Post-rock,
avant-garde jazz, folktronica: Kieran Hebden has had his share of labels as
listeners struggle to categorise his inventive output.
This, the first Four Tet album in five years, avoids pigeonholes once more but
- despite passages of real beauty and delicacy - suggests Hebden’s resistance
to classification might just be an inability to sustain a winning theme.
All nine tracks have drawn inspiration from anywhere and anything – Pablo’s
Heart is simply 11 seconds of his godson’s heartbeat, while Plastic People
features a child playing a toy piano. None of this feels superfluous or
gimmicky; instead, the personal touches make the album feel like a collection
of memories. It’s like stumbling on someone’s diary, only without the bad
poetry and mortifying self-analysis.
Opener Angel Echoes is strangely affecting, with its ethereal female voice
struggling through a backdrop of chopped-up stop/start electronica. It segues
into future dancefloor filler Love Cry, an epic nine minutes of pulsing beats
with a surging vocal growing in confidence as the track builds.Circling calms things down, all pizzicato
strings and looping keyboards, lulling us back down from those dizzy heights.
After the opening trilogy, however, there's nothing else that stops you in your
tracks. Admittedly, the first three songs are so captivating that anything that
came afterwards would be a let-down, but those absorbing layers of sound are
lost. That’s not to say it’s without its moments; how could it be with Hebden
at the helm, injecting warmth and lightness into what could be a clinical
experiment in electronic sound in less talented hands. This Unfolds does just
that, drawing us in with bubbling melodies, while Reversing is strikingly,
refreshingly sparse.
But on the whole the rest of the album meanders where it should take off, with
fresh ideas petering out without making an impact. It’s a shame when it starts
so brilliantly, mixing familiar Four Tet themes with original rhythms and
sounds, that it should leave us wandering off to put the kettle on when we
should still be rooted to the spot.
This record has got a hard task. The
Festivus season is over, everyone's joy banks are as depleted as their actual
banks, and all that fresh fallen snow is crunching into black ice with every
step towards work we'd forgotten existed.
So to recreate the ecstatic summer
bounce of their eponymous debut was never going to be easy. But it sounds like
it was. Easy. Skipping. Smart casual. It's not more of the same, but the spirit
and joy are still there in spades.
The sound palette is expanded, there's a less rigid adherence to a Capetown
time signature (although they do still convey that bounding gleefulness without
a hint of phoniness), but this is still Vampire Weekend's world. Wes Anderson's
bored, beatific rich kids, not the teeth-grinding empty horrors of Bret Easton
Ellis. Cousins tears at you from the off, their first attempt at a 4/4 stomp
still sounding entirely themselves (with maybe some Violent Femmes mania thrown
in). Horchata is more playful and music-box, littered, like the rest of the
album, with Ezra Koenig's chocolate-box delight in language, words and phrases.
California English mirrors the babbling-brook guitar with a lightly autotuned
voice dappling over preppy pebbles. More instant hooks and tingles keep coming,
each song trying and succeeding with new sounds and ideas. Only Holiday could
pass for Freshman VW, rikki-tik drums and polyrhythms all where you'd expect
them.
I Think UR A Contra could be their first ballad, but it won't be on Celine
Dion's next Vegas setlist. A simple, stumbling piano riff plays and guitars
oscillate lightly in the background while Koenig gets close to a consistent
narrative of love and loss. It's lovely.
This is a great, joyful record. No doubt it's also a record that will end up
interpreted a million different ways on blogs, sampled for BBC3 ads, played
endlessly at festivals, listened to by people who wouldn't usually etc - but
while it’s complete, it’s magic.
The BBC
have been making some tremendous music shows recently, Synth Britannia being
maybe the first talking heads TV show about the synth
strand of post-punk which doesn’t just tell us how CRAZY the time was, or how
GAY it all was, or some other tedious reduction. That was a treat, but even
more surprising was their krautrock-doc, digging into 70s German music and
treating it with the peaceful seriousness that it brings out in the listener.
You can
hear in Kraftwerk, Neu! etc so many of the strands of house/techno/electro, and
putting on this record after a dubstep compilation I can hear the sparse
stabbings and paranoid retreats that characterise that strand too. OK, they
don’t have subsonic bass throughout, but it still sounds like it could have
been made in a Lambeth council estate.
Recorded by
Eno and members of Cluster, who were members of Neu! (and I’ll leave it there
before I have to write out a rock family tree), this was in fact made in an
idyllic pastoral retreat. Between the simple, gorgeous sounds and melodies,
rich with analogue warmth, depth and craftsmanship, you hear birdsong.Repetition is used to create texture and
shape, and sound and digression give colour and weight. It sounds like some
very smart people slowly working out new ways of thinking, which is really what
it is. These songs could equally soundtrack 70s children’s TV or one of Adam
Curtis’s paranoiac sequences of cut-ups.
This
comes after Eno’s song-based masterpiece Another Green World, and makes a
perfect bridge between that and his subsequent journey into ambient music.You can also clearly hear the sound palette
of Eno and Bowie’s Berlin triptych here. That’s not to say that
Eno pinched this and commercialised it for Bowie. This is more like folk, where ideas
and sounds aren’t owned, and band members drop in and out of groups and seed
ideas around for everyone to dip into.
