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Interestingly, the group is known for producing vastly different results, swerving between proto-industrial clunk to spacey synth pop over the course of albums and even songs. "Champos '08," for example, features electronic crud mixed in with rotator blades and squeal that reads more like some basement Michigan noise project, while the percussive organicism of "Dirty Cloud" largely explores a much more overtly pretty side of psychedelia. Concussion Summer, their most recent full length on the Not Not Fun label, grinds out mostly instrumental clatter that is in constant flux. This one seems to meld the brazenly fried feel of the latter while persuasively melding it with a kind of numb song form whose fuel is in its monotanous, dead-to-the-world attitude.
This is more or less clear right from the opener, "It Just Isn't the Same," whose constant thud is at once primitive and futuristic, the battle cry for an interstellar war fought with spears and rocks. While the parts are all simple—the three note synth melody unendingly stuttering forward, the bleating scrapes—they are mixed so masterfully, brought forth, drawn back, reworked, that the sound is in constant motion, providing a spaced drift for the half-dead vocals to drift across.
"Those Final Seconds," which begins with a fax machine running across the rattles of snakes and delayed vocal punctuations, creates a sort of endless loop that feels overwhelmingly trapped, stuck in place until, somehow, it manages to wriggle itself into slightly new positions, slowly freeing itself of its confines while free rock drum clatter mashes it to a pulp from beneath. This is some blown out stuff and truly fried material, a sax bellowing outward signaling the approaching peak of a seven-minute buildup. Having wrestled itself free, "Grief" seems to a signal a kind of anti-climax, a new and placid world where synths drape over one another as they reach toward a mangled synth pop dreamworld as abstract as it is tangible. Jon Rickman and Bobby Caution join the duo on this (Rickman also plays on the title track), giving it a more full sound while still retaining the distorted peace within the work. It serves as a fine example of the different sounds the group can draw upon while still managing to sound like itself.
The following title track, the longest work on the album, moves between so many modes that it's tough to pin down. It glitches about, building and dying under its own weight like a Robert Ashley piece gone awry, or better yet as covered by Dead C. It is a true monster that feeds right into the brief "Behind a Wall" before the smoldering simmer of "Someone Upstairs" drifts through the coals. When all is said and done it is difficult to not be a convert, and even tougher not to believe in the group's increasing potential. Every release seems to push the bar further, and this one is another impressive statement along their path, as twisted as it is sincere.
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With the sudden emergence of a new drone dialect in underground music, Richter brings a classical sense to his concoctions, drawing on the likes of Steve Reich's organ works, La Monte Young's extended sense of time, Hermann Nitsch's sound world and Charlemagne Palestine's power far more than psychedelic babble steeped in rounded edges. His is a focused maelstrom, less concerned with dips into the nether regions of his mind than in sharp trajectories directly towards the sun. Starting with a microcosm of a drone, the piece largely develops itself as an extended crescendo, continuously moving steadily forward into ever deeper waters.
This sort of constant upheaval in a piece has a way of falling short, but Richter is wiser than a lot of his cohorts, instead focusing on an internal build rather than one extending out from itself. The bulk of the work is enshrouded in the subtle organ play, which reads as singular in any given moment but whose constant flux is clear over the course of the work. Within that cloud Nikolaus and Schutte are constantly building, laying down increasinly kinetic details that clatter, murmur and spew there way out of the organ flow like larvae out of a heated pool. Nothing ever takes hold though, the chatter instead serving to divert attention away from the bold organ drone which, somehow, ingrains a kind of festering bother in the listener whose creepiness is far more internal and personal than overt drawings upon darkness.
Half way through the work breaks up entirely, the tickling metallics fumbling forward until, at last, the work explodes under its own weight. A thick smoke, sharp atop the smooth drone, ricochets across while warbling electronics distort themselves into dreams haunted by wolves and ghosts and ivy. By the time it all comes to a fore it has buried itself so deep that any semblance of self is surrounded, blown apart by the sheer quantity of sound. This, it seems, is why they recommend it be played loudly.
