25.5.10
New Wiley - Electric Boogaloo
Hmmm. Nuff said. This is Wiley's new single is out June 28th on Back Yard Recordings. Directed by Charles Henri Belleville
24.5.10
Metro: Crystal Castles LP review
Track above is Baptism, from the new LP, which rather confusingly is called the same as the first album, Crystal Castles. Here's my review of the new LP which ran in today's Metro. In short, I heart Crystal Castles.
Crystal Castles: Crystal Castles (FOUR STARS)
Fiction
Canadian duo, Crystal Castles’ self-titled 2008 debut LP was a 200 000-selling surprise smash: Alice Glass’ barely-decipherable wailing and Ethan Kath’s mangled 8bit assaults proved thrilling, mysterious and danceable. CC’s second eponymous album, brings metronomic dance rhythms, abrasive rock and rave to Kath’s Gameboy-glitch and Glass’ caterwauling. Celestica’s house beat, smooth vocals and rave euphoria takes a sinister turn with Glass’ distant howling, her screeching reverberates unsettles Baptism’s smiley bleepy-trance, Doe Deer combines violent heavy metal and horror-show vocals, while Empathy’s old school electro hip hop meets dreamy electronica, offers a lull. CC’s cacophonic blues for Generation Sigh (Y), is music to lose yourself (and dance) in and although familiarity slightly dims Glass and Kath’s visceral impact, their cloak of mystery remains tightly drawn.
Metro: Pendulum - Immersion LP Review
Here's my review of Pendulum's third LP Immersion, which ran in today's Metro. The track above, VAult, is from the first LP... The video's hilarious. Enjoy
Pendulum: Immersion (TWO STARS)
Warner
Electronic dance music albums can often feel like a battle between man and machine (as well as dancefloor and living room), and so it is with bedroom d&b producers turned stadium-rock & bass band, Pendulum.
Following two platinum-selling albums, Immersion sees Pendulum’s develop their human side with songs and Rob Swire growing into his mantle as lead singer. Guests vocalists include undisputed king of combining punk rock attitude with dance music energy, The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett, Swedish metallers In Flames and Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson.
However Immersion’s stand-out moments are either instrumental, or feature a sprinkling of vocals: Salt In The Wounds is a punishing fusillade of high frequency, electro bass and titanium beats. It evokes 2005 high point Vault and is testament to Pendulum’s ability to crank out bangers bristling with intensity and bounce, and unite dancefloors and mosh pits as one.
Set Me On Fire is spaghetti-Western tinged dubstep featuring laser blasts, haunting wind instrument and Auto-tune reggae chorus, while The Island Part II’s a cheery, zig-zagging synth jam. Liam Howlett’s turn on the head-banging Immunize roars wildness and charisma, and inadvertently highlights Immersion’s failings.
Swire’s song writing comes across as heavy-handed and earnest, and his delivery fails to match the gusto of Pendulum’s trademark high-octane, pounding production. At 15 tracks and 67 minutes Immersion feels flabby, while moments such as the turbo-charged Crush breaking into an acoustic guitar, singer/songwriter outro, and The Island Part I’s plodding trance and shoe-gazing musings, are confusing.
There’s no doubt Pendulum are masters of forging churning d&b bangers, however as the quartet swings towards songs, their shock and awe subsides.
21.5.10
18.5.10
Metro One To Watch - Die Antwoord
This ran in Metro newspaper last week! Seriously so excited by this record - I stand by the fact that the beats are next level heavy, the rapping is tight and they're unlike anything else out there (novelty/pisstake or not)
ONE TO WATCH
Die Antwoord
At first glance South African rap-rave trio, Die Antwoord, straight outta ‘the Cape Flats’ (low cost, low level housing) seemed a flash in the online-pan: this year their site has clocked 15m hits, and tracks Zef Side and Enter The Ninja are closing in on 4m Youtube views, each. In recent weeks ‘Zef’-rapper Ninja, his Lolita-esque girlfriend Yo Landi Vi$$er and DJ Hi Tek, have signed to Interscope, and performed at Coachella, while District 9-director Neil Blomkamp is shoot their next video.
Not that Die Antwoord (The Answer) need Blomkamp’s help, their hyper-stylized look evoke a South African My Name Is Earl, and the skinny, heavily tattoo-ed Ninja is The Flats answer to Eminem.
