review

Album Review: Holy Ghost! - Holy Ghost!

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When duo Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel first unleashed 'Hold On' upon the world as Holy Ghost! I was a little bit awestruck. It is pretty much the perfect modern house record - a nod to label mates LCD Soundsystem in the rock song structure and snappy, live sounding percussion combined with a brilliantly restrained shuffling bassline and synth combo that managed to turn up just as Italo was tipping over. Even the lyrics somehow manage to transcend what are actually pretty conventional sentiments - some how the formulaic "Hold on, hold tight" chorus felt edgy when pressed up against that killer couplet: "I love this city but I hate my job".

For me nothing else the duo have done has quite lived up to that moment. The Static On The Wire EP had some moments - the catchy if slightly sterile track it takes it's name for starters, however it was second single 'I Will Come Back' (also on that EP) that really suggested there was more to come.

Here we are then, some four years on from 'Hold On'. Whilst that track appears here alongside 'Static On The Wire', 'I Will Come Back' is sadly only notable by its absence. It's a peculiar omission given that this album is just ten tracks long, clocking in at under fifty minutes. Regardless - what you have is a solid selection of vocal house tracks that more-or-less all hit the mark. 'Dot It Again' opens things on an even footing with a serviceable if risk-averse number - it is undoubtedly Holy Ghost! at their most commercial.

It is the album's middle that delivers though. The exposed sound of the vocals on 'Hold My Breath' when the melody all but completely drops away, the lyrics pushed out with a rapid insistence as though the singer is all to conscious they are running out of time. An ode to label mate and friend Jerry Fuchs, 'Jam For Jerry' is the perfect bittersweet electro-pop record. The vocals betray a certain guilty feeling at Fuchs' untimely death - "I've got the feeling I've done / something half wrong / it surrounds me, it drowns me in it". Paired with an undeniably sparkly melody it feels like the sound of the party going on whilst everyone there struggles to come to terms with what has happened and the result sounds like pure New Order: I'm unhappy but I'm still dancing

From there the album flows in to 'Hold On', and then on to 'Slow Motion', which stands out with it's drum-heavy breaks before closing on 'Static On The Wire' and 'Some Children'. The latter incorporating a chorus of children singing that feels like it aims to add a bit of soul but sadly just over complicates things - the duo are at their best when stripped back and left to their own devices.

As a debut this proves Holy Ghost! Are more than just a one hit wonder. Four years in the making means it suffers slightly from the burden of expectation though and I can't help but with there was just a bit more to discover here.

BP x

Holy Ghost! is out now on DFA, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: Nine Types of Light - TV On The Radio

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Back when I reviewed TV On The Radio's last album, Dear Science, I claimed it to be the band's career highlight to date. It's a statement I'd stand by, and yet I still can't help but feel that of their first three albums proper (I'm disregarding the self-released demo OK Calculator from 2002 as it's tricky to come by) it is still Return To Cookie Mountain that I always come back to. That record's bass-heavy, stuttering electronic production still sounds thrilling and fresh, and there are several tracks on that album ('I Was a Lover', 'Province', 'Wolf Like Me' and 'Dirtywhirl') that continue to mean far more to me than anything on its follow-up. As great as a record Dear Science is, it just didn't feel quite like the TV On The Radio that I loved.

Nine Types of Light was released a few weeks back now and I can safely safe it answers the concerns I had about the previous record whilst continuing to demonstrate the progression and growth of the band. From the opening bars of 'Second Song' it is patently clear TV On The Radio have still got it, and they haven't lost their ability to open their albums with absolute blinders. It feels like like the sound of a band emerging from the storm still tied to rigging and finding it irresistable to greet the world with anything but a beaming smile. This is a band that have been through some difficult times in recent years and sadly things haven't eased since Nine Types of Light was released, with the passing of the band's bassist, Gerard Smith, last week. Somehow though they still sound positive and in fact, on 'Second Song, complete with its 'ooh oooh' vocals, they sound more positive than ever. A brass backing only further adds to the effect, sounding like a band coming out punching, legs and arms flailing whilst they try and connect.

Perhaps the answer to this new found enthusiasm is the oldest of all, for more than anything else Nine Types of Light is a record about love, as evidenced on the lovelorn 'Keep Your Heart', with the vocalist belting out the words: "I'm gonna keep your heart / if the world falls apart / I'm gonna keep your heart". It's the sound of selfishly putting another first, and you can't help but hope it works out for him.

The theme is revisited several times throughout the album but probably nowhere better than on single 'Will Do', a paean to forbidden or unrequired love that bursts open with a shuddering bass line, to create the most electronic track the band have released since Return To Cookie Mountain. The lyrics betray a man unprepared to let life and love slip through his fingers, almost angry that the subject of his affections would dare waste the opportunity. If it sounds desperate, that's because it is, but you can't help but feel that the song is justified in its honesty all the same.

