"Zombieland" capsule review (warning: spoilers)

Highlight the grey (potential SPOILER) text to view it.

Clichéd zombie movie tropes + clichéd pop cultural tropes + soppy Michael Cera clone + overexposed celebrity actor cameo + zeitgeisterrific nod to currently-hip "indie" subculture + square miles of mugging and self-congratulation = big dull box-ticking overrated dud.

And hey, main character: if you're supposedly neurotic enough to have as many as 32 different rules for not being killed by zombies (that's just me inferring the total from the highest-numbered one) why miss out half of them yet feel the need to repeat other ones three times or more? Welcome to Zombieland, population: half thought-out.

At one point in this film, Bill Murray is asked if he has any career regrets. The smug, predictable, shooting-fish-in-a-barrel, circle-jerk-y answer? Garfield: The Movie. Really? Garfield? Not, say, pastel-tinged Orientalist snoozefest Lost in Translation or execrable sports-meets-product-placement headache Space Jam?

Objectively, Garfield (or its sequel, which Murray was also in, so he can't have hated the experience all that much) may indeed be the worst film Murray's been in. But what sticks in the craw with that line is its fourth-wall-breaking self-satisfaction and achingly safe obviousness, which sum up Zombieland perfectly. The whole film comes off as if the audience has been issued a crib-sheet of received cultural opinions in advance, and when the filmmakers flash up the relevant neon applause sign, we laugh/cry/opinion-form (delete as appropriate) on cue. They might as well have had the whole cast do a synchronised mug-to-camera to emphasis that Witty Banter™ is, in fact, in effect.


Upsides? The gore. There's shitloads of gore, sometimes quite inventive (is "goreography" a word? It is now), sometimes relentlessly horrible, generally pretty entertaining. There's some pretty good comic lines in about 5% of the script, too. If you can ignore the other 95% of the script, the actors and the general smug atmosphere, it's a reasonable gore film.

Since seeing this movie i've found out that the ersatz-Cera (apparently his name is Jesse Eisenberg) is going to be playing Mark Zuckerberg in the upcoming Sorkin-written/Fincher-helmed The Social Network (aka "The Facebook Movie"), so it remains to be seen if he's any better when not working from a script that's basically the equivalent of "The Zombieland Writers became a fan of Bruce Campbell and obvious meta-humour".

#9: The TV Theme Players — "Then and Now" (Big Eye, 2009)

Or: "things i have learned from listening to The TV Theme Players".

— My god but there are a lot of TV shows. This double CD has 110 tracks. And they're pretty much all American shows, the only UK representative being the really crap Skins.

— The Blind Boys of Alabama version of "Way Down in the Hole" is apparently the definitive Wire theme. Which is balls, of course, as everyone knows it's the Tom Waits original.

— Hardly any TV themes are in irregular time signatures. There's Mission:Impossible (5/4), of course, and stalwart Britcop drama The Bill (7/8). And that's literally about the lot. Wasted opportunity, this.

— No kind of treatment could make the theme from Nip/Tuck sound like a decent piece of music. That isn't on this album, i'm just sayin'.

— A lot of shows nowadays don't have proper themes so much as an inoffensive little ambient sound-squiggles (see: Lost, Heroes etc.) This, too, is a waste of potential.

— Ben Butler & Mouse Pad absolutely must cover the theme from Tequila & Bonetti. possibly also Jump Street. It's ok, i've told them already.

— The 80s were truly halcyon TV theme days.

— i've really gotta watch Twin Peaks soon.

— i do not find the theme from ER to convey the requisite sense of urgency, being far too relaxed for this purpose. In hospital terms, i think it would be a much more convincing soundtrack for somewhere like the Ear, Nose and Throat department.

— The TV Theme Players are likely a group of highly competent session musicians capable of convincingly switching between myriad styles and instruments with ease. However, the reason i say "likely" is because there's no clue anywhere on the internet who's responsible or why. Their last.fm page has no comments and no bio. In the absence of any sort of personality or obvious motive to the group whatsoever, what we're left with is the '00s equivalent of those weird Top of the Pops albums they had in the '60s where groups of session musos would perform ten Top 40 covers — mostly quite passable, sometimes incomprehensibly awful — to skirt licensing regulations.

