Lone - Galaxy Garden

By Greg Salter

Lone – real name Matt Cutler – has spoken about Galaxy Garden as feeling a little like his first proper album and, if you explore his back catalogue, you can see what he means. Early albums like Everything Is Changing Colour and Lemurian were clearly indebted to hiphop, while later material like the critically acclaimed Emerald Fantasy Tracks from 2010 and last year’s Echolocations EP brought in elements of rave and Chicago house, just as several other UK producers were embracing similar influences. Though this was all strong, consistent material, you felt like this was music that paid tribute to particular eras and genres, like faithful exercises in nostalgia.

On Galaxy Garden, Lone sounds like he has his own voice for the first time. There are still clear elements of rave, house and Detroit techno in there – track titles like ‘Crystal Caverns 1991’ are something of a giveaway – but they’ve been melted down and recast in even more lurid shapes and colours, with bright pop melodies warped in new directions or tacked on at odd angles. Every artist needs to work through their influences, and Cutler has done this at length, emerging in a uniquely ‘Lone’ world that combines dance music’s earthbound beginnings and its intergalactic possibilities.

‘New Colour’ kicks things off with a bright, off-kilter melody over a bed of polyrhythms that obscure the 4/4 beat that Cutler may have spotlighted on previous records. ‘The Animal Pattern’ dresses up the kind of acid Aphex Twin was churning out in his early days, while single and standout ‘Crystal Caverns 1991’ sets a huge rave melody (bound to put a stupid grin on your face) alongside pounding jungle rhythms and the kind of breakdown that immediately gets you thinking of grainy footage of thousands of people dancing in fields.

For the most part, however, Galaxy Garden is more subtle that that – far from consistently conjuring up images of open-air raves, it sounds more claustrophobic and introspective, as if the rave is happening in one person’s head. So you get one of two Machinedrum collaborations, ‘As A Child’, lowering the BPM and twisting the influences into something different, or the dense rhythms and synths of tracks like ‘Raindance’ and ‘Lying In The Reeds’ conjuring up the atmosphere of a thick, otherworldly rainforest. Cutler has talked about his aim to “communicate as much of my imagination to the listener as I possibly can”, and it does feel like these ‘history of dance’ elements are being filtered and amalgamated not for nostalgic purposes, but towards something else.

It’s become a bit of cliché to talk about electronic artists reappropriating dance music genres as a way of reflecting on time, and even mourning (hi Actress, Burial and Hype Williams, for starters) – Cutler is doing something similar perhaps, but seems to be ultimately aiming for a kind lurid futurism that makes him unique. The album creates these weird sonic worlds, half deeply familiar and half alien. As a whole, Galaxy Garden can be a lot to take it an at once – bright, gaudy, retro, experimental – but as final track ‘Spirals’ (a successful combination of Anneka’s pop vocals and Lone’s restless instrumental) plays out, you realise that, for the most part, you’ve been swept up by it all.

Little Boots - Every Night I Say A Prayer

Earlier this week, a few of our writers gave their views on the new Little Boots single and the result was mixed – to our (editorial – ha) ears, ‘Every Night I Say A Prayer’ sounds like one of the year’s better singles – we This Is My Jam’d it yesterday, if that means anything to  you.

‘Every Night I Say A Prayer’ now has a video and, well, if you heard a fair amount of late ’80s/early ’90s Madonna in the song, prepare to see a lot more of Madge’s influence in the video. And to be honest, if Madonna’s going to insist on being so shit at the moment, then Victoria might as well step in and show her how it’s really done. Belly tops, voguing and lyrca below:

Actress - R.I.P.

By Greg Salter

‘R.I.P.’, the opening, title track of Actress’ third album is short and ephemeral, like something from Boards Of Canada’s Geogaddi album drained of all nostalgia and colour. It’s a transient opener, made up of synths and the quiet fuzz of noise that both pulse, and it’s gone before you know it – or at least subsumed by second track ‘Ascending’, which builds on a very similar heartbeat ambience. These tracks very much set the tone for the rest of R.I.P., which develops through repetition, remains resolutely beat-free for the majority of its run time and often mesmerizes you with its attention to the most minute details.

