Reviews written between 2009 and 2014 were originally published on the now defunct Musosguide.com, which went offline in 2014. They are now hosted on this site.

Ben Frost – AURORA (2014)

Our century of global connection is still in its infancy, so the level of cultural crossover in the work of Ben Frost remains an exception. Frost, Australian, moved to Iceland in the mid-2000s to compose and perform. His electronic soundworlds have proved ideally suited to film, most recently on the soundtrack to Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin with alien seductress Scarlett Johannson. Meanwhile, albums such as Theory of Machines and By the Throat have mesmerised and disturbed. Now, from his northern fastness Frost is making music inspired by grim civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ben Frost visited the DRC with photographer Richard Mosse, to work on his film The Enclave. Accompanied by photographs which stained the green Congo hills blood red, The Enclave won Mosse this year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the Turner Prize of the camera world. A remarkably productive collaboration has also produced AURORA, an album of daydream/nightmare electronic exploration.

Frost has recently discussed, in an interview with Dan Barrow for The Wire, his intention of creating a passage through the layers of the physical world into a space beyond, something he sees in the paintings of Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko. AURORA is an album of disquiet and threat, with perhaps a serenity lurking somewhere far beyond. Frost is exceptionally direct with his listeners. Introductory track ‘Flex’ is a ritual passage through states of perception, whining and buzzing flashing by before ‘Nolan’ plunges into an intense electronic swell with a gentle beat that wavers in and out of focus. We are in the album’s inner space and it seems terrifying, apparently plagued with mosquitoes. However, despite the discomfort it is impossible to leave and the music demands to be heard. Something important is surely about to happen.

It is easy to believe Frost writes for cinema, creating soundscapes that are so real you could reach out and touch them. The sense of place is palpable, malign and enclosing. Threats fade and then rear again out of nowhere, the near-silence on much of “The Teeth Behind Kisses” giving way to howling and machete percussion on “Secant”. Frost’s live performances are well-known for deep quiet followed by bursts of extreme volume by, and his sensitivity to dynamics makes AURORA an album full of genuine surprises.

AURORA’s unpredictability is apparent in any attempt to describe its tracks. ‘Diphenyl Oxalate’ (the chemical used in glowsticks is the most alarming piece of discordant noise terror to be found outside of Scott Walker or Swans (which whom Frost has worked, naturally). ‘No Sorrowing’ on the other hand fades up what sounds like speaker hum until it becomes a celestial organ chord. ‘Sola Fide’ flirts briefly with drum and bass patterns and Laibach power-stomping, glimpsed below interference and atmospherics. Finally, ‘A Single Point of Blinding Light’ contains euphoric rave keyboards, a party taking place somewhere just out of reach. Frost’s music creates complete electronic worlds comparable with the work of Actress or Shackleton, but he moves further from the dance floor, shedding beats and adding extra layers of menace and reflecting visual language in his music. There is great originality and vision in Frost’s attempt to push through terrifying violence into abstract space. By no means an easy listen, AURORA is an album for our sophisticated, brutal times. 

Fennesz – Bécs (2014)

Many years after Endless Summer, his much loved 2001 album, Christian Fennesz has taken a trip back to the balmy 2000s. Bécs, his first new work since Black Sea six years ago, is a major mood shift and an explicit sequel to Endless Summer. But going back is not always the easy, or the sensible option, so what exactly is Fennesz up to?

The answer is not entirely clear. Fennesz uses guitar samples to build highly atmospheric layers, creating space by combining ambient, minimal and soundtrack electronic sounds. Endless Summer was music for mosquito-ridden beaches and smouldering campfires, melancholy with occasional forays into euphoria. Subsequent work took him into darker, more dissonant territory on Venice and Black Sea, as well as multiple collaborations with the electronic illuminati. 

The title Bécs, the Hungarian name for Vienna where Fennesz is based, hints at an underside, a lost alter ego. The feel of the album, though, is far more upbeat and produced that recent work, or indeed Endless Summer. The first track, ‘Static Kings’, uses the same bending, chiming guitar found on Underworld tracks. This is something of a concern, stadium electro not being the most subtle or rewarding of genres. The promised static is not really in evidence either, and the cheerful, Orbital melody seems inconsequential and dated. However, the mood shift rapidly on ‘The Liar’, which serves up heavy, pulsing, waves of guitar fuzz, returning rapidly to the abstraction Fennesz does best.

