Twitter this morning alerted me to a couple brand spankin’ Van She Tech remixes. The guys took some time out from recording what one can assume is a new album to make these booties in preparation for their upcoming Splendour In The Grass Dj set (which i’ll no doubt hear all about come Monday…)

The Love Machine – Funky Tambourine (Van She Tech Bootleg)

Ce Ce Peniston – Finally (Van She Tech Bootleg)

Did you know, this ‘Choice’ remix of the original was produced by David Morales. There you go.

Sometimes these days I feel like the only time I swing through these pages is when I’m violently ditching something at you with the triumphant cry of ‘LOVE THIS LIKE I LOVE YOU’ (see Mob, Glitch and Buttons, Fuck). Which is part of the point of blogs I guess, but I do worry that you may construe my reckless effusion as being insincere. I assure you, it’s not. This has just been a good few months for music. That, and I FUCKING LOVE EVERYTHING.

But, ironic exaggeration aside, ‘Teen Dream’, the new Beach House album, is just… stunning. Really stunning. It’s not due out until late January next year and already it’s jockeying for my best album of 2009/2010 (leaks make for hazy ranking periods). I enjoyed their first major offering, ‘Devotion’, but had found it a little too wintry and sleepy overall, like the sole intention of the name ‘Beach House’ was to make a joke out of the album itself. It was beautifully produced certainly, and signposted a lot of the elements that make ‘Teen Dream’ such a profound pleasure, but in the end I found myself reducing the album down to being merely sleeping music. A role it filled very well, but in retrospect this may have been an ignominious end for quite a remarkable record.

Not so with ‘Teen Dream’, with which I’m willing to say Beach House may well have turned in the crucial album of this summer. Whereas ‘Devotion’ seemed to traffic in rain-drenched waves and overcast holidays, ‘Teen Dream’ coasts on hungover and hot Saturday mornings, lazy Sunday beers and summer girls. It’s like Delorean made a special effort to get his glum mate out of the dumps and inadvertently caused him to produce the best music of his life. Whereas once Beach House drifted from track to track, covering their songs in a monochromatic, icy blur, now they soar towards their choruses, each song an expression of some new-found confidence and optimism. The album title is indicative too; ‘Teen Dream’ owes a lot more to the nostalgic, John Hughes-tinged optimism of ‘Saturdays=Youth’-M83 than it does Atlas Sound (which may be a patchy comparison, but I discovered the two at the same time and they share a certain resonance in my mind). Although fans of their previous work will still be able to wallow in the familiar array of fuzzed out edges and tentative sentiment; despite this shift toward dreamwave/glo-fi/et al, the sonic template and songwriting aesthetic has remained largely stable.

The end result is a lush, gauzey and gorgeous album, filled with gentle crescendos and vocals of velvet softness. It’s music that you want to backstroke lazily around as you flirt awkwardly with the girls you used to love. The kind of songs that make you see your life as a film recorded entirely in Super-8, filled with dull lighting and hipster asides. Music containing the cautious optimism of your teen years and suffused with the occasional longing you have to feel that strongly and abruptly once again. An album that will prompt you to write as pretentiously as those past few sentences look on the re-read. Yikes. But all this and more awaits you when you listen to Beach House’s brilliant new album ‘Teen Dream’ (especially the pretension). It’s available on January 26th, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with my primary obsession from the record, the gloriously restrained anthem ‘Walk in a Park’. The song itself is beautiful enough – and certainly showcases Beach House’s new attachment to the world of major chords and semi-traditional songwriting – but when the final climax kicks in, you suddenly find the song recast in shimmering euphoria and endless longing and you begin to realise that you might actually be listening to something quite remarkable. Which the entire album is. Do keep your eyes out for it. I guarantee you, it will define your summers.*

Beach House – Walk In The Park

-luke

* Really, really, really not a guarantee

I have no end of love for German electronica maestros Modeselektor, and am at least moderately fond of German minimal/IDM don Apparat, so when I heard that they were rekindling their German collaborative project Moderat (geddit? It’s a portmanteau!) I was very, very excited. So excited that I may have actually fallen off my chair. Although I was pretty drunk at the time, so it may have been that too.

