STACK #122 Dec 2015

MUSIC REVIEWS

STREAMYOUR FAVOURITE ALBUMS AT JBHI-FI NOW... NOW!

Doug Wallen dances with himself.

Arca Xen Venezuelan oddball Arca (aka Alejandro Ghersi) has produced Kanye and FKA Twigs, and his debut album seals his visionary reputation. Standing outside of established genre lines, Ghersi makes music somewhere between the digitised, industrial, and romantic. Whiffs of vaporwave

surface on the title track, and other tracks’ wonky ambience and crumbling motifs align them with the latest albums by Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never. But there are plenty of surprises, too. The constant collision of classical and post-modern, lovely and misshapen, defines an LP that’s always questing for new possibilities. Mute/Create Control/Universal

Black Cab Games of the XXI Olympiad Black Cab take an expansive, marathon approach on a concept album about 1976’s Montreal Summer Olympics, at which drug-abusing East German teams thrived and Australia earned not a single medal. The indulgence of concept albums often matches their ambition, but the Melburnians show great discipline. Even when stretching to heady reaches – hear the 10-minute, vocoder-laced Supermadchen – there’s an exacting focus. These 13 tracks stoke tension like an expert film score, vividly evoking a bygone era – and succeeding on their own. It’s also an unabashed love letter to synths and the gurgling analogue electronics that powered Kraftwerk and New Order – the cavernous space encourages us to lose ourselves in each pulsing moment. Members of Lowtide, Pikelet and The Sand Pebbles contribute, and co-producer Woody Annison lends his usual sonic depth, but James Lee and Andrew Coates remain the heart of the band. To them electronic pop is no fleeting confection, but a widescreen experience to transporting us to another time and place. Whether to ’70s Montreal or elsewhere, transported you will be. Interstate 40/Remote Control/Inertia

DANCE/ELECTRONIC

Yacht Where Does this Disco? In between albums, LA duo Yacht release a four-song EP that’s as elastic and retro as anything they’ve done. The title track is a compact, squiggly ode to the CD format that later gets stretched past six minutes in Jerome LOL’s pleasantly discursive remix. Works Like Magic is even rubberier

somehow, highlighting Claire L. Evans’s daggy vocal deadpan, and Terminal Beach nails the punk side of angular New Wave. It’s more of a entrée than a meal, but it reminds us just how well Yacht do self-aware electro-pop. Downtown/Create Control/Universal

Deptford Goth Songs English singer/producer Daniel Woolhouse’s second album as Deptford Goth places newfound emphasis on his voice. His high falsetto on Do Exist evokes Bon Iver, while such purred vocals over late-night electronics can recall James Blake. Many of these songs manifest as elegant slow-

Klo Cusp Simon Lam’s production finesse is well known from his Melbourne trio I’lls, but he bends it to newly accessible purposes in Klo, his duo with cousin Chloe Kaul. Between her slinky vocals and his percolating backdrops, this is an intimately catchy team-up that’s already sparked

burns, not climaxing but merely artfully simmering. Two Hearts feels like the breakout song here, and a push closer to more traditional pop while retaining a brooding intimacy. So much sleepy melancholy gets to be a drag over time, but it’s welcome in small doses. Cooperative/Universal

global attention. Cusp is their digital-only debut EP, uniting the blog-friendly previous singles Make Me Wonder, Under Lie and False Calls with two new tracks. They’ve got the same woozy emotional sway as early Chet Faker, and later Everything But the Girl. Dot Dash/Remote Control/ Unavailable on CD, stream at JB HI-FI NOW

Want moreWu-Tang Clan? Check out their back catalogue, and releases from RZA, GZA, Raekwon and others on JB Hi-Fi Now.

Dan Rule is a writer, publisher, art critic and total hip hop fanatic.