This isn't just a record of love songs, though. 'No Future Shock' revisits the band's fondness for celebrating the bleakness of our apparent future, encouraging us all to dance to the sound of the end of the world. 'Repetition' similarly celebrates misfortune, seemingly mocking the singer's own paranoia and inability to break the cycle. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

If you really want evidence of TV On The Radio's new found optimism though then go no further than 'Caffeinated Consciousness'. The excellent Fluxblog recently posted this song and likened it to the sound of someone trying to turn Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer' into punk rock and I wholeheartedly agree - it sounds like raw energy turning the listener's hands into megaton weights and feet into jet engines... to resist is futile, as the singer says: "I'm optimistic, on overload". It's a fitting close to a great album.

Nine Times of Light is the best of both worlds - an album that continues to reveal more with repeated listens yet still has the hooks to have you addicted from the first listen. This is a brilliant record, eclipsing the band's best work.

BP x

Nine Types of Light is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, Deluxe CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: Underneath The Pine - Toro Y Moi

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Toro Y Moi's debut was one of my real highlights of last year... That rare thing: an album that lives up to the blogger hype (yes, appreciate this is a blog and so I would say that...)

Full of funky J Dilla style loops, soulful low-in-the-mix vocals and tight eighties flourishes Causes Of This stands out as the best of what the chill wave genre can offer. It may have had the odd moment of weakness but its highlights more than outweigh them.

Underneath The Pine is unexpected. It would have been easy to just focus on taking Causes Of This and re-making it without the sub-par moments: an easy route to sophomore critical success. Instead Toro Y Moi appears to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The funky slabs of eighties synth are gone, replaced with a more natural sounding fuzzy seventies vibe, and the hip-hop influence has all but disappeared.

The result feels like the Carpenters covered by Animal Collective. The production here is immaculate and Chazwick Bundick's talent in this area really shows - this is a tight record. 'New Beat' is a part stomping funk number, part freeform jazz experiment and 'Divinia' is a gentle, slow paced ballad marked by it's piercing piano refrain. 'Got Blinded' is perhaps Bundick's finest vocal performance yet, his falsetto tones sounding more vulnerable than ever.

But is this the point? Underneath The Pine sounds like a frigging brilliant psychedelic album by a seventies soul artist. Which is admittedly fantastic. But ultimately this isn't the album we wanted - it's interesting, sure, but Toro Y Moi appears to have lost something along the way.

This week I got into a debate following the piece on Justice's new single over whether artists are okay just staying the same or if they need to continuously move on. My view is that progression is crucial but what I hadn't considered is the importance of time. Justice has let years fall away but have come back as if nothing has changed in the world. Toro Y Moi has done the opposite - a year after his first album we have a follow up that feels like it skips an important bridging album.

Underneath The Pine is a lovely album - it just wasn't the album we wanted.

BP x

Underneath The Pine is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: Space Is Only Noise - Nicolas Jaar

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Nicolas Jaar just made something indescribable. Space Is Only Noise isn't techno, but it feels a little bit like techno. In fact, it isn't really dance music at all yet it is routed in Jaar's earlier experimentation, but the songs themselves feel like they have got all twisted up inside his head. Imagine one of Ricardo Villalobos' most off the wall efforts, give it enough rope to hang itself and then watch it take it and simply run away.

This is music for listening to. Not dancing, working or talking against. BlackPlastic put this on in the office to the visible frustration of colleagues - the beauty is in the detail and the texture and in in anything but centre stage it just doesn't work.

But give it room and Space Is Only Noise can blow your mind. Jazz flourishes and four-four kicks and spaced out, warped vocals make this a strange varied listen. Space Is Only Noise is an appropriate title - just like on James Blake's recent debut this has bags of the stuff, and a lot of the time it is the space that defines the sound. In fact just about everything that James Blake just did for dub step Jaar does here for techno.

At it's best the tracks come together to make something brilliant, confusing and startling. 'I Got A Woman' feature one simple broken beat and various instruments seemingly falling apart whilst a looped soul vocal repeats the song's title. It doesn't sound like much - indeed it isn't - but it manages to capture a strange feeling, with the vocalist seemingly conveying disdain at his apparent emotional attachment.

'Balance Her In Between Your Eyes' snaps and crackles with jazz piano samples and snatches of soul to beautiful effect before transforming into 'Trace', which sounds like little more than a band sound check as an interlude. And that says a lot about this album - these aren't songs so much as pieces or movements. Each intriguing and beguiling in equal measure, but it comes together as a magnificent body of work reminiscent of some of Eno's mist experimental moments.

The title track is the album's real standout moment. Slinky, loose and paranoid, Jaar's vocals sound like the ravings of a man losing his way through his own mind. Uttering about his subject's past habits of checking the weather and the time. BlackPlastic has no idea what any of it is about (people's tendency to change no matter how much we may wish they wouldn't?) but it works. Gradually a strummed bass becomes the only dependable aspect of the song as everything else descents into glorious chaos before it all comes back to kick your arse with it's bouncing bass line.

Space Is Only Noise is an album of atmospherics and it pursues pure sound and feeling at the expense of all else. Frankly it's an astounding listen.

BP x

Space Is Only Noise is out now on Circus Company, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].