[review 2005: the disappointments]

The fact that The Milk Of Human Kindness is the worst album I hear all year should not necessarily be taken to mean that it’s a horrible album. Rather, its glaring sin is one many albums have committed this year: the sin of mediocrity. Perhaps it was the name change; while Caribou sounds a lot better now than it did when Dan Snaith first changed the name of his electronic psychedelia outfit, it may not be altogether meritless to blame Handsome Dick Manitoba for causing Snaith unnecessary stress by stealing the original name, Manitoba, from him. But more likely, it probably has to do with this quote from a Chart interview: “It’s just whatever the fuck I feel like recording… I just don’t give any thought to it. I just see it developing in the most random way.”

Occasionally this free-form approach to music composition works. But artists often work under various self-imposed restrictions because it focuses their creativity and results in a more rewarding final product. The Milk Of Human Kindness could have benefitted enormously from such focus; instead, Snaith’s given us 9 tracks of boring, repetitive material, and two songs that are actually interesting. The first is “Brahminy Kite,” which sounds like—get this—a song. The second is “Pelican Narrows,” which hangs its hat on a nice piano loop and some interesting percussion, but little else. More representative of the album’s malaise is “Bees,” a track that limps out of the gate and dies within fifty feet of the first turn. For the first three minutes, all we get is some half-hearted noodling; by the time we get to the actual beat, you’ve lost all interest in the song. And once we get there, the song still doesn’t actually go anywhere, content to amplify and decorate the original harmony (such as it is) with a couple of bells and whistles.

Too much of this album fades into the background; trying to pay attention to the album is like trying to revive a dead patient. Even during the interesting moments, there’s a faint sense that you’re not getting everything Caribou is capable of, that you’re simply settling for a pleasant concoction like “Brahminy Kite.” It’s certainly not an offensive record, and it’s not a stinker. But this could’ve been, should’ve been a better album.

I’ve only heard the last track off the Troublemakers’ first album, Doubts and Convictions, but everything I know about the French electronic duo leads me to believe Express Way is simply a bigger, bolder and better version of the first album: jazz-influenced film noir soundscapes, complete with lines written to evoke cinematic scenes—at least, when the vocals aren’t ripped wholesale from movies themselves. “Black City,” the one track I’ve heard off Doubts and Convictions, is anchored by Travis Bickle’s line from Taxi Driver: “Some day, a real rain will come and wash the scum off the streets.”

For Express Way, the Troublemakers went a step further—they actually shot an hour-long film to go along with the album. Apparently there’s a version of the album floating about that includes the movie, but I can tell you the import release I have doesn’t have an extra disc with a film attached. Another thing the album doesn’t have—to its great detriment—is this vocal mix of the leadoff track, available only on a Blue Note promo vinyl. The Express Way instrumental oozes tension, but it really doesn’t hold a candle to the vocal mix. I can’t find any information on the woman or the monologue she recites feverishly; all I can tell you is that parts of the monologue found their way onto Rhythm Unlimited’s “Reflections.” The trance track might have been recorded before “Everyday Is Just An Extension Of Yesterday,” or perhaps not; in any case, the pedigree of the monologue from the woman whose friend is losing his mind will remain a mystery.

Somewhere between 2003’s Haha Sound and the recently released Tender Buttons, Broadcast lost two members. Maybe it’s the band’s new configuration as a duo, or perhaps it’s simply the ravages of time, but Tender Buttons is a far different animal from its predecessor. To be fair, so was Haha Sound; but while the 2003 album was a far lusher, more evocative take on the brooding, distant psychedelia of The Noise Made By People, Tender Buttons is not so much an extension of previous work as it is a discontinuity. The cinematic scope is gone, and most of the songs are buried in far more static and distortion than anything previously. The exceptions to the new regime are equally curious; “Tears In The Typing Pool” and the title track are extremely spare and organic, anchored by the vocals of Trish Keenan and muted guitar.

