The Answer Is In The Beat

Monokle: Rings (Ki Records, 2015)

September 5, 2015 at 5:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Second album from a Russian electronic artist. Less Warp-ish and less James Blake-y than his first album. A few songs have full vocals, and others have manipulated vocal textures, without necessarily having lyrics or song structures. Plenty of acoustic instruments incorporated, sampled, etc. “Rouse” is an atmospheric intro track with an upfront plucked melody and fluttery sonics. “Calypt” is a slow thumping track with depressed sounding vocals and live drums along with the 4/4 thump. “Umbriel” picks up the pace and adds some clippy beats and nice melodies, and some chopped up vocal samples used as musical elements. “Blew” is a dark R&B-ish song which ends up with a thumping, shadowy 4/4 beat. “Backwash” is another shadowy, melodic tech-house track. “Loss” is kind of a crunchy, wobbly downtempo interlude with somewhat explosive, crashing-sounding beats and a constant looped voice that sounds like it’s saying “cone”. “Neon Sign” has a nice crunchy, skippy beat and neat sound design. “Holytin” has a xylophone-ish melody which has a sound that makes you think a download finished or something (you’ll know what I mean when you hear it), and is another decent track with a shuffling, kinda glitchy beat. “Kay” is another short, drifty, clattery, kinda angelic interlude. “Borealis” is another solid, sort of subdued tech-house track. “Radiant Pieces” is a slow, melancholy track with the same vocalist as “Calypt”.

Scissor Now!: Now That’s What I Call Scissor Now! LP (Arbco, 2015)

August 28, 2015 at 8:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Ann Arbor’s best sax-driven prog-punk trio returns with their second full-length album. The album seems slightly more refined and accessible than their debut, with less Ruins-like intensity and maybe a bit more of a dance party vibe. The band’s angular version of “Into the Groove” is titled “Madronna”, condensing Ms. Ciccone’s best song into under 2 minutes, and sounding way more focused than Sonic Youth’s dubby deconstruction of the same song. A few tracks from their stopgap EP Shear Immediacy! make their vinyl debut here, including their “Billie Jean” cover, which actually appears uncredited at the end of the second side, with the groove spinning outward from the middle of the record. Likewise, their Britney Spears cover (whose original name I don’t know, nor do I care) does the same thing on side A. The album also includes the group’s second, slower version of Ann Arbor punk standard “Make Babies or Die Trying”, which takes the song in a much jazzier direction than their more punkish first version… at least until they start screaming the song’s title, with added emphasis on the “OR!!!” Also, similar to the first album’s “Ham Sandwich”, this one has another short song about food, namely “Pizza & Cheese”. Another fun, exciting, crazy LP from one of my absolute favorite local bands.

Ryan Huber: Aleksandr CDr (Inam Records, 2015)

August 28, 2015 at 8:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The newest full-length from the overwhelmingly prolific Ryan Huber contains nearly an hour of slowly creeping, droning pieces with brittle rhythms. A few tracks (such as “Death of Institution”) seem to have somewhat of a minimal techno rhythm before they melt into static and distortion. Others are the opposite, slowly developing clicks and pulses out of the ether. “Tribunal” is a pretty affecting bit of soft dubby pounding beats and moving ambient drone. “False Intuition” is closer to jittery, clicky IDM. “Aleksandr” and “Emerge” both have paranoid, queasy synth melodies. The digital version ends with the death-ambient drone “The Hidden Word”, and the limited CD-r includes that as well as its finale, the thumping, clicking “Parallel Form”. Huber releases tons of music and I haven’t posted about everything on this blog because I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but it’s all worth checking out, he’s constantly refining and updating his sound. This album’s available for free download on Bandcamp but I’m not sure where you can get the limited CDr version with the bonus track.

Slow Meadow: s/t (Hammock Music, 2015)

August 22, 2015 at 8:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Appearing as the first outside artist on post-rock band Hammock’s own label, this is an album of quiet, orchestral, soundtrack-like post-rock/ambient similar to Stars Of The Lid, Eluvium, or Rachel’s. The album is perfectly sad and weepy and exquisitely recorded/produced, and many of the tracks flow together, creating an hour-long suite of sorrow. Lots of swelling strings and echo, and some spooky choral undertones on a few tracks. “Every Mournful Breath” has some withered/fading textures, which add a nice touch. “The Grandeur of a Modest Moment” has some soft, slow, tremor-like beats. Some of this (especially the first few tracks) reminds me of Moby’s incredible ambient album Little Idiot, which barely anyone knows about because it was a bonus disc on import pressings of Animal Rights, his universally derided punk album, but some of his ambient stuff is actually quite astonishing. Anyway, this Slow Meadow CD is seriously lovely, I’m trying to get myself to listen to something other than the Red House Painters vinyl reissues that I just bought, and this is hitting the spot nicely.