(Key:)
Old Favourite
Corresponding New(ish) Track
Fleet Foxes – He Doesn’t Know Why
Yeah, obvious as they come, but this album presented a reason to ignore the pretentious snivelling of the underground music writer and believe the hype; the reason so many harped on about Fleet Foxes is because their grandiose and uplifting formula of church-reverb-smothered choral harmonies, comprising simultaneously homely and ethereal melodies, works. This track presents one of the most breakfast-friendly and joy inspiring.
Wild Beasts – All The Kings Men
By no means a new track, or a new band, Wild Beasts are certainly still fresh, and still contenders for the musical landscape unfolding before our ears. While sonically dissimilar to Fleet Foxes, the vocalists in this band are similarly unafraid of a three-part harmony, although in Wild Beasts’ case they’re also partial to some bordering-on-the-silly operatics, employing an impressively squealing falsetto and some plodding and majestic bass vocals. They also share a common theme: grandiosity – Wild Beasts in a very intentional ‘baroque pop’ way (indicative of their art-rock intellectualism) as opposed to Fleet Foxes’ old-fashioned and peasant-like folky warmth.
The Flaming Lips – Are You A Hypnotist??
An all-time favourite track on an all-time favourite album. Wayne Coyne famously said that if asked what instrument he played, he would reply ‘the recording studio’, and this album epitomised that claim. Together with the rest of the band, he manages to blend the organic and the mechanical seamlessly. Acoustic crunchy drum breaks are here lightly sequenced alongside progressively varying bleeps and Wayne’s digitally-aided endlessly floating vocal to comprise a heavily-produced and polished studio product that somehow still strongly retains the feel of the performance.
The Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock – The Colouring Of Pigeons
Loose fit yet again here I have to say, but The Knife share with The Flaming Lips refreshing tones of experimentalism, a strong proficiency at orchestrating acoustic and digital instruments alike into profound and complex soundscapes, but also most commonly an innocent curiosity to their approach to tackling fairly dark and deep concepts in their music. This latter element comes across as a kind of naivety in the face of genuine profundity, which gives warmth to both groups’ music by removing them from that brand of artists that seem to take themselves just a little bit too seriously. Part of the score for their recently dropped electro-opera about Darwin, this is something monumental and really quite special. Having said that neither the Knife nor The Flaming Lips are showing any signs of petering out in any way, so keep track of both.
DJ Shadow – ...Meets His Maker
For anyone ignorant, DJ Shadow was the eminent pioneer for the power of the sample, innovatively constructing debut album ‘…Endtroducing’ entirely from non-original material. It’s safe to say that the man’s relationship with his turntables and a sampler has transcended his title from DJ to artist, and paved the way for others to do so (see below). This track (along with others like Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt) serves as a concentrated gemstone of his genius, that form such a vivid sonic atmosphere for the listener that you can’t help but be mentally transported to imagined movie scenes of hurried escape from danger, alongside an inherent feel of inspired melancholia. You’re emotionally anchored to the track so deeply that the ethereal crescendo at the climax of the track will literally tear you apart, the subsequent telephone ring that link this to the track before it on the album bringing you back to earth.
Pretty Lights – I Can See It In Your Face
This man is a clear contemporary to the above, in terms of his inheritance of the free and adventurous philosophy of creating individual, rich and profound music without technically 'composing' anything. Pretty Lights' sound is a lot less dark than DJ Shadow's however, sampling warmer soul/disco/funk records in as melodic but usually less atmospheric a way, featuring more modern rapped snippets and old school hip-hop beats adding punch to an otherwise warm and accessible sound. Efficient as they come as well, this track is included on the recently released EP ‘Making Up A Changing Mind’, which forms one part of a series of three awaiting imminent addition to the man’s huge back catalogue, all of which is generously made available for free download on his website.
Noisia – Stigma
And how could I avoid spewing inappropriately pseudo-intellectual nonsense about drum ‘n’ bass? Especially when the beauty of this track lies in something so blunt (even for drum ‘n’ bass) relying heavily (although actually pretty consistent throughout) on that essential sledgehammer that is the drop. And it’s as near as you’ll get to the perfect one – very dramatically built-up and then by-no-means-disappointingly huge to the point of making you unconsciously wince every time its ear-numbingly gritty pitch bend comes around. It’s just silly, and unbeatable. Also despite me naming them here as an old favourite, Noisia are still on the rise, recent tracks like Deception making us all excited about their imminent album drop.
