usage is a bit self-aware of their non-musical origins: "Kitchen Sink" is just that, a booming series of splashes that sound like elastic liquid dripping into a stainless steel basin and ricocheting its way down the drain; the fuzztone in the metallic drill-n-bass of "Esther's" is boosted by the rumble of a motorcycle engine, "Leader of the Pack" style (a rumble augmented by, and this required looking up, the sound of restless wasps); the title track introduces a few clamorous mess-making tumbles and crashes, shaped into something that sounds like the collapse of a kitchen shelf set to an Art Blakey drum solo.

But not everything is as blatantly laid out: The Robitussin whir that "The Killer's Vanilla" breathes through could be anything from a slowed-down pipe organ to a creaking set of gears passed through a filter or three, not to mention the way "Keep Your Distance" blurs the lines between woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and what seems to be the clamor of a recycling bin tipping over. Since Tobin still uses his share of musical instrumentation (including a memorable Slavic-esque string melody contributed by the Kronos Quartet on "Bloodstone"), figuring where the musician ends and nature or the machinery or the junkpile begins is intriguingly confusing. Supposedly there are recordings of ants eating grass and building acoustics somewhere on this record, but damned if they're easy to pinpoint amidst the beats.

Once the novelty of the record's field recording collage-job settles down, The Foley Room proves to be rhythmically consistent with Tobin's glitchy, post-jungle M.O., if somewhat exploratory; a couple moments flirt with dubstep but get too twitchy and restless to segue all that comfortably into your typical Burial track, and the broken-down carnival dance-rock of "Always" is just close enough to a genuine crowd-pleasing dancefloor number that it's a bit startling when the inevitable diamond-crushing load of distorted bass comes in. In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Download bonus DVD: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Video: DivX 720x480 29.97fps
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz stereo 128Kbps

Read More...

Summary only...

Bohren & Der Club Of Gore "Sunset Mission"

Artist: Bohren & Der Club Of Gore
Album: Sunset Mission
Label: Wonder
Release date: 2000
Genre: Jazz

---

Tracklisting:
01. Prowler
02. On Demon Wings
03. Midnight Walker
04. Street Tattoo
05. Painless Steel
06. Darkstalker
07. Nightwolf
08. Black City Skyline
09. Dead End Angels
Total running time: 73' 29"

---

[Bohren & Der Club Of Gore - Prowler - Video Clip]

"A long-time favourite of ours, Bohren’s 'Sunset Mission' is finally available again and is a must-have item for anyone looking for something to sit alongside Angelo Badelamanti’s soundtrack work for Twin Peaks. Whilst Motren Gass, Throsten Benning and Robin Rodenberg (aka Bohren & Der Club Of Gore) would like to have you believe they all live in unlit basements and only venture out to stare balefully at the moon, the truth, based on the reissue of 2000's 'Sunset Mission', suggests that they're all just a bunch of hopeless romantics... Comprised of piano, bass, sax and guitar, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore craft caliginous instrumental compositions that slow-waltz around the 'Jazz/Noir/Twin Peaks Soundtrack' divide with a sound they rather misleadingly refer to as 'horror jazz'. Referencing the likes of David Lynch at every turn, Bohren's sound takes deeply textured journeys into the smokey and crepuscular outer-reaches of Loungecore. Elegant, inviting and covered in Black-Lodge red velvet 'Sunset Mission' is perfect for long and sweaty summer evenings or cold and brooding winter ones. Highly Recommended." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Eluvium "Copia"

Artist: Eluvium
Album: Copia
Label: Temporary Residence
Release date: 20 February 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient/Modern Classical

---

Tracklisting:
01. Amreik
02. Indoor Swimming At The Space Station
03. Seeing You Off The Edges
04. Prelude For Time Feelers
05. Requiem On Frankfort Ave.
06. Radio Ballet
07. (Intermission)
08. After Nature
09. Reciting The Airships
10. Ostinato
11. Hymn #1
12. Repose In Blue
Total running time: 54' 45"

---

"It’s unfortunate that Eluvium – aka Matthew Cooper – has slipped under the radar here in Britain for too long. His previous performances have led some to hold the solo performer in the same regard as Eno in his prime – from the solo piano venture of ‘An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death‘ to the ambient works of ‘Talk Amongst The Trees‘, his music has made the moniker of Eluvium a trusted yardstick of modern ambient releases. Copia is the sound of Cooper surpassing himself, combining his patented minimalist drones with beautifully rendered piano; it’s evocative of half-remembered dreams and murky awakenings with emotions of both love and unsuspecting astonishment.

