Gorgeous Ambient Cover Art

One of the things I've enjoyed most about 2009 has been my exposure to ambient music. There's more about this to come, but enough to say now that this was quite unplanned. I'm not sure why, or for what reason, I first found myself building upon a collection that had previously only held Global Communication's 76:14 and some Ulrich Schnauss. Perhaps it was the entirely accidental discovery of Tied & Tickled Trio's clinical but whimsical and intimate Aelita in a stack of promos courtesy of the wonderful people at PopMatters. Perhaps it was the discovery of iTunes smart playlists to tie together all the music that I might arbitrarily consider ambient with those albums that I would be comfortable boxing into an 'ambient' genre:

So it's largely by accident that I've realized that my (admittedly meagre) 'ambient playlist contains the most beautiful cover art (apart from, perhaps, the 'hard bop' playlist).

Some examples:

Eluvium – Talk Amongst the Trees: the perfect cover for an album in which themes precipitate out of heavy ghostly textures, delivering with sudden familiarity feelings of consolation and companionship and a golden haze, though they at first seem distant and opaque and cloaked in satin noise.

Ulrich Schnauss – Goodbye: the album is actually a severe disappointment after the innocent beauty of Far Away Trains Passing By and A Strangely Isolated Place, but what a cover. The lure of this image keeps the album on my iPod even though I never listen to it.

Keith Jarrett – Changeless: the space and circle on the cover suggest at once the broad textures, atmospheres, and themes of the music; the rough edges of the figure suggest the tolerance -- actually the showcasing, the celebration -- of imperfection in the album's textures; the understated typography for the title implies the relative lack of emphasis on narrative -- melody -- throughout the album. "Endless" is, by far, the standout track, an epic performance in which Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette conjure the turbulence and beauty and calm and capricious rage and peace of the ocean.

The Fun Years – Baby, It's Cold Outside: a cover which, like the album, is a composite of unbreachable strangeness, overwhelming its components and becoming something both close and distant; but in which moments of lightning clarity appear brilliantly against moody and indiscernible backgrounds.

Solo Andata – Fyris Swan: delicate, shimmering, ambiguous surfaces suggest a music distilled from the air, a music made by subtracting elements, by overturning sounds to reveal their undersides. Noises that meld and jar and rest and agitate adjacent to one another in an order both formal and arbitrary. "Together Apart" is, as has been pointed out elsewhere, liquid sex, majestic and intimate; its wooden and aluminium instrumentation is a distant cousin to the textures on RZA's score to Jim Jarmusch's 1999 film Ghost Dog; its sway is tactile and coaxing; its promises are eternal but its touch momentary. But -- hauntingly beautiful as it is -- it is not the strongest track on the album: "Midnight" sings of forgiveness, swims in time, shimmers around the inside of your head, and redeems the minutes that you dare not to sleep for fear of losing a whisper of luminescent beauty. Wonderful.

Lawrence English – Kiri No Oto: like the music, an image of dense richness, though its first impressions are those of an immensity which is cathedral in its scale and non-negotiable in its terms. I first listened this while flying from a Vancouver that was saturated in early morning mist and rain; the image was both a promise of movement and a statement of the moment; something at once familiar and permanently unattainable.

More to come.

McKay

In preparation for my upcoming contribution to Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, I’ve been rereading everything I’ve read—and written—related to the mid-90s British downtempo scene.

I came across an unpublished piece I wrote in 2004 about Stephanie McKay’s debut album, McKay, which was produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Earthling’s Tim Saul. Because much of what I wrote still stands—because the album still sounds fresh and new, because permanently holds a place on the iPod—I thought I’d post it here. McKay was one of those astonishingly good UK-produced R&B albums which, sinfully, never found the audience it deserved. It sits alongside Lewis Taylor’s debut album as one of those magnificent albums that will turn heads whenever you put it on. Highly recommended. Sadly not available on iTunes (though her new album is) but it looks like the Amazon UK MP3 store has it.

For all the eclecticism that distinguishes R&B as a musical style, the ‘mature’ end of the genre can be surprisingly staid. While relentless competition for pop success pulls in sounds from UK garage and Jamaican dancehall, the more upmarket neo-soul sound is rather more conservative. Artists like Alicia Keys and India Arie establish their credentials by nostalgic invocation of Stevie Wonder, while others—Jill Scott, Angie Stone—appear stuck in the 1998 Atlanta production template.

