The Null Device Blog

It took BT 4 years to write and record “These Hopeful Machines”, and it’s easy to see why.  Aside from his turbulent personal and professional crises – the multiple robberies of his gear, the custody battle and subsequent abduction of his daughter – the album is a huge, sprawling affair.  Two 50-minute discs (or “Sides” as he terms them) of precision-sculpted electronic pop and dance music pretty much summarize everything BT is all about, and the sheer amount of labor involved in the editing and sequencing of the music is impressive.  The album is a mixture of electronic rock, pop music sensibilities, straight-up dance music, and experimental sound design, and is pretty much the embodiment of the BT ethos.  That ethos of hyper-detailed programming both helps and hinders his work – on the one hand, few artists are that ambitious and even fewer can pull off an engaging song with things like raindrops quantized down to the 2048th-note level, but at the same time some songs can feel like they’ve had the fun and spontaneity micro-edited right out of them.  This was more of a problem on his previous pop effort, “Emotional Technology” than it is here, simply because the songs on THM are stronger than on large portions of ET.

The digital marketing of this album has frankly been a bit baffling.  In an effort to return listeners to “the album experience”, the itunes and amazon versions of These Hopeful Machines comes as two 50-minute tracks.   While it’s laudable that as an artist he’s insistent  in his artistic vision, it feels a little misguided.  For one thing, there were few albums that ran 50 minutes a side back in the glory days of the LP.  Additionally, these are still essentially distinct pop songs, and despite a continuous mix, there’s no obvious need for a complete lack of track breaks, especially given that digital music can be gaplessly played back, and that one of digital music’s strengths is that the song information can be embedded in the track itself.  One 50 minute track doesn’t indicate easily where one song begins and ends, and while that may be partially the point of his single-track efforts, even the LP had band indicators so the listener at least had a reference.  (As an aside, I got around this by importing the files into my studio software and splitting them into the individual tracks).  As it stands, it’s like listening on cassette – you’re pretty much stuck rewinding and fast-forwarding to get to a specific point in the album, and while BT may want you to listen to the whole thing, it’s a good bet that not everybody is going to want to listen for 45 minutes to get to the one song they like.  A multi-track version is supposedly available, but neither iTunes, Amazon, nor eMusic seem to have it, leaving those who’ve abandoned the physical CD little of the consumer choice that’s coming to define the modern music industry.

The cover art is a little strange too.  It’s apparently a huge oil painting, and on the CD and the accompanying singles, the detail is visible, rendering the whole thing a Bosch-gone-to-Ibiza feel.  Digitally, though, only the front panel is visible, which is just a painting of  an anime-haired BT surrounded by roses, which in isolation looks a bit like something you’d find drawn in an artistically-talented 11th-grader’s notebook.  Thankfully, cover art is rarely the defining aspect of any album.

Disc one kicks off with “Suddenly” which is another in BT’s continuing efforts to make synthesized pop music rock out.  The programming on it is unsurprisingly beautiful, intricate and detailed.  Everything from the chunky guitars to the zillions of vocal layers is microquantized and digitally edited, and sounds pristine.  That’s both the song’s genius and its ultimate downfall – it’s sort of the Platonic Ideal of an electronic rock song – it’s a bit too clinical in many ways to really rock.  From an electronic standpoint, though, there’s a dizzying array of hooks, coming at the listener from various places in the soundfield.   It might not be a headbanging anthem, but it’s never a dull song.

From there, the more traditional dance music kicks in – The Emergency, Light in Things and Rose of Jericho all feature a more standard trance beat, but this being a BT record it is also filled with sweeping ambient passages and granular soundscapes.  Rose of Jericho is a deceptively complex song, which at first listen sounds like a standard tech-trance track but once again there’s a few thousand super-edited things going on in the background.    The non-dance track “Every Other Way”, featuring Jes (formerly of trance hitmakers Motorcycle) is a more subdued affair, although it too is filled with electronic craziness percolating just below the calm pop-ballad surface.  Disc one finishes off with another synth-rock track – this one a little less overwrought than “Suddenly.”  The song closes out with BT’s 5-year old daughter singing the main melody, which is touching if you’re familiar with the family backstory, but if you aren’t it could come off as a bit bewilderingly precious.

