VICE Album Reviews – March 2014

PRINCE FATTY VS MUNGO’S HIFI
S/T
Mr Bongo

Some white-dreads sorts from Brighton go up against some white-dreads sorts from Glasgow, a soundclash that I’m currently daydreaming will have some kind of critical bearing on the results of Scotland’s forthcoming independence referendum. Will the Scots triumph, and strike a blow for devolution, sort of like a patois-spouting Braveheart raining down fiyah on the forces of Babylon? Or will it be Prince Fatty and his crew who lay down the irie vibes, ensuring that England and Scotland will forever remain joined at the hip, like Siamese twins, except with one boasting slightly redder hair and an unquenchable thirst for Buckie? I’ll have to get back to you on the winner, as about midway through I got distracted by a sense of futility that was literally incapacitating.

3/10

DEAN FUNK

YOUNG FATHERS
Dead
Ninja Tune

These guys are the de facto worst rappers to ever come out of Scotland, mainly because they’re the only rappers to ever come out of Scotland. This is one of those albums that people who actually like rap will think is a load of pretentious, noisy horseshit, but art students will find interesting. In other words, curdled milk in rap-man form.

5/10

ERIC PUNDERMANN

ILLUM SPHERE
Ghosts of Then and Now Ninja Tune

In a world dotted with shiny, overproduced Disclosure replicants, it’s refreshing to hear a bit of crackle now and then – maybe a fuzzy field recording, or a rhythm section that sounds like you shook that tampon bin in the bathroom at work.

6/10

MAX PEARL

KID MACHINE First Contact Cyber Dance

He’s not a kid and he’s not a machine either, but in his own dark twisted fantasy, Mark Wilkinson is a swashbuckling starfighter with a twinkle in his eye who cruises from galaxy to galaxy, battling aliens as he searches for a hot playmate. Reality of course is he’s a bloke from Manchester with a few keyboards and one brilliant idea: to produce the kind of throbbing synth prowlers that will force Michael Mann to at last direct his first-ever sci-fi film about, I don’t know, a swashbuckling starfighter with a twinkle in his eye. This is an album of smouldering menergy and slow, hard proto-Italo tear-jerkers juiced with impossibly sentimental emotion. Let’s face it, if you’ve heard one Kid Machine track, you’ve heard them all, and yet you can’t stop yourself coming back again and again.

8/10

THEYDON BOIS

V/A Elaste Volume 4: Meta-Disco and Proto-House Compost

 Any compilation that features Gino Soccio’s “Remember” and Change’s “The End” – two unimpeachable electronic disco classics – is pretty much an essential purchase. Elaste guv’nor Mooner goes for the populist jugular on his fourth round-up of early-80s cosmic funk and international eccentrics, shifting the focus to those tracks that formed the foundations of house, like Rinder & Lewis’ “Gluttony”, Disco D’s “Beat It” and Equip’s “Xxxo”. Not too many surprises here – is the world really running out of rare records?

8/10

THANDIE NEUTRON

PERFECT PUSSY Say Yes to Love Captured Tracks

This year is turning out to be a vagina riot. Articles on FGM, clitorally-produced hormonal powers and grooming pepper the mainstream press before you cast a glance beyond biology at their owners and the issues they’re taking on. Pretty awesome time to be this band really, and it would have been seriously disappointing if they sucked. They don’t. At all. Perfect for now means a delirious cacophony of art school, punk and melodic noise sharing reels with a cavernous instrumental constructed over distilled tape hiss.

9/10

DUCHESS O’MALLEY

V/A
Warfaring Strangers: Darkscorch Canticles
Numero

Numero Records are best known for their fastidiously researched compilations of second-tier soul dudes who, either by accident or through not being quite as good as Otis Redding, languished in the cut-out bins until the obscuro-collectors came a-sniffing. On Warfaring Strangers, though, they’re mining a whole new seam, digging out a lost generation of long-haired dweebs playing hard rock with two primary inspirations: the intoxicating effect of cannabis and the mouth-breather mysticism of Dungeons & Dragons. Bands called Stone Axe and Gorgon Medusa do their Led Zep/Sabbath thing with limited talent but stout hearts. If you were to add frenzied, unceasing masturbation, you’d basically have the experience of being 14 years old burnt onto disc.

