My first Robyn album, even though I've been familiar with her music ever since she released her first single in '95. This is the first of the Body Talk albums that I've heard, and apparently it contains songs from the first two in addition to a batch of brand new ones. I've always been fond of her voice, and when it's coupled with such strong tunes and equally strong production, I think we're on to a winner.

I'm listening to it for the second time after purchasing it yesterday, and it's making me wanna pick up her '02 and '05 albums as well, since I recall "Don't Stop the Music" and "Be Mine" being wonderful pop tunes.

Rating Body Talk... Since this is only my second listen, I can't give it a proper rating, but so far it rates as a 7/10. I could see it growing on me, no doubt.

they cover "Dynamite?" One of hte best guilty pleasures ever.

Cut Copy
Zonoscope: (bad)



I seem to be talking about the 80s a lot in my reviews recently, in part a function of the whole crop of current artists mining the decade's simple, obvious drums and cheesy synths. These elements have come to define the "80s sound," and are a large part of why the decade is frequently maligned, despite having plenty of great music in a wide variety of styles. Despite that, several of the current bands looking to the 80s for inspiration have had a fair amount of success (check Destroyer's latest album for one of the best examples). Achieving that success requires a delicate balancing act, a difficult tightrope walk between affect and cheese. Cut Copy perfectly managed this balance on their 2008 album, In Ghost Colours, but on their latest, Zonoscope, they fall early and often.

Part of what made In Ghost Colours so good is that it worked on multiple levels. Each individual song was a great piece of dance music, but managed to become more in the context of the album. The overarching atmosphere and fluid transitions helped make In Ghost Colours joyous and life-affirming. I'll talk more about individual songs in a bit, but Zonoscope clearly fails in the latter category. There's not particularly any flow across the album. Moreover, the lack of variation means that it becomes monotonous and tiring quickly. I'm ready for it to finish by the time it's half over.

My listening habits have been shifting recently, however, and I now spend much more time listening to individual songs than I used to. If the songs on Zonoscope were generally good, I could live with it's poor status as a complete listening experience. Unfortunately, even this isn't the case. The most common problem with the album is that the songs are too long almost across the board. The songs are all repetitive, with enough content to sustain themselves for three or so minutes, but most are closer to five minutes than three. This lengthening of the songs adds a good 20 minutes to an album that already has problems with sustaining my interest.

More problematic than that, though, is that the hooks on the album pale in comparison to those of In Ghost Colours. The excellent melodies that graced songs like Hearts on Fire from In Ghost Colours are absent here. I can hardly remember what most of the songs sound like. The melodies are, to put it bluntly, boring. It's just typical 80s dance music, with little to set it apart. It's like In Ghost Colours without the atmosphere, Hot Chip without the humor.

This means that most of the album plods along in forgettable mediocrity, with few exceptions. On the positive side, This Is All We've Got has a reasonably strong hook, though not one I'd rank anywhere near their best (and the song still overstays its welcome). Alisa is another (relative) highlight, overcoming a weak hook by building to a refreshing climax. It's one of the few songs on the album that significantly develops, rather than just picking an idea and sticking with it through hell and high water. Both of these songs pale next to Out There on the Ice and Hearts on Fire, but they're not bad. Where I'm Going, on the other hand, is awful. I talked earlier about the self-consciousness needed to pull this style off. Where I'm Going completely lacks this, mashing together layers and layers of cheese.

Only one track on the album truly tries something new. Sun God, the closer, stretches out to 15 minutes. The first five minutes aren't promising, effectively standing as a self-contained song that, like the rest of the album, should've only been 3 minutes. After that, though, things look up, with a grandiose, slow-building instrumental section. It's still too long and repetitive to really hold my attention, and the development of the song largely stagnates with about four minutes left, but the adventurousness they show throughout the song is more refreshing than anything else on the album. Unfortunately, that alone is not enough to make it interesting, and, like the rest of Zonoscope, it just doesn't leave an impression. It's long, boring, and displays poor craft, a smaller-scale model of Zonoscope as a whole. Cut Copy's follow-up to In Ghost Colours is a tedious, relentlessly mediocre effort that is an immense disappointment, to say the least.

oh nooo

armond novick

I think I in large part agree with this. I don't think the hooks are as bad as you say, and didn't necessarily mind the 80s aesthetic. I guess my biggest problem was that the energy is just plain not at the same level. On In Ghost Colours, they sounded like they recorded every song in front of a billion fans. IGC was so cluttered with sounds, and for some reason, I loved it for that. The album was a straight up party, Zonoscope is more like an afternoon tea party.

