Album Review: Soft Pack - Ruede Hagelstein & The Noblettes

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Ruede Hagelstein's Soft Pack is not what you expect from a release on Tiefschwartz's Souvenir Music label by a DJ that has dabbled with electro-clash and been featured on Kitsuné Maison and Mathew Dear's Fabric album.

And that is because this is a laid back, experimental album and, together with his band The Noblettes, Hagelstein has made a set of contemplative jazz-influenced folk songs. The benefit of Ruede's producer-background are clear though, as this album is spoilt by a myriad of tiny flourishes and little moments that elevate these songs to greatness. Listen to 'Berlin', a tribute to the band's home, and it is full of detail - the clicks and shuffles of the percussion in the opening half, the disconcertingly slowed down break half-way through and then the shimmering jazz chorus that seemingly breaks out into flight for the song's second half. The layers of keys, the guitars, the traffic sounds that close it out.

There are more overtly electronic moments - the static and distortion of 'Blue Straight' or (an admittedly more laid back take on) previous single 'Emergency' - but even these moments are not going to bother any dance floors. This is an album of atmospheric pop, as close to Sufjan Stevens and Animal Collective as anything else.

And it is best when it is at its most free. The looping bass and rhythm of 'Leaving the Centre' feels improvised, the lyrics an unbound stream of consciousness. Despite the weighty bass it skitters around your head in floods of reverb. You can't help but worry the whole thing might fall apart if you were to concentrate too hard. 'Romance' is similarly unconstrained, a five-minute instrumental that feels like an extended snapshot of a single moment in time, the melodies unpacking and re-packing themselves over and over.

Ruede Hgelstein and The Noblettes have made an album of joyful ambient pop. It features the kind of music that can only come from the mind of an extremely talented producer. At its best, it is no less than beautiful.

BP x

Soft Pack is out now on Souvenir Music, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: Era Extraña - Neon Indian

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Neon Indian's debut album, Psychic Chasms, fell neatly into chill wave scene at exactly the right time. It had moments of sheer brilliance ('Should Have Taken Acid With You') but also felt like it had a fair amount of filler. Era Extraña is the opposite, it is the sound of musician Alan Palomo and his band seemingly freed from the shackles of genre-definition to make glorious shoe gazing distortion pop chill and, more to the point, it's packed with killers.

This isn't to say this second album abandons the Neon Indian sound - it doesn't. It just pushes it outwards to make something larger and more encompassing. At times it's a bloody noisy record, which isn't something you often hear people say about chill wave, and if you didn't tell me I'd probably have guessed this was M83's new one rather than Neon Indian's (more on which in a later post possibly...).

Era Extraña is brilliant simply because it boasts brilliant melodies. The cover depicts a confusing image of a person lit up from within (by a glow stick? Or mobile phone?), seemingly staring into their own hands whilst the sun sets on urban decay in the background. It feels totally fitting, packed with warm colours and messy scenery.

This is melodramatically hormonal music. Listen to the adrenal rush of 'Hex Girlfriend', fuzzy bass and a synthesised take on epic guitar solos and a suitably climatic finale. Similarly 'Fallout' just feels gorgeous - there is something so cool about Palomo's swagger on these tracks, he makes a song about actively wanting to fall out of love with someone sound like the most romantic thing imaginable. There are stacks of songs as good as this and before you know it Era Extraña is almost over, on dawn chorus of 'Sun Irrupt'. The album closes proper with instrumental 'Heart: Release', a bookend to the synthesiser referencing 'Heart: Attack' and 'Heart: Decay' that mark the opening and rough midpoint of the album.

Those that were fans of the previous album may feel like Neon Indian have thrown the baby out with the bath water on Era Extraña. I don't care - they just got themselves a much better baby.

BP x

Era Extraña is out now, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD, LP and MP3 [affiliate links].

Album Review: BBE 15 - Various artists mixed by Chris Reed

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BBE, along with their series of successful Beat Generations albums, caught my attention back in my university days. Hip-hop felt more interesting then with a movement of artists who brought a more creative free-flowing aesthetic to the genre. Some dubbed this as 'indie' hip-hop but I always felt that kind of seemed a bit condescending.

My favourite artists at this time were The Roots, Common and most of all Jay Dee, or J Dilla as he later became known. I've covered and mentioned Dilla on the site a number of times before but a few of his albums never fail to blow me away. Best of all was Donuts, a set of instrumental jams recorded from his hospital bed shortly before Jay died of blood disease TTP in 2006. Pretty far up the list however was his Beat Generations album for BBE - perhaps the first demonstration that he had aims outside of the hip-hop and R&B genres, with its wonky electro moments and thick and heavy soul.

This genre-bending experimentalism is what has made BBE a great label over the years, and it's here in spades on BBE 15. Hip-hop has lost something for me over the years but to listen to this you wouldn't know it. There is plenty of the loose, soulful hip-hop that is good enough but it is when things stray from this that this album really shines. Then rapidly accelerating beats and rhymes of 'Black Star' by Richy Pitch featuring M.anifest feel like a frantically tweaking modern take on hip-hop, the tempo making rapid shifts like moving through musical traffic. The transition into Ty's 'Heart is Breaking' is equally wonderful - a percussive, soulful track that combines breakbeats and soulful disco.

Osunlade and Erro's cover of Radiohead's 'Everything In It's Right Place' is inspired and punctures the first disc like a brass pin through a butterfly's wing, a gravity that holds the whole thing in place. A cover of Radiohead can be a risky move but the sales rhythms here work perfectly. The final portion of disc one takes in drum 'n' bass, soul and soulful hip-hop, with the bombastic 'How 'Bout Us' by Katalyst really pulling no punches.

The second disc never quite reaches the same heights, feeling much more constrained by genre than the first half of this album. J Dilla's turns return their glory, particularly 'Pause', but there is just a bit too much straight up hip-hop. There are still some great moments - the vitriolic rhymes and rough riding bass lines and beats of Jazzy Jeff's 'Scram' and the gloriously classic disco of Don Cello's cover of 'Aint No Stoppin' Us Now' - things just aren't quite as adventurous.

On the whole it's impossible not to forgive the slight disappointment of the second half of BBE 15 when it packs so much into one album. Few labels could hope to have such a varied and exciting retrospective - BBE 15 should make us grateful such great labels exist.

BP x

BBE 15 is out now on BBE.

Video: We Are The Creatures - Wild Combination

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Wild combination make cosmic art pop that is had to resist. There is an incescant jangly pleasure to this single from Wild Combination and it's catchy as hell.
Wild combination are a three piece from Essex and this single is released on 31 October. Pan Left have done a two-step influenced remix of 'We Are The Creatures'. That description makes it sound like it should be rubbish but it actually works - it reminds me of Deadboy's sundrenched take on the genre, which is a definite compliment. Check it out and download it in the Soundcloud player below:
BP x