What is it with Iceland? You can blame the unending winter nights, glaciers and treelessness all you like, but it’s still hard to credit a single place with producing such consistently otherworldly music. Where, for example, are the Icelandic skate-punks, boybands, and insipid R’n’B divas? It’s an odd state of affairs, but not one to complain about, as long as they keep giving us artists like Ölvis.

Based on the evidence of this, his second album, Ölvis (aka Orlygur Thor Orlygsson) seems less self-conscious than some of his peers, and perhaps a little less fearful of referencing more traditional folk and rock forms without first distorting them beyond recognition. There is little in the way of gibberish wailing, and effects are employed with sensitivity, rather than smothering the music to death in a ham-fisted attempt at creating atmosphere. There’s not much electronic twiddling either, save some minimal organ sounds. Where the likes of Sigur Ros (some members of which guest on this album) pretend to be ghosts, the music on this record seems very much of this Earth. Or, at least, a slightly out-of-focus Earth, endlessly looping the sun with a melancholy inevitability, expressed in psychedelic lounge-folk music.

If there is criticism to be leveled, it is that there’s very little variation to be had over The Blue Sound‘s eleven tracks. It’s perhaps best to take it as a single, lengthy piece, divided into sections that are easily digested on their own, should the mood take you, rather than impose upon it high expectations of excitement. Once you’ve sampled the first couple of tunes, you should have a reasonable grasp of what the rest of the album is going to be like, and whether it is, or is not, for you. However, to these ears, at least, it’s gently refreshing, and I would urge you to try it on your own.

Resonant

“Glitch, new-wave, playfulness, art-school, analogue synths, spoken vocals, computer burbles and real drums.”

The first couple of times through this album, all I was left with was a tiny collection of applicable mini-phrases, but no real sense of what the record was actually like. You can’t really describe something as guitar-based and beat-heavy as this as “ambient”, but it’s an effective description of how it slips past you without leaving much of a mark, as though the record’s reasonably dense textures are constructed from some new space-material that looks solid but is hard to get a grip on.

Most of the songs on “Make Motion Matter” establish a groove early on and then are content to riff away on it, hypnotically, until running out of steam. “Lost in Location”, for example, being an hallucinogenic spiral of overlapping spoken-word vocals and angular guitar that barely changes throughout its five-minute-plus length, while the title track nods at the current DFA-led nu-disco-punk fad, but in keeping with the rest of the album the increase in intensity that normally justifies an eight-and-a-half-minute disco tune is glacial.

But while the album may lack cheap thrills, it’s never trite, clearly isn’t desperate for your approval, and finishes before it exhausts its welcome. A pleasant musical palette-cleanser between more substantial courses, then.

Foolproof Projects

I played this album without first reading the accompanying press release, not twigging that the whole thing was recorded on a 4-track in a kitchen. Not that it sounds impossibly polished given the available hardware. It’s more that the recording process has wrapped these songs in a warm and dreamy fug that so perfectly compliments their gently ambiguous nature that I had assumed that it was the product of deliberate, and brave, production choices.

And what songs they are. This is an album steeped in folk tradition, but refreshingly dogma-free. Although wistful harmonies and acoustic guitar dominate (performed by one-man-band Duncan Sumpner) , the arrival of a drum loop or a distortion pedal through the mist doesn’t shock and disjoin as it might. Things are kept safely free of nu-folk cliche, contributing to some bravely ambitious arrangements, and finding new scope in a field that lesser acts would find restrictive. Lyrically, this is an album of sweet obscurities and half-caught imagery that refuses to force itself upon you, preferring instead to insinuate rather than demand, and opting not to give into ego and push to the front. Every component feels as though it has been placed with surgical precision and a rare sensitivity for both the needs of the listener and the bigger picture that is the song itself. On a first, casual, listen not much might seem to be going on, but boredom is unlikely. Having said that, I defy anyone to listen to trance-inducing closing track “From Here To Somewhere Else” without adopting something of a glassy stare. This is traditional music filtered through a post-rock lens, expertly smuggling it past the modern listener’s cynicism filter to give it a new lease of life.

Apparently there are plans to go on tour with a full band. Would I enjoy these songs live, face-to-face and unmasked, kitten-soft dreaming replaced by the awful consciousness of a sweaty, noisy pub? I fear that the qualities I admire in this record have a fairly low evaporation point and would soon vanish under spotlights, and are best appreciated under carefully controlled conditions in the home. And what of the second album? There’s no doubt about the pedigree of the songwriting, but I (pessimistically) can’t imagine a big-budget follow-up quite recapturing the same fuzzy warmth. But I’d love to be proven wrong.

By keeping the listener at a slight distance, Songs of Green Pheasant gives the impression of a performance that would take place whether anyone was listening or not, granting it a purity increasingly lacking in a world of arm-waving “look at me” acts wetting themselves in desperation for a fragment of the public’s micro-attention span. This is a record that genuinely deserves your full attention for its entire length. Please give generously.