Considering the potential audience for this creeps me out a little. Who is it aimed at? Prankster radio stations with archive space to fill? People who think TV shows are just a waste of 40 minutes between the cool music bits? The sort of people that listen to anime soundtracks, or consider Jonathan Larson their favourite composer?

At times the atmosphere is uncomfortably close to being stuck in an office Christmas party in Purgatory. The instrumental themes tend to fare better than, for instance, the Tesco No Frills version of Happy Days, which is like being badgered by a hyperactive Butlin's redcoat while trying to eat a cooked breakfast in peace. The most wretched of the lot are the themes which are actual songs: Jane's Addiction's horrible Entourage theme was bad enough to start with, and an anonymous cover of a bastardised excerpt, as here, only adds a sheen of gloss-eyed vacancy to the usual cock-rock bluster. Gruesome. Likewise, South Park illustrates the folly of trying to sound like Primus,¹ and Massive Attack's "Teardrop" gains nothing by being oversimplified and renamed "House". And let us never speak of "Jackass" (a.k.a. a horrible bowdlerising of the Minutemen's "Corona", but with all the "Corona" removed). If anything, the themes-that-are-bona-fide-songs mainly serve to reinforce the earlier point that good TV theme composition is a rarefied art, to be increasingly valued over the lamer and more prevalent options of licensing some generically hip alt.rock or setting a synth to AutoBloop.

— Jack White of The White Stripes shows up to do backing vocals on the Friends theme.²

— By the 85th consecutive theme i have started to feel as if someone has injected my entire face with Lidocaine. Only another 25 to go...

— The L.A. Law theme sounds like Christopher Cross playing "The Little Drummer Boy".

Highlights: Six Feet Under (wonderful theme in general; includes inventive rendering of the discordant modern classical mid-section vamp); Quantum Leap (which i've always felt to be quite a mediocre theme); Justice League Unlimited (too much metal for one hand); Dragonball Z (session-muso metal is just too hilarious); The Cosby Show and any of its jazzy cod-new-Jack-swingin' 80s contemporaries, against all odds (just unashamedly joyous and daft); Twin Peaks (atmospheric); Prison Break (rare class for a modern theme); Quincy M.E. (parping, clownish); New York Undercover (sounds like an MJ Dangerous outtake); Magnum PI (even, say, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain would have trouble fucking up a tune that good); Young Indiana Jones (a class rendition of Laurence Rosenthal's Boingo-esque theme); Boston Legal (just because i'm pretty sure the original did not feature someone imitating a guitar solo by going "wow waow waaooowww....").

Lowlights: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (no version of this will ever escape lame-o student-disco ironyland); "Woke Up This Morning" from The Sopranos (it was a terrible song to start with, this is just a straight cover. How have Alabama 3 managed to wangle the role of "the Gomez it's ok to like" anyway?); One Tree Hill (shockingly bland college rock crap); Walker, Texas Ranger (widdle widdle widdle); Murder, She Wrote (generally pretty good, but reorchestrating out the flatulent quacking trombone sections is total desecration); Baywatch (always was fucking awful, with its sand-in-the-joints phallic sax breaks farting all over everything, but this version is egregiously bad. it actually sounds like MIDI programming); the aforementioned Heroes (good effort, though); Chappelle's Show (funny for the first thirty seconds, excruciating for the next five lots of thirty seconds); Flintstones (wailing lead/synth revisionism).

mp3: TV Theme Players – "Prison Break"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Justice League Unlimited"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Six Feet Under"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Young Indiana Jones"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Tequila & Bonetti"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Twin Peaks"

¹ Even if you are Primus. No, especially if you are Primus.
² Not really.

Spodify advert reviews pt. 1

Who/what: Amy McDonald

The gist of it? "Hi, youu can broowshe throoough maaa baack cataloogue on Shhpodifyyy..."
Net result? Sounds like it was recorded onto a tape Walkman pissed after falling out of a Yates' Wine Lodge.

