Album Review: Late Night Tales Presents: Music For Pleasure - Tom Findlay

The Late Night Tales albums generally tend to be of a pretty high quality, as do compilations from Groove Armada. This one sees Late Night Tales team up once again after Groove Armada's lovely 2008 installment, albeit this time without half the duo... Music For Pleasure being just Tom Findlay and not Andy Cato.

If the subtitle didn't already give it away this is a little bit of a departure for the series. Music For Pleasure is more focused on laid back easy listening than the generally more twisted, tripped-out sound of Late Night Tales. Think a bit less lava lamps, passed round joints and hours spent watching the wallpaper move and a bit more pool lounging while the sun shines down on your ice cold margarita.

Each person's interpretation of 'music for pleasure' is probably a little different so we will have to see how much consistency this series has (if it even becomes a series). Findlay's take though is a mixture of laid back seventies soft rock, 80s MoR and yacht.

It's a difficult set to argue with because a listen is a pretty gorgeous trip through pastel colours, decadent good times and earnest emotion. The whole album is really soft and warm. Whilst Ambrosia's 'You're The Woman' opens things on a slow sunset falsetto heavy track it is Robert Palmer's steel drum and trumpet celebratory 'Every Kinda People' that really kicks things into touch.

Michael McDonald's 'I Keep Forgettin' upstages Warren G's 'Regulate' effortlessly (by which it was sampled), showing real gentlemen rock smooth. Similarly 'Baby Come Back' by the Player, last seen blasting out of Bumblebee in the Transformers movie, is pure soul and coke rock and roll, just perfect for a lie down with some Don Perignon and a little soft-focused fantasy about your ex.

Groove Armada have something of a flair for making mix albums of tracks with little mixing and a fairly subtle re-edit approach is employed here. It isn't quite as lovingly applied by Findlay as on the duo's Back To Mine set but it's good all the same and generally better than the fudged mixing you sometimes get on this sort of release.

We conclude with Tom Findlay's own Balearic re-edit of 10cc's 'I'm Not In Love' and to be fair, it's pretty Balearic - soft and dreamlike with an emphasised drop and a beautiful slight return. Music For Pleasure is a bit of a dream. My only concern is it is a bit too 'now' and I can't help but feel that it won't hold interest in the same way Findlay's other compilations with the full Armada have.

But who's for worrying about that? I'm going for another martini with a twist before the sun hits the Med.

Late Night Tales presents Music For Pleasure is released on 11 June, it's available for pre-order now on Amazon.co.uk on CD and LP & CD boxset [affiliate links].

Update on Tuesday, May 29, 2012 at 01:20PM by BlackPlastic

Turns out there is a minimix too - check it out for a taster of the album:

Album Review: LateNightTales volume Two - Belle and Sebastian

Image source: The Music Slut

Embarrassing fact or not (I'm really not sure) - I've never really listened to much Belle and Sebastian. 'The Boy With The Arab Strap' is excellent but beyond that I draw a bit of a blank. The LateNightTales albums are generally worth a listen though and so when a copy popped through the letter box I stuck it on regardless of relatively modest excitement levels.

And I'm very glad I did because it is probably the best LateNightTales I've heard. It's far more eclectic than I would have expected and there are not just one or two but a number of tracks by artists I've not heard of that I will certainly check out more of.

Things start off relatively psychedelic with Broadcast's 'Ominous Cloud' instantly plunging us into a swirling world of slightly trippy sixties pop. It feels like being stuck between the celluloid of The Wicker Man and Performance. Nothing on this album stays as it is for long though and soon you are enveloped in Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges' Latin Jazz and things feel much warmer than you would ever have expected on such an album.

Bonnie Dobson's 'Bird of Space' is back in bonkers psychedelia territory but it is also strangely beautiful, Dobson's shrill vocals dancing around sitars and sweeping strings to create a disconcertingly epic sound. In amongst all this weirdness Gold Panda's 'Quitters Raga' fits like hand slipping into glove, highlighting Belle and Sebastian's selection skills and Gold Panda's utter brilliance.