Either way, the album (also called Moderat…) has dropped and it’s pretty great. I must admit that it is is perhaps not as nut-bustingly amazing as I had secretly hoped, but even so the album is most definitely a worthy addition to the vaunted halls of both Modeselektor and Apparat’s discographies. As you might expect given their relatively disparate production styles, the album veers back and forth between walloping drums, hazy synth washes, dreamy vocals and rumbling bass with an almost reckless fervor. Which may sound a little difficult on paper, but to my mind it is this wilful eccentricity that is both Moderat’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. Ooh, a paradox. Pretentious. At its best though (this is a blog, let’s focus on the positive) Moderat sounds precisely how a collaborative album should sound; an exact synthesis of the most iconic parts of each artist’s individual productions. And with these two, that synthesis is an almost overwhelming merging of Apparat’s throw toward IDM-tinged shoegaze and Modeselektor’s dark and dirty bass-driven glitch-tech. God I love making up genres.

Standout track ‘Seamonkey’ is a perfect case in point. For the first minute or so the track gradually emerges from silence on the back of pounding, ominously building drums that are 100% pure Modeselektor. Then at the 1:40 mark they are joined by a creeping, echoing and very Apparat-y synth line that slowly expands until it dominates the track. But then the breakdown kicks in and the track swells and pulses with nervous energy, until finally it drops into a blistering and perfect amalgamation of the two elements, all kicking drums, driving bass and phasing melody. True, most tracks on here don’t come close to being this good, but even being in the same ballpark makes for a fairly impressive album.

Moderat – Seamonkey Tracks removed on request.

Also included for your perusal is a bonus track from the deluxe edition of Moderat, the strange and unsettling Shackleton remix of ‘Rusty Nails’. I guess you’d call it minimal, but really it’s an almost unrecognizable recasting of the original that spends most of its nine minutes skittering idly through a ghostly soundscape rather than laying down heavy techno beats. Curious and oddly compelling.

Moderat – Rusty Nails (Shackleton Remix) Tracks removed on request.

Moderat’s Moderat is available now and can be purchased through all good retailers. Thoroughly recommended.

/Luke

This photo notwithstanding, I really like Evil Nine, and have done for quite a while. I was (electronically) coming of age in the nu-skool breaks scene just as their debut album ‘You Can Be Special Too’ really started making waves in late 2003, so from the get go their particular brand of stomping, rock-tinged, snare-kick mayhem became the benchmark against which all other tracks were measured. Crooked, Restless, Hired Goons, Hazy Way, Sabot, Music – all were, and remain, solid place-getters in my ‘top dance tracks of all time’ list.

But then the Evil Nine boys, Pat and Tom, went quiet for five odd years. There was still plenty of DJing going down, but the entire period 2004-2008 witnessed at most a handful of remixes and, thankfully, a few suitably iconic mixes. In particular, their FabricLive 28 in mid 2006 was one of the first, and better mainstream statements from the then burgeoning electro/clash/rock movement (it managed to feature SMD, Justice, Riton, Mystery Jets, Boys Noize, Digitalism and Uffie, amongst others). Although, listening to their tracks from 2003/4, you realise that, as far as beats and sensibilities go, they were pretty much doing it before everybody else realised it was there to be done.

Then, in February this year, they released ‘They Live’ (September last year if you lived outside of Australia), a cranking assortment of suitably heavy, zombie themed numbers with appearances from El-P, Autokratz, Toastie Taylor and others. While still very much being the band that delivered up ‘You Can Be Special Too’, the album seemed to further fuse their signature one-two breaks style with the power-rock backdrop from which they both originally hailed. The result is a more detailed and more listenable LP, albeit one that is perhaps less immediately dancefloor friendly. But, given this, almost more exciting than the album itself (at least for me) has been the suite of EPs and remixes it has spawned, bringing in such esteemed producers as Breakbot, Trevor Loveys, Adam Freeland, Shir Khan, Alex Metric and U.N.K.L.E.

To date there’s been the first single They Live, followed by the El-P heavy All The Cash, and, most recently, the album closer Icicles. Not that they’ve been lazy in their own time: they’ve contributed a couple of remixes on their own releases, have put out a stonking remix for Marine Parade label boss Adam Freeland and have another EP due out in July, the appropriately epic (but very under wraps) The Power EP.