Who/what: Frankmusik

Gist? "Boom, ka-BAPhi, i'm-boomboom bap Frankchkkachkkamusik. I'm boom-ba-KA!doing that boof chk-chkreally annoyingticktick ba-ba-ba beatboxing-and-speaking-widdly-BOOM-chk-chkBOOM-bababa-duggadugga...AT-THE-SAME-TIME thing that boomBOOMboom Rahzel's been doing since der-der-derrrr before we were all spunk. Chkka-chkka-chkka."

Result? Like someone dug up Les Rhythmes Digitales and gave him an even stupider name and worse music and made him spew his Urban Tourette's™ all over my fucking playlist every half an hour. Wank.

Who/what: Little Boots
The gist of it? "Hi, ...Spodify." Followed by her music.
Result? You hear Little Boots' music and wish you hadn't.

Who/what: Mika
The gist of it? Promoting his new single
Result? Twofold. Initially there's dismay that Mika is still out there making music. This is then tempered by a kind of nauseated amusement at the way his new song simultaneously rips off Jason Donovan's "Too Many Broken Hearts", "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle, Kiss, Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer", The Darkness and about eight other really bad songs.

Who/what: "The Spotify answerphone"
The gist of it? Britain's Got Opinions (whether it deserves them or not)
Result? "Hi there... errrr.... Spotify's like amazing like, but the only fing that'd make it better is, ummm, y'know, if you could like, save the music, like, onto your EmPeeFree playa like, yeah?"

i can't even write suitably sarcastic commentary about how dumb that sentence is.<sup>1

1</sup> Yes, it's obviously a paraphrase. But the meaning is consistent with that of the original.

#8: Led Bib — "Sensible Shoes" (Cuneiform, 2009)

Remember that bit in Milos Forman's Amadeus where the Emperor dismisses the burgeoning genius Mozart's radical new composition with the words "... too many notes" (aka the best piece of music criticism of all time)? Well Led Bib's Sensible Shoes has fucking thousands of notes, and they're all completely necessary. Sometimes there's so many notes that the London quintet have to play different ones on four instruments at the same time with the speed of a broken fairground waltzer, just to get through them all before the song ends. Truly, this album has notes coming out of its ears.

The result is that Sensible Shoes is great, obviously. It's a hundred miles too good to win the Barclaycard Mercury Prize,¹ but for once in the Mercuries' existence, at least, we have something to thank them for, that being the spread of Led Bib's exuberant skronking glory to a wider range of ears (they were the only nominee not to have a Wikipedia article when the twelve were announced).

There are obviously going to be Zorn/Naked City parallels drawn with their "jazz with a punk aesthetic", but Pete Grogan and Chris Williams' two-pronged alto sax blitzkrieg also alternates satisfyingly with melodic vamps that skilfully display the group's Ornette Coleman influence. Toby McLaren adapts the Fender Rhodes equally well to dusky melodic passages and the frenetic, everyone-in soloing of "Squirrel Carnage"; and as you'd perhaps expect from a group with a drummer as bandleader, the rhythm section is also commendable, going balls-out on "Call Centre Labyrinth", building and just as suddenly dropping clouds of Bitches Brew-esque static/dissonance on "Water Shortage". By nine-minute closer "Zone 4", it's clear that, while a token indie act will scoop the Mercury, it's five thrash-jazz outsiders that have made the most interesting album nominated in '09.

mp3: Led Bib — "Sweet Chilli" (YSI)




¹ i can understand changing the name when they get a new sponsor, but why have they seen fit to drop the word "Music"? Should we be reading something into this?

Cake review: Pip's birthday cake

It occurs to me that i have never written a cake review before. Partly it's because the need for such a thing has never really occurred to me. Mostly though, i'd say, it's because i'm not much of a cake person. i find most cakes incredibly rich, even cheap supermarket ones, probably because that much sweetness in one entity just makes me to start to feel like a post-chocolate-chute Augustus Gloop after about two mouthfuls, but possibly because real cake never lived up to the reality of the ur-cake of cartoons, that perfect condensation of the essence of sweet flavour.