At the centre of Bécs is ‘Liminality’, which packs a proper punch. It features a ponderous, detuned guitar riff and drums from Tony Buck contending with a wall of static, pulling the track through ten minutes of storm and aftermath, a confident piece of electronic theatre. ‘Pallas Athene’, named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and civilised attributes in general, is an oasis of pastoral calm with an organ chord over a single bowed string, or its electronic equivalent. The title track is a cousin of ‘Liminality’, guitar and static building atmosphere, while ‘Sav’ features some delightful, crackling and buzzing from the modular synthesiser of Cédric Stevens, aka Acid Kirk. The final track, ‘Paroles’, has a similarly sunny mood to ‘Static Kings’ but is far more successful, combining a sense of humour (squeaky synths) with a gentle tune and a minor key.

The overall effect of Bécs is a little puzzling. In some places it feels like a retreat from the increasing subtlety and minimalism of Fennesz’s more recent albums, which were beautiful in their understatement and compelling because they had their own particular logic, independent of the music around them. Where Bécs heads into more conventional territory it sounds dated. Where it plays down the extensive production that has gone to make its sounds, it is a much more enthralling listen. The rewards from returning to the past are mixed, but there is enough hear to make it a qualified success.

Linda Perhacs – The Soul of All Natural Things (2014)

There could hardly be a more surprising release than Linda Perhacs’ new album. If Elvis had put out a press release calmly announcing he would be returning to the recording studio, it would only be marginally more of a bombshell. It is her second album, and the first was released 44 years ago. During the intervening decades, Perhacs left the music scene completely and spent her working life as a Californian dentist. Now, in her late 60s at least, Perhacs has belatedly resumed a career that no-one, least of all her, imagined she had.

Album no.1, Parallelograms, was released in 1970 and, hampered by pressing issues and complete public indifference, vanished without trace. Perhacs wrote it off and moved from the hippy to the dentistry scene. However, while the years passed Parallelograms reputation as a lost classic grew. When the internet age arrived the brand of psych-folk to which Perhacs partly belonged became intensely fashionable, and past decades were trawled for lost artists. Devendra Banhart, also involved in the re-emergence of the similarly fragile, forgotten Vashti Bunyan, invited Perhacs to sing backing vocals on ‘Freely’, included on his 2007 album Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.

Backing vocals are one thing but touring, as Linda Perhacs did last year leaving the US for the first time in her life, and recording new material is quite something else. Last year’s concerts were emotional, the audience astonished at the physical presence of someone they had never expected to see. She was backed by a group of younger LA musicians, with whom she seemed to have found both recognition and musical excitement. There was more than a touch of naivety about the way she not only failed to play most of the songs from her only album, after a 40-year wait, but also gave each of her band in turn a slot to sing their own material. However, Perhacs owes nobody anything, and her decision to record again is remarkable. 

Parallelograms is a psychedelic masterpiece, full of West Coast visions crooned in a clear, low, extremely intimate voice. Perhaps due to decades of rest, Perhacs’ voice remains entirely distinctive- older and deeper, but unmistakeable. In many ways The Sound of All Natural Things picks up where she left off, as though she had always meant to sing these songs. The title alone makes it clear that little has changed, and that Perhacs is still as Californian in outlook as the meadow-strolling, cloud-staring hippy chick on the Parallelograms cover.

Remarkably Perhacs, perhaps experiencing a form of synaesthesia, sees her songs in the sky. She reads the patterns and they become music. This explains the eerie calm and the open-air feel of her songs, as well as the predominance of clouds, winds, trees and the laws of nature. The title track animates nature as an entity, announcing that “it breathes, it breathes within”. The wind speaks and “It’s as if all the thunder in all the universe heard his cry / Peace, be still.” It is hard to believe this song was recorded last year, or indeed this century.

The Sound of the Natural Universe is not perfect. In places it tips over into a fey preachiness that represents less tolerable aspects of the 1960s. ‘Children’ tells us “Children would say it’s the only way to be / It’s a wisdom they have and they’re here to show us the way.” ‘Immunity’ risk banality in its social analysis that “Every day we work a little harder, harder / Every day we work a little more.”

