Records

WOLVES IN THE
THRONE ROOM

THE BRANDT BRAUER
FRICK ENSEMBLE

MORBUS CHRON

MAVERICK SABRE

Consensus has it that Lil Wayne’s ninth album isn’t much cop and actually a bit shit. It’s true that there are moments that slip the wrong side of perfunctory, but when you consider the clamour for Tyler’s slothful effort,

Tha Carter IV

is a comparative masterpiece. Plus it has “6 Foot 7 Foot”—the best rap track of the last three years.

MABEL SIZZURP

KUEDO

Severant

Planet Mu

Kuedo is Jamie Teasdale, once half of Bristol’s industrial-strength dubstep unit Vex’d. He’s sacked off the dickhead-friendly wobblers for modernist techno laced with eastern chimes and juke-inspired stutter. “Truth Flood” and “Whisper Fate” gleam with the sort of serene clarity that makes most dance music sound rubbish.

CHILL DAVE

Back in the early 80s, evil Tories invented “fun” to buy off the working classes. Concerned that long raincoats and German philosophy might not be satisfying the nation’s youth, Factory responded with special miserabilist club tracks that allowed you to dance without losing that all-important gravitas that only deadly earnest white-guy monotones can convey. Obviously no one bought any of it, unless it was by those blokes who used to be in Joy Division. Which is handy because these tracks sound a lot fresher the first time than they do after six listens.

STEVE WHY

QUANTIC

The Best of Quantic

Tru Thoughts

With his goatee and massive jazz-funk vibes, Quantic’s Will Holland has always been a man out of time. He even left the UK to live in Colombia so he could more easily soak up the local cumbia and latin sounds on the beach while sipping a mojito that costs 3 pence. This round-up of highlights from his first decade on Tru Thoughts takes in cuts from Quantic Soul Orchestra, Flowering Inferno and the Limp Twins and is worth a dabble. Not convinced? Just check Mark Ronson’s glowing testimony in the press notes: “I’m fully aware of Quantic’s importance in the new soul/jazz scene.”

INSTANT SHARMA

L-VIS 1990

Neon Dreams

PMR

As one half of Night Slugs, L-Vis 1990 continues the wash and brush-up operation on London clubland after the nastiness of grime and surliness of dubstep. Somewhere between Adamski and early-00s Chemical Brothers, the tasteful songs and gently trancy ambience slip down like a lazy Sunday afternoon. But if

Neon Dreams

gets any more polite it’ll have to move out to the suburbs and enrol its kids in faith schools.

SHEEP BLADDER

ALI RENAULT

S/t

Cyber Dance

Having left his former group Heartbreak’s Italo-disco in a discarded codpiece somewhere, Ali Renault toughens up with this pleasingly big-bottomed album of early-80s roboboogie. Sometimes it sounds like one of John Carpenter’s themes, at others like a ZTT away day in

Warriors

-era New York. And then he does his best to ruin it by getting one of his Italo heroes to sing like Bernie Sumner with a head cold. For the rest, though, it’s a va-va-voom.

SKYHAWK HUNTER

TROPICS

Parodia Flare

Planet Mu

Imagine if your job was to sit and write really detailed descriptions of chillwave bands every day. You’d spend 50 weeks a year trying to think of new words for “ethereal” and “dreamy” and “hammock”, and then for ten days straight you’d probably just sit in a dark room that smells of burning plastic, listening to jackhammer techno. Anyway, this Tropics album sounds extremely ethereal and—um, sorry, I think someone’s at the door—gotta go!

DEAN FUNK

JUSTICE

Audio, Video, Disco

Ed Banger/Because

Last we saw Xavier and Gaspard, they were fucking groupies in tour bus bunks, firing automatic weaponry and glassing drunk people in car parks in Romain Gavras’ rockumentary

A Cross the Universe

. If you were thinking this means that on their second album Justice might turn into Led Zeppelin or Mötley Crue, though, think the opposite: they’ve actually turned into Supertramp.