Take Battenberg, for instance, the belladonna of the cake world. It looks incredible, the ultimate cartoon food manna, its day-glo squares laden with the flavour-Nirvana of double-barrelled pink-and-yellowness. Then you bite into it, and your dreams are all ruined by the horrifying emetic almondpaste that is marzipan.

Nevertheless, i agreed to eat this cake because it was Pip's birthday cake, and because she said i should write this review of it. So instead of just cake, i now had cake and effort. Not sure what kind of bizarre reverse psychology is involved in that, but it fooled me anyway — kudos, Pip.

Anyway, the cake was in the form of popular undersea cartoon favourite Spongebob Squarepants, and of all the Spongebob cake pictures i've found on the 'net, it looked most akin to this one, only somehow sort of better. For one thing it was more lifelike (to the extent that this means anything when we're talking about cartoon baked goods), probably thanks to the fact that Spongebob was posed in this kind of one-legged action stance, as if about to hurl a baseball or administer a savage beating to a cakey opponent.

(Bonus round: StonedBob; PancakeBob; PointillistBob; AmputeeBob; ShowtunesBob; DementedBob; WarholBob; FuckingCreepyBob; WherethefuckismynoseBob; EforEffortBob.¹)

i ate it while enjoying the start of Anthony Gormley's latest artwork, One & Other, wherein 2400 people spend a total of 100 days on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, noting the sense of mild irony in solitude atop a public monument being about the furthest atmosphere from that of a typical birthday party; including this one, its time divided between garden and densely-packed garage, its occupants' conversational streams weaving and buzzing in and out of each other in all directions. The cake was pretty good, actually, for a non-cake person. It was perhaps a little squashed, but for that i've no-one to blame but myself, and it didn't hurt the cake too much. Inside it was composed of a time-honoured jam and cream combination between two sponge sections (a Victoria Spongebob, if you will)². My portion came from the section surrounding, and partly including, Bob's grinning mouth, so i also gained a good chunk of icing for variety. Overall, this was an excellent piece of birthday cake, amply filling its twin roles of pudding and celebration, and even for one without the infamous "sweet tooth", it is nonetheless always heartening to mark the passing of another year of a friend's company with such delicious and comical foodstuff.

Now for some cake-related music.
mp3: Fire Party – "Cake" (YSI)
mp3: Young Marble Giants – "Cakewalking" (YSI)
mp3: Melt-Banana – "Creeps in a White Cake" (YSI)

¹ Photo credits to original uploaders.
² Sorry.

#7: Monkey Power Trio — "Lest We Be Misunderstook" (Monkey Power Trio, 2007)

Usually i hate bands with animal-featuring names. Whether it's for the smart-arse wackiness of Horse the Band and their ilk¹ or the total dearth of imagination (musical and general) usually signified by animal-naming ("Rob, we're called Sonic Death Monkey… If Laura and her bourgeois lawyer friends can't handle it, fuck them. Let 'em riot." Yeeeaahhhh.) or the fact that seemingly every other indie hipster darling of the last few years is called something Bear. Grizzly Bear, Minus the Bear, Panda Bear — ok enough bears now thanks.²

So it seems highly unlikely that a band called Monkey Power Trio would dodge that bullet, but dodge it they do, mostly by virtue of the comfortable slacker Zen and slight sense of wrongness they exude — for a start, there's five of them (of course). They never play live, and only assemble one day every year "to create works of inspired genius" — i.e. brainstorming and recording a complete new set of songs that are given away on their web page as well as in limited physical runs.

Lest We Be Misunderstook documents their 2007 meeting, the thirteenth of the band's "career". Of the experience, they write:

"There was time in their annual musical exploration to stop and taste the earthly delights of J. Alfred Prufrock's juicy peach, but there was also time to study world religions, from Buddha to the Bible, through hard rock melody and harmony. And, going even deeper into their shallow understanding of life, the band stands on the edge of Toccoa's cliffs and blinks into the fathomless abyss of mythical monsterhood.

