Machine Translations – The Bright Door

I've lived in Melbourne for ten years now, and during that time Machine Translations have been perpetually on the periphery of my musical radar. Only now, with album number eight, have I finally investigated J. Walker's music – and I'm gently blown away.

The Bright Door reminds me of lonely days as a teenager back in England. I would listlessly wander the disused railway tracks near Steeple Claydon in Buckinghamshire listening to my favourite C90 on headphones: Nirvana's In Utero on one side, Sparklehorse's Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot on the other. Angry. Sad. Beautiful. Alternately downtrodden in the dirt and breathing fire against the sky. Those two albums have stayed with me, and it's the latter I'm reminded of most strongly as I listen to The Bright Door.

Much like the wonderful music of the sadly departed Mark Linkous, there's simplicity in these songs, which accounts for their immediacy, but also subtle depth that reveals itself on repeat listens. The instruments are beautifully recorded; each part resonates and blooms. It's woody and airy, it sounds like musicians in a room, but it's not earnest or striving for 'authenticity'. There's a bracingly off-key Sonic Youth-meets-gamelan quality to some of the instrumental parts, whether played on electric guitar or what sounds like a hammered dulcimer (or could equally be someone abusing the innards of a piano). The core of each of the songs is acoustic guitar and voice, but it's the way J. builds the momentum and weight of the arrangements that keeps me coming back. Bruised autumnal colours glow and recede. Light and shade. Breathe in, breathe out.

'Perfect Crime' glowers with the threat of violence, distorted guitars brewing like rainclouds. Single 'Broken Arrows' employs the eerie textures of gamelan gongs and chimes to weave its spell before a cantering drum pattern carries the song into more conventional territory. A song like 'Needles', with its hesitant beginning, has me on tenterhooks as I know what a wonderful crescendo it builds into. I get goosebumps anticipating the drum and accordion drop-in, the way the song sways and sighs, the ache of violins. Arrangements and dynamics are majestically handled throughout.

J.'s voice, as limited as it may be, hits the spot for me. It feels intimate and slightly gritty. None of his lyrics stand out, which means they become part of the emotional fabric of the songs rather than symbols stitched on top. After seven albums of this stuff, J. knows what he's doing and he doesn't rush things.

My only complaint about this album is the two minutes of silence at the start of final track 'The Bright Door', which upsets the flow somewhat – but that's a minor issue. (At least it's not one of those irritating 'hidden tracks' tucked away after fifteen minutes of silence that you have to skip through.) I haven't felt so strongly about an album for months. Time to dig back through the Machine Translations discography to see what I've been missing.

Volcano Choir – Repave

I have a real problem with Volcano Choir's Repave – it makes me feel empty. Not nihilistic-fuck-everything-let's-get-wasted empty. Just empty. Sad and disillusioned and angry enough to feel compelled to write about it.

This is painstakingly constructed and overproduced indie-folk-rock that deeply, earnestly believes that instrumental detail equals depth, that building something big and expensive-sounding means you've created something significant and valuable. 
 
The first thing that stuck in my craw is that Justin Vernon's vocal shtick – falsetto into reverb – is sounding really tired. On Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago it felt like a ghostly puff of breath in cold air, sad and eerie. His words used to be more direct and resonant, but here they're just abstractions, gestures towards meaning. On The Talkhouse, Mark Eitzel describes this as part of the album's appeal, but I couldn't disagree more. It feels evasive and cowardly. So far I've only managed to pick out one line that resonates. On 'Dancepack', Vernon yowls, "Take note, there's a hole in your heart." Finally, a moment that connects – and it's an acknowledgement of emptiness.

