MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
SYNTH POP CLIP ART Clip Art (Instructional Media) ●●●●● A senior relative once tried to show me something ‘on the web’, then spent ages footering about in Clip Art thinking it was Internet Explorer. It was too funny to put him right. The tenuous point of this anecdote is: the digital realm can be baffling for older generations. For
younger generations, when it comes to creativity, it’s been a horizon- expanding, even liberating force in many ways. Where contemporary music hitherto took a predominantly linear course, each movement reacting to or against the last, it now all seems to coexist side by side. Take Clip Art, the debut solo album from Stephen Livingstone, a member of Glasgow electronic / post-rock instrumentalists Errors. It’s a set with an undoubted retro fascination – Livingstone's
unburdened, self-recorded cut’n’paste sensibility freely shortcuts back and forth through decades and strata of electronic music. ‘Dance 2 Energy’ welds a jackin’ post-disco / early-R&B programmed bassline and trippy-smooth melody to a swirling, quite beautiful coda redolent of countless 21st-century dream-pop bedroom producers. ‘No Light’ could be an early New Order 45 spinning at 33rpm. ‘Floral Tribute’ is an opulently melodic finish to an album that, shrouded in a disquieting narcotic haze as it all may be, clearly considers itself a pop record above all things.
It’s all too slight at just six tracks. But whether Clip Art ultimately proves a standalone oddity, or the basic framework for an ongoing experiment in electronic-pop open-sourcing, it’s an intriguing and completely immersive little thing. (Malcolm Jack) ■ See page 76 for a Music Family Tree of Glasgow’s DIY pop and electronic scene, including Clip Art.
DOOM METAL OF SPIRE AND THRONE Toll of the Wound (Broken Limbs) ●●●●●
Following last year’s split release with Groningen sludgelords Ortega, Edinburgh- spawned doom trio Of Spire and Throne return with a limited edition EP on cassette, CD and black or red vinyl. With bleak cover art and a tracklist that promises three tracks in ten times as many minutes, it’s pretty obvious that a hefty amount of darkness dwells within. This thing is mastered by the hand and ear of revered US producer James Plotkin too, who knows a thing or 12 about crafting vast and brutal sonics. In fact, with his recent CV including duties capturing and enhancing the sound of freak-out psychonauts The Cosmic Dead, twin-bass noise-rock ensemble Thin Privilege and now this lot, Plotkin is becoming an increasingly ubiquitous presence in the Scottish heavy scene. Pounding opener ‘Legacy’, a shockingly visceral and single-minded bit of caustic, staccato sludge abuse, is perhaps the strongest track. It starts like the heaviest point of an Isis tune (skipping the long, tedious build-ups), but ends up somewhere much more monolithic and disturbing. It’s not so much a collection of riffs as it is an arrangement of colossal granite pillars being shoved over by burning apes. All the while, vocalist/guitarist Ali Lauder tells of unknowable and unintelligible horrors in a voice made of hot tar and bone fragments. More subtle and atmospheric in its early stages, ‘Tower of Glass’ eventually kicks in with an agonisingly slow instrumental trudge, an experience much like being stepped on by a drunken baluchitherium on the long saunter home. The closing epic
‘Cascading Shard’ offers nigh-on 13 minutes of relentless, grinding, dead-sloth-paced misery, flowing expertly and with understated complexity from grim riff to sad riff to utterly despondent riff, any one of which could qualify as a public health hazard. An expertly crafted, sadistically
punishing and highly satisfying slab o’ sludge. (Matt Evans) ■ ofspireandthrone.com. See the next issue for a Family Tree of Scotland’s doom metal and stoner rock scene.
AMBIENT / EXPERIMENTAL ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER Confessions I (Warp) ●●●●● SOUL / R&B / POP KELIS Food (Ninja Tune) ●●●●●
Daniel Lopatin, under his Oneohtrix Point Never guise, has long since wandered off into the conceptual, compositional undergrowth where you are fêted almost no matter what you do because, hey, you’re pushing sonic boundaries, ‘challenging’ listeners, tearing up old musical motifs and forging new and unique paths through sonic vanguardism, like a midi-Magellan circumnavigating the highbrow seas of contemporary music quackery with only the ghostly apparition of Karlheinz Stockhausen as your guide. How it works is this: you make some niche-y compositions, Wire magazine approves, and before you know it you’re on the outer-limits festival gravy train, playing cities like Graz and Tromsø, and then you’re collaborating on the soundtrack of a video installation with Isaac Julien in MOMA, while planning a live tour of caves. My apologies. Being snide about this cosseted bubble of experimentalism doesn’t change the fact that some pretty remarkable music survives beyond the highfalutin pretext. This Record Store Day EP will please anyone familiar with OPN’s last full-length effort, 2013’s R Plus Seven – a digital mindmelt filled with odd sounds, samples, layers, gauzy white noise, broken chunks of MIDI pre-set audio, all of it dreamy, intoxicating and cleansing – like how it must feel to get a Casio keyboard enema. On Confessions I, Lopatin finds a home for three tracks that he worked on for various nixer projects, and each displays his singular sonic vision. ‘Music For Steamed Rocks’ is a beatific reinterpretation of
With her fierce musical and sartorial style, Kelis always felt a little bit too free- thinking, too sassy, too strange, too damn cool for the pure pop mainstream. There was almost a sense of infiltration about hearing songs as smartly unconventional as ‘Caught Out There’, ‘Milkshake’ and ‘Trick Me’ from 2003’s half-a-million selling Tasty become supermarket-soundtrack ubiquitous. Even if situations such as this – when artists rebound onto independents
following major-label duds (2010’s Flesh Tone failed to scrape the top 40 here or in the US) – always feel faintly suspicious, it still seems quite natural to find her partnering up with highly respected British electronic label Ninja Tune for the Dave Sitek-produced Food. Music and food being two great passions of Le Cordon Bleu cookery school-trained saucier Kelis (yes, really), who launched her own range of sauces last year (yes, really).
Although his work with Beady Eye served as a reminder that turds can’t be polished by even the most maverick of producers, we’ll forgive TV on the Radio member Sitek that blip, in memory of Foals’ Antidotes, and other such triumphs – including now this deliciously bright, brassy (in both senses), big-bottom- ended soul / R&B / pop / electronic concoction, or at least its highlights. Lead single ‘Jerk Ribs’ sounds like synthy Swedes Little Dragon loosening their coolly minimalist aesthetic in favour of honking horns and orchestral thrusts. With its chiming piano motif, darting strings and throbbing arpeggiator bassline, ‘Forever
Witold Lutoslawski, with sweeping synth swashes and ethereal vocals. ‘Meet Your Creator’ was originally done for a Saatchi & Saatchi show and is a more pulsating, arpeggio-ed number, and a throwback to OPN’s Rifts era. ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ is a dislocating and portentous reimagining of the 1920s romantic ballad. It’s art, it’s collage, it’s retro-futurist music for replicants and it sounds very nice. (Mark Keane) ■ See list.co.uk for more RSD special releases.
Be’ is an up-tempo electro-soul ballad with power and class.
‘Floyd’ finds Kelis singing about how she wants to be ‘blown away’ in smoky tones over lazy, jazzy brass and purring organ. ‘Friday Fish Fry’ has an almost southern rock vibe, with its bluesy overdriven guitar and an excellent call-and-response interlude. All told, Food’s probably not the most refreshing nor nourishing musical spread you’ll consume all year, but when it finds form it’s finger-licking good. (Malcolm Jack)
72 THE LIST 17 Apr–15 May 2014