In the end, the needle is stuck in a crackling groove, and our unused nurdles end up swirling in the Pacific gyre right along with our thoughtlessly used-up polymer shopping bags, neither floating nor sinking, breaking down in sunlight, swirling into the marine soup, and entering the food chain."

What this means i have no idea, but it gives you a convincing taste of their appealingly ridiculous schtick. The four songs on LWBM recall the likes of Presidents of the USA, Sebadoh, Camper Van Beethoven and other 90s grunge/alt. antiheroes, both in the shambling guitar chug and daft humour. So supremely laid-back lead track "Hit It with a Bible" proclaims "Satan is my rival / Evil's my Kn-ivel³ /rock'n'roll revival / humanity's survival", but the band slyly undermine the high drama of the lyrics by delivering them as if heavily tranquilised. It sounds like it'd be appropriate listening on awakening in a clearing in the woods near a lake on a sunlit spring morning — perhaps unsurprising, given that it was all conceived and recorded in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Georgia. "Slow, fast, whatever — when you speed up, we'll speed up. Let's go" says one of the group at the start of "Juicy Peaches", neatly summing up the easy-going ethos.

Of the other songs, "Kraken" adds falsetto backing vocals to the jovial menace of a less arsed Shellac, while closer "Buddha Sings" sounds like it borrows from the teachings of the Enlightened One himself ("in the dark night, make your own road / perfection is deadly / in the richness of black pain you will find your own home"), only to back them with an incongruous upbeat country-rock jaunt.

This isn't music that's likely to change anyone's life, but it's not like they mean it to. Rather, MPT's importance lies merely in the fact that they exist, impelled by nothing more than the desire to make daft music for their own amusement once every year, and maybe catch a couple of listeners along the way too. It's a refreshingly modest ambition amidst the din of everyday self-promotion.

Happily, the whole thing is available for free listen/download!

mp3: "Hit It with a Bible"
mp3: "Juicy Peaches"
mp3: "Kraken"
mp3: "Buddha Sings"

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Part of an over-amibitious ongoing series wherein i attempt to review every new (to me) record i hear this year (or until i regret this decision or am overwhelmed by circumstance). See also: Philip Jeck; Magic Lantern; Bălănescu Quartet; Rainbosws; Zan-zan-zawa-veia; Wavves.

¹ In case someone confuses them with horse the animal, yeh? Oh wait, no, cuz that'd never actually happen.
² Wandering Bear is the exception because of the dope CYE reference. OK?
³ Pronounced to rhyme with "Bible", natch.

#6: Wavves – "Wavves" (Fuck It Tapes/Woodsist, 2008)

Wavves is a Californian noise-pop group consisting mainly of San Diegan Nathan Williams and completed by Ryan Ulsh when playing live (i'm not sure whether you pronounce that "waves", or to rhyme with "Chavez"). Apart from having a fucking dope taste in hip-hop (a topic which he seems to blog about more than i do these days, rather embarrassingly), Williams is most commonly to be found on the internet, getting compared to a cross between punk rock and The Beach Boys by legions of moist-undergarmented indie hacks.

You can kinda see where that description comes from, though it isn't going to survive the first 20-odd lazy journalistic iterations and, more to the point, it leaves a lot out. Personally i can't even find that much Brian Wilson (or really any surf) on Wavves, save for the surf-y titles and Williams' fondness for high-pitched woo-ooh harmonies.¹ (Apparently they do like to sing about the beach, but i cannot verify this suggestion because of what seems like the sixteen different distortion pedals smothering my chance of hearing any of the words.)

The self-titled track and "Lover" best illustrate the Beach Boys/punk element, their coruscating guitars and frantic garage-rock drumming carrying swooning rushes of scuzzy melody. But on their (i'll call them "they" for the sake of argument) self-titled debut — first self-released on cassette, then reissued on vinyl by BK psyche-heads Woodsist — Wavves also mine a seam of classic noise-pop that includes the likes of Sebadoh, the Mary Chain and early-90s Sonic Yoof.