That is one reason why Stephanie McKay’s self-titled debut album is refreshing. The production is handled by two outsiders to the US R&B scene, Geoff Barrow and Tim Saul. Both of these men—as the producers behind Portishead and Earthling respectively—were closely involved in the ‘Bristol sound’ that was at the core of the short-lived trip-hop genre.

There is a freshness about McKay from the outset: vinyl cracks and pops announce an analogue sensibility missing in the post-Atlanta sound of Timbaland and The Neptunes, and somewhat bypassed by the acoustic mannerisms of Keys, Badu and Arie.

There is also a distinct difference in tempo. The songs which sound most like Portishead - “Tell Him”, “Sadder Day”, “Five Days Of Faith”, “Thadius Star”—join precisely-arranged minor-key chord stabs to soundtrack-esque strings. But above all they display an awareness of space that outlines trip-hop’s debt to dub, fore-grounding thunderous bass figures and Barrow’s crisp drum programming. The production on songs like “Sadder Day” is meticulous and strident: a sparse acoustic guitar loop opens, before breaking into ruptured bass tones, dramatic string arrangements, a rattling mandolin and a backing vocal racked up to sound like Portishead’s trademark theremin.

McKay, formerly of The Brooklyn Funk Essentials—and a sometime associate of Kelis and Talib Kweli—is certainly up to the challenge. In “Sadder Day” her vocal gradually builds from the throwaway breathiness of the opening lines—“I ain’t got no money / and I don’t care / I been sitt-in’ down in this well I swear”. She accelerates through the following line—“Now I ain’t gettin’ nothin’ but the same old shit every day”—before strutting behind the beat to haul the song into the chorus. Later she displays a tempered command of melisma, and enough wit to tease out the emotional implications of the song.

The match between the vocals and production is often flawless. “How Long” works around a moody altered piano chord that recalls Wu-Tang. But the lush strings at the back of the mix and the delicate chord changes suggest instead the 1970s Gamble & Huff Philadelphia soul sound. The vocal works its way between the two extremes before building to such intensity that it seems ready to puncture the mix. There’s a gorgeous middle eight, too, in which a thickly harmonized vocal—“What time is it? What time is it?”—syncopates against the same bass-piano loop and makes it seem to lilt and buck in its moorings.

Elsewhere, Mckay’s impressive vibrato on “Rising Tide” finds all the angles in a rather harsh, unnerving song—from hip-hop vocal ticks through nursery-rhyme chant and molasses-slow behind-the-beat blues.

The lyrics are mostly devoid of the sentimentally and cliche that mark much songwriting of this type. The more earnest tracks, which flirt with a kind of Five Percenter spiritualism, are less interesting. But in general, the lyrics are well-married to the production.  “Echo”, a hypnotically-underproduced protest song, recalls Nina Simone’s ability to marry uncompromising politics to charming simplicity.

There is certainly a retro feel to the album, even animating the more lightweight songs. The dancefloor bubblegum of “Thinking Of You” brings to mind the sound of London’s pre-trip-hop Soul II Soul crew. “Take Me Over” is an unironic and unassuming faux-reggae piece, based on the Dave and Ansel Collins’ “Double Barrel”. It comes dangerously close to pastiche.

This shouldn’t suggest that the album lacks any flavor of contemporary R&B. “Bluesin’ It” has a distinct Timbaland feel: discreet parcels of sounds push the beat forwards. The tightly-coiled vocal wraps itself around the taut guitar and organ licks, before breaking into a coy and playful lilt. “Loving You” opens with a lean, sparse digital beat that recalls some of Jay Dee’s production, although the chorus—with its gentle string line and breathy high-range vocal—sounds eerily like Minnie Ripperton.

As with the much of the mid-nineties Bristol sound, it’s hard to distinguish McKay‘s fond regard for its influences from a general feeling of nostalgic loss. In either event, the hand-on-heart retro aesthetic causes a strangely weightless feeling of freedom from context. It is this weightlessness that animates and buoys this refreshingly individual album.