But that may well be the longest I’ve ever gone on this site without a joke. My apologies. To make up, here’s proof that Benny Hill makes everything funnier. And now: music!

Find enclosed their rolling, soaring, almost sublime 2005 take on Santos’ Sabot, their dancefloor-shredding remix of Freeland’s new politically charged electro-rock anthem ‘Under Control’ (taken from Freeland’s forthcoming, and much anticipated new album ‘Cope’) and finally their solid as Iraq reversion of one of the “They Live” highlights, Icicles.

Santos – Sabot (Evil Nine Remix)

Freeland – Under Control (Evil Nine’s Graveyard Smash)

Evil Nine – Icicles (Evil Nine’s Graveyard Smash)

The album They Live and the They Live, All The Cash and Icicles singles are all available now from iTunes and Beatport. Both the album and singles have pretty much unimpeachable track selection and are very much worth checking out and purchasing irresponsibly. They come with my highest recommendation. And, I assure you, I don’t get excited by muc- OH MY GOD, IT’S A CAT PLAYING A KEYBOARD!!!!

Yes.

-luke

I think that when I look back at this grand music blogging adventure and start tallying up all the hits and misses of my career, the one that’s really going to sting was the time in June last year when I picked up a track called ‘Sleepyhead’ from the now defunct Good Weather for Airstrikes, and thought to myself ‘Hm. This is actually quite good. Maybe I should blog this. Nah, one track seems a bit insubstantial. Maybe I’ll see what else they do’. The band was Passion Pit, and suffice to say, they have done quite a lot in the intervening ten months. In terms of the buzz surrounding the band, it’s probably not entirely beyond the pale to call them this year’s MGMT. They’ve already had the ultra-hyped single (the aforementioned ‘Sleepyhead’), the acclaimed EP (the not aforementioned ‘Chunk of Change’), the SXSW breakout gig and now the major label debut album, Manners, due to be released on the 19th of May. As I said, quite the 10 months.

I must admit that I, personally, was a little underwhelmed with ‘Chunk of Change’. In fact I could oft be heard pontificating about the fact that it seemed like ‘Sleepyhead’ was their only good idea and that the rest of the EP was under-produced laptop pop, which did not bode well for the album at all. Well, humble pie all round! (No? Just for me? Ok, then) Because the album is here and from the first track it becomes pretty obvious that 2009′s gods of indie pop have arrived.

The first thing you notice is that they, well, sound like a band. I think my major issue with ‘Chunk of Change’ had been the fact that to my mind it sounded a little ill-disciplined; lots of good ideas but insufficient attention actually paid to making them work. Amazing what some production values can do. The tracks shimmer with sing-along choruses, soaring falsettos, propulsive drums, 80s synth stabs and children’s choirs (they feature on album highlights ‘The Reeling’ and ‘Little Secrets’. Apparently we’re now far enough post-D.A.N.C.E. to make that actually work again. Who woulda thought?) And there’s barely a flat track on here either, although some (‘Folds in Your Hands’ and ‘Eyes as Candles’ leap to mind) are a little more perfunctory than others. But, at a basic level, Passion Pit have produced a full, coherent and enjoyable album, a feat that MGMT certainly couldn’t achieve with ‘Oracular Spectacular’.

Let’s be clear though: ‘Manners’ is in no way revolutionary stuff. This is, very undeniably, indie pop and makes no bones about it. But it’s shiny and energetic and joyful indie pop, and will be absolutely fucking everywhere in a couple of weeks, so you may as well brace yourselves and enjoy the ride.

Passion Pit – Moth’s Wings

-luke

If you needed further proof that the aural flavour of the year is smooth and glossy disco revivalism, then the latest Maison compilation from trend-setting uber-label Kitsuné should eradicate those final doubts in a blinding burst of disco ball funk. “Aieeeeee!” you’ll say, shielding your eyes from the safari suited splendour, “where be the bangerz?”. And a friendly man with an afro and sideburns the size of shoes will declare “Nay! The time of the banger has passed! Now come with me and fall into the disco strings.” And then you’ll wake up 5 hours later in a pool of amyl, wearing a vest made from a shagpile rug, thinking “I can’t remember anything after that lovely man showed me his disco strings”. But boy you had fun. You think.

