That Hawk Is Doing Something

The Hawk Is Howling
Mogwai
Matador/Wall Of Sound, 2008
4 stars

After 2006’s hot-and-cold Mr Beast, this album is a return to form for the Scottish post-rock heroes. Once again they’ve tried to combine their ruggedly beautiful slow-burners with flat-out guitar tracks, but this time they’ve got the mix just about right. Batcat shows that these guys haven’t lost their love of insanely loud guitar noise, but the following tracks, the beautiful Danphe And The Brain and Local Authority, also shows their understanding of light and shade - the treatment of which, on this record, is fantastic. The gradual build of opener I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead (which brags one of the finest song titles of the year) shows that this band are back at the top of their game. Mogwai usually work best when they pick a style and stick to it for an entire album - their Zidane soundtrack was a superb example of this - but here they’ve made an album that covers the whole gamut of their sound without sacrificing a thing.

Artwork: B+
The liner notes to this album credit the cover and inside artwork to someone called Yahua's Thinking Studio, citing a couple of old eBay item numbers as reference. Whether this means that they bought the artworks (and, therefore the rights to print thousands and thousands of copies of them) from some unsuspecting Mr Yahua, or something else, I don't know - Google's letting me down on this one. What I do know, however, is that I really like it. That cover image is really good, in a kind of shit way. I love it when people paint or draw really intense things, like pets or landscapes or, here, birds.

Published in mX, Thursday October 30, 2008.

Haunted Castle

I originally posted this review back in June, but seeing as the album was finally released and given a proper album cover this week, I thought I'd update it.

Microcastle
/ Weird Era Cont.
Deerhunter
Kranky, 2008
4.5 stars

The second side of last year's excellent Cryptograms (possibly the best 16-and-a-half minutes of music released by any band in 2007) left listeners hanging. The album's tumultuous recording process resulted in contrasting shades of stifling dark and bright light, but thankfully Microcastle picks up where Hazel Street, Cryptograms' dreamy climax, left off. Opening with an Intro that sounds like the Flaming Lips covering Pink Floyd, the distorted guitars and straightforward drumming haven't actually changed much at all, but the band don't spend as much time in a fog of guitar noise stalking their prey - they go straight for the kill with pop-guns blazing. The ambient psych-pop leanings of singer Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project are all over this album, though the subtle sampling of Let The Blind (...) has been replaced with some beautiful reverb-soaked instrumentation. The driving guitar-rock of Nothing Ever Happened, the spacey blissed-out Green Jacket and self-proclaimed 'doo wop' closerTwilight at Carbon Lake are standouts. Cox is this year's Noah Lennox - his releases both solo and with-band are sure to see him with both feet straddling the top rungs of this year's best-of lists. But let's face it, releasing two great albums in a year is just slack, isn't it. Enter Weird Era Cont., Microcastle's 'secret' second disc. Remember that episode of the X-Files where that guy had a little brother that lived inside him and only came out at night? Yeah, well Weird Era is kind of like that. Kind of. It's not as good as its big brother, but it should certainly not be ignored. To be honest, had these guys hung onto Weird Era for another six months then released it (or uploaded it onto an unsecure file-sharing server) as a set of Microcastle B-sides - or an entirely separate album - it would have stood up just as well.

Artwork: TBA A
Can't wait to see what they come up with for this one. After giving us a couple of different type-based designs and another interesting one combining a castle and some flowers, it seems that the band decided they needed to do something new for their masterpiece's physical release, and so we have this version. I actually really like it. The photo (is that Cox with long hair?) is nice, and really hints to the shoegaze aesthetic of the album. And, thought it probably didn't even need the skull/eye thing, it's a nice subtle touch. Top marks.

Under the radar

Dark Times (Symphony No.2)
Cam Butler
Rocket, 2008
4.5 stars

Silver Ray mastermind Butler has eclipsed his group’s work with his fifth solo outing, Dark Times. A grandiose set in eight parts, it is at once charming and foreboding - the songs build up and gather weight like storm clouds, eventually unloading their full force on the listener in a shower of orchestral strings, jazz-infused percussion and Butler’s trademark guitar. Butler is smart enough to know that words would spoil the mood set here – the entire album is purely instrumental, yet its rich, romantic ebb and flow communicates more than any lyrics could. Musically, you won’t find a finer Australian album in 2008.

