list.co.uk/music SYNTH POP SÉBASTIEN TELLIER Confection (Record Makers) ●●●●●
Records | MUSIC CLASSICAL / WORLD RED NOTE ENSEMBLE AND KULJIT BHAMRA Reels to Ragas (Keda Records) ●●●●●
Hirsute synth pop seducer Sébastien Tellier is a playful man of parts. In 2008, he represented his native France in the Eurovision Song Contest, singing bubblegum pop in a bubble car. Last year, he manifested as a New Agey self- help guru on his album My God Is Blue. But he is no stranger to soundtracks – Sofia Coppola has used his songs in a couple of her films, and he scored the 2004 French comedy Narco. He exercises those cinematic tendencies on this latest album, Confection, a predominantly instrumental suite that pays homage to the classic soundtracks of Ennio Morricone and John Barry in its subtly shifting moods, melodies and arrangements. This panoramic pick-and-mix begins perversely but dramatically with ‘Adieu’. An operatic soprano soars over a backdrop of glacial analogue synthesisers, the steady, inexorable drumming of Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen, and ever-ready strings, lovingly arranged by Emmanuel d’Orlando. The melody is reprised on twinkling harpsichord and undulating piano as ‘Adieu Mes Amours’ and ‘Adieu Comme un Jeu’ respectively. Tellier weaves other recurring leitmotifs through the album. ‘Coco’, a romantic theme etched on Spanish guitar, is rearranged for piano and woodwind as ‘Coco et le Labyrinthe’ to mischievous then mournful effect, while spaghetti western-style theme ‘Curiosa’ is played on sonorous piano and then again using pizzicato strings and solo violin. The
Conceived as a performing and recording project – looking at how things end up being really quite similar when at first glance they may seem very different – Reels to Ragas is also a celebration. It’s about music and traditions from thousands of miles apart colliding together and sitting as naturally as two friends breathing the same air. Scottish contemporary music ensemble Red Note are joined here by the superb and internationally acclaimed tabla player Kuljit Bhamra. The four instrumentalists involved – cello, violin and viola, plus Bhamra on tabla and percussion – bring sounds of Scotland and India together in a wonderfully vivid range of contemporary and traditional tunes.
In the opening track, ‘Himalaya’, composed by Bhamra, an atmosphere of
the east is instantly conjured up by sliding strings, plinky-plonky pizzicatos and a rather catchy tune underpinned by complex rhythmic patterns on tabla that make you want to dance. Tabla is a strong feature throughout, found bubbling away in accompaniment to Scottish traditional tunes such as ‘Always Welcome’, or bringing a bit of Bollywood to ‘The Gypsy’s Hornpipe’ and the descriptively named ‘Billy Bhangra and His Bolly Bongos’, another of Bhamra’s own compositions. There’s plenty of fun and good humour here, but also plaintive melancholy from
Robert Irvine’s cello. His ‘Love Song’ is reflective, serious and agonising in its
cheesily synthetic Walter / Wendy Carlos-inspired ‘Waltz’ stands alone, as does ‘Hypnose’, a gossamer web of feather-light piano and some ominous synth chords. Otherwise, all is bliss. Tellier makes his one vocal turn count on current single ‘L’Amour Naissant’, sculpting a dreamy love theme out of gentle house piano and Allen’s light, jazzy touch. Although it may smack of pastiche, Confection is cumulatively more than just a tasty bucket of popcorn. (Fiona Shepherd) bittersweet melody. Based on Burns’ ‘Ca’ the Yowes’, it is matched by Irvine’s daughter, Stephanie, singing the tune more traditionally, her clear, true tone, distant at first, becoming louder as the song unfolds, and creating a heart-stopping track of beauty. The chunkiest pieces are by violinist Jacqueline Shave, who enters into further exotic territories in ‘Machair to Myrrh’, a narrative that’s calmly evocative of Scotland before breaking down to become a frenzied melting pot fusing elements of east and west. (Carol Main)
ALT. ROCK MAGIK MARKERS Surrender to the Fantasy (Drag City) ●●●●● WONKY POP THE LEG Oozing A Crepuscular Light (Song, By Toad) ●●●●●
Although the title of the first Magik Markers album in four years might hint at a Spinal Tap-esque revelling in rock’s excesses, what the music actually displays is some of rock’s most scintillating rehabilitation. Despite being submerged in an ocean of reverb, it’s clear that the range of Elisa Ambrogio’s vocals has simultaneously expanded and warped. The great-in-the-small tenderness of ‘Mirrorless’, with the singer cooing, ‘I was the ghost and the flesh and the bramble / I was the crown and the king and the example / You rolling yellow sun / Seems like you couldn’t heat no one’, like a punk rock Emily Dickinson, is a stark contrast to the scorched-earth blues of first single, ‘Bonfire’. This track starts like a hex, with drummer Pete Nolan incanting the title over and over, before being drowned out by his own pummelling drums and Ambrogio snarling like a hepped-up Joan Jett.
