list.co.uk/music EDM / R&B HUDSON MOHAWKE Lantern (Warp) ●●●●●
GRUNGE DOOM / ROCK SHAREHOLDER Jimmy Shan (Know Your Enemy) ●●●●● Records | MUSIC
Hudson Mohawke’s debut album, Butter, was made by an up-and-coming 23-year-old producer from Glasgow. As this follow-up arrives six years later, it’s remarkable to reflect on the pace and scale of change in Ross Birchard’s career. In the intervening years, he’s released a handful of EPs for Warp, but it’s his work with others – as one half of TNGHT and as a producer for the likes of Kanye West and Drake – that has taken him to where he is now.
Lantern is, in parts, a gleaming reflection of his experience as a producer for rappers who mostly mingle behind thick rope cordons, and its tone is often not dissimilar. The choruses are outsized; the synths squeal in ever-escalating registers; the drums land like boulders off a cliff. It’s a big record, a monument to the physicality of Hudson Mohawke’s music. His sound has certainly matured – there’s much less of the fun, hyperactive funk of Butter here – but Lantern isn’t without its pimples.
Irfane’s diabetes-inducing vocal on ‘Very First Breath’ isn’t a good start; ‘Warriors’, a truculent ‘fuck the haters’ anthem, is the ill-advised rendering of a passive-aggressive Facebook status. After this rocky start, things improve considerably. Where its predecessor orbited a world that felt like a teenager’s bedroom (R&B, funk, computer games, garish Photoshop gags), Lantern’s touchstones are more adult. ‘Indian Steps’, featuring Antony Hegarty, fares surprisingly well as a tender love song, and Miguel’s heartfelt vocal for
I’m looking at a cassette with a picture of a skull and some clouds loitering over a silhouette of Edinburgh with a clock tower. On the side of the inlay card it reads ‘Jimmy Shan by Shareholder’. Inside are some titles and an unattributed quote about singing songs, and on the front is a logo of a 4x4 with ‘Know Your Enemy’ series. This much I know. Correction: this is all I know.
Reviewing can throw you curveballs and this is certainly one. Like that Wu-
Tang album which only ever existed on a hard drive in an art gallery, I’m not sure if anyone else will get to hear this tape of dirgey dirtpool jams by these ‘three people from Scotland’ who have previously supported Magik Markers. It’s also not that clear how you would even go about it (unless it’s by West Bromwich Albion’s current under-21 coach, Jimmy Shan, which really would be something of a curveball). Instead, I like to think of this whole thing being an elaborate situationist prank:
let’s make a tape of no-fi, guitar scuzz with vocals that sound like they were recorded by a cement mixer and get it reviewed even though it will never actually exist outside this realm. If a cassette of feedback-drenched sloth rock only exists in my old Walkman alone, does it really exist? Deep.
The tape is blank, incidentally, apart from ‘Know 14’ written with a Sharpie. There have been 13 others before this one. Have they all been hurtled into the same void? No idea. In many ways it’s not relevant as stuff on the outer limits
‘Deepspace’ stretch es over streaky organs and a sparing drum track, proving that Birchard can do pop music well, and on his terms. Some of the album’s surest
moments recall tropes of Birchard’s solo work – anthemic synths, helium vocals and frenzied drops: two out of three of these appear on the bright ‘System’. While Birchard’s versatility isn’t in doubt, Lantern only shows the best of itself when it sidesteps the champagne bar for a more familiar space. (Ray Philp)
does have a habit of finding listeners, and fate will see that this will meander its way into the tape decks of those seeking out an atrophied lump of swamp noise.