NXNE

Coverage of NXNE over at PopMatters, edited by yours truly. Includes a piece on the festival’s film content:

Nostalgia is the dominant emotion in much filmmaking about music. The primary impulse of many biopics, musicals, and documentaries is to memorialize music or musicians who have had a significant impact on the filmmaker’s life. Too often this has its own dangers: the rare biopic that does not sag with pacing problems suffers because it cannot establish any critical distance from its subject. But the mode can be uncannily beautiful — from the elegiac rhythms of, say, Clint Eastwood’s Bird, or the smoke-filled purism of Robert Altman’s Kansas City.


And a trawl of various music acts. Highlights were BC’s No Luck Club and Toronto’s Holy Fuck:

Holy Fuck are reductionists, intent on marshaling the squeals and protests of equipment designed for other purposes. At the Reverb, the audience comprised the would-be-hip and the professionally curious. It was a brilliant set, but only a few people got it. Much of the audience seemed more concerned with impressing the other people there. It was an elitist crowd, brought by the Now magazine showcase, of which Holy Fuck were the fourth act. Downstairs from the intimacy of Holy Joe’s, the Reverb has something of the church about it, and something of the thoroughfare. Its high ceilings produce great sound, showering shards of noise back to the audience along with drips of condensation from the air conditioning, a venue in which a dropped glass produces a shatter rather than a smothered crunch. But the utilitarian design — the traffic to the bar and the washrooms and the exits runs along the back — means that until an act is truly engrossing, it feels contingent. There is little to keep you there; you could be listening to another act upstairs (or downstairs, at the Kathedral) within moments, or out on the street. It does not ask anything of audience. It does not require you to commit. You have to want to be there, and you have to want to stay.

Profile of M.I.A.

An extended interview/profile up on PopMatters:

“Sunshower” has been sampled for almost 20 years now; there’s a snatch of its warped Hawaiian guitars and splintered percussion towards the end of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, but like attempts by De La Soul and Doug E. Fresh, it’s just dressing. The appropriations always seem piecemeal and placeless: Busta Rhymes’ “Take It Off” is slick, but not convincing. Ghostface Killah’s “Ghost Showers” attempts to wholly inhabit the song; it swallows him whole. There’s simply too much in the original: swooping Hawaiian guitars, child-like chants, ambient noise, guitar barely recognizable in a flood of in reverb. The percussion is so richly syncopated, so densely layered, that it leaves Daye’s vocal somehow isolated, exposed, as if shimmering in a cloud of dust. The melody itself sounds free and ungrounded, and takes on an almost atonal quality. The groove is woodlike, organic, pulmonary. Nobody has done anything as remotely convincing, assured, or unique with the same materials. Until M.I.A.‘s “Sunshowers”.

The difference between the original and M.I.A.‘s second single, produced last year by Steve Mackey and Ross Orton, is more than one of genre or period; it is a difference in aesthetics, a difference in the place given to popular culture. The original material itself is gutted. The slightly adrenaline bliss of Davy’s chorus sounds highly phased, over-exposed, washed-out at the edges. A percussive bass glissandi, which in the original gracefully eases the song into a final elaboration of the chorus, is ripped out and looped throughout the piece. The groove is a relentless throb that hammers its way throughout the entire song, rattling and lurching between violence and grace. “Sunshowers” erases the spirit of the original as it goes along.

Where Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band brought a wispy lyricism to disco, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia wrapped in their elaborate big band arrangements, M.I.A.‘s use of the song is—like the rest of her material—a blend of hard unsentimentally and poplike glee. It’s a striking contrast: strident political stances sit alongside made-for-ringtone hooks. There’s no middle ground on Arular, her debut album. Even the wordplay is taken to a level of abstraction, with playground chants in place of intimacy and wit. There is very little that deals with the minutiae of personal relationships; even “URAQT”, a song about betrayal, revolves more around the exchange of postures than of emotions. Relationships are almost transactions. There is no trust in this music.

Update: Now picked up by AlterNet.

Nostalgia 77: The Garden

Review at PopMatters:

If any of this material feels like pastiche, it is nevertheless very well done. There is just enough hip-hop to keep things grounded: the breaks at the start of “Freedom” have a pedigree that goes back to Mantronix. The attention to period texture is particularly refreshing, given the tide of neo-jazz schlock that is increasingly upon us: Riaan Volsoo’s bass is recorded with a wonderfully acoustic rattle and throb; Kelsey Jones’s trumpet and Jon Shenoy’s sax have a up-close spittle to match the density of the arrangements. Above all, the tracks themselves have a purpose that is typically missing from the worthiness of hard-bop revivalism or the meandering of jazz-influenced hip-hop. This is a solid meal, even if you can still pick out the ingredients.


