Best of the Rest of 12: Indie & Electro

In addition to the 20 albums counted down at the end of the year, there were a number of other pleasure-providing musical products from 2012 that deserve note. All this week, I'll be celebrating the Best of the Rest of 12, starting with Indie & Electro, featuring artists coming from the world of small labels and Bandcamp pages.


Package Deal
The Prism from Nicolas Jaar's Clown & Sunset label is a sleek little silver box filled with a sampling of terrific music, much of which features the man himself. It lends a sense of occasion to the listening experience, even when I'm using it at work, and that's certainly something we can use more of these days.


Gotcha Covered
The all-covers album is a stumbling block much of the time. Classic tracks are either bashed out or over-thought, carbon-copied or needlessly deconstructed. Two albums, both released in extremely small numbers, avoided many of the common issues.

Holly Miranda collected many of her various covers, called it Party Trick, and gave it away to some of the fans (like me) who joined her PledgeMusic campaign. Anyone who's heard her smoking rendition of the Etta James standard, I'd Rather Go Blind, knows that she has a way with interpretation. She also has eclectic taste, tackling material by everyone from David Byrne and The XX to Prince and Bon Iver. Highlights of the collection include a searing take on God Damn The Sun by Swans and a version of Forever Young by Alphaville that manages to impose a grandeur and sincerity on the trite song almost despite itself. My appetite is successfully whetted for her self-produced second album, due out soon.

Field Music Play..... gathers covers by the Brewis brothers from the last few years, including a magnificent Suzanne and a charmingly complex approach to Ringo's Don't Pass Me By. The care they lavish on Syd Barrett's Terrapin leads to a result more fully realized than his own recording. It's a short album, almost an EP, and two Pet Shop Boys songs are two too many, but it shows the range of Field Music's talents. They also released the fine album Plumb in 2012, which was nominated for a Mercury Prize. However, to these ears it was a holding action after 2010's incredible double album, Measure.

Back To The Bedsit
Ghost Carriage Phantoms is the joint project of songwriter Michael James Hall and producer Mark Estall (also the proprietor of the cleverly named Marketstall Records), and their debut record, The Boy Lives, is an absorbing trip through a witty and introverted lo-fi universe. Both Woody Allen and The Psychedelic Furs are name-checked - doesn't that just say it all?

Not Grimes
While I don't want to be snarky, the amount of attention paid to Grimes seems disproportionate to the quality of her music, which often runs out of ideas halfway through. Two more promising artists in a similar vein are Twigs and Py. The electronic instrumentals backing Twigs's soprano on her EP feel almost three-dimensional and lend necessary depth to her airy singing. Her melodies are consistently intriguing as she dissects her interpersonal relationships with a clipped precision. I'm eagerly awaiting more from her and Py, who is memorably in the mix of Two Years, a moody track from Breton's Other People's Problems. Get in on the ground floor with her Tripping on Wisdom mixtape.

Marsupial Madness
Fans of Black Moth Super Rainbow and Tame Impala might want to do a little digging and give a listen to Opossom. With better songs than the former and a less slavish sound than the latter, they bring some serious fun to the psych-pop realm on their album, Electric Hawaii. They literally move to the beat of a different drummer - Kody Nielson, who also writes, sings and produces - slices up time in some pretty interesting ways on the drum tracks. He also holds the drum chair in his brother's Unknown Mortal Orchestra, whose second album is out February 5th.

Record Review: Breton

The album is dead, say the pundits. Listeners live on shuffle play and you can't sell'em anymore, so why bother? From an artistic point of view, however, this holds about as much water as telling playwrights to only write one-act plays or painters that they can only use one subject per piece. Just as real musicians desire to use a bigger canvas for expression, real music fans demand to hear their heroes go big. Finally, if a forward thinking bunch like Breton still see value in creating a long-player, I wouldn't worry too much about the health of the format.