And this inelegance really is something to behold. Shareholder’s sludgy guitar barf and desiccated vocals won’t chime with many, but if you get it, you will get it. That’s if you can actually find the thing. (Mark Keane) ■ The album is now available to stream and download at shareholder.bandcamp.com
NOISE ROCK / HARDCORE KEN MODE Success (Season of Mist) ●●●●●
On their sixth outing, Winnipeg’s KEN Mode boldly step away from the brutal, complex metallic style they’ve been plying since 1999. Instead, they opt for a stripped-back post-hardcore lean and lanky noise-rock sound that references the likes of Dischord and Touch & Go. Naturally, this requires the hiring of Steve Albini, whose presence guarantees raw, powerful and direct sonics. From barbed feedback is born ‘Blessed’, an astoundingly monstrous opener and the album’s strongest track, based on a colossal, monomaniacal two-note riff, charred around the edges and barely holding itself together. Wiry, louche twin basses cycle beneath sardonic spoken word from Jesse Matthewson, while churning noise from Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker and horrifying howls from Oxbow’s Eugene Robinson further exacerbate the oppressive fury.
The frantic riffs of ‘These Tight Jeans’ nod vigorously in the direction of old-school Fugazi as Matthewson hollers: ‘I would like to kill the nicest man in the world’. Another nigh-spoken piece, ‘The Owl’, rides a louche bass rumble topped with jazzy, surf-gone-wrong guitar sprinkles, detouring into a mournful cello section before reaching a big, bouncy climax.
Manic, punky, scratchy, fidgety, ‘I Just Liked Fire’ finds Matthewson becoming increasingly feral as he worryingly informs an unidentified object of his affection (or possibly homicidal intentions) that he ‘can’t stop thinking about your skin’. And ‘Management Control’, a forceful stomp with a heavy post-punk feel that
ELECTRONIC / SPOKEN WORD ECCENTRONIC RESEARCH COUNCIL Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine . . . I’m Your Biggest Fan (Without Consent) ●●●●●
This approximately Sheffield-based synth trio, comprising Dean Honer (of All Seeing I), wordsmith Adrian Flanagan and actress Maxine Peake on droll, dramatic dictation, take all the po-faced pain out of concept albums. Admittedly, a spoken-word suite inspired by the Pendle witch trials might not be everyone’s idea of a sonic treat but 1612 Underture, released in 2012, was an audacious introduction to their blend of spoken word and vintage analogue electronica. This latest offering is a first person account of an obsessive fan’s pursuit of her rock star quarry. Johnny Rocket is the lederhosen-wearing frontman of the Moonlandingz, the local big noise in Valhalla Dale, a degraded northern town where ‘jugglers were not welcome’. The story is sinister, the comedy is coal black, like Eminem’s ‘Stan’ as adapted by the League of Gentlemen.
Peake enunciates with relish her character’s increasingly stalkerish encounters with the irascible Rocket over a series of florid, deluded, one-way online communications, eventually revealing the horrifically humorous justification for her actions, which add a whole new socio-political twist to the story as it pitches towards its hysterical conclusion. Flanagan has nailed the stalker’s warped logic, and that thin line between love and hate; as well he might, given that the album was inspired by his own experience of a persistent fan and the enabling effect of social media.
brings to mind early Killing Joke, forms a solid central pillar. The second half of the album
is almost as fiery and furious, but somehow lacks the character of its predecessor, becoming increasingly indistinct. As a closer, ‘Dead Actors’ is predictable, almost obligatory in its mid-paced build from wounded whisper to climactic roar. At its best, Success is potent, fresh and thrillingly noisy, but it’s also heavily front- loaded, making it a victim of its own . . . well, you know. (Matt Evans)
The music is suitably distorted. Iggy Pop’s ‘Nightclubbing’ soundtracks a scene in a trendy northern club and its disorientated lurch is echoed across a couple of bad-trip tracks. Meanwhile, Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczewski of Fat White Family are on hand to play the Moonlandingz, providing snatches of off-kilter vaudevillesque electronica, the most complete of which is the space rockabilly of ‘Sweet Saturn Mine’, though ‘Psyche Ersatz’ deserves a nod for its Fall-like title alone. (Fiona Shepherd)
4 Jun–3 Sep 2015 THE LIST 85