However, for the most part this album is the most unlikely masterpiece. Its songs are written with total confidence, ranging from the infectious, funky groove of ‘Intensity’ to the remarkable Joni Mitchell-esque vocals on ‘Daybreak’. ‘Prisms of Glass’ is a counterpoint to the prismatic title song on Parallelograms, inhabited by visions of geometry, spirals and circles and swirling maracas. The final track, ‘Song of the Planets’, is the kind of mystical extravaganza restricted these days to archive psychedelic compilations. The spheres sing, Perhacs floats calmly into space, and a stoned voiceover tells us the planets can bring us peace and demands “What will your answer be, men of earth?” At this point it becomes impossible to remember what we did during the 44 years we waited for Linda Perhacs to finish what she started.

Simon and Garfunkel – The Complete Albums Collection (2014)

Simon and Garfunkel may have produced five studio albums, four live albums and one soundtrack, but all have played second fiddle to the astonishing success of their Greatest Hits collection. Released in 1972, it sold fourteen million copies, sealing Simon and Garfunkel’s status as the ultimate singles band. The re-release of their full catalogue, remastered as a box set (including Greatest Hits) is a good chance for a spot of re-evaluation. Have the ultimate odd couple been unjustly remembered for just fourteen classic songs?

Simon and Garfunkel exist to a great extent in their own musical and cultural space. Their songs, from ‘Scarborough Fair’ to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, are so well known and universally popular as to have blended with the cultural narrative of their time. It is very difficult to hear ‘Mrs. Robinson’ or ‘I Am A Rock’ or ‘59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)’ afresh, and almost impossible to separate them from personal associations and context. Simon and Garfunkel’s collaboration was a mere six years long, beginning with Wednesday Morning 3AM (1964) and ending with Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) – although sadly there is no room here for evidence of their previous existence as Tom and Jerry. However, while bands such as The Beatles squeezed an epic journey of psychedelic self-discovery and meltdown into the second half of the ‘60s, Simon and Garfunkel did no such thing. They emerged at the other end of their career sounding pretty much the same as they always had, with the addition of a discrete band and a piano ballad or two.

The S&G formula is in place from the first track (‘You Can Tell the World’ – a gospel cover with harmonies-and-acoustic-guitar makeover) to the last (‘Song for the Asking’ – harmonies and guitar, less cheerful). For Paul and Art there was to be no discovery of mind-expanding new sounds, no free-form 10-minute wig-outs, and no proto-heavy metal. Instead, each album consistently delivered three or more classics built on their trademark sound. The results were often exceptionally effective, and their songbook features both undeniable, era-defining music such ‘Sound of Silence’ and distinctive, deceptive songs about a changing America such as… well ‘America’.

There is a shift in repertoire from the early days. Wednesday Morning 3AM includes five covers and a traditional song, and there is an emphasis on explicit protest song. It features three of the best tracks missing from Greatest Hits: ‘He Was My Brother’, an impressive civil rights song written by Simon; ‘Bleecker Street’, one of his effortlessly atmospheric New York songs with weird echoes of John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Beasley Street’; and ‘Sparrow’, a neo-folk earth song. Classics aside, Sounds of Silence features an unsuccessful shift into ‘Eleanor Rigby’-esque social realism, with ‘Richard Cory’ and ‘A Most Peculiar Man’, and an odd mash-up of ‘Wednesday Morning 3AM’ and Davy Graham’s finger-picking standard, ‘Anji’.

The third and fourth records are the weakest. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme contains ‘Scarborough Fair’, perhaps their most over-rated track, which strips the pagan eeriness and the imperfections from Martin Carthy’s version and serves it up as comfort listening. Other songs include ‘The Dangling Conversation’, which Art Garfunkel thought was pretentious. He was right. Lines such as “We sit and drink our coffee / Couched in our indifference” have not stood the test of time. Follow-up, Bookends, contains its quota of classics: ‘America’, ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’, ‘Old Friends’. However, there are also the intolerably quirky ‘Punky’s Dilemma’, the equally annoying ‘At the Zoo’, and ‘Voices of Old People’, which is literally just that. 

Final studio album, Bridge Over Troubled Water, is the one everyone’s parents owned, but it is an uneven experience. ‘The Boxer’ is irresistible, with its combination of rumbling brass, epic drums and absurd self-dramatisation (‘the boxer’… he’s Paul Simon!). ‘The Only Living Boy in New York’ is another surprising omission from ‘Greatest Hits’, although perhaps it sounded too much like Simon solo material. ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ itself is impossibly familiar. Other tracks include not one but two ill-advised comedy blues songs (‘Baby Driver’ and ‘Keep the Customer Satisfied’), and the ludicrous ‘So Long Frank Lloyd Wright’, apparently S&G’s break-up song. 

