Yppah - Eighty One

By Jim Merrett

The soundtrack to your life is probably a playlist of songs that have wormed their way into your subconscious through a process involving repetition, zeitgeist, emotional response, repetition, ubiquity and/or repetition. In this light, the output of – much like the name of – Ninja Tune’s Yppah appears to have been reverse engineered. Most notably on his last joyful effort They Know What Ghost Know, Californian Joe Corrales Jr turned out ditties such as ‘Bobbie Joe Wilson’ that could’ve have been theme tunes for post-Seinfeld sitcoms (thankfully without the slap bass).

Eighty One keeps to the manifesto, delivering the kind of chirpy trills and stirring moments that you would like to be heard in the backdrop should your existence be filmed in front of a braying studio audience. Tied into the April release date maybe, the cover presents a weather front of changeable conditions, the dawn of a new day, warm sunbeams seeping through or rainclouds barging in and dispatching a soaking. The human experience is just as fluid and as a body of work this album instills that sense of irregularity, touching on the stylings of shoegaze and the indulgence of postrock as much as the pointers of electronica.

Intriguingly, it also yields more in the way of human interaction, with the gloopy vocals of Anomie Belle providing us with a spokesperson for the surges of beats and melodies. So while some of this album rattles around like The Go Team (the restless ‘Paper Knife’) or even unfashionably like Moby (see ‘R. Mullen’), there are links to Yppah’s contemporaries, the more underground, the likes of the our own bedroom aural alchemist Hiatus and his musings with singer Shura.

Deeply nostalgic from its opening, childish giggles marking its arrival of ‘Blue Schwinn’, a song that gorges on The Campfire Headphase-era Boards of Canada, which proves a key influence throughout (particularly ‘Film Burn’). The musical equivalent of Hipstamatic’s deliberately sepia-tinged revisionist photographs – the album title even nods to the year of its creator’s birth – Eighty One wallows in a partially imaginary past. It is also a lush, glorious, technicolour, lavishly widescreen soundscape, the sort of soundtrack that you can only hope that your life lives up to.

The 2 Bears - Be Strong

By Jim Merrett

A GSOH might be a prerequisite for a lonely-hearts ad, but in the music industry it won’t get you very far. Everyone wants to be taken seriously, so a po-face, skinny jeans and stick-on council estate accent is in, a bear suit is definitely out.

But if there’s one music genre that knows how to have a good time, it’s dance. And of course this arena is not alien to novelty either. No doubt thanks to the availability of cheap drugs, we’ve embraced robots (Daft Punk) and a man with a massive mouse head (deadmau5), now with a typically British low-rent, half-hearted Carry On spirit the 2 Bears lumber into a club near you.

With Hot Chip rumoured to be winding down ahead of their forthcoming album release, and following the stratospheric high of last year’s ‘Gabriel’, we find chunky songsmith Joe Goddard in fine fettle. Here he’s roped in DJ buddy Raf Rundel  (the project was comically to be called the 3 Bears until Metronomy’s Joe Mount pulled out) for a teddy bears’ piss up. Indeed, if there was a club somewhere called “The Woods”, then this pair would not only go out of their way to do their shit in it, they’d slap up posters boasting “If you go down to The Woods today…” (blissful opener ‘Birds And The Bees’ even melts into a music box rendition of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’) the bear-related pun are at times stretched further than a hammock given the task of holding up the two aforementioned bears.

The obvious link between house music and gay culture make their moniker even more fitting, although when the pilled-up duo aren’t indiscriminately putting their paws around anything that moves (the burbling ‘Bear Hug’), they seem to have an eye for the ladies. Be Strong goes a long way to affirm that the giddy beat that kept Hot Chip in line wasn’t just a sideways glance at the dancefloor but came from the heart. And nowhere is Goddard’s day job more obvious (fittingly) than recent single ‘Work’.

But it’s not all paw-on-the-floor (sorry), with a nod to Ian Dury in ‘Time In Mind’ and a ska-tinge to ‘Heart Of The Congos’. And while nothing might touch the celestial ‘Gabriel’, there are moments that come close, notably epic sentiment-crammed closer ‘Church’, which marries Hammond throbs to calypso drums, wind chimes and chirpy gospel for a suitably upbeat – spiritual, even – send off.

This chunk of rave revivalism (ravivalism?) might just be an excuse to get into all those clubs that might not otherwise let them in the door, but it makes for a very likeable album, even once the novelty wears thin. The bears play it well: not too serious, not too camp – just right.