Yeah. That’s exactly what this sounds like (see also Bec’s musings on the disco juggernaut here).

I must say this is a welcome return to form for the mighty Kitsuné after the frank disappointments that were Maison’s 4 and 5 (the latter of which you can read up on here. While I don’t think this is going to be new disco’s defining statement (a la Maison 2 with electro), it’s certainly a remarkably consistent and entertaining jaunt through the many varieties of synthed up disco house.

It leads off with ‘Want U’ by the long absent Lo-Fi-Fnk, setting the agenda for the rest of the album with its funky basslines, cheesy synth keyboards and smooth vocals. As I’m typing this the final remains of the afternoon sun are dripping through my window, and this tune seems fucking tailor made for moments like this. The following offerings from La Roux, Pnau, Beni, Streetlife DJs and Hot Chip (via Grosvenor) are mired up to their elbows in disco, while even the typically gritty autoKratz seem to be upping their funk quotient. Of course there’s still some straight up excursions into more familiar electro territory – see Ted & Francis, Digitalism and Heartsrevolution – but even these seem afflicted by the slowing influence of their disco laden housemates. It’s all in the amyl. Maison 6 also has some wonderful down-tempo moments, with rather gorgeous back-to-back tracks by David E Sugar and Appaloosa exploring the heretofore untapped possibilities of the electro-ballad. Which isn’t to say the entire compilation is a laconic free-for-all; Etienne de Crecy, D.I.M. (remixing Fischerspooner) and A-Trak (with the by now ubiquitous ‘Say Whoa’) all turn in more grinding/driving tracks to keep things shifting along nicely, while The Shoes continue to impress, finishing the whole thing up with a punchy, guitar-fuelled number called, surprisingly, Let’s Go. The only real mis-step seems to be the fourth track, ‘Superheroes’ by You Love Her Coz She’s Dead, a weird amalgam of chiptune, electroclash and shouting whose misplaced mania sits amidst the early stages of the album like a pilled-up candy raver at a black tie dinner party. But that’s over quickly enough, and the rest of the compilation makes for an always entertaining tour through the many voices of a resurgent label getting back to the peak of its powers.

Kitsuné Maison 6, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Embrace New Disco. Eight thumbs up.

Lo-Fi-Fnk – Want U

Beni – My Love Sees You

Kitsuné Maison 6 is out in physical form on October 27 through… Kitsuné. Get onto it. Ye shant be disappointed.

-luke

TV on the Radio hold an odd place in my musical pantheon. Over the past few years I became, and still am so deeply enamoured with the song ‘Staring at the Sun’ that it’s made it quite hard for me to really listen properly to anything else they’ve done. Every time I tried to listen to ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’, their much-loved 2006 sophomore album, I’d inevitably get halfway through before my brain would click in with the thought ‘you know what, I kinda feel like listening to ‘Staring at the Sun’ again’. And I would. Hell, I’m listening to it right now and I’m supposed to be writing about their new album ‘Dear Science,’ (yes, the comma is intentional). From which you might be able to deduce that there’s nothing of ‘Staring at the Sun’ calibre on here, but you shouldn’t hold that against ‘Dear Science,’ too strongly, for it’s still a very worthwhile release in its own right. And like, ‘Staring at the Sun’ is totally the best song EVA!!1 fo shiz.

Yes, quite.

I hadn’t really been sold on the two previously unveiled songs, ‘Golden Age’ and ‘Dancing Choose’, so I’d started to harbour some reasonable doubts about the album itself. Fortunately TVOTR have come through in spades, producing a surprisingly gentle and pop-laden album that oscillates between straight-up indie rock and pseudo-symphonic ballads on almost a track to track basis. It sounds jarring, and occasionally it can be – the transition from ‘Family Tree’ to ‘Red Dress’ is particularly traumatic – but for the most part it’s a wonderfully sequenced, and occasionally quite emotive set of songs that probably constitutes their most listenable album to date.

