Review: Rustie - Glass Swords

Glass Swords was one of the most critically important albums of 2011 in electronic music, if only because it inspired Simon Reynolds to write an article about maximalism. This album seems like the kind of thing Reynolds loves writing about, particularly his current narrative about "omni-music", in which he figures that the Internet and the availability of music means your average listener is bombarded with a huge selection of music from across the world and throughout history, with all the usual barriers of time and place demolished and the music set adrift in non-space. A 1970s Bollywood soundtrack and an acid house retrospective are now separated by nothing more than a couple of centimetres of white space on a screen. The result is "omni-music", music that takes influence from anything and everything, that is effectively genreless and fits into no conventional musical lineage.

Glass Swords often feels like exactly that kind of album - a mish-mash of everything from garish Euro-trance supersaws and helium pitched rave vocals to primary colour '80s synths and heavily processed guitar chugs, with the inevitable post-dubstep rhythmic intoxication that no halfway experimental electronic musician can withstand these days. At times it feels extremely poppy, at others totally off the wall. Most of the time it feels weirdly like both at once. I can understand why Reynolds labels it "digital maximalism", even if I'm raised on a diet of 15 minute Blue Amazon club cuts and so these little three minute ditties don't feel too massive to me. The general mood is one of overload - most of the time the album feels giddily upbeat and restless, songs ending alarmingly, new ones firing up in a scatter-brained frenzy of randomly superglued ideas and sounds.

Rustie comes across as some pilled-up successor to FlyLo, and like Cosmogramma there's far too much happening here far too quickly for me to take it all in in one listen. Reynolds likens this disorientating listening experience to the mind-numbing information overload that comes from the iPhone existence of the 21st Century. Whether Rustie's album will coalesce into a more sensible listening experience once I've given it a few more runs-through remains to be seen. What I can say after just one listen is that this is a very hard to dislike this album. It combines the instant impact and digestibility of its pop influences with interesting ideas and combinations, managing to sound at once like everything out there and like no other record you own. That's a winning combination, and one not many can pull off -off: genuinely experimental and unusual music that is still very easy to listen to and enjoy. Rustie never feels self-consciously arty or like he's pushing any of his off-the-wall ideas for the sake of being different.

Rather than bleat on about it, I'll simply leave you with the Simon Reynolds article, which sums up the album and most of these ideas in his usual effervescent adjective attack style. Try listening to the album while you read - it's not very long and if you alt-tab between a couple of other things you can probably stretch out the article to last until the end. Reynolds, and Rustie, would no doubt approve.

Genre: Omni-music
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Review: Desolate - The Invisible Insurrection

The first time I heard Desolate's album The Invisible Insurrection, I told myself I needed to give it a second listen before writing up my thoughts. That first play was through my speakers at a fairly low volume while I was doing some laundry, which is not an ideal context for listening to, well, anything, so I gave it a second shot walking home at 4am in the rain. This, after all, is an album that came with the recommendation of being a spiritual successor to Burial.

And guess what? It sounds pretty damn moody in that context, as you'd expect anything with Burial comparisons to do. That said, the Burial reference is, I think, a little lazy overall. Yeah it's moody and mournful, yeah there are occasional plaintive female vocal fragments, and the drum effects on a couple of tracks sound a bit like Burial's crackly 2-step samples. Stylistically though, it's pretty different. The core of this album is a series of delicate piano motifs, around which the crackliness and the female shards are arranged. The drum work is extremely minor and distinctly secondary, whereas Burial often talks gleefully of his love of classic garage "rollage", and his music is as much about the skittery, paranoid rhythms as it is about the stuff going on above it. This is Burial-esque in the sense it evokes the same mood as Burial, rather than in any particular techniques.

And really, this isn't nearly as good as Burial. Well, obviously. I doubt Desolate himself ever made the comparison, but plenty of other critics can and they've coloured my expectations, the bastards. This is definitely a mood piece, a 45 minute atmospheric backing for those moments late at night when you're walking home in the rain. But nothing on here really scrapes the soul in the way so many Burial tracks do. Think about the way Burial sampled a sound effect of a shell case ricocheting off a tiled floor from Metal Gear Solid - an incredibly distinctive and arresting sample that evokes an entire sonic headspace of coldness, isolation, discard, all in one little sound looping back and forth in a larger track. Production tricks here don't get any more adventurous than sampling gloomy film dialogue during moody intro segments - things we've heard countless times before. They're functional but not inspirational. People have already thought of them. If I were writing an atmospheric downtempo night-time record, I'd pencil that kind of thing in without thinking, whereas I'd never think to sample the falling shell case. This is an effective album, but it's nothing that a whole bunch of people couldn't have done by writing out a few morose piano sketches and throwing in a whole bunch of atmospherics and samples. It's background music, in other words, music that only really comes alive when set to imagery or put in a certain context. Very good background music, I should stress, but the world isn't short of that.

