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The Rosebuds' fifth full-length was not an easy album to make. While Kelly Crisp and Ivan Howard's marriage had come to an end the duo had decided to continue their music partnership, and the resulting record is no doubt a very personal one. With production help from the dB's' Chris Stamey, Loud Planes Fly Low is highly detailed and nuanced from beginning to end, moving from lush jangling, mid-tempo numbers that shimmer with rich orchestration to stark acoustic-guitar driven brooders to jazzy funky pop reminiscent of Merge labelmate Tracey Thorn and Everything but the Girl. There's certainly catharsis at the heart of these songs, but for the listener, it's absolutely gorgeous. Enjoy this free preview of "Second Bird of Paradise."
Following the sad passing of drummer San Fadyl in 2007, the Ladybug Transistor return with a new set, featuring a few fresh faces and couple of group veterans. As you'll hear in this free download of the album's title track, there's an underlying tinge of melancholy in most of these new tunes, particularly in Gary Olson's baritone croon. Not that Ladybug's earlier music wasn't lacking in maturity before, but they've grown here, and the rich harmonies, jangling guitars and flourishes of swirling organ, horns and strings do more than simply pay tribute to the classic baroque-pop canon; they've added a new chapter.
Free download of "Guessing Game," a great rollicking track off of Patrick Cleandenim's new album, Radio Heartbreak. Cleandenim is a pop-craftsman in the truest sense, his music pulling from a time-tested variety of influences, from the Brill Building era of singer/songwriters to glam rock to Motown, with rich, thoughtful arrangements and a voice that's truly his own. "Guessing Game" is one of the many highlights on the album, which is reviewed in full below. This Week's Featured Downloads Over the course of three albums, Patrick Cleandenim has proven to be a bit of a pop chameleon. The NYC by way of Lawrence, KS songwriter introduced himself in 2007 with his debut album, Baby Comes Home, bringing the influences of Bacharach, soul, lounge and Tin Pan Alley together into a wonderfully swinging, orchestrated confection. Two years later, he threw us a nice leftfield follow-up with Orange Moonbeam Floorshow, Cleandenim eschewing his 12-piece band and wrapping his classic pop influences in an electro sheen. It's not surprising that Radio Heartbreak is another unexpected twist in his growing discography, much of his new record playing out like one of those undiscovered gems from the '70s/early '80s that coulda, shoulda, woulda been AM/FM gold had it not been sitting forgotten in a record label vault. Back with a full band in tow, Cleandenim's musical palette is a time capsule of influences, from driving rockers like "Stone Cold Crazy Love" which coasts along funky stabs of Rhodes piano and fiery guitar riffs (to these ears coming across like a sister song to Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind," and I mean that as a compliment), to the jazzy disco-romp of the title track, which eventually fades out in a light, Stereolab-esque transmission of buzzing synths and static. Throughout Radio Heartbreak, a lush latticework of rock instrumentation and strings perfectly frame Cleandenim's expressive croon, which falls somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Shuggie Otis -- check the soulful Inspiration Information-esque ballad, "Even I." Nothing, however, prepares the listener for the devastatingly gorgeous ninth track, "Satellite," where Cleandenim taps into an almost Roy Orbison kind of sentimentality amidst a restrained backdrop of not much more than piano and brushed drums; the nostalgia is familiar yet all at once his own, delivered with a sincerity that only a handful a modern musicians are able to muster. Next time you hear someone bemoaning "they just don't write 'em like they used to," put on Radio Heartbreak. It's safe to say that Patrick Cleandenim's days of being a best-kept secret are very numbered. -Gerald Hammill
Manchester-based producer Andy Stott delivers his finest album yet in Passed Me By, 33 minutes of gritty, dread-filled electronic doomscapes with creeping beats and a thick, hypnotic ambience that leads to constant over-the-shoulder gazing. Tempos here hover around a slowly creeping 100bpm, owing much to the spatial dynamics and atmospheres of dub, blending it with the noirish technologic hauntology of Shackleton and labelmates Demdike Stare, and the syncopated sampledelica of Actress' Splaszh album. It's a disorienting yet kinetic listening experience, expertly crafted and seriously HEAVY; the bass on this record consumes you like a huge low-end black hole, sucking in everything that gets in its way while pushing small flickers of rhythmic debris out into orbit, with the arrangements turning inside out on themselves. That same bass vortex absorbs sonic influence like 2-step, dubstep, and good old fashioned house, and spits it all back out into crunched-up, sawed-off mutations of themselves; it's that simultaneous sense of alien familiarity that makes this such a compelling, visceral listen. What really drew me in, though, was the subtle sensuality of these tracks; rather than pummeling you with such extreme, stark textures, Stott gives everything ample breathing room and lets his creations swim in a deep, almost aquatic environment. Anyone with even a passing interest in recent electronic music of the kinetic persuasion needs to hear this; it's one of the most important and relevant electronic releases of the year. -Mikey IQ Jones
