Here is something else I wrote on a message board.

Burial – Untrue

So much to say about this album, and so little that hasn’t already been driven into the ground and rendered cliché. I’ll keep it short, as my time with the album still hasn’t been as long and involved as I would have liked. At a time when the term ‘rave’ is being misappropriated for use on marketing cheap ‘n’ gaudy jackets and finger-painting indie bands, it’s nice to know some people know what the term actually means.

One such person is Neil Landstrumm, whose Restaurant of Assassins set earlier this year was an incredibly satisfying melange of basic three-chord punk Ardkore melodies and modern production techniques (rather reminiscent of LFO’s storming last album – Stealth (2003) – then). The bass was humongous and dominating, the whole thing was vibing like people in ‘intelligent’ ‘dance’ circles had largely forgotten to do in the late nineties and it was a riot.

Meanwhile, the closest thing to what we used to call ‘raves’ today is the local dubstep sound-system: you’d have DMZ, Skream, Kromestar and co testing the bass bins and noise pollution laws while people get high, get low, get mashed and feel the power. But while all that is happening, the jubilation of the rave-naissance and general middle-class debauchery (not that there’s anything wrong with that) rings hollow with one man: the mysterious Burial. Burial has been thinking about rave too, and he also knows what it’s all about. He’s not one to pretend everything’s OK though.

Burial is thoughtful and sensitive, lurking existentially in the corners like Hamlet while his peers pray at the altar of the divine party. He’s mourning what he considers the true epoch of rave, that halcyon time of ice pops, Game & Watch, shell suits and the voices of ubiquitous anonymous rave divas filling the clubs. Where is it now, he asks, to nobody in particular. The signal’s echoing randomly out there somewhere, so Burial devises a means of dragging the fading signal into the now. But rather than attempt any kind of futile resuscitation like all too many revivalists in the here and the now, he is content to use his technology to peer longingly and distantly at what remains, like a musicological Hubble staring at the extinct beauty of sonic stars long imploded.

Whether by the music’s own design or a lingering artistic frustration with the trend of hauntology, our plucky hero transcends the limits of this hypothetical music-time continuum, and the ghosts we hear in the grooves are imbued with the emptiness and decay of the black holes that remain where those stars once shone so brightly. We’re stuck in time. The anonymous vocals, at one life so proud and exuberant are now pained and withered, and the anguish of a lost lifestyle is plain for all to hear while the transmission gets interrupted by stray rhythms and the mist of gloaming. Like those super-powerful lenses that allow us to see what once was all those millennia ago, and like the ruins of great civilisations that can be seen today in mainland Europe and South America, Untrue is at once a jarring reminder of what has been lost and a time-capsular snapshot of what stands in its place now.

In his painstaking reconstruction/deconstruction, Burial has created an album – a document – that should be a self pitying exercise in futility. However, Untrue manages to sidestep such fate with its doomed last ditch nobility in the immutably unyielding shadow of Chronos. This music knows it is going to die. It really already is dead, despite the necromantic efforts of Todd Edwards, the Riff Raff Crew et al. Burial just doesn’t want us to forget a great lost musical civilisation, and who are we to deny him a moment of reminiscence when his thoughts are filled with such beauty as this?

Catch You, by Sophie Ellis-Bextor

There are few things as satisfying in the world of popular music as the stalker song. Most notable is that ode to prolonged harassment ‘Every Breath you Take’, by The Police. Now, though, comes a contender to that throne; an absolute banger that throws the ominous solemnity of Sting’s shrubbery-lurkage out of the window in favour of a more turbo-charged, frantic psycho approach.

This ditty’s lyric is perhaps most thematically reminiscent of that time in Seinfeld when Elaine was stalked by her demented colleague Sam. Her answer-phone diatribe of ‘Elaine…I am going to find you. If not in your office then in the Xerox room or the little conference room near to the kitchen…’ is very much echoed by Bextor’s own semi-lunatic raving:

The morning paper
Look in the mirror
On your key chain
Or in the coffee spoon

On your shirt sleeve
In the flat-screen
In your mailbox
I’m breathing over you.

