The Seven Fields of Aphelion is, indeed, the full performing pseudonym of one of the key members of Black Moth Super Rainbow, and one might imagine that her full solo debut would be something in the vein of the playfully strange (and sometimes very sugary sweet) psychedelic whimsy of that band. But Periphery is something else again, an elegant exercise in sound (along with her own photography featured in the album artwork) that is far more suggestive of documentary soundtracks from the late ’70s and early ’80s, a mix of acoustic and electronic instrumentation to match dreamy images of nature and technology as featured in her photography.
Tracklist:
01. slow subtraction 02. grown 03. pale prophecy 04. wildflower wood 05. cloud forest (the little owl) 06. mountain mary 07. saturation : arrhythmia 08. fever sleep 09. lake feet 10. sunburst chemicals 11. michigan icarus 12. starlight aquatic
While he’ll still carry around the tag of ‘noise musician’ in some quarters, Carlos Giffoni’s recent creative trajectory has seen him venture ever deeper into the realms of more formal and austere minimalist electronic composition. Severance follows on as a natural successor to 2008’s Adult Life, prompting comparisons to the analogue stringency of Mika Vainio and Pan Sonic at their most experimental whilst also doffing a proverbial cap to academic 20th century synthesizer music. The album is broken up by a series of concrète miniatures, the first of these being ‘Severance I’, which commences the disc with a kind of industrial hacking noise, beating away belligerently until the first synthesis track blurts in with an undulating throb: ‘The Hermit’ gathers itself from initial strands of gnarled tonality, eventually introducing sequenced elements that install a rhythmic order. At this point Giffoni enters into a sinister, spiralling soundworld in which starkly malevolent tones hobble around like something from a ’70s synth horror soundtrack before crumbling away and dissolving into a din that sounds rather like V2 bomber drones. So far, so good. Even more rhythmic is ‘Knife’, which sculpts raw noise signals into rudimentary 4/4 beats whilst hypnotic arpeggiating synth patterns lurch around. ‘Shaved Arms’ is more aligned with good, old fashioned drone music and commands a masterful array of buzzing, slowly modulating rasps, sustaining and throbbing with real menace and analogue heft. The last of the long-form pieces, ‘Athens’, might be the most complex and ambitiously constructed of the lot, combining the various techniques demonstrated in the earlier pieces into a visceral finished product. Here, percussive traits combine with pure analogue sound design and harmonically skewed step sequencing, all building up to a punishingly extreme climax that crosses over into all-out noise-spewing dirge. Another indispensable full-length from the No Fun boss. 1. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance I 01:24 2. CARLOS GIFFONI : The Hermit 14:33 3. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance II 00:16 4. CARLOS GIFFONI : Knife 05:03 5. CARLOS GIFFONI : Shaved Arms 10:03 6. CARLOS GIFFONI : Severance III 00:30 7. CARLOS GIFFONI : Athens 14:40
Jaguar Love is an American indie rock band from Portland, Oregon / Seattle, Washington that formed in 2007. Jaguar Love is one of two bands that have sprung out of the 2007 break-up of experimental hardcore band The Blood Brothers (the other being Past Lives, comprising ex-singer Jordan Blilie, ex-drummer Mark Gajadhar, ex-bassist Morgan Henderson, and original Blood Brothers guitarist Devin Welch).
Tracklist:
01. I Started A Fire 02. Polaroids and Red Wine 03. Cherry Soda 04. Don’t Die Alone 05. Up All Night 06. Jaguar Warriors 07. Everything Is Awesome 08. Evaline 09. Sad Parade 10. A Prostitute An Angel 11. Freak Out Bonus Track: 12. Piece of My Heart (Cover)
Frightened Rabbit’s steady ascent is set to rise incrementally with the release of the new album, appetite for which has been whetted by the anthemic ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’ teaser single which gave the band their first Zane Lowe plays and made a unaminous critcal impression at NME, Q, News Of The World, Record Of The Day, CMU Daily. More tellingly they registered strongly in the albums of the decade polls everywhere from blogs to NME and The Skinny.