Fat Cat

Beep… Beepbeepitybeep… Blame a squandered youth spent indoors cultivating a cathode-ray tan when I could have been out interacting with other kids and developing social skills and the like, but I’m a sucker for music that sounds like it could be from an 8-bit computer game. As a result, track one on this EP – “Jesus Son” – has my sympathies right away. Then it immediately goes and squanders them by turning into a lazy Primal Scream knockoff, as if Bobby Gillespie were replaced by a rhyming dictionary. “Severed Head” does a bit better, ditching the guitars in favour of the electro-funk thing, but again the vocals spoil it with sub-Gallagher “can’t be fucked singing properly” whining. “One Last Cigarette, One Last Call” is an instrumental that makes heavy use of synth-strings. Enough said there, I think. Final track “Junk” returns to the plundering of 90’s ecstasy casualties, but this time it’s the Happy Mondays who get the treatment, with similar results. Meh.

Viva Stereo

It’s nice to hear a band having fun, and given that The Scaramanga Six come from Yorkshire, where, as is my (admittedly limited) understanding, there’s nothing much else to do but hang around in coal mines drinking brown ale and watching whippet races, one can hardly begrudge them that. Rocking out glam style is the order of the day throughout the four tracks of this single. Saxophones skwonk, riffs riff, and lyrics are all knowing rock’n’roll braggadocio, with tongues not quite as cheek-penetrating as the suspiciously similarly-named Electric 6, but certainly enough to cause minor speech difficulties in the band’s members. The second track “Pincers” is probably the best of the lot. I wonder if the chorus is referencing Dark Side Of The Moon or The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack? I don’t suppose it’s important, but the piano, saw and surface-noise break in the middle invokes a sense of movie-matinee kitsch that makes me suspect that their affections are with the latter.

The world really doesn’t need a band like The Scaramanga Six, and neither do you, but like a final After-Eight found nestling among the empty wrappers after the guests have all left, they’re nice to have.

There’s a video on this CD as well. Nice shirts.

The Scaramanga Six
Wrath Records

In all fields of entertainment, there’s much to be said for the carefully planned opening move that grabs your audience from the get-go, leaving them rapt and attentive for the rest of your set. Fireworks Night clearly took this advice to heart, because “The Gold Leaves”, track number one on this, their debut album, immediately makes the listener sit up and take notice. And not with a gimmicky sledgehammer to the ears, either, but by being such a mournful and delicate song it makes you feel like slipping into a warm bath and opening your wrists. It’s a lovely, dark thing constructed out of minimal, booming percussion and delicate vocals. Sadly, It’s also the best song on the album, which does the collection as a whole no favours. Fickle buggers that we are, being grabbed in the first minute isn’t quite enough when you spend the rest of the album’s running time waiting for one which does the business as well as the opener.

It’s a pity, really, because, on first listen at least, it takes a lot away from what are generally fine songs. The Bill Callahan-esque baritone never returns, replaced by a Wayne Coyne-like squeal, though the trend for carefully understated but imaginative instrumentation happily survives intact. While the acoustic guitar reigns supreme, there’s still room for some nicely trashy banjo, and a precisely-judged cheap organ sound that brings to mind a dusty back room in which there’s an old woman accompanying Daniel Johnston on an ancient Casio. But maybe that’s just me. The mood of the record is more hopeful than it at first appears, as though, once kicking you into the gutter, they invite you to take a peek at the stars. And it works, to a point. But misery is a force to be reckoned with, and it’s only on subsequent plays through the album that the beauty of some of the later tracks reveal themselves.

Entertainment is all about tweaking your emotions, and making you feel when the drudgery of day-to-day living has left you numbed. Fireworks Night are yet to break new ground in this area, but they have the tools and have demonstrated the ability to do so. I’ll be expecting big things from album number two. Don’t let me down, guys.

Fireworks Night

“Tonight the monkey dies.” We’ve only just been introduced to this album and already it has announced its intention to murder a simian. Despite the mildly comedic image (sorry, ape-lovers), “Monkey” is a dark, brooding, and fairly noisy opener, which sets the tone for the rest of the album and suggests that it’s the monkey on their collective backs – the one telling people that they are a one-trick band who can only write sad, glacial-slow dirges that you have to strain to hear – that Low are gunning for. This is their rawk album.

The minimalist songwriting, and ear for melody are all present and correct, of course. The Great Destroyer isn’t a radical departure, just the inevitable arrival at a destination that attentive fans may have spotted on the horizon since 2001’s Things We Lost In The Fire, where the latent desire to turn up and rock out started to make itself felt in their music. However, where on …Fire, and follow-up Trust, the more energetic songs served to punctuate and add to the record’s emotional range, The Great Destroyer seems like a homogenous mush, and even more contemplative moments like “Silver Rider” and “Broadway, So Many People” get smothered in inappropriate overdrive.

It’s not a total loss, however. “Cue The Strings” allows both our ears and Alan Sparhawk’s distortion pedal a half-time break via some minimal electronics and one of the best applications of the patented Low vocal harmonies in recent memory, and “When I Go Deaf” is as sweet a folk-song as any they’ve written, at least until the ironic rock-out ending. But where, in another context, a handful of songs on this album could stand out as proud highlights in the Low canon, they are smothered by turgid bedfellows that are content to turn up, fuzz away for three minutes, and wander off again. Where Low used to move, here they just numb.

I don’t want to give away the ending or anything, but the “Great Destroyer” of the title is Time. At least, according to closing track “Walk Into The Sea”. It’s almost as if the band feel the need to justify the death of “old” Low, which, of course, they don’t. That they’ve embraced change should be commended in a world where so many make a living from rehashing past glories. One can only hope that The Great Destroyer is just a slightly uninspiring lay-by on the road to somewhere more interesting.

Low