• Eluvium – Nightmare Ending

    June 6, 2013 - By 

    Over the course of the past decade, Matthew Cooper has established himself as one of the finest contemporary ambient musicians, with each new Eluvium release showcasing his mastery of a different aspect of the broadly-defined genre. What we have with this glorious new double album is a distillation of every style he has explored to date into one fantastically ambitious opus; essentially, both the perfect primer for those unfamiliar with his work and a kind of ultimate Eluvium package for the converted. The first disc opens with Cooper at his most accessible. ‘Don’t Get Any Closer’ commences on a simple,…

  • The Dead Presidents – Can You Dig It? EP

    June 4, 2013 - By 

    It’s been a long trek for The Dead Presidents, having been a power trio in their early years, suffering from lazy comparisons to Thin Lizzy due to frontman (and former bassist) Matthew Wilson’s charismatic – to say the least – onstage demeanour. Having released very little other than an early brass section-free version of the band’s signature tune ‘She’s Falling In Love Again’ prior to this EP, the Dead Presidents spread almost solely on word-of-mouth press throughout the local circuit, with the launch of this very EP packing more people into QUBSU’s Radar than any in recent memory. One of…

  • REPLETE – REPLETE EP

    June 5, 2013 - By 

    Picture the scene: it’s 3 am on a Saturday night. You’re in a club. Your friends are long since gone and you’re isolated. It’s hard to focus. Your head isn’t where it should be due to over-the-counter downers and under-the-counter uppers. You’re surrounded by a swirl of sounds and disembodied voices that seem to have no beginning or end. All you can do is just sit back and let it engulf you. In a different light this is a nightmare, but for REPLETE – aka Pete Lawlor – capturing and showcasing the beauty of these dark moments is a mission…

  • Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

    June 4, 2013 - By 

    Unlikely though it sounds, it is actually possible to simultaneously love and loathe something. A catalogue of things that The Thin Air has at once both liked and disliked might include: the effects of alcohol; Wayne Rooney; various members of our social circle; and most of all the taste of olives (delicious, salty, greasy, disgusting olives). To this non-exclusive list we might now add Random Access Memories, which is partly ludicrously enjoyable – and partly just plain ludicrous. Where to begin with this sprawling ginormo-album? Perhaps with joyous single ‘Get Lucky’. It hardly needs saying at this point that it’s…

  • Mount Kimbie – Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

    June 1, 2013 - By 

    It’s a familiar trajectory – new outfit releases a series of head-turning EPs on a niche electronic label, graduates quickly to a full-length album and then gets snapped up by a much larger concern for a full assault on hearts and minds. That path has now more or less been trodden by three leading lights of the dubstep diaspora: James Blake, Darkstar and now Dom Maker and Kai Campos of Mount Kimbie. While Blake has sought to weld his background in dubstep production to a new role as a writer and singer of delicate soul, Darkstar and Mount Kimbie have…

  • Koreless – Yugen EP

    May 31, 2013 - By 

    Welsh producer Lewis Roberts places great emphasis on the synthetic. His debut EP as Koreless is for the most part beatless; whilst the hypnotic  (and at times vaguely unsettling ) sounds which pervade on Yugen are derived from Roberts’ fondness for sci-fi; with the novels of JG Ballard having been a particularly prominent influence during the recording of the EP. Indeed the Welshman was quoted in a recent interview with Pitchfork as having said, “I don’t ever want my music to be real— I don’t want any acoustic or human elements. I want it to be completely artificial and sci-fi”. There is…

  • John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts

    May 29, 2013 - By 

    What happens to the elephant in the room when somebody talks about it? Contrary to popular opinion, it does not vanish in a puff of grey smoke. Rather, everyone is abruptly made aware of said elephant as it crushes their toes, pokes them with its tusks and snuffles about in their pockets for polo mints. And nobody appreciates the impact of proverbial elephants more intimately than John Grant, once of The Czars and Midlake, whose penchant for revealing his most secret desires and guiltiest pleasures knows no bounds. Infamously, at last year’s Meltdown Festival he announced onstage that he had…

  • Bibio – Silver Wilkinson

    May 27, 2013 - By 

    Ambient, electronica, folk, Boards of Canada and a couple of kitchen sinks are the constituent elements of  Bibio‘s (aka Steve Wilkinson) seventh album, Silver Wilkinson. The British producer has been toying with his distinct sound for the last ten years; a sort of folktronica. For this album he has attempted to expand on his previous effort’s more funk-driven style, leading to a conflict that divides the album into two distinct halves; the downtempo, Air– like first half and the funkier, more dance -based feel of the second half. Silver Wilkinson is an album to listen to during a late night chill-out session. The first section of the album is draped with shades of Eno‘s Ambient series and Zero 7‘s earlier releases.…

  • Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires Of The City

    May 27, 2013 - By 

    Ever since Vampire Weekend poked their heads above the sub-Libertines dross of late-noughties indie they have always seemed several steps ahead of their peers. The self-titled debut’s hyperactive afro-pop and the genre-bending follow-up Contra established the New York quartet as the thinking fan’s hipsters of choice; their star continuing to ascend even as, one by one, those contemporaries deservedly crashed and burned. Despite this, it would be fair to say that they weren’t universally admired. What was perhaps missing for some amidst all this clever-clever meta-pop mashing of styles was heart: Vampire Weekend were perfectly capable of connecting with the…

  • The National – Trouble Will Find Me

    May 27, 2013 - By 

    There’s a famous Edward Hopper painting, simply entitled ‘Gas’, in which a solitary, dapper figure stands in the centre of the canvas, almost obscured by a cherry red petrol pump. On first glance its meaning is immediately apparent: it’s either a character study or an elegy to those charming locations found off the beaten track. However, this simplicity is deceptive – as simplicity often is. Look to the right of the frame, where a particularly vicious darkness is bleeding from an obscured road into the forest. One wonders where this path leads and what is to be found there. The…