Metophorically, lead single ‘Swim Until You Can’t See Land’ might have taken up where the band left off (‘Floating In The Forth’), but ‘The Winter Of Mixed Drinks’ showcases a more fully realised sound with a broader pallette, with direct and upbeat songs like (new single, 22nd Feb) ‘Nothing Like You’ and ‘Living In Colour’ jostling for position with intense and brittle epics like ‘Skip The Youth’ and ‘Yes I Would’. Speaking to nme.com at the end of last year, lead singer Scott Hutchison explained ‘We’ve broadened our horizons sonically and it feels like a natural move forward. Most importantly, it’s better than the last one.’ Produced once again by Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios in Connecticut, and engineered by Stuart Hamilton at Castlesound Studios in Scotland, ‘The Winter Of Mixed Drinks’ also boasts stunning string arrangements from labelmate, Teutonic ivory-botherer, Hauschka.
In order to facilitate the new material and flesh out the older tunes live, the band – once upon a time simply Scott alone – have recently expanded to a five piece with the addition of new member Gordon Skene (formerly of Make Model). ‘”We want to do the recordings justice when we play them live,” explains Scott. “Gordon will be playing a bundle of instruments – we just bought a tasty wee mandolin for him to fiddle!” Having toured the UK in November and December as support to Gomez and Modest Mouse (and the USA in September with labelmates The Twilight Sad and We Were Promised Jetpacks), the band have UK headline shows coming up in March.
After months on the road and a climatic sell-out show at the Scala in April 2009, Frightened Rabbit finally called a hiatus to touring, Hutchison decamping to the splendid – and beautiful – isolation afforded by the seaside town of Crail on the Fyfe coastline to write the material that would make up the new album. Perhaps because of this ‘The Winter Of Mixed Drinks’ is populated with nautical references in the same way that Midnight Organ Fight found expression through body metaphors.
Frightened Rabbit saw out 2009 playing to an 80,000-strong crowd at Edinburgh’s Hogmanay celebration and 2010 will be a pivotal year for the band, as Scott acknowledges: “I’ve never been in a positdion of being aware of an audience of any size that was waiting for our music until now. You have to be aware of it or else it’s totally selfish. Pressure sounds like a negative thing but it’s quite positive actually. It feels earned. Everything we have achieved has been earned. It would be disappointing if we didn’t become more popular because that’s got to be the goal for every new record. If it comes I think we are actually ready for it now.’
1:22 | 1. Weapons II 3:02 | 2. Weapons III (Polyphonic Remix) 3:56 | 3. Weapons IV (Nico Muhly Remix) 4:50 | 4. Weapons V 4:50 | 5. Weapons VI (Alias Remix) 6:27 | 6. Weapons VII
In 2008, New York’s Son Lux (a.k.a. Ryan Lott) released his debut LP to a chorus of praise… Much of what gave At War With Walls & Mazes its unique appeal was Lott’s central objective: to create a body of songs that inhabited the pop spectrum whilst ditching binary form (verse-chorus) for something more akin to chant. On record, rhythms and words moved uninhibited around anchoring melodies; live, this freed Lott to reinvent each track during performances, either reorganizing bits solo via piano or arranging the parts for new ensembles and instruments.
In the time since Mazes, Lott has stayed busy composing – among other things – hours of music for dance companies from New York to Paris. But for him, the chant-based concept of the Son Lux debut required further investigation. The Weapons EP is Lott’s self-issued challenge to do just that – to use Mazes standout “Weapons,” whose primary melody haunts various points of that record, as a launch pad for a complete EP of material derived from a single source.
To this end, Lott built three new compositions around the original’s essential kernel and enlisted three trusted collaborators – Anticon artists Alias and Polyphonic, plus Muhly himself – to do the rest. The result is not only six unique reincarnations of “Weapons,” but a fractal work where melody becomes song becomes cycle, with one essence woven throughout.