It’s hard to know what hardcore TVOTR fans will make of ‘Dear Science,’ though; a lot of their more grating art-rock tendencies have been honed back and as a result they’ve begun to sound like a more musically detailed version of the Bloc Party. And there is definitely a feeling that ‘Dear Science,’ is a little more insubstantial than their previous releases. However, this isn’t to say that this TVOTR is totally unrecognisable from the band that produced the first two albums. Tunde Adebimpe’s vocals still cut across the songs with an odd mixture of desperation and warmth, while the persistence of the drums and the fuzziness of the production gives all their music a very distinctive texture. But there has definitely been a shift towards pop’s cleaner sounds on this album (which seems to be a bit of a recurring theme this year – it felt like both CSS and Wolf Parade did the same), which is invariably going to disappoint some people. But I must say I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’ve listened to and enjoyed ‘Dear Science,’ over the past couple of days… even if it’s probably not going to be immediately jostling for a slot in my albums of the year. Which I’m sure will upset TVOTR no end.

TV on the Radio – Love Dog

TV on the Radio – DLZ

‘Dear Science,’ is out on the 23rd of September via Interscope in the US and 4AD everywhere else. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to ‘Staring at the Sun’ again. Sigh. It makes everything ok.

-luke

I always get slightly nervous when I come to write about an artist such as UK’s Tim Simenon, who maintains the lofty status of one of electronic music’s great figureheads. In this case it all seems particularly out of my depth seeing as the dude contributed significantly to the rise of what NME coined, “DJ culture,” in their 1987 issue which featured Simenon on the cover with that incessant yellow smiley face, which Simenon inadvertently introduced into the rave and acid house scenes only to watch it explode into an icon in a mere moment. (All the while I was three and quite possibly scouting for lizards in my backyard.) Since then Simenon has produced and remixed material from the likes of Bowie, U2, Depeche Mode and Massive Attack, which has of course rendered him some sort of a legend, so I’ll probably accidentally write something completely wrong about him and get yelled at by some Simenon tragic, but persevere we must.

It’s been twenty-one years since the London-born Simenon released his debut single, Beat Dis, under the Bomb the Bass title, and thirteen years since his last record, Clear. During that thirteen year gap, he created his new album, Future Chaos, scrapped the entire thing, only to make it again, but this time using just a Minimoog synth, laptop and microphone set up in the kitchen of good friend and former A.P.E., Paul Conboy, Simenon intriguingly asserting, “…If there could possibly be a thing as electronica unplugged, then Future Chaos might be it.”

Future Chaos has been quietly approaching its September 15th release ever since, this refreshing lack of fanfare feeling entirely appropriate, the record picking up where Clear left off with its darker, more subtle sound and decidedly unrave-like aesthetic. If the life-blood of early Bomb the Bass was perfectly executed sample gathering and layering, with Future Chaos it’s the Minimoog, which helped to create the combination of what Simenon describes simply as, “drums, bass, some tones and some voices.”

And oh yes, the voices. With a career as rich in big-name collaborations as Simenon’s, including Sinead O’Connor, Bjork, and Neneh Cherry, he is unlikely to find himself lacking in options for a guest vocalist or two. So for Future Chaos we see appearances from Fujiya & Miyagi’s David Best, Jon Spencer, Toob, Conboy, and a particularly gorgeous effort by former Queens of the Stoneage vocalist/guitarsman, Mark Lanegan, which you can sample below.

You can head over to the Bomb the Bass Myspace page to hear more of the tracks from the album, and you can pick up a copy in September via !K7 Records.

Bomb The Bass – Black River (Ft. Mark Lanegan)

- bec

Listening to Rex the Dog’s long-awaited debut LP (well, at least as far as the Rex the Dog moniker is concerned – Jake Williams, the man behind Rex, has been producing dance music since 1993) ‘The Rex the Dog Show’ you start to realise two things. One, that Rex is making some of the best electro house doing the rounds at the moment – his tunes and remixes are wonderfully consistent and brilliantly produced. And two, that Rex himself is thoroughly convinced of this fact. I mean, how else do you explain the presence of no less than EIGHT previously released singles on a 14 song album. Granted one is a 2008 remake of ‘Maximize’, and another, ‘Frequency’, has essentially been split into two separate tunes, but that is still a lot of previously issued material to be banking off. Moreover, of the remaining six tracks, one is a 40 second album opener, and another is a downbeat two and a half minute interlude. So, in essence we have four new tracks to get excited about, and maybe it’s just me, but that just doesn’t seem like a hell of a lot for a debut album.

