Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: James Teej / ‘Eight Bit Ocean’ (Last Night on Earth)

Matt Oliver 1 Comment

James Teej Eight Bit Ocean

★★★☆☆

Teej fosters a strength setting up a set of deep house that prides itself on the exactness of its level head, the Canadian looking you square in the eye and daring you to test him. Completely, authoritatively in control, he’s not here to lift you up, or maybe even entertain you; his task-mastery, ignorant to the title’s lo-fi suggestions, pays to pay you physical attention. Pro-fortitude without being stiff or tuneless, color is limited to transient flecks (“Right at Home”), making it a perfect disconnection for the end of the day.

“Liking Your Disorder” couldn’t be any more clinical if it had its own waiting room and surgery hours, one loop engineered into a go-getting, deal-crushing Gordon Gekko of the dance floor, popping tech pep-ups to stay on track. A silent fumer, as losing your head gets your nowhere, Teej’s restraint perhaps comes from the imposition of a limited studio set-up to test itself and show its mettle.

“Disclosure,” dusting off a lava lamp to groove to, and “Leaving the Island,” showing signs of comfort and relaxation and perhaps a grudging admiration for rave, are still laced with a grimace that shows that the deck-hand never takes time off. Teej is much happier preaching his wisdom on “The Last Request” and although not adverse to the neon lights of the club, the notion is dismissible like change petulantly chucked to a beggar. Get your game face on in preparation.

File under: My Favorite Robot, The Kings Arms, Âme

Album Review: Beacon / ‘The Ways We Separate’ (Ghostly International)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Beacon The Ways We Separate

★★★★☆

Sidling up to you with the softest of electronic pop and R&B via some attachment to post-dubstep/meta-bass subsidiaries, Brooklynites Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett stretch their arms wide to show they have a lot of love to give. Except everything’s in miniature, bringing music boxes into the studio to use as a metronome and reimagining the grace of its pirouetting ballerina. However tender and fresh-faced, the presence of an anonymous puppet master watching every move they make shows that beckoning for an embrace isn’t enough.

“Overseer” is that casual, smoke-blowing observer slash noxious voyeur, attempting to move the finger permanently pressed against the album’s lips by slipping in busy signals. Despite wanting to “separate the lies from the truth,” oddly it’s not a cold reception Beacon slink with. Given the construct, humidity is present throughout the softly-judged electronica, though “Late November” is art imitating climate and “Anthem” deals with a wintry air, revelling and revealing itself in low volume textures and enclosed, shadowy spaces. And despite when feelings are made to the contrary, the vocal delivery helps relax ears tricking you into thinking peace is always on the horizon (the assuaging “Studio Audience”).

This as much as anything gives the album its low insistence and quietly scheming coyness, making you worry about how amicable Beacon’s degrees of separation really are. Mullarney and Gossett scatter rose petals en route to the boudoir, but also leave the thorns in your wake.

File under: James Blake, The XX, Emika

Album Review: Andy Cato / ‘Times & Places’ (Apollo)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

andy-cato-times-places

★★★★☆

Owner of a well-worn passport, Andy Cato sidesteps going around the world in 80 raves and creates instrumental reflections out of check-ins, layovers and time to kill. Hotel lobbies, lock-ins, road trips and terminals are his canvas, as the co-captain of the good ship Groove Armada re-masters lost cassettes, audio doodles and sonic postcards, in some cases rebuilding them from scratch to preserve their memory.

Production both plush and tremulous could just well have seen Cato holed up in an orchestrally-extended studio (“The Coastal Path”) for years on end rather than revisiting a traveller’s scrapbook. Lots of wise electronica, trip-hop kickbacks, free and open chillout and back to mine strums bump in time to the wheels of the pick-up truck Cato thumbs a lift from. A sense of the open road/world does not make for a cultural compare and contrast. It’s more a means of de-ringing ears and finding a happy place when the life of the jetsetter sometimes yearns for home.

Here lies the album expressive lean; everything’s fairly buoyant and in the moment, save for a couple of sterner border checkpoints, dismissing the dullness of any waiting room by looking for its next session under the stars (“Back from Castlemorton,” “Rear Window”) or hitting a secret spot only his inner circle knows of. Very media-savvy as well (“Abbey Road Jam,” “North from Montparnasse” as a boy of summer), it’s a fine companion for your own travels or when returning to terra firma.

File under: Andrew Bayer, Anthiliawaters, Windsurf

Compilation Review: ‘Fabric 69: Sandwell District’ (Fabric)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Fabric 69 Sandwell District

★★★★☆

The comeback of techno X-factors Sandwell District is a meticulous unsheathing of tongs and hammer. Protecting their territory, setting a scene of grim isolation on an eerily quiet battle-scarred backdrop, Function and Regis draw out their pincer movement that you know is coming, but are still thrilled by when it develops the shadows. Suffice to say you have to buy into this protracted build-up if it’s just you and the stereo for company, but Fabric patrons will value the claustrophobia driven to banging down the doors.

The liquid drops of a Terminator finding one another, trying to connect with outside frequencies as the balaclava beats find rhythm and range, Fiedel’s “Andreas” becomes the layer down of the gauntlet, the flicker of the switch, and away Sandwell go. Gristly techno that bangs to a metallic pulse is classically taught (JPLS, Rrose), yet you don’t really care once the kick drum has found its voice. Just occasionally pausing to lick its lips (Carl Craig, Mark Ernestus), Markus Suckut’s “Hunt” rattles and reviles as a snake oozing with venom as mercury spills across the boiler room, the decks’ tone arms being used as thumb screws endorsed by Untold’s “Motion the Dance”, dropping wincing voodoo shattering rare brightness and hope.

Having proceeded like an intense, heart-weakening exorcism, the mix’s last quarter sounds a little cleaner. The toying process is now in effect, the heat brought back to a simmer, the physical battle won so time can be spent getting inside your head.

File under: Surgeon, Plastikman, Trevino