Disc two features the pre-requisite appearance by Kristy Hawkshaw – I think there’s a requirement in every major-label dance music contract that specifies at least one Hawkshaw guest vocal.  It’s a more straightforward trance track, and likely to be the one that shows up on every “Trance Smashes 2010″ and “Ministry of Ultra Ibiza” compilation this year.   “A Million Stars” hits every major trance note – the angelic vocals, slightly nonsensical lyrics, 4-on-the-floor beats, breakdowns/buildups and enormous hands-in-the-air club hooks.  Oh, and the 12-minute running time.  It’s still clearly a BT song, but it’s one of his less dramatically trademarked tracks.

“Love Can Kill You” is another electro-rock anthem attempt, and suffers from the same over-egged pudding problem as “Suddenly.”  ”Always” features Catherine Wheel frontman Rob Dickinson, which gives the track some rock bona fides, and while the track is again quantized within a sample frame of its life, Dickinson’s voice has a more emotive edge than BT’s, and the wild electronic effects settle more comfortably behind the singer, rather than dominating the song.  It’s a strong candidate for the most radio friendly single on the album.

Despite the title, “Le Nocturne de Lumiere” is not an ambient ballad, but a surprisingly aggressive dance track.  A heavy thumping beat is paired with bouncy glitched synths.  There’s not a whole lot in the way of explicit melody – you can tell there’s a song in there someplace but it’s been granularized and hocketed to the point where the listener is left to fill in the blanks.   It works surprisingly well, and there’s some nice ambient textures in there as well.  It’s as if he took “Flaming June” and ran it through an electric fan (Until it briefly switches to 6/8 time at about the 7 minute mark, which would be the place where everyone on the dance floor either really grooves out or falls over).  Rob Dickinson shows up again on “The Unbreakable” which starts out subdued, and slowly builds to a more epic track, again walking a finely balanced line between a rock song and an electronic dance track.

Everything closes out with an unusual twist – a cover of Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You.”  It’s a quiet, intricate affair, luckily not over-produced (although the occasional granular tweak shows up).  It’s a nice, chilled way to end the album.

Overall, it’s hard to find much fault in this album in terms of its ambition or technical prowess.  While some in the press are hailing the album as some sort of groundbreaking bridge between experimental electronic music and accessible pop, it’s not quite to that point.  The album is still heavily geared towards the dance music audience, and isn’t going to somehow become this Prokofiev-like monument of avant-garde music, especially since a lot of its electronic avant-garde-ness tends to erase the kinds of song elements that help embed a song in the pop music canon (would “Smells Like Teen Spirit” have been a monster hit if the signature guitar riff were ultra-quantized and overdubbed 20 times?)    That said, it’s loaded with pop hooks, even those mangled and twisted by bleeding-edge software.  At the very least, this album will stand as a peak in BT’s development as an artist.  Only time will tell if this is some sort of first shot fired in a software-as-instrument revolution, or simply a refinement of BT’s particular sound.

Another year, another mix of tracks that stuck in my brain during the year.

Download it! – as one big mp3 or a bunch of little ones that you can gaplessly play back.

This year:

1) Midival Punditz – Atomizer
2) Bassnectar – Churn of the Century
3) Gusgus – Add This Song/Simian Mobile Disco – Audacity of Huge
4) Crystal Method (feat. Emily Haines) – Come Back Clean
5) Deadmau5 (feat. Rob Swire)- Ghosts ‘n Stuff
6) Mark Knight & D. Ramirez (feat. Karl Hyde) – Downpipe
7) Flight of the Conchords – Too Many Dicks (On the Dance Floor)
8) Empire of the Sun – We Are The People
9) Royksopp (feat. Robyn) – The Girl and the Robot
10) Orbital – Halcyon (Tom Middleton Re-model)
11) Bell X1 – The Great Defector
12) Nadia Ali – Fine Print
13) Metric – Help I’m Alive
14) IAMX (feat. Imogen Heap) – My Secret Friend
15) Stripmall Architecture – Stop Thief
16) Bear McCreary – All Along the Watchtower

Best Album I Released This Year:  Null Device – Recursions
Oooh, a tough category this year.  But Recursions clearly won out over the competition, by dint of the fact that it was really the only one.  It’s also available for download from nulldevice.bandcamp.com

Best Underworld Track That Wasn’t By Underworld: Mark Knight and D. Ramirez feat Karl Hyde – Downpipe
Seriously, a complete banger of a track.  Hyde’s strange cut-and-paste lyrics nicely complement an already pretty decent progressive house track.