The long-running collaboration between Raster-Noton founder and digital sound pioneer Carsten Nicolai (a/k/a Alva Noto) and pianist/composer Ryuichi Sakamoto reaches its apex with Summvs, the fifth and allegedly final release by the pair, and without question the finest album from the duo. Sakamoto performs on one of only fifteen pianos in the world tuned to 16th intervals, and there's a higher focus and emphasis on his melodies here. Nicolai, meanwhile, displays the same focus on rhythm within his textural processing that he began with his Anbb project with Blixa Bargeld. The results here are always engrossing and never less than beautiful, as Sakamoto's piano solos overflow with both intense emotion and skilled restraint; Nicolai fleshes out those melodies with skittering percussive pulses and thick swathes of bass, creating epic tone poems that evoke the classicist melodicism of Debussy, the epic urban chill Vangelis' Blade Runner, and even the regal ambient tapestries of Cluster + Eno, often all at once, yet never sounding like anyone but themselves. The Cluster + Eno nod is given further exploration via two evocative cover versions of the trio's "By This River," from Eno's 1977 Before and After Science album, and like that groundbreaking collaboration, this record gives final evidence that Sakamoto and Nikolai have spent the past ten years using their collaboration to not only open new doors, but to explore seldom-tread paths which have bore deeply meaningful, sonically delicious fruits. This is a high-water mark for both parties, and Summvs stands as a beacon in both of their discographies, and as one of the best, most beautiful albums of 2011. Absolute highest recommendation on this one, people. -Mikey IQ Jones
Now available on Other Music Digital. Throughout the last heyday of electronic music (the '90s), some of the edgiest and freshest music coming from the UK included Autechre (the minimalist), Matthew Herbert (the avant-garde), and Amon Tobin (the breakbeat wonder kid). Each of theses artists presented a new take on electronic composition built from an array of samples, found sounds, self-created noises, and a vivid imagination of what their combinations could bring about. With 1997's watershed Bricolage and the following year's excellent Permutation, the Brazilian born, UK-based Tobin would utilize thousands of record samples in creating his spastic, elastic, swirling, and stuttering brand of music -- then known as drum-n-bass. Over the next decade, he'd continue to mature, soon replacing his vast LP collection with live, acoustic and natural sounds, and it all culminated in 2007's surprisingly great The Foley Room. Now with the release of his tenth album (seventh for Ninja Tune), Tobin again steps forward in his study of sound design, ISAM being a collection of textured and melodic pieces completely composed from self-created sounds, which he then manipulated through state-of-the-art software and hardware. Like Hebert, Tobin favors the use of household items like old rocking chairs, light bulbs, springs, tools, etc. The results are great, and while you still hear his trademarked breakbeat inflections, hip-hop informed beat patterns, jazzy interludes and abstract chord structures, the actual sound has been completely re-envisioned. His always-cinematic constructions play more like dramatic film scores here; the use of familiar and natural sound elements never lose their organic origins, even as they are pushed, pulled, shrunken and expanded into an array of atmospheres. It's a compelling concept and honestly, the results are hard to describe. While the first several minutes of ISAM are slightly chaotic, about a third of the way in the album suddenly opens into a wide, spacious place. The sounds are distilled a bit and not jerked around as much, yet it's still almost impossible to grasp what you are actually listening to beyond the melody. It becomes more and more clear that the bass lines are not from a bass, the beats are not from drums, all of the traditional instruments replaced by sculpted sounds. It's a giant leap for Tobin as a producer -- he even sings on two pieces -- while still being a natural progression from all the great places he has taken us before in the past. For those of you that don't know the man, ISAM is an excellent place to start, and if you're already acquainted with this breakbeat boy from Brazil, this is all the reason you need for a re-introduction. Fans of a wide array of labels including Type, Ghost Box, Leaf and Warp will find much to love here. Think Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma minus the 'beats,' meets the Focus Group with some rhythm -- it's psychedelic, atmospheric, driving at times, confrontational, complex, and overall, hauntingly beautiful. -Daniel Givens |
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