RL Grime Burnt Offering While elusive UK producer Burial’s chewed, stretched, decelerated vocal treatments have done a lot in terms of expanding the post-dubstep movement’s aesthetic and musical palette, they have also resulted in a lot of infuriating pastiches. Enter RL Grime, a lively young NYC producer

known for his impressive bootleg remixes of various high-profile artists (Kanye and Rihanna included). While there’s plenty to like about his debut record of banging bass music and techno angularity (check the smoking Danger ), when he attempts to offer light and shade, things turn awry. His noisier moments veer towards ‘bro-step’ while his quieter, vocal- riddled atmospheres resemble a kind of musical chipmunkery. Warner Machinedrum Neverlove

The Wu-Tang Clan A Better Tomorrow A legacy can be a curse, especially for artists whose early work strayed close to iconoclasm. Every meticulously crafted, well-realised or mature later career effort will pale in comparison to the early, raw and relatively unedited. Good albums are built in studios: great albums emerge as signposts of social and cultural context. The Wu-Tang Clan – and their hugely anticipated sixth album A Better Tomorrow, which arrives two decades after their world-changing debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) – is a prime example. The weight of the nine-piece’s history haunts their every move, including the purportedly fractured, conflict-strewn making of the new record. And from its opening stanza – the sprawling, key-flecked manifesto Ruckus In B Minor , featuring all MCs on deck – it’s clear this no gritty throwback, as the lurking guitars and pianos of Felt reiterate. This is polished, balanced and reflective. Indeed, there’s all manner of drama, theatre and plaintiveness here, if little that ties A Better Tomorrow to the gritty minimalism of its predecessors, save the ever-charismatic, ever-astute Clan itself. Keep Watch is an anomaly; with Meth, Deck and GZA unfurling over a straight-up-and-down, crunching beat. An interesting addition to the Wu catalogue, but not life-changing. Warner Music

STREET LEVEL

The title of Machinedrum’s latest set of tightly sequenced and manicured bass music explorations is somewhat misleading. Vapor City Archives is anything but a retrospective of old ideas and past triumphs. Rather, the follow-up to 2013’s Vapor City is brimming with swabbing synths, frenetic

beat attacks, stark bass/treble dynamics and wildly expanded reimaginings of what might have once been phrased as drum ‘n’ bass. Opener Boxoff is a searing ascent – scattershot snares opening out into deep, thick clouds of synths and vocal waves. Hard 2 Be pulses and shakes with nimble rhythmic intonations, poppy vocal hooks and heavy-set bass. Even when gazing back, Machinedrum continues to forge a path forward. Ninja Tune/Inertia

Various A Fine Selection of Independent Disco, Modern Soul and Boogie 1978–82 As much as DISCO – yet another finely curated set of rare, historical cuts from London’s astute Soul Jazz imprint – does much to free the genre from often painfully flippant connotations, it also exposes its inherent limitations. Focusing

Dels Petals Have Fallen Dels isn’t your average MC. On second record Petals Have Fallen , the London-based rapper shifts between moody, grit-strewn vocal melodics and hectic, technical rhyme attacks, all delivered via impossibly smooth, measured intonation, cadence and flow. Likewise, his wider musicality – realised with the

help of producer Kwes – twitches, shudders and sways with a rippling array of styles and nuances. Fall Apart and RBG swerve between dirty bass music and ball-tearing rock, while Pulls resembled a plaintive re-routed interpretation of ’90s NYC hip hop. Perhaps Dels’ most impressive feat is a knack for understatement. In lesser hands, it may have been a trumped-up rap opera. Big Dada/Inertia

on a relatively tight timeframe and in the midst of the movement’s heyday (and exploring its more experimental leanings into modern soul), this compilation says a lot about both disco’s danceable qualities and almost irksome polish. Jessie G, Superfunk, John Gibbs and the US Steel Orchestra all make choice appearances, but it might be tough to bring the disco-adverse around. Soul Jazz/Inertia

DECEMBER 2014 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au/music

22