list.co.uk/music EXPERIMENTAL POP ANIMAL COLLECTIVE Painting With (Domino) ●●●●●
INDIE ROCK STEVE MASON Meet the Humans (Domino) ●●●●●
Records | MUSIC
After 15 years and ten full-length albums together, you would be forgiven for thinking that Animal Collective had reached an impasse in terms of musical growth. But the band is somewhat of an exception to the rule as they return with album number 11, once again illustrating their consistent artistry and reminding everyone that they still have a plethora of ideas and soundscapes left to share. Working as a trio this time, Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist have taken
Painting With in a direction that differs from recent releases, switching up the overall energy in favour of a gloriously catchy pop record that veers more towards 2007’s Strawberry Jam. In many instances, their trademark haziness has been replaced by a sense of brevity and clarity such as on lead single ‘FloriDada’, which features an instantly memorable hook and some playful vocal layering. Avey Tare himself stated this in a Rolling Stone interview: ‘Everything seems
drenched in reverb these days, and is so distant.’ But tracks like ‘Golden Gal’ and the brilliantly structured ‘The Burglars’ seem to counteract this distance through the combination of staccato melodies and densely packed instrumentation. ‘Summing the Wretch’ and ‘Lying in the Grass’ both make use of bouncy polyrhythms and droney synthesisers which i t together harmoniously rather than the expected battleground of dissonance. Meanwhile, in highlight ‘Bagels in Kiev’, the band utilise interesting experimentations with pitch, taking the album
Albums in 2013 didn’t get much more political than Monkey Minds in the Devil's Time. Steve Mason's second solo effort, the critically acclaimed, SAY-nominated record dealt with everything from the London riots to the death of David Kelly, and even featured Mason's i rst ever protest song, ‘Fight Them Back’.
Third album Meet the Humans is a different beast. As Mason revealed earlier this year, it has no overarching concept and, he says, each song is its own entity. While it doesn't have the sock-it-to-’em sentiment of its predecessor, it's just as lyrically strong and musically impressive. Produced by Elbow's Craig Potter, and Mason's i rst release since his move to Brighton, it's a much less tightly wound offering than Monkey Minds. First track ‘Water Bored’ is a bridge between the two records – not only in the political play-on-words of its title but in its opening piano riff, which resembles that last album's most accessible track, ‘Oh My Lord’.
Yet Meet the Humans evolves into something that's both gentler and more
experimental, while at the same time being very recognisably Mason. He's written powerfully about his struggles with depression in the past, and that experience resurfaces here: on ‘Another Day’, for instance, he pleads ‘Don't send me back to the black / because this time I might never come back’.
But it's a much happier album too. ‘Alive’, ‘To a Door’ and i rst single ‘Planet Sizes’ are softly summery, the sun of the south coast creeping its way into
into the more anticipated realm of psychedelia. There are many contrasting
elements at play in Painting With, but Animal Collective ultimately succeed in their attempts to make all these elements mesh into something less ambiguous than previous records and more direct, condensed and dynamic. It may have been 15 years, but the band continue to demonstrate their creativity and thirst for adventure with every release. (Arusa Qureshi) Out Fri 19 Feb.
Mason's songwriting perhaps. Potter's inl uence is clear too: ‘Alright’ and the heartache-i lled ‘Hardly Go Through’ have the orchestral expansiveness of a trademark Elbow song, but without overshadowing Mason's distinctive voice or resonant lyrics. And though the trip-hoppy i nal track ‘Words in My Head’ ends with a typically Mason note of self- doubt – ‘Please don't ever listen to the things that I say’ – Meet the Humans is a coni dent record, and an infectiously good listen. (Yasmin Sulaiman) Out Fri 26 Feb.
SHOEGAZE PINKSHINYULTRABLAST Grandfeathered (Club AC30) ●●●●● INDIE/CHAMBER-POP TINDERSTICKS The Waiting Room (City Slang) ●●●●●
Beholden as they tend to be to all of two albums released less than a year apart – Ride’s Nowhere (1990) and especially My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (1991) – self-designating shoegaze bands tend to be about the most myopic ever to wobble guitar tremolo arms and stomp on effects pedals. Which is what makes Pinkshinyultrablast such a breath – make that a blast – of fresh air. Hailing from St Petersburg, Russia – an entire country, much less a city, from
which most people would struggle to name another single guitar band of any great note – they’ve developed their sound in splendid isolation. Prior to the release of their impressive debut album Everything Else Matters last year, they’d never even played a gig outside of Russia. It’s easy to imagine them being enthusiastically received in most any corner of the world now as they follow up in brisk and more expansive style with album two Grandfeathered. It’s tempting to apply the word ‘dreamy’ to singer Lyubov Soloveva’s Liz Fraser- esque ethereal vocals, which are sung in English yet dipped so low in the mix as to rarely be intelligible. But to associate music of such power and i erceness even tangentially with sleep would be wholly misleading. Drift off into a haze to the kaleidoscopic electronica of opener ‘Initial’ and you’ll promptly be violently kicked awake by the cascading fuzz-max riffs and feedback wails of ‘Glow Vastly’.
There are basic resemblances with reverb-heavy second-wave shoegazers
Like so many other things Tindersticks – from Italian actress Isabella Rossellini singing on one of their timeless early singles ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven’ to i ve soundtracks for pictures by French i lmmaker Claire Denis – there’s a cinematic aspect to the Nottingham-formed chamber-pop band’s 11th album. The Waiting Room is a collaborative project which sees each track accompanied by a short i lm made by different directors from Christoph Girardet to Rosie Pedlow, Gabriel Sanna, Gregorio Graziosi and who else but Claire Denis.
It’s far from a groundbreaking conceit (everyone from Super Furry Animals to Beyoncé and Justin Bieber have tried something similar over the years) but a tasteful and quite functional adornment nonetheless to this very settled, spacious and enveloping set of songs. Stuart Staples’ baritone voice – so warm and inviting you want to lie down in it – is one of the most instantly identii able in British pop. And yet such is his way of slurring as if his mouth is perpetually pumped full of dental anaesthetic, his words alone don’t always conjure the strongest of imagery.
The sashaying glockenspiel and steelpan-decorated ‘Hey Lucinda’, a duet with the late American folk singer Lhasa De Sela, is paired with a simple but sympathetic video directed by Joe King and Rosie Pedlow, and presents a particularly successful marriage of music and moving image. Elsewhere ‘Were We
such as Lush, fellow Eastern Europeans The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa and obscure Americans Astrobrite (from one of whose songs Pinkshinyultrablast take their name). But the prettily punishing likes of ‘Kiddy Pool Dreams’ and ‘The Cherry Pit’ add to a sense of Grandfeathered moreover representing an uncommon and heady brew of post-hardcore and blissful psychedelia, and with it the sense of these Russians being a band beholden only to themselves. (Malcolm Jack) Out Fri 26 Feb.
Once Lovers?’ recalls the Blue Nile with its clipped funk bassline, while the repetitively grooving ‘Help Yourself’ is adorned by 60s cop show-theme horns. ‘We Are Dreamers’ features backing vocals from Savages’ Jehnny Beth, and i nds her revealing a more mellow side than she shows with her own i erce band, while still baring her teeth in l ashes. “Don’t let me suffer” sings Staples over a lonely orphaned organ on the title track, his pain at odds with an album which is always a pleasure. (Malcolm Jack) Out now. 4 Feb–7 Apr 2016 THE LIST 75