Gold Panda - DJ Kicks

By Jim Merrett

Existing at the polar opposite end of the spectrum to the Now That’s What I Call Music compilation juggernaut, the DJ Kicks series offers a glimpse of a world where singles charts are controlled by a revolving door of non-elected dictators with impeccably well-informed taste in music and not based on the fickle democratic whims of the vast bunch of morons we collectively know of as “the Great British public”. For 15 years, it’s offered the then-serving custodian of the DJ Kicks mantle the opportunity to impose their worldview on listeners.

What began as an exercise in moulding club soundscapes into a format compatible with home listening has evolved along with dance music, hence the brand’s longevity. Now playlist presidency is handed to knob-twiddler de jour Gold Panda, a man propelled to relative fame by one of the stand-out electronica albums of last year, if not one you could actually consider dancing to. His first foray into the realm of the compilation side-project also offers little in the way of movement, beyond nodding, foot-tapping and the odd beard stroke.

Derwin Panda himself admits that he is no DJ, and on the evidence of this he’s no long-term curator either, with most of the 22 tracks on offer here recent enough to suggest they are new acquisitions. They do at least provide an insight into what makes Gold Panda tick, although if this is a aural  mood board for what comes after the joyous Lucky Shiner, expect something a lot less chirpy.

Whether accident or deliberate ploy to beef-up his own output, Mr Panda’s own (previously unreleased) track, opener ‘An Iceberg Hurtled Northward Through Clouds’, is probably the high point of this album. Clearly he’s not familiar with High Fidelity or he would know that one of the golden rules to making a mixtape is not to start by raising the bar so high you can’t later poke it up a notch or two. Still, at least he himself comes out of this looking good.

And no one else comes off particularly badly, but much of the album is so subtle it verges on forgettable. The spongled dubstep of LV & Untold’s ‘Beacon’ is rattled enough to hold its own, while the Untold remix of Ramadanman – himself the author of a superb fairly recent FabricLive volume – is strong, but moments that demand attention are certainly fewer than… I’m sorry, where was I?

This is too often minimal to the point you can see though it, which is a shame.

David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time

By Jim Merrett

It’s probably no surprise to learn that the debut album by David Lynch is cinematic in scope. Better known for his back catalogue of films, this effort isn’t about to change that. But the 65-year-old has dabbled in music before – from the odd score to one of his odd movies to a scattered history of collaborations, more of which appear here. If you’re familiar with the man, you’ll have a rough idea of what this is going to sound like. And largely you’ll be right. Only instead of Kyle MacLachlan, you’ve got Karen O.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer makes a guest appearance in ‘Pinky’s Dream’, this album’s clattering opener, a rhythm beaten out of shattered Chris Isaak surf guitars pointing down an imagined highway, a motif shared by much of Lynch’s body of work. As is the darkness that seeps from the stereo.

And the plot is far from linear, with single ‘Good Day Today’ taking a left turn down a dance beat cul-de-sac, a place long ago visited by Moby’s ‘Go’, itself aping Lynch’s own theme to Twin Peaks.

In that series, Lynch actually cast himself as an FBI agent – a comic turn since his character was completely deaf and spent his screentime shouting. Likewise, our first glimpse of Lynch on this album is not how the polymath creator should sound, instead tucked behind a vocoder.

‘So Glad’ then is Lynch exposed, his slightly reedy Neil Young-like voice pleasing to the ear, somehow holding its own against a backdrop of percussion and soviet chants, Meanwhile, sinister ‘Noah’s Arc’ reciprocates DJ Shadow’s nod to Lynch – the tail-end of Entroducing…. is lifted straight from Twin Peaks – by borrowing his beat.

Elsewhere, woozy blues (‘Football Game’), smoky jazz (‘The Night Bell With Lightning’), toasted trip-hop (‘I Know’), end of the prom Roy Orbison (‘These Are My Friends’), even a Kraftwerk-like groove with a Borg-driven meltdown (‘Strange and Unproductive Thinking’) present a whole that, without the narrative its creator – just by being David Lynch – gives this, would be disjointed. But like everything he’s done, that seems to be the point.

“Lynchian” is the word that has come to describe the man’s skewed viewpoint. Like the best artists, often authors, who have an “ian” stuck on the end of their names (Dickens, Orwell, etc), it describes a geographic place as much as semiotic style, as though you can be a resident of the land of Lynch, just as Argentinians and Bulgarians are of their respective nations.

