Catching The Waves

Knit One, Pearl Two

So, being an internet hipster, you'll be wanting a bit of the ol' boom-bap. Rise from your slumbers and emit a half-baked "yay", for fLako (German beats via Berlin & London) and Noir (New Orleans rap) have combined to produce Pearls, a six-track EP released by the righteously funky Kwatro netlabel.

Disappointingly, only two one of the tracks are is available to hear outside of the zipped free full album. Kwatro are so hip it hurts, but it's awkward to get hold of their music. Pearls is available via a zShare account, which will strike fear into anyone not particularly au fait with the net - like my good self. It's ostensibly a matter of following the download instructions, but that's not the point. Netlabels, trust me on this: we surfers (ok, me) are mostly simpletons - if you want your releases to be heard, make it easy for visitors to download them. Netlabels with a one-click download system are the way to go, though I'd like to make it clear that I'm extremely grateful to all and sundry for the free music. End of moan. Are we still friends? Handshakes? Hugs? How about a quick -

*slap*

Sorry. I got carried away.

Back to the sounds: Milky Way is a low-key tale of crime and commerce backed by fLako's understated rhythm and smooth soul; Paparazzi sees a Hammond organ massage a dreamy background vocal and a gentle beat before Noir crashes in, as rappers do, with a snare drum and his opinion of fame and fortune. Edit: Paparazzi is now available only as part of the zipped album file. Don't hit me.

fLako x Noir - Milky Way by flako

While fair tracks, I would have chosen some of the other four on the EP to entice listeners, particularly Cosmic Theory and the head-nodding wOoop, the latter title doubling up for the sound you'll make when the beat drops. None of these outings are longer than three minutes so there's little chance of the beats outstaying their welcome.

Now, you might be one of the many who love hip-hop and find nothing more immediately satisfying than a dusty drum-beat that's tighter than my budget, but who ...hate rap. C'mon, own up. Noir makes a good job of spittin' (Yeah, kids. CTW is down with the, er, lingo) on Pearls, but, like it or not, some people want to get to the main course without interference from a maitre'd. What to do, what to do? I know, let's see if fLako can help to find us some beats that don't feature bad language and...

Sigh. Still, that's the only swearword on the whole fucking album, wherein you'll find twenty (Recession? What recession?) snippets of instrumental hip-hop goodness. Most of the twenty tracks on The First Space Shit On The Moon are less than two minutes long, yet they're not just extended loops; they're instrumental hip-hop miniatures that are wonderfully varied, from the rankin' Shake It Harder to the slinky Crying On The In. What vocals there are consist of the merest snippets that act as a musical counterpoint rather than the dominant theme. Whether you're a hip-hop listener or producer, there's a lot to enjoy and learn from. How much variety is there among this fistful of beats? Let a master wordsmith paraphrase for you:

All right, we got white boom-bap, black boom-bap, Spanish boom-bap, yellow boom-bap, we got hot boom-bap, cold boom-bap, we got wet boom-bap, we got [sniffs] smelly boom-bap, we got hairy boom-bap, bloody boom-bap, we got snappin' boom-bap, we got silk boom-bap, velvet boom-bap, Naugahyde boom-bap, we even got horse boom-bap, dog boom-bap, chicken boom-bap! Come on, you want boom-bap, come on in, boom-bap lovers! If we don't got it, you don't want it! Come on in, boom-bap lovers!

You can't beat Shakespeare.

But there's a small problem. You've guessed it - only two tracks to hear outside of the free zipped album. These are Sparkling Dust, a cheerful, dub-ish slice of boom-bap, and Desert Ride, a dusty beat with a hint of rock music - a track that'll hint at the variety to be found on The First, etc. Again, they're not the tracks I'd have chosen, but we all know that I am to discernment what ice-cream is to athleticism.

fLako Sparkling Dust by flako fLako Desert Ride by flako

The loose, almost sloshed, nature of some of the rhythms and synth sounds remind me of the previously reviewed Comfort Fit, whose new commercial release, Polyshufflez LP, is available from Tokyo Dawn Records. (Incidentally, TD's 24-carat back catalogue contains an almost unknown entity: free and genuinely good hip-hop. Run, Forrest, run.)

My thanks to the good volk at the always superb Phlow, where one of their many album discussion threads pointed me to fLako. So, if you don't mind braving the aforementioned pestilential download scheme, please scoop up these two lovely slices of beat-based distraction from real life.  Stick your chest out and have a go. After all, it's one small shit for man...

fLako x Noir - Pearls (scroll down the page, find the download link, go to zShare, press "download" and wait 50 seconds. Bleurgh.)

fLako – The First Space Shit On The Moon (straight to the zShare link)

fLako and Noir on MySpace.

Kwatro netlabel

Enjoy It While It Lasts

You'll see from the title of his quirky album that QuarterBIT, a talented cove from sultry Barcelona, has loosed his floe of ambient on the icy waters of the internet without so much as a glance at his spell-checker. Ah me. You should know by now that free music can't afford sub-editors. Besides, this is the internet; anyone can make a tipo typo.

