| The Ever-Moistening Nucleus
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Taste The Dreamer's Tech
Facial Reproductor
Peeking Pie
Naivety Tends Toward Me
IntelliCAD Hoax
Flatweight Bandana
Interact with the Brain
Grandfather's Talkbox Exploded Upon My Vest
Closer to The Bone
Frittering Wrath of Joseph
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The Soundtrack To A Quantam Leap
Here is where the scientists detail the music that is keeping them alive thru the cold, dark nights in a sterile lab, staring at endless calculations, trying to make sense of the nonsense. They make the choices and we take the role of Hermes - messenger of the Gods.
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Sunfactor - Midnight
The breakneck rumbling of pounded drums herald the beginning of these heartfelt slice of defiant emo. Sunfactor were born - I believe - quite close to the secret location of our lab (clue:somewhere near Guildford), but the frenzy of Midnight's cerebral riffage sounds like it was constructed somewhere in a Texan desert. Perhaps if Sunfactor could pull away from the sounds of their American heroes they would be able to bring their quite excellent tunes to the masses. But maybe they don't want to. |
Dark Star - About 3am
In some whispered circles, this epic has been referred to as 'the perfect song', so ideal are its components. Hushed,fuzzy vocals detail sweet nothings over the elegant, melodic guitar chime; drums and bass step in exactly when they are wanted, augmenting the song with military overtones; stormy distortion kicks into action to make way for a mile-high chorus; yes - all the elements are correct: every single molecule is right.
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Beck - Beercan
Beck has an image has the bandit of rock to many people (although certainly not us), they claim he robs from the richness of genres from b-boy funkateering to alt.country swoon, and donates these hallowed elements to flippant mishmashes. Beercan surely silences his critics in one hypnotic loop - his playful humour and immediate ear for a loping melody fuse to expel an organ-grinding, child-sampling, whiteboy-rhyming party explosion of mid-nineties excellence - feast your ears Einstein.
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Clearlake - Jumble Sailing
Often criticised of merely being the mockney regeneration of a britpop civilisation now lost, 'Jumble Sailing' indicates the fantastic manner in which Clearlake can augment synthesiser based psychedellia with an emotive anecdote that now seems beyond the 'relationship has broken down' agenda of Albarn and co. Pegg serenly whispers the engaging story of a visit to a Sunday morning Jumble sale, and the social and emotional reprecussions of it against a backdrop of meandering keyboards and humble harmonica, and doing so evokes memories of many a past sunday.
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The Flaming Lips - Clouds Taste Metallic
A deep space exploration, defining the alter-world definition of love, God, zoology and etheral pilots. It shimmers with the psychaldelic ghosts of Neil Young, Captain Beefheart and the slacker generation, to find its place as a metaphorically humourous, yet spiritual guide. Over-driven fuzz guitar subdue the frail falsetto of Wayne Coyne, breaking through with the anthemic hymn "Lighning Strikes the Postman". And yet this album's treasure lies behind its pop convention. The shining "This here Giraffe" and eerie "They Punctured My Yolk" leave us high among their tortured harmonies, floating with a breeze of light hearted, subverted intellectualism, rivalled by no other. |
And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - Madonna
Austin, Texas does strange things to some people - take ...Trail of Dead for example: four twenty-something mods with guitars should be bashing out sub-Jam drivel, but this record showcases their ability to combine killer hooks with skyhigh, fuzzed-to-fuck guitar squall. From short, sweet thrashout A Perfect Teenhood (with sublimely expletive refrain), to the monstrously huge walls of sound that comprise The Day The Air Turned Blue, Madonna manages to span a huge range of tones and emotions; the seamless tracks merge into one huge journey like riding a bus with Sonic Youth, The Cure and Charles Manson...sublime.
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The Strokes - The Modern Age
.......awaiting deliverance |
Mercury Rev - Deserter's Songs
So here we find the indespensably perfect haze. Whispering through reeds and bowed saws, the starry eyed twillight of Donahue's sky sweeps to the eternal clouds. Indeed, on first listening we were all taken up to Mercury Rev's skylight scope, yet the beauty of this record lies not in the flight, but the decent. The decent into tortured subtlety. The decent into age. The flight into tradition and the parallel float down to the Catskill Mountains.
The opening three songs set a shade of light minimalism, from the female strung chorus of "Endlessly", to the tears enduced in "Holes". Deserter's Songs represents a stylistic change for Mercury Rev. Whilst "Boces" explored their driving psychadelic chainsaw, throbing into the heart of jazz, Deserter's Songs is all fairy tale sepia tinged bliss. Grasshopper trades in the razor acidity for quasi-country playfull sweets, and Donahue's vocals reveal a new found maturity. Distinct, yet distant. Distinct, yet aged. Mellow, yet bitter. Misty, yet perfection.
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Elbow - Asleep in the Back
For all the prog accusations, Asleep In The Back delivers disappointingly little in the way of squealing moog solos and orchestrated spoons, but perhaps this (somehow) is a good thing. Unfairly lumped in with the turgid NAM-ery of Starsailor or - shudder - Coldplay, Elbow have very little do to with their over-simplified faux-slo-core for the masses. Instead Elbow plough a much more complex furrow, mixing their lovelorn acoustica with church organs, and emotionally electrified rushes of guitar. Their songs are constantly underpinned by some brilliantly brooding basswork, and Guy's vocal parts verge on the textbook definition of angst-ridden.
All in all, a sterling debut effort from this hard-grafting Manchester outfit, but we expect much greater things...
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The Moldy Peaches
Broken voices and stumbling strums, we find these heroes walking the New Yorke subway in disguise. The rabbit has never been one for seriousness..whilst robin hood is drowning his mind in a paper bag. Perhaps this album depicts such haphazard scenes too clearly, writing in irony tinged nostalgia. Not so explorers. This album contain eighteen perfectly angular comi-tragedies, all of which deliver to the youth a refreshingly simple take on loss, love and porn. Crunching at times, fragile in most, duell vocals have never sounded so lo-fi. Indeed, surveyors of lo-fi will do well to move their paws towards such sounds, whilst adventurers of sorts will likewise find solice in a tortured plea from thunder cat whores and vengefull bunnies.
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