Tor Lundvall – A Dark Place

Discovering the work of Tor Lundvall has been something of a revelation. The prolific ambient musician and painter has released nearly 20 albums in the last 20 years, both independently and via Dais Records, yet I only heard of him last month when the single 'Quiet Room' was released from his new vocal-led album A Dark Place. Luke Turner of The Quietus described it as "the sweet spot between Talk Talk and Slowdive's underrated Pygmalion" – my interest was immediately piqued.

Digging back through Lundvall's discography unearths a very deliberate, consistent aesthetic. Each release tends to be themed around a sense of place, our relationship to nature, the weather or a time of day (e.g., Rain Studies, The Park, Night Studies, The Shipyard). A Dark Place, though notably nocturnal in feel, is more of a metaphorical place – the space one enters alone while reflecting upon our mortality. It's no surprise to learn that the album was influenced by the recent loss of Lundvall's father.

While his ambient albums create a lovingly rendered instrumental space for exploration on headphones, A Dark Place features Lundvall's vocal musings front and centre. He emotes in a mesmerisingly neutral tone, which creates a curious effect. His vocal presence is the focus on each of these eight tracks, yet his delivery and lyrics seem to do everything they can to slip into the shadows so the music can do the talking.

The music itself is typically beautiful for a Lundvall album, with plenty of focus on weighty, looped figures that exhale eerie reverb trails. Befitting a vinyl release it works well as a two-sided experience. Side openers 'Quiet Room' and 'Negative Moon' feel like companion tracks with their insistent bass pulse. At its conclusion, side A feels like it's fading away with 'The Invisible Man', while side B ends on a more hopeful note with the beautiful, lilting 'The Next World'.

Listening to several of Lundvall's previous instrumental albums while waiting for this release felt like stumbling upon a treasure trove, each release fully realised and deeply emotive. My expectations for A Dark Place were high. While there's an undeniably compelling atmosphere to this release, the vocal focus means there's less space for Lundvall's immersive environments to work their magic. As a result, the listener is left in a state of suspension, pulled between the worlds of ambient and downtempo pop. Nonetheless, this release is a grower – and a worthwhile introduction to Lundvall's immense discography.

[A Dark Place is available as a digital download via Bandcamp, and on vinyl from Dais Records.] 

   

The Amazing – 'Pull'

Sweden's The Amazing are, predictably, amazing. They've been releasing albums since 2009, crafting music akin to Nick Drake reimagined by early Verve. (Plus it doesn't hinder matters to have Dungen's masterful Reine Fiske on electric guitar.)

In-keeping with their apposite band name, new song 'Pull' really pulls you in with its density and gravitas. It's an exquisite bummer of a track, fading gently into existence and lolling around in gorgeous melancholy for the majority of its 7.5-minute run-time. But there are at least two alchemical moments when the song shifts into another dimension and makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. The first point of take-off is 2:13, when fresh waves of heavily effected guitars loom into view, carrying the song into similar territory to My Bloody Valentine. Then, at 4:56, the dreamy guitars get sucked through a flanger (a classic Slowdive trick), making the song soar even more majestically.

While there's currently no mention of a new album, fingers crossed that 'Pull' is taken from a forthcoming record that will no doubt prove to be another essential addition to The Amazing's stellar discography.

Richard Dawson – Peasant

I don't know where we're going. What does our future hold? I worry about the world my daughter will inherit in the coming decades. During my journey to and from work, I observe my fellow commuters and feel alternately repulsed by them and deeply affectionate towards them. At our core we're all the same, and wherever we're going, we're going together – but our experience of that future will diverge wildly depending on where in society we find ourselves.

These divergent experiences are explored in vivid and moving detail on Richard Dawson's new album, Peasant. Individual tracks tell the story of different characters: 'Soldier', 'Weaver', 'Prostitute', 'Scientist', etc. However, no matter where in society these roles are played out, Dawson gives equal weight to their trials and tribulations. Everyone suffers. Everyone struggles. Everyone has their own cross to bear.

Dawson's wildly expressive voice and guitar playing have been a constant throughout his discography, but on Peasant we also find a massed choir of voices and strings, foot stomping and clapping, a herald of brass dissolving into tragi-comic parps. It's long, it's dark and dirty, and it's the most moving album I've heard in a fair while. 

For such a harrowing journey, Dawson has wisely front-loaded the album with the more accessible songs: the rousing 'Ogre', the sweetly sad 'Soldier', the hurtling 'Weaver'. From then on, although things become more knotty and bleak – especially during the nightmarish 'Scientist' and the climax of finale 'Masseuse' – individual songs have plenty of light and shade, whether it's Dawson's voice reaching delicately into the higher registers, meandering passages of slack-tuned guitar, or thunderous riffing that has more in common with metal than folk. It's a deeply disorientating and immersive journey.

