Plumbline, "Pin Points"

The track listing for Pin Pointswas not impressive, as each bears titles like like map references (ie."555 W24" and "56 E"). It annoyed me when nearly every second Warprelease was named like this and it annoys me now. I was expecting somesort of bog-standard glitch and beat driven album. I was half right,Plumbline (Will Thomas) makes glitches and beats but most of the timehe does it well.
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Plus, the sterile nature of this style of music isremoved thanks to addition of cello by Julia Kent and vocals by ConniePetruk that are very reminiscent of Bilinda Butcher. While this couldvery easily go wrong and end up sounding like something played in thebackground of clothes shop, Plumbline keeps it on track for most of thealbum. Unfortunately, towards the end of Pin Points there is anoticeable drop in the quality of the music. Thomas seemed to have runout of ideas and instead of stopping the album at an earlier point hegoes on to regurgitate the first few tracks and of course,regurgitation is too close to vomiting in terms of keeping upstandards. The penultimate track "811 10A" with its amateurish and lazystructure pales in comparison to the beautifully crafted opener "11E52" with its perfect programming supplemented with some equallyperfect cello. I really have to wonder what went wrong. Luckily, themajority of the album pulls it back on to the side of listenable.Plumbline could have made a classic of an album but instead he hasproduced a good album with a few flawed tracks stuck onto the end.

samples:

• 11 E52
• 66 9A
• 501 W23

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