Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: Lovelock / ‘Burning Feeling’ (Internasjonal)

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★★★☆☆

The fresh-faced, nubile electro of Steve Moore cannot help but dangle on the high wire overlooking the cheese pit. After all, in space travel, the preferred mode of travel for Burning Feeling, the moon is supposedly made of cheese, what with the Whitesnake guitars on “Love Reaction” and “Maybe Tonight” almost overdosing on hairspray. Using ’80s fluorescent flourishes to tag along with the cosmic disco bandwagon (“The Fog”), Lovelock plays it relatively safe and isn’t committed to putting much of a personal stamp on stock sounds. So if you find passages cringeworthy, they were like that to begin with: these eight tracks sound exactly how you remember the synth-pop/electro experience, and Moore is unequivocal in his goals. In places your mind will wander to protein pills for breakfast lunch and dinner, and galaxy commuters playing the ultimate odyssey-writing superhero.

The unavoidable fixation on the space-bound spreads to the touching, beautifully poised lovesong “Don’t Turn Away,” and the digital meets analogue, astronaut meets girl “South Beach Sunrise”, doing chillout that will live through the ages. The astral setting also provides a shiny sense of both peril mixed with excitement streaking across “New Age of Christ,” as Lovelock departs through a thick fog of dry ice. Easy listening that has traveled through time, and is conversant in all dimensions.
File under: Zombi, Gianni Rossi, Titan

Album Review: Addison Groove / ‘Transistor Rhythm’ (50 Weapons)

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★★★☆☆

Antony Williams will forever be judged by the irrepressible “Footcrab.” If you’re after more of the same crowd-slaying, booty bass-beating juke that sends vocal samples spinning in the middle of a game of sonic tetherball, you do get cruder incarnations “Bad Things” and “Beeps” both featuring Spank Rock, and “Starluck” dishing out drum machine punishment. The rest of his debut LP refers to his breathless calling card, but in a slower and chunkier format of torrential up-down drum kicks and cowbells, and Chicago prototypes dragged down by low-end weight.

Whether athletically muscular or inexplicably ponderous (“Ass Jazz”), Transistor Rhythm stands for a kind of primal tribalism, with “Dance of the Women” mixing up high-speed carnival and indigenous flavors. In fact it can get a little too clunky and unsophisticated — “Sooperflooper” and its fizzy riff are out of keeping – as Addison Groove strips down the ultramodern facade to create a weirdly clever paradox, or con trick, of future-past, until he has cast himself as “Homosapien beating drum harder and harder.”

A compact album that barges through the front door, rattles the place and leaves its quaking upon a relatively hasty exit, Williams is unable to replicate his hit work with something that you’re happy to be thrown around the club by. At the very least, those that just love noise will get on board immediately.
File under: Headhunter, Lazer Sword, Blawan

Album Review: Soul Clap / ‘EFUNK’ (Wolf + Lamb)

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★★★★☆

Cool is such a difficult thing to achieve. You can’t try too hard to get to it, but being blasé about it usually digs its own hole. Soul Clap reach the C word by carefully guiding space-bound electro away from sleazy environs, while maintaining a sexual appetite.

“The Alezby Inn” is coded for something salacious, the one fantasy tome where Eli Goldstein and Charles Levine ooze with the oily charm of a celestial pimp spitting booty bass poetry. But, as ever, their understanding is that powering down means the sensual can come to the fore. “Islands in Space” heads to make-out point, and “Ecstasy,” featuring Mel Blatt from past UK girl group All Saints, slopes off to the parents’ bedroom away from the house party. Meanwhile, the prowess of “Clapping Song” isn’t too cool to laugh at itself, given that it comes equipped with a kazoo symphony.

Boldly playing up to electro-soul nostalgia, R&B popstrels “Take It Slow” and “Let It Go” confidently remind that keyboard is king, and the same self-belief runs through the risks the album takes. “Need Your Lovin” is yet another re-up of Baby D/The Korgis – now seasoned with Salt n Pepa – and “Let’s Groove On,” with nods to Doug Lazy and Chad Jackson, toys with irony and knowledge. Soul Clap: cool, but without rubbing everyone’s nose in it.
File under: Chromeo, Egyptian Lover, Jack Splash

Album Review: Kris Menace / ‘Electric Horizon’ (Compuphonic)

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★★★★☆

Kris Menace is a firm believer that euphoria will take care of itself if you let it develop naturally. Time and again across his follow-up to Idiosyncrasies there are moments of elevation and jubilation, bearing all of the riffs a Balearic paradise could ask for in a higher state of “Discopolis.” The key is not to lay it on thick or ostentatiously; such knowledge of how a dance floor works (while not being a source of revolution there are tracks that overlap too much into one another, about the only criticism Menace has to wear), makes you wonder how so many others fail in turning the same essence into an overblown fireball of cheese. The album title couldn’t be more clued up either. Even the format is a winning throwback of thirteen, vocal-less tracks.

With reference points to bygone clubbing via keyboard also not missing the point (the divine “Fly Me to the Moon”), electro-house is measured precisely by the German, who always seems to have extra time to push forward with his bass pads and twinkling synths, with no discernible drop in BPMs. “Trusting Me” shows the tactics aren’t always lightweight either, with “We Are” appearing to want to fade to grey, and crisp and clean electro punches “Timeless” and “eFeel” make movements as mesmeric as following a particular thong clad video of Menace’s. A summer spellbinder to warm you until winter.
File under: Junior Jack, Mainframe, Lifelike