Although Die Antwoord seem a spoof, their sound - built around Yo Landi Vi$$er’s bubblegum trance choruses, Ninja’s hyper-English/Afrikaans rap ‘celebrating the fantastically poor’, and Hi Tek’s Hi_NRG booty bass is like nothing you’ve heard before. One thing’s for sure, the deliciously post-modern Die Antwoord won’t feature at the World Cup’s opening ceremony.
Website here
11.5.10
Die Antwoord
Check. It. Out. Afrikaner rap straight outta South Africa. 4m+ Youtube views. Nuff said. More words to follow on this trio, in the form of my One To Watch for Metro, in a few days.
Wot Do U Call It - Bygone Beats/Vintage Rave/Depression House?
Call it bygone beats, retro rave, or vintage house, there's a new trend building in clubland which is mixing up the music of the 1920s/1930s/1940s with electronic music. The biggest example of this is Serbian producer Gramophonedzie's Why Don't You?
Super Berlin-based producer Jesse Rose's Touch My Horn is another example:
And Jem Stone of pioneering breakz label Fingerlickin is behind this Teleparp track, and is missus is responsible for this quite beautiful animation to accompany it too. The biggest label behind this is Brighton's Freshly Squeezed, and in strange twist of fate, I interviewed the guys behind the label for a Mixmag feature on the trend (see below) only to find out that a couple of my sister's mates are working for the label. Small world, especially in the country's first Green constituency *drum roll* Brighton, where my sis lives. Check Freshly Squeezed's Black Cotton/White Mink compilation as an intro to what's gwannin'.
Here's the feature what I did for the March edition of Mixmag on the emerging scene, which looks sets to grow and grow:
BYGONE BEATS
It’s the opening night of Distortion, Copenhagen’s flagship electronic music festival and the wooden floor of a sports hall is a slippery mess thanks to the sweat and spilt drinks of 2000 ravers dancing to Carl Craig’s cosmic funk and M.A.N.D.Y.’s blurry electro.
In a smaller side room a cheeky chap wearing a Trilby, braces and shirt with sleeves rolled up is waltzing frantically with a woman in 1950s Hawaiian livery (short tight skirt, red head scarf and shirt-knotted above the navel). Whoops and hoots go up as a circle forms around the couple while grainy black and white footage of Hollywood pin ups including Marlene Dietrich and Ingrid Bergman, plays on a screen behind the clapping DJ.
The soundtrack here is swing, the breathless dancefloor variant of jazz (120bpm upwards) that emerged in 1930s Depression-Era America, set to electro and d&b. The combination of dance music of yore and today, and guys and girls in period garb dancing in tandem concocts, concocts an atmosphere that’s heady, exhilarating, carefree and just a little bit silly – something you just don’t come across in big-room raves.
Producer/DJ Gramophonedzie’s Why Don’t You, a house record sampling Peggy ‘Fever’ Lee (Positiva/Virgin), is set to bring this jolly spirit to discerning dancefloors and Joe Public. It’s already wowed Ibiza and is a fixture in the laptops of taste-making illuminati including Dennis Ferrer, Carl Cox, Norman Jay, Roger Sanchez and Jesse Rose.
Gramophonedzie (Marko Milicevic) has shaped a club banger fit for daytime radio, by chopping Peggy Lee’s smoky purring tones from her 1942 1m-selling version – a fix up call to a bygone wasteman with no job, greenbacks, prospects or woman - over shaking accordion house. The unlikely fusion of 1940s jazz and 21st century house, works so well, you wonder why it’s not been done before.
Where did the inspiration come from? ‘I’ve been making music for ten years and all my favourite house records, in fact all big house records are sampled - Daft Punk, Armand Van Helden, Chicago house,’ explains the 30 year old from Belgrade.
‘I’m really fond of jazz, blues and swing, so that’s the inspiration behind the record and the fact my girlfriend really, really, really likes the Peggy Lee track, so I had to make it work,’ he laughs. ‘I also wanted to explore something new – these days I’ll listen to 200 house and electro tracks and buy three. Everything sounds the same and is pointless electro or house, it’s not doing anything new.’
