More excellent polished electro-dream-pop from Octave Minds, the new collaboration between Boys Noize and Gonzales as covered back in July. Love those keys in the final minute!
Stream: Anthem (Radio Edit) - Octave Minds
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Stream: In Return Megamix - ODESZA
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15-minute mix of the tracks from ODESZA's new album, In Return, out on 9 September on Ninja Tune imprint Counter Records. Check this out - it's full of fizzy, wondrous sounds, cinematic soundscapes and soulful vocals and manages to feel intimate and yet global. Love it.
Stream: A Monument To Everything (Kindness mix feat. Busiswa) - Röyksopp & Robyn
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Kindness lends his loose and funky charms to Monument, one of the stand-out tracks from Röyksopp & Robyn's recent mini-LP Do It Again... The additional lyrics from Busiswa feel like a bit of an onslaught set against such a laid back track but the last minute or two are pretty special.
This remix comes hot on the heels of the recent preview of World Restart, the first track from the next Kindness album. Hot and heavy summer vibes here with guest vocals from Kelela:
Stream: Parasols - Polarsets
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We're sitting under parasols, sipping pina coladas, lounging by the pool as the Pacific ocean laps against the shore gently. We're tumbling out of bars with fizzy heads full of too many shots and memories that will soon age and tumble out of our heads. We're darting from beach bars to sunsets to meals that get out of hand before we leave, holding hands and looking for the next adventure.
The album Parasols will be out 21 September.
Baby I'm Off Drugs And I'm Ready To Marry You - Starfoxxx
Album Review: Baby I'm Off Drugs And I'm Ready To Marry You - Starfoxxx
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Baby I'm Off Drugs And I'm Ready To Marry You is the new album from Starfoxxx and the latest release on Donky Pitch, whose recent releases have included albums from Lockah and The Range.
Starfoxxx is the solo project of David Beltran and here he treats us to a modest smeared collage of dreamy, ambient pop. Baby... is nowhere near as sugar coated nor as dancefloor orientated as its title and cover suggest. In fact on listening you'll question if that title is played for laughs at all - this is an album that spends a good two-thirds of its body on slow moving introspection.
Despite containing no real lyrics the album flows like a concept album built around a storied night out. Club Entrance (Intro) captures the excitement of a night's opening moments before Bad Reception and Bae HD deliver the warmth you associate with a club, albeit through a wonky, slowed down lens. The latter represents the album's most immediate moment, full of warm synths and rhythms that unfold amongst scattered vocal samples.
From here things become considerably more psychedelic, perhaps those drugs not being so distant after all. My Cats Will Die B4 Me is a brief, spacey interlude that feels distant if not exactly sad, punctuated with meows. XTC Makeouts has layers of squeaking melodies layered atop deep bass stabs and trebly rimshots, a dubstep deconstruction.
No Text No Call feels like a dance floor track heard through the ears of someone caught in a maudlin trap of their own making, those moments of fun when you suddenly fall to earth through the realisation you still haven't heard from the person you most want to. The track has is full of bouncy synth crashes and yet it feel beautifully reserved.
The track Outro closes Baby... in suitably cinematic form, full of as much mystery as you would expect from such an odd album. It is like the uncertainty of the final glimpses of The Graduate, or the dazed and confused scene that closes Larry Clark's movie Kids. This is a strange and disjointed album and yet I can't help but be charmed by it's wonderful curiousness.
Baby I'm Off Drugs And I'm Ready To Marry You is out on Monday through Donky Pitch. Check out Bae HD below.