New Album from Liam Singer

Dislocatia is a truly beguiling song cycle that contains multitudes. In Liam Singer’s music, the prosaic and the magical are two sides of the same dusty coin. Produced by Scott Solter, and featuring vocals from Boxharp’s Wendy Allen, Dislocatia is rich in wondrous, resonant details. These fantastical song-stories carry the listener skyward like a clockwork cloud.

It’s rare to find such arresting compositional talent married not only to an innate sense of melody and emotion, but also to a keen sense of texture and atmosphere. Dislocatia manages to merge these elements together and, more importantly, blur any lines that divide them. Liam Singer’s alchemical compositional process transforms the songs into a whole that transcends simple descriptors.

The digital version of the album also includes a wonderful re-working of the Cat Power track ‘Cross Bones Style’.

‘Winter Weeds’

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Kno – Death Is Silent

Better  known for his production work with down south indie Hip-Hop group Cunninlynguists, Death Is Silent is Kno’s debut release, not just entirely produced by himself but also featuring his rhymes. For those who don’t know, Kno has been at the forefront of making Cunninlynguists indie Hip-Hop royalty, a group that has evolved from its early but endearing comedy-rap to A Piece Of Strange, the pinnacle of indie Hip-Hop of the 00′s. A Piece Of Strange was itself in many ways an homage to OutKast of the ATLiens/Aquamini era, less creative and off-the-wall perhaps but nonetheless an album of singular focus, consistent and well-conceived from beginning to end with deep layered production and intelligent MC’ing. Post- A Piece Of Strange, Cunninlynguists dropped three entertaining but inconsistent albums that fail to measure up to their masterpiece, Dirty Acres, an imitation of what came before and largely bereft of artistic evolution, while Strange Journey Volume One & Two were looser than previous work, designed as guest-heavy mixtapes/albums. As such, with Death Is Silent, we are faced with two questions – first, if a renowned beatmaker can double up as a competent MC (most can’t) and secondly can Kno return to the kind of form shown on A Piece Of Strange.

In terms of production, there is little doubt that Death Is Silent is one of 2010′s exceptional releases in Hip-Hop. Most tracks are deep and heavily layered, in a genre more often not determined by minimalism – “If You Cry” boasts strings, trumpets and piano  along with a hazy, ambient backdrop, multiple vocals samples and some bouncing bass, while “Death Is Silent” is something like a funeral dirge, mixing dark doomsday pianos, and again multiple vocal samples, ranging from soul samples, a couple of bars from Andre 3000 and some constant female crying in the background. The effect is that the listener is rarely bored, the beat always interesting and often switching up. Even though every track seems intricate with numerous different elements sonically, Kno does go ‘minimal’  to great effect, particularly on “When I Was Young”,  which contains mainly dominant drums and energetic bass to create an impressive sense of momentum,  while the dark and dirty “Graveyard” features some brilliantly heavy bass and is the album’s nod to more traditional head-moving Hip-Hop. The overall effect is an album that  sonically seems to be meticulously created, impressively free from over-elaboration despite the many elements within, an example of a perfectionist in full flow.

Vocally, its maybe unsurprising that the best verses largely do not come from Kno, but rather from fellow Cunninlynguist Natti. Natti is in his element, his full-on domineering flow well suited to two of the album’s more epic songs – on “If You Cry” he offers an emotive and engaging picture of dealing with emotions and death (“inside you cry, outside you hindu/when my nigga died red eyes no tissues/ex-cons and killers finding shoulders to cling to”), while offering up an amusing slice of nostalgia on “When I Was Young” (“I thought cartoons came through the tv for free/But now that I’m grown I know everything’/'To think back to how strong she had to be’/'Because I was into everything like Vitamin C’).

That is not to say Kno struggles in comparison. Lyrically at least he does the idea of a concept album revolving around death and the morbid justice. “Le Petite Mort” is the best example of his lyrical abilities, the entire track mixing sexual and desolate imagery vividly (‘while I guide your little man in a boat, across the styx river’/'your body quivers beautifully as Jodeci sings the eulogy’). The entire track is a rather stunning allegory for ‘the little death’ (climaxing) and represents one of the strongest concept tracks in the Hip-Hop genre. Similarly, “I Wish I was Dead” shows off his story-telling skills, mixing the violent with the surreal (‘I can feel my blood circulate the whole of my body’/'Cos there is holes in my body, like a blow from a shotty’/'I’m assuming it probably, cos the hospital’s got me’/'I get up off the gurney and I am certainly wobbly…’). “Graveyard” keeps intact the lyrical narrative of the album whilst also offering a bit of a throwback to the days of Cunninlynguists joke/shock-rap (‘She don’t swallow, that claims preposterous/lets just say she has a populous esophagus’) along with Kno’s most confident and entertaining flow on the entire album. Largely, Kno sounds not uninteresting as such, but certainly monotone and flat which isn’t such a problem for the most part thanks to the dark nature of the production and the strength of the guests, but some will find Kno’s delivery rather boring. Adding to this is the overtly serious nature of the album, only really broken by a couple of lighter (“When I Was Young”) and mischievous (“Graveyard”) tracks. Without generalising, a concept album with morbid and dark lyrics, plus matching beats, may not be what some Hip-Hop fans are looking for.

