On his second album of 2003 (his fifth overall), prolific 22-year-old MC/bedroom beatcrafter Rjyan Kidwell delivers his most focused yet fractured portrait to date. While his last full-length, Being Ridden, wavered between elliptical indieisms and folk-flecked funk, Maryland Mansions finds formerly schizophrenic production settled into a nigh-goth grind. Mentally, Cex comes across decisively unsettled and claustrophobically insecure. Over the caustic clank and syrupy creep of industrious industrial (owing a noticeable debt to NIN and Skinny Puppy), Cex rends himself in anguished howls and desperate whispers. The clamor and clamber hits with a resounding rattling, making for an album that is far more cast iron skillet than Teflon-coated. Once merely a gangly goofball amongst the IDMminent, Cex is now all the more impressive for being unafraid to wrestle with his angst candidly, if not gracefully.
Metal Urbain Anarchy In Paris!
Send back those “Freedom Fries,” because all ill-conceived notions of the French as mere pacifists will be burst courtesy of this reissue, an essential compendium of blister-pack post-punk available domestically for the first time. Using an overdriven synth as a proto-drum machine, Metal Urbain flew skuzz sorties, piloting strafing flurries of static back and forth across the English Channel in the mid- to late ’70s. Rough Trade, indeed. Inspired by the Stooges, Brian Eno and Lou Reed, and inspiring the likes of The Jesus & Mary Chain and Big Black, Metal Urbain welded roughly tenderized textures to spare power chords and friction-fused, piston-pumping rants that regularly threatened to seize as they snarled. While contemporaries such as New York’s Suicide were putting rockabilly beat poetry to a taut throb, Metal Urbain were metronomic maniacs. Call them French fried.
Various Artists Champion Sounds: Grandmaster Roc Raida
Christened “Grandmaster” in recognition for many years of service in the field, the X-ecutioners’ Roc Raida has long held it down for the DJs. With Champion Sounds, Raida sits down behind the decks to showcase how turntablists can make records, not just routines. Using pure buttah blends to weave together exclusive productions and tracks by Triple Threat DJs, Radar, the Allies, D-Styles, Scram Jones and fellow X-Man Rob Swift, Raida reveals DJs as far more than “featured guests.” Champion Sounds thumps soundly with tempo and tone taken to task, but at no point does Technics trickery overshadow musicality and momentum. An excellent compilation that features boogie-down beatsmiths and MCs stitched together without getting cut (or dumbed) down.
Simian Mobile Disco Boat Race
On this one-sided, white-labeled slab of perfection, Simian transforms last year’s creative apex of the magnificent We Are Your Friends full-lengther into a diving board into the raucous depths of dancefloor destruction. This taut, bleepy, punky, electro-rock number is replete with skanking bassline and the boys shouting the title. Relentlessly effective, resplendently dedicated to its own singular sound, fresher than the majority of the post-punk rip-off bands out there-within minutes you’ll be shouting along, “Boat Race, Boat Race!”
Carl A. Finlow Electrilogy+
Ostensibly a compilation of Finlow’s annoyingly packaged 12-inch trilogy of last year (with three bonus tracks), Electrilogy+ actually makes for a more than enjoyable CD listen. Never one to scrimp on intricate minutiae, Finlow summons, scrapes and shoves thousands of sounds into each second of electro brilliance he crafts. There’s much to appreciate in this long-format disc, including a range of dancefloor emotions and the beautiful way his galloping electro tracks benefit from the insertion of his own heavily processed voice.
Various Artists DJ Cutlass Supreme Presents UK Bass
New genre alert! This time: UK Bass, the result of the introduction of ghetto tech and booty bass to the English continent. This phenomenon has also resulted in the formation of the Wide records crew, renowned for their club nights mixing ragga, techno, electro and drum & bass with UK bass. Wide’s prime export Cutlass Supreme does an admirable job of summing up the excitement on this ambitious mix CD, which takes in 26 tracks liberally peppered with vocal snippets and testimonials from DJ Assault and Disco D. Cheaper than airfare to East London.
The Books The Lemon Of Pink
Tucked away in Massachusetts, the Books wholly committed themselves to the possibilities of symbiotic relationships: silence/sound, nature/technology, up/down. Then they cracked open their laptops with garden gloves and spade and, with Richard Thompson strumming softly in one corner and Arvo Pârt smiling devilishly in the other, they released this beauteous electro-folk tangle into the world. Where most folktronicists focus on Shambhalic Czukay-meets-Premier drum tracks, The Books weaves an Indra’s net of intricacies with shrewd attention to their palette of sound. Guitars nebulously mutate onto themselves; the comfortably familiar is spliced, diced and reintroduced; the human voice sounds so new and raw; and the Lemon Of Pink becomes an equation that just seems so right.
Shadow Huntaz Corrupt Data
IDM and hip-hop are strange, but familiar, bedfellows. Hip-hop’s loping rhythms and boom bap have been an integral and abstract part of the core of IDM’s sound. Now, experimental label Skam releases a straight-up hip-hop album. Exciting production from Quench/Funckarma lends a tricked-out, spatial dub feel, but the overall result is fairly straightforward. With the glaring exception of “Medic,” an alien equation of CGI-reconfigured hip-hop, Corrupt Data suffers from its conventionality. A fine record, but unfortunately not corrupt enough.
Savath + Savalas Apropa’t
Warning: this Scott Herren project sounds nothing like Prefuse 73. In the rush to heap praise upon Herren, critics have forgotten that Savath + Savalas predated his predominately hip-hop/jazz mash-up project by a year. One can instead compare the strong Latin folk influences of Apropa’t to its predecessor, 1998’s Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey, with its more brazen use of light jazz, funk and granola folk. Recorded in Herren’s new Barcelona studio, Apropa’t luxuriantly grooves with delicate guitar ditties and harmonized vocals, and smacks of quaint Spanish caf»s on warm summer nights. Forget the hype, and Apropa’t it for yourself.
Coh Electric Electric
Ivan Pavlov’s COH project usually sounds like the tone and minimalist experiments on 12K or Raster-Noton, but “Electric Electric” kicks some Detroit-electro ass with the best of them! “Dog Dynamo” is off the races like Hawtin, with a punishing 32nd-note undulating bass rhythm that breaks down mid-breath then picks back up with a flurry of tone-pulses on “KOCMOC.” All of which goes to prove that experimental is closer to the floor than most like to admit.
