James Blake's album works SO much better if..

...you erase from your mind the idea that it's a dubstep record.

It really isn't.

I admit I was pretty surprised to find that it's mostly sort of quite polite electronic folk-soul.


It's this




plus a dash of this





Nowhere near as good as either of course.

A few of the tracks are actually quite insipid, much more anaemic than expected, and the dreaded glottal stop of Blake's delivery renders at least one track virtually unlistenable.

BUT

At its best it suggests a true, emerging artist experimenting with dynamics and sonic space.

And this is great. In the air tonight for the blubstep generation.

February feeling

five for feb


This track is just so ferocious and evil. It cannot be stopped.





The ghost of some 50s doo-wop band played through an electronic noise box. Underwater.




Toro Y Moi is spring sex music




White-powder soul whose individual elements; an impossibly sunny, smothering sax, New Order-ish guitar lines, vaguely prefab-y vocals, shouldn't really work - but they do. And how.




Teenage girls playing the music of 40-year-old Mojo readers sounds all kinds of wrong, but this is so lovely and timeless, it's hard to resist.



bonus:

hurry up summer



white and nerdy. And brilliant. And also kind of horrible.

sex, sleaze and style

Couple of recent pieces by me over at Chris and Phil.

Why Amer succeeds as art installation but not giallo cinema





the grotty bare behind bars and why I don't dig the 'chicks in chains' genre very much.