JASON DILL IS DEAD

Fight Bite - Fight Bite(Self released - 2012)

If you have been abusing that Beach House album for the past few months I highly recommend you pay attention especially if you’re mid coke bender. Fight Bites new record may not try as hard to cram as many hooks into 50 minutes as Bloom does, nor is it as sonically overwhelming as the other Baltimore killers, Lower Dens 2012 masterpiece but it will definitely tug at the same place that keeps you skipping back over “Irene.” It’s hard to say where this drugged out sound came from exactly but it’s a dominating force in independent music right now. Lucky it’s pretty hard to fuck up. This record does it in a similar way to the very good Sleepover record of last year, and like that record will still get skipped over, I guarantee it. As far as attempts at all consuming, coked out beauty goes it’s hard to go past “Nancy.” 

Stream It. - http://fightbite.bandcamp.com/ 

Liars - WIXIW (Mute - 2012)

NPR called WIXIW  ”the best Radiohead album since Kid A”  this could be, but unfortunately is probably not, the stupidest thing they’ve ever said. Radiohead is the obvious reference Liars have taken for their latest stylistic shift but saying this is better than Amnesiac is akin to saying Fleet Foxes are better than Crosby, Stills and Nash. Liars frontman Angus Andrew, although unpredictable, has always shadowed Thom Yorke, and Liars’ synths have regularly nodded towards an attempted replication of the unpredictability of Radiohead’s current electronics (always about three years after they started to sound normal and Radiohead had moved onto something else). When you put on “His and Mine Sensations” you could be listening to any competent band channel any song on Kid A and trying to pass it off as genius. Twelve years too late. 

Just as not a single soul touted Sun Airway’s very good post-MPP 2010 album as “better than Merriweather” nobody should say this is nearly as good as even Radiohead’s most mundane stuff. It’s a mere tribute to that bands unstoppable mid-era years. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s the best front to back Liars records I’ve ever heard in a minute. When they step furthest away from Kid A they’re most successful. On the industrial dance punk of “Brats” they sound like early era…. Liars, and psych strumming closer “Annual Moon Words”  sounds like the album they should have made. Radiohead inspires CEOs, mall goths and that stoner dude with the tattoos who hates everything to run out and spend money on their new record. If this record inspires the same reaction there will be flying pigs. You’ve been warned NPR. 

Olan Mill - Paths(Facture -2012)

Olan Mill is a duo consisting of Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko and Paths is a neo-classical record that is beautiful without guilt, and more importantly with zero pretension and most importantly full of far reaching cinematic (sorry) compositions without the sugary after taste of 2011 era M83. These six beautiful recordings are from live performances and they are all instant bliss. As a record it’s a perfectly weighted 31 minutes, not a second feels wasted, each track contributes it’s own important fraction of the whole. It’s a somber record, but it allows for some emotional leeway that perhaps could have been easily swallowed up. It’s very successful in its willingness to restrain itself from this genre’s tendency to be all consuming. I’ve been enjoying this one for a few weeks now and it almost always creeps onto my speakers come 11.55pm. It’s music for exhaling. 

 

Walls - Coracle Remixed (Kompakt - 2012)

Remix EP’s are normally to be avoided like the plauge but two of 2011’s most underrated records have given birth to two very worthwhile, well curated remix work overs this year. The first is Warp’s take on Battles Gloss Drop - the amusingly titled Dross Glop and now Kompakt have gone and formed a collection of reworks of tracks from Walls’ brilliant second album that slipped past everyone last year. I’d heard the spooky Holy Other rework of Sunporch but the rest are all new. It hardly feels like this material is being milked because it was so overlooked in the first place. Coracle was a very well thought out and executed piece of ambient techno so there’s penalty of give in its tracks. The success of these reworks are all testament to the amazing strength of the source material and hopefully this thing inspires a few more people to listen to it. 

stream the rest.  

F.E Fenning - Descent into Darkness (Sleepy Hollow - 2012)

There’s something in the water in Copenhagen. This week I was alerted to the presence of Lower, another outstanding punk band to complement the rise and rise of the ever spine-throttling Iceage and speaking of Iceage, forntman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s side project War is responsible for one of 2012’s best tracks - “Brodermordet”, a stunning, tortured dark rave that chugs and gnarls it’s way along for five gut wrenching minutes. It’s the electronic complement to the punk brute force of Iceage that I never even imagined could exist. It turns out there’s more of a scene focusing on this area than I’d thought, This cassette by Copenhagen’s F.E Fenning is a brutal, industrial shitstorm of noise. I know little about it but it’s creepy as they come. The gap at the ten minute mark at first seems like it may be a blissful release from the dark forest of sound you’ve been engulfed in - there’s a feeling maybe some form of narrative closure may be close by. Instead it stays at this creepy low volume and then your speakers are overwhelmed by black noise recorded too loudly. All remaining life disappears from the recording. You haven’t been saved, somethings just fucked you up. 