Gramophonedzie’s reimagining of retro dance music in a contemporary club context is his personal stand against house masquerading as pop and soundtracking stadium raves: ‘We’re in a different era of dance music now, you go to McDonalds and get a Happy Meal with a toy figure of Bob Sinclair. I don’t see guys like David Guetta or Deadmau5 as house music, they’re pop music,’ says Milicevic. ‘Many house producers stick to big room and festival music, my music comes from clubs and is for clubs.’
This isn’t the first time retro music has been sampled in recent memory: both Jive Bunny’s up tempo rock’n’roll mash ups scored a hat trick of UK No.1’s (1989) and Doop’s eponymous Euro-house meets Charleston also topped Britain’s charts (1994), smack of novelty. More credibly Chicago crew The Greenskeepers developed ‘G swing house’ a few years ago.
The big difference now, is rather than producers simply sampling ye olde sounds, a micro scene dubbed ‘electro swing’ is flourishing in Britain. It seems a logical progression from the recent clubland trend for period dress up nights celebrating the fashion (flappers, pin ups, showgirls and mobsters) and music of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.
The ‘electro swing’ scene is in its infancy, with key nights in London (Polkananny, Raison D’Etre, You Need This, Black Cotton, Lady Luck), DJs (Nick Hollywood, Chris Tofu, El Nino, Lady Kamikaze), bands (The Correspondents, mix up Charleston, cockney, ragga and d&b) making festival appearances (Big Chill, Bestival, Secret Garden) last year and this.
Electro swing’s first landmark moment is the White Mink: Black Cotton compilation featuring electronic artists drawing on vintage music, including esteemed Berlin based house maverick Jesse Rose’s big band-influenced Touch My Horn.
‘Gramaphonedzie’s Why Don’t You’s one of my favourite tracks - it’s putting the fun back into house music and bringing back the energy. The last couple of years have been all about deep dance music, whereas there seems to be a shift towards more musical, and fun dance music, and swing and Charleston are carefree music,’ explains Rose, from St Lucia.
Rose enjoys the challenge of making a dusty sample work on modern dancefloor. ‘This music is on crackly 78s which makes it really hard to sample but at the same time it makes you do something interesting with it and be that much more inventive,’ he explains. ‘It’s easy to sample a disco record – you get the vocal and put a beat under it but with a crackly sample you’ve maybe got to chop it up between the crackles and twist things up.’
Nick Hollywood the DJ and producer who compiled White Mink: Black Cotton over the last year and is busy putting the second edition together wonders if the current popularity of music born between World Wars and in the Great-Depression is because of its resonance with the credit crunch and current hard times.
‘The Wall Street Crash, the two World Wars, and prohibition, parallels the financial turbulence of now and the attitude then was ‘hey let’s just forget all that and have a good old party – it just feels right for our times, and people seem to be connecting with the mixture of hedonism, escapism and glamour.’
Gramophonedzie, however, is in thrall to the unique sonic qualities and aura of jazz swing and blues: ‘These old records have so much soul, the way it was recorded was different – all of the musicians were in the studio with the singer and it would be done in one take and somehow that atmosphere and spirit comes across in the music, and that atmosphere and soul is lacking in new music.’
Gramophonedzie’s Why Don’t You is out now on Positiva/Virgin
White Mink: Black Cotton is out now on Freshly Squeezed
Devlin & Giggs - Shot Music
Two of the hottest UK urban artists of 2010 join forces for Shot Music - I'm really, really excited about Devlin. He's got a bit of early Mike Skinner about him, but he's harder, more real and the social realism/commentary dimension, is what really does it for me. Check Community Outcast, for what I'm talking about.
While I'm here I should probably mention that I was lucky enough to goto the Giggs album playback last Friday which was in the grand surroundings of Good Enough college, and took the form of a school exam. We walked into a hall - like something out of Harry Potter (as Semtex put it) - with papers and pens laid out (and headphones) and proceeded to fill in the exam paper with notes on Giggs LP. Keep an eye out on the LIVE EAST website (soon come) for a short film on the experience, as filmed by LIVE EAST Online editor, Daniel Oniya.
Since we only heard Giggs LP once, I'm going to hold fire on my thoughts. Over all, it's a thumbs up, but could have been harder and grittier. However the LP tracklist hasn't been finished so these thoughts and the album itself may well change.
10.5.10
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