There's not much point in listening to this on your daily commute unless you have high-quality noise-cancelling headphones. The Antartica Files is a pure ambient album, by which I mean that it's all field recordings, so it'll get bullied by extraneous real-life ambient sounds like planes, trains and automobiles. And other John Hughes films.

Hey, where do you think you're going? Come back here, buster. Listen up. I know it's ambient. I know it won't make your rump do the rumba. Nevertheless, if you're feeling a bit jaded about music or you love sounds for their own sake, try one track - then I'll let you go. As you'll hear, there are few more beautiful sounds in this world than church bells, especially the deep, round, full chimes that appear towards the end of Church. Lovely.

QuarterBIT - Church

Just about the only track here that sounds overtly manipulated is Harbor Harmonic, where seagulls compete to see whose mournful screams sound most like a mellow Eddie Van Halen. It's either a marvellous layering of different recordings, some tasteful pitch automation, or Hitchcock was right and the birds are up to something.

QuarterBIT - Harbor Harmonic

This being ambient, there's an obligatory inclusion of crashing waves. Most ambient beach recordings tend to concentrate on the higher frequencies; not so in Antarctica Surf (correct spelling!), where you'll feel the weight of hundreds of tons of ice-cold water pound a pebbly shore.

Parade features some jolly car horns and a trad jazz band that will go in your right ear and out your left like a hot knife through ICan'tBelieveMyGreyMatterIsSoPliable Butter.

A female relative of mine (who has dropped a couple of ankle-biters) says this type of album is good for someone who is with child. Perhaps she's right. Mind you, I think she was listening to something a bit more vigorous a few months earlier.

There are so many details here that will tickle the tired ear: a motorboat that sounds like a wallowing warthog; a droning fly; snatches of conversation; footfalls; querulous sheep, a clanking gate (a nice way to end the track Sheep); and water, water, everywhere, be it running water (At The Glacier), lapping waves & bubbling streams (The Ice Island) or churning, frothy pools (The Waterfall).

I hope the above verbiage gives you an idea of what to expect. I suggest you find a quiet corner, press “play” and let the magic of audio transport you to everyday but wondrous places around the world. If you need more of the same, stick your head out of a window and listen anew.

There will be some strange people out there who insist that music should include esoteric things like instruments, notes, melodies and rhythms. Yeah, I know; weird. Still, CTW is a fat broad church so I've done something startling and included a second album for your delectation.

This classy compilation of burgeoning ambient artists is the most recent product from the same label, PublicSpaces Lab, that released The Antartica Files. As this is not a proper album review, it's fitting that the album is named Ceci n'est pas une pipe. The sound quality is excellent throughout, there are some winning tracks lodged between the plethora of ambient sounds and drones, and four dimensions (time & space) and the truth (laziness) are forcing me to cut this review far too short.

Somio has pulled a flanker with San Feliz, a track inspired by numerous sojourns to northern Spain. It's far too upbeat, cheery and hip to be described as ambient. But we won't complain, will we?

Somio - San Feliz

And despite lettering that's driving my Anglo-Saxon keyboard round the bend, Løser's Núr is definitely worth a listen. The unimportant stuff: drones, trip-hop, ethereal vocals, camera noises. The important stuff: it's good. If you like ambient-ish downtempo grooves with a dash of electronica, this'll be your pint of porter.

Løser - Núr

Not bad, hmm? Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe also comes with an excellent booklet that gives lots of information about the contributing artists, including one QuarterBIT. And that's it. C'est tout. Run along, gang. You might get some music next time.

QuarterBIT – The Antartica Files (link to zipped album)

QuarterBIT on MySpace

Various Artists – Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe (link to zipped album)

PublicSpaces Lab netlabel

Nice Legs; Shame About The Face

Yes, that is an actual (and full-size) album cover. Yikes. Moving swiftly on, pray place your head between two large loudspeakers and say “wibble”, for Max Cavalerra is here to shatter your earwax with five tracks of bangin' techno.

The majority of Cavalerra's The Bigger, The Better EP eschews the groovy complexity of minimal for more straightforward dance beats: the holy trinity of snare, kick and hi-hat stick closely together and move in a group from “fast” down to “take a breather” and back up to “crush the dance floor”. To illustrate, allow me to recommend  the immensely heavy opening track, Impact, wherein various noises off reverberate around a lone synth stab and a simple yet irresistibly catchy kick/snare/bass combo. Play it on a meaty sound system and watch your windows wobble.

Max Cavalerra - Impact

Similarly, the follow-up, Function, uses a "melody" consisting of just the one bass note repeated endlessly. Swathes of white noise and high-speed flummery threaten to swamp the relentless techno beat but that aforementioned religious trio keeps on keeping on. Hey, it's techminimalhousedance. What did you expect, a fugue?