Photo by Robbie Butler; excerpted from Nathan Williams' blog @ here

Thus, "Space Raider" sounds like someone sweeping up at the end of the day in a factory that makes broken fluorescent strip lights and penny whistles. "Spaced Raider",² meanwhile, could even be a fuzzed-up lo-fi rock descendant of The KLF's seminal Chill Out album, if all the synths had been replaced by tiers of keening, distant guitars. "Vermin" sees the band follow a calmer, more stripped-back garage-rock path a little like the respite offered by "Maps" on the first Yeah Yeah Yeahs record, and allowing Williams's tendency for space-soaked psyche tunes in the vein of Woodsist contemporaries Magic Lantern to shine through. "California Goth" even pleasingly recalls underrated Scouse perennials Clinic.

As mentioned, this lot/this guy/whatever is/are/whatever really tearing up the "blogosphere"³ at the present time (you know you've made it when you've generated your own backlash by Album #2); and while any hype gets more and more disconnected from reality the more people get involved in it, it's still gratifying that Wavves seem to have made it thus far solely by sounding like a pop band playing extremely loudly at the end of a wind tunnel during an air-raid.

You can catch Wavves @ the Paradiso on June 19, 2009, London's Luminere on June 22, or various other European spots on the surrounding days. Judging by how the tour is apparently going so far, it might be a spectacle worth witnessing for more than just their music.

— Originally writ for Amsterdam Event Guide.

¹ The love of a good melody does not count as a similarity with the Beach Boys. A large amount of the world's great musical groups have used good melodies, not because the Beach Boys did it first, but because good melodies are just sort of innately... good.
² Watch those titles, there is tricksy humour afoot. How else to explain "Intro Goth", "California Goth" and "Beach Goth"?
³ God i hate that fucking term.

#5: Zan-zan-zawa-veia – "Mysa Fyce" (Glitch City, 2008)

Zan-zan-zawa-veia have to be one of the most interesting thing i've heard in a while, combining the seemingly incongruous (actually, scratch that – completely incongruous) styles of lo-fi 8-bit/chiptune and progressive rock (oh, and torch songs...) and consequently sounding kind of like if Magma had soundtracked a nightmarish Nintendo game at the end of the 'eighties. But also nothing at all like that.

Right from the lilting waltz of opener "Work Song", Mysa Fyce (still pondering the meaning of that one) is all unpredictable structures, gymnastic time sig changes, and technical lead flourishes that neatly sidestep the fretwanking trap they might garner on a "traditional" prog record by virtue of being completely programmed. It's not only ZZZV's compositional styles that impress, but the command they have of adapting the 8-bit idiom to that style. The full musical colour palette is on show, from rumbling sub-by lows to piercing high trills to full-on drum stomping to the sweet synth opening to "Pink Bows" to ace ornamentals like the tide wash effect on "Hrbr Mstr".

i also like how they seem to have come pre-formed with hints of their own strange mythology, too. On further reflection, the connection between chip music and progressive rock doesn't seem quite as far-fetched when you consider that prog was the music of choice for a lot of the people playing text adventures and programming BASIC from the late seventies on (still doesn't really account for the torch songs, but hey). "Zan-zan-zawa-veia" itself could pass for the name of one of those games, or maybe its hero or the land it was set in. Maybe that's also the reason every track title consists of two four-letter words, the vowels sacrificed for space if needed, reflecting the pre-SMS computing conundrum of how to convey the precise contents of your programming endeavours in a mere eight letter filename.

Anyway, whatever – this record has to be heard to be believed. This is only their/his (Zan-Zan is the sole member, so i suppose "his") debut real-world EP, and from this evidence i think he will end up either singlehandedly creating a whole new style or become one of those artists with a completely unique output that get namedropped by cognoscenti in style mag interviews and largely ignored by everyone else. You should get it (from Glitch City, yep!) before either of those things happen, though.

— Listen to "Work Song"
— Listen to "Pink Bows"

#4: Rainbosws – "Untitled" (Glitch City, 2008)

"Rainbosws produces a minimalistic blend of sound sculpture and ambient music", says his last.fm bio, thereby pretty much negating my whole review. But fuck it, i've already written it now, so i'm going to post it anyway.