 

Buck 65: This Right Here is Buck 65

Review running in the lead spot on PopMatters:

Terfry shows no sign of slowing down: a sequel to Talkin’ Honky Blues is due this year. His appeal isn’t just in the wedding of hip-hop to the American folk tradition; other artists from Beck to Timbaland have taken respectable shots into that acoustic barrel. Buck 65 is doing something more ambitious: reading a tradition of American storytelling through hip-hop. The expansive, inclusive, digressive American voice that runs through Guthrie and Dylan (and stretches back to Whitman) doesn’t sound out of place for a Canadian like Buck 65, any more than it did for Kerouac. Terfry has some of Mark Twain’s frontier nostalgia (his concert tall tales about Pythagoras’s fear of beanfields suggests a sure grasp of Twain’s sense of humor). Where he takes this ambition next will be fascinating to hear. This release is a pretty good summary of what he’s been up to so far.

GB: Soundtrack for Sunrise

Review of GB’s Soundtrack for Sunrise at PopMatters:

In general, what distinguishes the treatment of vocals in the garage-influenced genres is a willingness to let the production flex around the shape of the song. On one hand, this means that a vocal is not—as in much recent R&B—gridlocked by beats; it allows a song to rise and fall, rather than simply stop and start. Where the material is weak, though, it over-exposes the smoothness of the vocal delivery and the paucity of melodic construction.

Massive Attack: Danny the Dog OST

Review up at PopMatters:

There has always been an unusual feeling of space at the center of Massive Attack’s sound, as if the music was somehow adjacent to its own emotional core. Even in their most brilliant work—Shara Nelson’s voice clearing a path through the ragged and magnificent string arrangements of “Unfinished Sympathy”—the music’s heart feels somehow misplaced. What remains is a hole that perfectly suggests a forlorn and radiant lovesickness. Their work isn’t as much a reproduction of grief or loss or anger or rapture, as it is a series of perfect, and perfectly evocative, outlines. For all the emotional gravity that their better songs bring to bear, it is an effect that is accrued, rather than immediately impressed. The effect is as disorientating as it is unique.

Gabriela Anders: Last Tango in Rio

Review at PopMatters:

The music… lacks the outcroppings to enable—let alone reward—serious listening.

If this is not merely the result of lack of imagination, or the triumph of marketing taste over musical inspiration, it is presumably drawn from the po-faced introspection of cool jazz—of Gerry Mulligan, Art Pepper, Stan Getz and, above all, Chet Baker. The stance that these artists took in the 1950s, apparently shunning overt artistic creation and concentrating on the smallest inflections in the performance of winsome ballads, has dominated much of the popular imagery of jazz ever since.

Unfortunately it suffers badly out of context: in the 1950s, their attitude bespoke a turning away from the materialism and conformity emerging as mainstays of American culture—not to mention a revulsion at mainstream acquiescence in the inequalities of post-war racial and cultural politics. The cool movement’s suave wounded romanticism was deliberately counterfeit; a tool to suggest how deeply felt was their ostracism from mainstream life. It was a cue taken up by the Beat movement, inspiring much of the cultural radicalism of the following decades.

Wayne Shorter: Footprints

Review of the new Wayne Shorter anthology, Footprints, at PopMatters:

Shorter’s compositions for Davis took the raw ingredients of hard bop and stretched them out, exploring the modal space that Davis had outlined a few years earlier in Kind of Blue. Shorter’s surprising, angular melodies had a singular and unpredictable beauty. Floating above chords arranged into glistening, half-seen shapes, they sketched out logical figures that tailed off into fluid emotional whimsy. At other times they cut deep into the logical bedding of the music, bringing light to unseen corners. Coltrane proceeded via exhaustion and explosion, never letting any musical or emotional wall remain standing; Shorter and Davis preferred the scalpel.