This sort of slow development does more than its share of demolition, but it also reveals a fully realized vision and a musician whose focus and sonic sense are at once contributing to and one step removed from so much of the drone music coming out now. This is not music to take drugs to so much as it is music as drug, an intoxicating and immersive experience akin to the very MC5 song it is named after. Not in sound perhaps, but certainly in attitude and scope.
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Molina has been surprisingly candid about his latest record. He doesn't quite explain Josephine, but he doesn't hide the fact that it is a reckoning with the death of a friend and fellow musician. Appropriately, the record is one of the darkest the Company has crafted. In places it recalls the subterranean gloom and lonely isolation of the best Songs: Ohia records, but it doesn't linger in the past long enough to be a step backwards. From the opening "O! Grace," which features a surprising sax solo, to the romance of "Rock of Ages" and the punchy organ on "Little Sad Eyes," Molina and his band avoid falling into clichés by refusing to sit still. The variety of musical styles and instrumentation is, in part, a tribute to the ideas Farrell had for this record, but also proof positive that Molina is one of the best songwriters this country has. He moves gracefully from the straight rock of "Josephine" and "The Handing Down" to the woeful sludge of "Knoxville Girl" and the bar-room balladry of "Heartbreak at Ten Paces." Keeping these disparate adventures in tact is Molina's magical lyricism, which deserves a review of its own in many ways. Although the familiar images of horizons, bells, moons, and birds persist on this record, they acquire a personal dimension in light of Molina's forwardness.
It would be easy to say that Josephine is a concept record about the loss of a bandmate, but that'd sell Molina's songwriting ability short. Perhaps the most emotionally overwhelming song on the record, "Whip-Poor-Will," was written at least as early as 2003. It appeared on the bonus CD to the Magnolia Electric Co. debut in acoustic form and it remains largely unchanged lyrically. So, while the song might sound like a letter to the deceased, it is more likely a song about loss and mortality in general. With Molina it's hard to tell, however. He's called the lyrics to "Josephine" a rebus and refused to say too much about who or what Josesphine is. As honest as he is on this record, he's also just as obscure and impressionistic as he's always been.
Josephine focuses a lot on ghosts, hope, and believing in something, but that only solidifies the album's central figure enough to make her something less than an abstract name on paper. She's mentioned throughout the record with references to hope, freedom, and foolishness surrounding her. On "Hope Dies Last," the band half cries out for her, like she's a lost lover far beyond their reach. Musing over the album's many themes is probably best left to each listener, who can mull over lyrics, images, and the album's evolution in the same personal way that Jason created them. But, I think it might be possible to decode Josephine by listening to the deep, resounding bass that dominates nearly every song. Its sensuous, pulsing sound is the album's lifeblood. It is at the center of the best songs and, like a gift, encourages Molina to explore the dark territory that has always marked his best work.
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This brief album clocks in at around 30 minutes and contains only nine songs but at least a third of them achieve EBM near-perfection. Eisold vocalizes his caustic lyrics with a world-weary conviction that favorably reminds me of all of the best British post-punk bands, but the darkness and catharsis is transformed into something accessible and non-oppressive through memorable melodies, catchy synth hooks, and charmingly naïve drum machine beats. The title cut is a great example of the artful union of bleak intensity and shameless embrace of '80s dance music that makes Cold Cave such a likeable band: Eisold’s lovelorn melancholia is beautifully enhanced by former Hatebreed guitarist Sean Martin’s C86-style jangling, a relentless pounding beat, burbling keyboards, and warm and deceptively simple synthesizer chords.
"The Trees Grew Emotions and Died" is similarly propulsive and unrelentingly catchy. Xiu Xiu’s Caralee McElroy and Eisold share vocal duties over a foundation of rumbling bass and impossibly thick and anthemic synth hooks. It also prominently features a somewhat harsh guitar solo, which is an unsubtle example of another aspect of Cold Cave’s excellence: despite strongly adhering to pop song conventions and featuring big dance beats, there is an omnipresent menacing hiss, ugliness, and distortion lurking beneath it all. While rarely being in the foreground, this noise element is enormously important to Eisold’s aesthetic. Consequently, Cold Cave songs have a damaged, dark, and heavy feel that bears almost no resemblance to slickly-produced precursors like OMD, Yaz, or the Human League, despite being superficially built upon similar foundations.