So, this
is on Spotify, and Amazon, and if you wanted an entry point with either krautrock
or Eno, this is a great place to start. If you already have some idea about
those two worlds, this is a beautiful addition to them.
Tyondai Braxton's new record on the excellent Warp is simultaneously peaceful and an assault. The sound of waking up in a city you don't know and going for an early morning walk in the autumn air while people set up for business. Braxton is the chap from Battles with Marouane Fellaini hair and the multi-directional polyrhythmic genius bucking out of him every which way.
The record is called Central Market and sounds like mid-century jazz/avant garde American orchestral music, specifically Bernstein or Gershwin to my gauche ears, but with Tyondai's skittering sound-voice breaking all through it. It's an orchestral piece, but with the music heavily imprinted with the jagging sine-wave movement and tone that made Battles so compelling and amazing. Some of the songs' strident enormity overwhelms at first, there's a lot to take in, but try getting lost in this on a long walk with the walkman on and it will make sense as a whole.
Dave Longstreth whose Dirty Projectors had me bookending their set with tears a few Sunday nights ago says, “In an era when a lot of artists' idea of style seems to amount to a preference for one expired decade or another, Braxton points to something that's both tougher and more pleasurable: he makes his style out of nothing more or less than the kinds of shapes and colors he likes. I'd compare his temperament to Gershwin's - aiming to correct art and pop music by uniting them - except he's doing so from a place where there is no clear sense of what's pop or what's art, why the two are different, or why they ever got separated in the first place. The result is a singular mix of Stravinsky and Black Dice, Messiaen and Eno, Reich, Hindemith, and Reznor. But really Tyondai Braxton sounds most like himself.”
Give it a go and get yourself lost in the maps in Braxton's head.
While the original scurries to debase his own myth, floodingthe market with reams of sub-par releases and Sunday Mailgiveaways, the quest is on to fill a Prince-sized hole in the rock landscape.
TV On The Radio had a game punt with the taut funk, brassy tunes and general wild eclecticism of last year’s Dear Science triumph, and now here come their recent tour support. With their second album, Sweden's Little Dragon reckon they've made a record the purple priapus himself would be proud to call his own. It’s a lithe piece of 80s pop classicism, sure, but worthy of a genius?
In truth, Little Dragon cherrypick rather than plunder the miniature maestro’s catalogue. Theirs is a spacious, often sedate sound, more reminiscent of Sign ‘O’ The Times, If I Was Your Girlfriend or When Doves Cry than fizzing epics like 1999. And altogether Machine Dreams is a set straight from 1985, not Paisley Park specifically.
That said, they avoid pastiche. Where their self-titled 2007 debut dwelt on the heavy bass synths of early Human League and singer Yukimi Nagano’s arresting facility for sounding like Erykah Badu, Machine Dreams settles in its smoothly produced 80s niche yet never sounds dated. That gaudy decade is a rich hunting ground right now, but Little Dragon avoid the dauntingly layered sonics of Florence and the Machine and tinny keys of La Roux, wallowing instead in a sheen that seems genuinely futurist.
Opening track A New still owes a debt to the Human League’s austere period, creating the eerie, bleak ambience Kanye West appeared to be striving for on 808s and Heartbreak – although, happily, Little Dragon trump Kanye by adding a tune. From this point, however, wings are spread and new, true colours are shown. Looking Glass with its splashy drums and marimba percussion is the obvious Prince touchstone, but the stabbed synths and detached vocals are more evocative of his cohorts Wendy and Lisa. My Step boasts a beautifully abrupt chord change into a pulsating chorus – “My step slide/Lightning fight/Tropical times”. Beguiling nonsense; it could almost come from the pen of another 80s icon – er, Simon Le Bon.
The swinging, crystalline chimes of Never Never hit like piercing shards of sunlight, its bittersweet refrain “I could never have what you have” nailing the flavour of the album. Regret also soaks the drifting Thunder Love, Nagano sighing, “Keep dreaming of when I was kissing you/My past erase as we lay in a daze”. Lyrics deal in the abstract, but there’s no escaping the sense of melancholy.
Well-chosen singles are where the album really hits its stride: Feather is softly atmospheric – “You are airborne/You got silver rays/Will it ever float/Will it ever soar along?” – bubbling along on a charming synth signature courtesy of keyboard player Håkan Wirenstrand; the intriguingly titled Blinking Pigs is a bouncing earworm wriggling free of plangent chords straight out of the songbook of devastatingly earnest mid-80s jazz-poppers China Crisis. Somehow that’s a good thing.
This is a record steeped in an oddly comforting disquiet, subdued yet hopeful. Living up to its name, Machine Dreams finds the organic in the mechanical. It has soul in its neat grooves and while Little Dragon don’t crackle with the new like the fierce modernism of – to take another Swedish treasure - Fever Ray, this is an album that sounds as contemporary as anything in hock to styles of 25 years ago can. That it can do this and still remember to rack up the killer tunes, well, that’s the cherry on the cake.