7/10

LUIGI PATAZONI

SCHOOLBOY Q
Oxymoron
TDE

Schoolboy Q loves bucket hats so much that he’s admitted to owning over 300 of the little bastards. He also loves playing Call of Duty, being blunted and getting fat. Basically, just like me and you, but rich, famous and with more than enough talent to ensure that he doesn’t spend every weekend picking Doritos crumbs out of an ash-ridden duvet. Oxymoron is his debut album with Top Dawg Entertainment, which means that whatever happens, internet-savvy rap fans will eat it up like Q eats up food (seriously, he’s been getting fatter with every release) so…. I guess all that’s left to say is YAWK YAWK YAWK YAWK YAWK.

7/10

BASSIL BRUSH

TRUST
Joyland Arts & Crafts

An unwelcome air of comfort, of pre-middle-aged spread, coats this second LP from Robert Alfons. The crude, industrial grit of the first eroded down and polished up anew. The music that plays in that underground club that paused for a needless refurb and has now reopened to find its best residents have drifted off, the real party kids are long gone and the bridge and tunnel crew pile in each weekend. Still not a totally terrible place to hang out, but you wouldn’t want to admit to it.

6/10

DITCH HOLE 

LIARS Mess Mute

While there’s something pretty laudable about Liars’ resolution never to make the same record twice, it’s a methodology that can, if you’ve ever enjoyed any of their previous albums and fancy a little more of the same, prove somewhat tiring. On Mess, they’re trying on a sort of electronic death-disco, funky in a stiff sort of way, and imbued with a certain goth melodrama. “Mess On a Mission” certainly qualifies as a great Liars moment, a brittle 8-bit electro stomp that sees Angus Andrew barking things like, “We’ve caught you at the séance!” All well and good, but I can’t help but feel that if Liars had stayed right on course after Drum’s Not Dead we might have ended up with a genuinely inventive rock band instead of this sporadically entertaining sideshow.

5/10

CHARLES HANSON

LEGOWELT Crystal Cult 2080 Creme   Organization

Danny Wolfers churns out another album of portamento boogie and bleached-out ethno-rave that, texturally at least, has to be at least 35 percent smodgier than his last effort, The Paranormal Soul. The wispy mysticism he so often draws on has descended like a thick fog over his creative practice, obscuring his vision and resulting in the kind of misty rainforest techno you seldom hear played out because it’s choked with drama and birdsong. One of the best things about Wolfers is that he’s so prolific that even if you’re not sold on one record, another one will be along five minutes later.

7/10

SUBURBAN DWIGHT

KILLING SOUND S/T Blackest Ever Black

Producers working in the field of extreme low-end have often spoken of the mythical “brown note”, a frequency that, if played at sufficient volume, causes the instantaneous evacuation of the human bowel. To carry this off would probably take a bass rig the size of Canary Wharf, so let us commend Killing Sound for their far more efficient approach: making you fill your pants by sounding like the sonic embodiment of fear itself. Here, three producers from Bristol’s Young Echo collective roll out the skeletal percussion, murky bass and occasional bursts of semi-automatic gunfire. It’s gloomy and understated, but imbued with the sort of impressively murdery vibe that should have Raime and the Haxan Cloak screwing up their fists and muttering things like “thwarted!” under their breath.

8/10

CHEATAHS S/T Wichita 

What was that? Four dudes made a record of reverb- drenched Swervedriver worship? Why yes, I’d love to give this a good review, thanks for asking, publicist! God, 1993 is like the mob. Every time I try to get out and live straight, it presses a £825,000 gem into my palm and convinces me to garotte some union delegate.