Audio, Video, Disco

is silky soft-rock and perky disco-funk in what we now recognise as a very French mould, and while it’s all held in place with those familiar concussive beats, the fact one song prominently features a flute solo means we’re going to call this “quite a departure”.

JEAN SAUCISSON

DEATH IN VEGAS

Trans-Love Energies

Portobello

Seven years on from the last Death In Vegas album and

Trans-Love Energies

, like all their records, is pretty cool but isn’t quite as good as it thinks it is. Nice to see Dicky Fearless still rocking the hobo-hipster look, and “Your Loft, My Acid” and “Witch Dance”, both with Katie Stelmanis somersaulting over sinuous bleeps, are tremendous. But calling songs “Coum” and “Drone Reich” in 2011? That’s a bit naff.

JENNIFER JUPITER

WOLFGANG VOIGT

Kafkatrax

Profan

Now this is what I call German techno. Proper mad old bosh-bosh oompah-oompah woink-woink business knocked out by a man who looks like a 1930s Oxbridge economics don and likes to get stuck in at Berghain from time to time. I’m not even going to pretend to know what this record is “about”; I just want a dark corner, a Funktion-One system and a bag of meow meow.

SUBURBAN DWIGHT

THE FIELD

Looping State of Mind

Kompakt

The Field will never outrun the freshness of his debut, From

Here We Go Sublime

—the greatest promise an album has made about what would happen to you over the next 35 minutes since Earl Brutus’

Tonight You Are the Special One

. Album three finds Axel Willner backing off on the bpm while simultaneously adding two other musicians. God bless his uniquely improvised working methods and all that, but lacking the same techno turbo-thrust jammed behind him, a lot of

Looping State of Mind

feels as though it’s treading glassy Germanic ambient waters without ever fully engaging, like a hovercraft trying to climb a flight of stairs.

GEORGIE GREED

RUSTIE

Glass Swords

Warp

Of the two child-faced Scottish techno savants that Warp signed back in 2009, it’s Hudson Mohawke who’s been busiest, pumping out freaky R&B sex jams like there’s things going on in his filthy imagination that don’t yet have an appropriate soundtrack but really, really need one pronto. Actually, though, I think his LuckyMe compadre Rustie is better. See

Glass Swords

, a splattery melding of 80s keytar pop, chopped-up grime drums and big smears of neon synth that’s so generously tuneful you worry a bit he might use up all the good melodies before anyone else gets a go on them. The only real oversight is that he hasn’t included his best-titled track, “Inside Pikachu’s Cunt”.

NED BUNGER

CLASS ACTRESS

Rapprocher

Carpark

Class Actress are yer typical “lady who sings and is gorgeous” and “bloke who plays synths and is not” combo. It’s a cliché enlivened here by the fact that Mark Richardson (“bloke who is not”) is also a trainee psychoanalyst. I sense a lot of conflict between their id and superego—a childlike desire to participate in the wanton sensuality of early Madonna and Human League records, but one that is suffocated by an overdeveloped superego which blocks desire by refracting it through the deadening lens of hip over-stylisation, emotionally neutering the expressive value of content by making it fit the exacting templates of their forebears. Also: that lass has definitely got penis-envy. Well, you can’t have one, dear.

LARRY LAMBO

WALLS

Coracle

Kompakt

Walls say they “learned to trust the goosebumps” while making the follow-up to 2010’s critically creamed-over debut, which explains why they made it while sitting in a bath of iced water and running their nails down a blackboard. Their second widens the palette to offer more sugar-spun guitars, heartbeat kick-drums and twinkling far-off chimes, plus plenty more music to hang suspended in amniotic fluid by. A subtle, barely noticeable glacier of joy sliding towards you.

FRUITY MCGINTY

ANTICHRIST

Forbidden World

High Rollers

When I heard Antichrist’s second demo “Put to Death” last year, I heralded it as one of the finest ever, rivalling anything from thrash’s mid-80s glory days. The anticipation for the album has been mammoth, especially for a band with no website and only two demos, but unfortunately they’ve left their speed/thrash roots in favour of a more blackened thrash sound. This is a little disappointing because

Forbidden World

doesn’t quite conjure the same vibe of beer-encrusted, over-patched denim vests beaten into the mud at the Banzai Axe Festival in 1985. Still, the nine-minute “Minotaur” has as much Maiden as it has Slayer and the album’s finale whips up feelings of that infamous demo.