Naturally these are points of personal preference – Death Is Silent cannot be regarded as anything other than one of Hip-Hop’s finest releases in 2010. It’s a considerable return to form for Kno, an album that is a proper sequel in terms of quality to A Piece Of Strange, and represents a rare success in Hip-Hop, a beatmaker’s LP that works well vocally, and a successful concept album.

Kno – Death Is Silent (Bandcamp)

Keith Canisius – This Time It’s Our High

The sounds on This Time It’s Our High have a lot in common with Keith Canisius’ band Rumskib. The heavily-reverbed and spangly guitars, the waves of spacey synths mixed with programmed beats and the captivating female vocals are all in there. But there’s also a bit of a different feel too. Somewhat of an Animal Collective approach to making psychedelic sound collages into swirling pop songs. Add a smattering of global beats and international folk to the mix and you have a unique and curiously entertaining album.

Some tracks employ an abundance of electronic instruments and delicate percussives in compliment with the shimmering guitars. Others use buzzy synths and echoing, schizoid guitar licks looped into psychedelic swirls with multi-layered and patterned vocals similar to Deerhunter and Broken Social Scene. “Gentle Guys” and the title track are well crafted songs that shimmer with heavenly melodies and have a multi-layered and textured edge to them.

The album bogs down in the middle a bit as a couple tracks are layered sound collages that lack a central melody and instead build up with layers of swirling keyboards and fuzzy guitars that morph slowly into a rapturous mix of strident tones with crisp, sometimes vibrant beats. It can be hard on the listener to decipher all that is going on, but if you listen closely, the assortment of effects in play distort the overall sound into something completely different each time you hear it.

Mostly though, Keith Canisius entertains with dynamic, textural sound tapestries that form a bouncy dream world where celestial sounds orbit swirling pop beats. Some even have vocals that sound eerily similar to the multi-tracked, heavenly voices commonly heard on Cocteau Twins records.

This Time It’s Our High is a gauzy mix of distorted guitars, tape loops, hypnotic synth washes, pounding rhythms and shoegazing guitar noise wrapped around short, sharp melodies with atmospheric vocals that has something in common with all of the bands listed as RIYL.

Recommended If You Like (RIYL): Rumskib, Bear In Heaven, Yeasayer, Animal Collective, Deerhunter and Broken Social Scene

Darla Records

The Brute Chorus – How The Caged Bird Sings

The Brute Chorus has interesting lyrical inspirations. Rather than discuss anarchic rebellion, sex, drinking or any other clichéd subjects, they favor Biblical stories, nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Fusing this with a sound of garage, blues and folk, their sophomore LP, How The Caged Bird Sings, has a retro rock feel and some enticing moments. But, at the same time, a lot of it sounds too much alike, and almost all of it feels like merely bonus tracks.

Formed in 2008, the quartet of James Steel, Nick Foots, Dave Ferrett, and Matthew Day cite plenty of classic 60s and 70s bands as influences, including The Animals, CCR, The Fleshtones and The Jam. Add to that the modern touch of The Killers and Sloan and you’ve got an idea of their sound.

One of the best aspects about How The Caged Bird Sings is how well the tracks flow together. While there aren’t segues, it’s an album that seems to drift along as if on a calm river; it’s easy to get lost in it. The opening track, “Lazarus,” is quite epic for such a short duration; there are a lot of dynamical changes and some folkloric production. Its follow-up, the single “Could This Be Love?” has that great danceable Englishness of The Last Shadow Puppets or The Dark Romantics.

“Starlings” has a prophetic quality with the coolness of the vocals, the repetitive lyrics (in a good way) and the interruptions of distorted guitar. The lamentation of “Wife” builds slowly but smoothly, with an upright bass sound and quietness. It’s a case where the space in the music fills in the emotional holes.

Another tale of sorrow comes with “Red Blood,” which is highlighted by glimpses of electric piano and carefully chosen syncopation. Both elements add the essence to the track. “Birdman” is sung like a hybrid of Elvis Presley and Robert Plant. It’s a silly song that, hopefully, isn’t intended to be taken as anything more. Finally, the album closer, “Heaven,” well, closes the album.

