Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury – Ex_Machina Soundtrack (2015)

The last time Bristol pair Geoff Barrow, of Portishead and Beak>, and film composer Ben Salisbury tried their hands at a soundtrack, it broke loose from its film and strutted away. Drokk was written as a notional soundtrack to the 2012 Judge Dredd film, Mega-City One. In fact it was too complete a soundscape to exist in the background of anything, summoning up rather than complementing the action. It was the film, full of deeply atmospheric electronics and the unashamed influence of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

Now Barrow and Salisbury have a real soundtrack on their hands. They have completed the music for Ex Machina, an Alex Garland written and directed sci-fi released this week. Domhnall Gleeson is assigned to check the human qualities of alluring robot, Alicia Vikander. With the soundtrack out at the same time as the film, the main question is how well it works as standalone music, regardless of its role on screen. The answer, fortunately, is very well indeed. The tone of Ex Machina is different to Drokk, more subdued, less assertive, less conclusive – necessary for a functional soundtrack – but it operates as a distinctive, absorbing set of tracks. A full ten bonus tracks are included, half the album, which do not feature in the film.

The tracks are chilly, laboratory specimens, with titles such as ‘The Turing Test’, ‘Bunsen Burner’ and ‘Masks’. They build slow, shimmering layers of synthesised sound, as for example on ‘Skin’, which increases in volume over five minutes to reach a rush of interference reminiscent of a satellite link beaming a rocket launch. Shivering gongs and lurking menace dominate ‘Watching’, and then a strange, organic pulse emerges in the background. Something is alive! On Hacking/Cutting’ cymbals imitate the thin buzz of a surgical saw. ‘I Am Become Death’ channels Robert Oppenheimer in the most minimal piece of all, in which oscillating electronics shelter behind thick glass from a muffled atomic blast. ‘Bunsen Burner’ comes closest to the spirit of Drokk, but its rich, vintage synth chords are detached and eerie. 

Ex Machina sounds like another world, once in which invokes 50s sci-fi films and 70s television soundtracks exist as faint memories. The music floats free, cocooned from the unsettling events and disturbing sights clearly visible through the laboratory door. 

Laura Cannell – Beneath Swooping Talons

If you didn’t realise you needed the ancient tones of the double recorder, or the deep groan of the over-bowed violin in your life, Laura Cannell’s new album will enlighten you. Appearing over the long horizons of East Anglian fens, last year’s Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth made her name instantly as an unconventional, remarkably original musician. Cannell plays as though the dark soil she belongs to has burst into song. But, despite her affinity for rarely heard instruments, she is a contemporary composer improvising from traditional tunes. Although she clearly loves medieval music – its simplicity, its clarity, its tendency to leap from the harsh and the sweet – these tunes could not have been written five hundred years ago. They belong to our time, unmistakably urgent and experimental, played as though in dialogue with ancestors under the earth.

The opening track, “All the Land Ablaze”, suggests the sun rising over the Fens with expressive, stabbing fiddle phrases. It is optimistic and beautiful, but also restless and a little disconcerting. From the start, Beneath Swooping Talons side-steps easy classification. The underlying melody sounds like plainsong, but it is played in a style that is almost Balkan. It is undeniably modern composition, but entirely accessible too. This instantly recognisable sound, both new and old, is what made Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth such a success. 

Beneath Swooping Talons takes Cannell’s music a stage further, as she pushes into deeper, stranger territory. “Deer Barks” does exactly what the title suggest, Cannell’s recorder trilling like a frightened beast, ululating across the wintry fields. “The Cathedral of the Marshes”, an alternative name for Ely Cathedral, sees the fiddle impersonating a church organ, pressing long, sonorous chords which break up as the bow catches, as though being broadcast on a dying frequency.

By the time we reach “Be Not Afeard”, a quote from The Tempest which concludes “The isle is full of strange noises”, it is hard to believe that all the music are hearing can be coming from one musician. Cannell’s over-bowing technique, loosening the bow hairs so that they cling to the strings, creates a drone effect a little like a bagpipe. The isle, in this case presumably the Isle of Ely, is a whirl of melancholy polyphony. “Conversing in a Dream” shows off the capabilities of the amazing double recorder, which looks like two recorders stuck together at the mouth piece and sounds like an entire troupe of 14th century entertainers. “Cantiga” – based on medieval Portuguese lyric poetry – is a jaunty wedding dance of a piece, while the final track, “Born from the Soil”, mixes the violin’s low tones into the black Cambridgeshire peat. 