LORD DYLAN OF ROCKWELL

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM

Celestial Lineage

Southern Lord

My instincts say that Wolves In the Throne Room, with their farm-dwelling, compost-toilet lifestyle and deep thoughts about spiritual enlightenment, are basically the Grateful Dead gone grim. Thing is, their stock-in-trade—a sort of misty-edged Burzumic charge with gloomy synthesisers and sombre religious orations in the quiet bits—is on the whole so good I don’t actually feel stupid saying things like, “They’re the black metal Godspeed You! Black Emperor, you know.” Well, OK, maybe I feel a bit stupid.

CHARLES HANSON

MORBUS CHRON

Sleepers In the Rift

Pulverised

Swedish death metal has been grinding up against anything that will tolerate it for more than 20 years. Morbus Chron are, alongside Maim, Bastard Priest et al, one of the scene’s future legends, like Entombed and Merciless before them. This Autopsy-style, nightmarish trip through 80s and 90s-influenced death metal might lack some of the menace of their earlier recordings, but

Sleepers In the Rift

will be keeping the winter excruciatingly grim. As frontman Robba said to us last year: “Give me a can of ravioli and a beer and I’ll write you a song.”

TIM ROT

It’s hard to know why Carla Bozulich isn’t better known. She basically makes music that sounds a bit like PJ Harvey, but the PJ Harvey that sounded sinister and driven mad with lust, not the one that’s a bit like an A-level history teacher in a nice dress. The new Evangelista album is a collection of husky confessionals, skeletal blues and squalling strings, and I think it’s probably not going to be that popular because its blend of torrid sex and creeping terror makes you live in fear of your own genitalia.

WALTER DA SOFTY

MAVERICK SABRE

Lonely Are the Brave

Mercury

He may sound like the Finlay Quaye who never heard Bob Marley, but Mav (can we call you Mav?) makes soul music that’s gentle, tuneful and seductive without ever sounding like it was conceived in a bucket of slush and then given an extra dollop of gloop. Frankly, if this doesn’t get you, girls, it’s time to consider that op your older brother always said you should have.

CRASH STEVENS

HOODED FANG

Tosta Mista

Daps Records

Equally split between Black Lips, Mando Diao and the Bees, Hooded Fang’s retro guitar licks are obvious as all hell. There is nothing new here. If there were, they’d probably denounce it as sorcery, hit it with sticks and bury it in a trunk in the back garden. There is, however, a weary croak of true knowledge in singer and head honcho Daniel Lee’s voice—a lick of truth and dash of songwriting gift—that buoys their slender adventures above the bog standard.

KELVIN MACKCRACKERS

WIDOWSPEAK

S/T

Captured Tracks

I love Widowspeak so much. They make wildly beautiful music. There’s a Stevie Nicks-looking girl playing acoustic guitar and singing while a George Harrison-looking guy plays electric guitar and a handsome man who doesn’t look like a celebrity plays a two-piece drum set. Some people think they sound like Mazzy Star, but Mazzy Star never made me feel like I was chasing Laura Palmer through the woods on the last night of her life.

DUDECHAT

REAL ESTATE

Days

Domino

Is it weird that the cutting edge of indie-rock in 2011 sounds like it could’ve been recorded in 1989 in Maidenhead? After the Horrors’

Ride

and Julian Cope tribute

Skying

comes

Days

, Real Estate’s delightful homage to the janglesome swoon of Pale Saints and Felt. The real curveball is that Real Estate are not from Guildford but rather New Jersey and feature shoegaze heartthrob Matt “Ducktails” Mondanile in their ranks. Other than that, this is prime ginger beer and hair slides gear, best listened to while skipping round some provincial cathedral city with a copy of

The Whitsun Weddings

tucked into your duffle coat.

