Midland: 'Bring Joy'

A review I wrote for FACT magazine. View the original here.

It’s hard to think of a better way to announce a musical career than a collaboration with man-of-the-moment Ramadanman, but there’s inevitably a risk that you’ll forever remain in the shadow of such a highly regarded producer. Midland sidestepped this issue by releasing the captivating solo EP Play The Game back in July, and followed it up with a string of well received remixes for the likes of Caribou, 2 Bears and Stateless. With his latest release, he continues to cement his reputation as a notable producer in his own right.

Another example of the trend for genre cross-pollination that has born such exotic fruit in recent months, this time it’s the heady combination of rough breakbeats writhing beneath the kind of ethereal synth washes that hark back to the early days of jungle. A logical progression from ‘Play The Game’, it manages to evoke the brooding contradictions of early Moving Shadow releases with featherweight chimes defying the weighty breaks they are grounded upon, a tension echoed in the masculine grunts sparring with rave-diva moans. Like Lone’s ‘Once In A While’, the impression is of a producer exploring and updating a specific point in dance music’s past, in this case the moment when the breezy optimism of rave was first tainted by the early hours paranoia of hardcore and jungle.

In contrast ‘Dead Eyes’ is a relatively straightforward 4/4 percussive number complete with rumbling sub-bass and elegant synth stabs. In the same way that Play The Game juxtaposed the breakbeat-led title track with the regimented tech-house of ‘Heads Down’, it seems that Midland is keen to remind us that he’s not confined by any one particular rhythm. Meanwhile the Radio Slave remix of ‘Bring Joy’ is a 12 minute odyssey of pitched-down vocals and minimal aestheticism, and the ‘Youandewan Warehouse Dub’ rounds off the package nicely by conjuring up the spirit of Detroit techno striding over bulging, purposeful beats.

Bibio: 'Excuses'

A review I wrote for FACT magazine. View the original here.

Stephen Wilkinson is no stranger to having his music pigeonholed. His 2009 album as Bibio, Ambivalence Avenue was immediately stamped with the ‘folktronica’ tag, a categorisation that he now seems keen to distance himself from. With ‘Excuses’, the first release from forthcoming album Mind Bokeh on Warp, we instead find the West Midlands producer looking across the Atlantic to draw inspiration from the sepia-toned harmonies of chillwave and the cerebral hip hop of LA’s Brainfeeder clan.

One of Bibio’s greatest assets has always been his effortlessly emotive singing voice, and here he confidently positions it in the foreground, albeit in a forlorn and distorted form. Tantalising glimpses of a proper melody peak through cracks in the playschool percussion and fractured synth lines, an impression perfectly captured by Michael Robinson’s hypnotic video which consists of a flurry of fragmented kaleidoscopic images.

For the second half of the track Wilkinson takes the gloves off and boxes your ears with an unexpected, but a deliciously dirty, glitch bass riff reminiscent of label mates Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. The producer has promised that the new album will comprise of “a balance of the familiar and the non-familiar” and this equation is literally displayed in the binary song structure of ‘Excuses’, a track that should appease current fans while garnering a few new converts to the cause, and bodes well for the album’s release later this month.

Minks: By The Hedge

A review I wrote for FACT magazine. View the original here.

What is it about the sound of England in the ’80s that has such an allure for young, guitar-wielding Americans today? The answer can probably be found somewhere amongst recent offerings on trend-setting Brooklyn label Captured Tracks, where bands such as Catwalk, Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing take their cues from the downtrodden dirges of My Bloody Valentine and the studied melancholy of The Cure and The Smiths. The latest addition to their ever-swelling ranks are MINKS, the brainchild of Boston-born, New York-based Sean Kilfoyle, whose debut album By The Hedge attempts to join the dots between all of the above.

MINKS are a band who don’t so much wear their inspirations on their sleeve as have them self-tattooed on their arm with a pair of scissors and a biro. The spectre of shoegaze icon Kevin Shields haunts tracks like ‘Life At Dusk’ and ‘Bruises’, and recent single ‘Funeral Song’ is an ode to Robert Smith’s unrefined pop sensibilities, but that’s not to say that the group ever fall into the trap of letting their influences define them. While the forced morbidity of titles like ‘Cemetery Rain’ and ‘Ophelia’ could have been lifted from the pages of a sixth former’s notebook, the songs themselves are charming and surprisingly visceral. Even the despondent moniker of ‘Funeral Song’ disguises an upbeat elegy to summers past, where Kilfoyle’s vocal slurs somewhere between Dylan and Ferry atop a wailing synth, dragged forward by the simple but effective paring of bass and drum.

Album closers ‘Juniper’ and ‘Arboretum Dogs’ are strengthened by proper duets between Kilfoyle and Danish singer Amelie Bruu, and the resultant harmonies lead to moments of genuine and disarming beauty. It’s this interplay between the former’s despairing delivery and the latter’s beguiling melodies that saves opener ‘Kusmi’ from the contrived lyrics of “walking home after dark, the girls with broken hearts”. By drawing out the indie-pop wallflower that is nestling shyly amongst the album’s tracklist, the band not only honour their idols but occasionally equal them.

Don’t then, approach By The Hedge looking for much originality, instead view it as an evocative and accomplished love letter from one generation of musicians to another. As a testament to the influence that Shields, Smith and Morrissey continue to have on artists today, you’re unlikely to find better.