EP Review: The Come Back EP - Pillow Talk

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On first listen PillowTalk's EP, out on Life and Death, blew through my mind like ocean air. It is a refreshing set of tracks that melds soul and jazz to tech-house. Think a more immediate Nicolas Jaar with proper lyrics and choruses and you wouldn't be far off.

Opener 'The Come Back' swings and sways with samba rhythms through the first two-minutes before showering the listener in soulful male vocals. It is remarkably simple but the funky baselines and old fashioned vocals blend into a strangely new sounding creation. Add in the synthesiser and vocal harmonies and you get a winning formula. Minimal tech soul anyone?

Even better is 'Soft', a skittering blues soul track with stark rim shots and reverb that bounces around the inside of your lonely head. It's sensual and seductive but ultimately comes off sinister, feeling like you are being talked into something. "No more wasting time, you're being soft again I know", the vocal croons, ”come out tonight, dry off your eyes, don't let it show." Melancholic, sure, but it's also got class and a rhythm and pace you can't help but move to.

Instrumental 'Long Lost Friends' is jazzier, packed with loose rhythms and taught bass it is perhaps even cooler and more sophisticated than the other two tracks. The EP also packs a couple of Life and Death remixes. The remix of 'Soft' is a drawn out version that keeps most things in tact, giving most parts of the instrumentation more room to breath and giving the enough length to fit the track into a set. ’The Come Back' gets a more significant going over, the original being further from dance floor material in the first place - expect extra reverb and some vintage house kicks.

Whilst the value of the remixes is slightly questionable it's mostly because the original material standouts so well they aren't needed. The Come Back is inventive and the three original tracks here justify your attention alone.

BP x

The Come Back EP is out on Life and Death on 20 October.

Album Review: Le Danse - Slove

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Slove's 'Do We Need' caught my attention with it's bleached post-punk sound over the summer. The French newcomers' debut, Le Danse, is released soon - could this be another addition to the ever growing list of too cool French bands?

Despite my impression when reviewing 'Do We Need', Slove don't actually have a vocalist. Instead they work with guest vocalists - almost every track on Le Danse features one, and most of them guest on a couple of tracks. It's obviously a well trodden approach amongst British electronic artists (The Chemical Brothers, Groove Armada) and it works well here, adding extra variety to the album's 48-minute length.

There are a number of styles referenced throughout Le Danse, from the Madchester loose funk of the title track to the heavy, electro grind of 'Flash'. the latter's vocal, delivered by Maik, combining with distorted bass to create something cold and clinical yet fragile.

On 'Carte Postale' Anne Laure's spoken word vocal counts in French whilst a simple muted guitar bumps along on a crashing drum track and it is here Slove are at their best. Minimal, structured concept tracks that combine a deft touch with surprising aggression. Similarly, 'Noisy Neige' is wave after wave of distortion with gently hummed vocals, an audio thick shake of rough and smooth.

Le Danse feels tight and, for an album of guest turns, relatively focused - a good thing for a debut. Slove feel like the post-punk Air, which I guess should be a compliment... The only nagging feeling is that you can't escape the thought that we have heard it all before.

BP x

Le Danse is due to be released on 3 October on Pschent.

Comment: Has pop eaten itself?

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Following a conversation with a friend, who blogs over at kissthefist, yesterday I started reading Simon Reynold's Retromania. I'm literally nowhere into the book but my friend Dom wrote a post on his blog about it. And the problem is I'm not sure I agree with Reynolds' basic assertion that pop has eaten itself.

The premise behind the (non-fiction) book is that culture, music culture specifically, has all but died as a result of its own obsession with the past. The post-punk revival, concerts dedicated to playing single albums, re-masters, bands re-forming and movie biopics: it's easy to see where Reynolds is coming from.

But burying our heads in the myriad of awesome albums from the past is hardly a solution... It just makes us more likely to miss something genuinely new that comes out now. And that is half the point of Reynolds' argument, but still... There is a middle ground to be had, enjoying the classics whilst still believing in new music.

And, as I said, whilst I am nowhere in Reynolds' book yet (I have only just read the intro) I'm a bit incensed by the fact that he starts by listlessly reeling through the last decade picking out all of the bands that re-formed, re-imaginings and re-interpretations without stopping to pick out any of the more revolutionary moments.

Soulwax created a whole new form of rave culture that was too distant from the original to be a rebirth, and the elements of older tunes within their mashups too small a part of their overall ambition to ignore the impact they have had. Justice took the same ideal of dance music you can rock out to and ran with it.