Jimmy Behan: Days Are What We Live In

Album review of Jimmy Behan’s Days Are What We Live In at PopMatters:

Behan has supported Four Tet and Manitoba on tour, and shares much of the sonic vocabulary of “folktronica”. Days Are What We Live In has a crisp, clear upper mid-range; spare, sparse piano and keyboard figures dominate. There are the same splintered fractions of guitar licks and reversed fragments of sound that Four Tet has made its own. The album’s lower range is generally filled with warm, throbbing sounds; the effect should be hypnotic, cumulative. Drum sounds, when used, punctuate the shimmering structure.

And:

There are moments of great prettiness here. They remain opaque, which is both frustrating and quite deliberate: this music is all surface. It is meticulous, measured, finely-crafted. If it fails to move or arouse, that is as much a feature of the genre as it is a failing of imagination.

DJ Nu-Mark — Hands On; DJ Nu-Mark & Pomo — Blend Crafters Volume One

To get the ball rolling: 2004 was a great year for Jurassic 5 solo releases. Next year is going to be pretty good too — more on that later — but the highlights were certainly DJ Nu-Mark’s two projects.

Hands On was the increasingly obligatory ‘I have an album coming out’ mixtape, except that it was also an official release on Sequence Records, which brought us Automator’s Wanna Buy A Monkey? and Babu’s two DuckSeason releases.

Hands On opens with some unselfconscious funk, including Organized Konfusion’s JBs-sampling “Fudge Funk”, and Rex Brown Company’s unrestrained clavinet workout “Hot Track”. (Clavinet: “the funkiest instrument known to man”?) A handful of Beatnuts- and Premier-produced skits and intros precede a slab of red-hot US hip-hop. There’s a guest spot by fellow J5 member Chali 2na. “Saliva”, the best track from Viktor Vaughn’s Vaudeville Villain, is produced by Rjd2 in Deadringer mode. And there’s Vitamin-D’s “No Good”: think you’re sick of sped-up vocal samples? Hear this.

Among the album’s highlights is the stretch of international hip-hop towards the end. There’s still something disconcerting about hearing a properly-practiced non-American flow; the accents fall across the beats in ways slightly — and therefore illuminatingly — different. Even MCs with a distinctively London delivery still stand out (on the other hand, there’s nothing more bland than a UK MC aping American delivery). But that’s nothing compared to the novelty of French, German and Aussie cadences and rhythms here. And there’s All Time High’s Ayrshire brogue, which I imagine must be unintelligable to the majority of listeners. Excellent.

Like Hands On, Blend Crafters is back-to-back crisp breakbeats and muscular basslines. The first track — “Melody” — is featured on Hands On. It’s a taut jam built around a stack of overlapping baritone vocal samples and a phat snare sound. “Lola” similarly stacks up and parcels out horn riffs. “Bad Luck Blues” takes the reedy vocal and winsome guitar riffs of Skip James’ Delta classic “Hardtime Killin’ Floor Blues”. The mechanical throb of “Shedding Skin” sounds like Chemical Brother’s “Piku”. And that’s just the first few tracks: there’s more, including a strangely touching corny piano-sax-beats cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. It should really say ‘EP’ on the tin, though — at 30:16 it runs a little too short.

As with Jurassic 5, there is something of the old-school about these releases: they are fun, funky, not too thoughtful, and not too self-important. They certainly more than fill the spot taken by 2003’s DJ Format/MC Abdominal collaborations.

In other J5 news, Chali 2na’s Fish Market mixtape had some high points. Cut Chemist’s Litmus Test (about half of it streamed at his official site) is a 28-minute cut-up of his best-known productions. Both of them are, presumably, efforts to soften up the market for solo albums (2na’s Fish Outta Water, Chemist’s The Audience Is Listening) due at the start of the next year. There is also a J5 album slated for May.

DJ Nu-Mark, Hands On

(Sequence, 2004)

DJ Nu-Mark & Pomo, Blend Crafters Volume One

(Up Above, 2004)

Chali 2na, Fish Market (mixed by DJ Dez)

(N/A, 2004)

Cut Chemist, The Litmus Test

(Tube, 2004)

New Portishead material?

From the Beth Gibbons mailing list:

Beth has been very busy this year taking the opportunity to work with other artists - writing the track ‘Killing Time’ for Joss Stone’s new album Mind, Body & Soul, writing and performing backing vocals on the track ‘Strange Melody’ for Jane Birkin’s new album ‘Rendez Vous’, co-writing and performing the track ‘Lonely Carousel’ with Rodrigo Leao for his new album ‘Cinema’ and co-writing the track ‘Love Is A Stranger’ with David Steel (of Fine Young Cannibals fame) for his current Fried album.