It's not really that the hooks are bad, but that they just don't stick. There are few I outright dislike, but none that I outright like, either. Also, it's not so much the 80s aesthetic that bothers me (except on the one song), but that that's all there is. It's like an empty shell with no personality to me. So very little of the music is offensive to my ears, except when you stick an hour of it in one place and call it an album.

I agree with your comments about what sets IGC apart. Still a fantastic record.

Half assed review for a half assed listen to a half assed album that for some reason a lot of people took seriously, as an album, during the 90s.


Feel So Different - Remember that thing everyone said about Have One On Me, with the orchestrations being kind of interesting unto themselves but without any meaningful relationship to the structure of the song? Well like that, only less interesting. Pretty voice though.
I Am Stretched on Your Grave - Not incredibly enjoyable, but it's an interesting surprise. Bjorkian weirdness.
Three Babies - Yeah, babies are cute, but not that cute.
The Emperor's New Clothes - The dregs of hard driving adult contemporary pop.
Black Boys on Mopeds - "Margareth Thatcher on TV / Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing / It seems strange that she should be offended / The same orders are given by her [...] England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses / It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds / And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving / I don't want him to be aware that there's / Any such thing as grieving" + all of this sung like an operatic Elliott Smith lullaby gone awry = the score I gave it.
Nothing Compares 2 U - One of the best songs of the 90s. Tempted to give it only 4.5 because it caused me to listen to the rest of this crap album.
Jump in the River - Crunchy guitar and airy vocals. Can you comprehend that sentence? Then there's no need for you to ever hear this song.
You Cause as Much Sorrow - Her sad pretty voice makes you want to kiss her and make her happy, but there's no real song, and despite her nice eyes, she's bald. And I don't think she wants you to kiss her anyway.
The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance - Have I mentioned that she has a good voice, and sometimes when the lyrics aren't horrible and the melodies aren't banal it is possible to perceive this fact?
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got - No, it's me who is walking through the desert. Impressive though.

It's too bad the whole "serious artist" thing didn't really work out for her and she ended up being little more than an incredibly gifted but pretentious wreck of an artist. Something about this sort of extremely over the top earnest unselfaware confessional shit makes it so that it's better when it's sung by someone who can't sing, because people who can sing are really just serving to accentuate the cringe-inducing embarrassingness of the whole thing. Sucks, because I was hoping to make this my avatar for the next two weeks:

<3 NC2U

Cuong Vu
Vu-Tet: 8



I haven't listened enough to write a real review, but I just listened to this while walking around campus and wanted to get down some thoughts, so here they are:

-Vu has a fantastic ability to contrast beauty with chaos. The album opens with a slow-burning, gorgeous improvisation, then slams into the wild and uncompromising Accelerated Thoughts. At other times, he mixes the two in a single song, as on Solitary Confinement, the album's best song. Vu builds up slowly to a frantic end section. The contrast works just as well across the album—the pacing of the album is just impeccable, balancing the two so that it never loses momentum or becomes so chaotic that it overwhelms me.
-There is some fucking nasty bass on this album. The tone is thick and fierce as hell, and the melodic and rhythmic content isn't too shabby, either.
-While Vu is the clear highlight of the album with his riveting trumpet playing, the rhythm section is really quite fantastic. It never settles into a comfortable groove. There are times where there's clearly a groove (I've forgotten the exact moments by this point), but it's never a Can-style groove that provides an anchor around which everything else revolves. Because of the specific drums Ted Poor utilizes (I really don't know the technical aspects of it, but you could say his choices aren't poor lol), it never sounds settled, and the grooves don't last long. In the quieter moments, the rhythm section adds emphasis tastefully, accentuating key moments without dominating.
-From about 4 minutes to 6 minutes in Now I Know (For Vina) there is just this incredible beauty. I'm not sure what adjectives are appropriate to qualify it, but it really hit hard.

In conclusion, get this album.

I know exactly what you are talking about with Now I Know (For Vina).

