I can’t lie. I want Christmas early this year. I’ve been trawling various secondhand record shops of Soho and Notting Hill for the best part of a month now. So I was delighted to finally track it down in the rain and neon of Caaaaaamden-guv. There it was.
Interplay
Hmmmmm. Should I buy it? Unwrapping presents early n all that etc etc.
I think that argument raged in my head for – ooooo – all of 0.2 milliseconds.
So…Interplay…
Shatterproof you know, but that doesn’t make it any less suprising – it sounds ‘tastier’ on here, with its 808 beats and various hoodlum bleeps and sinister strings and stabs. Don’t meet this track in a dark alleyway – you won’t come out too good.
Catwalk has a bassline that’s been around since Booker T. and the M.G.'s – and that’s not a bad thing! It’s that Blues sound that’s normally hidden in his work or at least buried lightly under topsoil. Not here – uh uh – it’s writ large in neon for all to see. In an alternate universe there’s a Blues band performing this and following it up with Burning Car, Green Onions and Smokestack Lightning…hell, I’d pay to see them.
Evergreen is a little longer than the version we know – such a fantastic song, I hope it becomes a staple of any future live sets. I just love the way it quietly kicks and echoes through the streets and silent trees. Forever Evergreen. So pretty and blissful it shouldn’t be allowed.
Watching a Building On Fire is where it goes full-on Metamatic; Mr No, only this time Burial-ised with a new groove. Mira becomes a modern day Gina X with Foxx in full-on crooner mode à la Your Kisses Burn and the bassline. Oh, the bassline - the bassline bleeps and burns – stunning. He needs to do more stuff like this. He needs to do more stuff like all of it.
****!!!! Interplay – is that a real guitar? Woah! It’s almost acoustic! The vocal! Woah – The Vocal! Bleeps sequence and echo, wrapping warmly around the guitar, the thunder and the rain. There’s a universe out there where this song/line of flight follows In Mysterious Ways.
I calculated everything,
looked at it everyway.
Considered all the angles,
the chance of any break.
I counted all the elements,
every possible mistake.
Accommodated every change,
but not the interplay
Heartbreaking, breathtaking and very touching. It stands out like the Empire State on a grey New York skyline wet with rain. The ‘almost dropped my chips’ track on the album…and that’s saying something on an album full of ‘almost dropped my chips’ tracks.
Summerland – moves down the motorway opened by Catwalk and has ‘Giorgio Moroder’ lit large in neon signage warning drivers; ‘DISCO 5km” with its “…grief and sunsets streaming through” and “...ghosts from 1994…” the roads are dark, car-lights through the trees, Wardour Street, Archway, Suicide Bridge. Just gets better and better on every play. Got to say it’s vocally superb this album and lyrically he’s looking through the sunlight of The Golden Section. Sumerland has a Moroder breakdown that goes a bit, well, best described as Les Chants Magnétiques – which isn’t Moroder but I can live with that too. As will you also. Tell your friends.
And another thing – Have I mentioned the vocals? The tracks we’ve all heard so far really don’t give you an overall idea of the vocals on this album – this is one of his best vocal performances ever. Fact. And the songwriting – again – as I mention above – we’re somewhere between the streets of Metamatic with Shatterproof and Destination, but there are lyrically places he’s not visited since The Golden Section.
Well if Summerland charged, Running Man shifts a few gears forward – and – bass guitar! Proper bass guitar – early Cure bass guitar – alongside the fat Moog-ish bass synthesizer. It’s one of those next level songs – I have no idea what the music terminology for such things are but it just keeps pumping, moving up and up a gear, and then it breaks down into fat synth bass that goes a bit The Quiet Men and strings come in, finishing with a rising sequencer pattern…and laser blasts – yeah laser blasts. Stunning. And there’s 70s tape echo on the vocals – bliss!
A Falling Star is pure CR-78 (funnily enough, the same rhythm pattern as on George McCrae’s Rock Your Baby – early pressings of which, were the first ever commercial pop single to use a drum machine (Bentley Rhythm Ace) – Foxx and Benge on a serious roots trip then!).
Over the CR-78 some beautiful analogue drifts about and phases and filters and folds in and out of some drifting ghost-like vocals;
Some love will last forever,
as the sunsets roll over the waves.
And the last time someone saw you,
they say you looked just the same.
And behind you, in the sky -
A falling star
Gorgeous. Just gorgeous. We should be locked-up for listening to this.
After A Falling Star, Destination almost sounds out of place (I’d of put September Town on - but then I’m not in The Maths…*sigh*…I would of applied for membership but would of stood around looking at a wall of Moog saying “yeah but what do these wires do?” and short-circuiting all of Shoreditch…which might not of been a bad thing, but I digress…) and you’ll probably feel that way too, well, until the chorus arrives and those big sinister strings kick in at least. There’s lots of sinister strings on this album. And beauty. But mostly sinister strings.
And then it arrives - slowly, as if by a sunlit canal, passing slowly under the dipping willow trees and delivered by a canal boat sailored by Cluster – The Good Shadow. Last year at the Roundhouse, this was the ‘almost dropped my chips’ track. And still is. I’ve been living with an echo of this song in my head for almost a year now. Everyday. Everyday. It really is all I hoped it would be and more.
Complaint #1: The Good Shadow needs to be about 20 minutes long and released on 8-track so I can play it on loop. Forever.
Complaint #2: these basskick/facekick analogue frequencies should be on 180gsm double vinyl for full-on frequency overload!
Fact #1: You are gonna love this!
Fact #2: No, really - You are gonna love this!
