MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
COSMIC POP ART OF THE MEMORY PALACE This Life is But a Passing Dream (Static Caravan) ●●●●●
Beautiful Silvery Tay, with your landscapes so lovely and gay, and your uncanny knack for producing pop music that’s cosmic and thrilling. Witness Django Django, the Phantom Band and the Beta Band, all of whom have central protagonists raised a stone’s throw from Dundee. And now the city’s musical riches are further embellished by local duo Art of the Memory Palace.
The band, it must be said, has form. Art of the Memory Palace
comprises Andrew Mitchell (Hazey Janes, Idlewild) and Raz Ullah (often spotted touring in Jane Weaver’s band). The harmonic synth- brandishing duo bonded over a love of Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Popol Vuh and cassette technology. They recorded hours of freeform music and created the album layer-upon-layer from reel-to-reel tapes, in order to instil it with what they call ‘an analogue vapour quality’. The duo’s meticulous approach pays off. The record launches with
an evocatively-titled space jam (they all are) called ‘Sun-Blinded Capsule Memory Haze’, all shimmering electro, choral disco and sonic laser beams. If that wasn’t a fine enough portent for things to come, it’s followed-up by a brilliant celestial suite in ‘The Ghost of Benno Ohnesorg (Parts 1 and 2)’.
There’s a lot of interplanetary intervention on the album – it shines throughout the stellar waltz of ‘La Lumiere’ – but there are myriad earthly wonders, too. ‘The Ancient Mariner’s Burden’ is awash with seafaring reverie, from seabird cries and briny splashes to undulating cymbals and dirgy guitars: a tech-psych shanty haunted by mermaids past. Life is a passing dream, and death is eternal, but it sure does sound beautiful. (Nicola Meighan)
DANCE JAMIE XX In Colour (Young Turks) ●●●●●
Jamie xx’s paean to dance music is the soundtrack to the summer (as Limmy might put it), possibly whether you like it or not. His judicious debut album has an effortless charm that is both elegant and clever, with nods to different genres without being too overbearing, and a studious but heartfelt attempt to pinpoint what dance music means to him. As a bellwether, what In Colour lacks in daring it makes up for in accessibility, beauty and smarts. In essence, In Colour is like something made by Burial’s optimistic twin. It has a similar appreciation of bass music and culture – including snippets of mixtape dialogue – but looks at the world with a more upbeat slant. Instead of the ornate isolation and ethereal gloom of Burial, Jamie xx – aka Jamie Smith – delivers the flip side, a positive, twinkling togetherness that is neither cloying nor sentimental, but a kind of measured millennial euphoria. This is perfectly evinced in ‘Loud Places’, the album’s beguiling lead-off single featuring The xx bandmate Romy on vocals, an unabashed festival anthem with its delightfully ecstatic singalong chorus. Equally buoyant is its successor ‘I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)’, a lollygagging slice of sunkissed R&B.
There is a clear striving for authenticity here on Smith’s part. The charged low-end rumble of opener ‘Gosh’ with its air-raid siren synths and sampled MCs is the kind of conscious yet finely spun hat-tip to his predecessors that Smith has excelled in, as is the melodious thrill of ‘Sleep Sound’. Elsewhere,
‘ Stranger in a Room’, with bandmate Oliver Sims, and ‘Obvs’, with its hypnotic steel drums, acknowledge Smith’s role in somnambulant pop makers The xx.
There is a hint that In Colour might just be too refined, a studied exercise in musical glad- handing that will cause some listeners to bristle. But even with this considered approach Jamie xx has shown that he can simultaneously pay homage and find his own path. (Mark Keane)
SYNTH POP MIRACLE STRIP Magic Milk (Simply Thrilled) ●●●●● ART POP FFS FFS (Domino) ●●●●●
The Miracle Strip was a popular amusement park in Florida which enjoyed an extended heyday from its opening in 1963 and throughout the rest of the 20th century. It eventually closed in a dilapidated state in 2006 when they flogged off all the rides to other parks across the States. We introduce this information here because, well, this band are called Miracle Strip, and listening to them gives us a strong sense of faded Cold War-era glamour too. They sound like the 1980s, albeit a misty-eyed reflection on a childhood spent in that decade, rather than a facile contemporary spin on what the period was meant to have sounded like. When we say the 80s, by the way, we mean the semi-skilled, DIY, full-of-heart-
and-charm 80s of recording John Peel’s show onto well-worn TDK cassettes, rather than the era of yuppies and cocaine and Soho and New Romance. Fife-raised brothers Fergus Christie Jack and Malcolm Jack (the former a one- time member of Dirty Summer; the latter a writer for this magazine and one of the collective who help run Pictish Trail’s Eigg-based Lost Map imprint) are fully skilled at what they do, which is producing sonorous, affecting synth-pop anthems with a tropical bent and clanging guitar lines reminiscent of mid-period New Order. Yoshi Nakamoto of the Aislers Set and Still Flyin’ features on drums. Singer Fergus has a distinctive voice whose rolling baritone depths are offset
by the occasional slip out of key when he reaches higher, an imperfection which is charming rather than off-putting on the glistening pocket epic ‘Take
FFS, indeed. Following much in-secret collaboration, this fusion of Glasgow’s own Franz Ferdinand and Los Angeles’ arch pop classicists Sparks sees both bands blend together perfectly. The gaps in their respective personae are filled in with a shared love of bombastic guitar riffs and the similarly expressive, almost melodramatic qualities of both Alex Kapranos’ and Russell Mael’s voices. They lend each other youth, urgency and a sense of dignified gravitas, and each transfer doesn’t always go in the direction you might expect.
The opener, ‘Johnny Delusional’, lopes in on ringing, typically Sparksian piano, Kapranos’ signature breathy croon lamenting its inability to find the right words to use. It feels as though the grounds of this collaboration are being tested for firmness, but very quickly find their footing. The song builds into a quick, boisterous crescendo on the theme of yearning love as a metaphor for this team- up: ‘wouldn’t it be terrible if there’s no music there? / wouldn’t it be terrible if she don’t want you here?’.
Once the group have found the confidence that what they’re doing is working,
it doesn’t leave. ‘Call Girl’ is a jittery, suggestive groove in the vein of Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Michael’, while ‘Dictator’s Son’ belongs very much to the Maels with its dramatic, symphonic sweeps carried along on Bob Hardy and Paul Thomson’s typically meaty and hard to resist rhythm section. ‘Little Guy from the Suburbs’ is a soft, murderous, duetted ballad in the vein
Running Jump’ and the blissed- out Madchester swoon of ‘Daydreams of Crashing’ (‘why stay alone / when it’s easier with you?’ he croons with a lazily contented sentiment). There are shades of Scott
Walker to ‘Flying Chances’ and early Pulp to the eight-minute ‘Two Silhouettes’, although with a brief instrumental title track which takes the song count up to seven, it feels like they’ve settled on introducing themselves with an extended EP rather than a full album. (David Pollock)
of Scott Walker and ‘Police Encounters’ is taut, edgy synth- rock. ‘The Man Without a Tan’ surges on one of those punky FF riffs which gulps up everything before it while containing a most Sparksian musical reference to Liszt. Not every piece here is essential, but every one bears plenty for lovers of assuredly eccentric pop and a skewed, playful sense of humour. Most notable are the joyously self- referential ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’ and ‘Piss Off’s careening, sweary verve. (David Pollock)
84 THE LIST 4 Jun–3 Sep 2015