Album Review:Shabazz Palaces – Lese Majesty

(Sub Pop)

Over the last five or so years hip-hop seemed to have made a lot of space for the stranger and weirder side of the genre to show. Alongside the rise of bedroom producers like Lil B or Odd Future and acts like Death Grips that show that there are till many ways to approach, interpret and reinvent the genre. Shabazz Palacees are made up of Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets and Tendai Maraire, two artists that have been peddling their own unique takes of hip hop for over two decades now, well before this new outsider hip hop emerged, and manage to create some of the most unique music around..

Shabazz Palaces seem to have as much in common with the cosmic stargazing of Sun Ra or sci-fi techno of Drexiya than they do with contemporary hip hop. The group's debut, 2011's Black Up, appeared with song structures that avoided conventions with dense electronic influenced beats. It balanced a left field with the approachable as glittering synths and samples twisted beyond easy recognition make for an alien feel while synthesizer bass lines and treated vocals hint at a synthetic and artificial world. Shabazz Palaces music aims for a point where the line between technology and biology is blurred, and they're getting even closer on their follow up Lese Majesty.

Forerunner Foray features the kind of electronic futurism of acts from the Hyperdub roster in the blips and bleeps that rise and fall over the beat, broken apart by soulful female vocals stretched out to a crawl. They Come In Gold hits harder and stranger, a vocal is twisted into a melody under lines like 'we converse in ancient languages' as they map out a psychedelic interstellar journey.

Lese Majesty's beats flit between the loose and easy J Dilla style to the rigid drum machine beats. #CAKE opts for machine noises and 4/4 808 whilst Colluding Oligarchs stumbles and lurches forward with an off-centre rolling drum beat. The way the duo use samples isn't just as a backdrop for the lyrics, they feel integral to the immersion that Lese Majesty demands, as sounds often swallow up the voices or at least take equal space in the dense production. The album blends together into one ever-changing shape, retreating then re-emerging in a new form, MindGlitch Keytar TM Theme appears like a lost post-punk record, jagged and uneasy before Motion Sickness floats forth almost beat-less, bleeps of spaceship computers abound, over a bass line light enough to sound like it exists in zero gravity.

Listening to the album is taking a trip to another world that I don't fully understand, song titles and lyrics are often impenetrable, but a definitely enjoy my time there. Lese Majesty is an intricate and detailed place that demands that you invest your time to explore. Amongst a style that has embraced lo-fi grit, noise and experimentation more than ever in recent years, Shabazz Palaces shows a pair of musicians that can do strange and make it sincere in a way that outs the newcomers to shame.

Album Review:Mogwai – Come On Die Young (Reissue)

(Chemikal Underground)

Mogwai's second album begins with a clip of Iggy Pop talking about the burgeoning punk rock genre “it's a term that's based on contempt, it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, Satanism and everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll”. It is easy to see the sample intended as a parallel to the post-rock tag that had been stuck on to their debut Young Team, a term they have dismissed both in interviews and musically with their follow up record Come On Die Young.

Fifteen years on and Mogwai are now amongst the most established bands to have emerged in instrumental rock and a formidable live act but over the course of their career the Scottish band have never taken the easy path and for better or worse all of their albums have distinctly different. 1997's Young Team, which took on shoegaze, metal and the sounds of forward thinking acts like Slint, Bark Psychosis and Talk Talk, won the band critical acclaim. Huge sweeping creations like the seventeen minute long Mogwai Fear Satan or the violent and harsh riffs of Like Herod. Since then they have stripped their songs down to no frills essentials on Rock Action and taken their most ambient shift scoring the soundtrack to the French television show The Returned.

Instead of an easy follow up where they continue to construct the builds, crescendos and big shifts in dynamics that would define post-rock the band have never taken the easy route. On 1999's Come On Die Young they sidestepped their noisey debut's ferocious immediacy and put together a selection of restrained and subtle tracks that unravel over multiple listens. The album is now getting the reissue treatment, and seen in a much fairer light of their whole discography can be regarded as one of their finest successes.

Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite provides vocals on Cody, starting the album unpredictably, having as more in common with slowcore acts like Codeine and Low as it does with anything anything on Young Team. The track mixes whisper soft, tender vocals with the equally unexpected pining sound of a slide guitar. In fact a distortion pedal isn't triggered until the fifth track, Kappa, and even then it's overshadowed by harshly struck, clean guitars. The whole album has an order but with it's laboured limits there is variation. The shorter moments like chiming echo of piano keys Oh, How The Dogs Stack Up or Spaghetti western outro of Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/AntiChrist help hold the album together.

That's not to say the band don't let loose at times, Ex-Cowboy is as heavy as Mogwai have ever been. As riffs give way to harsh machine-like noise and drum rolls they prove they are still capable of creating the kind of thrilling noise-laden cacophony that few other other bands can manage and here, amongst the serene sounds of tracks like Cody these moments are all the more striking. It followed by two more aggressive tracks. A sparse and melancholy piano melody carries Chocky, as drums cascade around it, threatening to turn the track into something louder and more dangerous but just about manages to restrain itself whilst Christmas Steps delivers melodic hardcore punk riffing, taking the band back to the loud quiet dynamics of Young Team.

Amongst the extensive additional material accompanying Come On Die Young is the Travels In Constants EP, originally released in 2001, which seems to fit in well with the album despite having a slightly different feel, the first track Untitled sounds like Neu!'s more electronic moments given a moody update and shows the electronic touches that would become more apparent on later Mogwai albums. Another bonus track, Hugh Dallas hold up alongside the album tracks, featuring Braitwaite's vocals placed amongst echoing guitars, beginning at a mournful dirge before before swelling up to offer up a visceral and emotive climax that still manages to surprise like the first strike of thunder from a slow-moving storm.

If there are any weak links, it's the demo tracks, which are too similar to the finished versions to really reveal an insight into the bands process, just a little rougher around the edges. Still there are early versions of Rollerball and 7-25 which would later form part of Mogwai's soundtrack for the film Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait.

There have been a lot of bands that have played around with the same template that bands like Mogwai established in the nineties so it really does show how well Come On Die Young hold up fifteen years on that it still has an feel all of it's own. Eschewing some of what made Young Team such a success was a gamble, as the band reassessing the builds and distortion of Young Team and creating a different and more restrained approach. There is still an atmosphere that in a certain light creates a tense, uneasy drama and in another beauty.

Die-hard Mogwai fans may already own most of what is here as most of the extras have previously been released in some form but it is clear that some effort has gone into this reissue, gathering just about everything there is from this period in the band's history, clocking in at two and a half hours. The album itself is still the best part of the package but everything here stands up and adds a little more context around one of Mogwai's defining musical achievements where they realised that they quieter statements can be the most powerful.

Album Review:Drcarlsonalbion – Gold

(Oblique Italy)

A pioneer of both drone and ambient metal, Seattle musician Dylan Carlson has also shown himself to be a capable writer of interesting and innovative heavy music. Beginning his career with inspirations like early metal groups such as Black Sabbath and the Seattle music scene and groups like The Melvins, his main band Earth has, over twenty five years, developed and pushed itself into more varied sonic territory, especially over the last decade since their return from a hiatus caused by Carlson's drug addiction.

Gold is the first foray into soundtrack work for the Earth front man for a film of the same name. It comes amongst a productive time for Carlson, shortly before the release of his first solo album, funded through Kickstarter, and a new Earth album, both due before the end of the year. The film follows a band of German settlers, traversing the western frontier in hopes of striking gold on Canada's west coast. A familiar story unfolds, where the often environment and those that inhabit it become the main obstacles for the travelling group.

The twenty four tracks, titled Gold I through to Gold XXIV, that make up this soundtrack exists in a lonelier space to Carlson's usual work with Earth. Many of the tracks just featuring a single guitar, an effective representation of the vast and empty North American wilderness. Sparse percussion is used like punctuation for the riffs as splashes of cymbals pass by like clouds or a bass drum hits like distant thunder.