Scandinavians Attack, pt. 1:  Royksopp – Junior
A more focused effort by Royksopp, despite the presence of all sorts of different guest vocalists, it seems more cohesive than previous outings.   Some truly catchy, albeit slightly off kilter, tracks define this album, and there’s a noticeable lack of the kind of jambandish meanderings than marred their earlier releases.

Scandinavians Attack, pt 2 The Revenge: Gusgus – 24/7
GG gets their old lead singer back and finds a home on Kompakt, which seems a good fit.  Daniel Agust’s distinctive voice grounds their new album in a way their non-Agust albums couldn’t quite manage.  Their minimalish, Detroit techno sound fits well with the Kompakt family as well.  The main criticism of this album is the same as many later Gusgus releases – the songs go on too long.  “Add This Song”, the single off the album, works great as a 4-minute pop song, but gets annoying after the 7 minute mark.

That Weird Girl You Knew In High School Award: Imogen Heap – Ellipse
Imogen Heap has become the darling of new media as she twittered and vlogged and 12seconded her way through the production of the new album.  She also became the poster child for the DIY artist, writing, performing and engineering nearly everything on her album, earning her feature interviews with the likes of SoundOnSound and Electronic Musician – no small feat for someone who is essentially a singer-songwriter at the core.  So, media aside, how’s the album?  Well, it’s good, and it’s beautiful, and it’s intricate, and it’s enigmatic, and it’s everything you’d expect from a hardcore tech-nerd who also happens to have wacky hair and a penchant for wearing fake feathers.  It does, however lack some of the immediacy and emotional impact of her previous efforts.  One gets the distinct sense that everything on this album is intricately crafted with forethought, which robs some of the tracks of resonance.   It’s still gorgeous to listen to, though.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the firste): Claire Voyant – Lustre
I know how irritating it can be as an artist to be told your music sounds like something out of the 80’s.  Certainly, I struggle with that a lot.  In the case of CV, I can say it sounds like something out of the 80’s in the absolute best possible way.  In the mid-late 80’s, that swoony, melodic, shimmery 4AD sound began to take hold…before it was entirely obliterated by shoegazer and grunge, so it never really got its day in court.  Lustre brings that sound back in full force, making you understand what would’ve happened had it been allowed to progress over a decade or two.  Still the glimmery guitars, still the majestic synths, still the dreamy vocals, but with ballsier production and less of the twee-pop sound that those early 4AD recordings often had.

Shuffling On This Mortal Coil (parte the seconde): Stripmall Architecture – We Were Flying Kites
Another band in the “what would happen if Ivo Watts-Russell and Jon Fryer were still doing that thing today” category.   Stripmall Architecture takes a slightly different tack, with a bit more of a rock edge and some sonic nods to the glitch-pop sound, like if Jimmy Tamborello and Dean Garcia suddenly joined the Cocteau Twins.  Sharp songwriting and incisive lyrics elevate this beyond the “conceptually interesting” level to something that holds up extraordinarily well to repeated close listening.

I Did Not Expect This To Be So Good: Metric – Fantasies
It’s hard for me to listen to this album all the way through.   Not because it’s bad, but because I’m completely enraptured by the first track, “Help, I’m Alive” and I want to put it on repeat.  The song switches back and forth from ominous to spunky on a dime,  and is filled with monster hooks.  The rest of the album is kinda like that too, but “Help” is so damn good I’ve almost entirely forgotten what comes after it.

New Zealand’s Fourth Best Comedy Folk Album: Flight of the Conchords – I Told You I Was Freaky
Nothing on the album quite measures up to “Business Time” or  “Bowie”, there are still some fabulously funny tracks on this album.  “Too Many Dicks (On The Dancefloor)” is a prime example of what FOTC do so well – they ape a style without directly parodying a song.

