Throughout their career, James Ford and Jas Shaw have proved themselves to be nothing if not versatile. From the subtly swirling psychedelia of Simian, to the various dancefloor shapes they’ve thrown as Simian Mobile Disco.
Jon Hopkins navigates the territory between avant-garde electronic and beat-driven dance music with brilliance. There’s plenty here to make you want to get up and move, but as much to persuade you lie down and let the symphony of textures and timbres open you ears and take you on an inner adventure.
There’s a regular problem with techno albums. The DJ-producers who make them are usually so deeply embedded in club techno that when it comes to making a long-form collection, leaving the dancefloor and showcasing variety, they’re incapable. What, to them, sounds like a sonic adventure, to the rest of us sounds like a series of four-to-the-floor bangers that, after a couple, grows quickly monotonous, however good they’d have sounded at 3am in strobe-strafed Belgian warehouse darkness.
Holland-living Brit Oliver Way, however, has some success evading this particular curse. Way, after all, has form in escaping techno’s straitjacket. He is one half of the Detroit Grand Pubahs, an outfit who’ve shown themselves capable of deadpan humour and tongue-in-cheek outings. His debut solo album, once it gets going, has a similar sense of adventure and relative eclecticism.
At first things don’t look good. After a very promising Damian Lazarus-like, Middle Eastern-flavoured piece, “Dust Storm”, Way settles down into the usual bosh-bosh-bosh of a night out in Belgium. However, after a moody soundtracky thing (“Calling Danny Boy”) with DJ Ben Long, he hits his stride with a juicy selection of electro, Fatboy Slim-style cut-up, the geezer-ish Underworld-like “Lucky Dip”” and “Bad Bwoy Tune”, which is a ringer for The Prodigy’s “Voodoo People”. Going even further out on a limb, “Thorpe Road” struts its ragga’n’sax stuff over the much-used bassline to Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng” (as heard in SL2’s rave monster “Way In My Brain”), and “Stained Glass Shadows” sounds as if it hails from another album altogether, an eight minute, Hammond-laced midnight funk jam created on trad instrumentation. The latter, a number apart, is the album’s stand-out track.
With From The Shadows Oliver Way offers a lesson to his techno peers in stylistic exploration. In doing so, he keeps things interesting and the listeners’ ears tuned in.
Overleaf: Listen to "Dust Storm" by Oliver Way, featuring Jasmin Nolan & Liam Nolan
This Saturday marks Record Shop Day, when Midas-touch music execs turn car-boot staples into gold simply by re-releasing them and charging 30 quid for the pleasure. Normally, the pressing-plant backlog that these needless, gaudy trinkets cause means that new music, typically that put out by innovative artists on small independent labels, gets moved to the back of the queue so that the big fat kids can get their dinner first.
Can you find a more extensive and comprehensive rundown of monthly vinyl releases than theartsdesk on Vinyl? We can’t. But then we would say that. Don’t believe us, though; below we surf punk, techno, film soundtracks, folk, major label boxset retrospectives, avant-garde electronica, pop, R&B and tons more. Dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Belako Render Me Numb, Trivial Violence (Belako)
The last we heard of US duo Daphne & Celeste was 18 years ago, when they made their name with three hits, notably the nursery-rhyme playground chant bitch-offs “U.G.L.Y.” and “Ohh Stick You”. They famously performed under a hail of bottles at Reading Festival in 2000, then disappeared, going on to peripheral film-acting careers. Max Tundra, an alt-tronic artist who is released on vanguard labels such as Warp and Domino, now engineers a comeback for this millennial, tween-pop pairing. On paper, this is a great, original idea. Upon listening, it’s partly successful.
Mostly gone is Daphne & Celeste’s bubbly juvenility, although they still emanate shiny glee and sweet harmonies. Instead, Tundra has created a meta-commentary on pop, conceptually similar to what artists such as Scritti Politti and The Associates were doing at the dawn of the 1980s. The music is modernist electro-pop, then, yet often awkwardly so, perhaps deliberately. Songs such as the one-minute title track, the bright-eyed “Sunny Day” and the pared-back “You and I Alone”, are straightforward and lovely, but elsewhere dense lyrics and production push into odder territory.
Having Daphne & Celeste sing lines such as “You extemporise/We’re too busy getting idolised” on the stompy robot-electro of “Taking Notes”, apparently a commentary on 21st-century media, or meditate on the disappearance of a post-acid house pop star on “Whatever Happened to Yazz?”, is intriguing but doesn’t always work musically. Well, not as catchy pop, anyway. And the subject matter veers from the “vascular component” of plant-life on “Song to a Succulent” to an ace takedown of Ed Sheeran and his ilk on “BB” (“Three chords and a minor key/An exercise in mediocrity”!). On extended listening, it’s a surprisingly complex album.