Artwork: B
From a distance it looks good, but jesus - did they pull this cover image straight off the internet? Pixels people, pixels!

Published in mX, Thursday October 23, 2008.

Don't Delay

Delays
Mark Barrage
Mistletone, 2008
4 stars

A Barrage show is unpredictable at best – a relatively inoffensive-looking bloke, he’s just as likely to start absently throwing objects into the audience as he is to sit down at an unattended drum kit and ‘air drum’ along to his own loops. That you don’t know what’s coming next is the perfect live treatment for the Melbourne artist’s music – catchy, warped and synthetic pop tunes that crackle and buzz like faulty electricity poles on a rainy night. Hindsight melds low-fi samples with Casio keys to create a reflective digital jam, title track Delays is like the soundtrack to a 22nd-century jail-break and Is Digitalis is like a Roni Size nightmare commited to tape. Delays has a real universal appeal – it’s at once a bedroom dance record and a DIY rock record, and it’ll find a place in garage CD-players and indie club sound-systems alike.

Artwork: B
You can't beat a bit of CMYK action. I've only seen the press mail-out, but I'm assuming the proper one has three Rs, an A and an E inside the cover.

Published in mX, Thursday October 23, 2008.

Lens Flares

Like Pearly Clouds
The Sun Blindness
Sensory Projects, 2008
4 stars

If this album were a day, it would be a stinking-hot Saturday in summer, where the horizon shakes and vibrates, the road burns the soles of your feet and the only place you want to be is at the pub, sitting in the beer garden leaning over a pint. It’s a luxurious, laid-back pot of psychadelia, full of echoey guitars and sweeping synths, with Tor’s smooth vocals washing over the top. Parts of Like Pearly Clouds are like late-sixties pop songs that have been slowed down and drenched in bong water and elsewhere it’s purely experimental, but not once is any of it overly indulgent. This Melbourne duo have nailed the formula here – equal parts sunshine and moonshine – and the result is a concoction you just want to strip down and lie down in.

Published in mX, Thursday October 16, 2008.

Radio On The Internet

Dear Science,
TV On The Radio
4AD, 2008
3.5 stars

This is pop music at its most modern. Political, lyrical and thoroughly musical, Science brims with crystal-clear instrumentation, elegant production and about a million instruments and effects. Its songs cover a number of styles (fuzzy guitar rock, sleazy funk and danceable electronica are covered in the albums first four tracks), making for a bit of a mixed bag - but the mix is pretty good. Tunde Adepimbe and Kyp Malone’s soulful vocals smear themselves across upbeat tracks like Golden Age and album highlight Crying, but sit back on the more subdued numbers like Family Tree – their voices are just as finely tuned to the overall sound as the plethora of instruments they employ. Overall it’s an energizing epic; a hopeful, confident pop album for what are pretty difficult times.

Artwork: C+
It's a pretty boring cover image, but I guess they figured there's enough happening in the music itself. Inside the cover there's nice fold-out liner notes - pretty text-heavy, but it makes a nice change to the stock-standard booklet. And, in the end of the day, I'm a sucker for a nice digipak.

Published in mX, Thursday October 9, 2008.

Happy Places

High Places
High Places
Mistletone, 2008
4.5 stars

Earlier this year this Brooklyn boy/girl duo released a collection of singles titled 03/07 – 09/07, a playful and absorbing set of danceable psychedelic pop songs that sounds like Playschool sing-alongs dipped in honey and rolled in crushed opiates. This early release generated a fair amount of digital hype, and it turns out it was totally warranted, as the group’s self-titled debut LP sees every wax crayon in their arsenal sharpened to point and ready to rip. The influences here are wide-reaching (opener The Storm plays with Middle Eastern instrumentation, The Tree With The Lights In It has an unreal tropicalia beach party vibe and From Stardust to Sentience is like a late night meditation on late-nineties drum-and-bass), but Mary Pearson’s vocals speak a universal language of good vibes and child-like innocence. High Places is a record that will appeal to both a little kid’s sense of fun and an big kid’s sense of adventure.

Artwork: B+
This seriously looks like the track out the back of my family's beach house in Blairgowrie. No joke - have a look here. I must say, I've never seen a giant pink floating head, or a diamond sun, when I've been out there though.

Published in mX, Thursday October 2, 2008.