"Untitled", from what i can gather the first "proper" Rainbosws release (after his track on the Glitch Village 02 compilation & the "for s" single; certainly the first i've heard anyway) starts with a crackle, becoming an oscillating glitch that gradually swells for the first minute-and-a-half. The longer second movement (there are no track titles, only the numbers 1 to 4) continues the rhythmic crackle and intertwines it with murky subterranean-sounding looping, and the two skip off to make beautiful polyrhythms together before being satisfyingly derailed around the 3:00 mark by the noisy bastard son of a great big '70s glam riff.

"3 (ver. 2)" stays more ominously ambient, preferring to bump its clicking, buzzing and glitching variety of textures gently against each other; its slow-burn tension probably be used to score one of the type of avant-garde horror flicks that seek to gradually unnerve the viewer rather than jolt them with surprises. Closer "4", the longest track on the album at 8:34, effectively pits all the attributes of the other tracks against one another, building loops like sediment layers into a kind of digi-noise equivalent of one of those slag heaps that destroys mining towns, slow, but with unstoppable momentum.

While a relatively short release, "Untitled" is nonetheless a worthy statement of intent. Fans of minimal ambient/noise-type styles could do well worse than to intercept.


— Download "Untitled" from @ Glitch City (.rar format)

#3: Bălănescu Quartet – "Possessed" (Mute, 1992)

On hearing the words "string quartet" and "tribute" in close proximity, the average fan of music would have to be excused for a sudden inexplicable and irresistible Pavlovian urge to destroy their surroundings with fire, such has been the proliferation of crap in this area recently.

Apparently, the responsibility for lumpen note-for-note elevator-muzak string arrangements of such musical genii as Simple Plan, James Blunt, Natasha Bedingfield and Puddle of Mudd lies at the door of one Todd Mark Rubenstein (i hate him already), who can't even muster any better justification for the series beyond "they sold well, so we kept doing them". (i'm reminded of a quote from Malcolm Williamson, late Master of the Queen's Music, regarding Andrew Lloyd-Webber: "[his] music may be everywhere, but so is AIDS.")

But before the string quartet tribute just became shorthand for a way to sell formulaic musical pabulum to dumbass emos while letting them believe they're being in some way cultured, there came Possessed, Romanian violinist and composer Alexander Bălănescu's tribute to Krautrock Übermenschen Kraftwerk.

The quartet, comprising Bălănescu himself, fellow violinist and arranger Clare Connors, violist Bill Hawkes and cellist Caroline Dale, run through five numbers, "The Robots", "The Model" (respectively "Robots" and "Model" here, for some reason), "Autobahn", "Computer Love" and "Pocket Calculator", as well as three of Bălănescu's own compositions and a David Byrne track, "Hanging Upside Down".

The Kraftwerk versions that begin proceedings are masterful: precisely executed, maintaining both the playfulness and wistfulness of the originals and bringing the kind of grandeur you would expect from a world-class string quartet on peak form.

Allmusic's Jason Ankeny's comment that "[g]iven that the precision of the German electronic band's songs bear^[sic] no small resemblance to Baroque classicism, the Bălănescu Quartet needs to do little to make their covers work than to play them straight" is something of a red herring. After all, it's not like Kraftwerk's drum and synthesizer programming, for example, owed a lot to Baroque classicism. Not to mention that Kraftwerk were concerned with ideas of man/machine interdynamics in an industrial age which, clearly, the composers of the Baroque period could hardly have foreseen. (Also, i don't really think i've ever heard any Baroque classical piece with the sheer funky drive of any of these, though i'm obviously quite willing to be corrected if Mr. Ankeny's reading this.)

Rather, the Quartet play out their own version of Kraftwerk's human/machine tension in figuring out how to interpret the German group's technological opuses for organic performance. You can hear it in the squeaks and crunches or four-square percussion on "Robots", the cheerful intonation of "I'm the operator with my pocket calculator!" and the subsequent scraping and pinging on "Pocket Calculator", or the simulated engine-revving on "Autobahn" (i wish this could have been the 21-minute version, but i guess there were probably stamina/sanity issues).