Like Matthew Herbert’s production of Róisín Murphy's debut solo album, Save the World is often more cerebrally interesting than engaging. I was never in danger of falling in love with it, but at its best it boasts a post-modern novelty that’s both bemusing and fascinating.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "You & I Alone" by Daphne & Celeste
There was a hint of what was to come in Gwenno Saunders’ debut, Y Dydd Olaf. It was, for the most part, a Welsh-language affair, save for the closing track “Amser”, a song sung in Cornish and the album’s dizzying slow dazzle. For her follow-up, Le Kov, Gwenno has chosen to record an entire album in this Brythonic language that has, in recent times, gamely rallied itself from UNESCO-declared death.
Le Kov, then, exists as a document of a living language, albeit one that the majority of listeners will have no working knowledge of. In order to make real sense of the songs, we have to do the reading as well as the listening – we’ve been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and asked to find our way home with a book and a map rather than a Sat Nav app.
This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor
That’s not to say that Le Kov is hard work – far from it. The sonic landscapes that these story songs inhabit are accessible: new, but posessed of a faint familiarity. It all makes sense when one realizes that the translation of the album’s title is “the place of memory”.
This is, in some ways, a more assured album than its predecessor. While there are still shared reference points with the likes of Broadcast and the Soundcarriers, there is also rare sophistication and scope at play. Opener “Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow” (“She Shed a Flood of Tears”) boasts the sort of perfectly picked bass playing and soaring strings that one would expect of a vintage Vannier/Gainsbourg production, while the subtle shifts in “Herdhya” (“Pushing”) posses a delicate, electronic refinement.
The more propulsive moments are equally as impressive. “Eus Keus?” is glorious pop, with chiming, chourused guitars and a joyus refrain, while the melody of “Tir Ha Mor” (“Land And Sea”) positively surges, rising and falling with palpable emotional weight. “Daromres y’n Howl” (“Traffic In The Sun”), which sees Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys joining for vocal duties, is another quirky pop masterpiece: mid-paced, but as far from middle-of-the-road as it’s possible to be.
At a time when we’re headed towards post-Brexit cultural hegemony, Le Kov is a wonderful celebration of a rich and diverse culture. Gwenno carefully frames the unfamiliar and, in doing so, shows us how stories can be told in different tongues, and yet be steeped in a shared language.
@jahshabby
Overleaf: watch the video for "Tir Ha Mor"
Without further ado, let’s cut straight to it. Below theartsdesk on Vinyl offers over 30 records reviewed, running the gamut from Adult Orientated Rock to steel-hard techno via the sweetest, liveliest pop. Dive in!
VINYL OF THE MONTH 1
Zoë Mc Pherson String Figures (SVS)
After two albums of battle anthems for Trump-addled times, raging against the machine with his “Void Pacific Choir”, Moby’s fifteenth long-player is ostensibly a return to his millennial purple patch, when Play conquered the world and was bought by millions. The tune especially touted thus is the single “Motherless Child”, a spiritual standard revisited, but soul singer Raquel Rodriguez, accompanied by Moby rapping, over bass-propelled electro-funk sounds nothing like that old stuff. And so it is with the rest of the album.
This is a good thing, because that would be boring. That period of his career has already been mined by enough imitators, without the originator adding to them. Instead, he takes us on a melancholic journey that seems loosely informed by WB Yeats extraordinary, apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming”. Musically, meanwhile, it’s closer in tone to the haunting “Sleep Alone” from his 2002 album 18, a spooked tune that was written pre-9/11 but contains haunting lines about how “At least we were together/Holding hands/Flying through the sky” amid a desolate ruined city.
This time the ruin is wider, and Everything was Beautiful… has lots of Moby MCing in a whispery, broken voice, firing out lines such as “The darkness closed like a mouth on a wild night/I’ll never be free” (on the gospel/beats epic “The Wild Darkness”), and how, in the face of a “criminal soul”, “criminal silence” and “criminal violence”, “I can’t see, I can’t speak, I can’t walk, I can’t talk/I can see how it’s falling”.
It’s all accompanied by Moby’s trademark brilliance at classically choreographed synths, riven with old soul's penchant for wrenching, reaching harmonics. This occasionally gives the impression of euphoria. Indeed, the massive “Falling Rain and Night” is hopeful and upbeat but, really, as is made clear on blues guitar-laden closer, “A Dark Cloud is Coming”, all is not well. While he remains as accessible as ever, stadium-vast in sonic scope, clearly Moby is vexed in his musically luscious way at “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Mere Anarchy" by Moby
A little over two years ago, The Arts Desk reviewed Hipnotik Tradisi, Black Merlin’s extraordinary first offering for Island of the Gods’ Island Explorer series. The idea is simple. Take an artist, invite them to Bali, let them soak up (and, crucially, record) the sounds, and see what happens when they process the results in a studio setting. As a business model for commercial growth, it’s unlikely to win The Apprentice, but as a clarion call to auteurs, it’s almost irresistible.