Whilst this isn't metal, the music does bare the hallmarks of Carlson's main project, Gold I establishes a guitar progression that reappears throughout Gold with slow tempo pentatonic riffs and a thick and carefully constructed guitar tone that crackles and splits like the dry ground under an oppressive sun. It does explore some of the directions that Earth has taken over the last decade, with the sound sun-baked country and drawn-out Morricone melodies dominating, twisted into a much more minimalist form.

The vast slide guitar chords of Gold VII ring out and echo like their being performed in a valley, it's the most identifiabley “western” moments on the soundtrack. Gold XII echoes about like an demo from the heyday of psychedelia, wah pedal-soaked guitar jams that sound lost and wandering. Some tracks barely hang around for more than thirty seconds, filling in the gaps between the longer tracks with soft hums of feedback and low drones rattling away, swathed in reverb.

Fans of Carlson's work should know what to expect from Gold for the most part, the thick and warm guitar sounds but the stripped down approach creates something a little different, for creating a lonely and vulnerable sound that could crackle and fall apart. There is something powerful that rings out in these singular riffs and isolated chord progressions, familiar styles that feel somehow other placed on their own with a result that is much more evocative than you'd expect from it's simple approach.

Album Review:Tom Vek – Luck

(Moshi Moshi)

London multi-instrumentalist Tom Vek gained a cult following with his 2005 debut We Have Sound with a modest reception it gained him a dedicated following who'd have to wait six years for a follow up. In 2011 he released Leisure Seizure and whilst it didn't win him further exposure it still shown an artist work keeping an eye on. Now he's got his third album in just under a decade, Luck, and whilst he isn't the most prodigious artist it might be enough to cement his cult status.

Jittery and agitated post-punk of Sherman (Animals In The Jungle), the first single form Luck really stands out. It has the kind of simple three note guitar line that would be at home on a track form the mid-2000s post-punk revival. Whilst it all sounds a bit like Bloc Party's first album it doesn't come across as old with a sharp synth line cuts in alongside a restless drum beat. As the song's title forms the track's chorus Vek's ability for creating urgency in his half-spoken deadpan vocals becomes apparent.

Broke stands as one of the more ambitious genre-hopping tracks, with big pop song keys and middle eastern scales mixing with big garage rock riffs and and messy drum beats, throwing a succession of hooks and riffs at you for it four minutes. Trying To Do Better brings together a mixture of heart on sleeve emotion and aggression from post-hardcore with electronic sounds that works way better than you think it will.

The songs keep themselves around the four minute mark and simple verse chorus pop structures which is both a strength and weakness. Vek's penchant for mixing up disparate genres keeps things interesting but you always feel you know it is often leading to a big chorus. He has never been striving for lyrical complexity and for the most part his straight up and simple approach works but there are a couple of lines like “If you say you didn't do it /I'll believe you didn't do it” on the chorus of Ton of Bricks that are hard to overlook. He started ahead of the curve with his mix of indie rock and electronica but now it's common place for bands to incorporate electronics and smart production in the mix with the tried and tested band dynamics.

Luck is a varied piece if work, covering enough musical styles to give nineties Beck a run for his money but the risk with that is you can lose out on cohesion and that's were it falls short. You'd be hard pressed to find another recent album that touches on such varied genres as tracks like the acoustic The Girl You Wouldn't Leave For Any Other Girl to the cut-up jungle beats and squelchy digital bass lines of You'll Stay where Vek pushes his electronic influences to the forefront. Even in the internet age that has brought about the blurring of genre lines when he's at his best Tom Vek's musical approach still sounds unique.

Album Reveiw:Tobacco – Ultima II Massage

(ghostly)

As popular music becomes increasingly electronic, it's also aided the rise of the computer as an instrument, along with digital instruments and interfaces. Whilst this is a prevalent trend there are always those acts who go against the tide. Eschewing modern equipment for analog synthesizers, tape machines and old drum machines, Tobacco would be one of them.

Tobacco is an offshoot of cult act Black Moth Super Rainbow allowing frontman Thomas Fec to take the BMSR aesthetic into a stranger and often darker place with his primitive bedroom hip-hop and no computer in sight. I became familiar with Black Moth Super Rainbow's 2009 album Dandelion Gum, an album full of sunny and pastoral electronic music. Tobacco seems like an outlet for a completely different side of Fec. He has provided beats for rappers like Aesop Rock, Beans and The Hood Internet and his last album Maniac Meat also featured Beck on two tracks, an artist who also made his own oddball take on hip-hop on his breakout album Odelay.