Of the remaining albums in this box-set, The Graduate soundtrack is only notable for ‘Mrs Robinson’. The four live albums that make up the remainder of the S&G discography cover their career from Live 1969 to 2004’s reunion album, Old Friends in Concert. They are generally of interest to enthusiasts, with songs sounding at their best in the studio. The Concert in Central Park (1982) is an intriguing artefact, with Paul Simon audibly taken aback by the size of the half-million strong audience. Musically, S&G were not happy with their performances, but the recording includes the duo playing on a number of Simon solo tracks, including ‘Me and Julio Down in the Schoolyard’. Live from New York 1967 is the live album that exudes the most energy, and contains the non-album civil rights track “A Church is Burning”. 

By spreading their best songs evenly through their output, Paul and Art made their Greatest Hits an essential purchase. Their catalogue reveals a truer picture of the Simon and Garfunkel phenomenon, ups and downs, hits and misses. Perhaps listening to the albums is the only real way to escape the Greatest Hits stranglehold and see the pair as they really were, warts and all.

Wye Oak – Shriek (2014)

Wye Oak hit a high point with their third album, Civilian, which was released in 2011 and gathered a lot of affection. It appealed very widely, mixing acoustic Americana, shoegazing guitars, Low and Yo La Tengo dynamics, and a tuneful charm of its own. It was a very appealing mix, and the sound of a band finding a place and relaxing into its groove. However, Wye Oak are not the kind of band to stick to the straight path, and they have changed their approach and upped their game for their much anticipated follow-up album.

The opening notes of Shriek are picked out on a jazzed-up synthesiser and suggest a radical change of direction. While further listening confirms that Wye Oak have swapped the acoustic guitar for electric bass and added 80s revival synth, the basic components are unchanged. Their sound comes from just two people – Jenn Wasner who sings and plays guitar – a bass on Shriek, and Andy Stack on keyboards and drums, which he plays simultaneously. Together they make a complex, multi-layered sound which underpins some irresistibly poppy tunes.  

The first half of the album also contains its best tracks. ‘Before’, floating on startled, staccato keys, merges dreams and reality. Title track ‘Shriek’ is a tour-de-force. From the cawing of crows that heralds a bustling keyboard melody, to the offbeat drums, it is a frantic carnival of sounds. Wasner’s vocals are deliciously peculiar, her vowels stretched and drawn tight over the squirming synths. The lyrics, addressed to a lover, are stilted like an android attempting to understand human relations, with a mysterious chorus that proclaims “When I see at will, I will/ I know I know I feel no information/ Come follow how it seems in pleasant dreams.” Wasner’s pronunciation of “pleasant” is ridiculously mannered and oddly compelling.  

If ‘Shriek’ has strange, addictive qualities ‘The Tower’ goes one better, with a melody that arrives unbidden and will not go away, and a vast, rumbling bass synth line that tips the track towards epic balladeering territory. If there is a hint of Fleetwood Mac about both the unrestrained, crashing, bass-driven keyboards and the violin thrown in for good measure, it is hard to hold it against Wye Oak. The fairytale lyrics also suggest that this is probably not to be taken too seriously, but just enjoyed.

Shriek peaks early with ‘Glory’, which has a tremulous keyboard squawks under a towering, tempestuous bassline. Stack delivers an effects solo worthy of Tangerine Dream – late Tangerine Dream – and Wasner throws herself at the vocals with breathless gusto. It sounds as though she’s describing a Salvador Dalí painting, “Until the heat of day is seared / I watch the clock as it turns backwards / I see the water on the hills”.

It is hard to keep the pace up for a full ten tracks, and the later songs that stand out are those that ease off the throttle. ‘School of Eyes’ is calm, relatively, with Stack’s keyboards threatening to explode but managing to hold off while Wasner sings with the purity of Franҫoise Hardy. ‘I Know the Law’ is bluesy and reflective, closer than any other track to the style of Civilian. The final track, ‘Logic of Color’, treads a fine line between absurd lyrics – “The logic of color / the color of your skin / the color of your eyes” – even more absurd keyboards, and a charm that somehow lets them get away with it.

Wye Oak have produced an album that is both irresistible and confounding, mixing unforgettable tunes with cheerful self-indulgence. Their creativity is fiercely focussed, to the extent that Wasner and Stack appeared to have actually transported themselves back to 1984. However, Shriek is no ventriloquist act but an album that will have listeners coming back again and again for just one more listen.