And I don't much like dub step, but it is a whole new scene with a huge amount of relevance for some people. Will we look back on it as this generation's hip-hop? I doubt it, but it still resonates with the zeitgeist - contemporary youth's alienation and disaffection.

Maybe we lack 'scenes' in the way that we once had, but that is a symptom of our increasingly fragmented, choice filled society and is arguably a good thing: we aren't all the same. Sure, I'd love another 'rave' or 'post-punk' (I note here that actual punk was pretty derivative), but I'll settle for a stack of innovative albums. Look back over the past ten years and there are some thrilling new sounds to be heard... In response to Reynolds' list of uninspiring re-hashes, a list of some artists, off the top of my head, who have done and are doing something genuinely new:

Gang Gang Dance, Polar Bear, M.I.A., Flying Lotus, Outkast, Matthew Dear, Battles, Björk, Luomo, TV on the Radio, The Knife, Sigur Rós and Sufjan Stevens (who bizarrely Reynolds quotes with reference to the White Stripes being a re-hash, without really noting Stevens' creativity).

I'm jumping the gun and will plough on with the book, but what do you think? Is music really becoming as dull as Reynolds seems to suggest?

BP x

If you are interested you can buy Retromania from Amazon.co.uk [affiliate link].

Album Review: In The Grace Of Your Love - The Rapture

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It has been five years since The Rapture's last album and, with the exception of the gloriously funky Timbaland produced 'No Sex For Ben', ages since we heard anything new from Luke Jenner and the band.

The Rapture were one of the first artists to release anything through DFA as a label and were certainly first to release a full album in the form of the DFA produced dark and strung-out yet funky Echoes. It was an album that helped plunge post-punk into the limelight.

But a lot has changed since then. Bassist and vocalist Matty Safer has left the band, they have left and then returned to the label that first broke them and most significantly Jenner's mother sadly tragically suicide, with Jenner having his first child and converting to Catholicism shortly after and.

You can feel the impact of these events on In the Grace of Your Love. Whilst previous album Pieces of the People we Love was carefree and celebratory - a collection of songs about parties, cars and music itself - this feels much more grounded and grown-up. With Jenner's father depicted on the cover seemingly effortlessly standing on a surfboard as he rides a wave it feels like The Rapture are in the same pose - willing themselves to land the moves without seeming to break a sweat.

On the whole they manage it. The album is bookended by polar opposite tracks. Opener 'Sail Away' is ballsy, almost arrogant, as Jenner rides the wave of emotion that the rest of us are seemingly excluded from. Musically it's strident, with soaring keys and a vocal that just feels like a continuous chorus. But it feels a million miles from the relative sophistication of Echoes. Whilst the latter was full of references to Gang of Four 'Sail Away' feels like U2 covered by the Killers. It comes off like a confusing compromise.

If the opener is a million miles from the Rapture we fell in love with then the closing track, 'It Takes Time to be a Man' is equally distant but in another direction. A ballad that sees Jenner openly making his moves whilst simultaneously demonstrating his sensitive side, it's punctuated with a surfer rock baseline, jazz keys and brass. For all the change it is a much more welcome entry into the band's catalogue than 'Sail Away' and packs the kind of album closing gravitas that benefitted the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Maps' on their debut.

Elsewhere things are a bit less contentious. Much of In the Grace of Your Love feels midway between the darker first album and funk of Pieces of the People we Love. 'Miss You' is typically of this - the verses stripped back to little more than a thick drum beat and heavy bass. It feels like a contemporary re-imagining of the Rolling Stones track of the same name, desperation seeping from Jenner's vocals. 'How Deep Is Your Love' takes proto-house and rebuilds it around a brass heavy punk funk number.

'Come Back to Me' is one of the best songs on this record, it's song structure seemingly an inverse of the established norm of starting quiet and building to a crescendo. With a looping, dubby start based around a twisted accordion sound it pulls a handbrake turn halfway through into a dark and foreboding re-imagining of what you have just heard, a minimal house conclusion that works by emphasising an alienated longing for something, anything.

After the partied excess of their last album In the Grace... feels reigned in, but in doing so I can't help but feel that The Rapture have tempered their creativity. Echoes felt packed with ideas and songs the band needed to get out. At times In the Grace of Your Love feels a little bit like that album cover - coasting along with little evidence of the effort that making this album must have taken, particularly given the tumultuous period the band have been through.

BP x

In the Grace of Your Love is out now on DFA, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].