Darren Cunningham’s last album as Actress – Splazsh – was fractured and wide-reaching, taking whole genres as inspiration for particular tracks and stretching and reconstructing them in longer forms. R.I.P. retains that ambition but applies it more broadly – Cunningham has arranged the tracks here into a narrative loosely inspired by Paradise Lost. These pieces of music are generally shorter and feel more unified, while still drawing on influences as varied as minimal techno, Detroit techno, modern classical, IDM and the broad spectrum of UK bass music.

Much of R.I.P. (as you might expect from its title) sounds decayed, mournful and grey – it’s been produced in a way that can make it sound mechanical and slightly damaged.  There are hopeful elements too – strange, pretty melodies buried in the gloom, as they often were on the early Autechre and Boards Of Canada releases. For example, the album’s central track ‘Shadow From Tartarus’ is driven by a grimey, worn beat that sounds like it’s disintegrating, but eerie melodies rise and fall, in and out of the mix. Meanwhile ‘Jardin’ is one of the tracks on the album most indebted to minimal techno, but also incorporates a dainty, improvised melody that picks its way through the distorted, almost featureless backdrop.

The beats become a little more prominent as R.I.P. reaches its latter stages – ‘Caves Of Paradise’ is a highlight, with a clanging pulse that inches towards 2-step while still retaining the 4/4 drive that subtly propels the majority of the album. Muffled voices and a sample of a flute loop in and out. ‘The Lord’s Graffiti’ sounds like a celestial rave confined to the inside of someone’s head. The album finishes on a high, with the muted house thump and twisted vocal of ‘IWAAD’ approaching The Field, with less snow and ice and more fog and haze.

It’s easy to grasp that R.I.P. is a personal album for Cunningham as you listen – from the song titles to their detailed though imperfect production, this is clearly a labour of love, something in which he has absorbed himself. The appeal to the rest of us may well be the distinctive, mediative quality of these pieces of music, their fractured, worn beauty, and the way they convey, wordlessly, the themes of mortality, time and spirituality that Cunningham has obsessed over. Other electronic artists have addressed similar themes recently – Burial’s recent EP seemed half-preoccupied with the physical sounds of vinyl and their emotive qualities, Zomby took on death in his typically unfocused, inventive fashion, while Hype Williams’ last few releases have reflected on mortality through the prism of grime samples, ancient synths and meandering monologues – but none have crafted a captivating, enveloping, unique record quite like Actress.

Hello there. Here at Muso’s Guide we’ve always tried to focus on quality music writing, avoiding the temptation to publish every new track/video/album cover/press shot/hate email that finds its way to our inbox, and remaining – new Robyn albums aside – suspicious of ‘hype’. We publish daily album reviews, plus regular gig reviews, photo sets, features and single roundtables in our ‘Now Playing’ column; we cover pop, rock, ‘indie’, electronica, dance, hiphop and everything in between, and we’re proud of what we do.

We currently have a fantastic team of writers and editors who contribute to and run Muso’s Guide, driven by their passion for music and writing, and we’re looking for people to join us. If you’re interested in contributing, we’ve got a number of ways you can get involved. First off, we’re particularly interested in hearing from budding features writers – we’re looking for people to take on interviews with artists, or writers keen to pitch ideas for a regular column, or just someone who’s looking for a forum where they can reflect, intelligently and thoughtfully, on some of the issues flying around in the pop music landscape. We’re also always looking for new album and gig reviewers – come and join us if you’re interested in getting involved in this side of things too.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, send an email with some samples of your writing to greg [dot] musos [at] gmail [dot] com.

Dawn Richard - Armor On EP

By Greg Salter

Sean Combs’ Diddy Dirty Money emerged at the tail end of 2010 as a bit of a surprise – no one had been expecting Diddy to produce anything of real note for around a decade, let alone a loose concept album that acted as a kind of bridge between R&B of the past and future, treaded a fine balance between egotism and soul-searching in the lyrics, and came laced with some of the finest pop hooks in recent memory. The album was remarkable not only for the way it brought together some of the finest or more interesting MCs of the last few years (Drake and Lil Wayne for starters) but also in that Diddy was flanked by two women whose songwriting and vocal contributions arguably lifted the album way beyond the ruminations of a load of drunk and heartbroken blokes in the club – Kaleena Harper and Dawn Richard inhabited the roles of spurned lovers, eye-rolling exes, and yes, drunk and heartbroken women in a manner that made Beyonce and her ilk seem hopelessly one-dimensional.

