Reviews for Mouth - spring issue 2010

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB - TOURIST HISTORY
(Kitsuné Music)

Jaunty luminous guitar riffs,  French dance-floor beats and chorus lines that stick to your brain like chewing  gum on hot pavement.  It’s as if Foals, Bloc Party and Phoenix had a private disco called Guilty Pleasures: it’s not the future of music, but we all secretly want to go there. It might be just a one-night stand but we promise you won’t feel bad after this one. And isn’t this what pop is all about?

LIARS - SISTERWORLD


(Mute)
These guys change with every album so, again, we’re in for a surprise. The art-punk basement party from 2007 has exploded and Sisterworld is miles away, at the edge of the fading shock-wave. Their voices now float mystically over the remains of guitar-feedback and  waves of ethereal synths. There is a certain 70’s psychedelic feel to it but the band’s dystopian discomfort is still present. And when you least expect it, these landscapes are suddenly invaded by the loud and ferocious Liars we missed.

JÓNSI - GO
(Parlophone / XL Recordings)
Ever wished to sing along a Sigur Rós song? Now you can. The Finnish band’s vocalist sings in English in his new solo project composed with the help of the young musical genius Nico Muhly. Comparisons with Sigur Rós are inevitable but this album moves away from the cold post-rock landscapes of his band. In Go, Jónsi has created a bursting evergreen world, filled with Nico Muhly’s intricate arrangements of strings, brass instruments and glitches . A sure fire to be the most joyfully grandiose  album of the spring.

DRAKE - THANK ME LATER 

(Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Motown)

Former child star trying to make it big in the music business? Might sound familiarly uninteresting. But with two Grammy nominations and the uber success of the single “Best I Ever I Had”, Drake appears to be on the right way. His inspiration Kanye West and the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z  are on the guest list. And with rumours of a collaboration with legend Sade, there are plenty of reasons why we should keep an eye on this.

Ncontrast magazine - Visual Sounds section - theme: Myth (this version was not published)

I try to write about music and I put TV On The Radio’s “Tonight” playing. There seems to be some sort of darkness, some bells that appear,like ephemeral drops of rain that make the ground visible in the instant they hit it. Echoes, pianos and dust emerge as light – abstract elements made concrete through the eye of a camera. A melancholic voice roams the space that exists between the suggested objects. There is also a pilgrimage of whistles and a flute that dances amongst dirty buildings.

I try to write about music and I end up presenting an bizarre landscape inhabited by strange figures, a space where tridimensionality is pierced by two-dimensional bodies. If I see and hear, I can talk as if this were a film: a cinematographic traveling. I find the usual scars and stains of old films, moments of Super 8 where ralentis of over-heating create layers of visual static.

Why do I keep with this synesthesia? I remember my music teacher playing Brahms and asking us “What is the color of this music?” At the time, without knowing why, it seemed to me that it was dark-green. Yes, that’s it…music suggests images and feelings but what does that say about my relationship with this art? What spaces are these and where do they come from?

I find the space of the place where the music was played. A space that assumes itself as an integral part of the music when the material level sonorously pierces the composition: the fizz of old speakers, the glitches, the breathing of the artist and the pages that are turned in the music “Shousetsu” by Radicalfashion. And in the case of John Cage’s “4’33”, the place of the performance is the composition itself, regrouping musicians and listeners in the same envelope.

I’d better not drift away from the song that I started with. In the space that I verbalized I see and hear ghosts of myself, urban depressions, pressurized release of my asphyxiated desires. Yes, this space is not just the aggregation of suggested images but also of hidden divisions of my human conditions that are now waking up. Yes…I feel the music being lived as performance; sounds that are realized in each instant as a choreography in a space; music that is an event of present; music where sounds are acts and movements that materialize bodies, spaces and times.

Yes…I see now that each text about music is a luggage of life experience and culture, a complex and synesthetic experience that bridges the limits of the personal and reaches out for someone else’s experience.

"I'll listen up tonight"

Ncontrast magazine - Visual Sounds section - theme: Diaspora.

In today’s globalized world, music has distanced itself from the human migrations and is assuming its own diasporas: endless and complex exchanges that go beyond the mixing of two cultures. Each musician, but also each person, is a land of arrival and departure. Sounds and techniques leave the limits of the material and, either as simple information or as personal sensitive expressions, travel permanently, creating new communities.