My favorite song on the album is probably "Youth and Lust," which marries gorgeously lush minor key synth chords, alternating male/female vocals, a insistent thumping beat, and an irresistible keyboard riff. The rest of the album is pretty solid, but hopelessly eclipsed by the aforementioned three songs. Had they been included on Cremations, "Cebe and Me," "I.C.D.K.," and "Heaven Was Full" would have all been standouts, but the high points of Love Comes Close are on a completely different level.
Love Comes Close captures the sound of an excellent band accelerating rapidly towards their prime and features some of the best songs that will be released this year. It is rare for me to be this enthusiastic about a new band, but I had unreasonably high expectations for this album and they were largely met anyway. It's worth noting that some of Eisold’s pre-Cold Cave bedroom electro-pop recordings have just been released this month as well (Ye Olde Maids’ God Blesses Us, Mother Dresses Us).
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Reactor
Each disc roughly corresponds with the band’s studio albums. Disc One features the early garage stomp of "16 Dreams" as well as an earlier take of "Head On" that would be more polished and sped up for Heaven’s End. The oddly out of place "Brittle Head Girl" is here as well, which with its synth flourishes and levels of tremolo make it sound like some odd hybrid of early Cure and Spacemen 3. It’s an very different track that resembles a different path the band could have taken, though I would say the more forceful heavy space rock they ended up going with was a much wiser choice.
The heavy hitters on this disc are the two titans of "Burning World" and "Spinning." The former is a slow, morose track of shaky tremolo and funeral drumming that trudges along in a barbiturate haze into worlds where psychedelic drugs aren’t even necessary. The latter is an unabashed blast of tremolo laden '60s guitar rock with just enough of a post-punk edge to make it a creature all its own. Of course it appears here in the "full" version, which appends a longer instrumental outro after an initial fadeout. Both tracks appear in different variations as well: "Spinning (Spun Out)" is an alternate recording that’s just a bit faster and more up-tempo, but feels too immediate, rather than the expansive swirl of the original. The previously unreleased demo of “Burning World” is a rougher take on the track, emphasizing repeated guitar solos and even more buried vocals. It’s a notably different, though not superior, version.
Disc Two is mostly the Eternal/Fade Out era material, and could almost be considered the "covers" album, because more than half of the disc are various covers from tribute albums and singles. Leading out with the strong, reverb covered "Collision" (which appeared in a Peel Session form as well); it is a more polished version of that rock monster that would have been a perfect fit on Fade Out. "Crawling Heart" is a perfect bridge between the two studio albums, as its psych rock rhythm is matched with a distortion laden bassline and cutting guitars. The haunting "Circle Grave" is the strangest piece here, with its hollow guitar ambience and shrill feedback, making it by far one of the most dissonant tracks the band ever recorded, and another demonstration of Robert Hampson’s early infatuations with musique concrete.
The covers here are an eclectic mix: The Pop Group’s "Thief of Fire" gets two runthroughs: the first being all jagged guitar and echo chamber hell vocals while the longer "Motherfucker" alternate mix is more stripped down, allowing the flanged guitars to go off in their own trajectories. Here, Hampson’s more impassioned vocals being the only thing keeping it together. Their cover of Can’s "Mother Sky" unfortunately ditches the original’s in medias res opening, but is still over 10 minutes of sharp mechanical drumming, and alternating restrained and manic guitar riffs. While it lacks the virtuosity of Jaki Liebezeit, it is otherwise a faithful, if somewhat unadventurous take on the classic. It is also the track that made me check out Can as a teenager, so it’s definitely got its charm. Nick Drake’s "Pink Moon" receives a reverent treatment, leaving just acoustic guitar with little effects or processing. Neil Young’s "Cinnamon Girl" also gets a throwback to the more hazy Heaven’s End Technicolor sound with more than a smattering of old school psychedelics.
