disclosure- carnival

We all love that feeling of a limited release, don’t we listeners? Isn’t it a fetish when we rush to buy a song whose production run is in three figures, enjoy the triumph of ring-fencing one of those copies in our little pockets, and then gallop to the nearest listening facility and share it heartily with our friends? I think so.

Well Disclosure, comprising 19 and 16-year-old brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, have released 'Carnival' in a seriously limited, 300-print run 7” double A-side single (that’s one copy for every member of Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band, probably). However, simultaneously, they have been good enough to accommodate the fact that most of us won’t be able to get our mits on one by releasing the song as part of a free 5-track EP in exchange for liking the Disclosure Facebook page. Aw, guys.

If light market whoring seems an effort, then release aside, 'Carnival' is a great song. Its 2-step rhythms bring to mind SBTRKT’s recently successful 'Wildfire', which crossed sparse dubstep and garage, and herald good things for a duo that are so incredibly young. The tight vocal loops and minimal instrumentation that have been popularised by James Blake in the past year help the song build to a crescendo: a lively ball of fidgety pop that is at once familiar and irresistibly danceable.

Disclosure- Carnival

Even New-er James Blake!

Well I'm acutely aware this is being focused on disproportionately but as an example of an album not being everything in this digital world, three unreleased songs from James Blake have surfaced recently.

'Love What Happened Here' featured on a mix by the suitably named Fantastic Mr Fox last year (just to demonstrated the link between these two young UK producers a little more). You can listen to it below, courtesy of The Up Turn. (For more on Fantastic Mr Fox, check out my other posts).

And in other JB news, Some Kind of Awesome have posted 'You Know Your Youth'. This is a scatty b-side that features as a bonus track on the vinyl version of the album, as if hearing the rest of it on the warmth of record wasn't enough. LISTEN BELOW! Post-Dubstep have posted another (!_) vinyl-only bonus track, 'Tep And The Logic', which iiiiiiiss, HERE. What a lovely bunch!

James Blake- James Blake LP, The Much Anticipated Debut

When the final moment of James Blake’s meteoric rise to fame took place, newspapers, magazines and websites looked back together on five months in which a 22 year old music student from London went from a virtual unknown- a barely featured artist on the national dubstep scene- to the darling of Radio 1, cleared from the shelves, wonder producer. When playing a set on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show, Lowe treated him like near-messianic pop royalty, inquiring after the album in such a way as it had already set as a classic. Check your local store for CMYK. You won't find it. Then check Ebay. Try and buy a ticket for his upcoming London shows. Then check Ebay. Appetites gorged on opportunities to see and hear him like the first hour of the Sales. Blake saw, or perhaps more accurately, he was seen, and he conquered, beyond all recognition.

Since shedding the petals of a first bloom, James Blake- the LP- picked up the mantle a few days ago from the 2 EPs that clearly spoke to music lovers for much longer than their 15 minute run times. Here the big posturing, media work and endless London Underground adverts really took over. Atlas, owned by Polydor released it in the UK. An expected immediate entry into the UK top 10. Universal in the US. Tours on both sides of the Atlantic. There really is no overstating the change that took place, nor the intensity and focus of our interest.

To that reception, a quiet animal arises. James Blake is a brooding and discordant record such that one would expect a well-known and already seasoned creative artist to make to compliment their work. This is Neil Young jumping straight to the digi-stuff on Trans without years of classic rock and traditional songsmanship. It is ambitious, does away with CMYK and Klavierwerke to a large extent and forgets what everyone might expect James Blake, a young cool producer, to be and sound like. If you’ve already read a review of this album, you have almost certainly seen a comparison with Bon Iver and that is a view I take too. As incomprehensible as it seems, the minimal dubstep of CMYK and piano/vocal combination of Klavierwerke are smashed together and toned down about three notches on the scale of druggy dance. The result is, oddly enough, down-tempo slow-building laments that stew in a pickle of electronics, clicks and auto-tuned vocals a la Blood Bank more than For Emma, Forever Ago. If that sounds horrible, James Blake’s Feist cover ‘Limit To Your Love’ (which features on this album) showed four months ago that Blake is versatile, adaptable and brimming with ideas. The core of this album is at ‘Lindesfarne I’ and ‘Lindesfarne II’- one song really, but split into the bit that’s almost completely vocal-only (yes, that’s right), and the bit that’s almost completely vocal-only with a few rhythmic flicks of a guitar here and there. Busy it is not. Silent moments on these and other tracks such as ‘I Never Learnt To Share’ (again, very much devoid of instrumentation) and ‘Why Don’t You Call Me’ serve as nervy seconds of reflection to stress and package the real sound that is carefully dotted around. Is it complicated? No, I wouldn’t say so either. The creations are just excellently crafted- like ‘I Mind’, perhaps the closest thing to Blake’s CMYK with its pitch-altering and dizzying sample, rarely places more than a chord and a carefully selected sound effect in any one place, breaking them up intermittently and unexpectedly for a new, sparing but deliberate ration of sound.

