electropop
Guy Oddy
Read the track listing of Belgica and you might assume that this soundtrack is a compilation featuring 15 different artists from a wide variety of musical genres. In fact, it has been written and produced in its entirety by Belgian experimentalists Soulwax, using virtual bands created purely for this project. Soulwax is actually made up of Belgian brothers Stephen and David Dewaele (AKA dance titans 2manydjs) and Stefaan Van Leuven, and their latest offering accompanies a film set in a nightclub in Ghent which, on this evidence, sounds like quite a wild venue with plenty to recommend it.The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The career of the Gran Canaria-born musician Pablo Díaz-Reixa seems to work in an accelerated time-frame, speeding through decades and eras as he develops his sound. Though he has always worked with digital technology, his early work sounded archaic, its massed carnival percussion and traditional melodies roaming around the Afro-Latin diaspora.Then, on 2008's Pop Negro, he embraced modernism, albeit still with a retro twist, rigorously examining and adopting the high-gloss production and songwriting techniques of the biggest mainstream American and Latino pop acts of the mid-1970s to mid-'90s Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
It would be easy to write off The Jezabels’ third album as style over substance. The gaudy, synth-heavy gloom-pop of Synthia seeks to catch you off guard with its sexualised sighs, sinewy rhythms and liquid melodies. It’s only on repeated listens that its wider themes emerge: gender roles and identity; desire and disgust and, in “Smile”, a devastating put-down of the everyday street-harasser.It begins with “Stand and Deliver” – an immersive, seven-and-a-half-minute synthesised dream sequence during which frontwoman Hayley Mary transforms from wide-eyed ingenue into high priestess of electro- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Kannon, Sunn O)))’s (pronounced “sun”) first non-collaborative album since 2009’s epic Monoliths and Dimensions, is a doomy triptych that will make long-term fans of the American band very happy indeed. Taking inspiration from the Buddhist Guanyin Bodhisattva “perceiving the cries of the world”, walls of distorted guitars played very, very slowly provide a cosmic and crushingly heavy groove that suggests that Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson are still very much on top of the drone metal game after their recent, more avant-garde collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker and almost 20 years Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Justin Bieber’s undoubtedly had a tricky time of it, living in the full glare of the world’s media. While it’s demonstrably not “the toughest thing in the world”, as he recently suggested in Billboard magazine, it can’t be much fun having your every misdemeanour writ large. His fourth album, Purpose, purports to be his mea culpa, but I’m left wondering what he’s supposed to be apologising for. Surely a teenager who has been gifted unimaginable wealth should be forgiven for occasionally acting like an impatient dick and driving badly? We let pensioners get away with it all the time.At the time Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There's a current running through the underground club / electronic music of the 2010s that cares not a jot for progress – but neither is it retro as such. It's been called “outsider house”, which is a pretty lame name for stuff that is often extremely accessible and welcoming, and is certainly not just house music. Rather it's a kind of neo-psychedelia, a sound that plays tricks with memory and expectation, collapsing oppositions between sophistication and naiveté, between kitsch and sincerity, and between low and high fidelity in the pursuit of beautiful discombobulation. And as the none- Read more ...
Barney Harsent
John Grant is nothing if not a confessional songwriter. On his last album, Pale Green Ghosts, there were moments of dark despair, caustic barbs and some surprisingly slinky grooves soundtracking a man who was offering himself up with a breathtaking honesty. On Grey Tickles, Black Pressure – a title that places us somewhere between mid-life crisis and full-on nightmare – he is similarly laid bare, but the literate humour has now become full-on funny and could well mark him out as the best lyricist of his generation.Although Grant says he wanted to get “moodier and angrier” on this record, he Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
As the year in which Jenny Hval has already declared war on “soft dick rock”, 2015 seems perfect for the return of Peaches: the electroclash shock-rock pioneer’s bass-heavy, provocative music is the diametric opposite. Rub, her first album in six years, comes as an audio and visual package: each track is accompanied by an artist-directed video featuring everything from Peaches and comedian Margaret Cho sharing a day of zany adventures while dressed in matching hand-knit body suits (complete with comically oversized, flapping penises) to performance artist Empress Stah shooting lasers from a Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Don’t be fooled by the header picture. Despite the relaxed poses, Iceland’s Pink Street Boys are amongst the angriest, loudest, most unhinged bands on the planet right now. Hits #1, their debut vinyl album – which follows distorted-sounding, lower-than-lo-fi cassette and digital-only releases – is so impolite and wild that once the rest of the world gets the message the story of what constitutes the current-day music of their home country will have to be rewritten.They are not an anomaly. Iceland is currently witnessing a groundswell of loosely punk–inspired bands drawing from the edgy spirit Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Giorgio Moroder has long been adopted by the cognoscenti. He’s the studio wizard who gave us key Seventies disco hits, iconic in the development of electronic music and club culture. The culmination of this archiving tendency was the tribute song on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, indeed, the whole album seemed sprinkled with shiny Moroder synth polish. It was undoubtedly this that resulted in Sony hauling him from retirement to work with a who’s who of contemporary chart-pop. The result is appalling, a catastrophic mire of Costa del Dumb Euro-cheese, pitched in some teeth-jarring Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Most people like new music to sound as much as possible like music they’ve heard before. At the very least it should adhere to core genre tenets that don’t force listeners from their comfort zone. Music that’s regarded as brave by a conservative music media usually has the tiniest hint of something fresh, resulting in self-satisfied hurrahs for the excitements of Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire and the like. A label such as Belgium’s Crammed Discs, then, which consistently backs artists unbound by genre or even locality, never receives the mainstream attention it deserves as one of the world’s Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 2004 the era-defining dance duo Orbital supposedly went their separate ways. In fact, they merely took a four-year sabbatical. Three years later one half of the sibling pairing, Paul Hartnoll, released his debut solo album, The Ideal Condition. It was a lush affair, demonstrating a rich, warm musicality which hinted where Orbital’s melodic chops came from. It didn’t sell but was the best thing either Orbital brother, together or separately, had done in years. The revitalised Orbital then released two further albums, the latter of which, Wonky, was a gem, its closing number, “Where Is It Read more ...