Laura Cannell says that “We build our own traditions… a place where we can be entirely ourselves”. She describes her music perfectly – at once familiar and strange, a collection of particular sounds that could only have come from her. She has created something that is truly original and therefore deeply satisfying, a special album.

The Fall – Sub-Lingual Tablet (2015)

No one ever went broke underestimating the conservatism of the electorate, or the ability of The Fall to keep on going. Mark E. Smith and his current set of friends are now up to their 31st studio album, relentlessly pursuing a discography that threatens to outlast time itself. However, The Fall’s apparent permanence could be one of their toughest challenges. When a combustible, shifting collective becomes a conventional band, with a line-up unchanged in six years, what keeps them interesting? The release of Sub-Lingual Tablet has seen reviewers accuse Smith of becoming a tribute act to himself. So is there a reason to listen to this Fall album, rather than the multiple alternative choices?

Smith has yet to give an interview revealing how much he hates Sub-Lingual Tablet, as he did for album no.29 (Ersatz GB), nor has he claimed it is will “terrify people”, as he did for no.30 (Re-mit). Instead, the new album seems more confident and importantly, consistent, than for some time. It is also very funny. The opener, ‘Venice with the Girls’, is a series of semi-comprehensible complaints which seem to be about someone being ditched in favour of a girls’ holiday, while ‘Quit iPhone’ channels fury and cultural critique. The end result, however, with Smith croaking a chorus of “Why don’t you leave alone / why don’t you quit iPhone / aaarrrr…” is most comical. Meanwhile ‘Junger Cloth’, a satisfying piece of Fall grind, seems to be a rant directed at poor typography.

It is not all impotent rage though – there are strong tracks to stand with some of the best The Fall have to offer. ‘Dedication not Medication’ is an anti-prescription incantation with rattling, mesmeric bass. While it is directed at Pierce Brosnan is unclear. ‘Black Roof’ is a brief, eerily melodic, psychedelic scramble. “Auto-Chip 2014-2016” is ten-minutes of motorik entertainment with soaring guitar lines, and “Pledge!”, lyrics incomprehensible but quite possibly about furniture polish, has delightfully fuzzy garage keyboards.

Not everything is a success, particularly the cover of ‘Stout Man’ by the Stooges which features a frantic impression of Captain Beefheart. However, Sub-Lingual Tablet not only has many of the ingredients that brings Fall fans back for more and more, it also stands out from the band’s recent recordings. It is comfortably The Fall album of the decade, although there will doubtless be another one along soon. 

Low – Ones and Sixes (2015)

Twenty-two years and 11 albums into their career, Low are confronting the unavoidable reality that they are still going. Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk, the world’s coolest Mormons do not, they admit, do long-term planning. Nevertheless, by taking it one album at a time they have outlasted most of their contemporaries. In their new release, Ones and Sixes, the lyrics constantly return to themes of getting on and getting by, despite the strains, the stresses and the misunderstandings. The high throws and the low throws even out. The dividing line between Parker and Sparhawk’s real marriage and their musical world is fuzzy, but the theme is unflinching introspection and the result is both unassuming and dramatic. 

Despite their long history Low have, to some extent, slipped beneath the radar. Their minimal musical approach sounded, right from the start, like music beyond time and fashion. However, their unmistakable template – Mimi and Alan’s eerie, exquisite harmonies counterpointed by droning guitar and pounding tom-toms – means that any new musical element seems seismic. Keyboards, banjos, and unexpected effects have found their way into the music, and recent albums have developed their own take on the Low sound. The Invisible Way (2013) was brooding and almost acoustic at times, its lyrics full of barbed digs. Before that, C’mon (2011), with a sardonically upbeat pop title, featured Neil Young-esque ragged guitar distortion and songs full of wide spaces. On Ones and Sixes the sound is part classic, part new model Low, with the production is turned up several notches beyond anything previously attempted.