The lack of general confusion here, every action seemingly precision-engineered, makes for a focused and seriously engaging record. As though it were a dance of electronic hypnosis, each apparently immaterial singular blip or background chord hits a deeper place than it ought to. This is James Blake’s real crowning achievement. If ‘Limit To Your Love’ was its show piece, there might have been a sense of disappointment among keen followers, asking why a producer with a seemingly natural ear for choreographed minimalism and general creativity would conform to neat song structure or allow an excellent radio smash to take control of the record musically. But ‘Wilhelms Scream’, ‘Lindesfarne’ and seven other tracks do thrust Blake into an excellent direction, and, most promisingly, nothing sounds like it was a labour of pain or self-conscious worry. For a man on top of the world right now, Blake has a lot to be pleased about, and hopefully, a long career to look forward to.

Stream the album HERE courtesy of eminently lovely 'Pretty Much Amazing'

STARTING AT 2010.

In the age of the fractured music audience, it only seems fair that this be a list of albums I discovered in 2010 rather than those that came out in 2010. With almost all music standardised, accessible and instantly available, time has flattened. We just have now an astounding catalogue of sound that has quietly crept up on us and presented, to be explored via the internet (and hopefully bought too).

The 10 in this list illustrate that very point in my view, coming from different eras and genres, even the oldest/most obscure of which- Al Wilson’s Show and Tell is really just a type away. It’s filed below Al Green and above All American Rejects. Sleigh Bells’ Treats is conversely probably the ‘biggest’ album on the list. Like La Roux, Bombay Bicycle Club or Phoenix, they have steadily but quietly built an imposing profile (here in Britain), spearheading this year’s output of blogosphere headline-making pure indie. By comparison, James Blake is perhaps at an earlier stage of his germination into the popular zeitgeist, and it remains to be seen where he will go. CMYK and Klavierwerke EPs were two defining records of 2010: they sat on the dance counter at Rough Trade in Shoreditch and very soon trickled away. They spawned an ambush of the Radio 1 playlist, shows and the announcement of his first long-play, due in 2011. A young, promising and exciting artist making music in a great era of creativity and musical dialogue, his success next year might be a further measure of the potential the online music world has granted artists to cross boundaries and escape genres or musical and geographic scenes. Musically, James Blake and How to Dress Well, as well as many other artists on both sides of the Atlantic show that past, present, dance, hip-hop, pop, R&B, dubstep, dub, dancehall, electronic and organic instrument-led music can be seamlessly brought together. Mount Kimbie's Crooks & Lovers is another such example, and the remaining album on the list released in 2010.

The #1 in the list is DJ Jazzy Jeff’s second solo effort The Return of the Magnificent, which I think-although I don’t know- passed unnoticed on the US R&B charts, as well as here. The star who is so often (hell, always) obscured by his lankier former co-artist deserves not just commercial and critical recognition beyond his 90s pop smashes with Will Smith, I think, but a profile that matches the best R&B and hip-hop artists of the post-millennium. When I first heard ‘Come On’ from the album covered here, it was immediately up there with 2Pac’s ‘Keep Ya Head Up’ in my mind, and has not yet come down. The druggy chill of ‘The Garden’ and summer strut of ‘The Definition’ sound like they deliver exactly what Jeff wanted from them- a perfect, focused flow of open-top car radio goodness that lasts through the initial high, out into the open road and into half-asleep in the back chill out in a hefty 78 minutes. The other hip-hop album on my menu is Jurassic 5’s self-titled LP. Yes, I know- this is firstly a classic that perhaps shouldn’t be on the list (not least because I should have discovered it sooner), but it’s fresh to me so it stays. ‘Concrete Schoolyard’, ‘Improvise’, ‘Without A Doubt’, ‘Lesson 6’: of course some of the most awesome sounds of the rap underground, splicing drum fills, Cut Chemist’s crazy public information samples and turntables that sound like flutes…or the other way round.

Turning to some other random choices, White Denim have been referred to previously on this blog and is one artist that you could be sure is the only in any list of the top 10 of 2010 that wasn’t meant to be in there. Last Day of Summer was in fact just an online-only update on how the band’s third LP is coming along. See below to download it.