Since Diddy Dirty Money was unceremoniously disbanded last year, Dawn Richard has been plotting her next move – 2012 seems like it could be a big year. Armor On, billed as an EP through stretching beyond half an hour in length, is designed as an introduction to her debut solo project – three more full albums will follow this with the first, GoldenHeart, arriving this year – and if the material here is anything to go by, we’re in for some R&B of the same depth, ambition and vision as The-Dream that filters outside influences as creatively as Drake and his team of producers. Richard herself has a vocal timbre that recalls Brandy, though the way these releases have been planned brings to mind Robyn – another woman who had to strike out on her own to fully realise her own vision.

Richard promised to build on the R&B template with Armor On and she’s more than delivered – working alongside producer Druski on all but one of these tracks, Richard has created an album that selects bits and pieces from other genres carefully, rather than grafting dance elements on to the tracks so that they become ugly, charmless things (take note Alexandra Burke and Nicki Minaj in ‘pop mode’). Early highlight ‘Black Lipstick’ works in drum and bass rhythms and off-kilter synths, providing a skittering, unnerving backdrop to Richard’s powerful vocals, which are themselves allowed to bleed into each other beautifully. This could well be R&B re-pilfering from up-and-coming house music producers like Jacques Greene. Meanwhile, lead single ‘Bombs’ hurtles out of the blocks as one of the finest singles of the year so far – Richard sounds at her most confident delivering lines like “Just feed me beats and watch me eat up all y’all” before letting the harmonies take over in the bridge.

Elsewhere, the experimentation continues – an earlier track ‘SMFU’ is remixed with the kind of attention to space, reverb and warped vocal samples last heard on The Weeknd’s tapes, and is then swallowed up by ‘The Battle (Outro)’, where Richard’s vocals are layered and auto-tuned to an emotive climax, a bit like Brandy covering Bon Iver’s ‘The Woods’. Richard has still got her eye on the pop landscape though – ‘Faith’ is clearly indebted to Calvin Harris’ production of Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’, but works a lot harder for its pay-off. The driving 4/4 beat is there from the start, but they build slowly and Richard’s lyrics (“we’ve been deep in the trenches, you never left me”) suggest that some serious shit has been come through. When the track eventually explodes around her “You never lost faith in me” chorus at the third time of asking, she sounds as battle-scarred as she does ecstatic.

‘Faith’ pretty much encapsulates Richard’s appeal and the strengths of Armor On as a whole – she’s clearly operating in a pop/R&B sphere while also complicating these pop songs with little touches, extra depth and a sincerity in her lyrics (much needed, when the rest of the mainstream R&B world seems to have followed Diddy to ‘the club’). Here’s hoping she gets the opportunity to follow through on this project – we’ll be waiting for it.

Death Grips - The Money Store

Ex-Military, Death Grips‘ debut album, found a fair amount of underground acclaim last year, and the hiphop group have already completed a follow-up - The Money Store is being released in a week but it’s available to stream (with around half of its tracks available for download) right now. We’ve got the stream embedded below – from an initial listen, it sounds like Death Grips have retained the ferocious energy and paranoid beats of Ex-Military on The Money Store, while expanding their sound in new directions – the ‘Push It’-esque rhythms of ‘I’ve Seen Footage’ being a case in point.

Chromatics - Kill For Love

By Greg Salter

Everyone likes a narrative, and Chromatics have woven a fair few in and around their music – there’s the shift the band undertook in the mid-00s from unspectacular guitar band to streamlined synth collective with ambition, driven (it would appear) by Johnny Jewel. There’s also the cinematic narratives that have formed the basis for the band’s long-players – 2007’s breakthrough Night Drive loosely gestured towards the idea that it might soundtrack one woman’s post-club, late night car journey, while Kill For Love comes with its own film poster, suggesting that we’re listening to a soundtrack for something here, without ever revealing exactly what that might be. Finally, there’s the narrative of the long-delayed follow-up album finally emerging – fans and critics have been waiting for Kill For Love for years, Jewel has been toiling away, narrowing 36 tracks of music down to the tracklist’s final 17 (he lists “blood, sweat, tears” at the end of a list of instrumentation on his soundcloud page) and the album cover looks not unlike that of another album which emerged triumphantly after a long, torturous gestation period.