While The Brute Chorus creates some interesting sounds with a touch inventiveness, there’s nothing really memorable here. It’s all rather sparse and feels more like demos or a B-side collection. There are many other bands today that approach the same style, but they put a lot more into their music, and so The Brute Chorus falls behind. The band definitely as the potential to release a great album if they focus more on grabbing listener’s attention with melodies and fuller production – let’s hope their third release does that.

Julie Peel releases new Album

Julie Peel’s “Living In A Movie” – first single from “Near The Sun” is out on September 14th. It’s been recorded in Stockholm with Andreas Dahlbäck, (producer and drummer for Anna Ternheim, Nina Kinert and Jona Lee) and Cyrille Catois, famous bass player in the Jazz scene. The Music video for the single was directed by Audrey Culver from MTV, and shot in New York. The album was mixed at Gary Smith’s (producer for The Pixies, Natalie Merchant, Juliana Hatfield…).“Living in a Movie” can be also heard on NBC’s “Mercy” and Life’s Unexpected.

“Near The Sun”, the album will be out on the 21st of Sept.

Vidéo “Living in the Movie” : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4srwq7AbRvk

http://www.myspace.com/juliepeel

Susumu Yokota – Kaleidoscope

You can count on restless electronic producer Susumu Yokota to release an album every year, and you can expect each album to sound distinct from all the others, as well as internally consistent. After making a name for himself with a mix of melodic/ambient and shiny tech/house albums during his early years, Yokota has spent his last five albums hybridizing his melodic/ambient sensibilities with other styles to create lush song-based albums, each rhythmically undergirded by electronic production techniques, but defined by its special organic elements. Through Symbol‘s classical samples, Love or Die‘s elegantly busy piano playing, and Mother‘s demure melancholy, they all strove to transcend the simpler stylings of his earlier work to arrive at something more grand and unique. New album Kaleidoscope breaks this mold, returning to a largely loopy, sample-based approach which eschews the continuity of his recent work for an anything-goes, ambient psychedelia.

I can’t think of a time when a kaleidoscope has kept my attention for longer than a minute or two, so I was relieved to find that Yokota was going for the tripped-out sense of the word instead of the “cute little trinket” sense. What’s happening on the record is an deconstruction and reorganization of Yokota’s different esthetics. Most tracks are based on light and simple loops which advance with metronomic constance. Shards of Yokota’s past – chanting females, slow electronic melodies, elegant piano – float past like zero-gravity debris over the top. It’s a distinctly psychedelic version of ambient music which finds Yokota in trippier territory than he’s ever been in.

This trippiness is refreshing at the track level, but at the album level it’s somewhat discombobulating. The soft pleasantries of lead track “Your Twinkling Eyes” give way to the hazy industrial flavor of “Her Feminineness”, which is followed by the bizarre carnivalia of “9 Petals”. The album then transitions to the beatific “Sprouting Symphony” which dispenses with any weirdness, sounding like it could have come off of Sakura. Then it’s right back to the unusual with “Photosynthesis” and its shapeshifting waves of sound, coming off like a chamber quintet of cosmic didgeridoos wriggling and worming around each other.

The album plays out in a similar fashion over its 70-minute length, each new track a different card up Yokota’s sleeve. His mastery of recording techniques makes each piece vivid and clear, allowing each track to play up its uniqueness. He’s never allowed himself so much range within an album, and it results in an album which is filled with worlds of intriguing sound, but which is a disjointed overall listen. With some different transitions and sequencing, Kaleidoscope might flow together as well as Yokota’s previous albums. As it is, it’s a bold new direction which merges trippy psychedelia and ambience into inventive and bewitching miniatures. While the album-length consistency is gone, the excitement of the unknown is back.

Susumu Yokota

Lo Recordings

New EP from James & Evander

James & Evander Present Sunlight & Circuitry
“Turtle Two”: http://bantermm.com/tracks/JE-TurtleTwo.mp3

After meeting in college in 2005, Oakland based duo James & Evander began making music together in the bedrooms of their apartments. There they discovered a shared love of Moog synthesizers and analog delays and began writing the twee electronica that would make up their first EP. In the time that’s passed, James & Evander have constantly been making music, releasing a full length, starting an ongoing remix series, and now present a new EP: Sunlight and Circuitry.

Sunlight and Circuitry finds James & Evander wrapped inside their synthesizers and drum machines, exploring new territory while continuing to reference their long standing influences (Dntel, The Album Leaf, and Kompakt Records). Much of the EP was written and recorded in their West Oakland basement (dubbed “The Turtle Shell”) where the one corner window let in the sunlight that covered their scattered mess of keyboards, cables, and pedals. The six songs that make up the EP are moody pieces of electronica that can best be described as weedwave, the stonier more introspective cousin of chillwave. Processed and glitched drums drive the songs while melodies bleep and bloop through thick layers of delay. James & Evander attempt to make music that doesn’t say “Hey! Look at me!” but more “Hey, we make music in our basement. Want to check it out?”