Lynch deals in other realms attached to our own reality often only by a thread, from the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks and Silencio club of Mulholland Drive (a replica of which now actually exists not in Los Angeles but Paris) to the “Third Place” he explored in, of all things, an advert for the PlayStation 2. This product is no less an exploration of space.

Crazy Clown Time is the soundtrack to a Lynchian movie that scrolls exclusively in your head. It’s a roadtrip built around the car in the same way Burial composes with public transport in mind, as the song suggests a ‘Speed Roadster’ hurtling down Lynch’s own Lost Highway. The rolling road markings, protagonists switching roles, half-caught backwards speaking, possibly out of the mouth of a dwarf – it’s all there. Only this is a film that doesn’t actually exist – the vision between the dots is all yours.

The Field - Looping State Of Mind

By Jim Merrett

Repetition is an effective means of getting across all the nuances of a piece of music – just ask all those Guantanamo detainees for their thoughts on Barney the purple dinosaur. As the album title suggests, Axel Willner’s third effort as The Field turns reoccurring patterns of sound into a weapon used to crack open and then fuck with listeners’ heads.

But where Looping State Of Mind deviates from the US military’s rendition playlist is that after 24 hours’ exposure to any one track over-and-over, rather than break you down, you would still be picking new subtleties out of said sound nugget. That and the fact it doesn’t involve a man in a dinosaur suit.

The theme of repetition runs throughout The Field’s back catalogue – from the off-white “no frills” packaging, with just font colours to differentiate albums, to the particular niche of trance groove that Willner fell into with From Here We Go Sublime and never emerged from. But whether you look at the bigger picture of his body of work or get drawn into any one of the seven tracks on offer here, or even any one of the loops that form any one of those tracks, a quirk of chaos theory kicks in. Each oscillation or wobble produces different results.

And sometimes those results are so surprising you have to wonder if this whole story arch is actually an in-joke. Take ‘It’s Up There’, which inexplicably dissolves into the pulse from the theme tune to Knight Rider (try listening to it now and not thinking of the Hoff). Or the title track, which gloriously supposes that instead of composing the score to The Saint, Orbital re-imagined Labyrinth. Have we been played with? The brash album title suggests yes, as if Willner has nothing to lose by revealing his hand. But then he’s landed some real aces.

What could almost be a companion piece for record label Kompakt’s other big recent release, Walls‘ Coracle, this once again finds density in the sparse use of the lightest components, turning matter into energy. Opener poses the question ‘Is This Power’ – notice there’s no need for a question mark, we know the answer: yes. It’s this very sorcery Four Tet seemed bent on matching with his last album, but what for Hebden was a departure for Willner comes naturally.

A return to source, but with more sauce. To say this is a sonic onion waiting to have its layers peeled off might undersell it, but then every meal tastes better with a subtle flavour of onion.

Walls - Coracle

By Jim Merrett

The cover of Walls‘ Coracle provides a handy visual aid. Much like cLOUDDEAD’s equally extraordinary (if very different) debut, it shows a cloud formation, a nod the ethereal sounds contained by the album format and to the stratospheric heights scaled within.

Last year’s eponymous debut was named electronica album of 2010 by NME journalist retirement home Mojo – which is a bit like scoring the top hybrid car award in Horse & Rider. Despite its brief gestation, the follow up is a vast evolutionary step forward. The only difficulty with this album is when you attempt to shake it out of your head afterwards.

Since last time, the duo have filled out their sound and plotted their craft through new points in the universe, squeezing through a wormhole and simultaneously puncturing shoegaze, Detroit techno, Chicago house and krautrock at the same moment. Think of a singularity where Ride and Fuck Buttons co-exist as one.

Opener ‘Into Our Midsts’ propels tribal percussion and proto-language chants into envelope-pushing contrails. It presents itself as a mission statement for the potential of human evolution, much as the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey gives a monkey a bone. Only where 2001 saw technology as a threat to our species’ celestial destiny, here, people and computers can only make this quantum leap together. A naked skydive into an infinite washing machine drum.

Further on, ‘Sunporch’ twists Sigur Ros into a Balearic dancefloor clusterbomb, warming up for the pounding spin cycle of ‘Il Tedesco’, which in turn gives way to the glistening fortress of solitude that is ‘Vacant’. ‘Raw Umber/Twilight’ rattles like Boom Bip jamming with rainbows, drum machines and wind chimes in a cathedral, while ‘Ecstatic Truth’ channels the Chemical Brothers at their acid-laced  kaleidoscopic peak.