My Alt-Country Girlfriend: Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
This time out, her songs are a little less straightforward, and a little more fleshed-out than her previous works.  Given how well that Spartan aesthetic has worked for her in the past, it’s risky for her to layer instruments and production over her voice.  But it works.  Boy does it work.  Her voice still soars over strings and bells and helicopter guitars.  There are still a few tracks of her trademark sparse country-noir sound.  And that voice.  That voice!

Kingdom of Welcome Followup Albums: IAMX – Kingdom of Welcome Addiction
It’s pretty much what we’d expect from IAMX – enigmatic, bombastic songs of loss and addiction. It’s a bit more emotional than “The Alternative” and it feels slightly more harrowing to listen to.

Almost, But Not Quite, a New Order Album: Bad Lieutenant – Never Cry Another Tear
It’s hard to have much of an opinion on this one.  Bernard Sumner and the non-Peter-Hook members of late-period New Order (well, occasionally – Stephen Morris isn’t on every track).  It sounds a little like New Order without Hook’s high-fret basswork, but not quite.  Maybe like a set of B-sides from Electronic’s second album.

Daybreak: Bear McCreary – Battlestar Galactica Season Four Original Soundtrack
A sprawling 2-disc sequence featuring music from the fourth season, and the series finale, in which McCreary pulls out all the stops.  More ethnic instruments, more orchestra, more electric violin, more taikos.   Every theme from the series, and some from the original series, seem to come into play, overlapping and interplaying.  Whatever opinions critics may have had of the finale or even the final season, the soundtrack is fairly unimpeachable.

Back to the Roots: BT- Rose of Jericho
While I have this sinking feeling, given the title of his upcoming album (“These Hopeful Machines”) and the pattern he’s taking for his new cover art, that BT’s next full-length may devolve into over-produced synthesizer acrobatics rather than accessible songs,  “Rose of Jericho” is a smashing trance track, full of bleepy hooks and a solid four-on-the floor rhythm.   Oh, sure, it’s rife with stutter edits and meticulously programmed effects, but it’s still a dance track like he used to write, not some attempt to be a rmicroquantized rock god or a modernized Wendy Carlos.

Change of Direction: AFI – Crash Love
AFI ditches a lot of the bombast and sing-along choruses of Decemberunderground for a more traditional punk-pop structure.  But…well, it doesn’t quite work.  It’s not bad, but after the soaring hooks of DU, it all feels a little forced.

What Is The Deal With Australians?  Empire of The Sun – Walking on a Dream
It’s perplexing, given that their single was also the title track of their first album.  It’s also perplexing that a band with a distinct visual concept of “bad 80’s scifi/fantasy film” and a sonic aesthetic to match, and a lead singer who sounds like he’s being pulled through Limahl’s nasal cavities would be so…good.   The chugging retro synths, the 1980’s drum machines, the jangly guitars the falsetto choruses, all belie a sharply modern edge in the production and songwriting.

Best Crackhead Rant-based Song: Bogart Shwadchuck – Ben The Rat
What can you really say about a dubstep wobbler featuring a sample of a deranged crackhead repeating “Butt-naked wonda, big brotha thunda, and the master blaster!” among other bizarre nonsequiturs?  It’s just ridiculous and fun.

Wait, What?: MIDIval PunditZ – Hello Hello
I’d heard MP ages ago.  They were okay, one of those Asian Massive bands that threw drum-n-bass beats over tabla.   They didn’t really do a whole a lot for me.  One a lark, while browsing the CD racks at a bookstore, I saw this album and gave it a listen.  I was quite frankly stunned.  Tracks like “Electric Universe” and “Atomizer” are grungy electro, rife with vocoders and strong tech-house beats over the Indian roots.  I know from experience that it’s hard to make that work – when done wrong it can be a complete trainwreck.  This manages to work.

Most Egregious Use of Peter Hook:  The Crystal Method – Divided by Night
The latest entry from The Crystal Method crew isn’t a bad album by any means.  It’s not as edgy as their earlier works, but it’s a pretty decent album.  Peter Hook, now that he’s free of New Order, seems to be showing up everywhere, and he shows up on a few tracks.   He seems to show up, cash a paycheck, and then go home – his basslines are his usual high-neck bass-noodling, but without the grounding of a New Order song structure it sounds more like he’s just doing finger exercises.

