MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
DARK / VINTAGE / ART POP ELA ORLEANS Tumult in Clouds (Parental Guidance) ●●●●● This sublime, disorientating LP is a rarity in every sense. For starters, it’s uncommon to make a double vinyl album. For said pressing to sell out – as did the initial 2012 run of Tumult in Clouds – is similarly unusual. Now this welcome re-press looks set to follow suit.
Ela Orleans is an exceptional artist, vocalist and multi-
instrumentalist. The Poland-raised, Glasgow-based haunt-pop diviner assimilates literature, theatre, fine art and technology into her untethered music, which navigates chanson-pop grooves, eldritch psych-rock and vintage electro. What’s perhaps most striking about Tumult in Clouds is that,
despite its variegated sonic vistas, it is an entrancing, cohesive work – from the ominous, minimalist electronica of ‘Dark Wood’, through an Aleister Crowley-citing dread-pop psalm (‘A Jealous Lover’), to the scuzz-riff-toting, Lord Byron-quoting garage reverie that is ‘Your Fame’ (a track that perhaps echoes Orleans’ sonic underground tenure in New York). Evocative, haunting titles eddy like recurring dreams and half-memories (‘Nocturne’, ‘Longing’, ‘Light At Dawn’, ‘In The Night’), and so too do motley literary references.
You might align Orleans’ unearthly charms with Grouper, Broadcast or Julia Holter, and her unsettling aesthetic resonates with the Outer Church, Trunk, Scarfolk and Ghost Box, but Orleans is quite unlike any other. Contrast the album’s reedy discord (‘Where Are You’), for example, with its uber-chic vintage pop swansong, ‘In The Night’. The latter rivals Stereolab and Portishead in terms of classy ambience, and provides a fitting ending to this beautiful compendium of billowing gloom and silver linings. (Nicola Meighan)
ELECTRO POP METRONOMY Love Letters (Universal) ●●●●●
Across three albums, Metronomy evolved from Joseph Mount’s one-man glitch electronica project into an iridescent indie pop band. Debut album Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe) (2006) bristled with wonky beats while The English Riviera (2011) saw Metronomy expand not just in personnel but also in scope. A shimmering slice of retro pop, it marked a wonderful side step that felt quintessentially British. A celebration of Mount’s youth in Devon, it transformed the mundane into the exotic, drenching dreary seaside towns with hidden glamour. It also won Metronomy a Mercury Music Prize nomination. Mount still holds the reins, writing, producing, singing and playing multiple
instruments (backed up by Oscar Cash on keys and sax, Anna Prior on drums and vocals, and Gbenga Adelekan on guitar) but for record number four he has ditched the computers. Stepping back from the digital world, they recorded the album on analogue equipment at London’s Toe Rag Studios, as favoured by the White Stripes, the Cribs and the Kills. You have to admire Mount’s production work, adding as it does an organic warmth recalling 70s rock and Motown funk. In fact Mount stated in a recent interview that he sees his future as a producer after a couple more Metronomy albums.
However, Love Letters very much continues the theme and sound the previous album set out. The title track overflows with joyous energy; ‘Never in a Month of Sundays’ bubbles with a jaunty melancholia; the instrumental ‘Boy Racers’ is
a Kraftwerk-meets-haunted-ice- cream-van jingle, while ‘Never Wanted’ is a wistful closer. There’s a hitherto unexplored sadness at play with hints of prog, French new wave and glam rock. It’s not that Love Letters is a bad
album – far from it, featuring ten exquisitely crafted, sophisticated pop songs. It just doesn’t feel as cohesive as The English Rivera. The last album so succinctly captured a mood and set such a high benchmark that the follow up can’t help but suffer by comparison. (Henry Northmore)
EXPERIMENTAL POP BLANK PROJECT (Smalltown Supersound) ●●●●● FOLK-ROCK WITHERED HAND New Gods (Fortuna POP!) ●●●●●
She’s like no one else, is Neneh Cherry. She has sung, danced, stamped and rapped across post-punk, hip hop, pop and electronica since the early 80s. And although this minimalist, throbbing tour-de-force is her first solo album in almost two decades, Cherry has never been far from our thoughts or turntables, thanks to some choice collaborations, including 2012’s alliance with Swedish jazz-noise rabble The Thing. Every Neneh Cherry record breaks new ground. Her 1989 debut, Raw
Like Sushi, ushered hip hop into the charts, and 1996’s Man introduced the Senegalese language Wolof into the mainstream thanks to ‘7 Seconds’, her duet with Youssou N’Dour. And so it is with Blank Project, made with producer Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, and London brother-duo Rocketnumbernine, channelling beat poetry, avant-electronica and free jazz via melodic pop (and vice versa), and using space as an instrument, a refuge, a weapon. ‘Naked’ is a case in point: stripped bare from its title onwards, it spotlights Cherry’s warm voice and incisive words, and the cardinal beats between them. ‘Cynical’ is similarly striking: a clanking industrial groove which gives way to a dystopian-pop chorus. And if ‘Spit Three Times’ lays bare the raw grief and disarray that spawned this album, following the death of Cherry’s mother, then ‘Weightless’ offers salvation – or helpless liberation, at least. That’s not to mention the melancholy of ‘Out of the Black’, with fellow Swede singer Robyn, which renders our hearts fit to bursting.
Cherry’s albums also serve as a motley pop continuum. Raw Like Sushi’s still-glorious ‘Buffalo Stance’ echoed post- punk revolutionaries Rip Rig and Panic, thanks to the brassy, spoken-word intro to ‘Keep The Sharks from Your Heart’ (from 1983’s Attitude), and similarly, the languorous drawl of Blank Project’s opener, ‘Across The Water’, evokes ‘Manchild’ from her debut LP. Sometimes all we need is the air that we breathe, and her words in heavy doses. (Nicola Meighan)
68 THE LIST 20 Feb–20 Mar 2014
It’s a brave thing to make a breezy jangle pop record in the year 2014. Tastes are more sophisticated, audiences are atomised, communal experiences are rarer, music fans are constantly sated yet never more whiney (yes you, you big moanyhole). Yet amid this maelstrom of ever-shifting contemporary mores and the conveyor belt of genres and microgenres, we get Withered Hand’s shamelessly unabashed paean to cosy, warm-bath melodies and charming singalongs. And guess what? It sounds terribly old hat.
Some people may consider this record a sort of woozy throwback to ‘proper’
breathlessly jaunty songwriting; three-minute pop wonders with swoops and cooing and that necessary soupçon of lovelorn misanthropy. And to be fair, what else it has – to its credit – is its sincerity; it doesn’t sound forced or acted out. Instead, it’s that most terrible of things: nice. These are entry-level songs, inoffensive, unchallenging, join-the-dots acoustic indie numbers, with a healthy dollop of signposted verse / chorus / verse vanilla-ness. The record is sunkissed and buoyant and whimsical and melancholy and all that vital stuff, but the problem with retreading old musical ground is that our expectations are higher now, our choices are innumerable, our time is precious and we yearn for something MORE (see, I told you, whiney).
Dan Willson, whose project this is, clearly has a handy Rolodex, being able
to call on members of the Vaselines, Belle and Sebastian and Frightened Rabbit to conjure up his, at times, cosy and pleasant creations, and there’s undoubtedly a blithe charm to ‘Fall Apart’ and the title track.
But the album is conspicuously devoid of any real nuance, intrigue or subtlety; it leaves this platter of samey morsels in front of you and expects the listener to want to explore, to come back and to keep indulging. Instead, you just roll over, bloated with acoustic indie-gestion. Stick a tuning fork in me, I’m done. (Mark Keane)