Surrender to the Fantasy is the first Magik Markers’ album to feature former
Son of Earth noise-nik John Shaw, and his bass brings a crooked spine to some of the band’s strongest songs to date. He also acts as an adhesive between Nolan’s troglodyte drums and
Ambrogio’s haywire guitar – both of which are as wild as ever. Amborgio’s axe cuts through the skag blues of ‘Acts of Desperation’ like labelmate Neil Hagerty in the nasty majesty of his Royal Trux days. On album highlight
‘American Sphinx Face’, it’s all contorting sheets of sound like Japanese noise artist Keiji Haino riding a gigantic electric eel through Patti Smith’s Birdland album, as she sneers ‘In America every man’s a king / No good king but a dead king / I got no feudal feeling . . . I’m American like the dream’.
Surrender to the Fantasy is an exciting clarion call from some of underground rock’s most adventurous and intelligent practitioners. (Alex Neilson)
A lot can happen in 23 minutes. It certainly does on this fourth album by The Leg, mercurial junkyard auteur Dan Mutch’s manic spleen-venting songwriting vehicle over the last decade. With cellist Pete Harvey and drummer Alun Thomas completing The Leg’s (un)holy trinity, its whip-cracking gallop through eight numbers sounds oddly melodious, even as they appear to have come crashing down the stairs in a Samuel Beckett vaudeville routine.
The opening strung-out slide guitar and rockabilly canter of ‘Dam Uncle Hit’
sounds innocuous enough, but that’s before Mutch starts declaiming with demonic delight something about an elderly relative and laughing gas. The equally off-kilter ‘Lionlicker’ is the first song on the album to mix up Mutch’s acoustic thrum and Thomas’ restlessly nuanced percussion with Harvey’s newly developed piano skills. These flit between silent movie chase scenes and, on the music-hall clatter of ‘Chicken Slippers’, Les Dawson after a few sherbets. ‘Lionlicker’ is nevertheless fused with child-like wonder at something which has shuffled unwillingly off this mortal coil. Possibly helped along with a mallet. ‘Don’t Bite A Dog’ is a forebodingly urgent whirlwind involving Batman, gangsters and other unsavoury types. ‘25 Hats’ sounds like someone left all the machinery on at the slaughterhouse, where the owner has been bound, gagged and hung upside-down by a bunch of Buckfasted-up psychopaths.
While ‘Quantum Suicide’ is nervily relentless, the album’s finale, ‘Celebrating Love’, promises happy endings and redemption. By the time its frenzied Cossack burl gives way to a tender meditation on jelly babies and absent friends, the raging calm it reaches might just be an exhausted up-all-night collapse into drunk-sleep. Here, then, is a feral and dysfunctional thrash-folk jug-band which retains a cracked and fragile vulnerability that needs to get all this stuff out lest sectioning be deemed necessary. (Neil Cooper) ■ See list.co.uk for a longer version of this review.
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