News: Glastonbury announce the Emerging Talent Competition longlist

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Glastonbury have announced the longlist for the Emerging Talent Competition. This features the list of the 123 acts through to the next round to be considered for Glastonbury's Emerging Talent Competition - the winners of which will guest the pyramid stage at the festival this year!

Included in the list are the three acts shortlisted by BlackPlastic.co.uk having gone through over 150 entrants:

 

  1. Encounters [link fixed]
  2. Run Toto Run
  3. After After Hours

 

Look out for a feature post on each band over the coming weeks but in the meantime check them out - all three are fairly varied but represented the most exciting bands out of all of those BlackPlastic checked out.

BP x

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].

Album Review: Zonoscope - Cut Copy

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Cut Copy's sophomore record, In Ghost Colours, was BlackPlastic's favourite album of 2008. Under the watchful eyes of ex-DFA producer Tim Goldsworthy it seemed that everything the Cutters touched turned to gold. Where debut album Bright Like Neon Love was all glittering pop hooks with the odd post-punk muted guitar the follow up was smeared in a veneer of melancholic synthesisers and seemingly sprinkled with cosmic space dust. Whereas ...Neon Love felt contemporary, In Ghost Colours still sounds like Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac who somehow got stuck in the future with no way of returning. For many, it redefined the reference points - those albums that serve to inspire contemporary musicians. In other words In Ghost Colours is pretty much timeless.

Now Goldsworthy is gone - the question is whether the magic is still there.

One thing is definite - Zonoscope makes a very good first impression. Starting with a trio of killers - 'Need You Tonight', 'Take Me Over' and 'Where I'm Going' - it is difficult not to be won over very early. If you are a fan of the band you are likely to have heard two of these already and both wear Cut Copy's influences on their sleeves - 'Take Me Over' was the Men At Work-esque first single off of the album and 'Where I'm Going', which is even more reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac than anything on the last album, was given away as a free download last year.

Both of these tracks are great but 'Need You Now' still somehow manages to blow them away - a dough-eyed new-romantic-on-MDMA-ballad, the bass pulses along with excitement like a racing heartbeat amid rolling drum breaks and a soaring chorus. It is without doubt the best thing we have heard from Cut Copy yet.

As openers go this almost feels mis-judged. Slamming two singles and an obvious future single right up front leaves the rest of the album feeling slightly askew. Couple that fact with closing track 'Sun God', a fifteen-minute Moroder-esque epic and the first couple of listens to Zonoscope can feel a little deflating. The highs are just so goddamn high that they either make the record's middle third feel somehow less worthy or the highlights themselves end up feeling gimmicky.

But as is often the way with Cut Copy, these are songs that crawl up inside your brain gradually, to the point that you can't imagine a time without them. And they rapidly become as important as the record's more obvious highlights. 'This Is All We've Got' and 'Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat' are better than most tracks on In Ghost Colours whilst 'Alissa' is a fantastic return to that record's dream-like aesthetic. And 'Blink And You'll Miss A Revolution' deserves a mention simply for having the most timely song title of any release, ever.

Several sites, including Pitchfork, have already commented that Zonoscope is more of an album than In Ghost Colours, on the basis that the latter is more a collection of jams than a cohesive whole. BlackPlastic isn't so sure - Bright Like Neon Love was a collection of pop songs, In Ghost Colours a statement of intent. Zonoscope feels no more album like than its predecessor and there are occasional transitions within the first four tracks that feel almost clumsy.

But the songs themselves are certainly as good as any of those Cut Copy have released to now, if not better. This will be the album that divides the hardcore cutters fans from the mainstream - the former might claim this album loses the focus and understatement the band once had, the latter will probably just enjoy the songs. Neither view is wrong - Zonoscope is In Ghost Colour's equal but it doesn't feel as important. This is undeniably another evolution but it doesn't feel like it will change the old records people view as cool, something In Ghost Colours certainly did. Instead it just further reinforces Cut Copy as one of the greatest dance rock bands of our time. And that can be no bad thing.

BP x

Zonoscope is out now, available at Amazon.co.uk on CD, Deluxe CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].