MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
REMIXES THE KNIFE Shaken Up Versions (Rabid/Brille) ●●●●● One listener’s subversive visionary is another’s wilful contrarian, and so it goes for the Knife. A remix album? These Swedish enigmas of esoteric electronica would never turn in something so mundane, instead offering us Shaken Up Versions – a ‘mini album of classic
tracks reworked especially for the band’s recent North American leg of their Shaking The Habitual Tour’. Which, let’s face it, just means a remix album sans any external remixers to help punt some live dates. Shaking The Habitual last year prompted one of the biggest critical circle-jerks in recent memory. Of the countless reviewers who awarded that record full marks, you have to wonder how many kept it on their music players for long afterwards. It's hard work – easy to admire, much tougher to live with.
Here, Knife’s sibling members Karin Dreijer Andersson and Olof
Dreijer pull together a tracklisting drawn from each of their four albums to date. The scope is wide, but the vision focused. Out: Foucault quotes and detuned zither drones. In: slamming beats backlit by doomy soundscapes. The individual sounds The Knife use set them far apart from so
many of their contemporaries: the detuned electronic toms and warped vocal drones on ‘We Share Our Mother’s Health’, or the frantic tribal drumming and rave-in-a-haunted-house synth wails on ‘Bird’. The muscular ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’ sounds like it’s been through boot camp since its Shaking The Habitual incarnation, and alone encapsulates much of the fabulous contradiction at the Knife’s core – music at once extravagantly joyous and dead-eyed terrifying. This is their best record since Silent Shout. (Malcolm Jack)
EXPERIMENTAL ELECTRONIC BEN FROST A U R O R A (Mute) ●●●●●
Antipodean noisenik Ben Frost loves a bit of clatter. As anyone who has seen his visceral live shows involving a couple of drummers and Frost stalking about the stage like a weather-beaten Asos model will tell you, this lad likes to turn it up to 11. It’s not enough to be loud though, it’s essential to have a high concept behind your abrasive tumult, and here Frost does a fine job.
A U R O R A (stylised title, naturally) was recorded in Eastern Congo, a place which exists ‘in a constant flux of destruction and re-creation: an Ouroboros’, according to Frost. Does that matter? Not really. You will not sit down and hear this album and
think, ‘hey I can get a sense of the unflinching chaos and beauty of Eastern Congo and the looming, eerie majesty of Mount Nyiragongo’. Maybe you will if you read the sleevenotes and try hard, who knows. Happily, Frost’s post- industrial sonic maelstrom can stand alone as a raging aural torrent without having to hang it on notional art bollocks. A U R O R A is such a jarring aural beast, it answers the question, ‘Tim Hecker’s back catalogue . . . will it blend?’ (Much like the meme-creating internet sensation, Will It Blend, where various components are chucked in a blender.) It sounds at times like shifting tectonic masses of abrasive synths and blast beats colliding with each other on some giant sonic lithosphere, a kind of volcanic, geological breakup of an angry, auditory Pangea. There is definitely a dangerous beauty to all this carnage on ‘Nolan’, with its pounding rhythms wrapped in portentous buzzsaw electronics, while ‘Secant’ begins ponderously before inevitably swelling into a tsunami of cacophonous sturm und drang. Ditto for battering ram centrepiece ‘Venter’.
Look, I’m running out of ways to say this album is an absolutely thunderous bedlam, but that's what it is. Play it loud enough and they will be able to hear it in Eastern Congo. (Mark Keane)
NOISE ROCK THIN PRIVILEGE Thin Privilege (Struggletown Records) ●●●●● ROCK / EXPERIMENTAL THE PHEROMOANS Hearts of Gold (Upset The Rhythm) ●●●●●
Thin Privilege know what's best in life. And what's best in life is bass. These four young men eschew the pompous banality of the six-string in favour of a potent double shot of the more economical four. They’re not the first to employ twin basses: Girls Against Boys, Cop Shoot Cop, Pharaoh Sanders and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin have all recognised the truth of four strings good, eight strings better. Spinal Tap even went one (or four) better on the sonically superb ‘Big Bottom’. What’s surprising is that, given it sounds so good, it’s not more common. Comprising members of Billy Ray Osiris, Hunt/Gather, Friends in America and Salo, Thin Privilege are a largely Glasgow-based noise-rock outfit with hardcore touches and connections. Their debut album, released on lurid pinky-orange vinyl, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, in the best possible way. Tracks such as ‘Hex Charmer’, with its dogged staccato riff and frenzied drool-spatter, or the chugging horror of ‘Leave the Body’ have an alarming, maniacal feel, the sound of someone burying intolerable memories through compulsive self-flagellation. ‘Red Cloak’ does this brilliantly, wrongfooting us with an almost danceable groove before mutating into something much more discordant, unsettling and rhythmically jarring. ‘Howl, Sleeper’ and ‘Perfunctory Blood’ run together into one vicious, spasmodic, barely-two-minute blast. Relatively lengthy closer ‘With Apologies to Thin Privilege’ is perhaps the peak, an intoxicating combination of utterly maddening repetition and surgically precise mathematical fury.
Brighton’s Pheromoans see the world through a slightly cloudy pint glass, in parts reminiscent of the experimental rock of The Fall at their sloppy best, 60s surf rock and the early stripped-down, DIY tape approach of The Shadow Ring’s kitchen sink observations, a very prevalent influence on the early days of the group. The Pheromoans are a quintessentially English-weirdo ensemble with a reluctant sound that has managed to survive a Britpop hangover, through the pomposity of avant garde and post punk in full circle. Poet-turned-frontman Russell Walker politely mumbles his daydreams over
the groups most-realised and polished songs to date; opener ‘Coach Trip’ adds a pastoral punk visage to Hearts of Gold which wouldn’t be amiss on a Sarah Records compilation, a scenic and appropriate invitation. There’s a buried frustration about Walker’s lyricism, heard on the baggy Madchester vibe on ‘Dried Dreams’, the stringed moodiness of ‘Let’s Celebrate’ and over a Human League synth build-up on ‘Chung Said’, but it’s his vulnerable delivery that acts as the wobbly adhesive which keeps the jangling glory of the rhythm section loosely in line – a less-is-more approach in the purist sense. The album is also incredibly upbeat at times for the sum of its parts, with title track ‘Hearts of Gold’ a perfect anthem for summer showers in overpriced beer gardens. First single ‘The Boys are British’ might just be their finest moment. A comical
and heartfelt diatribe telling the tale of two rejected army cadets, it features
Despite – or more likely, because of – their self-imposed instrumental limitations, Thin Privilege’s concise, venomous and sublimely heavy debut is squirming with ideas. It effortlessly dodges cliché and, with the whole lot clocking in at under 30 minutes, refuses to sit still long enough to risk capture. True, politically sensitive listeners may be put off by the snarky, acerbic implications of the band name – but eight times out of ten, bass beats politics. Just ask Spinal Tap. (Matt Evans)
strummed acoustic guitar, out-of-tune electric guitar, wiry synth repetition and trademark voice cracks throughout its clear and to-the-point two and a half minutes. Making mundaneness sound
invigorating is quite a skilled trick in itself, and with this, their most confidently produced and rounded-off selection of songs to date, The Pheromoans have delivered their best album yet, and one that follows a fine tradition of English existentialist apathy. (Nick Herd)
72 THE LIST 12 Jun–10 Jul 2014