Chimpomatic

3.10 To Yuma

Top class western with Crowe and Bale on fine form.

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30th Nov 2009

The House Bunny

Dumb-but-fun Playboy-based re-working of Old School. No streaking in the quad though.

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30th Nov 2009

Slug and Murs

Felt 3: A Tribute To Rosie Perez

Rhymesayers

"The boys are back, the boys of summer, and this time Ace Rock is the drummer." Thus states Murs on the opening track to his and Slug's collaborative project Felt's third installment. As is customary, this record is too named after a B-List celebrity that happens to be taking their fancy at the moment and while Christina Ricci and Lisa Bonet were pretty damn solid releases Felt 3 has the added bonus of featuring the mighty Aesop Rock on production duties and the results are effortlessly special.

Murs and Slug boast two of indie raps smoothest flows and when put side by side the rhymes are liquid. It's good to see these MC's out from behind their day jobs and Aesop Rock certainly gives them a plentiful backdrop on which to perform. His beats are crunching and refreshingly unpredictable. Meticulously crafted they glisten with detail and boom with such depth. It would be impossible not to raise your game as an MC to assure that this backdrop doesn't make you look bad. And raise their game they do.

Individually Murs and Slug have rarely slipped up and together their powers are two-fold. Hip hop collaborations are not always a guaranteed success, with egos and flows often finding it hard to play nicely together but as Felt, Murs and Slug rhyme like one entity. The lyrics bounce in every way, between each beat and between each MC, as they alternate verses and slot in rhymes each song evolves into impressively complex constructions. Ace slices these rhymes up with expert precision on the beats, they're equally complex, they're very dense and and very Def Jux. It was a tough ask to contribute anything to a project that already had a flawless back catalogue but with the addition of Ace this collaboration has turned into a supergroup for sure.

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30th Nov 2009 - Add Comment - Tweet

Changeling

Engrossing, but ultimately shapeless missing persons drama from Clint Eastwood.

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29th Nov 2009

Blindness

Shockingly under-developed sci-fi from the City of God team. Mark Ruffalo can't even save this.

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28th Nov 2009

Fuck Buttons

Tarot Sport

ATP

Having produced one of the most intense and energy draining albums of 2008, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power return with a much more user-friendly take on their drone headache and one of the most succinctly perfect dance records I've heard for a good while. Street Horrrising had its fair share of melody and pop sensibility, but that's before a tone of ear scraping noise was dumped on it from a high height and all but obliterated any nod towards recognised form. That's not to say it wasn't an endlessly intriguing piece of work, but I must admit the shift that has occurred with Tarot Sport comes as a welcome change and one that retains all the edge we associate with this band, but channels them into subtler and more palatable structures.

There are various factors behind this change of approach and therefore sound. The enormous expanse of songs like Sweet Love For Planet Earth that opened the first album came from a post-rock school of thought and while this thinking still drives every song here it comes from a more electronic place. The other factor to bear in mind would be Andrew Weatherall at the helm. His influence is stamped all over this record and the combination of his techno history and Fuck Button's post-rock drone tendencies is a near-perfect marriage. The band explain Weatherall's input: "There are so many more layers of sound that we needed somebody with the ability to spread these out over a wide plane... The ambition of sound in this record required him to realise it." The result is massive synth textures that grow and evolve around meticulously constructed rhythms which together expand into epic sonic journeys.

Their skills are put to way more mature work here. These constructions are subtle and slow to evolve but carry with them such gravitas. They unfold with narrative melody and throughout their lengthy progression they become more like mini life-spans than actual songs. Where brutality was the flavor on their first record, it is merely suggested in the might of these tracks. It's in this restraint that Tarot Sport really succeeds. Opener Surf Solar employs a clipped synth melody to build tension growing fiercer with every mangled texture, while The Lisbon Maru is built around a military drum beat that threatens an onslaught but always holds back. The central song Olympians could be the soundtrack to one of Godfrey Reggio's Quatsi movies. Over the course of its near eleven minute length it could only be fitting for something this grand to accompany the evolution of the universe itself.

Tarot Sport is a seismic shift away from the first album but a conscious and meticulous one. It is a pure exploration of sound that holds the listener in mind all the way. It's a record that demonstrates an obsessive commitment to their art and one to be exceptionally proud of.

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24th Nov 2009 - Add Comment - Tweet