In Memory of Violett is actually more, er, minimal than techno. (Self-contradiction is my speciality. It's not. It is, really. No, it ain't.) Some synths waft about in a chilled-out manner and make good use of the aural spatial field, although the intricate percussion still runs on rails. Like the rest of the album, it confirms CTW's well-known First Law of Dance Music.*

Energetic, forthright, insistent: all adjectives that apply not only to CTW's manly odour but also to 1000ccm's six and a half minutes. I must report that this tech-house track is full of the usual culprits. Yep, expect bass drops, low-passed breakdowns, hi-hats that move your noggin back and forth and the odd piquant vocal snippet. It's not overly original, but nor are olives - and I love olives.

Using the same punctuation-notation as a questionable but interesting chess move⁺, What The Bell?! is a track that shows Cavalerra's production chops. Surprise, surprise, there's some delicate chimey stuff nestling in the background of the seemingly well-mannered minimal-tech that constitutes the track's first half, but the chief attraction is the introduction of a chewy, electro-acid synth line that gets all glitchy over its bad self. It reminds me of the electro badass rather super Tom Neville. This is a good thing.

Right, it's time for me to skip gaily through the daisy-drenched uplands of free netmusic only to return  at an unspecified time and waistline measurement. In the meantime, I suggest you dump The Bigger, The Better in your mp3 player, swap its egregious album cover for a picture of Beyoncé/Britney/The Hoff/Alastair Sim, and wait for your headphones to flap up like the ears of a surprised basset hound. Netlabel music can have that effect.

Please think about sending a "thank you" email to Max, who is probably busy DJ-ing Munich to a standstill, and/or Broque.de netlabel, which should be thinking hard about adding a PayPal "tips" button to its whiter-than-white website. Thank them for all the lovely sounds. But not the pictures.

Max Cavalerra - The Bigger, The Better (link to zipped album & individual files)

Maxcavalerra.com

Broque.de netlabel

*All dance tracks are a third too long. You know it's true.

+Knowledge of this stuff has not affected my love-god status in the slightest.

Whatever Floats Your Boat

Sorry about the small album cover. Come on, you've missed my traditional difficulties with graphics, haven't you? At least there are waves.

Paper Navy is a four-piece band from near Nashville, Tennessee, that draws its inspiration from be brave, you can do this Country & Western and American pop from the 70s. I think they've drawn their instrumentation from the past, too, because there's not a whiff of a synth, digital effect or anything with a microchip in it. Doctor Who could smuggle All Grown Up into a Nashville record shop circa 1972 and no-one would be any the wiser.

Pleasingly for those of us with OCD, today's recommended track, Swan Song, adheres to its title and is the last track on All Grown Up. It's a charming, foot-tapping folk song with a surprisingly bleak attitude and a jaunty whistled riff that will rest awhile in your cortex before continuing its search for a spaghetti western it can call home. (Somewhere, Sergio Leone is gnashing his teeth in frustration.) Have a listen via the first appearance at CTW of Bandcamp's media player:

(Apologies to feed readers: Google Reader hates me. Please visit the link at the end of the review or visit CTW and get grimy.) Apart from being unable to resist whistling that riff for the rest of the week, you'll notice from the lyrics that there's none of that twee "my jiggling dashboard Jesus will guide me through the roadworks of life" C&W nonsense. (Please note, anonymous angry internet person, that CTW respects all creeds from devout to aetheistic. I'm so fluffy.) Instead, All Grown Up takes an existentialist but pragmatic view of life. For instance, I Can't Read essays the following thought: Do we persist out of fear/The afterlife ever near/I'd be remiss were I not a critic/So God save the cynic.

The title song is a lament for childhood by someone who isn't too keen on adulthood. It's child-like guitars, rocking singalong chorus and Beatles-ish backing vocals will soon have you singing All Grown Up at work, shortly before you curl up in a foetal position and force the boss to call social services. But I regress digress.

If you're a fan of the album Homecoming by that quintessentially American folk-rock band of the 70s, America, then make a bee-line for Factories, where Shawn Anfinson's folky vocal harmonies about bitter-sweet love and longing should remind you strongly of that classic bit of, er, Americana.

Make Time is just about the simplest, most everyday love song I've ever heard. How's this for a lack of artifice: I'm not a superstar/but I can cut the grass and clean the car/And I'll make time for you/I love the woman I'm married to. That's either the apogee or the death of romance. Answers on a postcard, please.

To save this review turning into a boring list of song descriptions, allow me to be lazy inform you that  in All Grown Up, Paper Navy have produced an album that is more than the sum of its twangy Telecaster-laden parts; it's a beautifully produced set of hummable songs that display a questioning sensibility about modern life. Not all albums need the latest whiz-bang effects to make their point: music fans know that there'll always be a place for good melodies, harmonies and lyrics, pure and not so simple. Now, having avoided doing my job properly given this lovely album a thorough reviewing, it falls to CTW to encourage you to send some "thank you" emails to Paper Navy and ask Shawn how the band managed to record the tracks in his laundry room and yet still produce such a sparklingly pristine set of underpants songs.

I apologise for being so witty overdoing the strikethrough gag.

Paper Navy - All Grown Up (link to zipped album and individual songs in most formats)

Paper Navy website