With regard to Life of Leisure, that was for me, the album that led the tidal wave rushing towards our shores in late 2009 of American lo-fi indie. A dirge of sluggish, distant melody and synthesisers beating reluctantly, wearily, Washed Out captured the haziness of long, lazy hot days and bottled it. Best Coast, Summer Camp and others pushed similar buttons over the year, employing similar production techniques and pushing for their formulations of lethargic disconnection, but to me, no other finished product was as multi-layered or resonant. This has been an exciting year generally for lo-fi music, driven by many excellent blogs presenting excellent bands seemingly out of the blue. Although featuring on them, Bonobo’s Black Sands was brought to my attention by a friend, and from the first opening montage of soundscape I was hooked. (See below). That particular part of the album might have been a suitable soundtrack for the blockbuster of the year, Inception, with all its soaring strings and ominous undercurrent chanting brewing a dream-like world. However, as opposed to that created in Life of Leisure, it is one that brims with detail. That world makes the album: it fleshes it, informs it, gives it wings. You can soar over endless green hills and into tropical storms: an atmosphere so pertinent that music becomes just an accompaniment to imagination.

Lastly, I was glad to discover Talking Heads this year. The band’s big, consistent output has been rewarding and fun all round, and finally ‘clicked’ when I heard ‘Sugar on my Tongue’ from the album 77: a provocative, slightly disturbing test tube filled with either sex, anger, man, woman- some combination of everything with an angst plug and shaken.

So concludes. At a bit of a stretch and ramble, that was my top 10 of 2010. There was a lot of enjoy this year-a great deal- a huge deal- most of it unknown and untouched, inevitably leaving us all basking in little wee specks in contrast to the massive edifice. And to think that we sleep…

1. DJ Jazzy Jeff The Return of the Magnificent (2007)

DJ Jazzy Jeff- She Was So Flyy feat Kardinal Offishall
DJ Jazzy Jeff- Come On feat. Dave Ghetto

2. Bonobo Black Sands (2010)

3. White Denim Last Day of Summer (2010)

White Denim- Some Wild Going Outward

4. Jurassic 5 Jurassic 5 LP (1998)

Jurassic 5- Concrete Schoolyard

5. Sleigh Bells Treats (2010)

6. James Blake CMYK/Klavierwerke (2010)

James Blake- Klavierwerke

7. Talking Heads Best Of (2004)

8. Washed Out Life of Leisure (2010)

Washed Out- Hold Out

9. Al Wilson Show & Tell (1973)

Al Wilson- Broken Home

10. Mount Kimbie Crooks & Lovers (2010)

Mount Kimbie- Before I Move Off

JAMES BLAKE

Rampaging across the blogosphere, James Blake’s music has traversed and codified many of the common influences appearing among breaking artists in the past six months. The London-based electronic producer, still only 21, is on his fourth EP. Here, I will be focusing on his third: CMYK.

You will see below ‘How to Dress Well’ and how Tom Krell’s bedroom-created dreams were inspired by 90s R&B. Well, CMYK is a rather different outcome from the same inputs. Aaliyah and Kelis samples are dropped in, worked upon and fished out of an electronic hubbub- as before HTDW, I could not have imagined. The genre focused upon is emotional, hazy and subtly tinged with memory: “a kind of dead zone for nostalgia, not yet retro-ready but no longer current”, says Mike Powell on Pitchfork. And I would certainly agree. Fleeting use of these 90s tracks do strike a dead zone, in which early twenty somethings- such as myself- have snippets of these commercial tracks from childhood lodged somewhere in the back of minds. Vague, and not fully formed.
The stop-start of ‘Footnotes’ drifts into an addictive half-beat reminiscent of the best warped dubstep. It rarely gets more than minimal, but never less than the synthesiser and clapping beat that together mark this out as a conspiratorial and jittery five minutes. The song with which most readers might be most familiar is 'CMYK'. Its upbeat and frequently joyous lifts are a good example of the smooth R&B Blake gently handles. ‘I’ll Stay’ is warmer, and I would love to know where he found the short, one second thuds that roll around it.
Overall, the EP is, in my view one of the best and most exciting of the year. In just four tracks, it could scarcely manage more wild journeying, both through time and exploring the subject of memory, with so few and carefully chosen blips, beats and jolts. Thoroughly recommended to any open minded listener...particularly in you enjoy How to Dress Well!

James Blake- CMYK
James Blake- Footnotes