Album Review: Mwahaha - Mwahaha

Mwahaha's debut album was released a couple of weeks ago through Plug Research Records and on it the four-piece have created a dizzy and psychedelic pop record that blends delicate vocals with assertively delivered drum beats and chaotic synth melodies.

Mwahaha has a chaotic sound but recalls The Flaming Lips as much as anything else, capturing the spirit of Wayne Coyne's band just as they descended from heavenly to deeply paranoid. So this album feels a little like At War With The Mystics, if without some of the hooks and the knowing sideways glances to pop-culture. Ross Peacock's vocals are predominantly delivered falsetto, something which manages to simultaneously emphasise the moments of candy-dreams and the descent into the album's more frictional and uncompromising moments.

The album opens with 'Swimmer', a track that seems to roll in like heavy cloud on a summer's day. It's a little out of control with chip-tune bass loops and heady drumming clatter into Peacock's vocals. 'Poinsettia' is a moodier version of the band, the vocals obfuscated beneath several layers of production and at times dropping several octaves.

In the beginning 'We Build' is youthful, reckless and feckless in comparison to Mwahaha's more conflicted moments, but it descends into one of the album's noisiest and most industrial moments - heavily processed vocals functioning as bass lines against a clattering drum beat. When at full-tilt the band channel the same kitchen-sink aesthetic used by melodic electro punk band the Mae Shi.

That latter half of 'We Build' triggers the band's most confrontational moment as the album moves towards its second half. 'Rivers And Their Teeth' is a barrage of sub-bass and found sounds that emerges as a syrupy and doped-up ballad. The album draws to a close with 11-minutes of psychedelic rock in 'Bathynomus Gigantes', a track that slowly builds like a pressure cooker and feels post-apocalyptic. It's the aural equivalent of the shoots of grass that burst through neglected asphalt and animals repurposing our living space after the end of our species. Out of the seemingly disordered sound of Mwahaha comes something new and almost beautiful: they are at their best when their focus is at its worst.

Mwahaha is out now on Plug Research Records, available to order on CD, LP and MP3 from Amazon.co.uk [affiliate links]. Stream the album on Spotify:

Video: Ride The Prejudice - Phonat

OWSLA: owsla.com/releases/phonat-identity-theft-ep Beatport: beatport.com/release/identity-theft-ep/1090154 iTunes: smarturl.it/idtheft Like Phonat: http://facebook.com/phonat Follow Phonat: https://twitter.com/phonat Listen to Phonat: https://soundcloud.com/phonat More on Phonat: http://phonat.net

Lush video for 'Ride The Prejudice', taken from Phonat's recent Identity Theft EP. 

Phonat is Italian producer Michele Balduzzi and this EP follows up his 2008 debut. The video itself is a surreal but spectacular shape-shifting piece of modernism that really fits with the IDM / future 2-step sound of the song.  

Check it out and go to Phonat's official website for more info. 

Album Review: Fires In The Park - Benin City

There's something eerily familiar about Benin City's debut album for label Audio Donuts. Taking their name from the capital of Nigeria, Benin City's sound is a reflection of the cultural melting pot that is London - there are elements of UK hip-hop and bass music in here, together with experimental spoken word moments. It also feels drenched in references to the artists that inspired vocalist Joshua Idehen and his band.

There are moments where Fires In The Park sounds like the Pixies meets Bloc Party, as on single 'Faithless', with its low-slung Kim Deal bass line and building synths. But just as often they sound like TV On The Radio, particularly when the horns are busted out by Tom Leaper, who also handles synths and samples. 'Baby' is a good example - a track torn between balladry and angst heavy trip-hop that is to relationships what a tailspin is to planes. On 'D.A.M.' we get Idehen with his vocals at their thickest and heaviest - there's a hint of Roots Manuva to the flow.

