Judging Unmap by its cover, you could be forgiven for thinking that Justin Vernon of Bon Iver hadn’t made it out of the wintery woods that enshrouded and shaped his astounding debut For Emma, Forever Ago. However, this collaboration between Vernon and fellow Wisconsin residents Collections of Colonies of Bees is a warmer affair, defined by gentle, ambient settings for Vernon’s vocal explorations.
Saying this, Unmap’s most straightforward track, ‘Island, IS’, is one of the highlights: tightly ordered electronic loops eddying along, Vernon’s vocals semi-submerged, intriguingly slipping between clarity and elusiveness. Volcano Choir also rework ‘Woods’ from Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP as ‘Still’. In its original form, it was a striking vocal experiment that outstayed its welcome and could best be described as vocoder marmite. It certainly stood apart from Vernon’s earlier work, but it also felt forced and lacking. Here, …Colonies of Bees aid its transformation from spectre to full-bodied song, layers of ambience drawing you in to its alien desolation, his voice rising to an epic, multi-tracked chorus.
This collaboration apparently predates Vernon’s work as/with Bon Iver, even though the material wasn’t pulled together and mixed until Winter 2008. It feels like a comfortable conversation between friends, even if it occassionally lulls into a pleasant but dull murmur. Unmap stands as an interesting companion to Bon Iver, showing Vernon to be a musician with much more up his plaid sleeve than most singer-songwriters.
Spotify: Unmap
MP3: Bon Iver live Daytrotter Session
We’re pleased to announce that the Ikon Eastside Closing Party, On/Off, will feature a live performance by Leeds-based electronica duo worriedaboutsatan.
The pairing of Tom Ragsdale and Gavin Miller released their debut Arrivals earlier this year to great reviews. It subtly weaves ambient, minimal techno and post-rock structures to create an incredible sonic landscape, recalling godspeed! you black emperor and aphex twin’s ambient works in its ability to summon and sustain a vivid, otherworldly environment.
The album recently received a glowing 7.6 review from Pitchfork, who had this to say:
“like the back of an immense sea-creature rhythmically slipping above and below the waves. The percussion is manicured yet spritzy, with the baroque cadences of spitting rain. Periodic vocal samples are hung about in hazy washes, making it sound a bit like Burial for English-Lit majors. The structures are crescendo-based, but arrive by such creeping degrees that we’re never jarred, only soothed, lulled.”
Upon hearing Arrivals, we knew we had found the perfect band for On/Off: a British band that are pushing the boundaries of electronic music and integrating advances in digital technology. The stunning Eastside gallery space, an enormous former warehouse in Digbeth, Birmingham’s former manufacturing district, is the ideal setting for their soaring guitars and dramatic beats to envelop.
On/Off is inspired by the work of Ryoji Ikeda, whose instillation piece data.tron (2007-2009) is showing at Ikon Eastside until 8 November. The party itself will have suitably monochrome visuals, lighting and dress code and will feature Colour DJing classic electronic music new and old, from epic ambient soundscapes to synth-pop, IDM and glitchy pop.
Thursday 12 November, 7.30pm – Late, Free
Ikon Eastside, 183 Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SE
MP3: worriedaboutsatan – You’re In My Thoughts
This Saturday, many of the venues at the heart of the Birmingham live music scene will host a plethora of bands from a broad spectrum of genres for Oxjam. It will be the focal point of the month long, grassroots-organised festival which aims to raise awareness of Oxfam’s work on climate change.
If you’re heading into the city centre for it, be sure to check out Colour favourites Is I Cinema (Island Bar), James Summerfield (Sunflower Lounge) and Richard Burke (Sunflower Lounge). The full line-up is available on the site, while tickets for the whole day are just £6 and available from WeGotTickets.
Is I Cinema released a new track, ‘Innocent X’, on their MySpace recently, a serpentine of a song packed with more ideas than most bands manage on a whole album. Their live sets are awesome and we’re eagerly anticipating their next move.
I had the pleasure of seeing The Felice Brothers at The Glee Club on Monday, playing raucous, ramshackle, honky-tonk country rock, which falls somewhere between The Band and The Pogues. Passing the bottle and sharing the songs, it felt like a family affair: three brothers, a dude called Christmas on bass and Greg Farley, who hyped the crowd like Americana’s answer to a hip-hop MC, on fiddle and washboard. They were quite the spectacle but their raw and rough-edged style never felt like an affectation.
Instruments and vocal duties were traded around on the backwater bar band numbers like the anthemic ‘Frankie’s Gun’ and ‘Take This Bread’, but at their core is frontman Simone Felice and his rusty hearted tales of too-much-too-young,; alcohol, violence and women of disrepute. The band seemed to find the typically reserved audience a little too polite, but made up for the lack of bad behaviour off stage with plenty of their own, a highlight being Farley’s use of his washboard as a drumstick.
Support came from A.A. Bondy, touring his new album When The Devil’s Loose, which happened to be partly written during a stay at the Felice Brothers house. Although hearing his sparse, rustic songs over the chattering masses was a struggle, it sounded promising, with evocative lyricism and an atmosphere that called to mind Springsteen’s Nebraska and Neil Young’s After The Goldrush. Bondy also added extra guitar weight to several of the Felice Brothers’ songs.
Stream: Felice Brothers – Yonder is the Clock and A.A. Bondy’s When the Devil’s Loose on Spotify.