Of course the intentions of the television character and this song’s narrator are quite opposite; Bextor’s psychosis is driven by love rather than resentment, and it is for this very reason that it is so powerful; obsessive lust is a far deadlier foe than mere office rivalry (‘Come on baby, when will you see’, she demands, ‘that you and I were meant to be’). The sense of a very English eccentricity at the heart of the mania is seeded by such turns of phrase as ‘but may I remind you’, delivered in Home Counties English lurking betwixt the more trad pop threats that ‘there ain’t no engine fast enough / My love’s gonna catch you’.

And it is this intense lusting that really frightens, as Sophie follows that popular posh-kid perspective of the spoiled sector insisting they get whatever they want (c.f. Franz Ferdinand and their surely rhetorically-monikered anthem of the Rohypnol fiend ‘Do You Want To’: ‘I’m gonna make somebody love me / And now I know that it’s you’). So it is with Bextor, she too uses the word ‘love’ as a threat, the Damoclean sword dangling ominously over her quarry and ready to drop at any moment: ‘Why waste your energy / No point in fighting’, she sings, as she suggests the relationship she demands is the target’s ‘destiny’.

The music has enough bite in its grooves to keep up with the lyric: buzzing synthetic guitars zip around, mingling in the mix with alien insectoid keys that swarm in the background. The beat is basic but powerful as it gets Sophie’s point across suitably bluntly. Most satisfying of all is the chorus which explodes as bombastically as one could want; it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to compare it favourably with that of Rihanna’s omnipresent ‘Umbrella’. ‘Catch You’ is Bextor’s most oddly compelling song, and I would be content if she never topped it.

The Neurosis Album Hierarchy

Talk on a message board recently turned to Neurosis, and what their best albums are. I got involved and that, combined with having not written anything for ages, results in the following. Listed in ascending order:

The Eye of Every Storm (2004)
Pain of Mind (1987)
The Word as Law (1990)

TEoES was just bland. Bland stuff with the only really good song being ‘Bridges’. Pain of Mind is cool for the completist, but a tad pointless when it sounds so similar to the better recorded The Word as Law.

Given to the Rising (2007)

A total return to form after their 2004 fudge, the riffs were solid as fuck, there were some grand songs… but it all seemed a bit going through the motions. Ever since 1999, they had been getting more melodic, slightly more adventurous with each release. This was good stuff, but very safe territory for them. Quiet-loud, recorded by Albini, we get it.

Times of Grace (1999)
Souls at Zero (1992)

Times was shockingly disappointing for me at the time, because I was expecting it to be further out into the unknown, when they actually did the opposite. I blame Scott Kelly, and his banging on about 20-minute songs before release. That, and the release with Grace made it seem like I was getting half an album. The dust settled and it turned out it was really fucking good. ‘The Doorway’ and ‘Under the Surface’, especially, are fantastic. Souls was kind of a different and similar story, being the first Neurosis album I went to after TSIB. It was like being a musical archeologist, seeing where their key sounds were founded, and what they had sounded like back in the day. Massive Joy Division influence, but they were really starting to spread their wings. There is a segment on the wonderful ‘Stripped’ which is a career high, with its combination of rock solid riff, bombastic fanfare and chimes of punctuation. Proper precursor stuff.

A Sun That Never Sets (2001)
Enemy of the Sun (1993)

More v different-similar juxtaposition. Sonically these two couldn’t be more separated. ASTNS is the apex of the Albini era for me, as they finally get confortable with being melodic, but before they fell off the precipice into Anathema-AOR. They bring the riffs, but also the inventiveness like on the vocal patterns of ‘Fallling Unknown’ and the dramatic ending of the album. Enemy, meanwhile, is the darkest Neurosis album, and probably the hardest to get into. It’s essentially three movements between Epic Neurosis, fuzznoise freakout and pre-sunnO))) terror atmospherics. Each album also has a total standout classic: ‘Crawl Back In’ which sees them out-Mogwai Mogwai in the tenderness stakes before building back up to massive catharsis, and the momentous ‘Lost’, which is TSIB-level in its semi-industrial dynamic meltdown. Awesome false finish too


Through Silver in Blood (1996)