Giant Drag is a Californian indie rock group, composed of singer/guitarist Annie Hardy and simultaneous drummer/synth-player Micah Calabrese. They have released an EP, Lemona, in 2003 and a debut album, Hearts And Unicorns, which was released in the United States on September 13, 2005, and February 27, 2006 in the UK. Tracklist: 01 Swan Song 02 Stuff to Live For 03 White Baby 04 Heart Carl
try listen watch subpop buy tracklist:
False Jesii Part 2
Half Idiot
Dream Smotherer
Pleasure Race
She Is Science Fiction
Request for Masseuse
Human Upskirt
Lip Ring
Spent
R-Rated Movie
Dominate Yourself
Goodbye (Hair) If 2005’s Shallow was Pissed Jeans coping with moving out of their parents’ homes, and 2007’s Hope for Men their initial reaction to the mechanical lifestyle of a wage-earner, King of Jeans is their formal and uneasy acceptance of adulthood, by way of one hell of a rock record. Working with renowned producer Alex Newport (who holds a Fudge Tunnel pedigree and has worked with such luminaries as At the Drive-In, The Locust and Sepultura), Pissed Jeans have pushed further into the raw, minimal core of heavy rock music with King of Jeans. Masters of the mundane, beasts of the banal, high priests of the humdrum: these four, white, male high school graduates hardly look further than their own appendages for artistic inspiration, content to execute their own brand of brash and heavy punk music in the Joe Carducci-approved standard rock formation of guitar, bass, drums and vocals. From simple minds and simple fabrics comes this King of Jeans. And there can be only one.
tracklist:
1. When I Go
2. Giving Up On Love
3. I Was Unconscious, It Was A Dream
4. It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful
5. There Is No Good Way To Say I Am Leaving You
6. Trophy Room
7. Because We’re Dead
8. Dance Till The Morning Light
9. Sorry About The Doom
10. Come On Youth
11. Apples And Pairs
12. Our Most Brilliant Friends Anyone keeping tabs on London’s antifolk scene over the past few years ought to be familiar with the joyous cacophony that is Slow Club. Having toured their wares relentlessly, Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor have gained a steady following of boys and girls with an ear for a melody and a soft spot for the percussive properties of a chair. Having already whetted our appetites with a string of magnificent singles and last year’s Let’s Fall Back In Love EP, they could have just lumped them together to make an LP to be proud of. But never ones to rest on their laurels, Sheffield’s finest have gone back into the studio to create a whole new bag of folk-pop gems to mix with a few handpicked and re-recorded old favourites, and the results are outstanding. Recorded almost entirely in their hometown, Yeah So was produced by Mike Timm (Pulp, Richard Hawley), and, as with their live set up, Watson provides vocal and guitar duties, Taylor sings and bashes out a rhythm on anything to hand, while friends and fellow musicians help out on everything from backing vocals to glass bottle. ‘When I Go’ gets Yeah So off to a gentle start with a tale of friendships and romantic back-up plans that aims to charm the pants off its audience right from the outset. Couplets like “If we’re both not married by 24 / will you pass me those knee-pads and I’ll get on the floor” play with the assumed romantic connotations of the boy/girl duo (although they are just good friends) and is typical of the mix of wistfulness and humour that Slow Club weave into their music. This sweet-tempered introduction is blown away by the delightfully raucous ‘Giving Up On Love’, the sound of a band enjoying themselves unabashedly, as big, bold and focused as Motown at its peak. Themes of emotional heartache and relationships coming to an end are everywhere on the album. Fortunately, Slow Club have an innate ability to sound positive, so things never get hopelessly bleak. New single ‘It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful’ mixes a wrist-slashing lyric with a deliriously happy racket to create one of the best pop singles of the year so far. Its nagging chorus of “Baby, I know it’s over / don’t tell me / please wait ’til you’re sober” is perhaps the catchiest thing they’ve ever produced, and that really is saying something. The previously released songs that have made it onto Yeah So fit into the grand scheme of things well. ‘Dance ‘Till The Morning Light’, ‘Come On Youth’ and ‘Apples & Pairs’ are given a second airing, while ‘Because We’re Dead’ is a bolt of pop lightning at half-time to let newcomers in on the secret of Slow Club’s history so far. If there’s one minor criticism, it’s that Yeah So sounds oddly like a second album rather than a debut. Slow Club have come a long way over the last few years, and taking so long to produce a full-length album means that the result seems to be conscious of shedding the irritating “twee” tag they’ve been branded with, coming across altogether more mature, restrained and thoughtful. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a shame that the sheer youthful exuberance of ‘Me & You’ and ‘Summer Shakedown’ have been omitted in favour of a more consistent sound. With them, this triumph of an album could have been all the more magnificent.
