Tears for Fears – Nocturne Live, Blenheim Palace – 26th June 2019
Category Archives: EP reviews
Vienna Ditto – Ticks EP
Released 13th May 2016
Vienna Ditto, the best Tarantino-esque duo to have never soundtracked a Tarantino film, have followed up their 2015 album Circle with the EP Ticks, with whose generous seven-track length they are really spoiling us.
This collection is as eclectic as Circle was a neat, coherent summing up of the voodoo sci-fi blues they peddle. The EP’s title track is a menacing rockabilly tale of identity theft; Tiny Tambourines wouldn’t sound out of place amongst Depeche Mode’s early 2000s glitchy blues electronica; and Frank Account is a slinky dollop of sinister Andrews Sisters harmonies.
They cover two Negro spirituals – Motherless Child and Go Down Moses; while their rendering of the former is beautifully restrained, its melancholic marriage of voice and twangy guitar more reflecting the isolating misery whence this song came than the comforting togetherness its performance was intended to achieve, the latter becomes a Chelsea Dagger-style romp – yet they make both sound as if they’re original compositions.
The gems here are the gloriously unsettling My Way of Missing You, a Sergio Leone-homaging and apparently Adam Curtis-inspired triphoppy triumph, and Come Back, a frenetic rock n’ roll drum machine anti-love song, whose cosmic synth wig-out outtro signs off this genre-melding audio embodiment of unease and impudence perfectly.
From Nightshift, May 2016
2016
Wild Swim – Untitled EP
January 2016
BBC Introducing in Oxford’s Band of the Year 2013, Wild Swim, are calling it a day – which is a huge shame. The biggest tragedy is that they weren’t more prolific, considering the multi-influenced, genre-melding and flamboyant promise of their early singles Echo and Another Night. Their farewell EP, Untitled, may be more measured and less histrionic or arty than their earlier stuff, but it’s the perfect showcase for – and testament to – their intricate, exotically textured and unnerving folky indie hip-hoppy electronica.
On Hollow, floaty orchestral atmospherics and singer Richard Samson’s almost whispered, seemingly distracted refrain of “Tonight we fall in love again” are underpinned by a contrasting, relentlessly arpeggiating math-rocky guitar, creating a creepy, unsettling track that gets under your skin – like a manipulative Air.
My Love and Too Late take trip-hop to the more menacing Massive Attack and Tricky end of the scale, with laid-back beats and plaintive vocals layering over beautiful reverbed guitar and piano chords.
The stand-out track, however, is the almost anthemic Cut Me Out, on which the light Burundi Beat drums of the early 80s flit back and forth with the crunchy electro guitars and careworn sonority of Dave Gahan’s voice of recent-period Depeche Mode.
We can only hope that the quintet responsible for all of this greatness stay making music; a legacy like this is far too good to not build upon.
Esther Joy Lane – Esther Joy Lane EP
October 2015
It’s easy to be cynical about new musical acts. Some artists precede the genre they’d most comfortably slot into and don’t get the attention they deserve; some merrily ride on the coattails of others, benefitting from the happenstance of all their musical stars aligning; some abandon their soul and change their sound in order to gain traction; and some would really benefit from their audiences not overthinking whether they’re going to be commercial and successful or not and just concentrating on how good the music is. Slotting neatly into this final category is twenty-three-year-old Leeds-born and Edinburgh-raised Esther Joy Lane, whose timely nascence is largely a product of her youth coinciding with the advent of Garageband, and whose sound can – incidentally and not detrimentally – be herded into the “chilled but edgy” paddock of The XX and London Grammar.
This, Esther’s debut EP, is so confident and accomplished that it’s astounding that it isn’t yet major label, TV sync stuff; someone needs to send stand-out track You Know to Grey’s Anatomy immediately. The acoustic-inspired sparse electro soul of the synths and gentle beats perfectly frames Esther’s low, velvety voice, giving it space without overcrowding it; emotion is conveyed how little she gives away – the more she controls, the more she implies.
The songs do admittedly lie somewhere on a continuum that has Jessie Ware at one end and Grimes, Banks and FKA Twigs at the other, but they’re all favourable comparisons; Esther shares with them a certain hypnotic and beguiling quality, with each play of this EP more rewarding. It has a sort of late night inner-city shimmering-streetlights-reflected-a-river vibe; sultry, personal and highly polished, yet claustrophobic, detached and aloof: in short, captivating.