THEYDON BOIS

VERONICA FALLS

S/t

Bella Union

NEON INDIAN

Era Extraña

Static Tongues/

Mom + Pop

A lot of people have wondered how the second real Neon Indian record would sound. The answer is that it’s pretty. I think this is the kind of record I’ll enjoy when I’m not hunting for hits and trying to find clever things to say. It’s certainly a smoother, more produced album than their first, but I like rough sounds, so while it’s not a plus for me it does make the album more likely to be used for soundtracks and commercials.

NICK GAZIN

THE BRANDT BRAUER FRICK ENSEMBLE

Mr Machine

!K7

Woah, wait a minute! This is techno? But played on real instruments? Please excuse me while I pick up the pieces of my tiny mind. In case you missed the meeting, BBF are three serious-looking Germans whose USP is that they aim to emulate the grooves and layers of electronic music using old-school 20th-century gear like drums and guitar. What this means is they sound like any number of uncelebrated late-90s post-rock acts who managed to lock into a rhythm and jam steadily for a few minutes. Performed by a ten-piece band,

Mr Machine

might be looser and jazzier than its predecessor, but this is still stiff, sexless boffin boogie that should’ve stayed in the lab.

CANARY DWARF

GIRLS

Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Turnstile

Girls used to take drugs and the main one was in a God gang or something, which makes him interesting. Their first album,

Album

, is bright and big and exciting. Their second album,

Father, Son, Holy Ghost

, is older and more boring and has a song called “Die” on it which sounds like Queens of the Stone Age wrote the theme tune for a racing game on PlayStation. There is a team of songs in the middle which sound like happy children. How much dancing I did: sometimes rolled my shoulders.

BEN BROOKS

M83

Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Mute

Anthony Gonzalez has written a double album about dreams. In hindsight, this was probably a more predictable move for him than all those rumours that he’d written one about the role of the IMF in the ongoing Eurozone debt crisis. More surprising is that, compared to the John Hughes-mused

Saturdays = Youth

, his dreamland is a far more direct, more vividly pop place. If it were a dream itself, it’d be the one where your dad is there at your high-school reunion, but he’s not actually your dad, he’s a strange amalgam of Nicolas Godin from Air and Washed Out, but with better synth presets.

HAVIN GAINS

I own more Belle & Sebastian albums than there are Belle & Sebastian albums. I have prostrated myself in front of the Popguns and done time for the Field Mice. But bar the gilded wrecking ball genius of “Found Love In a Graveyard” and scratchy-swivelling splendour of “Beachy Head”, it’s been difficult to warm to the cold corpse of Veronica Falls. I’m thinking that maybe going round their house to cross-stitch pictures of Edwyn Collins with them could help me empathise with their often inert, occasionally ploddy indie-pop. Then group sex, obviously. Blokes can leave the room, though. Go on. Off you fuck.

DOMINIC MOHAWK

PRINCE RAMA

Trust Now

Paw Tracks

Selected excerpts from the press release for

Trust Now

: “They left the Hare Krishna farm where they were living to attend art school and form a creative nucleus in Boston… Animal Collective… the album rose to #3 on the New Age Billboard charts”. In short, these people make the Levellers look like the Stooges. They probably don’t even punch cats because it’s “against nature” and won’t torture horses with cigarettes because it’s “bad karma”. Risible world view aside, theirs is one of the most transportational instances of Vedic folk singing we’ve ever stumbled upon—destined to become a cult classic to those who know about these things and to turn up on every Amorphous Androgynous mixtape from here to eternity.

DANNY DEWDROP

RETOX

Ugly Animals

Ipecac

The Locust/Some Girls stalwart Justin Pearson turns down the spaz attack a little for this debut record, allowing a Jesus Lizard or Scratch Acid-esque seepage into the angular battering and stop/start dynamism. Clocking in at a healthy 13 minutes, points are not laboured and the scorched earth policy makes for a welcome table-turning aggression. Potent.

TONY MOLESTER