9/10

DARK E. SMITH

BEHEMOTH
The Satanist 
Metal Blade

I can get down with this. If you’re going to play blackened death with stratospheric guitar solos and double kick pedals you better be from Gdańsk, and you sure as shit better have a singer who stomped a mud hole in leukaemia’s ass and looks like Nick Zedd. Plus, these guys have been around for 23 years, and according to our market-research lady (hi Julie!) that’s even older than you, so show some respect, tweens.

6/10

KARA GARGA

BONG Stoner Rock Ritual Productions

Recently, somewhere around their 472nd recording of a live “ritual” released on a limited edition run of 23 beer mats, Bong stopped being pretty good on record and started being fucking awesome. Their thing is still improvised psychedelic drone metal but one senses that they’ve started using better studios – or started using studios full stop – and now spend as much time setting up the sonics of the recording as they do making sure the atomiser is full of high-grade pollen. They now have a distorted guitar and sitar tone so utterly lysergic that if they wanted they could simply release an album of two 35-minute long tracks of one chord played over and over again. Which of course is exactly what they’ve done. Mind-blowingly good.

10/10

SMOKEY BACON

FUTURE ISLANDS Singles 4AD

There is something utterly preposterous about Baltimore’s leading – and probably only – practitioners of post-wave, Future Islands. They manage to sound like every half-forgotten, disposable synthpop heartbreak song of the early 80s, from “First Picture of You” by Lotus Eaters to “I Ran” by Flock of Seagulls via “Feels Like Heaven” by Fiction Factory. However preposterous or not, they will thrust a fist straight through your ribcage and squeeze your heart tightly until the ventricles squeak and your eyes well up.

9/10

BLACK MAN RAY 

THE WAR ON DRUGS Lost in the Dream Secretely Canadian

The War on Drugs has been a massive fucking failure. I don’t care what anyone says, the devil’s lettuce has ruined a once great nation. Take, for example, Colorado, a state now reduced to broken dreams, empty packets of Sour Patch kids, and 45-year-old men who think it’s totally OK to be devoid of any kind of commitment. The War on Drugs may or may not be part of a plan, but they do have a song on their new record called “Red Eyes” which is what happens to you if you spend too long on the computer or something. If I wrote for Pitchfork I’d probably describe it in a really flowery way, but to be honest it just sounds like every car journey with my parents.

6/10

BRYAN RAZZLE

OWLS Two Polyviynl

What with Slint cracking open their archive and Owls breaking a 13-year hiatus and, oh I don’t know, The Sea And Cake probably having a new record out sometime or other, perhaps this is the moment that math-rock swings back into fashion. Experimental rock will again teem with men who look like socially awkward librarians, soundmen will leaf through ancient ledgers to learn the best way of micing up a vibraphone, and anyone caught playing in a straightforward time-signature will have their tickets to see King Crimson’s six-drummer line-up immediately

revoked. Yeah, the glory days are back.

5/10

LES PAUL

KOUDEDE Guitars From Agadez Vol. 7 Sublime Frequencies

If Koudede’s rolling desert blues sounds roughly similar to the uptempo Afro rock produced by Tamikrest and Tinariwen, that is perhaps not surprising as they are all members of the embattled Tuareg of the Sub-Sahara, east of Mali. In typical Sublime Frequencies style, these are raw recordings that are not face-scrubbed for Western consumption, like some of the work by the other two bands. Instead, they are live documents that are urgent, passionate and ultimately tragic, as Koudede died in a car crash shortly after they were recorded.

8/10

JOHN DORAN

THE BODY I Shall Die Here RVNG Intl.