Disc Three is a bit less diverse, with the front end featuring no less than three mixes of "Arc-Lite." The "Sonar" version is the original one, with its echoing vocals and repetitive guitar riffs being pushed along by a rhythm that doesn’t really lock into where it should be for about half the track. The Daniel Miller mixed "Radar" and "Radiated" versions take different directions, with the former sounding more like an alternate mix, just with different effects and layering on the guitars, while the latter is cut and pasted over a Suicide-like monotone drum line, bringing the buried bass melody to the surface and resembling some of the later period Wire/Wir work. Between all of these is "Sunburst" which is just as beautiful as the more widely released Peel Session version, though I must say I prefer that ones urgency to the studio polished version that appears here.
There are also three tracks from the live Prisma Uber Europa EP, with "Afterglow" and "Got to Get It Over" both appearing as harder edged, muscular takes on the album tracks. The third one, "Burning World" (labeled "Burning Prisma" on the initial issue of this album) draws the already long track out even longer, with a faster pace and a more aggressive guitar line that is just the right level of hypnotic repetition and improvised squall. The closer is the legendary cover of Godflesh’s "Like Rats" from the Clawfist Loopflesh/Fleshloop 7". The sound quality is far and away better than the lo-fi mp3 I had of this track for a few years, but the death metal growl vocals from the original aren’t Hampson’s forte, and thus aren’t quite as effective as Godflesh’s cover of "Straight To Your Heart" (which isn’t included here). It is nice to hear a more psyched out take on this track though, and the pained guitar solo here is a lot different than the metallic squeal of the original.
Again, this compilation is as indispensable of a release as any of the band’s studio albums, but does function well as an overview of the band’s career. While there is not an abundance of unheard material here, the tracks are so strong that hearing them cleaned up and remastered is worth the price of admission alone.
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One thing Loop perfected is leading off an album strong: Heaven’s End had the swirling wah-wah of "Soundhead;" Fade Out had the dark, manic "Black Sun;" and here it is the dense space of "Vapour," marrying a bass and guitar melody perfectly with Robert Hampson’s vocals fading even more into the background then they were before. Just as the track seems to be coming to its conclusion, it comes back with a force and vigor unmatched by most tracks in their discography (or most of their contemporaries) before slowly dropping in tempo to a lugubrious end.
For utter balls out rock, few things can touch this album’s first half. "Afterglow" is a panned nightmare of crunchy guitar stabs and erratic drums, and the following "The Nail Will Burn" runs on an overdriven bass guitar melody with crunchy, brittle guitar shards cast atop. It’s not until "Blood" that the pace begins to slow down. It does so with atmospheric piece of cascading guitar feedback, drum rolls, and more abstract elements and heavily processed vocals that resembles a darker, less isolating sound that guitarists Hampson and Scott Dawson would pioneer later in Main.
Both "Breath Into Me" and "From Centre to Wave" bring back the overdriven blast rock that characterized the opening of the album, the latter especially benefitting from producer Paul Kendall’s touch, with the closing resembling speakers being slowly disconnected from the player, the sound becoming more and more distant and tinny with every second before roaring back with a blast of feedback. The nearly 10 minute closer "Be Here Now" is also a slower and more sparse track, allowing multitracked guitar notes to trail off into space over a simple, but steady rhythm, closing the final album with one of the band’s more delicate moments.
The bonus disc here contains both pre-released tracks as well as a few rough demo versions of the album tracks that, while not amazing on their own, still make for a good listen. The opening pair of "The Nail Will Burn (Burn Out)" and "Shot With a Diamond" both were bonus tracks on the original CD issue of A Gilded Eternity, the former being a slightly more straightforward, trebly mix of the track, while the latter is a mostly instrumental (with the exception of Apocalypse Now dialog samples) repetitive drone of basic guitar clatter and metronomic percussion, also a good foreshadowing of what the band would go on to do in their post-Loop careers.