Spor – Overdue
Spor is a natural inheritor to the cold-blooded, dangerous-sounding neurofunk helm of Noisia, although they don’t seem too ready to pass it on. Noted for wearing skull masks under a hoodie, the man represents both in appearance and in his music, the epitome of every pensioner’s nightmare. Utilising characteristically dark ambient overtones to his production, and breaks that perfectly capture the incessant rapidity and impact of a mechanical bludgeoning to the death, his obscene remixes of (most parts of) Bad Company’s Bullet Time and Two Fingers & Sway’s That Girl sound designed to give people ASBOs just for playing them. This (so far unreleased) track however proves Spor to be more versatile, sticking to a much warmer liquid sound. The harp sample is guaranteed to evoke some shivers.
The Widdler – Sensi Samurai
Anyone who is used to my face-to-face music force-feeding will probably have heard this more than a few times. It signifies the first dubstep track I openly admitted to enjoying, having previously been in denial. The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one… It broke my aversion to dubstep as a concept by taking all of its genre characteristics and turning the dial to 11, to the point where I couldn’t not like it. The wobble bass on this one is stretched to breaking point, the entirety of the track essentially just featuring rhythmical variations on the same elastic hook interspersed with a few breakdowns and old Kung Fu movie ambience and samples.
Wet Look – Joy Orbison
The above Widdler track is essentially named as an excuse to be able to talk about this one. While perhaps less timeless, it signifies my evolution in dub taste, but also the importance of a consistent simple core to great dub track – yet again it's that LFO-ed synth wobble that does it, although here the bass is crystalline and rhythmically spared from the hectic syncopation on the Widdler track. As the title suggests, it feels like being repeatedly splashed in slow motion with some kind of liquefied shimmering gold dust.
Born Ruffians – I Need A Life
A rare signing to Warp records, the label apparently felt that these Canadian boys’ innocent sonic indie clutter could sit alongside Aphex Twin’s twisted creations and electronica called things like (Flying Lotus’) ‘GNG BNG’ and (Luke Vibert’s) ‘I Love Acid’ as well as tracks comprised solely of the lyric ‘I’m gonna fuck you in my red hot car’ (Squarepusher’s ALWAYS allowed). Their shambolic twee melodies are incomprehensibly charming though – and not without intelligence – this track purifying their sound into something self-deprecating yet unifying and progressive yet infectious. Naïve and inoffensive verse gives way to anthemic and chant-along-able chorus, gives way to spine-tingling crescendo (‘I NEED A LIFE!!! I’ve never ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-wheeee-hooo’), gives way to violently joyful and neat melodic finale.
Local Natives – Airplanes
This New York band, while less messy than the above, echo their recorded-in-a-garage-feel and innocence, this track’s gist being, in a nutshell, ‘it’s a shame you’re dead granddad, you seemed pretty cool’. The melodies are just as infectious though, and there’s that same chant-along tweeness to the choruses, the repeated phrases in this track flowing beautifully into each other (‘I love it all, so much I call’ into ‘I want you back’ into ‘I did not know you as well as my father knew you…’). It’s the simplistic translucence to both these tracks which stands out, as the absence of anything beneath the surface fails to impinge on their near-infinite repeatability (although more so in the case of Born Ruffians).
Everything Everything – My Keys, Your Boyfriend
One last track, which I felt an urgent need to post about, doesn’t seem to fit with any one of my previous favourites. There are whiffs of eighties synth pop around the hook and strong elements of noughties indie pop in its clean guitar twiddles and vocal breathlessness in places, but the two don’t simply fuse into your average generic turn-of-the-decade guitar/synth crossover pop. Its exclusivity lies in the combination of these elements with a covertly experimental lyricism. Deceivingly, the combination of the title, the fast-pace of the vocals and the only lyrics that really hit home at first listen (“and I wanna know what happened to your boyfriend, cos he was lookin’ at me like ‘woahh’”) make you expect a lightly-veneered track about teenage romantic triviality. Upon closer listening (and a google search…) the lyrics actually describe, in the band’s own words, ‘what it would be like to try and have any kind of normal relationship if your country was being bombed constantly by an occupying nation’. Lines mentioning ‘barbed wire in the bathroom’ and ‘everything coming through the windows’ subsequently pack more of a punch, and add to what I would call a (perhaps slightly pretentious but) refreshingly experimental approach, broadening the scale of the track and yet somehow not resigning the band instantly to the twatty art-rock cupboard – at least not in my opinion, although this fact probably rests on just how damn catchy it all is.
