Owen Pallett – In Conflict

Although it's not much to look at, the cover of Owen Pallett's new album In Conflict is a telling reflection of the music's beguiling appeal. The four columns of text contain the lyrics from the songs on the first half of the album, but a cancerous blob of ink obscures a good portion of the words. Everything may be laid out in black and white, but part of it is deliberately obscured, frustrating any attempts to apprehend 'the big picture' and grasp its full meaning. Perhaps as a result, In Conflict holds me rapt. Its appeal is immediate, its beauty obvious, but its motivations and through-lines feel like they're just around the corner, dissolving into air or ducking into the shadows as you move thuggishly towards them.
 
Such a response feels appropriate when the music is this shamelessly sophisticated, this swooningly gorgeous. Having never heard Pallett before, I have no idea if this is his usual MO, but initial spins of In Conflict make it abundantly clear he's a master at this stuff: melodies move in delicate arcs, lovingly coloured with brass and strings, his soft, supple voice reaching and harmonising with itself. Tracks flow together like water and the arrangements feel like natural, billowing things – part of the songs' DNA rather than a later addition to make the music sound more epic and emotive.

From opener 'I Am Not Afraid' through to awesome single 'The Riverbed', I simply can't fault this record. That's about 40 minutes of beautiful, orchestral pop music, with 'The Secret Seven' and 'Chorale' its delirious apex. If I was nitpicking, I'd say that after the heady rush of 'The Riverbed', the final three tracks feel like too much – the wafer-thin mints that bust the gut after a hearty, satisfying meal. Ultimately, though, this is music that leaves me clawing for superlatives and eager to experience more of Pallett's music.

Spoon – 'Rent I Pay'

Spoon are fundamentally a rock'n'roll band. Generally, I can't stand rock'n'roll's boozy good-time glow, its recycling of songwriting tropes, its leaning on bluesy riffs and classic rock posturing. So why do I love Spoon so much?

They tread a fine line, that's for sure, between cutting loose and holding back. In their new single 'Rent I Pay', the chorus gets a bit cringeingly pub-rock – the line "That's what my brother would say", doubled by the backing vocals, being the prime culprit – but there's that Spoon rhythmic jag to the song that not only keeps it afloat, but renders it pretty damned crankable. 'Cos prime Spoon is, if nothing else, all about tense, meticulously produced momentum and hip-snapping swagger. Everything locks in and charges on, dragging you behind it, panting.

'Rent I Pay' isn't doing anything particularly unique in Spoon's discography, but the production hand of Dave Fridmann nudges all the instruments into the red, giving the whole song an overdriven glow that suits Spoon down to the ground, especially as this is one of their songs where Britt Daniel's voice (The Best Voice in Rock'n'Roll Bar None TM) is at its limits, controlled but straining into its golden, throaty glory.

Spoon are a rare beast – a singles band and an albums band. Their new album They Want My Soul (due on Loma Vista in August) is eagerly awaited by my earholes. This will do nicely for now.

Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams

Aside from the fact they have one of the clunkiest band names I've ever heard, plus an affinity for groaningly bad puns (see Creep On Creepin' On and 'This Low Commotion'), Timber Timbre's music is masterfully conceived and executed. On the cover of their fifth album, Hot Dreams, we see the twin icons of Western material success, the car and the house, in a palm tree-lined street in (perhaps) the Hollywood Hills. Yet against the bleached-white sky, these parched husks take on a tragic dimension. Therein lies the key theme of this record: promises of glamour and happiness glow like neon in a strip club, yet behind this facade is a loneliness and despondency that threatens to erupt into violence.

The way in which vocalist/guitarist Taylor Kirk and multi-instrumentalist Simon Trottier juxtapose the elegant with the ominous is spectacularly satisfying. Production nerds can geek out on the gorgeous sounds found throughout – the wonderfully precise and crisp rhythm section; the chewed-tape warble on the guitars and keyboards; Colin Stetson's deliciously greasy saxophone lines. But it's the consistently strong songwriting and sustained mood that bring you back time and again.

The first half of the album, from hypnotic opener 'Beat The Drum Slowly' through to instrumental 'Resurrection Drive Part II', is absolutely flawless. Although Hot Dreams is far from aping Portishead's sound, the wonderfully noir 'Curtains?!' and 'Resurrection Drive Part II' are strongly reminiscent of the seminal Bristol band's self-titled second album.

Though the second half of the album is less immediately gratifying, partly due to the ongoing downbeat vibe, it certainly develops with repeat listens. 'Grand Canyon' sounds like a knowing update of 'Rhinestone Cowboy', its swagger undermined by existential dread, while 'Run From Me' puts a murderous twist on its Elvis-indebted execution with Kirk's sinister lyrics: "Run from me darling / Run my good wife / Run from me darling / You'd better run for your life". The way in which Kirk's ambiguous words subtly undercut the luxuriance of the music, preventing it from slipping into pastiche, is another of Hot Dreams' more enviable qualities. 

If you fall under the spell of this record it's tempting to seek out live versions of the songs on YouTube, but to see Taylor Kirk sweating his way through a performance, looking strangely like Bond villain Mr Kidd from Diamonds Are Forever, is to break the spell. Though there's something eerily pristine about the production on Hot Dreams, it's part of what makes this album so mesmerising. Passing these songs through the rigorous filter of the studio has rendered them phantasmagorical; sublime. It's a work of art.