Ludicrous Earworm: Das Racist – Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
Dear god, this song is ridiculous, and catchy.   It’s dumb, dumb music, but completely manages to hook itself into your head.  It’s practically a cultural phenomenon.

I saw the documentary “it Might Get Loud” this weekend.

Interesting film.  It’s quickly very clear why those particular three guitarists (Jimmy Page, The Edge, Jack White) were picked – they each represent a different era of guitar heroics, and they’re also the kind of guitarists who are known for their sound as much as any guitar heroics.  As much as there are many super-shredders out there who could outplay all three of them, probably only EVH would have the appropriate amount of crossover appeal.

It’s also clear what these guys did, in terms of their places in their respective bands – Page was a consummate Musician, joining bands after long stints as a studio musician and arranger; The Edge was a hardcore technician and sonic architect, showing up with a guitar and 4 giant racks of effects gear; Jack White was…well, Jack White’s a douchebag.

Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair.  He has a very distinctive sound and manner of playing, and he’s probably the one of the three who’s got the closest ties to old blues, so there’s that, and he’s  admittedly a reasonably iconic axeman.  But he was also the only one with a lot of conceits – he had his special outfits, he had a sidekick of “12-year-old Jack White” which was a mini-me version of him, and he was busy showing off his playing in some tumbledown old Tennessee house as though he were some backcountry bluesman, and not the $37M-valued rockstar he actually is.  While Page and Edge were pretty frank about what they did and how they did it, Jack White spent about as much time espousing his personal philosophy about vintage gear, recording a song on a battered old plywood guitar into an ancient reel-to-reel (I noted that he  *was* using a like-new $3000 Coles ribbon mic).  He was frankly pretty annoying.

The Edge was, to me, fascinating.  He was pretty spare with words, but he was also surprisingly humble.  He fully acknowledges he’s not an incredible player, but he also displayed almost boyish glee showing off his electronics gear and effects processors.   It was also interesting to see that a good portion of his “U2 sound” was in the way he voiced his chords.

I’ve never been a big Zeppelin fan, although I acknowledge their impact on the development of rock and roll.   And Page was a capital-M musician.  He certainly makes playing look effortless.  His callbacks to those heady, experimental days of the late 60’s when Zep recorded in manor house stairwells with cables running out to a mobile truck were fascinating.  It was also interesting to note his early career – as a kid in a skiffle band, then as a fill-in session musician, then a regularly gigging studio aguitarist doing everything from rock songs to muzak before he finally got fed up and joined the Yardbirds.  He also seems to be the godfather of Rock Face.  Most intriguingly he said he wept while watching Spinal Tap – not because he didn’t think it was funny, but because he said it was hardly parody, accurately portraying the ridiculous excesses of the 70’s rock band.

A lot of the actual music in the film was surprisingly sub-standard.  You’d think that three iconic players in one room jamming would lead to some crazy sessions, but it was really just three dudes sitting on couches halfheartedly strumming their way through the Led Zeppelin backcatalogue, each with a wildly different guitar tone clashing with the other two.   The exception was when Page played something by himself, and it was obvious that neither the Edge nor White could really conceal their joy at watching Jimmy Freakin’ Page cruise through a legendary rock song.

Overall, from a music-nerd standpoint, it was a fascinating film.  Other than U2 I can’t say I’m a big fan of the artists involved, but they did represent three very distinct points of view and approaches to musicmaking.  Also, the “early years” footage of each of the bands in question was often hilarious.  A big-haired, macho-rocking embryonic U2 from the early early 80’s was hysterical, and a 14-year-old Jimmy Page playing “Momma Don’t Allow No Skiffle” on British TV was rather cute.  Footage of the White Stripes obviously doesn’t go back as far, although what was most interesting was how much Meg White’s drumming has improved in the intervening decade.

Sadly, during the film, it never really did get loud.   It did get interesting.