In many ways, your appreciation of Chromatics’ new album will depend on how you engage with these narratives – how far you want to herald Kill For Love will depend on how far you enter into the album’s cinematic landscape. The landscape on Kill For Love – and the narrative or storyline within it – is vast but vague, seductive but also kind of cold. Across the album’s first six tracks, these contradictions don’t seem to matter so much – the title-track’s Jesus-And-Mary-Chain-gone-disco turn is a simple stroke of genius, while ‘Lady’ is Ruth Radelet’s best vocal performance, all beautiful detachment over ‘I Feel Love’ beats and the kind of bassline that has been begging for a revival. Then there’s ‘These Streets Will Never Look The Same’, which is the perfect marriage of widescreen ambition, building slowly across 8 divine minutes, with a mournful male vocoder vocal and irresistibly sad hooks. It’s at moments like this that you really believe in Chromatics’ desire to soundtrack the movie in your head.

The trouble is the sheer ambition and imagination that has gone into Kill For Love is also its downside – stretching across an hour and a half, it becomes increasingly dominated by creeping ambient passages, which are beautiful and unsettling when you’re paying attention, but increasingly likely to fade into the background. To be fair, this seems to have been Jewel’s intention – he’s spoken on numerous occasions of his admiration for film soundtracks from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, of the way disco music sounded, to him, like wallpaper. And that’s exactly how Kill For Love sounds: it was, after all, uploaded to soundcloud by Jewel himself in it’s uninterrupted entirety, so it’s presumably intended that we should treat Kill For Love like a film – dim the lights, get comfortable, and get ready to be transported elsewhere for an hour and a half.

But where exactly? Kill For Love is heavy on the atmosphere, the broad strokes, the panoramic ambient passages, the half-mumbled, vague lyrics, but light on details, on characters, on moments you can actually engage with rather than just passively admire as admittedly very beautiful interpretations of Jewel’s beloved influences. It’s a soundtrack to an imaginary film then, much like the work Jewel released as Symmetry at the end of last year, but one that asks you to do much of the imagining, filling in the gaps in the narrative that Chromatics have loosely imagined just enough to inform their own aesthetic but without any actual substance.

To criticise an album for not wholly delivering on its concept is perhaps a little unfair – Chromatics do a far better job at delivering a long form, ambitious album built around retro themes than M83 did on the filler-heavy Hurry Up We’re Dreaming from last year. But then I think about other albums that have embraced a loose concept recently – the Diddy Dirty Money album from last year for instance, or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or even Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded – which were at least fun and engaging as well as ridiculous and completely alien. At times, in contrast, Kill For Love can veer towards self-conscious, stylish music for a particularly icy dinner party. When the pop songs re-emerge towards the back end of the album the atmosphere does thaw again, but you can’t help feeling that Kill For Love is as flawed as it is impressive, and, like a Hollywood movie, makes grand gestures while actually saying very little.

The Invisible - Rispah

The Invisible‘s self-titled debut album was one of 2009′s slow-burners that almost saw them scoop the Mercury Music Prize that year – and now, having collaborated with everyone from Micachu, Jessie Ware and Polar Bear, the trio are on the verge of returning with their second album, Rispah. Below, you can find a typically rich, patient first taste of album in the form of ‘Protection’, while the full LP is coming in the UK and Europe on June 11 on the brilliant Ninja Tune label.