Vernon is credited with just the vocals, while the music is played by the guys from Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, who made a great instrumental rock album called Giving a couple of years ago. Together they attempted something interesting on the first Volcano Choir album Unmap, mustering deconstructed folk music that at least invited repeat listens. However, most of the songs on Repave are so desperately epic that they just grate. Only the droning, open-ended 'Keel' is truly affecting, simply because it doesn't try to be anything more than it is. The ascending guitar lines in 'Byegone' would work just fine if they weren't bolstered at the song's crescendo with the massed cry of "Set sail!" Fuck off! Arcade Fire have the same tendency to overstuff their songs in their quest for grandeur, rendering them irritating and unlikeable.

Ultimately, listening to Repave feels like watching a firework display in lieu of sitting down to a meal, then wondering why you feel so hungry. This music is pretentious, self-serving, boring and empty.

Boards of Canada – Tomorrow's Harvest

Boards of Canada are so highly regarded that they could do almost anything and their legions of fans would still find a way of regarding them as masterful. Me? I like their earlier albums, but I think all the build-up surrounding this release was horseshit dressed as a puzzle box. All the clever marketing of albums in the Spotify age serves to build expectation regardless of whether the music is any fucking good, especially because the music is unlikely to live up to the hype. I suppose that's the point – pique the interest, create some mystique and the pre-orders come rolling in. 

Boards of Canada cultivate this mystique to a frustrating degree. It's one thing for an artist to invite multi-faceted interpretations of their work; it's another thing entirely to create art that actually encourages deeper engagement. Such is the problem I have with Tomorrow's Harvest. While their revealing interview with The Guardian hinted at plenty of depths to explore and ponder over, Tomorrow's Harvest falls short of the mark by simply being too long and fragmented, and by including a handful of bland BoC staples that dilute what could otherwise have been a delirious and unsettling brew.

My initial expectations were low after The Campfire Headphase, but my anticipation of this release heightened with the video for 'Reach For The Dead'. I hadn't heard the track prior to seeing the video, and experiencing the music for the first time as Neil Krug's stunning video unfolded before me was revelatory. Since then I haven't been able to hear the song without imagining the visuals.

There's nothing here that comes close to equaling 'Reach For The Dead's majestic slow-burn, although the first five tracks, which include the single, do a decent job of setting the scene. After the album's longest track, the unique, disorientating 'Jacquard Causeway', and the brief, sinister 'Telepath', 'Cold Earth' feels almost comically dated, in that it sounds like it could have happily appeared on an earlier BoC album. It's a nice-enough tune in itself, but totally disrupts the eerie atmosphere that the first five tracks generate.

And that's it – I'm immediately disinterested, the spell is broken, the promise squandered. What were they thinking? Why is this track here? It's also perplexing to learn that they sourced a particularly hard-to-find effects unit in order to create one second of audio for this track. Considering how meticulous the Sandison brothers are in everything they do, I don't understand some of their aesthetic choices here, which is frustrating. For a while I kept listening to try and work out why. But now I just don't care.

These New Puritans – Field Of Reeds

Writing about These New Puritans' new album Field Of Reeds feels somewhat redundant – as if it's beyond a music review. Trying to convey what it is about this record that is so utterly transporting means going beyond references to their previous albums; beyond the stories of recording a magnetic resonator piano, a hawk and breaking glass; beyond comparisons to music made by other artists. Field Of Reeds succeeds because this music, as challenging as it can be, feels natural. It takes a perfectionist like Jack Barnett at the helm to create something that sounds effortless, like water, like breathing, like feeling. Elusive yet anything but impenetrable, this album must be experienced on its own terms in order to appreciate its breathtaking beauty.

Try putting it on in the background and you'll soon find it irritating. Despite its atmospheric qualities, there's something insistent about these compositions. They don't demand your attention, but rather insinuate themselves into your consciousness. String and horn arrangements form the basis of the majority of these songs, but rather than being built around repeated melodic motifs, they're structured around phrases, around fragments. Initially it doesn't seem to cohere, but it's this tendency towards abstraction that sustains fascination. There's just enough structure to cling to: the piano ostinato in 'Fragment Two'; the metronomic drum pattern in 'V (Island Song)'; the synth arpeggios in 'Eternal Organ'. For the most part, though, it's a question of switching off the part of your brain that seeks pop-song payoffs and going with the heavenly flow.