Stripmall Architecture – We Were Flying Kites
It’s hard for me to be objective about this release, since I liked the projects of the Cosebooms enough to solicit a remix from them.  Ryan Coseboom could probably record Rebecca singing over radio static and I’d probably give it a rave review.   (Actually, that could be kind of cool, come to think of it).

That said, I’d like to say that this is a pretty fantastic release.  It alternates between extremely delicate micro-programmed electronics, lush soundscapes, and fuzzed-out guitar pop with almost dizzying frequency, as though My Bloody Valentine were trying to make a Dntel album.  The whole thing is anchored by Rebecca Coseboom’s voice,  a dreamy soprano.  The surprising thing is how well it cuts through the mix and drives the melodies – the tendency for most artists of this stripe is to use vocals like this as a texture, burying them amongst all the noises and effects, but they come through clear here.

The other surprising thing is that there seems to be no shortage of hooks, something again rare in the genres of music that this album overlaps.  Tracks like “Stop Thief” and “What’s Wrong With The Kids Today” are surprisingly driving shoegazy-rock songs with very well-defined melodic hooks.

I still don’t know what a “Minnesota smile” is, though.

Claire Voyant – Lustre

Keeping with the theme of dreamy pop from the west coast, Claire Voyant returns after a too-long absence with what is frankly a phenomenal album.  It’s both reminiscent of 80’s 4AD dreampop (This Mortal Coil springs to mind, particularly on tracks like “Mercurial”) but yet full of modern production sheen and electronic textures.  Victoria’s voice, however, doesn’t fall into the same kind of “ethereal” mold that often defines such music – she has a stronger vibrato and more raw power than say, a Liz Fraser.

I do have trouble getting away from the 4AD comparisons, because for a solid chunk of the album I could swear Watts-Russell and Fryer are behind the mixing board.   Lest anyone think this is a bad thing, I would point out how much I love the old 4AD sound and lament the fact that it kind of got consumed by Britpop in the early 90’s.  This reminds me strongly of what would’ve happened if it had been allowed to evolve into the current era – the shimmery synth pads of old amended with treated samples and tweaked electronics, the vocals brought down from the inscrutable stratosphere into the forefront, and the tendency to kick a little harder (case in point – “Painted Gold” builds to a chunky guitar riff and swirling synths from a  simple mix of staccato guitars and vocals).

In short, it’s really freaking good.

Gusgus – 24/7

I’ve been a fan of this band since their 9-piece-Icelandc-artist-collective days, and have always been a little leery of a lot of their transformations.  They’ve lost members, they’ve added members.  Now they’re down to a three-piece again, original vocalist Daniel Agust is back with them, they’re signed to the label for all things minimal, Kompakt, and their sound is stripped down to a core of techno beats, squelchy basslines, buzzing synth leads, and slick vocals.

This works pretty well, actually.  While it lacks some of the immediate hooks we got on their first two albums,  the return of Agust augurs well for them.  I had no problem with their previous vocalist, “Earth”, other than she sounded a bit too house-diva for their sound, stripping the music of some of its originality.

“24/7” is surprisingly short – it’s only six tracks (albeit, some are upwards of 12 minutes long) and I honestly find about two tracks to be on the annoying side.  When it works, though, it really works.  The lead single “Add This Song” is a driving techno track of the old-school Detroit variety, with an infectious vocal hook.   “Hateful” features guest vocals from Jimi Tenor and a machine-gun of a bassline.  “Bremen Cowboys” sounds like a classic techno jam.

It’s not quite a return to form, but it’s a unique sound melding a retro cool with a pop sensibility.

Bell X1 – Blue Lights on The Runway

The single “The Great Defector” has made some inroads in US pop radio of late, although I heard it played constantly on the radio in their homeland of Ireland several months back.

That track displays an affinity for an almost Talking Heads-like sound.  The rest of the album doesn’t sound like that, though.   Paul Noonan’s vocals does veer into Byrne-ish textures, but the bulk of the album is straightup pop.  While a lot of the arrangement harkens back to classic 60’s guitar bands and alt-pop, the instrumentation and performance displays a distinctly modern electropop edge.  The lyrics display a rather unusual wordplay, veering from literary references to oblique metaphor to pop culture references, but without the kind of preciousness that one might think accompanies that.