The demos are also nothing too drastically different: the instrumental early draft of "Arc-Lite" unfortunately suffers from its lack of vocals, focusing too much on the repetitive elements of the band without the more dynamic counterbalance, and the also vocalless take on "Vapour" is not drastically different from the final version, just slightly rawer, but structurally the same. "The Nail Will Burn" demo version is quite similar to the other two versions, but the shorter take of “Be Here Now” is much more interesting: it’s a harder edged version of what would finally be released. It’s still sparse and vast, yet there is a bit more clang and grind to it, reframing the track completely differently than the previously released one.
The best part of this disc though is the band’s third and final Peel Session, which, like the others in this reissue campaign, was also available on the Wolf Flow collection. "Afterglow" is functionally the same as the album version, but "From Centre to Wave" is given even more room to breathe, and the rawer pseudo-live edge of the BBC studios causes it to a be a different beast entirely. Finally, the closing "Sunburst" is my personal favorite moment here. A B-side on the "Arc-Lite" single, here it is stripped down to repetitive drum rolls and a mix of guitar chord drone and crunchy squalls, all proceeding along with a slowness and sadness unmatched by most.
Each Loop album was such a different beast, though all still connected through vast space and overdriven guitar bonds that makes it impossible to pick a favorite. Here perhaps it is their most fully realized work that unfortunately signaled their demise. Like the first two albums though, it is essential listening for anyone who claims to enjoy shoegaze/drone/space rock/whatever it’s called these days.
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Diametrically opposed to their 1998 album Law of Ruins, Half Control puts the focus more on blasting scum rock instead of flirtations with krautrock. The synths are still present but they definitely take a backseat to blasting guitar riffs and distorted bass lines, both of which are very similar to citymates Landed and I doubt it’s coincidental that guitarist Joel Kyack and bassist Shawn Greenlee appear on this album.
Opener "Thrown Out" kicks the door in immediately with a short grinding guitar riff and spastic yelled vocals that coincidentally feel like a band having less than half control over themselves. The similarly short "A Tighter Passage" continues this aggression, even tossing in a harsh guitar noise break in the middle of the track to add just a bit more dissonance to it. "Long Time No C" is in a similar realm, but has a bit more of a punked out edge to it, adding more catchy guitar/vocal combinations to the mix rather than just the scraping aggression from the other two.
"Herpe Gimme Strength" is another more melodic one, building descending divebomb melodies out of guitars that sound like synths (or synths that sound like guitars, I can’t decide). This somewhat continues into "Artificial Light," which has more obvious synth string leads over the distorted din. With its shorter looped structure and restrained vocals, it comes across more as an extremely agro take on new wave rather than just plain ol’ noise rock, in a good way.
When the shifts away from the harsher stuff happen, I think it really is a better indicator of the strengths of the band. The title track, while still having that noise damaged quality to it, is a tighter, darker creation that feels more structured and composed with an aggressive, bass-lead passage at the end. "Live Legs" is also a synth lead song that undercuts the more traditional guitar and bass stuff, subtly punctuating it in a way that other bands would probably ignore.
The closer is, in my opinion, the album’s best moment. "Bored Oracle" is a long tune, far longer than any other on the album that emphasizes more development and variations on dynamics than the others. It opens with only drums and the entry of slow, methodological synths that are gentler than any of the others found here. As the build begins, restrained guitar enters along with more spoken word type vocals. While not screamed, the words drip with venom and hatred more than any of the others on here. There is just a better, slow build to the sound that doesn’t get as showcased on the previous tracks.
Considering that this material is some eight years old, I’m curious to hear how the newer reunited band will sound now, though who knows how the lineup will change between now and then. But even as an archival recording this is a really strong release, and the moments where a greater concession to melody and structure are made are where it truly shines.