Copia sees Matthew Cooper revert to using a traditional palette of instruments, straying away from the bombastic sprawl of guitars that delivered ‘When I Live By The Garden And The Sea‘ and ‘Talk Amongst The Trees‘. Horns, violins and an organ all make their appearance, but it’s in Cooper’s classical piano playing where the record warrants the most praise. The use of the instrument is widespread, taking a simple yet affecting form in the virtuoso performance of ‘Radio Ballet’, and fluttering in and out of consciousness in ‘Prelude For Time Feelers’.

The hazy mirage of drones and subtle chord changes exploited on the second half of the record could easily get relegated to background music, unfairly suppressed by their own dreamy textures. Of course, that would mean missing out on some of the most beautiful ambient pieces put to record – elegantly constructed from the gently amassing walls of strings and keyboards. Album closer ‘Repose In Blue’ should be viewed as the highlight of Copia’s ambient works, obscuring everything before it with an epic test in glacial sonic stature, while the organ-led ‘Ostinato’ proves that Cooper is competent enough to work with almost any instrument he comes across.

One of the incandescent qualities of purely instrumental music is that unless the artist has put any forethought into describing the processes and intentions, then the record stands up for the listeners own interpretation. Cooper is a master of imagination, leaving you the keys to the endless worlds in which Copia resides. Whichever way you see it, Eluvium is going down in history as one of the innovators of contemporary ambience." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Arcade Fire "Neon Bible"

Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: Neon Bible
Label: Merge Records
Release date: 5 March 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Black Mirror
02. Keep The Car Running
03. Neon Bible
04. Intervention
05. Black Wave/Bad Vibrations
06. Ocean Of Noise
07. The Well And The Lighthouse
08. (Antichrist Television Blues)
09. Windowsill
10. No Cars Go
11. My Body Is A Cage
Total running time: 46' 57"

---

[Arcade Fire - No Cars Go - Live in Amsterdam]

"Like all great albums there were no real precursors to Arcade Fire's astonishing debut. Despite being infused with the pungent stench of death - as indicated by the title, Funeral - it erupted from the speakers with an awe-inspiring vigour that very few, if any, indie rock sets have possessed. In fact, indie rock does scant justice to an album that referenced Haiti, featured snippets sung in French and - while unquestionably a modern artefact - made explicit its regard for 19th-century chamber music in the shape of a surfeit of violins and harps.

For all that, though, and the praise bestowed on it by critics, Funeral wasn't one of 2005's bestselling albums, losing out to the Blunts and Coldplays of this world. Perhaps that's why its follow-up, mostly stunning though it is, sacrifices Funeral's extraordinary flights of fancy in favour of a marginally more conventional template. This time round there are no vampires lurking in the shadows (as there were on Funeral's 'Laika') and fewer masterclasses in disciplined chaos. '(Antichrist Television Blues)' sounds promising but, disappointingly, it strikes the set's sole bum note, being a largely nuance-free homage to Bruce Springsteen, all jaunty boogie woogie and blue-collar imagery ('You gotta work hard and you gotta get paid').

But what remains unchanged is when they're good, really good, as they are on the magical 'Ocean of Noise' and the simmering, church-baiting 'Intervention', the Canadian septet are the greatest art rock group since Talking Heads stopped making sense. In part this is due to frontman Win Butler, who is the singer Ian McCulloch might have been had the Echo and the Bunnymen mouthpiece invested every line with a sense of dread. 'There's a great black wave in the middle of the sea,' he howls on the incredible 'Black Wave/Bad Vibrations', which starts like the B-52s at closing time and ends, a mere three-and-a-half minutes later, with the sound of the earth cracking at the seams.