DIIV - “Doused”

I’ve been flogging this track so hard I’ve come to the realisation that I don’t even give a fuck how good the album is. This nightmare pop number is the most addictive thing out there. Since Altered Zones first pointed Dive (now DIIV) out to the world in mid 2011, they have gotten consistently more exciting with each track and are more and more their own band with their own sound. Beach Fossils shouldn’t even come into the equation anymore. This is one of best tracks of the year and it’s giving me a similar vibe to the phenomenal Soft Moon track that obliterated everyone else’s attempts at post punk last year. 

Pantha Du Prince +Stephan Abry Ursprung. (Dial - 2012)

Name a more influential techno artist of the last five years than Pantha Du Prince, ok, The Field… name another one…… the post Villalobos era belongs to Pantha Du Prince. His landscapes (excuse the lame metaphor but they are landscapes) of darkened electronica, its distinctive bells, its restless and mesmerising pulses and most importantly it’s unmatched beauty are the perfect balance to the Field’s more trance based loops.  Where the Fields work is kind of like meeting electronic Jesus, a religious experience in pure pleasure, Pantha Du Prince’s work is about desolate train rides through freezing, dark German wastelands. This Bliss is a masterpiece and the 80 minutes of techno my generation will rave about to the next. 

Ursprung is a collaborative album with German Noise experimenter Stephan Abry. It’s a cold desolate more minimal exploration of a sound we’re very used to and requires many many metaphors (Jack White if you’re reading - wink face emoticon). It’s a deep dark cave. It’s a weird swiss mountain and it’s going to take a while to flesh out. Dare I say Krautrock? It’s a growing trend, look at the Field’s exploits as Loops of Your Heart. Brain Eno’s airport dabbling has surely played a part as well meaning this lacks the warmth of his solo work. I’m yet to decide how I feel about that. The relief is it does retain is the one thing about Pantha Du Prince that sets him apart. These tracks feel real, they feel like someone not something is making each and every note.

The Walkmen - Heaven (Fat Possum - 2012)

I lost my passion for the Walkmen after Bows and Arrows. To me and many others they were the band that wrote “The Rat.” I don’t think a day went by when I was 15 years old that I didn’t listen to that song. It knocked me flat every time and still does. You don’t really listen to that song as much as you get slammed over the head by it. It’s huge. It’s so fucking that big nothing this side of Led Zeppelins fourth album could cast a shadow on it. It’s quite probably the greatest rock song of the 21st century and I’m not alone in suggesting that it should have propelled these guys to the same sort of fame the Strokes enjoyed, at least temporarily. After that tidal wave of a four minutes, I’d wait for them to write the next rat and it never happened. Everything else the Walkmen did seemed flat in comparison. It’s taken me seven years to realise maybe that was their point.  

The Walkman as a band formed around one idea - anxiety. 2010’s Lisbon showed they’d moved on front that. They’d moved past the pains of early twenty’s life and gave us all a falsely optimistic view that everything turns out all right. It wasn’t all roses, the songs were still coloured with the depression done with swagger thing that always comes with a Walkmen song, but singles like “Angela Surf City” seemed unaccompanied by that utter desperation that so violently marked Bows and Arrows. There was a “life goes on” mentality - it’s a line in that very song. Still when a band is so heavily founded on the very idea of worrying, it just takes a slip for things to return to normal. Heaven spends a lot of time begging a partner and best friend to stay at a point in life where if they leave, they’re not coming back. It spends it’s time worrying about other people. It’s a more mature expression of desperation in that it’s begrudgingly accepting, but still it’s a very painful acceptance. Heaven is the most stripped back, bare bones Walkmen record yet, a sound they have consistently moved closer towards with every release and it’s also blatantly made by a bunch of much older men, but these thirteen songs rival Lisbon as their finest complete piece of work. Considering these guys used to be the Yin to the Strokes Yang, it’s truly remarkable that they’re churning out albums of this caliber ten years into their career and albums that get better and better with repeat listens. Maybe it’s a good thing “The Rat” never got what it deserved.

Girls Names - “A Troubled See”

Belfast winter rockers Girls Names released an good but quickly forgotten LP last year called Dead To Me. It was far from a perfect piece of music but I did write that the heartbreak laced indie rock of that record hinted at something great lurking just round the corner. I’m normally right about things and this track is that something great. Louder, more resolved and ten times more purposeful than their last standout “Black Saturday.” If you’re a Wild Nothing fan get on this immediately.

The Marvellous Darlings - 7 inches 2008 - 2012 

After that last post about Fucked Up member Ben Cook’s stoner rock duo Roommates, it might be a good time to quickly mention the guitarists other lesser known (real) band, The Marvellous Darlings. Another Toronto punk band sans the harsh vocals of Fucked Up, but with just the same energy and tendency towards the melodic. Cooks vocals have the attitude of someone who’s not old and not sober and their guitar hooks all pack that extra bite. It’s pretty badarse.

Download a whole bunch of their 7 inches.