Ever since their real artistic breakthrough, 2011’s All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, the Chuckle Brothers have really cemented their reputation as one of the most oppressive and nihilistic bands on the face of the planet. This album is more bowel-prolapsing bass sludge, breezeblock-hitting, reinforced-concrete drum- ming and the anguished howl of Homer Simpson every time he smacks his head on a door frame. However, this time out, their meditations on suicide, depression, apocalypse and the death of all things have been remixed by gothic electrician par excellence Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak. So astoundingly grim, it’s actually quite beautiful.

9/10

TO ME, TO YOU (WITH A SHOTGUN)

METRONOMY Love Letters Because

Oo-er, missus, that Joe Mount is a right one and no mistake! He’s only gone and made his new album in fackin’ Hackney, right round the corner from the chi-chi Chatsworth Road. And what do you know: Love Letters is a chintzy ’n’ tuneful bargain-bin blast of Sparks and Jona Lewie and Elvis Costello that doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of The English Riviera, a cool, classy, us-against-the-world romance which seemed to suggest Metronomy were about to burst out of their funky nerd chrysalis to become a beautiful pop butterfly. Clearly it’s all going swimmingly, but Mount’s self-conscious soul-searching gives this album an introspective flavour that doesn’t always sit with his happy-go-lucky demeanour. Between the junkshop synthpop and Motown be-bop, it seems Metronomy are no longer just here for the fun things in life. Hashtag sad face, baby.

7/10

LES PANINI

THE MEN
Tomorrow’s Hits
Sacred Bones

Sorry, but what the fuck happened to The Men? I

totally dug their Swans-y, noise-rocking direction to the extent that I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when they pulled out a harmonica and started tootling away a couple of albums back. But here is what such lack of vigilance brings. A collection of rock ’n’ roll jams that would doubtless confidently describe themselves as “rootin’-tootin’”, a weak and aimless mess apparently under the erroneous impression it is Crazy Horse multiplied by The E-Street Band. It’s enough to make you want to track down rock’s gravestone just so you can tramp the dirt down.

1/10

NED BUNGER

REAL ESTATE Atlas Domino

Sunlight, flecked with the dulled yet promising satu- ration of a better time, pours in through the window. Filled with the warmth that only comes from company, a couple with the permanent air of an OkCupid meet-up sit opposite each other, nervously giggling about something stupid. It’s basically a scene from Garden State 2 and yes, I hate myself, but it’s also my life within this record of pure hand-holding fire. Seriously, it’s a fucking cliché and I don’t even like coffee but all I want right now is to buy all the caramel macchiatos and play with your fingers, making shapes in your palm.

7/10

RYAN BASSIL

KOEN HOLTKAMP Motion Thrill Jockey

Koen Holtkamp may sound like a character from ’Allo ’Allo! but is in fact one half of cosmic voyagers Mountain, presumably so-named because they produce music that suggests standing atop a psychedelic peak where the air is purest, the sun scorches your retinas and a visitation from a Kangchenjunga demon or the Kali Yuga is more likely than usual. This solo LP isn’t your usual case of alpha synth fetishists playing “Who’s got the biggest Buchla” as Holtcamp isn’t a purist and uses a variety of soft synths and computers in conjunction with his creaking analogue gear and electric guitars. And the end result is all the more breathtaking for it.

8/10

HERR FLICK

DAMAGED BUG Hubba Bubba Castle Face

If you have any good sense you will have recently poured one out for Thee Oh Sees, the still-warm San Francisco group who single-handedly justified the existence of garage rock these last few years. But do not weep too loud or too long, for this ending marks frontman John Dwyer’s return to his old mercurial ways. Before Thee Oh Sees, Dwyer bounded through a bonanza of wonderful mini-projects – Zeigenbock Kopf, Pink and Brown, The Hospitals and the mighty Coachwhips – and Damaged Bug feels very much in this instinctual, zero-prevarication style. Here, then, we have a cranky synth-punk project apparently inspired by interstellar travel, Brian Eno and strong ganja. Often quite a bit silly, but on “Eggs at Night” and “Photograph”, a thing of weirdo beauty, too.

7/10

FLORENCE RIDA