Genre: Late Night Ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: Spatial - Spatial

Spatial's self-titled debut is very much what I would call a pretentious record, and I personally am not a fan of the word "pretentious". Most people who use seem to be suffering from intellectual insecurity, and invariably it's levelled at anything vaguely arty or intelligent that makes the accusor feel a little uncomfortable. But Spatial's album is, for me, pretentious. It has trappings of artiness that aren't matched by the content. The (visually) abstract artwork and the (semantically) abstract numerical track titles are a red flag, and the very name Spatial seems to echo the rhetoric of early-20th Century modernist abstract art, or something. The music itself could also be called "abstract", insofar as that term could be applied to music (NOT as a synonym for "weird"). There are no live instruments here at all, and only isolated slivers of sampled human vocals, chopped up and deployed in typical dubstep/garage style. It's very difficult to discern anything in the way of structure in these stripped down tracks - most of them are just skittery broken beat rhythms with minimalist bass pulses and odd loops that are added and occasionally subtracted.

But, as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no point to most of these tracks whatsoever. They drift by in a directionless blur. If this is supposed to be dance music, it's a horrifically sterile and funkless approximation, and if this is supposed to be listening music... then why? What are we listening out for here? There seems to be a trend amongst these self-consciously experimental techno/garage/omni producers to take dance music and just strip it down a lot until it just becomes difficult to listen to, this difficulty probably intended to make the music "challenging" and therefore worthwhile. I don't think it is. I think this is a fucking boring record for the most part.

Dubstep and the subsequent post-everything diaspora has always been quirky, weird music and Spatial has merely abstracted it out a little further. Congratulations. Such a worthewhile artistic enterprise. Most of these tracks sound like the idle creations of a child picking their way through FL Studio for the very first time. The sound design is remarkably uninteresting, the tracks explore an extremely limited set of ideas and the interaction of the various musical elements doesn't go past the most laughably simplistic of counter-pointing and the occasional bit of call-and-response. I imagine there are atrociously hairstyled crowds somewhere in London that actually dance to this stuff, but it does not elicit any notable response from me except irritation that I wasted an hour of listening time on it.

Genre: Post-future-UK-wankery
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 5/10

Review: Orbital - Middle Of Nowhere

I fucking love this album. I fucking love Orbital, who made at least three albums that would probably all make it into an all-time Top 10 list if I didn't feel so guilty and let some other guys into the limelight. The Brown Album speaks for itself, and Snivilisation is another album I love to death, but in a violation of conventional wisdom I've always preferred Middle Of Nowhere to In Sides. In Sides is often seen as the best of Orbital's albums: it's the most ambient, the most cinematic, it has the longest tracks and it coincided with their peak of mid-90s "electronica" popularity. Middle Of Nowhere took three years to follow it, during which time the Hartnoll brothers suffered from terrible writer's block. Style actually resulted from Paul going into the studio with a kid's stylophone and simply seeing what sounds he could get from the toy, making percussion sounds from the "click" when he unplugged it, as a way of battling through the band's lack of ideas. In the end, the album was seen as a step backwards because it was a return to upbeat, danceable material after the sombre, politically-minded introspection of In Sides, and consequently disappointed many a critic. Most people heard the thumping breakbeats and punchy keyboard riffs and dismissed this as a more straight-up, cheerful party-time record.

But you know what? They were wrong. Middle Of Nowhere is actually one of the darkest Orbital records, and a supremely underrated album. There's a recurring theme of negativity and nothingness on almost every track - just look at the repeated usage and punning of the words "No" and "Nothing" in the lyrics and track titles. "Why can't anyone hear me?" cries a distorted vocal on Spare Parts Express, "No good, nothing changes. Nothing" mourns a malfunctioning robot sentience on I Don't Know You People, while on the bleakly beautiful Otono (Autumn), vocalist Pooka breathes "I want nothing at all". Frankly, I do not know how anyone who has actually paid attention to this album can call it happy or trivial, and yet people seem to take one listen to it, hear the crunching robot-funk of Nothing Left and the pseudo-big beat madness of ...You People and draw their conclusions from there.

I also do not understand how people have said this was nothing new from Orbital, again a conclusion that seems entirely drawn from the presence of some loud bass thumps. If you think this album sounds anything like The Brown Album you are an absolute fucking idiot. The glorious opener Way Out -> (Orbital certainly knew how to open a fuckin' album) features sampled operatic vocals and live trumpets that sound almost spaghetti western, a vibe that had never been done on an Orbital track before. It leads seamlessly into the sprawling Spare Parts Express, another exercise in writer's block where the duo threw in everything they had lying in the studio into one ever-changing electronic journey that morphs multiple times before reprising gloriously at the end. I have all of Orbital's albums and I've listened to them all countless times and they had NEVER fucking done this before that track. There are more vocals here than on any previous Orbital album, used in different kinds of tracks to what we'd heard before.