After the Pop Group, whom are probably the sole bum-note, their avant-garde post-punk still leaving me cold, things get even more sublime. All too brief, the Stan Tracey Quartet's 'Starless and Bible Black' provides a brief one-minute stellar jazz interlude that feels like free-wheeling through space, see the Earth vanish from view and barely caring. The Lovin' Spoonful's 'Darlin' Be Home Soon' is a perfect contrast, filled with the same dull ache but wrapped up in earnest pop melodies and beautiful production. Belle & Sebastian's cover version of the Primitives 'Crash' is good, but mainly serves to highlight how brilliant a lot of the other material here is.

I could go on, but you should probably just listen to the album... There is just so much worth hearing. A dub of Pete Shelley's solo record 'Homosapien' almost steals the show but it is Remember Remember's heartbreaking 'Scottish Widows' that does. A haunting, perfect piece of music - call it new-classical, call it post-rock, I call it fantastic.

In summary then? You'd be foolish not to.

Belle and Sebastian's Late Night Tales Volume 2 is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]; stream now on Spotify.

Album Review: Late Night Tales - MGMT

Having filled a gap between the Klaxons' first and (disappointing) second album MGMT's debut album became somewhat of a perfect pop filler. It may not have been nu rave, strictly speaking, but it came from the same jumping off point.

Unfortunately the follow-up left many cold and it now feels a little as though MGMT have come somewhat adrift. I can't help but feel it is unclear what they represent as a band any more.

This compilation in the Late Night Tales series probably won't help. What it will do is help reinforce that, if nothing else, here is a band with some taste. In fact this is a bit of a disconcerting release because it feels so very distant from the band's own material. This is particularly evident on the obligatory exclusive track, a cover of Bauhaus' 'All We Ever Wanted Was Everything', a dusty psychedelic cyclical track that sits midway through the album and is not like anything the band have produced before.

That one track is an appropriate representation of the mix as a whole - both ageing and psychedelic. The Late Night Tales albums usually consist of their fair share of older tracks but this is even more so the case here, with tracks from The Velvet Underground, Suicide, Julian Cope and the Durutti Column amongst others. The mixture of tracks is, however, pretty spectacular. The album opens on Disco Inferno's ghostly and lost sounding 'Can't See Through It' - a track by a band I had not heard before but that perfectly kicks off this floaty, folky mix.

Suicide's 'Cheree' blends in perfectly with the looping waves of melodic distortion, giving the mix a seafaring feel. The Durutti Column's 'For Belgium Friends' is full of tripped out dreamscapes that represent a heavy contrast to the dirty blues of Charlie Feathers' 'Mound of Clay'.

And the contrasts here are worth touching on - the Late Night Tales albums have always attempted to capture those times when it is so past home time that a collective denial is the only path and whilst this captures that feeling, it feels like it comes at the cost of a cohesiveness or any consideration to sequencing. There are beautiful instrumentals that grind harshly against folk music laced with punk and there is a definite lack of progression throughout the album.

But the songs themselves, and the conclusion at home time, are beautiful. And to these ears at least, unknown enough that this probably shouldn't matter. Indeed Dave Bixby's 'Drug Song' is staggering - listening to it you can't help but wonder if he has borrowed a few ideas from Richard Hawley (he hasn't, unless time travel is possible). It is a hard man that doesn't marvel at this kind of songwriting, it is glacially slow, powerless and shot through with pain.

Similarly Spaceman 3's 'Lord Can You Hear Me?' feels like an incredibly fitting close, with massive epic vocals that struggle to be heard over the much more pedestrian guitar work and distortion. It sounds like neurosis and melancholy brought on by a come down that is uncompromisingly brought into stark relief by the realities of morning daylight. And then the album squeezes in one last track, 'Morning Splendor' by Pauline Anna Strom, a touching instrumental of heavy eyelids and the final surrender to sleep.

Messy and ramshackle it is, but for nights lead astray you couldn't find a much more fitting or touching album.

BP x

Late Night Tales selected by MGMT is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links].