 

That leaves us with Other People's Problems, the debut album from Breton, which comes on the heels of the Blanket Rule EP, the most recent of several they've released since 2010. The first sign that they are going to treat this seriously is the addition of secret weapon Hauschka, a fairly prominent avant garde pianist/composer who is also signed to FatCat Records. His string and brass arrangements appear on four songs, which are brilliantly sequenced throughout the record, lending it a continuity. Fortunately, there is no reverence for the work of the Dusseldorf-based master. The first sounds we hear on lead track Pacemaker (after some ominous clanking, which may be the "Demolition" or "Metro" referred to in the sleeve notes), are Hauschka's strings, chopped, scuzzed, and quickly joined by the brick-hard rhythm section. Roman Rappak's doleful sprechstimme soon enters along with some uber-distorted synth that could cause a weak woofer to clip in protest. It's a fantastic song that doesn't end so much as back out of your consciousness.

Pacemaker is an apt title for an opener as it sets the tone without hesitation. Those of us who have followed Breton for a while know we will hear them evolving but familiar. Anyone new to the band will know right away what they're about and be ready to go along for the ride. Electrician follows, with the crucial couplet "Why are they trying to salvage/What we'll be leaving by the side of the road?" Crucial, because nearly everything is treated as salvage in Breton's world, from the dilapidated London bank they use as a headquarters, to Hauschka's strings, and even Rappak's voice, Adam Ainger's drums and the field recordings used by Ian Patterson and bassist Daniel McIlvenny to thicken the texture. It's a scorched earth approach that leaves only the future as a possibility: Don't pick up our scraps because we've bled them dry.

The third song is a re-recording of standout 2011 single Edward The Confessor, an assaultive stomp that includes their other secret weapon, Rappak's delicate harp filigrees, which are also heard on one or two other songs. The noirish soundscape of 2 Years follows, with its alternating refrains of "Two years is not so much" and "Whatever happens, don't ask us who we're here to see" - its mood made stunningly effective by the soulful backing vocals from Py. It's one of my favorite songs on the record, a haunting combination of glitch, strings and sorrow.

For all their engagement with the world of electronics, samples and studio wizardry, Breton has always come off as a band and Wood and Plastic has a careening forward motion that only a live rhythm section can create. Soaring strings once again bring drama and segue nicely into the next song, Governing Correctly, which opens with the bone-dry wit of Ainger's drums. This song showcases the band's compositional chops, almost a mini-suite with three or four micro-movements in a mere 3:50. There's a casual virtuosity in the way the synth picks up the melody of the almost spoken lyrics, hinting at an anthem, but only just.

Interference is actually anthemic, with massed football-terrace vocals and a chorus of "It's a mechanism we've come to rely on/It's a skeleton." Hauschka's work here has a grandeur reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield that exposes the cinematic nature of the song, amplified in the poignant video Breton created. Ghost Note is a dense keyboard-heavy workout leavened by Rappak's harp but unmistakably grim. "They decide, they decide, they decide," Rappak repeats, as if he indeed has no choice.

The spacious opening to Oxides comes as a momentary relief, as does its mildly funky backbeat. However, subway announcement vocals and mechanistic synth patterns soon bring the calamity of modern life back to the forefront. Just when you think there will be no let-up along comes the goofy cowbell and cheap keyboard intro to Jostle, which they somehow transmute into the most lyrical song on the album, the way a shaft of sunlight can make an urban wasteland sparkle. Shattered safety glass and the stars in the sky can be equally uplifting, if we let our eyes do the seeing instead of our minds.

The album ends as I hoped, with the fractured stasis of The Commission. Five minutes of broken glass, bass drum drops, pulsing keys and echo-laden vocals. It's the kind of song that continues after it's over, until you go back to the beginning. And you will go back quickly - Other People's Problems is a triumph.

The packaging is also exemplary, as is the extra stuff included in the deluxe package, most notably a limited edition cassette. Only 150 exist and no two are alike. Mine was recorded an old copy of Elton John's Tumbleweed Connection and contains gorgeous mostly instrumental music - low-fi and hinting at further possibilities for Breton. No doubt the contents of these tapes will provide future material to be salvaged...

Full disclosure moment: I am thanked on the inner sleeve, not for anything I've done in any official capacity but just for trying to spread the word across all my networks about this terrific band. Call me "the under-under-assistant east coast promotion man."