Songs such as first track, ‘Gentle’, surprise with crunching electro beats that are most un-slowcore. Even Parker’s trademark vocal has been given the treatment, fading, echoing and sliding from speaker to speaker. Single ‘No Comprende’ uses equally pounding electronic percussion, bass beats exploding like depth charges under Sparhawk’s crooning vocal combing relationship miscommunication with household annoyances (“You can’t just throw it in the trailer/
You’ve got to stack it so it’s stable”). Elsewhere the themes are developed. ‘Lies’, which starts like a thriller – “When they found you on the edge of the road / You had a pistol underneath your coat” – ends as an extended domestic. The centrepiece is ‘What Part of Me Don’t You Know’, cymbals and keyboards accentuating the tension as Mimi and Alan sing “What part of me don’t you own” in perfect harmony. It sounds as though there is one singer but two voices. They get to let their hair down too on ‘Landslide’, nearly ten minutes of lyric-free vocalising over rumbling, floor-shaking bass.

Ones and Sixes is a strong album, grabbing its place immediately in the Low canon. Tracks are almost all consistently strong and, although the updated production style may not appeal to all, the songs hit hard. Parker and Sparhawk’s writing is open and touching, and the final track ‘DJ’, with its conclusion that “We find each other on the edge”, leaves us in no doubt about the strength of their personal and musical partnership. 

Of Montreal – Aureate Gloom (2015)

Aureate Gloom is not an album to leave anything to doubt. Like Of Montreal‘s twelve previous albums, this latest features a cover that lovingly, obsessively pastiches the likes of The Incredible String Band. It has a title that could mocks hazy, early 70s pretension. Opening track, ‘Bassem Sabry’, arrives in a barrage of guitars pretending to be jets landing, ‘Back in the USSR’-style, and rolls into a funk-laden slice of melodrama that sounds like an exercise in replicating Roxy Music. 

In fact, the track is a tribute to Egyptian freedom of speech blogger and activist Sabry, who died tragically in 2014. Singer and writer Kevin Barnes’ identification with those who stand up to oppression is admirable, and fits closely with his outsider status (he sings as a reincarnated 70s glam singer called Georgie Fruit). However, the problems with Aureate Gloom are encapsulated in this song which distracts entirely from its themes with relentless layers of styling, lyrics filtered through jabbing, effects-laden guitars that seem to be part of an elaborate exercise in pastiche. On previous albums, since Georgie’s arrival on 2007’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? the funk tributes and the perverse retreat into the past have made some sense. However, the layered ironies of Aureate Gloom prove impossible to take seriously and, some of the time at least, this seems to be what Barnes is asking. It as though Of Montreal are determined to hide their bushel under a gigantic lava lamp, and this is only track one.  

The rest of the album delivers a great deal more of the same . Stylistically, there is little variation and no deviation from the lush, decadent sound of forty years ago. That is not to say that this music isn’t entertaining. There is fun to be had in juggling the transition from late era psychedelia into funk and glam rock, and playing with the sounds that hypnotised a generation. However, the fun is mostly being enjoyed by the band. Artists such as St. Vincent and Fiery Furnaces spring to mind throughout Aureate Gloom, but where Annie Clark and the Friedburgers take the era as a jumping off point for something that sounds new, Of Montreal‘s songs insist on sounding like something else.

Sometimes a general familiarity persists, but on some tracks the source material becomes alarmingly apparent. ‘Virgilian Lots’ has a nagging familiarity, a certain, unmistakable Brummie aura. It soon becomes clear that the songs owes plenty to ‘Mr Blue Sky’, a similarity tough to unhear when the instrumentation, effects and vocal style are all screaming “ELO!” at the listener.

Other tracks try the patience of the listener before they begin, with titles including ‘Apollyon of Blue Room’, ‘Empyrean Abattoir’ and  ‘Cthonian Dirge for Uruk the Other’. These are in fact deeply personal songs, telling troubling stories about unhappy relationships and times that turned sour. The latter track suffers a heavy meltdown halfway through, hinting at deeper levels of psychedelic exploration that never really materialise. Of Montreal know their music, they can write nagging tunes and they can certainly create an atmosphere, but it is not at all clear that their chosen song-writing style allows them to say anything different, or to tell us why we should be listening.