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In 1982, producer Martin Hannett famously filed a lawsuit against the other four directors of Factory Records and ultimately left the fold to pursue more alcohol- and heroin-centric pursuits. In typical Factory fashion, this potential disaster was issued a catalog number (FAC-61) and a revolving cast of New Order members and their associates took over production duties under the deliberately generic pseudonym of Be Music. Of course, this resulted in lot of bands sounding suspiciously like New Order, but that aesthetic effectively complemented the label-wide shift in focus away from the arty brooding of bands like Joy Division towards dance clubs and pop charts.
Naturally, the aforementioned New Order are responsible for one of the best songs on the album: the pleasantly lurching “Lonesome Tonight,” which was the B-side to the "Thieves Like Us" single and began its life as a half-assed cover of an Elvis Presley live recording. The Wake’s propulsive “Talk About The Past” is also immediately gratifying, even though it sounds almost exactly like New Order (a good song is still a good song, even if it lacks originality). The other unqualified success on the album is the infectious synthpop of Red Turns To’s “Deep Sleep” (whom I had never even heard of). Fortunately, while the quality of the rest of the compilation veers wildly, it remains uniformly compelling for other reasons.
For one, the album is bursting with guilty pleasures. I was especially delighted by the inclusion of a Shark Vegas rarity ("Pretenders of Love”) that was originally only available on a 1987 compilation entitled Young, Popular, and Sexy. The magic of Shark Vegas is that they sound exactly like New Order, but comically exaggerated in all respects (especially the vocals). This particular cut does not let me down and even surprised me with a hair metal guitar solo. Then there is Quando Quango’s “Atom Rock,” which is quite possibly the single worst song that I have ever heard (perhaps more painful than even Rob Gretton’s molar reconstruction (FAC-99)). Despite featuring uncharacteristically funky guitar by Johnny Marr and production by Bernard Sumner, it fails on literally every level and approximates a lobotomized Haircut 100. That said, it is so profoundly moronic (“atom rock from the bottom to the top, atom rock tell me when its gonna stop”) and inept that it somehow transcends mere awfulness and becomes perversely infectious. It is a horror that I cannot turn my ears away from.
Of course, Factory released quite a bit of forgettable—perhaps even genuinely awful—material as well. One of the compilation’s more baffling aberrations is a mediocre piano and violin classical piece by The Durutti Column (“Duet (Without Mercy)”), which Vini Reilly describes in the colorful liner notes thusly: "Without Mercy is a joke. That album’s terrible. It was all Tony Wilson’s idea to make it more classical.”
Also, while this disc regrettably contains no A Certain Ratio songs, the ACR gang are conspicuously involved in virtually all its clumsiest and most embarrassing moments. Nearly the entire band played on Kalima’s smooth vocal jazz abortion “The Smiling Hour” and former frontman Simon Topping delivers his own solo Latin jazz atrocity entitled “Chicas del Mundo” (Tony Wilson believed that Topping was “so upset by the death of Ian Curtis that he turned his back on singing, and instead retreated behind a set of bongos.”). Incidentally, Topping later joined the above-mentioned Quando Quango to continue his post-ACR streak of crimes against music. Also, ACR drummer Donald Johnson’s brother delivers a sub-Blondie rap interlude on 52nd Street’s “Can’t Afford” and Johnson himself is credited as co-producer for “Atom Rock.” I should perhaps note that despite arousing my extreme antipathy, Quando Quango are regarded as very influential on the early NYC and Chicago dance music scenes. Of course, that does not mean that their music has aged well.
That said, nearly all of the “bad” songs on Factory Records 1984 are still quite fun, and curator James Nice’s quixotic warts-and-all approach has unexpectedly resulted in a great album. Factory’s tireless enthusiasm, willingness to very publicly fail, propensity for throwing huge sums of money at ridiculous shit (like Happy Monday’s albums), and unwavering sense of humor (there are catalog numbers for both the Haςienda’s cat (FAC-191) and Tony Wilson’s coffin (FAC-501)) made it uniquely human and deservedly beloved and Nice has done a remarkable job of capturing that elusive spirit. Further installments in this series would be extremely welcome.