His third album under the Tobacco moniker Ultima II Massage sounds like a seedy video game title and it mostly lives up to that as opener Streaker begins with all the tact of a grubby adolescent. There is none of the perfect EQing and over-laboured sound that you can find in a lot of modern music, the bass drums thud clumsily like a drunken madman. When Tobacco does take a step back into something a little more chilled out it often sound like a Boards of Canada demo, like on Self Tanner with its hazy and slightly-off synth lines or the stoned beats of Beast Sting and Creaming For Beginners. The slinky and funky Lipstick Destroyer is the music Daft Punk might make if they were locked up in a basement after making Homework with an 4-track and some early hip hop records as a vocoder and a disco beat fight through fuzzy guitars whilst album closer Bronze Hogan could be the theme from a long forgotten 1980s straight to VHS film as a big guitar riff and keys jostle around.

Eruption (Gonna Get My Hair Cut at the End of the Summer) has some of the more obvious vocal hooks (and some of the most discernible lines) like “Twist it like a pigtail/I can make your heart fail” along with a synth sound that is just gloopy. The song finds Tobacco liberally dropping “Motherfucker” like a teenager playing tough and reinforces a teenage viewpoint seems to come through a lot of this music, capturing an age where nothing is over thought and the world is still a strange place that you haven't quite figured out yet. There are a few tracks like Good Complexion that are a little closer to the sunnier psychedelia of Black Moth but for the most part Ultima will leave you feeling like you've taken a swim in a sewer.

It's a journey into a strange and grimy place, in fact if you have Chromesthesia I imagine you'd see the music as the yellow-brown stain left by tobacco, it's that dirty sounding. Whilst the retro and vocoder sound may seem to make Tobacco a one trick pony, there is a pretty surprising amount of variation and ideas in the lo-fi tunes that make up Ultima II Massage. It's gleefully strange, with song titles like Dipsmack, Spitlord and Video Warning Attempts that only seem to aid the oddness and make it all the more indecipherable. If you like your music a little on the weird side then it may well be worth taking a trip down this particular rabbit hole.

Album Review:Sharon Van Etten – Are We There

(Jagjagwuar)

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten has gathered a dedicated following with her delicate and personal music since emerging with her debut album Because I Was In Love in 2009. Winning the adoration of fans, including musicians Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and reaching a larger audience with 2012's break through Tramp, which saw her opening for acts like Nick Cave and St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten Returns with her fourth album Are We There and seems set to keep building upon her successes as she continues to refine her confessional style of songwriting.

Like the title and picture on the Are We There's cover, the album evokes a road trip with close friends, with plenty of space for laid back contemplation where daydreams and past mistakes find their way into the mind as you gaze out of windows. And like a journey, you move forward, whilst having space to reflect. In that respect this might be Sharon Van Etten's most personal and honest album yet, and that is from an artist who has already gained a reputation for her intimate song craft, taking a step back from the larger sound of Tramp, produced by Aaron Dessner of The National.

Her albums have always brought together a host of talented musicians. This time she has gathered Torres' Mackenzie Scott, Peter Borderick, Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg as well as borrowing Dave Hartley and Adam Granduciel from The War on Drugs to make up her band. After meeting putting together music for the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, Etten brought in Stewart Lerman to co-produce the album with his natural and unfussy style giving lots of space for Etten's voice to lead.

Taking Chances brings in The War On Drugs penchant for drum machines but it's Etten's voice and use of harmony that is the real strong point here. It allows here to have a depth and delivery that is all her own and it really helps that the song provides one of the albums best choruses with scuffled up guitars and keys adding some bite to the otherwise laid back beat. The stark and violent imagery of Your Love is Killing Me makes for one of Etten's most powerful songs to date. The lyrics 'Burn my skin so I can't feel you/Stab my eyes so I can't see' conjure suffering as her voice is outright defiant with drum rolls and soaring guitars backing her to an effect that feels emotionally cathartic.