“America’s Boy” is more representative of the album’s makeup, and sounds as though the backing track was piped through an old television with bad reception. Broadcast has always evoked a mood resembling a past depiction of an industrial future long dead; this aesthetic was most obvious on earlier instrumental tracks like The Noise Made By People’s “Dead The Long Year.” The songs were echoes of an ancestry obsessed with progress and technology; they sounded like pristine lullabies shot through a distorted lens, filled with reverb and static. Tender Buttons feels far more immediate in a sense; less reminiscent of the past and less evocative of the future, the album loses out on much of the atmosphere of previous work. In its place is a new sort of sound that seems to communicate something equally interesting; what that is, I don’t quite know.

Having finally listened to the whole album, I can say with certainty that Adelie Land is an unstoppable force that should reach the top of many a best-of-year list, if there’s any justice in this world.

So in case you weren’t convinced by the last track, here’s another.

Quickly gaining a reputation as “the Japanese Go! Team,” Handsomeboy Technique will nevertheless be hard-pressed to replicate the Stateside success of Japanese luminaries like Cibo Matto or Puffy AmiYumi. While lots of indie bands here have found that you really can become big in Japan, the reverse has never really been true; Puffy was only able to gain traction here after the Cartoon Network thought they’d make really cool role models for school-aged girls. While the Handsomeboy Technique is also a duo, I doubt they’d ever get their own cartoon show.

On the other hand, “Season Of Young Mouss” makes a convincing case otherwise; while there are surface similarities to the Go! Team (tons of samples, really upbeat, funky but practically indecipherable raps), the overall atmosphere is very different. The Go! Team are all about funky 1970s action shows, spaghetti westerns and Schoolhouse Rock; they love their harmonicas and horn samples and sound as though they were recorded on a four-track. “Season Of Young Mouss,” on the other hand, is far more overtly twee; it’s pure candy-coated rainbows and big, bold, technicolour cuteness. Throw in some awesome jazz flute, two rappers that do sound a lot like the vocals on the Go! Team’s “Bottle Rocket,” and a blissfully narcotic “doo-doo-doo” vocal sample, and you’ve got a track that bursts at the seams with goodness.

Adelie Land is only available as an import at the moment (gee, also like the Go! Team), and somehow it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see this Japanese duo on our shores. But so long as they keep manufacturing hits of sunshine like this, it’s easy to forgive these minor problems.

The closest Photek came to mainstream fame was back in 1998, when the landmark album Modus Operandi was released. Shortly afterwards, the drum and bass genius’s early singles were compiled and released as Form And Function, giving further insight into Modus Operandi’s jazz-influenced minimalist drum and bass. Both were released at the height of late-90s electronica, when radio was beginning to discover there were beats beyond big beat, and the man behind the machine, Rupert Parkes, was the man to beat in some circles—here was someone doing something popular, and yet different from the rest of a scene already falling into habit and cliche. It was, as much as anything else, his moment to shine.

But time stands still for no one; the drum and bass revolution fizzled, radio turned away from electronica and subsumed the poppier elements into the mainstream, and Photek had to keep up or shut up. But 2000’s Solaris was a stylistic shift, almost completely abandoning the clinical, minimalist sound for a more upbeat house atmosphere. And while the darkness still remained in some of his tracks, it was obvious Parkes had moved on. With Solaris, Photek retreated from view, his contract with Science finished.

Since then we’ve heard very little from Photek proper, though his Special Forces alias has put out some hard-hitting drum and bass that resembles neither his late-90s work nor Solaris; as the name implies, Special Forces puts out a far more aggressive brand of drum and bass miles apart from Parkes’ older work. Recently, that style has carried over to his Photek-labelled work, as evidenced by this compilation track. Whether Photek will ever reappear in the same capacity as before—releasing full albums as opposed to twelve-inches and compilation tracks here and there—remains to be seen, but it’s clear that even if he’s kept a low profile, Rupert Parkes continues to evolve.

