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4 Music Reviews

Coldcut, "True Skool" (Ninja Tune)

Stunning ‘True Skool’, the third single taken from Coldcut’s latest album “Sound Mirrors”, features Roots Manuva on vocals, and is characterised by a brilliant Bhangra-like rhythm. The single also features various remixes: Sway favours rarefied ambient atmospheres; Spank Rock adds some booming rhythms and a new chorus to the original track; Switch, aka Dave Taylor, goes for mad pulsing beats and The Qemists choose to lace the track with the hardest d’n’b rhythms on the planet, producing what is possibly the best remix of this single. If that’s not enough for you, check out the cool video for ‘True Skool’, directed and animated by Clay Lipsky, and simply get hooked. – anna battista

Envelopes, Demon (Brille Records)

The Swedish band Envelopes takes its own idiosyncratic approach to your standard pop song. It's often like they've taken a straight-ahead song with a catchy melody and a hook of a chorus and screwed around with it for pleasure – cutting it apart here, twisting it around there, throwing influences and styles around it to suit their whims. Guitars and synthesizers propel their songs; the synths are bright and bouncy, the guitars tuneful yet ragged, occasionally lurching forward with a big, loud riff. Henrik and Audrey sing (and shout) lyrics which are playful and weird, sometimes fable-like ("Isabel and Leonard") or nearly nonsensical but other times disarmingly emotional ("Your Fight Is Over"). There's a Pixies-style surrealism at play here, but also a core of sugar-sweet pop. They sometimes sound like they're looking for a fresh, vital-for-today take on '90s college-rock throwbacks, but other times they evoke the mood of a lazy afternoon in the countryside, with a folksy simplicity. One of the things I find most refreshing about the album is the way it sounds like they're creating with a full-speed-ahead mentality, without caring if the music fits in a category or not, or if it sounds like someone else or not. "There's some things in this world that I haven't heard / I don't like it," one lyric goes. That sort of attitude, that desire to experience everything at once, propels their music, the way it takes in various styles and spits them out as one new, fresh one. Demon is Swedish for 'demos', and apparently that's what this album consists of. But don't consider these recordings underdone, as Envelopes' sketches present a more vivid musical universe, with a more exciting presence, than most bands' fussed-over, engineered-to-sell albums. – dave heaton

The Love Letter Band, Fear Not My Brothers, Fear Not My Sisters, For I Have Seen the Future… (Happy Happy Birthday to Me)

"I have seen the future / and these dark clouds will part," The Love Letter Band's Chris Adolf sings. The howling, growling voice he uses to sing it makes you wonder about his optimism, though. The Tex-Mex guitars and horns sound both bright and eerie, but his singing's downright apocalyptic. The album's lyrics overall don't point too strongly to world-wide happiness, either. Adolf's folk songs detail feelings of loneliness, awkwardness, longing for love and friendship and a feeling of home. At the same time there's a running sense of hopefulness in it all. It's partly in the friendly advice tone of the lyrics, in the way "I Will Be Here" stands as an attempt to erase the mistakes of the past and build something new, in the way "Love Will Be My Home" sounds like a wish, and the way "My Brave Friend" captures the braveness involved in striving for love and happiness and the conquering of pain and sorrow and hurt. But most of all, the album's optimistic feeling comes from the music itself. The Love Letter Band's style of folk music touches on the past, with song styles and instruments of traditional country-folk music. But it also has an anything-goes approach that looks forward. Choruses of friends sing back-up vocals on a few songs, and a variety of instruments are pulled out along the way to help make the mood inspiring and joyous. Fear Not My Brothers… often has the tone of moving forward from the past, and it also stands as a genuine individual creative expression. As one song title states, "Everybody Sings Their Own Little Song." – dave heaton

Spank Rock, "Sweet Talk" (Big Dada)

‘Sweet Talk’, one of the best tracks taken from the album YoYoYoYoYo by Naeem Hanks, aka MC Spank Rock, is a pure explosion of the best funk. It crackles and pops with samples, scrapings and pluckings of guitars, submerged noises and an irresistible euphoric chorus by the Typical Girls, all to a very hallucinatory effect. The single features the radio edit version of ‘Sweet Talk’, but also two remixes, one by Kalbata and the other by XXXChange featuring Anthony Barba, while bonus track ‘Prime Time’ combines raw and deep pounding rhythms with some hard lyricism. – anna battista


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