Another week, another Banks jam to swoon over. This remix of recent single Brain by Ta-Ku is to die for... Jump on that drop at 2:52...
Banks
EP Review: Rootwork - Trees
Charles Trees is allegedly something of a legend in the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where locals are said to often proclaim "I spent half my life waiting for Charles". And yet up until now he has remained something of a secret, despite releases for Ghostly International, Moodgadget and Fulgeance’s Musique Large.
This new EP, Rootwork, has been in the making since mid-2012 and it just might help to explain what the fuss is all about. Opening with the title track there is a Latin-jazz, Sun Ra vibe to proceedings as Trees pretty much throws an onslaught of beats and percussion against Dan Bennet's brilliant sax playing. It is organic, fresh and absolutely full of life, bumping along to its increasingly electronic and acidic climax - this is the sound of totally disperate genres playing together and it seems effortless.
Exodus takes the baton from Rootwork and creates a calypso punk-funk stomp, house beats gradually dissolving as the track breaks into sunny funkadelic joy. On Get Advanced rapper and poet Intricate Dialogue casually flows over a loose rhythm, James Brown samples and a little 303 to create something intoxicating. Finally What's Left is cosmic funk, keys floating in space whilst some chunky bass lines create a sense of movement.
The EP also comes with two remixes, though neither feels quite as innovative as the originals. DJ F gives Rootwork a isolated and galactic feel with sinister keyboards substituted for the sax. Shigeto then extends What's Left to a nine-minute epic, a lengthy freestyle-sounding intro eventually giving way to a rapid, elastic and jazzy take on the original.
Rootwork is out on Monday through Lovemonk, available to order from Amazon.co.uk on MP3 [affiliate link]. Preview Rootwork on Soundcloud below:
Stream: Fields - Still Parade
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Gloriously smoky dream pop from Still Parade, real name Niklas Kramer, on this track taken from his forthcoming EP Fields. There's a cool laid back feel to this - Kramer was trying to capture a late-80s Fleetwood Mac feel and you can really feel that coming through in the instrumentation.
The Fields EP will be released through Serve & Volley Records on 6 May.
Dillon
Album Review: The Unknown - Dillon
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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.
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:
Ninetails
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.
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: