What? - Whateverism

Artist: What?
Album: Whateverism
Label: Self Released
Year: 2009

Tracklist:
01. Whateverism
02. Odium Of Being
03.Lost Beyond Recall

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20,000 amps and more: Germany is back on the map with alternative rock sounds - What?'s Whateverism EP has more current than a lightening strike. The 3 songs are not only dynamic and captivating, they also provide a wide base range where several emotions fuse into each other. Changing from melancholy to anger, What? finds the right atmosphere for its sophisticated and extraordinary arrangements. Kurt Ebelhäuser (well-known German producer) has equipped the band from the Ruhr area with a powerful production which completes this great band’s line-up.
It is clear that What? has a lot up its sleeve and the Whateverism EP is just the beginning of great things to come.
However let's start with the present.
The songs boast an intensity that might remind one of Placebo at times but very quickly you see that such an association is out of place. Altogether the songs feature a considerable tension; in the climax they resemble an emotional eruption. It grooves and each time you listen it gets into your brain more deeply. The band radiates great vitality and delight in playing, using unconventional instrumentation. They hit the accelerator hard without sounding monotonous. This emphasizes that What? possess a real keen sense of enthralling song composition.
Eleven minutes of progressive guitar storms between alternative rock, hardcore, metal and many other styles that influence What?.
You feel that Ingo (vocal), Skotty (guitar), Schrör (bass) and Marc (drums) know their trade and now want to know their limits.
What? is a well-oiled rock machine with lots of steam and pressure behind their pistons. The Whateverism EP is a true stroke of luck for people who are sick of the usual rock releases. Let the action begin. The tracks can be bought on iTunes and on Amazon. (-taken form the band's press release)

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A Cold Dead Body - Promo

Artist: A Cold Dead Body
Album: Promo
Label: EARTHACHE ArtLab
Year: 2009

Tracklist:
01. Collapse
02. The Chosen Ones
03. Divinity Pt.1

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A Cold Dead Body is a band from the North-east of Italy. Everything started in 2005 as a one-man-band of lead singer Sten (ex-singer of the Metal-hardcore band Zune). After Zune's dissolution, this project finally became a real band starting the activity in 2007.

In 2009, they released a Promo EP of 3 tracks – the preview of the forthcoming debut album (spring 2010) – which is the very first publication of Earthache ArtLab - an art collective founded byLorenzo Cercelletta, Lucia Violetta Gasti and Cristiano Perin(members of the band).
Being realised in a limited number of copies (#150), each piece is handmade and hand-numbered, thus unique, and almost entirely made of natural and recycled materials.
The 100 Promo copies issued for the sale went sold out in about 48 hours.

Their first release promise big things to come, it remains to see them fulfilling our expectations.


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Képzelt Város - Mit Nekem

Artist: Képzelt Város
Album: Mit Nekem
Label: Major
Year: 2009








Tracklist:
01. Sol
02. D2
03. Papírhajó
04. Zuhanó
05. Sergei6
06. White Noise
07. Hercules
08. Futok

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Pandoras.Box - Barriers

Artist: Pandoras.Box

Album: Barriers

Label: Clinical Archives

Year: 2009







Tracklist:
01. A Modarete Breeze
02. This Tenderness
03. Golden Spoon
04. Arrows & Bows
05. Next To Mine
06. Dolphins & Seaquakes
07. Sight unseen
08. I Don´t Care
09. City Cultures
10. Chaos Back
11. You Master
12. Interlude
13. Virtual Sun
14. Minerals

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Download Arrows & Bows (RMX)

One of the best moments during music discovery is the one when you hear an album the first time and instantly are addicted to it. To know that you will hear it over and over again, that after hours of mediocre or boring music you found a new pearl in the ocean of music.

The independent rock band Pandoras.Box from Lower Bavaria with their album Barriers gave me the last incarnation of such a moment. The album could as well be sold on CD, the quality of song-writing and production does not need to hide behind commercial releases. I would be surprised to not see their next release in stores.

Their sound reminds me of Muse’s rich instrumental arrangements and Blur’s distinct vocals. The album is very balanced and features both slow melancholic (Next to Mine) and fast paced (Golden Spoon) songs. Golden Spoon is my favourite (non remixed) song of this album. The song Interlude is an instrumental meditation with guitar and strings. The final song is a danceable Remix of the fourth track “Arrows & Bows” by Rampue which I personally like best because it frees the original song from its lethargy. -by (ojdo.de)

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Presence Of Soul - Blinds

Artist: Presence Of Soul

Album: Blinds

Label: Wheel Records

Year: 2008

Tracklist:

01. Seven Mortal Sins And Seven Doors
02. Sink Low
03. Lost
04. Whitenoise Snowfall
05. Ephemera
06. Rule
07. Forgiven
08. Tightrope

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pass: lateralnoise.blogspot.com

Japanese group PRESENCE OF SOUL is led by female singer and composer YUKI, who also handles guitars, keyboards and Mellotron. She's accompanied by a guitar player, a bass player and a drummer.
"Blinds" (2008) is a first album to be listened to somewhere between GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR !, SIGUR ROS, MOGWAI and ANEKDOTEN. As a matter of fact, the band was the support act for the swedish musicians during their 2008 shows in Japan.
From the very beginning, PRESENCE OF SOUL proves to be absolutely innovative and mature at the same time: ethereal female vocals create a sharp contrast with guitars fury and drumming power. Sad atmospheres, often enhanced by Mellotron and a great sense of slowliness (Without mentioning softness) evolve step by step, with an increasing violence, reaching its climax in an overwhelming maelstrom. It's a kind of "Progressive post-rock", and one cannot imagine a more intense musical world. You'll surely be haunted a long time after listening...

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Dosh - Wolves And Wishes

Artist: Dosh
Album: Wolves ANd Wishes
Label: Anticon
Year: 2008







Tracklist:
01. Don't Wait For The Needle To Drop
02. Bury The Ghost
03. If You Want To, You Have To
04. First Impossible
05. Hit And Pearle
06. Wolves
07. Food Cycles
08. Keep Up Appereance
09. The Magic Stick
10. Capture The Flag

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Dosh fits many of the backpack rapper stereotypes. He sits on the Anticon roster, a bastion of rule-breaking hip-hop that has no truck with the likes of, say, Cam'ron or Petey Pablo. He comes from Minneapolis, home of the Replacements and Prince, but wanting for nationally known rappers, save the canonized-on-the-quad Atmosphere. Dosh's beats aren't composed of soul samples, drowning in bass, or expressly built to house verses and choruses: they are impressionistic, surging, cut loose of 4/4 constraints. Over the frenzy of drum machines and looped samples, he would take the pensive swirl of his vintage Rhodes and pile it dramatically-- with a flair for surprise-- on top of something else.

But he doesn't rap. His connection to the genre won't be obvious to most listeners. In fact, you might call him electronica's answer to the rising tide, reported in The New York Times Magazine, of one-man operations that sound like bands. But listening to Dosh, as opposed to listening to the equally skilled Four Tet, you don't have the sense of technology rudely intruding into the creative process, of the wizard too busy to care whether we can see him behind the curtain. He does care: where Four Tet parades his mastery of vivid, unapologetic collage, Dosh goes for a mastery of illusion.

So like any illusionist, he takes care to start and end with a bang. Only Dosh could imagine, let alone orchestrate, a meeting of Andrew Bird's tender violin and Fog's hyperactive guitar and bass. The play of vibes and keys lends this, the album opener "Don't Wait for the Needle to Drop", a mesmerizing texture, the grooves recalling a funk-tinged, gamelan symphony. "Capture the Flag" falls on the other end of Wolves and Wishes, where it reaches for the same exotic grandeur. Strings appear again, in sampled form, along with the Dosh's fuzzy arpeggios. But now we hear a sax pumping away. And more surprisingly, we hear Dosh's own voice lowered over the maze of noise, cutting a passage of coolness and clarity into the thickets of dense, off-kilter instrumentation.

Between these bursts of color, the album rarely tones it down. Without sounding repetitive, a network of reappearing themes, people, and sounds holds Wolves and Wishes together. Andrew Bird returns to grace "Kit and Pearle", for instance, with more anguished turns on his violin, underneath Dark Dark Dark's sighing vocals. The outer tracks' air of exoticism pours back in on the rhythmically brilliant "Food Cycles" and "Keep Up Appearances". And Dosh's protégé Mike Lewis launches his sax into Jeremy Ylvisaker's vibrating, room-filling sheets of reverb on "Wolves". Not until we reach the final minutes of the tectonic, Sun Ra-repping, Arthur Russell-influenced epic "First Impossible" do we hear an unexpected, unmistakable rap beat. It fits right in. People want to call this IDM. The label tells vendor to file this under "Rock". Bristling with jazzy forms, infused with a global soul, Wolves and Wishes turns hip-hop's philosophy of bricolage into a glitchy, raucous, genre-spanning achievement. - by Roque Strew (pitchforkmedia.com)

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Since (Time) - Entropiate

Artist: Since (Time)
Album: Entropiate
Label: Venerate Industries
Year: 2008








Tracklist:
01. Introverse
02. Two Questiones And Three Complaints
03. 3am_1000 thoughts_min
04. Please Light, Clarify Yourself For Me
05. Through That Dark Cloud Came Our Redemption
06. Horizon's Exode


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It takes certain bands quite some time to settle, not only in regards to their line-up, but also their sound, and more importantly, their possibilities of making an album. Greece’s Since (Time) started off in 2003, recorded a short demo in 2005, and have finally released a full debut album, which is the subject of this review. Even if I’m glad to say that they’ve made a quality recording, the band’s still got a relatively long road to travel in order to become much more than what they are now.

Entropiate is, in that sense, a jumpstart, a step in a direction which may prove good for both band and listeners. “Introverse” greets us with a dark, delicate ambience that opens up the gates of this self-contained universe and plunges our minds into the passive (as in lack of physical movement) act of experiencing a thoughtful solitude, akin to that of losing oneself at the fringes of consciousness deep at night. “Two Questions and Three Complaints” continues on in this vein -- a vein that sounds like a less explosive version of any of Gifts From Enola’s debut tracks -- crafting a meditative mood which seems, at times, immersed in a kind of decadence; the complaints outnumber the questions, the deconstructive is greater than the constructive even if both could aim for the same things, and we’re burdened into static, cyclic, almost obsessive thinking because of it. “3 AM: 1000 thoughts / min” bursts forward in a very “City Lights Scraped The Sky” style which breaks the cycle, only for it to start anew. The mood remains the same, although the track develops a series of short riffs that in the end don’t do much but change the pace, and not the structure or the form in general.

“Please Light, Clarify Yourself For Me” is like the natural continuation of the last track, with its slightly more dynamic build-up and a sound that actually evokes movement, our thoughts -- at last -- going somewhere and culminating with the anguished, dramatic explosion of “Through That Dark Cloud Came Our Redemption.” This is still our “introverse,” and therefore, there’s no cloud but that which we’ve constructed in our mind: it cracks open and releases a great amount of energy in a heaviness reminiscent of Red Sparowes sans the epic feeling and overpowering distortions, making it sound more “sincere.” “Horizon’s Exode” (“exode” being the catastrophe or conclusion of a play in Greek Drama) finally brings it all down in a violently expressive display of guitar-work that ends with what everything ends: silence. A sixteen minute silence. “Exode” is too, after all, a satirical piece added after the end of a play in Roman Drama. The satire is, I imagine, an overextended silence that however we interpret it is still just the absence of sound: the band is gone and has left us alone to hear it.

As Entropiate stops playing, I’m left with a certain sense of disappointment. The first few minutes of “Horizon’s Exode,” as well as “Introverse,” and some parts of “3 AM” insinuate an emotional evocativeness so far only achieved in post-rock by the aforementioned Gifts From Enola. Unfortunately the effort goes only so far and remains in the realm of insinuation, dragged down by the band’s insistence on an ambient feeling which is not developed well enough and dwells in borderline repetitiveness. The music then sounds almost uninspired; even the heavier parts suffer from not sounding heavy enough, although that is possibly a problem with the album’s production, and not so much the band. The ideas put forward through the song names, which are pretty cool, find only a weak manifestation in the pieces themselves, and lose their strength completely by the time each song ends. “Horizon’s Exode” is the best example of this strength. What do we do with sixteen minutes of pure silence which, albeit a part of the album, are relegated to the very end, when we can expect nothing more and are ready to press the stop button? What do we do with this kind of experiment in an album that isn’t experimental at any given time? Whatever symbolic meaning this exode might have, it just feels out of place. It also feels like an afterthought, in which case it actually honors its name and concept, but even then, it just amounts to a small-time curious addition. Entropiate is, sadly, an average foray into a territory which already has very strong representatives. If Since (Time) wants to compete, they’ll have to push harder, but given the bright moments this album has, I’m sure they’re capable of it. I guess it’s just a matter of time. -by David Murrieta (thesilentballet.com)

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Deerhunter - Microcastle

Artist: Deerhunter
Album: Microcastle
Label: Kranky
Year: 2008








Tracklist:
01. Intro
02. Agoraphobia
03. Never Stops
04. Little Kids
05. Microcastle
06. Calvary Scars
07. Green Jacket
08. Activa
09. Nothing Ever Happened
10. Saved By Old Times
11. These Hands
12. Twilight At Carbon Lake

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One might expect this would be a good time for Bradford Cox to firmly establish a line of demarcation between Deerhunter with his Atlas Sound solo project – perhaps steer the band back towards the messy art-punk of the Atlanta, Georgians’ self-titled debut (alternately entitled Turn It Up, Faggot – a reference to insults hurled at the gangly Cox during live performances). Of course, it’s something of a moot point as there was little separating the two entities all along.

While the musical building blocks in their arsenal do not lend themselves to a mainstream crossover attempt, Microcastle is sure to win over non-believers with its pop flourishes. From the outset, the record takes an understated approach. Rough edges have been sanded down into a far more digestible format. Psychedelic leanings which have threatened to spiral out of control remain, but now with its bittersweet underpinnings pushed to the surface. Where short attention spans may have been frustrated with Cryptograms’ drone, an ever-lurking ataxia of guitars sidesteps any monotony.

A whitewash of sound is woven over an insouciant melody on ‘Never Stops’, the song picking up where Ian McCulloch’s similarly urgent refrain left off all these years ago. The guitar lead on ‘Agorophobia’ mirrors the vocal cadence giving the song symmetry not ordinarily associated with Deerhunter. When Cox sings, “I had a dream / no longer to be free,” it is not immediately apparent he’s talking about the price of fame. But the teenage angst prevalent in early recordings is no longer much visible and it’s difficult to imagine Cox onstage wearing a dress performing it. And despite claims of “nothing left to say,” Cox is indebted to his manic condition, resulting in an uncharacteristically expansive lyrical content.

Whether or not Cox’s health issues are the primary basis for themes doting upon death and desperation isn’t necessarily important. The band’s emotional range gallops ahead with the confidence bred from the nearly flawless Fluorescent Grey EP, giving a netherworld depth to sentiments which may otherwise have come across as callused or detached. ‘Little Kids’ (an almost slow-motion version of ‘Like New’) climaxes with its “to get older still” refrain, marking a strikingly hopeful posture relative to previous outings.

The near danceable percussion and bass blend seamlessly with down tempo tracks kicking off the second half of the album. A four-note piano arpeggio on ‘Green Jacket’ brilliantly sets up ‘Activa’ whom Deerhunter fanatics will remember from the Daytrotter.com sessions of last year. While this chopped down version loses the feedback, the song remains a beautifully painful endeavour. On the title track, in particular, Cox’s plaintive tenor carries sparse instrumentation until the midpoint at which time the roles are reversed. It is a songwriting tactic largely reserved for his main band, and honed to a fine-tooth comb here. Closer ‘Twilight at Carbon Lake’ brings this juxtaposition together – when Cox has finally had enough with words – the melancholy is broken open on the album’s final minute with an assault of blistering guitars and cymbal explosions in what can be imagined as some sort of cynical reproach of Ode to Joy.