After the Kraftwerk set, Bălănescu's own pieces, "Possessed", "Want Me" and "No Time Before Time", take the floor, building up from fragmented lines into irregularly-timed monoliths underpinned variously by producer/drummer Steve Arguelles' percussion and, on "Want Me", topped by the vocals of weirdly-named madrigalistas Miranda Sex Garden. While this triumvirate (especially the stirring "No Time Before Time"), and the filmic and rather jolly David Byrne interpretation that closes the album are engaging, it's the Kraftwerk versions most people will want this for, and for good reason.


— Hear "Computer Love" as part of "February mixtape"

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Tomasz is (still) trying to review every new (to him) record he hears this year (or until he regrets this decision or is overwhelmed by circumstance).
Previous reviews: Magic Lantern, Philip Jeck.

#2: Magic Lantern – "Magic Lantern" (Not Not Fun, 2007/Woodsist, 2008)

Magic Lantern, whose enormous music sounds like it could hail from somewhere between the Nevada desert and a supernova in a distant galaxy but who are actually (and rather incongruously) from Long Beach, California, wear their psyche heritage on their sleeves, right down to the cognoscenti-pleasing Magical Power Mako reference in their MySpazz URL. This, their first, self-titled record, originally came out on the Not Not Fun label on a CD-R limited to a measly 30 copies. Reissued last year on vinyl by Woodsist Records, it's precisely the kind of slow-burning lysergic desert rock i hoped, well, Desert Sessions would sound like before i actually heard them.

Fifteen-minute lead-off track "At the Mountains of Madness" sets the mood and the benchmark, its hypnotic motorik-meets-Motown drum pattern supporting an insistent guitar raga as trippy flute motifs freeform away in the distance. "Vampires in Heat" continues the blitzed atmosphere with a groove so laidback it's hardly going at all, while the riffed-up "Chance Encounter" could be a loose-limbed cousin to Mogwai's Jewish hymnal interpretation "My Father, My King", or even, towards the end, Sleep's legendary Dopesmoker. When a discernible vocal finally appears, on fourth and final track "Gateway", the effect is a little like having Mark Lanegan sing to you while the anaesthesia wears off.

This is a record well worth a listen for those that appreciate either expansive psyche-rock ventures or stuff that tends to garner the "freak folk" label nowadays. Or anyone who's every fantasised about Mark Lanegan on an operating table, obviously.

— Hear "At the Mountains of Madness" as part of "February mixtape"

#1: Philip Jeck – "Sand" (Touch, 2008)

The first in an ongoing series wherein i review every new (to me) record i hear this year (or until i regret this decision or am overwhelmed by circumstance).

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Liverpool sonician Philip Jeck must have developed some kind of sonic alchemical device, judging by what we know about his compositional methods versus the sounds on Sand. Jeck is a kind of plunderphonic turntablist, using a variety of antique and modern turntables (apparently he's got about 200 now) to process sounds lifted from found records into new music.

The result is seven description-defying screeds of echoing, pulsating soundscapery wherein loops of glitches and rhythmic clicking rise and subside while high, ethereal washes take solos like jazz horn breaks and textured drones avalanche in and out behind it all. This is not by any means to suggest that it's some kind of bland wash of sound; "Residue"'s sudden interplay grabs the attention, for instance, and the jarring cut at 4:39 on "Chime Again" has you wondering momentarily if the needle's fallen off the record, before the sound pulls back the focus to reveal a subtler bed of textures underneath. Imagine (sometime Jeck collaborator) Fennesz covering The KLF's Chill Out at incredible volume at the other end of a very long (Mersey?) tunnel, and you still don't come all that close.

How he does all this with turntables and existing records is beyond me, unless, like i say, the turntables are actually a front for some kind of sound-melting consolidation contraption, or the records he's sampling accidentally fell off the back of a lorry and into a timewarp as a job lot in about the year 2274. The reason so many folk in the experimental music-type communities placed Sand so high in their end-of-year lists, however, is more readily apparent.

— Hear "Chime Again" as part of February mixtape