In the case of musicians like Panda Bear, Gang Gang Dance, Black Dice or High Places, this movement goes even further. Everything in their music seems to come from fading countries and cultures: xamanism, paraphernalia, reverb, dislocated sounds. And everything seems to reach out for a somewhere new: traditional instruments from Polynesia, China or Africa, treated as samples, become embedded in a fluid yet organic electronic music that aims for eternity.

The way through which these bands take familiar sounds out of their context and work them in new musical structures gives the impression that their music has no fixed roots. It’s as if the sounds got together in a journey of uprooting, in a ever-going search for a new unity. All of them travel with the musician, and in the act of listening, they also implicate us in their conflicts, creating a distance or a sense of identification and connection. They take us with them on their diaspora.

This progressive sonority that mixes conflict and harmony shows that the essence of these songs is not the departure or the arrival but the diaspora itself. Seated on choirs of comfort or batered by glitches of uncertainty, together we look for the promised land.

The festivity, the contemplated beauty, the unexpected fright and the ecstasy of communion that are lived during the listening of these bands seem to translate the contemporary experience of unlimited sharing as well as the blurring of cultural diasporas. What is searched here is a common culture in permanent mutation and what is felt is that now we all are members of the same diaspora, eager travelers on our way to a hyper-world.

Ncontrast magazine - Visual Sounds section - theme: Meat

What does flesh sound like? Devouring, gnashing of teeth, pain and pleasure, death and power. Laceration, the dripping of blood and saliva leaving completely raw that which already was.
This is the sound of Test Icicles: flesh in all its material and symbolic realization.

Dreadful name for a dreadful band that lasted two years. Their only LP, “For Screening Purposes Only”, is a veritable B-movie with chainsaws, zombies and gushes of gratuitous violence. In fact, this band is a pastiche of trash genres, a gruesome creature made of shreds of flesh with only a few bits of loose skin, driven by the hunger for more fresh meat. It is a living-dead thing that struggles and squirms, contaminating others, causing reactions of revulsion and intense nausea mixed with fascination and a morbid primitive pull.

Secretly, we all are attracted to it and we all feel embarrassed for enjoying a regurgitated chorus or a blood-spattered riff. Secretly we all want to dive deep into grossness with them, undress our prejudices and, like in the track “Shark”, dance and scream“SHARKS, BITE, KILL, BLOOD”, amongst chunks of flesh, in a foaming sea of dark fluids.

This band's bestiality and the weakness we have for it come from the same place: the flesh and all that it embodies. That is why, if after we listen we discover that we always enjoyed raw meat, our hunger will never be the same.

Two short reviews I did for NME

Le Corps Mince de Françoise – ‘Something Golden’

A futuristic new-wave anthem to light the darkest hours of your night-out.

An angelical chorus line, CSS-like rap, and schizophrenic kung-fu shouts? This Finnish electropop trio just captured the essence of going home in the early hours of dusk with an aftertaste of chemicals in your brain. And they made it quite beautifully.

‘Something Golden’ sounds like angels in a glossy pink Cadillac, fluorescent headlights pulsating through the dark and sound-blasters oozing drones that could make a whole neighbourhood tremble with pleasure.

They preach about love and nature and when the song explodes into waves of epileptic-inducing synths tighter than Lady Gaga’s pants, you will believe in rapture.



Memories – David Guetta feat. Kid Cudi

"Memories"? You will only like this if you have none.

A thumping, uncomplicated house beat and a bite-sized piano-loop stretched over 2:30 minutes. Add to this an auto-tuned Kid Cudi singing with as much enthusiasm as a 160-years-old tortoise on Prozac and you get the latest hit churned out by David Guetta.
We all know the best house songs are the simplest ones but with no rise or tension, “Memories” ends up feeling like your limbs do after six hours of dancing: numb, heavy, boring and stuck in auto-pilot.
If “I Gotta Feeling” can fill the dance floor in a split second, DJ’s will be playing “Memories” to let the cleaning lady do her job. It is just another pastiche club-anthem for people with short-term memory.