And this is when it all came together. Not just a collection of their best riffs, nor just the best mix of ambience and rage (the quiet parts worked so well on their own that the album was co-released by Release Records, Relapse’s short lived ambient arm), nor merely their most inventive. What set this album apart was the combination of all these factors with the sheer sense of malice that drips from the records grooves. Steve Von Till at the time referred to it as ‘user unfriendly’, and that’s what it is. For every time they play an earth shattering riff for four bars, they trance out with five minutes of repeating chords. The riffs are pure evil, as are the quiet bits: rarely in metal were quiet passages anything more than punctuation but in this case they were as integral to the carnage as the louder parts. Then there were all the little touches. The times Dave Edwardson’s FX-laden vocals boomed emphasis onto the lyrics, the bassline nod to Cape Fear in ‘Aeon’, the drone & bagpipe duet that shouldn’t have worked; the ten minute death rattle that is ‘Enclosure in Flame’. It’s just too boss for words.

Ascoltare – B E A M, Part 1

I was sent this record a few weeks ago to comment on, and am pleased to report that its high quality means I do not need to lie in order to write a positive review. Not that I’d lie anyway, but this is good stuff nonetheless. Ascoltare is a one man operation that seems to have followed Kieran Hebden’s lead in as much as he has journeyed from the vague region of ‘post rock’ to the equally nebulous biodome that is ‘electronica’ (though that is pretty certainly coincidence rather than causation) with some aplomb.

The first side of the record is devoted to two relatively lengthy tracks, the better of which is the ominously building pulse of ‘Exo on Ferric’. Fractal lines of sound are etched over the continuously pulsing beat. The way layers join and fall out of the mix is reminiscent of video game Rez: a game whose aesthetic texture builds with success and is stripped of its flesh and glory when a hit is taken. Ascoltare takes no hits throughout the level while dropping his own occasional smart bomb; if he had an avatar it’d be dancing a soft shoe shuffle among the blossoming and fading vectors and textures.

I thought I had read a comparison to ‘post rock’, which I was about to refute quite strongly, but that was in reference to the previous Gwei-Lo project. For this is more reminiscent of the ‘minimal house’ strains of a Minilogue, specifically the excellent ‘Girl from Botany Bay’. Slowly, gradually, layers are methodically added to the mix until there is a (slightly mannered) party breaking out of the turntable.

This is my primary issue with the record: as good as it is, it can sometimes feel rather dry. The second song, ‘Semjase in Excelsis’ for example, has something of an absence of bassline in its mix, which can make it seem a touch more mechanical than the rest of its arrangement suggests. This is especially noticeable at the points during which dubby synth stabs rear their satisfyingly offbeat collective head in the composition. Conversely the nearly Aphexian minimalism of ‘Asket’s Ship’, which opens the second side, sounds a lot more musically robust, as the aural frequency spectrum feels a lot better represented. The interplay of the textural loops also seem to work to greater effect on this song.

The big surprise on a stylistic level is the thematic departure represented by the disc’s excellent closer, ‘Sky Fishing’. It’s a pleasant coincidence that Ascoltare was unaware of Asa-Chang and Junray’s Minna no Junray album while making this, because that album was the first thing that came to mind when initially listening to this track, due to the level of joyful exuberance generally and the quality brass loop specifically. That loop meets disembodied warped and chopped vocal snippets in a piece whose innocent enthusiasm marks a stark contrast with the detached minimalism that preceded; this can make those tracks seem relatively lacking in personality, which would be unfair to their meticulous construction and subtle groove. Back to the matter at hand, the moment the vocal samples and counter-rhythms collided in a hyper-colour party crash reminded me of the excellent Jackson And His Computer Band, a recommendation if ever there was one.

I couldn’t help but feel the record might have benefited from a little more variety in the structure of the songs, though the gradual-build motif in itself is no bad thing and is currently very much in vogue in both house and dubstep. And in hindsight, it’s refreshing after the ever-intensifying drill ‘n’ bass boot-scrape craziness of the late nineties c.f. Warp Records, Digital hardcore et al. Still, the tantalisingly full-blooded presence of ‘Sky Fishing’ makes me wonder, not what could have been as this is a fine EP, but rather what gems might follow from Ascoltare. So it is for that reason, as well as B E A M’s own position as a lean, deft counterpoint to the sometimes sludgy mire of generic dubstep, that I can very much recommend the record.

B E A M Part 1 is distributed through Cargo, and the entirely online Part 2 can be downloaded here! Be sure to check it out.