Currently in the midst of completing a film score for a French Film ‘L’Annulaire’ to be released in 2005 Beth is remarkably also finding the time to work on new tracks for Portishead!

Beth will be performing on November 20th and 21st in Lisbon and November 25th in Oporto, Portugal with Rodrigo Leao and there are unconfirmed plans for a one-off performance with Jane Birkin in Paris before the year end.


(Emphasis mine. The urge to copy-edit these things is strangely hard to resist.)

No doubt it’s just the latest in the long line of ‘they’re still working together’ rumours.

On the other hand, welcome to all those folks who are Googling for the “new Portishead album”.

Smith & Mighty — Retrospective

I’ve been meaning to write a ‘how to buy’ piece on the early Bristol sound for a little while now, but quite a few of the key early releases remain unavailable for the casual buyer. This career retrospective fills at least one gap, including as it does Fresh Four’s 1989 cover of the Rose Royce song “Wishing On A Star”.

Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped establish the production template at the heart of the Bristol sound, pulling the melange of influences (hip-hop, dub, lovers’ rock, rare groove, soul, punk, Two-Tone ska) into something distinct and coherent. Their version of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” was at the heart of “Stranger Than Love”, released in 1987 by Mark Stewart, a long-time member of the Bristol scene (and associate of Adrian Sherwood’sOn-U Sound project). Along with The Wild Bunch’s “The Look Of Love” (1986), “Stranger Than Love” is considered by many the prototypical trip-hop record.

Smith & Mighty’s 1988 versions of the Bacharach/David torch songs “Walk On By” and “Anyone (Who Had A Heart)” built on “The Look Of Love”: crisp mid-80s hip-hop drum programming rivets down a wide-open arrangement that displays the dub influence; floating above is a dreamy, slightly distanced vocal track, taking full advantage of Bacharach’s airy and drifting intervals. Tim Simenon, of Bomb The Bass, was doing the same thing at the same time with “Say A Little Prayer.”

Smith & Mighty produced Massive Attack’s first single — a cover of Chaka Khan’s “Any Love” — and Fresh Four’s “Wishing On A Star”, which epitomized the formula and introduced (to ears outside Bristol) the signature muted, low-key rapping. The consequent commercial success brought a major-label record deal — with disastrous results. A series of protracted disagreements with London Records meant that Carlton’s 1991 LP The Call Is Strong was the only Smith & Mighty production released for years. In 1995 their contract expired and — with Peter D Rose — they issued Bass Is Maternal on their own More Rockers label. By that time Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, among others, had taken the Bristol sound to an international audience.

Most of Fresh Four went on to become key figures in the Bristol drum & bass scene — as, indeed, did Smith & Mighty. But the Fresh Four LP retains its reputation as the great unreleased Bristol sound album (rivaled until this year by Earthling’s Humandust). In all likelihood it doesn’t exist in any kind of completed form — but I bet there are some great masters locked up somewhere.

This is a career-spanning retrospective issued by the German !K7 label, with whom they have released two albums since 2000. Most of the material here is, inevitably, post-1995 drum & bass; most of that is from the !K7 releases. There is one track from Carlton’s The Call Is Strong, the Fresh Four single, and versions of the two central Bacharach covers (both of which are also on their highly-listenable DJ-Kicks mix).

When the BBC finally get their act together (or I’m on the p2p networks at the right time), I will finally be able to hear Smith & Mighty’s apparently epic 1996 Essential Mix.

Smith & Mighty, Retrospective

(!K7, 2004)

Smith & Mighty, DJ-Kicks

(!K7, 1998)

Boca 45, Stephanie Mckay

An update on Boca 45’s Pitch Sounds LP. You can take a listen to “In The City” courtesy of Invada Records’ audio samples. It’s not to be missed—by far the standout track on the album and possibly one of the best singles of the year. It’s built around a static chord structure, ballooning bass tones and corny 60s backing vocals. There’s a great late-summer vibe to it, with the humid, charged atmosphere lit up by Stephanie Mckay’s electric timing.

If you missed Mckay’s astonishing debut album, co-produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Earthling’s Tim Saul, grab it while you can.


