Off The Record is based on a "secret acoustic diary" compiled by Bartos during his Kraftwerk days. The composer/producer extraordinaire has rifled through his "musical jottings" to create these new, remarkably fresh-sounding compositions. Dramatic opener 'Atomium' features pulsating bass, stabbing synths and narration from a heavily cybernated tour guide. "Welcome to one of the most emblematic buildings in the world..." announces Bartos, or Professor Hawking, or Twiki from Buck Rogers. Constructed for the Expo '58 World's Fair, Brussels' Atomium symbolises "the rise and fall of the atomic age". Exploring time, travel, landscape and radioactivity using electronic instrumentation and androidy vocals is all very Kraftwerkian, but this is no act of arrested replication. To the remnants of his old group's sounds, Bartos adds a harsher, almost oppressive industrial edge which even threatens to tumble into noise music at around the two-minute mark, when he hurls a bag of swirling, tempestuous fuzzery into the mix. What better way to mark his return?
Dusted's @jkellyfinwriter makes a Pyschic Paramount reference w/r/t Thee Oh Sees LP, so they must be improving: dustedmagazine.com/reviews/7625
— Otis Hart (@spotieotis) April 15, 2013
“Minotaur,” oddly both the album’s first single and its closing track, dips further into late Beatles psychedelia, with its rough vibrations of cello and its vocal counterpoints. “La la la la la la,” Dwyer barks, amid string flourishes and pretty pop fancies, and you can hear the punk past, the propulsive present and the baroque psych experiment all melding stitch-less-ly into one of indie rock’s most idiosyncratic wholes. Lots of bands that record one or more albums per year are just crapping out more of the same. Thee Oh Sees continue to mutate in fascinating ways.
Led by diminutive howler/guitarist J.T. (John Terlesky), the quartet — which didn't change, lineup-wise, save for one drummer change, between its 1987 debut and 1996's Bethlehem — has stayed true to its chosen era, re-creating the down and dirty organ-fueled excitement and atmosphere of '60s punk bands like the Standells and Seeds. Synthesizing convincing originals from standard ingredients, the Sins have been remarkably consistent in their quality control, trying new vintages now and then but keeping stylistic ambition from overtaking them (like the Chesterfield Kings) while steering clear of the sense that they've done it all before (like the Lyres).
Bigger and bolder than their 2010 debut Crooks & Lovers, Mount Kimbie's forthcoming second album Cold Spring Fault Less Youth not only features vocals from King Krule but also from the duo themselves. While this isn't exactly revolutionary, it's a step away from their debut's reliance on pitched and screwed vocal snippets, in favour of fully arranged song structures and a sense of wider ambition. While their debut worked around a post-dubstep framework of scratchy guitars, glitchy beats and air-tight atmospherics, 'Made to Stray,' the first taster from its follow-up released last month, is a much more expansive, airier affair. As the pair explained: 'Two years is a long time. Tastes change, what you want out of your life changes, and so on. Naturally, how we want to sound has changed too.' A further shift away from their debut is represented on 'Blood and Form' – premiered here – which utilises a strangely woozy-sounding, marching-band beat and oddly pitched synth lines opposite a warm vocal to create something welcoming yet oddly alien.
“I focus so much attention on the detail it actually drives me insane sometimes,” Howard explains. “I like to make music people can listen to several times and still find something new, buried in there somewhere. I enjoy complexities and getting immersed in sound so you forget who and where you are. I like to focus on moments in my music instead of alternating sections and formulaic structure. Like having little moments where a massive bass drum swallows up the mix or little pitch/ time slips here and there. I hate anything that sounds too perfect. Biology is massively complex and never perfect. I like that idea and enforce it in my music.”
I said, " Move over fashion plates, front-women, one-chord wonders and just-learned-the-bass-for-my-boyfriend’s-band chicks. Bex Marshall is a real woman of rock, a scorching hot guitar player with a cat’s-tongue of a voice that caresses even as it scrapes a layer of skin away. A Brit with a serious fixation on American roots, gospel, blues and R&B, she’s on fire in this third full-length, picking and sliding and bending the guitar notes until they wreathe around her like a heat mirage.
Her “House of Mercy” kicks things off in a whine of organ, a hip-jutting chink of tambourine. “Let the service begin,” Marshall insinuates, in a dirty whisper, as her tamped down guitar vamps against a bass-y cadence. A choir of gospel belters is on hand, too, ready to throw their hands and voices up at the chorus. Like all blues-people, Marshall talks in metaphors, using a vampire story (“Bite Me”), a fishing tale (“Gone Fishin’”) and a rattlesnake (“Rattlesnake”) as platforms for sexual innuendo. The heat is there anyway, pulsing through the lyrics, permeating Marshall’s playing and singing with a smoky sensuality. Her band is top-notch, too, with Barry Payne (quite possibly the love interest in “Barry’s Song”) bumping a groove on stand-up bass, Crispin Taylor on drum kit and Danny Bran on sizzling auxiliary percussion.
Like many a gifted writer garlanded with lavish acclaim at the outset of their career, Villagers' Conor J O'Brien was wracked with self-doubt when the time came to follow up his Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning debut. The treadmill of two years' touring had all but crushed his creative spirit, and he hated the songs he was writing with a guitar. So he adopted an entirely different approach, re-immersing himself in youthful penchants for electronica, krautrock, funk and jazz-fusion, and creating groove soundscapes as the basis upon which to build new songs.
The results are transformative, and by the sound of it, welcomed by O'Brien's fellow Villagers, whose collective input shapes the songs much more deeply than on Becoming a Jackal. Unlike that album, {Awayland} sounds like a band, one keenly engaged in creating their own musical road as they walk upon it. Whether it's buffing the Bon Iver-esque sheen of "My Lighthouse" with sleek harmonies, or building "The Waves" from its staccato tattoo into a maelstrom of snarling guitar, pulsing synth and sweeping orchestration, these songs fizz with the excitement of creation.
{Awayland} is a treasure trove of an album, brimming with ideas, most of which work and all of which, at the very least, prove that O'Brien is not simply another little-boy-lost lamenting the fact his parents wouldn't pass him the salt, but a songwriter of real note. Of all the lines from this sad, funny, exuberant and brilliant record that I now wish to have tattooed across my face, I think I've settled for this from 'Judgment Call': "we've gotta get the kids before they grow / God forbid they retain their sense of wonder". Consider mine rediscovered.