Our Love, which follows Your Love is Killing Me, sounds a bit too light and breezy, just drifting by never really leaving it's mark. I Love You But I'm Lost leads with a piano and the kind of soul searching themes that Etten can make feel so relatable and Tarifa, named after a small Spanish town, continues to conjure up the ideas of isolation and introspection but backed by shining horns it feels bigger and brighter turn. Near the end of the album Break Me stands out with it's 6/4 drum rhythm and chiming Robin Guthrie guitars give it a dream pop feel that really complements Etten's layered vocals. Are We There closes with the sun-kissed americana of Every Time The Sun Comes Up, ending the album on a lighter note with it's lyrics bringing to mind youthful abandon as it sounds like all the albums collaborators join in on the chorus of 'Every time the sun comes up I'm in trouble'.

On Are We There, Etten is thoughtful and hopeful, introspective and confident. At times it feels so personal she is opening herself completely to the listener and musically she matches it with her most focused songwriting. At points the deeply personal lyrics make it feel like it's just you that she has chosen to share and confide in. Whilst it doesn't reach the same big high points as Tramp, Are We There still makes for an engrossing journey with one of the best singer songwriters around right now.

Album Review:The Horrors – Luminous

(XL)

First impressions count for a lot, and that's especially true in the music world. The Horror's showed up in skinny black jeans looking like a band that spent too much time listening to Bauhaus. Amongst a wave of hype from outlets like NME, their debut album Strange House won them a host of fans with it's scruffy and dark post punk sound but while it impressed a lot of people it didn't seem like a sound that could sustain them. Then the band took a left field turn releasing the eight minute krautrock epic Sea Within a Sea, a track full of synthesizer rhythms and mesmeric looping drums, from the follow up record Primary Colours and really proved they were not a band to be overlooked. For the album they worked with Geoff Barrow and Chris Cunningham, delving into shoegaze and Jesus & The Mary Chain style noise pop and getting themselves a Mercury Music Prize nomination in the process.

2011's Skying explored new wave and British psychedelia leaning more on the electronics of keyboardist and synthesiser player Tom Cowan and saw the band becoming an ever more approachable act. The Horror's latest album Luminous continues to blend and refine these diverse influences in what might be their most polished and cohesive effort to date.

Chasing Shadows thunders into view after a short ambient passage with the huge sound that bands like The Verve and Ride would create. Anthemic and positive, this is The Horror's taking their sound out into the sunlight. The lyrics, often of relationships seem positive here, vocalist Faris Badwan captures that feeling of early romance as your mind plays out the future ahead of you. And its not just the lyrics that are positive, I See You starts of as the most pop minded track that the horrors have put together. Carried by layered synthesizer arpeggios and a big chorus before switching up to a glorious, hypnotically celebratory refrain of crashing drums and waves of ascending guitars.

Track like So Know You Know and In and Out of Sight are pretty much synth pop carried by the flickering sounds of analog electronics, the latter especially having a darker feel, as the bass and drums provide a danceable groove. Guitarist Joshua Hayward creates some of the most creative sounds I've heard in a while, following the Kevin Shields approach of utilising effects to make the instrument sound as little like a guitar as possible. On Jealous Sun he creates a sound like a string section recreating whale song before a sound like it's ripping itself apart amongst layers of distortion. Whilst Faris Badwan's voice can sometimes get a little lost amongst the noise on Luminous, on Change Your Mind, a song full of sixties pop atmosphere, the singer's gentle, pining croon shines through over a 6/4 drum shuffle. 'Hey, I'm still burning/Would you really walk away form me?' Badwan sings, momentarily bursting that positive bubble that Luminous seems to exist within.

Luminous is full of likeable tracks, none of which really let the album down and stands a s proof of a band that has shaken of it's early image and continue to go from strength to strength. They are one of those rare bands were you can see the indispensable contribution of each member, all of which seem to get an equal chance to shine on what is their most balanced album. It isn't as gritty as their debut or as noisey as Primary Colours, but Luminous is the strongest statement the band have made to date.

Originally posted on figure8magazine.co.uk