Reviews

Album Review: Random Soul / ‘Live for the Moment’ (Random Soul)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Random Soul Live for the Moment

★★★☆☆

House so creamy it should come with a napkin, topped with honeyed soul and pointing you toward pool parties sectioned off by velvet ropes, sing-alongs for you to splash around to, and a cast of bejewelled brass and horns players, pitter-patter percussionists, pukka pianists and pick guitarists acting like personal butlers. It’s funky clubbing of sweetness, sunshine and splendour.

Can any vocal, sand-between-toes house music be too blissful, too optimistic, too in love with life? Should the philanthropy of Random Soul’s Yogi and Husky wear a little thin over 74 minutes, there’s a clue is in the title, so no getting agitated by the Australians’ bright and clean sound that’s not going to upset an attractive, well set formula. Nor is it slick to the point of being full of itself (discounting “Are We” and its gratuitous rock solo), or having the divas, damsels and crooners bringing the quickness (“Mysterious” but one smooth operator undressing you with a microphone), constantly brushing their shoulder.

Plus Random Soul know a kick drum when they see one to underpin the live and crisp terrace sessions, the unit able to shift gears from purring, all loving flock pulling back silk sheets (“Gravity”) to greased cougar. Adding a cheeky gatecrashing with the Digital Underground-style “Time to Funk,” where Joshua Heath tells you to dowhatchulike, it’s a debut that will persuade you to quit your job and board the next plane Oz-wards.

File under: Ananda Project, Raw Artistic Soul, Reel People

Updated ‘Remiix Marc Houle’ App Released Today

Darren Ressler Leave a Comment

Marc Houle Remiix

Revered Canadian artist Marc Houle has released an updated version of his Remix Marc Houle app for IOS. The revised version features 28 new basslines and 32 new drum loops produced by Marc Houle himself. Developed by the Berlin-based tech company Liine, the app allows the user to take elements of a track and reimagine it on an iPhone or iPad, using EQ, delay, loops, samples, volume and reverb controls. Once the track has been completed, the app allows the mobile producer to master it and then share on their social networks. The Marc Houle Remiix app also contains an  features an array of tracks from Houle’s discography including “Bay of Figs,” “Edamame,” “Mooder,” “On It,” “Porch,” “Triple E” and “Undercover.” The app sells for $2.99 in the iTunes app store and can be purchased here.

Album Review: Bonobo / ‘The North Borders’ (Ninja Tune)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Bonobo The North Borders

★★★★☆

Simon Green broadens an established electronic compass with exceptional composure. Beginning with opening track “First Fires” you may be expecting something reclusive, hardened by the cold or quietly embittered. Instead it’s a balance of the honest — Bonobo dotting the sunshine with blackspots — and the tender and reassuring, burning incense and burbling at one with nature. With an embrace always available within a layout of organic meets electronic via an orchestral-folk double team, Green’s emotional awareness is never grandiose but always provides a crutch to lean on.

At the album’s core, a chime structure links rustically refined club grooves and “Emkay” doing picture postcard two-step for the discerning headphone wearer. Acting as a key cog to a chain of instrumental events, set off in perfect synch from a perfectionist’s tool shed, it makes the folk elements and wooded components intertwine with a satisfying snap through styles. Post-dubstep/après-bass roll “Know You” makes light of the heaviness crowding round it, neo-soul-improver “Antenna” chases butterflies to extend the footloose feeling, and hip-hop conscious instrumentals “Jets” and “Ten Tigers” safeguard a richness that stays limber.

Biting its tongue at noodly or twee, being in touch with on-trend sounds gets to nestling comfortably inside your head while introducing themselves to your soul. Beats to picnic by, for messing about on the river to, or hiding away with – and that’s not to forget the requisite alerting of advertising strategists along the way.

File under: Andreya Triana, Zero dB, Four Tet

Album Review: Sweatson Klank / ‘You, Me, Temporary” (Project Mooncircle)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Sweatson Klank You Me Temporary

★★★☆☆

He wipes away the night before from his eyes in a bid to present himself as a high definition canon. Pointing and clicking to a world of cloud rap and polygon R&B, he plays up to the themes of fantasy, watching Vikter Duplaix offering ladies a ride on his Light Cycle on “Waiting”. Maximalist and dubstep-ish manoeuvers, with some blurry chillwave poured over neo-soul, join his amalgamation that prefers convergence over single file: the slow jazz injection of the provocative “Morning After Pills” is a runaway rebel, still found dragging its heels.

Cruising the beat scene, the synth formulae of LA’s Sweatson Klank stretch and slink, wax and wane and impact like slowed thunder and lightning, bouncing off bass notes, calmly, at times impassively floating in fluorescent waters. A sometime cause for vocalists to sound too hushed, as with Pat Parra on “Still Dark,” Klank rolls as a slow tide, sinking voices on the soaring yet dissatisfied burial at sea “Chasing You”, though Doc Illingsworth is as animated as “15 Bucks” and “Till The End” dictate.

The sex talk of Deniro Farrar turns the galaxian glides into a slightly heavier, dourer mass, and Mobb Deep sampled on “Contemplate” is a curious adornment when opening the doorway to relaxation. Klank exhales the modern unreality (that most from the beat scene are on) of everything being thought activated from the comfort of a virtual couch, so smoke will get in your ears.

File under: Tropics, Take, Lockah