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Fires In The Park - Benin City

The album succeeds despite these components, not because of them. Where some bands are enjoyable in the way they sound like others, Benin City are unique and never feel even close to a one trick pony. Theo Buckingham's drumming and percussion work flows, loose and full of feeling, and the stripped back combination of sounds the band makes feels raw yet strangely polished. The experience of sounds feels extreme - brass is even more metallic, the bass usually rests much lower than everything else in the mix and a lot of the drumming is crisp, full of treble and mechanically staccato.

Fire In The Park is best and Benin City's vision most fully realised on the glorious 'This Is London PT2’ ( strangely there is no part one). A female spoken word vocal opens the track with a tribute to London's scruffy, messed up and contradictory beauty, declaring love before going on to declare London even more in love in return. It is a reciprocal attraction: London needs its people as much, or even more, than its people need it. For a band that both take much from but also give back to London's sounds it is a fittingly intimate and infatuated moment.

 Fires In The Park is out now on Audio Donuts, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]. Stream it now on Spotify:

Album Review: Get Lost VI - Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

It's been a while since I've checked out a release in the Crosstown Rebels Get Lost series of DJ mixed compilations. This new one, Get Lost VI, mixed by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs first caught my attention through it's somewhat eclectic track listing. It quite wasn't what I expected from TEED producer Orlando Higginbottom and it's the most leftfield release from Damian Lazarus' label in recent memory.

Disc one is a noticeably experimental affair - there are tracks from Gold Panda and LFO for a start. Higginbottom crafts a progressive but upbeat and inclusive mix. Early on a Roman Flugel mix of Valentina's 'Wolves' is a slice of minimal pop - wobbling bass beats and drums snapping whilst spectral vocals are draped across emotive pads. Shortly after Axel Bowman's 'Klinnsmann' is kicking things up a notch whilst continuing to deliver big vocal hooks and tight techno production values.

Matthias Zimmerman's heaving, percussive 'Vicente' is a chaotic envelope of sounds that wrap around the song's rhythms in a style not too far from Gold Panda's own and Dave Aju's 'Anyway' is just about as funky and off the wall as he can be. Both are funky and glorious fun. The first disc ends with the ambient progressive tribal rhythms of 'Bakatribe' by Albinos before Asa-Chung & Junray's absolutely classic 'Hana'. If TEED had just put out this one disc it would be quite the album.

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Get Lost VI - Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

However he didn't, and inevitably the second half of this album just isn't quite as consistent, nor quite as interesting. Yet it bloody tries...

Deutsche Wertarbeit's opener 'Auf Eneglsflugein' is a spectacular choral ambient tech-electro masterpiece which starts soft and ends barking mad - full of synthesised vocals and the skippy techno beats of Underground Resistence's track that follows. A number of retro- techno and garage influenced tracks come along, some hitting the right level of echo and fear, such as 'The Click' by Breach & Dark Sky, but some falling short. The TEED original track 'Lion, The Lion', recorded with Eats Everything, is at turns vicious then light and fluffy but feels like little more than a DJ tool compared to some of the tracks here.

Ame's remix of Tiga highlights the fact that 'Plush' is one of his strongest, most assertive tracks in some time. Future Four's 'Into Orbit' is the sound of a four-year-old hitting every key of a keyboard and every drum-pad at once and somehow creating a monstrously entertaining tune. Things then go a little off the boil with some more conventional bangers from Jamie Jones, Subb-an and Tom Trago and the dull and lifeless 'Time Reveals' by Bernard Badie. Old school piano house influenced track 'Troubled World' from an unknown artist closes things out, the pace of the album ruffled but it's a weird, disconcerting and somewhat brilliant end to the album.

Basically TEED's Get Lost VI is pretty great, but it's also pretty long. Dig deep and hold on.

Get Lost VI is out next week through Crosstown Rebels, available to pre-order from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links].

Stream: Let It Up - encore!

encore!'s new single out. Produced by encore! Mixed by Julien Briffaz.

If you don't know me by now you'll never ever really know me: I'm just a sucker for the Talking Heads sound. Encore! appear to be doing it with aplomb, as demonstrated of this wigged out electro piece. There's definitely a hint of LCD Soundsystem to this and the rough synth work is pretty awesome... Turn it on and turn it up.