To say that The Suicide of Western Culture’s Long Live Death! Down With Intelligence! appeared without fanfare in November would be an understatement. Emphatically underground without even a listing on Amazon UK, the Barcelona duo’s record company were clearly not expecting great sales from their third album. Nevertheless, The Suicide of Western Culture certainly provided a sonically enthralling disc that is head and shoulders above anything released by any of their leftfield fellow travellers in 2015.
Long Live Death! Down With Intelligence!’s low tech approach marries a post-rock attitude to a palette of raw electro-drone sounds that create plenty of depth as well as a lively groove that is fizzing with possibilities. The vocals on the magnificent title track and “Return to my parents’ hometown in Andalucia” come from looped samples of speech, while on tracks like the paranoid “Beware of the Fifth Column” spoken monologues are manipulated to present a wry and witty view of the world. That said, there is nothing dour or worthy about it. The whoozy synths of “Dysplasia”, trancey grooves of “Drugs bring me closer to you” and lead single “Still breathing but already dead” are all most certainly intended to move hips just as much as blow minds.
Other albums that are worth a listen from 2015 include Lightning Bolt’s joyous, high-speed noise rock opus Fantasy Empire which showed the drum and bass guitar duo to still be very much on top of their game after almost 20 years. Sleaford Mods gave a fiery state of the nation address with Key Markets, whose claustrophobic grooves and vitriolic stream-of-consciousness vocals got plenty of popular attention. Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit & Think, & Sometimes I Just Sit, however, provided the year’s best album title and, in “Pedestrian at best” the best single. Unfortunately, that song also had the worst video of the year.
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