Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: MOTOR / ‘Man Made Machine’ (CLRX)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★☆☆

MOTOR are not a mild mannered, mirror-gazing electro unit. With their synthesisers played with knuckledusters and with a stellar guestlist of Gary Numan, Depeche Mode’s Martin L Gore and Billie Ray Martin, MOTOR’s Bryan Black and Oly Grasset take simple mechanics and pump them full of anti-preening agent (they save the catwalk soundtracks for their days off). They aren’t over-vamping with animosity either, but as with Martin on “Hyper Lust,” the warpath is bearing the brunt of their occupancy and shows pop doesn’t have to pretty in pink.

Hang on though, one skeptical observer asks, aren’t MOTOR cyber–punks? And, as with the Numan feature “Pleasure in Heaven” and Douglas McCarthy sounding like an Alice Cooper droid on “The Knife,” isn’t that old news?’ Well…quite simply MOTOR kick it louder than most, arming laptops with rocket launchers and proudly beating a Euro-rooted drum. Even if the CPU science can be a little oversimplified (“Autographic”), the theater of piano requiem “Auotmne” helps turn the whole piece into a board-treading compu-drama, stirring up digital emotions but always intense at whatever end of the scale. The title track, almost feeding Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” through a fibre-optic shredder, makes a stomping din revelling in arena-sized conditioning, and with the equally dominant “Control,” MOTOR have the potential to swallow stadia whole.
File under: The Japanese Popstars, Jimmy Edgar, The Presets

Album Review: Blockhead / ‘Interludes After Midnight’ (Ninja Tune)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★☆☆

Tony Simon drops off instrumentalism back to when trip-hop was a misunderstood. Sometimes this is all you want — the prophetic title does mean that at least Blockhead makes for decent bedtime listening, stirring in nice folk/ethnic/nursery flavors, as on “Panic in Funkytown,” in the vein of last album The Music Scene. The best results lie in the trippier and tranquilizing tracks with more of a game plan to slip away into the night. “Hungover Like Whoa” is like a cooling sponge scraping across a needy forehead, with “Midnight Blue” explicitly miserable.

Sticking to a beats-as-beats theory, a smoker’s or advertiser’s delight, makes a fifth album disappointingly stubborn from a lauded producer. All Interludes After Midnight does is bring up the same old names from hip-hop-tinged collages from way back when. Rather than samples being designed by patchwork, everything is called from a queue after waiting its turn, and are part of an ever steady pace. It’s a reliable record if an unadventurous one, teasing you with what might have been, and though it can never be accused of being half-cocked (or even particularly flat-sounding), Blockhead emits an ambivalence leaning more towards the functional than the inspirational.
File under: RJD2, 2econd Class Citizen, DJ Krush

Compilation Review: ‘The Best of Perception & Today Records’ (BBE)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★★☆

Despite being an imprint that only enjoyed a moderate lifespan from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s, NYC’s Perception Records has an enviable back catalogue of funk, jazz, soul and the exotic links around it, ripe for cherry picking and bringing back to the masses. The ears of hip-hop fans will be alerted to the sources of samples (Raekwon and The Perceptionists but two), thanks to DJ Spinna, a none more capable beat miner who always maximizes in situations like these, and on a like-minded history appreciator like BBE. Some of the names speak for themselves — Dizzy Gillespie, Astrud Gilberto (just as sweet as her time enthusing about Ipanema), The Fatback Band, to the researchable The Albert and The Eight Minutes.

Everything is super slick, from blood, sweat and tears laid on the line to slow jams ticking over nicely (Bobby Rydell), and despite covering 30 tracks over two discs, everything gets it groove on in sharp bursts leaving ample room for zealously extended horn solos and guitar stairways to heaven – step forward, Jon Bartel and Julius Brockington getting busy on the organ, and Tyrone Washington threatening to blow his lungs out. Sunday morning, hot coffee and Perception/Today on your player — not a bad way to get a head start on the advancing week.
File under: Black Ivory, Wanda Robinson, JJ Barnes

Album Review: de la Mancha / ‘The End* of Music’ (Karaoke Kalk)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

★★★☆☆

Swedish group de la Mancha have heard about The End* of Music, and are not happy about the situation at all. Mournful acoustica and lingering rock with moderately angry outbursts in ashen surf-pop, the sophomore effort of Jerker Lund and Dag Rosenqvist may sound as if it has flowers in its hair, but the conditions in which they set up – grey skied, wallowing and wailing, shuffling feet — means said flowers are rarely in bloom for too long. An untainted, occasionally unplugged sound is broken up by the requisite echo really forcing home the despondency of their jangles and proselytizing, assisted by the pleads of the bluegrass-streaked “Under a Leaden Sky” and Thom Yorke/Gary Lightbody-ish “Erase.” See, the forecast isn’t great as it moves into a kind of grungy folk crossroads. Meanwhile, “Hidden Mountains” is like the lone cowboy making his way home and does offer a shard of semi-celestial hope.

Overall then, there’s one setting of the melodramatically, baggily wronged, building and releasing around the edges of walls of sound, that proves Swedish pop doesn’t have to be all smiles and sunbeams. Though dejected, it stays strong and doesn’t teeter on the verge of collapse (piano elegy “Willow Lane” considers throwing it all away), meaning that de la Mancha are best listened to somewhere dark, but where you can let in just a ray of daylight.
File under: Jasper TX, Sigur Ros