Being a pop band, their music would have to live and die by the hooks.  When they’ve got a hook, it’s usually pretty monstrous.  The aforementioned single is ludicrously catchy, as are more straightforward songs like “Amelia”  and  “One Stringed Harp.”

What is surprising is the lack of seriously uptempo tracks – aside from “Defector”, pretty much everything falls into the mid-tempo or ballad category.  And then the ballads have a twangy, almost alt-country feel about them.  “The Curtains Are Twitchin’” almost expects Neko Case to make an appearance.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag overall – satisfying listening from a pop standpoint, but not heavy on single material.

Empire of The Sun – Walking On A Dream

Australia’s Empire Of The Sun had a minor hit on their hands when iTunes listed  “Walking on a Dream” as a featured single, and “We Are The People” ended up in a commercial. It provided a pretty good snapshot of what the band was all about, too.  It’s an odd band, overall – the music is very much informed by 80’s radio pop, and the vocals sound like Gary Numan after a bender with Brian Molko.   Jangly guitars, chugging rock basses and fuzzy analog synths all come into play with a slightly more modern house/hip-hop production edge.  Their album cover deliberately looks like the poster for a cheesy 80’s sci-fi/fantasy epic, which says a lot about what the band is trying to accomplish.  It does sound like a soundtrack for some nonexistent “Neverending Story” ripoff, right down to the gratingly annoying love ballads.  It borders on self-parody, but that appears deliberate, and I can’t decide if that’s clever or just irritating.

It’ll be interesting to see what this band carries off in the future – the shtick that informs their music works now, but whether their catchy retro-dance tracks will stand up to future exploration is a big unknown.  Especially given the lack of variety in Luke Steele’s voice.

Imogen Heap – Ellipse

Imogen Heap is an odd bird.  And when I say “bird”, I’m not using the britslang for woman, I mean “she’s often seen wearing a lot of feathers.”

I’m almost tempted to forego saying anything about her new album, “Ellipse”, merely because she has blogged , vBlogged, tweeted, forum’ed, and youtubed the album’s creation in such detail that anyone who’s aware of the album probably already knows an awful lot of fine-grained details.

The album itself?  It’s good.  It’s not as immediate as “Speak For Yourself” – there’s nothing quite as soaring as “Hide and Seek” and nothing quite as dark as “Headlock” or  “Closing In.”  It is, however, much more complex in terms of arrangement, production and programming.  It’s intensely multilayered, the soundfield is huge and detailed, and the sound is astoundingly lush.  Her voice remains as elastic as ever, even within the hundreds of overdubs.

So that’s not a problem.

The songs themselves usually take a while to develop.  The leadoff single, “First Train Home” has a spartan, understated beat until the climax of the song.  Most songs take a bit to get going.  Once they do get going, the wait is usually worth it.    All it means is that there are fewer “radio-friendly” songs, which is kind of a non-issue for Imogen Heap anyway.

That’s not a problem either.

The problem is that a number of the songs teeter on the self-indulgent side.  The lyrics wander into twee, Tori-Amos-in-fairyland territory periodically, there’s a song that’s made entirely of processed vocal overdubs and beatboxing (didn’t Bjork do that already?  And isn’t that a bad sign?)  The “making of” video that comes with the iTunes download is bafflingly strange, involving Heap wandering around her house with plastic biscuit containers over her ears, supposedly as a way of explaining the songs.  She hasn’t quite gone over to the inexplicable side yet, but she’s dangerously on the edge.

What is frankly amazing about this album was the level of interaction Heap had with her hardcore fanbase during its production.  While she’s never been a multiplatinum artist, she’s developed an enthusiastic following, and her constant updates, use of fan feedback to determine which versions of songs make it to the album, and solicitation of fan artwork basically ensured extremely strong sales on release.   She’s quickly become the darling of the “new media” world, which is both heartening and annoying.  Heartening because it does prove the concept of some of these new media promotion processes, annoying because now they’re all going to be de rigueur  for anyone releasing anything, giving those of us who make music independently even more distasteful stuff to do.   Even Ms. Heap complained about the level of self-promo she had to do.  That doesn’t bode well for the rest of us.