Samples:
- Red Turns To – Deep Sleep
- Shark Vegas – Pretenders of Love
- Quando Quango – Atom Rock
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Aidan goes for broke and begins his latest endeavor with a side-long meditative jam. It's composed mostly of a strong, low-end rhythm, an indistinct weave of harmonies, and the kind of processed haze found on nearly every fuzzy, electronics-heavy record out there. A fraction of the way through, Baker begins to half-mumble some vague and mostly incoherent lyrics with a heavy-handed dramatic tint to them. "Bond of Blood" is a risky way to start a record and it mostly fails to capture my attention. It is mixed entirely too low and contains a repetitive structure that completely betrays Baker's typically intricate and subtle approach to writing. Anything on the I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed compilation bests this muddied work by a country mile.
Thankfully, the reverse side of the record picks up some of the slack with "Gathering Blue" and a cover of Joy Division's "24 Hours." Nevertheless, a strangely under-produced sound hovers over these songs. When compared to the second LP, all three opening tunes sound like unfinished demos tossed together without a thought given to production. Sometimes the rawness of poorly recorded albums can be appealing, but in Baker's case nothing is gained and a lot is lost. In any case, "Gathering Blue" is another mostly quiet amalgam of processed guitar and quiet melody, but it brings a little more structure and diversity to the table than side A did. The Joy Division cover is both amusing and disappointing. For the duration of the song Baker simply plucks its familiar melody and sings the lyrics in the same half-mumbled way employed on "Bond of Blood." The result is a dreary and dark remake of an already dark and weighty song, but without the driving rhythm or bitter anger of the original. It works to an extent, but I've come to expect more from Baker. Vocally, he doesn't seem capable of expressing anything beyond doubt, remorse, or self-loathing, none of which compliment the music on this record.
The second LP illustrates just why Baker became so popular in the first place. It collects the Cicatrice and The Taste of Summer on Your Skin EPs from 2003 and 2004 as well as a couple of remixes included on the Arcolepsy remix EP from 2005. The Cicatrice EP and a remix by Building Castles Out of Matchsticks take up the entirety of Gathering Blue's third side. Each of the five songs are soulful and carefully layered productions that move along at a slow and sensuous pace. The contrast between their shimmering high end and substantial low end produces an almost dub-like and hallucinogenic effect, which reverberates and throbs like a inhuman organ and lends a substantial amount of movement to the whole production. Colorful echoes and subtle nuances decorate Cicatrice from top to bottom, but Baker doesn't rely on them to be effective. An indistinct, but persistent sense of melody and intensity carries these pieces, which are seamlessly meshed together by crisp production and clever sequencing. It's a shame that an already limited and hard-to-find EP such as this one had to be re-released on a limited vinyl collection.
The fourth and final side of Gathering Blue is something of a mixed bag, but Cicatrice is a hard act to follow. The Taste of Summer on Your Skin is an upbeat and mostly busy production with drum 'n' bass rhythms populating a portion of its length. Dark, atonal pulses and cosmic noise constitute the rest of the it, which is entertaining but not altogether enthralling. I've heard lots of spacey sounds like these and though the effects and arrangements employed are attractive, they're also a little predictable. The dark colors and menacing passages work for me, but are familiar and well-trodden, too. The Troum remix, which ends the record, is a lovely mass of sound built from metallic trembling and futuristic horn sections. It ends the record on a high note, but doesn't exactly strike me as an appropriate closer.
On a record this uneven, a killer Baker original could have saved the day and left me musing over his many talents, but instead I'm left thinking of another band and their consistently excellent output. Gathering Blue is a sloppy and strangely fractured collection, but still worth seeking out just for the Cicatrice reissue and gorgeous packaging. Everything else will likely intrigue Baker fans, but fail to win anyone else over.
