Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: Metope / ‘Black Beauty’ (Areal)

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★★★☆☆

Michael Schwanen plies stylishness with distrust, and signposts warmth and comfort with an ‘enter at your own risk’ warning. Sophisticatedly tense deep house implores that contrary to popular opinion, you shouldn’t let yourself go. It’s a strangely engaging spectacle of a dance floor lined with glumness — not manic depressive, but as if the threat of a thunderstorm may sweep across the decks at any time.

Add to this a small but visible bluegrass theme — steel strings, verandas under streaky purple skies — and Metope earns his spurs. The country-twanged “Rough Romance” presents a correlation where the deeper the beats go, the more uptight the grooves becomes as well, enough to scowl at you from beneath its Stetson; while “So Cutoff” is the kind of rawhide groove local damsels will feel drawn to despite bad vibes being etched across its bassline.

“No Self-Control” feels more immersed in dimly lit, smoke and mirrors deep house culture, redirecting the flow of heat as it goes. “Deep Sheep” is a surprising hard stepper as the vibe moves inside and the sourness begins to burn. Reverting more to deep house type and away from the prairie, Metope goes a little off the boil/too on the money, but does seem to have some of the tension taken out of his shoulders as a result. You’d rather he skirt than adopt convention; either way he’s always a picture of concentration and cunning.

File under: Basteroid, Beachcoma, DJ Koze, Fur Coat

Album Review: Guillaume & The Coutu Dumonts / ‘Twice Around the Sun’ (Circus Company)

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★★★★☆

At times kinda kitsch and kinda retro – the very name of the band sounds velvet-crushed and cabaret-bound – but yet hella upfront and pretty damn catchy. With a deep house and oozy electro-funk profile, Guillaume Coutu Dumont and his Sound Effects collaborators catch the sound of the high life that’s been tainted, or play to a fashionista wronged; the title track shows the dark side of the glamour and glitz with immobilized R&B.

Labelled as subversive house music for GCD’s third album, “Morning Gin” is only par for the course in a deep house direction, and “Constellation” is cool if far from an uprising in ice-cube melting, horn-cooing clubbing. Despite these spots of modesty seeming to pass the time before inspiration strikes back, the sun’s double orbit is definitely capable of killing the chit-chat with a grand entrance and wanting to get everyone from dignitaries to socialites moving to the same beat.

“Ten Thousand Feet” brings a certain filtered glamour to the disco, twinkling its way until it’s moonlit. “Discotic Space Capsule” breaks the dress code with an acid-flecked roller telling everyone to jack while striking a pose with its out-there keys. Picking up on the acid theme, “Man, Woman and Soul” sweeps from a low key foundation as Guillaume isn’t as big a show-off as first thought, quietly and craftily goes about broadening the album’s range and shape-shifting the slickness.

File under: Art Department, Daphni, Dave Aju

Album Review: Lukid / ‘Lonely at the Top’ (Werkdiscs/Ninja Tune)

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★★★☆☆

Luke Blair doesn’t give into the bravado of a chest out-rapper with a statement like that. The context to Lonely at the Top does deal in loneliness though, an enigmatic clash of electronica defined by a lack of sympathizers, seemingly having it all but unable to conquer insecurities.

Beginning as a lounging blur and fade of color, unsteady on its feet after popping one too many corks as the classiness bedraggles come the end of the evening, Lukid strikes out with disjointedly echoing episodes. Cold sweat rains from its temples as “Manchester” sends chillwave’s temperature plummeting, a straggle of sounds and misted tangles meaning emotions are contradictory. Wallowing one minute to the beatless humbling/detox of “Snow Theme,” Lukid then parks himself next door to the boomingly irrational dubstep/techno “This Dog Can Swim.”

Jumping from one emotion to the next in pretty quick time could stereotype Lukid with a convenient label of ‘just’ being a complex character. Lonely at the Top has troubles, both figuratively and with its flow pushed and pulled, but is seeking to get better and always treats ears. “Riquelme” reaches deep house with a sore head, yet “USSR” and “The Life of the Mind” are much more calming influencers. Blair has a decent album of melancholy electronica that avoids sounding washed out, while being peppered with aggravated blows that play their part.

File under: Anenon, Arclight, Actress

Album Review: Stefan Goldmann / ’17:50′ (Macro)

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★★☆☆☆

What is it exactly, Macro man Stefan Goldmann of German house and techno’s front pages, that happens at ten to six in the evening then? It’s time to learn a lesson about something from nothing, and how old technology can sound future-bound while pitched sample-free. More scientific formula then than place on the day’s to-do list, initially the results are more a victory for sterility and efficiency, a feat of engineering that won’t hang up its white coat. “Carrion Crow” is such a demonstration of hazard alarms and beats calibrated by stopwatch, displacing the presence of Seinfeld bass. The automated start does develop, Goldmann feeding brainfood to the machinery so as to make it more user-friendly, and progressing the dance floor pull, literally hammering out the kinks from the iron-wrought minimalism of “Rigid Chain.”

With its off-sync riff, “The Outness Queens” goes from art exhibit to leftfield deep techno mover, then back into some weird kids show shanty that is the sloppily inane “Manila Grind”. The prolonged simplicities of “Adem,” aiming for less with a semi-intentionally Egyptian-sounding riff, could easily drive you round the bend. It seems a simple solution, but when the basics get bolstered, as on “Empty Suit” with its clatter of hi-hats and synth convergence, the grittiness is for the better. It becomes apparent that the diagrams and textbook theories aren’t translating to disc, and Goldmann is down a component or two.

File under: Finn Johannsen, Barricade, Fennesz