While Peasant depicts plenty of suffering, the overall tone is one of hope and deep empathy. Ultimately, I'm reminded of a line from W.H. Auden's poem 'September 1, 1939': "We must love one another or die." Thank you, Richard, for creating such a raw, evocative and poetic album. Whether it will help us as we cascade towards oblivion is another matter... 

Fred Thomas – Changer

Fred Thomas's 2015 album All Are Saved hit me like a bolt out of the blue, and ended up #3 on my list of favourite albums from that year. (I still play standouts 'When They Built The Schools' and 'Bad Blood' on a regular basis.) When I heard that follow-up Changer was on the way, I was predictably excited. Late last year, Polyvinyl previewed the album with four great advance tracks, two of which – 'Voiceover' and 'Mallwalkers' – knocked me sideways. Now Changer has landed, it's enchanted me in a similar way to its predecessor.

Although All Are Saved is Changer's Polyvinyl predecessor, it's worth noting that Thomas also released an album of instrumental electronic sketches in the interim via Bandcamp. Minim comprises 30 one-minute vignettes that point in so many interesting directions, the mind boggles (an early version of Changer's '2008' has a home there, plus Changer's title track is basically Minim's 'A Park For People'). Thomas seems to thrive in the overlapping zone of a Venn diagram that has loose electronic jams as one circle and strummy indie-rock as the other. (Check out his band Hydropark if you like Krautrock-influenced instrumental rock.) And let's not forget Thomas's words, which spill over everything like an upturned cup of coffee.

The words are the first thing you notice on urgent opener 'Misremembered' – it's so crammed full of them you feel like you're walking in on songwriting in progress. "There was something I was trying to say," is repeated over insistent guitars, emphasising his tendency towards open-ended pronouncements; there's the feeling that a Fred Thomas album is just a snapshot of an ongoing flow of music and words that the listener has the privilege of sampling. (Indeed, Changer was originally submitted to Polyvinyl as an hour-long album before being edited down to these 34 minutes.)

Thomas crams a lot of great songs into Changer, interspersed with instrumental stretches that allow the album to breathe amid his tumble of words. 'Reactionary' is an early languid detour; 'August Rats, Young Sociopaths' is an absolute peach. The fact it all ends with 'Mallwalkers' is no coincidence – it's easily one of his finest songs to date, crammed full of hooks and lyrical gems; a culmination of a lot of the best aspects of the album. While not quite as magical as All Are Saved, Changer still comes highly recommended.

[Changer is released today on Polyvinyl.] 

The White Birch – The Weight of Spring

The White Birch is time slowed down, moments drawn out, emotional burdens given their space to be felt. In the ten years since Come Up For Air, Ola Flottum has lost his mother, fathered two children, and bought a house in Oslo, where he's set up a basement studio. You can feel it. Despite the air and light in the arrangements of these slow, sad songs, there's the weight of earth around them, the slow transformation of leaves into soil, the movement of feelings from felt sensations into memories.

The Weight of Spring is so uniform in its mood, so consistently poised, it's almost ambient music, tinting the room with melancholy. It glows and thrums with an internal rhythm that allows it to unfold naturally without the desperate need to grab your attention. If you're not moved by this music, you're not listening, not really – you're waiting to be impressed. Key to this is Flottum's voice, a strange, wavering, deflated instrument, and once you acclimatise to its timbre, it has its own unique beauty.

Most of these anti-gravity ballads are sparse and beatless, traced out lovingly on piano and strings. Whenever rhythms are introduced (such as on 'New York' 'Lamentation', 'Lantern' and 'Spring') it feels like the clouds parting, like feeling your heartbeat again after being slumped listless on the couch. It gets the blood flowing, lifts the mood, breaks the daze. The album also employs striking textural shifts to break the narcoleptic fog, such as the second half of 'Lantern' and 'Mother'. These moments need the context of their neighbouring songs to create their dramatic effect, which lends the album a wonderfully unified atmosphere.

I still feel like I'm coming to terms with the subtle shifts this album stirs within me. It needs more time to absorb. It needs more space to breathe it all in. It's truly beautiful.

Wild Beasts – Present Tense

In this era of over-stimulation and perpetually prodded hand-held devices, less is more. Or is it? If recent interviews are anything to go by, Wild Beasts have rethought their working methods upon relocating to London, taking the time away from touring to explore alternative sounds and rebuild their songwriting from the ground up. They sound confident they've arrived at a workable new direction. However, while their new palette of sounds may have enlivened their creative process, assuaging their fear of repeating themselves or becoming irrelevant, there's something strangely unsatisfying about Present Tense. They sound like they're second-guessing themselves, as if in stripping back their instrumentation they lean too heavily on the emotive powers of Tom Fleming and Hayden Thorpe's beautiful voices (which have strangely become more similar and less singular over time), plus their new studio toys (including a Dave Smith Instruments Prophet synth). For better or worse, they've upended the delicate balance they achieved on Smother.