Boca 45, Pitch Sounds

(Grand Central / Invada, 2004)


Boca 45, “In The City”

(High Noon, 2004)


Mckay, Mckay

(Go Beat, 2003)

Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band — Your New Best Friends

The time for dull and superficial articles about the ‘Bergensound’ seems to have passed, but suffice to say that Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band come from the same locale as Kings Of Convenience, Röyksopp, Magnet and numerous others. Much of their debut, A Special Album, was produced by Jørgen Træen, who owns Duper Studios in Bergen and produced both of Jaga Jazzist’s albums.

While A Special Album (following A Special EP, naturally), did not benefit from comparisons to Röyksopp’s Melody AM, it was still very solid feel-good downtempo, if a bit glossy and formulaic. It certainly matched anything by Blues States or Kinobe, and tracks like “Nikita”, “Think Twice” and “A Special Morning” were well worth the asking price (which doesn’t seem to be very high at the moment: you can’t go into a second-hand CD store in Toronto without finding a copy). It also had some of the best kitsch cover art for some time.

Your New Best Friends seems only to have had a Norwegian release thus far. The formula has become even glossier. There are moments — the chorus of “Surprise” — that remind you of what was good about A Special Album. But only a few tracks (like the churning “Dubspace”) break out of the nightclub-friendly combination of disco guitar, pop-toned bass, chirpy synth riffs and closely-harmonized backing vocals. It sounds a Jamiroquai album, in other words.

If you like albums that come with a big ‘chillout album of the month’ sticker on the front, this is for you.

If I can say that without making my disdain too obvious.

They have managed to keep up the deliberately naff cover art, though. Consistency is valuable.

Info and audio samples at Emperor Norton and MIC Norway.

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, A Special Album

(Emperor Norton, 2003)

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, Your New Best Friends

(Emperor Norton, 2004)

Daddy G — DJ Kicks

The latest of an absurd quantity of Bristol-related releases (with more to come), and after Four Tet’s LateNightTales, the second mixtape series contribution this month. This is the latest addition to the DJ Kicks series, mixed by Wild Bunch and Massive Attack member Daddy G (Grant Marshall).

The tracklist looks extremely promising. It should suit those who miss the humid warmth of Massive Attack’s original reggae and dub influences. There’s some great Studio One material, including the reverb-soaked beats and paving-stone bass of Willie Williams’ classic “Armagideon Time”. There’s Barrington Levy’s early dancehall hit “Here I Come”, Foxy Brown’s Maytals-sampling “Oh Yeah” and Melaaz’s French cover of Dawn Penn’s “No No No”.

Plus there’s a handful of rare Massive remixes — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Mustt Mustt”, Les Negresses Vertes’ “Face A La Mer”, the ‘Napoli Trip’ remix of “Karmacoma”. Many of the Massive remixes seem to me to promise more than they deliver; those that strip the original material down to its guts (or, more usually, it’s bassline) seem to work best. I suspect that these will work very well in context, since it looks to be a remarkably consistent mix. Almost everything here features a wide, uncluttered mid-range and a thunderous bassline. In an excellent interview (it’s in English: scroll down), G recalls the Bristol scene in which the Wild Bunch came together:

We were sort of punks and stuff like that, we used to go to a lot of the reggae things and so there was a cross pollination of the reggae and punk thing at the time. So it did in Bristol actually get a lot of punks going into reggae sound systems and stuff like that. And that was a really big thing to go to a sound system and to see wall-to-wall speakers and stuff like that it was amazing. We were all into our sort of reggae at the time, so to have your stomach blown through your mouth by bass was amazing.

This mix seems designed to do the job.

There’s all kinds of other treats, including the Mos Def collaboration that appeared on the Blade 2 soundtrack, the Meter’s classic “Just Kissed My Baby” (everyone who knows EPMD’s “Never Seen Before” will have the riff hardwired into their brain). Most excitingly, there’s an early white label version of Tricky’s “Aftermath”, and the Danny Krivit remix of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady”.

Worth looking out for.

UPDATE: Scissorkick is all over it. You can check out the very high-quality Melaaz track, and Paul Oakenfold’s remix of Massive’s peerless “Unfinished Sympathy”. In the words of Joe Cocker, it makes me wish I was home again in England.

Daddy G, DJ Kicks

(!K7, 2004)