But anyway. I shouldn't have to answer decade old complaints from idiot critics on behalf of the band. Yeah, this is one of the most danceable Orbital albums. Nothing Left is the one Orbital track I've managed to seamlessly slot into a DJ set, while many a big beat DJ got mileage out of You People. The acid vortex headfuck halfway through Nothing Left 2 does bring back memories of Impact (The Earth Is Burning). But if this is a dance record, it's still a supremely clever and off the wall one. I actually think the writer's block they battled through and the subsequent unusual creative strategies probably resulted in the most unique Orbital album, which is why this one is still seen in some respects as the odd one out in their discography, the most neglected chapter in the narrative. Green is basically a techno album, and not a particularly good one, while Brown is a superb widescreen expansion of UK rave music at the time. Snivilisation and In Sides are undeniably out-there, but now I'm older, wiser and better-listened I can hear a huge amount of Kraftwerk in those records. But Middle Of Nowhere? It's sort of a collision of everything Orbital had previously done, but with more of the vocal collabs and inventive sampling that defined their post-millenial output, and some thumping beats that nobody had expected to hear from them again.

In retrospect, this was probably the beginning of the end for Orbital, not because it's in any way a bad album but because they never really recovered from the struggle of making it. In many ways this album is a triumph of two musicians forcing themselves to work through crippling writer's block, but it was clear they were running out of new ideas, that the spontaneous spark of their earlier work was gone and they weren't cut out for the hard graft or complacent repetition of the late-career period. The Altogether was a disaster, and I basically believe that's because they were forcing themselves to make music. Blue was a good swan-song, but it was deliberately devoid of new ideas, and I personally don't like any of their post-reformation material.

Anyway, I love this album to bits. I've heard it countless times since I first bought it in a HMV in Middlesbrough when I was 17 and going to an open day for the University Of Teeside. I remember it was a particular favourite to play when I'd stayed up all night to correct a broken sleeping pattern. I would take the dog for a walk at 6am in a delirious sleep-deprived world of weak winter sun, and the opening sweep of Way Out ->; was intoxicating, dizzying, the beginning of a wonderful musical journey. Now it's 5.35am, I've come back drunk from a shit abortive night out I didn't want to go on and I'm ready to sleep, and I had no plans to play the full thing but I got so sucked in I've listened to it start to finish and I love it as much as I ever did as a sore-eyed teenager. The only problem is that the player has gone straight through into the beginning of Snivilisation, and I'm worried I'll still be laid here awake listening in another hour. Good lord, I fucking love Orbital.

Genre: ERROR.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 10/10

Review: Fourward - Episodes

I've no idea where this came from or why I've listened to it, but Fourward's album Episodes turns out to be a pretty enjoyable slice of neurofunk. Pop neurofunk, I'd call it, if such a thing could possibly exist. Drum 'n bass, and dubstep, and a lot of bass music generally, seems to increasingly segregate its hooks from its dancefloor action, which often leads to that disappointing feeling when a track that sounds so awesome in the breakdown turns into the robotic madness of a rabid Optimus Prime once the FILTHY BASS DROP kicks in. Fourward are far from above deploying that cliché - in fact, they use it pretty damn often on Episodes, but for some reason it doesn't bother me too much on here. For some reason, I find this album endearing.

Neurofunk is a pretty tough genre to love, because it's basically apocalyptic male rage embodied in one music genre, and yet, terrifyingly, I seem to be getting into it. There's even a moment of monstrous wobble-stupid brostep on here in the form of Temptations, and I even quite like that track. And right now I'm damned if I can explain why. I guess this is just a rare neurofunk record that actually sounds fun, and the poppy interludes and breaks are all really well done. Just witness the hip-hop break in the midst of Simple - genius!

In many ways, drum 'n bass seems to be one of the most isolated of electronic genres. Sure, thanks to Pendulum and Chase & Status a lot of kids are listening to the popped up stuff, but serious electronic fans still seem to ignore drum 'n bass more than any other area. People are scared of it, they can't handle it. Episodes is packed full of drum 'n bass stereotypes which will turn a lot of people cold straight away. Hell, I still can't figure out why I'm not annoyed by this album. But that right there is one of the great things about music, and art - you can rationalise it as much as you like, but sometimes it just appeals or appalls you on some gut level. And I like this album. Deal with it, people.

Genre: Drum 'n bass
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10