With nary a duff track officially released and otherwise, it nevertheless seems improbable Cox’s latest incantations have undergone further improvements. He is, after all, merely a young man channelling his obsession of Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, Kevin Shields, and Pixies. Some will complain a noise reduction lessens the impact, but it is the softer side of Deerhunter which makes their music so compelling. There is elegance in the album’s simplicity, and by extrapolation provides proof the treated vocals and distorted guitars on Cryptograms weren’t masks to hide incompetence. Nirvana once dared to show the world their songs could be unplugged without forfeiting the band’s inherent raw energy, and the relaxed setting here demonstrates Deerhunter more than able to withstand similar scrutiny.

Where the split-personality of Cryptograms hinted as much, a cohesive effort on Microcastle delivers the goods in its entirety. In what amounts to a peek behind the curtain of reverb enveloping much of Deerhunter’s compositions thus far, the album justifies our expectations for greatness. It is a precarious algorithm of pedal guitars, drums, and bedroom experimentation few bands manage to attain. Curators of music history may yet remain unconvinced. In the meantime, there’s no harm taking the liberty of pencilling in Bradford Cox’s name for the next generation’s list of iconic influences. -by Bruce Porter (drownedinsound.com)

Official Site
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Preorder (official release on 28/10)

Kids Return - Tongue Tied

Artist: Kids Return
Album: Tongue Tied
Label: Tower Of Power Records
Year: 2007







Tracklist:
01. The World Is Burning And I'm Playing Video Games
02. Untitled
03. This Island
04. On Shelves, On Looking
05. In The Dead Of Night
06. The Sea, The Sky, The Trees
07. Ben Folds Was Right
08. Communication

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It is traditional that every year I "pen" a review that contains a sentence that says "it is traditional that every...", hang on, this isn't going to work... Ok, every year we get one or two emo records that are worth adding to the pantheon of the genre. This year, both of those LPs have been released by UK bands. One of them is Kids Return. When I put this LP on last night for the first time, my jaw dropped and I played air guitar in the kitchen instead of washing up to the spiralling climax of "The World Is Burning...". It was spot on, it was the best kind of music. The music which takes over my dis-coordinated body and makes it move in some kind of rhythm, clapping my hands and not really looking like I am quite with it.
Kids Return offer up 8 songs of intense, melodic emo. It's all about the driving guitars that play off each other, working in the twinkles, the sing/speak/shout/sob vocals, and all the other elements that this sound is known for, albeit so sporadically in the waning years of the first decade of the twenty first century. The vocals are a particular stand-out for me, I am struggling to think of a way to phrase it without sounding horribly technical, which would be so far removed from the music, so I won't bother.
There are all sorts of bands that this compares well to, chiefly it brings to mind Life at these Speeds first LP, but also the REDS LP, and with touches of Yaphet Kotto and September. It's not a direct imitation of any of those, nor any of the many other mid 90s forebears, but the band brings together each component to create a fine, fine album.
It would be amiss of me to neglect to mention the attention to detail in the packaging, this has been lovingly crafted and proves that the people in this band are up to their necks in it. With so few bands going the extra mile these days, it's impossible to dismiss it as cynical or bandwagon hopping as it may have been back when every emo 7" came in an envelope with 100 screen printed pictures of broken, rusting cars.
Be sure to spend a few moments with the lyric booklet too, for it contains observations and feelings that will strike a chord with most if not all. Who knew emo lyrics didn't have to be about lost love or so contrived that they were lost on all but the writer?
And so. 2007 draws to an end, and we get that emo record that a few of us crave, to keep the music ticking over. Wonderful. -by Andy Malcolm(collective-zine.co.uk)

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