| Aislers
Set
How I Learned to Write Backwards
(Suicide
Squeeze)
After three years of waiting for the follow-up to Aisler's Set's last
album, The Last Match, you won't feel at all ill-used. This is a superb
album with simple bass lines, pretty piano, handclaps, chicken shakers,
and spare, echo-y guitars. Fans from long ago will notice its similarity
to the earlier work on Terrible Things Happen. The songs are more personal
and all but a handful of the songs have the mournfulness of Amy Linton's
earlier semi-solo work.Not that there aren't moments that are relatively
upbeat on the album, notably "Mission Bells",
the biggest candidate for the album's single, but the strength the record
is its quiet cohesiveness. The Aislers Set produces an entire album worth
of quality; something not so easily said about other current bands trying
to get away with the renewed pre-Pet Sounds tradition of albums consisting
of a pop hit surrounded by filler. And the more you listen to How I Learned
to Write Backwards, you'll notice the layers of pop history. Sure, you'll
hear why every other critic has slapped Linton with weighty comparisons
to Phil Spector, but you'll also pick out other pretty pop threads: janglely
surf guitars that seem ripped-off from Surfer Rosa-era
Pixies (in turn, ripped-off from various 60s surf groups),
a VU nod, a Smiths quote, a Supremes-like
line or two. It's all in there. Of course, there is an element that is
unique: Linton's voice. It is wholly her own and I assure you, you will
not tire of hearing it when this album gets the heavy replay it deserves
on your stereo. -SG www.aislersset.com
Boards of Canada
Ge0gaddi
(warp)
Geogaddi is music for pilots flying over mountains. Marcus Eoin
and Michael Sandison have created this kaleidoscope of distorted reality,
a reminder of how music involves sonically traveling while simultaneously
remaining physically still. Hallucinating while looking at clouds listening
to Boards of Canada is sensationally pleasant, bordering on revelatory.
It's an ideal soundtrack to a video game, a reason to be envious of the
character that gets to jump and travel through digital terrain. The album
maps out topography by borrowing samples, at once textural and full of
surprises. This is music evoking fractal images in nature. To be emerged
in this music is mental fusion with nature itself. Completing a complex
task while listening to this album will improve your concentration and
oneness with the world. Geogaddi is ideal for
passport holders ready to travel in their own minds. -MNC
www.boardsofcanada.com |
Sea
and Cake
One Bedroom
(Thrill
Jockey)
This is music best heard in sunshine because it could easily lead to a
brisk walk or perhaps even dancing. This is the sound of Chicago. Not
soul or blues Chicago, but the urban samba of The Sea and Cake, invented
by Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, Eric Claridge, and John McEntire. Sam Prekop's
voice is an angular lullaby for traveling through cityscapes. Mondrian
would have made music like this, at once immediate and in the background
as his primary colored squares and rectangles, as easily as slipping around
the corner of a city block and hearing a phone's dial tone emanating from
the cubicle of a high rise office building window, or the soothing bass
pulsing from a passing car. One Bedroom is as
much a modern luxury engineered by Stereolab as it is traceable to the
post-rock lineage of Tortoise. Indie-rock gone modern,
fused with technology - synth, samples, and loops, with tasteful organic
undercurrents of live drums, guitar, and bass. More complex and produced
than the band's previous releases, a grand evolution in adding layers
and picking up the beat. Sea and Cake reveal its key influential ingredients
by closing with a sincere and un-ironic cover of Sound and
Vision by David Bowie. Post-rock modernity
never sounded this crisp and catchy as it does while lazing in the summer
sun or hustling to work on a busy morning street. -MNC www.theseaandcake.com
Yuki
Prismic
(Sony
Music Japan)
This album contains some pop, some rock, and some roll, but where
exactly is this album going? I couldn't seem to get an idea with all the
permutations of styles on this album. Songs like "Rainbow
Street" which seemed a beat away from a South Asian Dance
floor hit, while songs like "Sayonara Dance"
take me back to the funky jumpy JAM days. Aside from these deviations
of proper Asian Pop expectations, songs like "I U Me Him",
a Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her coached track,
and "End of Shite" pole-vault this album into as new, and as
I see it, fitting rough female guitar rock sound. In Japan that sound
would’t be far from the ranks of Tigers Moth, Kelly's
Duck, & M*A*S*H. Finally, Yuki's solemn
yearning for both the power of sound and silence in "66db"
reminds me of the beauty of the stylistic contradictions in this album's
mixed-up wonderful ways. -AS www.yukiweb.net
Be sure to check
out Yuki's latest album
Commune available only
on import. |
Takagi
Masakatsu
Eating
(Karaoke
Kalk)
I could classify this album to be across between Oval
and Tortoise but being sandwiched between those legends
of our time isn't giving Takagi enough space to breathe. I suggest giving
him some room and time before pigeonholing him because there is a lot
on this album to get your ears around. This album has got a clean mix
of lean lounge/down-tempo modest drums and horns to back it up. Aside
from that, this digital instrumental album does that special thing that
both Oval and Tortoise do to me: propel
my mind forward in to a neo-jazz future while holding my soul captive
in memory inducing analogue samples of children speaking foreign language
in a play ground of my past. -AS homepage.mac.com/utono
Buffalo Daughter
I
(Emperor
Norton)
Voted the best Japanese indie band sans attitude on my charts.
I is Buffalo Daughter's latest album that makes
me want to kick myself for not getting it soon and writing about it earlier!
Almost three years later, and being the only thing released since, then
I am here to push it on you -buy this album! After listening to this album
my admiration with Buffalo Daughter has been bumped up a notch to the
semi-fanatic level. I am still wondering why nobody has really been talking
about them? I've also recently heard their remake of Kraftwerks "Autobahn"
on an obscure Japanese Kraftwerk tribute album and thought
this sounds right. They're not Kraftwerk, but
like Kraftwerk there is something definitely solid if
not completely new about the way these guys make music. -AS www.buffalodaughter.com |