As the band’s name aptly suggests, this isn’t something you can simply walk through. You’ll want to deal with it as an album, not broken up into tracks. Considered as a whole, it exists as an immense immersion tank of sloshing beats, a second womb to be born into.

Like Marxist theory in reverse, Coracle turns melted air into something solid – a tangible structure, the ghostly corridors of which you will find imprinted in your mind long after the album has finished spinning. It’s a house made of sound, with a pan-dimensional autobahn redirected through the conservatory. Come in for a listen and stay for a week.

Shabazz Palaces - Black Up

Now here is a record designed to defy conventions. A Sub Pop release – their first rap record, natch – that sounds like it’s on Warp, or even Anticon. In an age of downloads, a beautifully put-together piece of packaging – velvety black with gold Arabic trimmings – that makes you want to own it as a physical object rather than as an ephemeral essence that exists only on iTunes. And proof that you can listen to Outkast and Flying Lotus at the same time.  That it also happens to be probably the most interesting and compelling hip-hop album released so far this year is a given (sorry, Odd Future).

A secretive figure buried under subjection and misinformation, Shabazz Palaces is actually the latest incarnation of one Ishmael Butler, once of Grammy-bothering 1990s trio Digable Planets. Like Flying Lotus. Shabazz Palaces uses jazz – notably the otherworldly sounds of Sun Ra – as a departure point, plotting a course for the parallel universe of hip-hop.

It’s fitting then that Flying Lotus fan Thom Yorke appears to pop up in opening transmission ‘Free Pres and Curl’, or at least the ghost of him, trapped, rattling around inside the machine. Also listen out for Battles-style clanks and Leftfield-like industrial clatter before the first track clocks out. Just wait until the interstellar bongos kick in part way through ‘An Echo from the Hosts…’.

The language is familiar – admiration for the female form, derivatives of the phrase “don’t fuck with me” and a light peppering of the n-word – but the delivery is unexpected, resulting in the most genre-bending on a rap record since maybe cLOUDDEAD. Not that there aren’t moments where Butler nods towards his peers – the stuttering piano loops of ‘Are You… Can You… Were You? (Felt)’ in particular invoke the crack-ridden wallowing of Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury.

If Tom Waits, Mr Scruff and Erykah Badu (we can dream) ever formed a band, ‘Endevour For Never…’ might be the outcome, with fuggy sounds as thick as cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, the rasping threats ‘Yeah You’ sit behind a militant, robotic percussion with a dash of Daft Punk-style voicecoder mischief.

The bold title suggests that this album sets itself up to define exactly where black music should be up to by now. An audacious claim, but then you can’t really argue with the case put forward here. This is cortex-pushing stuff – out of this world but not lodged up Uranus.

The best piece of advice Butler can give you is the mantra sewn into the DNA of ‘Recollections of the Wraith’: “Clear some space out/so we can space out”. In other words: make room for this record.

You’d imagine that David Hedges isn’t a big consumer of house porn lifestyle magazines. If you’ve ever spent 10 minutes flicking through LivingEtc, you’ll know that the bedroom is supposed to be a sanctuary away from the bustle of everyday life, all white walls, soft pillows and warm background noise. That isn’t the message you get from Response, his debut, recorded in a south-east London home studio set-up that sounds like the enigmatic Dave ID sleeps on the factory floor of a T1000 assembly line.

Dave ID - Response

A likely nod to Radiohead (the first of very possibly several), lead track ‘When Everything Is In Its Place’ is a snarling post-dubstep call to arms, all hawkish broken beats and clattering explosions of angular sound. By ‘SumR’, the apocalyptic lyrics, organ whirlwinds and soundboard pyrotechnics are propped up by a crescendo not unlike the totalitarian rumbles of Rob Dougan’s ‘Clubbed To Death’.

Behind ‘You Me Come For’, there’s almost the tender ring of fellow London kitchen sink super producer Hiatus, but it’s not until ‘Oil’ that there’s anything close to a respite – and breathe out. The lyrics here – “It keeps coming and it keep on hurting”, giving away to an unintentionally ‘Under Pressure’ Bowie-like lilt – empathise somewhat with the listener. Phew.

While always stretching beyond the limits of his own record collection, there are always moments that indulge in Dave’s influences, and ‘The Takeover’, with the caustic, claustrophobic menace of OK Computer’s ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, does just that. More implausibly, ‘There’s A Kingdom For That’ borrows its opening line from a Carry On film.