Tiger Mendoza and David Griffiths – Along Dangerous Roads EP
November 2014
Electro-rockers Tiger Mendoza have been descending into darker industrial hip hop of late, but their (or rather his, this release’s incarnation effectively being a solo project) new EP Along Dangerous Roads, a collaboration with ex-Eeebleee and Witches chap and latterly solo artist David Griffiths, draws on both parties’ influences of computer game music and soundtracks – with a quite hypnotic result.
Now That Days Are Colder is a synthesis of rhythm and orchestra on a claustrophobic scale, like a mini-Hybrid. This theme continues in the swooping violin-led title track, which is punctuated by frenetic, impatient beats and descends into snipped-up nu-skool breaks like it’s the turn of the millennium again and Adam Freeland will be along any minute to remix the hell out of it.
In Desperate Times is a Bedouin-flavoured heavy soundclash that would serve an espionage thriller well, and Eating Crayons is archetypal first-person shooter video game music: an Orb-like pulsating drone with bleeps that takes you through a dimly-lit shipwrecked spacecraft on an unfamiliar planet, stalking pursuing aliens.
On the one non-instrumental, Literature and Life, David’s hushed and measured vocals are underpinned by a plaintive cello while percussion batters around them. The slow and steady resultant tension is palpable.
Home Is The Sailor is reminiscent of ambient electronica proponent Ulrich Schnauss with its relentless drifting of beats above layers of strings. The beats remain delicate as the strings are joined by grinding guitar in a compelling juxtaposition of the whimsical and the sinister.
While video game and film soundtracks work with the visuals and action to consolidate the experience for the player or viewer, these tracks tell stories themselves; melody and mood combine into something evocative and compelling.
Amy Simpson – Fairy Tales, Stories & Myths EP
July 2014
At primary school, one of my classmates won a Christmas card competition. When her artwork was printed, we were horrified to realise they’d “childified” it. As we then discovered, it’s often easier for the young to be accepted if they play up to the older generation’s expectations of them, to the expense of their actual capabilities.
Amy Simpson, a seventeen-year-old A-level student from North Newington, seemingly hasn’t been tempted by this route; being more Radio 2 than 1Xtra, with a folky, delicate and unostentatious voice, she wouldn’t have gone far on The X-Factor anyway. She was discovered during a recording session her parents bought for her fifteenth birthday, and her lushly produced debut EP is entitled Fairy Tales, Stories & Myths, which sets the scene before we hear a note.
So, wistful, flourish-bedecked piano-led stuff it is – and opener Homemade Rocket is, despite the presence of “set sail in a homemade rocket” and other cheesy celestial metaphors, really rather nice. BBC Radio Scotland and Tom Robinson also think so, and ITV would no doubt love it for a drama trailer montage. But it doesn’t scream, “Look at me! I’m seventeen – aren’t I clever!” – which is refreshing.
All I Wanna Do sounds like an Echobelly b-side (praise indeed), and Only You, a country-esque ballad with some great chord progressions, is reminiscent of the Kylie Minogue 1989 album track Heaven and Earth, allowing me to indulge in personal nostalgia for a moment. Glow, a jaunty number, reminds me of the sort of thing we used to enter into Eurovision despite no contemporary chart music sounding like it. And actually, Malta might do well if they entered Everything.
In short, nothing groundbreaking, but lots of pleasantness, especially the rich orchestration. It risks teetering into the abyss of cliché to say so, but Amy is promising and would do well to nurture her talent.
2014
Vienna Ditto – Ugly EP
November 2013
The atmospheric slinky drama of the lead song of Vienna Ditto’s latest EP, Ugly, evokes a glorious red velvet-draped, dusky cavern of deception and intrigue, with space-age synths redolent of Jean Michel Jarre in his 70s prime and crunchy drums framing seductive slide guitar twangs.
The slower and measured By Way Of Apology is reminiscent of the claustrophobic electro-blues of some of Depeche Mode’s ballads and their main songwriter Martin Gore’s albums of covers, not least by way of Hatty Taylor’s voice, whose vibrato-soaked insouciance here creates an unconvincing testimony. In Stop, a seemingly defiant tale of a parting, sinister spaghetti western jangly chords, spooky half tones and unusual percussive experiments convey a Twin Peaks level of festering distrust.
With this collection, the “voodoo sci-fi blues” duo conjure up a more effective image of Westworld-esque double-crossing robot duels than that term could in itself; there’s some malicious intent going on, and all the better for it.