But then Arcade Fire are that kind of band; dark and unpredictable, explosive and restrained, au fait with global warning yet immersed in their own world. And troubled though they might be by the threat of Armageddon ('Mirror, mirror on the wall, show me where their bombs will fall,' runs the slow-burning opener 'Black Mirror'), for Arcade Fire, if no one else, the future looks rosy." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Kettel "My Dogan"

Artist: Kettel
Album: My Dogan
Label: Sending Orbs
Release date: 29 May 2006
Genre: Electronic
Style: Acid/Ambient Techno/Ambient

---

Tracklisting:
01. My Dogan
02. Dogan 9247
03. Mauerbrecher
04. Billiton Beruh With Cleo&Wouter
05. Little Tongues
06. Meeuwuh
07. Halt Him
08. Mannschaft
09. Follow Me!
10. Peeksje 1994
11. Sekt I Sing
12. Ok Norah
13. Sylvia
14. Afwezig
15. The Second 2006
16. Escape From ETA Th2
17. Choo Choo India
18. He's His Own Man
Total running time: 70' 13"

---

"IDM producer Reimer Eisling cites Aphex Twin, his AFX moniker specifically, as his primary influence and on his seventh album, it becomes so clearly evident for the first time. Rarely does an electronic artist come so close to AFX's sound but hardly infringes due to Kettel's ability to separate himself from the twin. Kettel's talent for inventing and weaving complex melodies allows “Mauerbrecher”, which could very well be off AFX's Analord series, to transform into an erratic rollercoaster ride. “The Second 2006” sounds like it was taken directly from Drukqs but with this wide collection of tracks dwarfing those of other recent electronic works, there's plenty of room for the new ideas that Kettel always brings home with him besides the impressive AFX tracks. “Mannschaft” and “Sekt I sing” take simple melodies and lift them up to amazing heights while “Halt Him” and “Peeksje 1994” are some of Kettel's greatest ambient works to date that display the controlled usage of nature sounds to temper the album's fantastic theme. No doubt, the best IDM album of 2006." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Alex Gopher "Alex Gopher"

Artist: Alex Gopher
Album: Alex Gopher
Label: Go 4 Music
Release date: 26 February 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock/Electro Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Out Of The Inside
02. Brain Leech
03. Nasty Wish
04. Isn't It Nice
05. Boulder Colorado
06. Carmilla
07. The Game
08. Song For Paul
09. 5000 Moons
10. Go!
11. The White Lane
12. Brain Leech [alternate version]
Total running time: 41' 05"

---

[Alex Gopher - Carmilla - Video Clip]

---

[Alex Gopher - The Game - Video Clip]

"Reviews of genre defying releases are often more interesting than the records themselves turn out to be, particularly the dreaded dance / indie hybrid, but ladies and gentlemen: I give you Alex Gopher.

Alex Gopher’s contribution to French musical pedigree (encompassing Nouvelle Vague, Etienne De Crécy and Air) has been long overdue an album showcasing what varied and interesting music he has been producing since 1985. The DJ / producer has drawn on his past releases and once again upped the ante to deliver, finally, an album to answer the question increasingly thrown up by today’s turgid guitar-weary scene: Where next? And whilst this intriguing record doesn’t slap you round the face in showing the way, its novel Gallic eccentricities creep up on you in a most satisfying way.

Meandering through a maze of house beats, lazy vocals and choppy riffs, the influences are obvious, but well picked and skilfully employed - Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here simmers just below the surface of "The White Lane" and a perfectly executed Peter Hook bassline has been nicked for the obvious single "Brain Leech".

The delicate "Nasty Wish" shows up the aforementioned Air connection, with its clean guitars and breezy optimism, and "Carmilla" see Gopher clear the hurdle that Bloc Party have recently fallen at, in producing a convincing marriage of spiky new wave guitars and dance beats.