The flip-side to this show of military might – hear the marching beat of ‘Marvel’ or barking orders of ‘N.O.W.’ and step in line – is the cathartic, cathedral-like harrowing gothic sorrow of ‘His’ or its sister song, the remorseful Depeche Mode-aping ‘Mine’, a glimpse of the soul behind the tirade of anger.

If Burial’s output was calculated to mimic the bus ride home, this soundtracks deployment to the frontline of the war with the machines. Stick it on and you’ll return bruised from the aural assault, but rewarded. And probably better equipped to battle cyborgs.

No one – other than contortionists with a strong sense of job satisfaction – likes being put in a box. Musicians are notoriously claustrophobic. Show them a movement or a scene that you intend lumping them in with and generally they’ll run the other way. Pigeonholes are their kryptonite, and with Washed Out you can see why.

Washed Out - Within And Without

A while back, Ernest Greene was billed as the next big thing. His wallowing brand of sepia-tinged shoegazing dreamed up in his bedroom studio – even his sun-bleached driftwood moniker – had him billed as the rising star of what was known as chillwave. Now he’s finally finished polishing his debut (and very polished it is), his moment has already got its coat. Washed Out? Washed up, more like.

Glo-fi was a black hole that Greene was sucked into and was never going to escape from. Here, he’s still tied to the sound. Opener ‘Eyes Be Closed’ will remind you why you swooned over ‘Feel It All Around’ a couple of years ago. It’s a glorious slab of woozy bliss that could be Duran Duran restructured by Kevin Shields. But as the record unfolds, and that song repeats itself with ever-diminishing returns, you realise why it’s taken him this long to stump up an album proper – he might be better off sticking to singles.

Drafting in Merrweather Post Pavillion co-producer Ben Allen to meddle with these nine tracks has done little to coax this project out of its homemade origins and the cavorting couple on the cover – and even the album title – present a false sense of intimacy. The vocals remain distant – they evoke a dreamy elsewhereness and sound like they were recorded in another room.

You can hear a longing and yearning that echoes through the track titles ‘Amor Fati’ and ‘Far Away’. Not that Greene is totally alone in this world – Chairlift founder Caroline Polachek appears on the glossy ‘You And I’, but there’s still a general trend to bury the song underneath loops and effects and keep the listener at arm’s length.

At its core, there’s an endearing emptiness to Washed Out that no guests or layers are ever going to fill. And perhaps this is the perfect release for right now – the sound of summer that’s also like a glamorous staycation for these troubling times. Here Greene is obviously grasping for something that’s missing, you just feel that he could reach a bit further.

Barely out of his teens, Spaceghostpurrp hails from Miami, but you imagine he has little time for the Sunshine State’s hallowed beaches. You’re more likely to find him holed up in his musky bedroom (or “the underground”, as you imagine he refers to it), perfecting his fatality moves, drawing pentagrams on the floor and listening to his own records backwards.

Spaceghostpurrp - Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6

From the tinny production and pseudo-Satanism to the barrage of n-words, b-words and boasts of sexual exploits – if he gets his dick sucked as much as he claims to, it’s a wonder he found time to cobble this 22-track mixtape together (unless he’s a good multitasker) – this is an album that sets out to be confrontational. And yet it’s the spacey, syrupy grooves that draw you in.

The beats flip between a goopy, purple drank-sedated wallow and occasional blasts of pounding, booty-quaking crunk-like bass – so far, so Dirty South – but Spaceghostpurrp’s off-kilter output suggests there’s a real depth to this emotionally challenged yoot. Dreamy standout album centrepoint ‘Underground’ in particular makes its presence felt. Never mind the video game decapitations, you think that if he stopped banging on about getting head, he could actually twist some listeners heads clean off. Metaphorically, at least.

Often unfairly lumped in with the Odd Future lot – partially due to the shock-value content but largely because of the timing of this release – Spaceghostpurrp is more interested in the class of ’91, the year of his birth, rather than 2011. As well as nods to Three 6 Mafia, there’s numerous Mortal Kombat samples and a general interest in the unremembered ‘90s. Besides, unlike Odd Future, Spaceghostpurrp is unlikely to be approached to work on the new Beyoncé album any time ever. (She’s more likely to slap on a restraining order).

So, while he might not be one to bring home to your parents – unless your folks are the more liberal minded Nevada desert-dwelling cannibal-type – this twisted slab of rap that deserves your attention.