Iceland’s For A Minor Reflection, whose whirlwind post-rock was a revelation at the Colour/ This Is Tomorrow show back in June, are featured in an article on The Guardian today. It focuses on how the country’s bands have survived the chaos of economic meltdown. In the case of FAMR, they’ve registered themselves as a business and taken out a bank loan to finance their forthcoming second album, which they’ve just recorded in Los Angeles.
According to the article, Iceland’s music scene has weathered the storm because the country’s size meant there was never that much money in music beforehand. As the article rightly points out, “music’s enduring popularity in Iceland has become a symbol of redemption from the failure of laissez-faire capitalism – a reminder that with talent and hard work, things can get better”. Definitely something for British bands worried about recession to bear in mind.
A few years ago, California’s Why? released Elephant Eyelash, an album that seemed to come out of nowhere to with its twisted patchwork of geeky hip-hop, euphoric pop melodies and indie-slacker sensibilities. It represented a massive leap forward for Yoni Wolf, who’s words and voice are core to the Why? sound. Formerly of exalted avant-rap group cLOUDDEAD and a core signing to Oakland’s hip Anticon. label, his previous solo work was promising, with moments of genius mired in a lo-fi aesthetic and a see-what-sticks canvas. On Elephant Eyelash, it came into focus: he found a distinct voice and style that suited his frank, acerbic words and their dexterous delivery.
Last year’s Alopecia took the outline of its predecessor and coloured it much darker, with harder percussion and gloomy, funereal synths framing Wolf’s pained, cathartic lyrics, which were so personal you felt like a creepy voyeur unable to take your eyes off the prize. Recorded at the same time as Alopecia but only released this month, Eskimo Snow’s ten songs feel like the closest thing to a bright side.
The Big British Castle continues its excellent …Britannia series tomorrow with an instalment chronicling the oft-maligned but undoubtedly influential electronic and synth-pop movement of the late ’70s and 80s. Influenced by dystopian fiction as much as the music of Kraftwerk, British post-punk pioneers created music that soundtracked the bleak urban landscape, yet was filled with emotion and an alien warmth.
It’s a genre of music we’ve been paying more attention to and discussing a lot lately, so I’m really looking forward to what will no doubt be an exhaustive and in-depth exploration of this unique period of musical history. As post-punk expert Simon Reynolds mentioned in his write-up for The Guardian, the innovations of synth-pop have become intrinsic to modern music, continuing to shape pop: “electronic tonalities are omnipresent to the point of banality, thanks to ’90s techno rave and noughties R&B, videogames and ringtones”.
Synth Britannia begins on Friday, BBC4, 9PM. You can view several clips on the BBC site.
Video: Kraftwerk – Das Model
Gary Numan – Cars
One of the many highlights of this year’s End of the Road Festival was finally getting to see Richmond Fontaine live, showcasing songs from their new album We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like a River, their eighth to date.
On 2007’s Thirteen Cities, the Portland-based band took a sonic journey south, augmenting their Americana sound with flourishes of brass and occasional Mariachi rhythms, thanks in part to guest spots from Calexico. Lead singer and songwriter Willy Vlautin focused his authorial gaze on the lives of the marginalised or working class folk of the Southern bordertowns and badlands: stark, dusty vignettes of the everyday, informed by Vlautin’s owned troubled past and keen eye for character. Since 2007, he’s published two acclaimed novels that explored similar themes, written in a engagingly minimalist style that recalls Raymond Carver and Cormac McCarthy.
For this new album, released back in August, the band have headed for ostensibly more familiar territory, powerful country-rock influenced by Uncle Tupelo and The Replacements like ‘Lonnie’ and the fierce ‘43′, alongside extended narratives that are some of the best Vlautin has written yet, including heartbreaking, spare snapshots of intimate moments between lovers on the title track and ‘Ruby and Lou’ and a nurse reaching the end of her tether on closer, ‘A Letter To The Patron Saint of Nurses’.
These story songs pay a large part in distinguishing Richmond Fontaine from other bands that channel the ghosts of Alt. Country, but aren’t the sole reason for this release being such a success: Vlautin’s experienced bandmates are adept at inflecting his words with mood and drama, taking them off the page and making them into engaging, widescreen dramas. They are able to take the single repeated line of ‘Watch Out’, into something deeply evocative and genuinely sad and turn the direct, jangly pop-rock of ‘You Can Move Back Here’ into a three minute, hook filled wonder.
Vlautin’s third novel Lean on Pete is released next February and if it’s as finely constructed and startlingly detailed as this album, it’s sure to increase his renown.
Listen at Spotify.
Video: ‘You Can Move Back Here’
ATP keep outdoing themselves with their annual festivals and next May’s event is looking like it may trump them all, with the newly-reformed Pavement set to headline and curate the line-up. Hopes for a Pavement reunion have surfaced and been dashed numerous times since the seminal indie rockers split in 1999, after helping to define the sound of a generation. Last month it was finally revealed that the band would get back together for four shows in NYC. Now it’s the turn of British fans to rejoice, particularly since Stephen Malkmus is known to have a deep and varied knowledge of music.
Pavement probably rank as the band most played by us at Colour events over the years and we’ve used the title of their 1993 EP Perfect Sound Forever as an inspiration throughout. Saying that, I do have slightly conflicted feelings about the reunion.
