Album Review: The Unknown - Dillon

Dillon’s sophomore album, due out next week on BPitch Control, instantly marks itself out as distinct from her previous work. Dillon’s sultry vocals continue to unnerve with their stark nudity and hurt-sounding delivery. Debut album This Silence Kills [Spotify] deployed these vocals on quirky pop similar to Iceland’s Emiliana Torrini, yet here Dillon feels like she’s drowning in a sea of electronics and it is a little more in keeping with the label where she resides.

The Unknown swells with a brooding sense of humanity and femininity, albeit with a rather futurist take. The album opens with the title track, a menacing and threatening piece that briefly puts a foreboding piano refrain and Dillon’s distinctive vocals in the foreground before a looping electronic beat shudders into life to create the sense of an immovable force that bulldozes the listener out of the way.

View fullsize

The Unknown - Dillon

Lead single A Matter Of Time is an appropriate introduction to what to expect from The Unknown. Despite the tone that runs the course of this album Dillon asserts that these songs are not all delivered in melancholy - instead she sees the lyrical content as poetry, both abstract and personal at the same time. She likens The Unknown to a book of spoken words and pictures rather than a conventional album and you can actually hear that come through in the material here.

Evergreen is a good example - a humanist ballad that describes plant growth as a dead-pan delivered simile to emotional connection that is crafted into a heart-stopping piece of music. In contrast Lightning Sparked sounds like a spaceship looming out of thunderous clouds, Dillon's overt sexuality feeling robotic and electronic whilst the lyrics clinically portray sparks, eruptions and combustion. It feels like a description of the innate unpredictability and uncontrollability of our emotions and brains - soft and subjective things powered by nothing but chemicals, and it is never short of thrilling.

Most of the time Dillon isn't looking to mend a broken heart or win anyone's affection - The Unknown feels like a biography of human emotion, the kind of letter Scarlet Johansson's alien might send home in Under The Skin.

The rareness of the more directly expressive moments on The Unknown only serves to heighten their impact, the costume occasionally slipping as Dillon exposes more of her real human self. Don't Go instructs the listener - to fall onto her, to stroke her skin - the delivery as emotionally divorced as much of the rest of this album, yet their is no denying her feelings as she delivers the track's title over and over, pleading not to be left alone, the moment her emotional walls crack.

The Unknown is both alien and yet one of the most overtly human albums I've heard in a long time. Experimental yet immediate and approachable, it feels like a tribute and celebration of the complexity of our feelings and what it is to be human and, more specifically, female. And it does so with spectacular production that heightens this record and yet never, ever gets in the way.

The Unknown is released on Monday through BPitch Control, available from Amazon.co.uk on CD and MP3 [affiliate links]. Watch the video for A Matter Of Time below:

EP Review: Quiet Confidence - Ninetails

Quiet Comfidence appears a surprisingly assertive and yet under-stated title for an EP from a relatively unknown Liverpool band, but it says everything about what this release actually is. Name-checking These New Puritans, Talk Talk and James Blake the press info surrounding this release simultaneously tells you everything and nothing about this release.

View fullsize

Quiet Confidence - Ninetails

All of those bands can be heard here. Ninetails pack in the jazz-like experimental musical structures of These New Puritans at their best, the detail and attention of James Blake and the broad vision of Talk Talk but they sound nothing particularly like any of them. Quiet Confidence is a warm wrapper that forms a close and at times unabashedly intimate record. Hopelessly Devoted demonstrates this most directly, borrowing André 3000‘s paranoid yearning "what if she's the ONE?" from Where Are My Panties? / Prototype on The Love Below and applying it to a boundless and exposed two-minutes of experimental modern electronic music and jazz.

Yet for all the wild and ambitious experimentation there are some irresistibly enjoyable hooks scattered across Quiet Confidence. An Aria's brassy guitar lick creates a familiar sounding melody around which everything revolves as if held there loosely by gravity. The melody loops as the instruments intricately and somewhat inexplicably return to the same place at the same time despite so much else going on, the miracle of rendezvous in audio. It is both beautiful and somewhat unbelievable - reminiscent of Dustin Wong's fantastic guitar work, but applied to something grander in scale. O For Two is equally complex and yet also just as engaging, soft vocals beckoning the listener in through the surrounding debris.

Quiet Confidence is exactly the right adjective - this EP feels like a statement and a taunt. If Ninetails can make music this good, what the hell is everyone else playing at?

Quiet Confidence is out now on Pond Life, preview An Aria via Soundcloud below:

Stream: Call My Name - HAERTS

HAERTS have just posted this new self-produced track from their forthcoming album and it's a bit wonderful. The Boston four-piece specialise in synth-laden dreamy indie pop and this new track feels like a perfect intro. I hadn't really heard of these guys before, but their sound is pretty lush.

If you aren't familiar with the band check it out in the playlist below. I've also included earlier track Hemiplegia and a couple of nice remixes, one of HAERTS' track Wings by Shlomo and the other a remix by HAERTS of MSMR's Think Of You.