But wait, there’s more.

It does kinda bother me that two of the tracks on the album are actually remixes Rex has done of other artists. Stonking remixes as they may be (being his take on The Knife’s ‘Heartbeat’ and The Sounds’ ‘Tony the Beat’), it does seem a little cheeky. If you’re that pleased with the results, then surely bring them on as collaborators and do something new with them, rather than relying on tracks that are now almost two years old.

Finally though, and this may just be because I already know the original singles, in his efforts to make the whole thing feel a little more ‘album-y’ he’s trimmed the singles back to ‘album’ lengths. Excessively so. The longest track is 4:14, and many are far under that, and as a result many of the ideas seem under-developed and almost all of them start suddenly and finish up well before it feels like they should. Let’s be honest, it’s kinda hard to cultivate a groove in two and half minutes.

In the end the entire thing just feels like a Rex the Dog sampler, and perhaps that’s the best way of seeing it. This isn’t so much a wholly contained album as it is an extended advertisement for his quite remarkable back-catalogue of singles. Which I guess is a little more like it was back in the early days of dance, when LPs often functioned as collections of previously released but now unavailable slabs of vinyl. But I guess things have changed quite a bit now (the concept of something becoming ‘unavailable’ these days is almost impossible to conceive) and as a result I think we’ve come to expect more from our releases. Still, none of this is to say that the tracks on here, considered individually and together, don’t constitute quite a good album (hell, I’m sure I’ll be playing it plenty over summer), just that for those of us who are already familiar with Rex’s sound there’s not a lot in here to entice you. Go blow your money on the singles instead – Frequency, Circulate, Maximise, Tony the Beat, E-Talking, Heartbeat, Girls (The Prodigy), Happiness (Goldfrapp) – they’re all worthy of a spot in your collection. I’m just not entirely sure that this album is.

So we end on a buoyant note though, here be music! First up is the album’s revised edition of Maximise, probably the best tune on there, a deliberate, furious stormer of a track that has dancefloor mayhem etched into every facet of its being. If only it didn’t end so abrup-

Rex The Dog – Maximise 2008

Second, we have Kenson’s slightly harder edged take on the album’s ‘first’ single ‘I Can See You, Can You See Me?’. The single itself is a brilliant and varied release, featuring both radio and club cuts of the tune, along with remixes by Kenson, Drop the Lime, Mr Miyagi and more. Pick it up at Beatport or the iTunes Store.

Rex the Dog – I Can See You, Can You See Me? (Kenson Remix)

And for posterity’s sake, here’s Rex’s wonderfully anthemic version of Soulwax’s ‘E-Talking’. Classique.

Soulwax – E-Talking (Rex The Dog Remix)

And just because it’s the cutest thing ever, this animated gif from the RTD myspace:

Awwwwwwwwwwww.

-luke

It feels like I’ve been anticipating this album for all of forever. I have a massive crush on this man, and not just because he’s pretty. It’s because he never disappoints, even after nine studio albums spanning fourteen years, Beck’s tenth album, Modern Guilt, is superb, and while he has described it as, “the most intensive work I’ve ever done on anything,” the end result appears characteristically effortless. From its very opening, Modern Guilt whisks you away to the Universe of Beck, where time stands still long enough to allow you to remember how it felt when you first heard Mellow Gold and Odelay! before flicking you back to the present where Brian Burton (Danger Mouse) lays a deft hand to the keyboard bass which spreads dotingly beneath the multi-instrumental Hansen’s hovering vocals and sex-fuelled guitar work. It was near impossible to choose a favourite track to post.

Modern Guilt is being released next Tuesday which, charmingly enough, happens to be Hansen’s birthday. Maybe that’s why they rushed the release… (but probably not).

Beck – Modern Guilt

- bec