James & Evander on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/jamesandevander

The Maple Mountain Sunburst Triolian Orchestra – The Maple Mountain Sunburst Triolian Orchestra

Mostly, The Maple Mountain Sunburst Triolian Orchestra is the creation of composer/multi-instrumentalist Andy McNeil. The Canadian musician creates a huge wall of sound and enlists the help of electronics, percussion and other scheming themes to convey something larger than life. Fortunately, his orchestra’s self-titled album is a fashionable retreat into wondrous tones and experiences. Sounds progress through a conscious wave of meticulous attention to detail and, while the groove is always in focus, McNeil ensures a successful journey.

Initially the album opens with what may seem like an unnecessary introduction about what’s inside – along with a melody that singularly recalls The Beatles – though, when looking further and deeper, there is much more going on. Like any other orchestra, the Maple Mountain Sunburst Triolian Orchestra fills the chambers of their compositions with an uprising of flourishing instrumentation. The narrative on “LookListenFeel” is actually Isabella Rossellini recalling Laura Huxley, reading from the late author’s 1961 book Recipes for Living and Loving, and the song’s plaintive feel gently rushes into the scattered guitar and beats of “The Auctioneer.” Like the rest of the album’s music, different patterns of music come together through what is, ultimately, McNeil’s melting pot of styles. Grafting discovered recordings, instruments that range as far and wide as a marxophone to a dobro, and fitting samples (the latter uses a Bruce Cockburn song, “Lightstorm,” to help paint the image), the culmination is a varied sense of flexibility and flair.

The spoken word testimony on “Where the Coyotes Howl” allows for the music to be equally ominous and, often, pensive. “I don’t know what to think of that,” states a 1953 interview before transitioning into a lonely guitar melody. Sounding like Beck at his most melancholy, the music portrays the characters’ emotions by way of selective placing. It all comes across naturally, and the pairing makes for a solid core. These kind of interesting choices make up the novelty act in McNeil’s music. Although the name hints at some kind of classical leaning, the music leans onto the side of rock and pop more than anything else. Returning to the aforementioned melody off the opener, “A Beautiful Walk in the Country” pulls everything together – including more spoken word – for one of the album’s best progressions. The orchestra can still remain active and even if the name is ambiguous, it’s definitely fitting when listening to the sheer kaleidoscope of sounds.

In the end, the last words optimistically shine through: “As we float toward the rainbow.” For “Boundless Blue,” McNeil looped a passing beat with more spoken word and its seamless ending is the best kind of closure. Rather than looking down, McNeil is poised as he stares forward into, to quote him, “the luminous blue.”

The Winebirds- Seance Hill

The time-honored tradition of rhythmic pop! The Winebirds are winding through much treaded territory on their new album, Seance Hill. This, however, isn’t a bad thing. We can forgive genre replicators if their hearts are in the right place, or if the music is good enough. In this case, The Winebirds make good enough music to make it worth your while.

The arrangement is simple; the band forms around a rhythmically strummed acoustic chord progression, time-keeping percussion, and nondescript bass. Their flare comes from the male/female harmonies, piano riffs, and synth/organ accents. The deciding factor in whether this album is listenable or not? The melody. It all falls directly on the melody’s head, which is always a slippery slope. For Seance Hill, some songs really work thanks to the melody and other songs are largely forgettable due to the lack of melody. The first five songs come out like gangbusters, using melodies that descend or have a slight hitch in them, which gives them the interesting angle this band needs. You all know how singing a line a different way can totally change a song, and on the first few here, all the little patterns they sing work. Then, as the melody gets bland, so does the music, and it all starts sounding like a hippie Americana band jamming out their “good time” but lackluster songs. When the music is backed against the wall like it is, where they get reduced to faceless progressions, it’s hard to maintain steam for an entire album.

“I Obscenity in My Mother’s Milk,” “The Solution,” and “Hit Machine” probably earn the honor of being the best songs, and they start the album in order. It’s not usually my favorite thing to have the best songs front-loaded, but then again, most albums fail to have multiple good songs, so I can’t come down on it too hard. The Winebirds aren’t trailblazing a new genre or anything very mind blowing, they just sunshine their way through an album and a few good songs pop out. It works, if not spectacularly.

Status Reign – American Queen

Status Reign is not your typical rapper, he’s not arrogant, flashy or melodramatic nor is he afraid of telling you the truth. His full length debut Brutally Honest is due April 5th, 2011 and is shaping up to be some of the finest work heard from the state of Minnesota NOT Atmosphere or Doomtree. He’s been getting a ton of positive press recently due to his well received lead single “Tonight” for which two different remixes were done by Ganzobean of Rhymesayers/Project Blowed fame.

Video – Status Reign – American Queen

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