One thing that's immediately apparent to anyone with a passing familiarity with their previous albums is just how different Present Tense sounds, right from the off. I'm fairly certain that if I heard this album without having loved Wild Beasts' previous records I would discount it as fluffy synth-pop and move right along. Indeed, if I was trying to persuade someone of Wild Beasts' singular brilliance, I certainly wouldn't start here. Not that this is a bad album by any means, but this latest iteration of their evolving sound is probably the least immediately gratifying, the slowest to reveal its charms. And those charms pale pretty fast.

My first listen to Present Tense was massively disappointing. Admittedly, singles 'Wanderlust' and 'Sweet Spot' took a while to win me over, suggesting that the album would follow suit, but the only song that stood out on early listens was penultimate track 'A New Life', which felt like it should be the closer, with its spine-tingling atmosphere of deflation. With each listen, different tracks rose to the fore. Aside from 'A New Life', I was initially drawn to the other songs featuring Tom Fleming on lead vocals ('Nature Boy', 'Daughters' and 'A Dog's Life') because they seemed to have a degree of ambiguity and depth. The tracks that have taken the longest to reveal their charms ('Mecca', 'Simple Beautiful Truth' and 'Palace') stray furthest from the Wild Beasts sound I've come to know and love, with superficially pretty synth lines and the simplest of melodic gestures.

Present Tense may prove to be a transitional record in Wild Beasts' discography. It's not without its merits (the production is flawless, as ever), but it leaves me frustrated – especially given how much I've been looking forward to enjoying it, which counts for a lot when the bombardment of new releases is so relentless. They're walking a fine line here. On the one hand, the music could be praised as diaphonous, equine, poised; on the other, it could be damned as flimsy, trendy, insubstantial. I appreciate the way these delicate, crystalline compositions glisten as I hold them up to the light, but I worry they won't bear close inspection for much longer.

The Caribbean – Moon Sickness

When I shared The Caribbean's last album Discontinued Perfume with my best friend and bandmate Jono, his initial response was similar to mine – the music's too busy, there are too many words, frontman Michael Kentoff has a nasal vocal tone akin to Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan on a caffeine buzz. It's hard to find a way in. Jono persisted, thanks in part to the appearance of the wonderful 'Mr Let's Find Out' on a mix CD I gave him, plus my continued insistence on the band's idiosyncratic brilliance. Given time, he had to admit The Caribbean have a certain something, a unique magic that I attempted to put my finger on in a write-up about my favourite albums of 2011.

On their new album, The Caribbean are more immediately persuasive. Although their attention to detail makes repeat listens a necessity, both to appreciate the smooth songwriting and to luxuriate in the wonderful production, Moon Sickness feels more vivid than Discontinued Perfume. Most notably, first single and album standout 'Imitation Air' juxtaposes guitar parts so sonically differentiated that the effect is deeply psychedelic – a warbling, chewed-tape guitar in the left channel, a clean phased guitar in the right – especially when the vocals, bass and drums sit soberly between them, carrying the song forward with a crisp clip. It's my favourite Caribbean song to date, perhaps for the band too – after all, that's a snippet of the song's lyrics on the album's front cover.



Second single 'Jobsworth', premiered late last year on rollingstone.com no less, is almost as appealing, with its chiming guitar refrain, shuffling drums, and some of Kentoff's most resonant lyrics to date:

American Jobsworth
Sends us out to scan the city
We've got nearly zero asshole factor here
No real shouters
In fact, everyone speaks quietly
And smiles your soul to sleep.

'Electric Bass' has a propulsive groove and the cheeky line "Cue electric bass!" prompts that goosebumpy feeling when a song's bassline kicks in and the energy level jumps. Except it's a feint. Nothing changes for a few bars – very funny, fellas – then some delicious instrumental colours begin to expand the song's horizons, tingling the extremeties. The guitar licks on this one are hot shit, too. Similarly tasty fretwork crops up later on 'Echopraxia', the song title potentially pointing to another sly Caribbean "joke". Are those guitar licks aping the earlier song? Or another band? Or both? Whichever way you cut it, it's smooth without being smarmy. A suburban Steely Dan.

Given Kentoff's fondness for chatty, literate lyrics, with his vocals pretty much guaranteed to start up as soon as the song gets going, the feel of The Caribbean's verses can get a bit samey, but just as you start to wonder whether you should skip a trick, something changes – beautiful instrumental details will pop up or drop out, a fresh chord sequence will evolve. They judge exactly when to make things interesting again to persuade the listener from tuning out, whether between songs or within songs, maximising the impact of each twist and turn. And on the title track, the band muster a rare extended instrumental coda for some much-needed breathing space. Smart songwriting.

I love how succinct The Caribbean are, and how much they cram into these 35 minutes. I love how I feel when I listen to their smart, deftly executed songs. Moon Sickness is a beauty, and probably their best album yet. If you need further convincing, producer Chad Clark's overview at the Hometapes website should do the trick.