MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
ELECTRONIC SAMPHA Process (Young Turks) ●●●●● It’s often the case that you can recognise a voice instantly even if you’re unable to pinpoint exactly who it belongs to. Many would be able to distinguish the steady tranquillity of Sampha’s vocals within just a few bars of melody (from SBTRKT’s ‘Hold On’ to
Kanye West’s ‘Saint Pablo’). But with debut album Process, Sampha has risen to new levels, traversing territory that allows his voice, music and production to firmly stand alone.
The album is led by a sense of opposition – an inhale and exhale, attack and release – which works to signify the intensity that comes with change. ‘Plastic 100°C’ is turbulent in its make-up, working up to the vehemence of second single ‘Blood on Me’ with its bold and sinister hook: ‘I swear they smell the blood on me / I hear them coming for me.’
But this quickly fades for ‘(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano’, a
quiet reflection, with the instrument from Sampha’s family home as a foundation for his reminiscence. It’s a focal point of the album, drawing attention to Sampha’s talents as a songwriter and musician rather than merely as a guest vocalist. The pace quickens again with the excellently mixed ‘Reverse Faults’ and the restless polyphony of ‘Under’, before eventually closing with the pensive meditation of ‘What Shouldn’t I Be?’.
With his debut, Sampha has succeeded in cementing his voice within a landscape that belongs solely to him. Each track, produced by Sampha himself and Rodaidh McDonald, acts like a small snippet of a wider story that has been in progress since the release of his debut EP Sundanza in 2010. Process is ultimately an archive of emotional shift as well as musical growth. (Arusa Qureshi) ■ Out Fri 3 Feb.
TV SOUNDTRACK GRAEME MILLER & STEVE SHILL The Moomins (Finders Keepers) ●●●●●
Some might say that The Clangers had all the best tunes. Graeme Miller and Steve Shill would beg to differ. In 1982, those two post-punk performers, from the same Leeds scene which spawned Gang of Four, home-recorded a lo-fi synth soundtrack for the televisual incarnation of The Moomins, Tove Jansson’s adorable creature creations who starred in a series of beloved children’s books.
The stop-motion animated series – adapted and produced by Anne Wood, the woman who would later bring us the brazenly lysergic Teletubbies – was broadcast in the UK in the early 1980s (not to be confused with the later Japanese anime series and its jaunty easy-listening country theme tune). But its soundtrack has never been commercially available until now: good news for fans of the gentle Nordic creatures and of whimsical vintage synthesizer music alike.
Necessity was the mother of invention and, surely inspired by the plaintive simplicity of Vernon Elliott’s soundtracks to various Oliver Postgate shows, Miller and Shill created their DIY score using a Wasp (an early, rudimentary digital synthesizer with all the finesse of a Stylophone) and an ocarina (or wind flute) to create that Clangers-like suggestion of naïve inquiry.
In keeping with the darker atmosphere of its European production, their
soundtrack has its eerie moments but is every bit as endearing as the lovably rotund Moomins. The engaging theme tune ambles along with a drunken hurdy-gurdy backdrop, and folk whistling of the kind you would normally only hear during the more rustic entries to the Eurovision Song Contest. Like all good themes, it ultimately gets under the skin. The rest of the score contains some ambient oddities, quirky vignettes and what sounds like a didgeridoo on the otherwise Middle Eastern- inspired ‘Hobgoblin’s Hat’ but its charm prevails. (Fiona Shepherd) ■ Out Fri 3 Feb.
ELECTRONIC BLANCK MASS World Eater (Sacred Bones Records) ●●●●● REUNION ALBUM GRANDADDY Last Place (30th Century Records) ●●●●●
The press release accompanying this third album proper by Benjamin John Power – presumably having been approved by the artist himself – describes World Eater as the ‘reactionary and representative record of a year teeming with anger, violence, confusion and frustration’. This is the musical document of 2016's upheavals from Power (a sometime Fuck Buttons member), but it’s not sufficient just to say you’ve taken inspiration from times of turmoil which have shifted global perceptions. If anything, you have to back it up through music which grabs the zeitgeist and breaks into a sprint with it.
There’s no question that World Eater sounds precisely like the prevailing
contemporary tastes in popular culture. It’s densely electronic, structured around icy beats and glistening electronic pop and hiss, somehow simultaneously impersonal and intimate. Interestingly, there are no vocals, or none which can be identified. Instead, chants, hymnal calls, quasi-metal screams and murmured, hard- to-place words abound, a sonic representation of the chaos amid our online world. World Eater snatches at influences, and the sense is of overwhelming tension and anxiety being released by some explosively accurate pop riffs.
‘John Doe’s Carnival of Error’ begins on a twinkling, repeated percussion line which walks the wire between comfort and uncertainty. 'Rhesus Negative’ follows it in more typically apocalyptic style, nine minutes of racing, crunchy instrumental beats pitched somewhere between Gary Numan and Rage Against the Machine.
When a long-awaited reunion has been spun out to this degree, it had better be good in the end. The 11 years between releases has seen a split, solo projects, one reconciliation, a move away from Modesto, California for their band's driving force Jason Lytle, and the realisation during the recording of the song ‘A Lost Machine’ that he was in fact working on a new Grandaddy record. Oddly, that song itself is the penultimate track here, and it’s part of a
reflective, almost mournful conclusion which is at odds with the record’s bright opening. If it’s the song which inspired Last Place, it’s coming from a beautiful but dark location. There's a wash of sad piano and spacey, Mercury Rev-sounding effects which see the narrator sheltering from some unspecified disaster at ‘the temporary shelter in the roller rink’ where there’s ‘live old-time music and it’s warm inside’. With emotions flattened, he reports that ‘every woman and child and man in the canyon lived,’ before the song rises to an apocalyptic, traumatised finale.
This song is supplemented by the punch-drunk electro-acoustics of ‘Jed the 4th’ and the breathy closing ballad ‘Songbird Son’, in which Lytle pines ‘you’ve lost your right to sing . . . message better left unsaid . . . don’t say nothin’.’ It’s a deflating conclusion which straddles the line between defeat and acceptance, but it doesn’t tell the full story of the record.
‘Please’ is a frosty and sparse piece of yearning chillwave, while ‘The Rat’ and ‘Silent Treatment’ soon submerge smooth pop hooks between galloping beats. ‘Minnesota / Eas Fors / Naked’ is the darkest thing here, a nerve- shredding track of stress-position fuzz and sick-building noise, with ‘Hive Mind’ the most beautiful, a soothing R&B beat stretched to eerily hypnotic dimensions. If this is 21st century protest music, it’s a protest against the complacency of the comfort zone. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 3 Mar.
‘Way We Won’t’ is a joyous, fuzzy rocker which sings the virtues of home and belonging; ‘Evermore’ confidently adds synths to the band’s rustic rock roots; ‘Chek Injin’ is a blast of youthful skate-punk; and ‘I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore’ speaks of a sense of rootlessness with breezy humour. For a reunion, the themes are strangely unsure and non- committal, but in both its depths and its peaks, the music still finds occasion to soar. (David Pollock) ■ Out Fri 3 Mar.
76 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2017