Featuring the lovely Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne on vocals, “Sunset Spirals” is not necessarily what you’d expect from a duo that lists as their defining moment a DJ night where they fast-forwarded through jazz songs to get to the drum solos. Xploding Plastix, as much as anyone else these days, act as a sort of ambassador to the electronic movement—The Donca Matic Singalongs jumps from subgenre to subgenre, and while none of the tracks are shining examples of any particular style, it all holds together quite well. “Sunset Spirals” serves at the centerpiece (and the first single): all warm, sublime synths and cosmopolitan beats, plus the aforementioned Cracknell for another layer of stylish sweetness.

Other tracks veer off in entirely different directions; opener “Donca Matic” and “Dizzy Blonde” are low-key ambient tracks that vaguely recall Wagon Christ’s less kitschy qualities, while “Geigerteller” and “The Famous Biting Guy” are full-on action-packed thrillers. “Tripwire” and “One Bullet Fits All” venture into darker territory, with the latter injecting some drum’n'bass into the album. But for all the genrehopping, The Donca Matic Singalongs is surprisingly satisfying. You can actually listen to the whole album in one sitting if you like, though it still works better if you split it into two or three-track suites. But if you’ve been out of touch with anything without a guitar in it, and want to know what you’ve missed, this is as good a place as any to start.

It seems the fate of many great but lesser-known songs is to become fodder for producers who take the original and retrofit it to create a dancefloor stormer with a soul. The quickest turnaround on such a transformation was when Everything But The Girl put out “Missing” in 1994. “Missing” was a dusty alt-pop song showing the duo at the height of their powers. A couple of months later, house producer Todd Terry got a hold of it and turned it into the four-on-the-floor version of “Missing” everyone’s heard in clubs and on top-40 radio. Everything But The Girl abandoned the romantic-eclectic blueprint that had led them to 1994’s Amplified Heart, and dove straight into the burgeoning electronica movement, where they’ve stayed ever since.

Other reconstituted tracks show up now and then; the Pump Panel Reconstruction mix of New Order’s “Confusion”; the multiple reincarnations of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” first as a fifteen minute mix by Patrick Cowley, and then again in 1995 by several contemporary producers; and others I can only dimly recall. One of the latest is Deep Dish’s remake of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” originally intended to be an instrumental on their latest album. As the story goes, Deep Dish sent their tapes off to Stevie Nicks’ entourage on a lark, only to find themselves weeks later in a recording studio with the singer herself, laying down new vocal tracks. As with most of these Frankenstein resurrections (to mix metaphors a bit), there will be plenty of people who’ll spit with disgust upon hearing the opening drum salvo, and likely an equal number of people who’ll hear this in a club for the first time and love it, unaware of its origins but nevertheless feeling deep in their gut the power of the Stevie Nicks effect.

A minor meeting of the fates apparently put Amerie and MIA on the front covers of two music mags at the same time—while Amerie graced the front of Vibe, MIA was the cover story on indie mag Resonance. While MIA has set aflame certain influential groups of indie music lovers, leading to her spot on tour with LCD Soundsystem, Amerie has traced a far more stratospheric flightplan, and has been compared to Beyonce (if unkindly). And so it makes sense to put the two artists together—mixing the obscure with the wildly popular has always been a dependable mashup formula.

Strangely (or perhaps not, considering how popular Amerie’s “One Thing” has been), more than one person has had the idea to put MIA and Amerie together; there’s another mashup floating around combining “One Thing” with MIA’s “Galang.” Carrasco replaces “Galang” with “Pull Up The People,” to roughly the same effect. It’s quite a bit easier on sensitive ears than the buzzy, harsh electronic stew MIA cooks up when left to her own devices, and so serves as a decent introduction to both artists.

Although the US release date for the next Goldfrapp album has apparently been pushed back to February, Supernature is still set for an August release in Europe. The first single is a sublime glam number in the vein of “Strict Machine,” but it’s the remix by German dance veterans Tiefschwarz that pushes the material beyond Black Cherry territory. If the original is a seductive flirt, then this is the whole package—four and a half throbbing minutes of spectacular eurohouse.

Another album to put on your import purchase list, I think.