Review: Sonos and Shuffler.fm

When I'm not busy catching up on the latest music or working on my day job within the digital advertising industry I'm known for being a bit of a technology geek. I'm a big fan of Apple's various products due to the emphasise on design, humanity and usability, but I also love various pieces of technology - my Pebble smart watch, my espresso machine, my car. One area that I increasingly feel confused by however is the world of home audio... The idea of buying a home stereo these days feels a little antiquated, and yet so many of the other solutions - such as iPod docks and bluetooth speakers - lack finesse and flexibility.

The reality is that I haven't had the need to review what I use in a while - I'm in a two bedroom flat... If I want to hear something in the next room I just turn it up. I have an Apple TV connected to a stereo via the TV and so I generally just use that from my phone, iPad or laptop. I am hopefully on the verge of moving house however, and a system that enables more control and flexibility will be welcome in the new place.

As such I was very happy to be offered a Sonos setup to check out for review purposes - I've long considered buying one once my home was large enough to warrant it, so it was great to have the opportunity to try out the experience first.

The setup itself is largely very easy - I had two Sonos Play:1 units and a bridge. The bridge plugs into my router and the speakers go wherever I want, provided they are within range of my wifi. Installing an app on my phone enables a very painless syncing process and then I was pretty much ready to go - cueing up songs in both the living room and the bedroom simultaneously, or different songs in each.

The Sonos app on the iPhone makes it very easy for multiple people to add individual songs and this aspect led to me and my partner experiencing music in a way we wouldn't normally - more of a shared experience than the way you usually consume music. The result was collaborative and fun - it would be great at a (moderately sized) party. The process of cueing up songs across devices is made possible by the fact that all music is played through the Sonos app - there is no support for AirPlay or Bluetooth and so you can't just beam tracks from your app of choice.

View fullsize

This brings the first of my only two real criticisms. In addition to the music on my phone or computer, I can setup third-party services within the app, such as Napster or Spotify. The downside is that without hacking about you can only register one version of each service on your Sonos setup - this meant we had to choose between the two active Spotify subscriptions we have in my home, removing access to the playlists and history on whichever one wasn't used. As music becomes more socially enabled (everything I play on Spotify is already pumped through to Facebook and Last.fm) this becomes a bigger stumbling block. I don't want anyone else using my account, but I want to be able to access my hundreds of playlists when I am choosing music. Sonos need to sort it - it is almost enough to put me off buying my own set.

My second criticism is the difficulty in setting up music if you, like me, keep your main music library on a NAS drive (I.e. a harddrive connected to your network rather than a computer). Eventually I got it working, but I had to work with unfamiliar network protocols and rename the router first, which for some reason then required me to basically re-setup the whole device (I use an Apple TimeCapsule - this last point is Apple's fault not Sonos') . Once setup it works like a dream - I can access any music on the drive without having my laptop on, which feels like a revelation. It does, however, demonstrate how easy to use AirPlay is in comparison. When it comes to NAS support, plug-and-play this is not.

These criticisms are both quite specific, and for many users will be irrelevant. Those people should definitely consider getting a Sonos player as everything else is pretty great. The sound quality out of the players is fairly impressive - much louder and better quality than my Bluetooth speaker (a Jambox), albeit always needing mains power... The Sonos Play:1 could do with a bit more mid-range, but I imagine this is addressed in the more expensive units. Regardless, I was impressed - the speakers are definetly loud enough to irritate neighbours, if that is your desire. The apps are pretty easy to use, if a little ugly (no iOS7 update as of yet) and the ability to play music in multiple rooms at once was great. I used to find myself walking around playing music on my Jambox whilst I carried it - I don't do that any more.

It is worth noting too that the services on offer within the Sonos ecosystem are extensive. Most cloud services are available, including Audible and Amazon's Cloud Player. There are also services specifically built for music discovery - I spent quite a bit of time playing with Shuffler.fm, which pulls together music based on what is being covered by influential music blogs. I'd not used Shuffler before but I was impressed by the fact that there were a couple of new tracks I'd not heard yet ready to be played easily within my home system. It is worth noting that both Soundcloud and Mixcloud are notable in their absence however - hopefully they will be added at some point.

View fullsize

So would I buy?  Probably. I would gladly pay more for AirPlay support, and if I find an equivalent system that does support it then I might give Sonos a miss. I use different apps for podcasts and films and videos on the go - AirPlay is great because it supports pretty much everything, including multiple Spotify accounts in a single home. As good as the Sonos app is, it will always lag behind the seperate music service apps from a usability standpoint - Sonos should just let me play whatever sound I want, whilst keeping their app as an optional route to manage things.

Sonos is very powerful though, and it represents pretty much the best solution for networked music. Niggles aside, this is the best way of listening to music in the home that I have found.

Stream: Capricorn - Newsome

This new single from Newsome, real name James Berkeley, who has previously released music under the name King Dinosaur. Capricorn is the Brighton producer's new single and it's a punchy slice of electronic soul with plenty of bass, a little reminiscent of some of the more modern moments on Jamie Liddell's under-rated self-titled album from last year.

Check Capricorn out on Soundcloud, the single is released on 24 March.