It’s the slow building "5000 Moons", though, which really highlights the range of styles that Gopher delves into, beginning as a lo-fi groove and steadily transforming into a production skills tour de force.

Firmly refusing to be a just a French house record and at the same time challenging today’s indie chancers, Alex Gopher has produced an album more exciting than the safeness of an Air release, but still with more warmth than Hot Chip’s mechanical soullessness. Forget Nu Rave, this is where dance music is headed… and guitar music for that matter, too." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Patrick Wolf "The Magic Position"

Artist: Patrick
Album: The Magic Position
Label: Loog Records
Release date: 26 February 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Indie Rock/Electro Rock

---

Tracklisting:
01. Overture
02. The Magic Position
03. Accident & Emergency
04. The Bluebell
05. Bluebells
06. Magpie
07. The Kiss
08. Augustine
09. Secret Garden
10. Get Lost
11. Enchanted
12. The Stars
13. Finale
Total running time: 40' 40"

---

[Patrick Wolf - Accident & Emergency - Video Clip]

"The essence of Patrick Wolf is captured for a fleeting moment during “Accident & Emergency.” Amidst the lolloping electronic beats, dancefloor anthemics, stereoscoping brass, and dramatis-personae vocals, there’s a moment of vulnerability as he tones down the delivery from preening disco-queen to lost child for the words “what happens when you lose everything?” It’s subsumed within the space of a breath though, and he returns to cocksure strength with the words “you just carry on and with a grin, sing!”—but there was just enough to catch a glimpse. Beneath the drama and colour, real human emotion; each heightens the other.

After “Overture” settles into the thump of the title track, Patrick announces that he's found the major key. It’s a literal change as much as it is metaphorical: after five years of writing almost exclusively in the minor key, after two albums of music by turns dissonant, austere, beautiful, and strange, his songs have opened up to reveal blue skies, love affairs, a place to call home, and near-endless possibilities.

It would be easy to explain The Magic Position as Patrick going pop, but things in his lycanthrope world are never quite that simple. Far from being a compromised plea for popular success, Wolf’s third album is no less driven by his enormous personality and musicality than either his 2003 debut, Lycanthropy, or 2005’s Wind in the Wires; it’s just that his personality is brighter, happier, and more communicative now.

Not that his third album makes a leap away from previous work. “The Libertine” and “Tristan,” from Wind in the Wires, hinted at an awesome potential in Patrick’s range and measure for full-on pop, a potential realized as fully as you could hope at least three times on The Magic Position: in the joyous handclaps of the title track; in last year’s slept-on electropop single “Accident & Emergency”; and in the romping escape-fantasy “(Let’s Go) Get Lost,” which climaxes with romantic defiance atop a mess of horns.

Book-ended by the pop pillars of “Accident & Emergency” and “(Let’s Go) Get Lost,” though, is a midsection of songs as beautiful and idiosyncratic as any in his catalogue; starting with the brief, prescient snippet of “The Bluebell” and finishing with the scant, ebbing violin noise of “Secret Garden.” Within this heart of the album, “The Bluebell” takes the idea from its brief sister-song and extends, realizes, and breathes depth and solidity into it. Marianne Faithful attempts to out-emote Patrick on “Magpie,” drama threatening to be cliché were the melody not so strong and arrangement not so oddly minimal and mechanically disconsolate. “…Get Lost” then moves into the brief, piano-led romantic sojourn of “Enchanted,” like a remembrance of Lambchop’s Is a Woman sans melancholy, before “The Stars” relishes in the beauty of the night sky and familial warmth, ushering us gently to close.

The Magic Position is a wild and beautiful ride. There are fireworks, electronics, trumpets, dissonant squalls, ukuleles, femme fatales, pianos, orchestras, beats, and escaping lovers. Above all there is Patrick Wolf: 6'4", shocking red hair, twenty-three years young, beautiful, unique, and a genius." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...