In the words of the band’s Dave Okumu, Rispah is a “love letter to grief”, deeply influenced by the death of his mother during the recording process. Okumu says, ”I couldn’t engage with music for a long period. The moment it returned to me was at my mum’s funeral, which lasted several days. One evening, during the wake, my grandmother Zilpa, my mother’s mum, arrived at our home accompanied by a group of women singing traditional spirituals. They approached my mother’s body and sang over it, dancing around her coffin. It was the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. They transformed the atmosphere with sound and the spirit they brought to it. They were celebrating life and death, grief and hope, all things. This act was allowing everyone present to express themselves. It served as the most potent reminder of everything I believe about music. It’s there for everybody, it’s inclusive and transformative. I’m so glad these voices are stitched through our record.” Listen to and download ‘Protection’ below.

Hot Chip

Hot Chip are gearing up to release In Our Heads on Domino – their first new album since 2010′s excellent One Life Stand. Today, we got the first taste of their new material – ‘Flutes’ has appeared on Youtube with a video that might make you feel a little bit dizzy. ‘Flutes’ is something of a departure from the more immediate pop of One Life Stand - it builds slowly and shifts between sections, more like a dance track than a pop song, while still brimming with positivity. Most importantly, it makes us want to hear more - In Our Heads is out in June.

In a way, it feels like Hot Chip haven’t been away – Joe Goddard’s Gabriel EP contained one of last year’s best songs in its title track, while Goddard was also partly responsible for the rather fine 2 Bears LP from earlier this year. It’s good to have Hot Chip back though – listen to ‘Flutes’ below.

Julia Holter- Ekstasis

By Greg Salter

I have been listening to Julia Holter’s second album Ekstasis for around a month – much longer than I would normally have been listening to a record before writing about it, such is the speed at which this kind of thing moves now. A bit of time is important for Julia Holter’s music I think – these songs have been composed in a slow, exploratory manner, developed and grown over time, out of improvisation, collaboration and experimentation.

In a way this is the exact opposite to something like the restless, short-attention-span-composition of the Grimes album, which is being released in the UK at the same time as Ekstasis. However, a bit of time may be important for you as a listener too – these are certainly well-crafted songs but Holter’s willingness to let the music go where it needs to can cause them to meander out of touching distance, while the insular atmosphere here can exclude you just as easily as it can absorb.

So, I initially found the album difficult to warm to, and though this has changed over time, I can’t say that I’ve been completely won over. But I have continued to listen – Ekstasis is one of the most distinctive-sounding albums released in a long time, built out of what can seem like infinite layers of sound that reference folk, electronica, pop, ambient and drone without ever settling in one place. You find yourself wanting to return to it, even when it never quite gives completely, always keeping you at arm’s length.

Melodies overlap – as on the album’s most ‘pop’ moment, ‘In The Same Room’, where two characters are allowed to converse – or are strung out and then left behind. As a result, the atmospheres veer between retro-futurism (the vocoder on ‘Goddess Eyes II’ is alienating at first, before somehow becoming one of the album’s melodic and affective highpoints) or church-like and meditative (as on the latter part of the clouded Beach House pop of ‘Our Sorrows’). As a fairly succinct way of summarising how these two elements overlap, album opener ‘Marienbad’ combines the two, with Holter layering her voice into a simultaneously unsettling and enchanting robotic choir.

The longer tracks take on similar themes and sounds, though they expand and abstract them – ‘Boy In The Moon’ is pure escapism with Holter’s voice at its most appealing in the wordless melodies, though the “This plane is taking off” lyrics and sci-fi synth flourishes can be a little cloying over eight minutes – it’s not so much a mid-record palette cleanser, as something that makes you long for the return of the more accessible moments. In contrast, ‘Four Gardens’ shows Holter as perfectly adept at reintroducing pop while also giving her experimental tendencies room to breathe – it combines one of the album’s finest melodies with occasion bursts of saxophone and emotive, shifting ambience.

So while Ekstasis can offer plenty in terms of melody, depth of sound and sheer breadth of vision, it also makes itself difficult to warm to completely, drifting off as it does into abstract, ambient passages that can be off-putting rather than expanding and broadening the atmospheres Holter has so carefully constructed. It becomes, then, something you can very easily stand back from, and admire and applaud (you may have read all the breathless reviews already), but up close, Ekstasis is difficult to love, though intriguing to explore. We’ve established that time is important here though – and you sense that Holter has created an album that will continue to demand our time for a long while yet. After all, why can’t an album mystify and delight?