[samples unavailable]
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When I say barren though, I certainly mean barren. The work is so slow to evolve in fact that many moments are only decipherable as different upon clicking through the piece's timetable. With this kind of cautious construction, layering the equivalent of vacuum cleaner air drawing upon airplane cabin engine noise, the work evolves slowly enough so as to take its virtually its entire length to entangling itself of each distinct moment. When distant scratches come through amidst the hiss around minute 13 it is nearly revelatory, being the most distinguishable sound yet presented. A soft hum around the 17 minute mark grounds it somewhat, imbuing it with a distinct direction for the first time, though that direction is surely a circuitous one not so much bent on arriving anywhere so much as one settling in to the old mental garden.
Yet the changes do happen, and the patience with which they do so rewards a concerted listening effort. Metal-on-metal clatter subsides in the mix almost half of the way through the work's length, sounding like a mini Gamelan orchestra playing from inside a wind turbine. Volumes are delicately adjusted, allowing details to come to the fore that, whether always present back there or not, feel to be coming from the same organism, drawing itself out through the most minute adjustments in color.
There is a sense of urgency in the latter half of the work, if only in contrast to the first half. It becomes less static and busier, with sounds rebounding around the space and jumping out from the singular static that started the work. Still, the consistency of sounds being as they are, the result is not so much busily seeking anything as it is teeming beneath its own weight, its super-heated molecules bouncing together without losing the general forms they inhabit.
It isn't until about half an hour into the piece that snippets of a discreet melody appear, though these too are so fractured as to become part of the general landscape, tickling the outer reaches of the hum with brief splashes of color. These flurries of notes not only tie the piece inward, setting the outer boundaries of the hiss buildup, but they also signal the piece's movement toward a more mechanistic and gestural sound for a time, one that has momentary flashes of a daily movement removed from the ethereal space of the work as a whole.
The final ten minutes find the work slipping back to its origins, decomposing until it is only the crackle of burning wax and a gentle airy breath of tone. Dense though it may be, the work is quite well situated and wisely done, uncompromising in its enactment without lacking beauty or finesse. There is likely no knowing just how this recording relates to its subject matter—certainly it is not in any linear manner representative of it—but there can be no doubt that this is a highly personal and well phrased statement from a musician with his ears on a singular form of sound composition.
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To be fair—as with much of the material from this era and locale—much of the sound on the record does read as a bit dated in the electronically advanced age we currently reside in. Analog sweeps and crude drum machines abound, but the constructions are still wholly tangible, imbuing the disc with a certain gratifying sense of nostalgia removed from the purely silly sound of a record whose time has come and gone. Despite the epic grandeur of a track like "Silberland," whose regal tempo is occupied by video-game worthy melodies, the careful choice of sounds, crystalline and hollow all, keeps the piece moving into truly spacious territory.
The opening title track is perhaps the most redundant offering on the disc in fact, its phased beat looping along a simple melody and dour vocal. The track could just as easily be a Kraftwerk circa Autobahn, but Riechmann's solo approach means that there is never any more present than is necessary, and no line contributes worthlessly. Even Riechmann's relatively unconvincing vocals are so of their era that they add a sort of baroque human element into the fold.
That said, most of the material here is instrumental, and in this realm Riechmann is truly adept. "Weltweit" shimmers with barely two sounds present, gliding on glacial tracts that grow as another line joins in and they are allowed to mingle and internally shift. This is clearly someone who requires very little to do quite a lot, exhibiting the same pointed melodic strength as Roedelius if devoid of some of the classical jovialism of the latter's solo output. Elsewhere, "Himmelblau" billows with ethereal tones that careen about before tightening their focus and growing into one of the most overtly forward-looking tracks on the album, revealing New Wave and even early House disciples through its child-like melodic line.
The all too brief closer, "Traumzeit" seems to point towards more from this young artist. Yet even in this debut, one genuinely feels like they can hear what might of been—his predeliction for long, drawn out pseudo-dance constructions could well have taken him into the '80s with more than was necessary. Perhaps no great revelation, the album is still a fantastic example of its sound, and does display more than a hint of distance from the usual crowd. There's almost a David Byrne-like melancholy buried beneath these chilly atmospheres, though maybe that's just the cover talking.
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