My experience listening to this album the other day was pretty intense. I read somewhere that if you meditate (as I have been for awhile now) you can use the sensitivity and bodily awareness you have developed through meditation as a tool to will yourself further into more intense levels of your high simply by concentrating hard and imagining the characteristics you wish for your high to take on. By doing this, according to this dude, you can get incredibly hallucinogenicly high from even a very small amount of decent weed. The guy said that if you are listening to unobtrustive meditative journey-like music you can use that as a kind of ladder to propel yourself into different levels of highness. I thought, well, if that's true, then that's awesome and I have to try it. I decided that the introduction to Vu Tet would be the best "ladder" track. So I smoke like 1/3 of a very small bowl--just enough for like 2.5 hits. I get into my bed and don't turn any music on--I just pay close attention to my body and my high and try to gauge how high I am. I'm pretty decently high, but nothing incredible, and it stays that way for a few minutes. Now that I have a feel for where I am, I turn on the intro track to this album. I was hopeful about this approach to getting way high, but probably more skeptical than hopeful. I was so pleasantly surprised to discover, then, that the technique works absolutely perfectly, and about halfway through the intro I was full on tripping in a way that was I shit you not almost comparable to LSD intensity--actually seeing all of the elements of the music expressed perfectly in various shifting shapes and colors and characters and forms. I started to become proud of myself for having achieved this, basking in the beauty of the intro, only to slowly remember-... Bam! "Accelerated Thoughts" comes on and all of a sudden I'm attacked by a million psychotic penguins and green polar bears who won't stop yammering at me about getting them some fucking food! I actually rolled out of my not-all-that-close-to-the-ground bed, my headphones snapped off, and for a few seconds I had no idea where I was sitting on my floor, heart pounding, having slightly pissed myself. Like I said, intense experience.

Autechre
LP5: 8



Autechre’s first six albums show a reasonably continuous move from the warm and inviting strains of Incunabula to the cold, mechanical, soulless, and excellent Confield. Confield is almost completely uncompromising, giving little indication that it’s creator’s feel any emotions at all. Much like The Man-Machine completed Kraftwerk’s transition to full-on robots, Confield represents the pinnacle of Autechre’s inhuman side. In 2001, it was the cutting edge of beatmaking.

There’s something to be said for emotions, though, and they did show through in the duo’s first five albums. Tri Repetae, the group’s most acclaimed album, has its mechanical side, but the warm melodies recall those of Aphex Twin’s first Selected Ambient Works volume. It’s colder than their first two albums, but still more human than not. After an uninspired follow-up, Chiastic Slide, Autechre took a big step toward the sound of Confield. The result is LP5, perhaps my favorite album of theirs.

LP5 inhabits both worlds that early Autechre occupied, both the human and the machine. Take Rae, one of the album’s many highlights. An ambient soundscape provides a shroud of beauty, but beneath it lies a more chaotic core, as the beat restlessly careens around the inside of your head. Arch Carrier is another good example. It’s dominated by a paranoid melody that gives a sense of foreboding to the track. There’s a cinematic grandeur to the song, but no overload of bombast.

Autechre expand in all sorts of directions on LP5—it’s one of their most diverse efforts. Acroyear2 mixes one of their most fascinating, spastic beats with a video game-esque melody. Walk around listening to the song on headphones and there’s a ninja around every corner. That sense of tension gives the song great vitality, and as a result Acroyear2 is one of their best tracks. Fold4, Wrap5 is another highlight. I’ve seen it described as an auditory illusion, and that’s an apt description. Autechre play around with speed and timing, both the overall tempo and the speed of the instruments relative to one another, warping my sense of time until I feel strangely disjointed and even disembodied.

Autechre do a create job tying these disparate threads into a cohesive whole. The pacing of the album is flawless, playing off contrasts between the songs. Under BOAC is the song on LP5 that most clearly points to their experiments on Confield, as it’s dominated almost entirely by the beat, with only very sparse atmospheres providing a foothold. While a great song, it could’ve easily led to the album becoming overbearing, but Corc, one of the album’s prettier, calmer tracks, follows it and provides some needed respite.

With LP5 Autechre released an album as forward-thinking as anything else they’d done before (and, in hindsight, after as well). Despite their clear technical innovation and creativity, I sometimes find it hard to sit through Autechre’s earlier albums. They are simply too repetitive for me when I’m not in a generous mood. LP5 balances their repetition with ever-shifting beats and brilliant horizontal layering. There’s always plenty going on. Even on 777, one of the less spastic songs on the album, elements are constantly zooming in and out. Moreover, there’s a pulsing groove located at the center of the album, never quite made explicit, but available on careful listening. It’s one of the most potent electronic albums of the 90s, and, along with the Garbage EP, Autechre’s defining statement.

whoa, is this the cuong vu of the pat metheny group??

Yup.

Fugees - The Score
Holy SHIT people. This is definitely my favorite hip hop album. Damn, just damn.