There are two key lines in the stunning 'Nothing Else': "Just for a minute, nonsense and meaning swap places"; "Just for a minute, real life and dreaming swap places". Therein lies Field Of Reeds' magic – embracing a dream-like state is the only way to appreciate this album's meaning. It's not something to be understood, but rather something to be experienced. And it's truly like nothing else.

Rich Bennett – DiBenedetto

Short but perfectly formed – like the man himself, perhaps?! – DiBenedetto is an excellent new instrumental guitar EP by Rich Bennett (Monocle, Rebecca Pronsky). Featuring five songs that sail past effortlessly in fifteen minutes, with not a moment's mis-step, I can recommend this without hesitation to anyone who likes their instrumental guitar music smooth, atmospheric, and beautifully arranged, played and produced.

Rich's interpretation of the great Ennio Morricone's 'Il Grande Silenzio' kicks things off in tense style, declarative guitar resonating atop a tense piano ostinato and tambourine. 'Lee's Summit' is so much like prime Sea and Cake that I half expect Sam Prekop to start singing at any moment. 'Narcissus' features the most gorgeous fretless bass (courtesy of Jesse Krakow) since Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. 'Cianciana' edges close to an '80s power ballad, but proves affecting rather than irritating thanks to the wonderful restraint of the playing. And closer 'Oss' is simply some heartbreaking piano chords and a sparing guitar motif – that's all Bennett needs to round out this release in style.

Personally, I could listen to an hour of this stuff and still be begging for more. For now, I'll have to put this EP (and Rich's mini albums) on repeat, drift away, and dream of a time when he'll get the opportunity to release an album's worth of instrumental music of this quality.     

Alkali Fly – Race To Victory Mountain

I work part-time as a booker for an acoustic music venue in Melbourne's south-east called The Chandelier Room. Each Saturday night we put on a diverse range of really good artists, and occasionally some great ones. One of the great ones is undoubtedly Alkali Fly, who performed at The Chandelier Room for the first time in April.

Alkali Fly is nineteen-year-old Leroy Birch and Race To Victory Mountain is his first official release. This is an incredible album, but what's all the more incredible is that Leroy played all the instruments (voice, guitar, drums, bass, effects) and produced it himself from the bedroom of his share-house in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Conceived and executed as a continuous suite of songs, it works beautifully.

On the first few listens, the album flows past like a dream. The songs all bleed into one another and there's no foothold – just a sense of suspension, of drifting, of being held aloft by the breezy arrangements and Leroy's impossibly high and pure voice. Did that just happen?! You're left with the feeling that something subtle yet significant has unfolded, but you don't quite understand it yet. Then, after a while, shifts between and within the songs start to come into focus and individual songs sink their teeth in: the goosebump-inducing ascent of  'Ban The Chords Discourteous';



the jaunty folk-pop hammer-ons of 'Minutia'; the eerie, spectral 'Peppermint', which seems to allude to domestic abuse;



and the absolutely stunning finale 'Spires'.

Each listen yields fresh kaleidoscopic wonders; each song rewards close listening both individually and as an essential part of the whole. If you're looking for comparisons, the best I can muster are the emotive falsetto acrobatics of Jeff Buckley, the heartbreaking balladry of OK Computer-era Radiohead, and the reverb-drenched atmospherics of Grouper. Essentially, though, Alkali Fly exists in a wondrous universe all his own. I really can't praise this album enough.

(Race To Victory Mountain is available on a 'name your price' basis from Alkali Fly's Bandcamp page. You can download it for free, but I strongly recommend you pay something, even if it's a few dollars, as I'm certain that if you download it for free, like I did, you'll wish you'd paid – it's that good.)