Charles-Eric Charrier – Petite Soeur

I think I missed the boat on this one. There was a moment a couple of weeks ago when I was listening to Petite Soeur on the train and I started weeping to '8 Minutes'. At the point where the guitar feedback burns through like too-bright sunlight, it was too much for me. After minute-upon-minute of those insistent, tumbling drums, that slovenly bass, the uneasy tinkling of the piano, the feedback felt like it was saving everything by killing it stone-dead. Sweet euthanasia.

I let that moment get away from me, and now, after a dozen or so listens to this album, I still appreciate it, but it doesn't move me quite as much as it did, because I know exactly what's going to happen. Don't get me wrong: something interesting/moving happens in each of these six long instrumentals, led by pianist/bassist Charrier. But if I'd have pulled my finger out and written this review that day – well, I'd have been waxing rhapsodic, I can tell you.

If you're into instrumental rock or Necks-esque jazz, you'll definitely get something out of this release. It's patient in its execution, adroitly played throughout, and, if it catches you at the right/wrong moment, exquisitely moving. 

Man Meets Bear – Buffalo Comets

The internet is such a fucking blackhole. And when you make music with the primary purpose of trying to fill that blackhole, to reach people for the sake of being known, to try and grab attention and build a "career", you're likely to turn yourself inside-out in the process and become a monumental dick. Most of the time, anyway. Some people are built for being famous, being out there touring and being in front of people – the whole band-in-a-van and photoshoots and fashion spreads and blah. But then there are people who just make music in their own little corner of the world. Once it gets sucked out into the blackhole, you can sometimes tractor-beam it in if you've got the coordinates and have the time to familiarise yourself with that speck of detritus floating in the blackness of cyberspace. Or something.

Man Meets Bear is one such cosmic drifter, a guy called Soren Little Brothers. He sent me this album and it means something simply for the sake of it being a connection beyond the clawing-through-the-blackhole shitfight of internet music discovery. Thankfully it's right up my alley. It's lo-to-mid-fi psych-folk-rock-etc and it's got a craft and an intimacy and a melodic sensibility to it that really rewards the time I spend with it.

It pivots around a gorgeous piece of drifting psychedelia called 'Sun Goes Down', which basically sounds like how it feels to watch the sun go down. It's sad as the day is ending and the light is drawing in, but you feel safe as you can get close to someone, get warm, hunker down and slow your bloodflow and maybe have a cup of cocoa while you're at it. The music is little more than a delayed guitar and some field recordings and Soren's forlorn voice. The drummer starts to tap away at something for a while, then decides the song doesn't need drums, so he stops. (He's probably gone to warm up the milk for that cocoa we've been looking forward to.)

Either side of 'Sun Goes Down' the songs get noisier and hookier, but always muffled and intimate and mid-fi at best, arranged in an hour-long arc that rarely drags. When those lead guitar lines on 'Spores of His Mind' reach out, they really reach out amid the song's desolate shuffle. The lyric sounds like "You will leave me", until the line resolves on "all the way home" and you realise he's singing "You will lead me", which is much more hopeful – but also a bit sinister. I get that feeling of ambiguity, of feeling alternately embraced and smothered, by most of the songs here. Then occasionally he'll shift gear and blast through the fog with something like 'Northern Lights', which is shyly anthemic, like your geeky mate busting some dance moves and really nailing it for a couple of minutes before he starts getting self-conscious again.

Sometimes the folksiness approaches Bon Iver in terms of the cosmic backwoods vibe ('Buffalo Commons', 'My Fire'), thankfully minus Justin Vernon's signature vocal affectation, which everyone must be getting pretty tired of by now, surely. Soren can play a nice fingerpicked acoustic guitar without trying to heavy-lift people's souls with it. Guitar and keyboard textures wrap around the songs so they feel held, like cruising in a homemade spaceship with just enough insulation for re-entry. You'll know you're in space because it'll get a bit bleak and rickety for a while as the blackhole is trying to pull everything apart, but it will hold. Soren's a seasoned pilot. He knows which buttons to push. I'm guessing he knows his Yo La Tengo, his Sparklehorse – all the indie-rock constellations.

As home-spun as they may be, these Buffalo Comets race across the sky like furry stars. Watch them burn, listen close, let them go. It's more than enough for a while.

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.

Wild Beasts – 'Sweet Spot'

As if to put paid to any speculation that they've abandoned guitars completely on fourth album Present Tense, Wild Beasts' new track 'Sweet Spot' deploys both guitars and synths in a sensuous, slowburning way, gently ramping up anticipation of the album's release at the end of this week.



What makes Wild Beasts so good is all over this song: the interleaving of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming's distinctive yet beautifully complementary voices; arpeggiated guitar parts that simultaneously suspend the song in place and twirl it elegantly; the nagging sense that the song will serve as a small yet essential part of the bigger picture to come. In itself, it doesn't really go anywhere radical, but the subtle melodic pirouettes behind Fleming's voice and the cascading vocal harmonies are rather elegant and lovely.

What I am cynical about, however, is the deployment of synth. It's nothing too egregious, but it feels a bit anticlimactic given how recent interviews with the band have highlighted their eager adoption of synths on the new album. The tone of the synth in this track feels a bit flat, and features too prominently in the mix – and the song stops abruptly after the synth hints at a new direction towards the song's conclusion. Sadly, Wild Beasts appear to be the latest in a long line of guitar bands waxing rhapsodic about the inspirational power of the synthesizer and how it enlivened their compositional process. The question of whether it works for them will be answered once Present Tense is released. But is this synth rite of passage something that every band has to go through, even a band as singular and seemingly abundant in inspiration as Wild Beasts?