PICK OF THE WEEK
Nicolas Jaar
Love You Gotta Lose Again EP (Double Standard)
Nico Jaar is a 20-year-old Chilean New Yorker who makes … well, what does he make? There is no obvious genre tag for his languid electronic reveries. This EP's lead track, WOUH, is an agitated, dreamlike mosaic of reverb, robot vocals, dusty samples and plonking piano, driven forward, albeit at a glacial pace, by loose, crisp, irrepressibly funky drum patterns. It brings to mind Madlib, Schneider TM, Arthur Russell, Villalobos, without, refreshingly, sounding like any of them. Jaar creates tracks which in their luminous, beguiling otherness convey a profound awareness of life and death. You don't get that with Kings Of Leon.
ALSO OUT THIS WEEK
Jamie Woon
Night Air (Candent)
Nico Jaar has talked about trying to create "rhythmic anguish", a concept that Londoner Jamie Woon, a singer-songwriter operating in dubstep's slipstream, would no doubt recognise. Night Air, a distant cousin of Japan's Ghosts, is wonderful: spectral, minimalist, machine-tooled neo-soul that unfolds effortlessly.
Corrugated Tunnel
Threadbare (Process)
A bumper week, this, for elegiac computer music. Threadbare, featuring Martin McCann, once lead singer of Dublin band Sack is precisely the kind of electro ballad - grave, wintry, crying out for a moody, pretentious video shot in Minsk – that Hurts would make, if they weren't such careerist pop tarts. Norman Nodge's Berghain mix, eight intense minutes of dub techno inflection, is glorious.
Sander Kleinenberg Feat Jamie Cullum
Remember When (This Is)
Joy be unconfined. It's the Jimmy Krankie of jazz and the, erm, Sander Whatsisface of big-room house bollocks, together not so much in electric dreams, as slick R&B nightmares. If I were Sophie Dahl, after this public humiliation, Cullum would come home to find his stuff in bin bags on the lawn and the locks changed. And he'd be getting off lightly.
Kele
On The Lam (Wichita)
Irritating as the attention lavished on The Boxer was (lad from famous indie band makes dance record; journalists lap up "story"), you can't blame Kele for the media's gullibility. He is culpable, however, for this dull grey squall of blustery electro and drizzly UK garage. The sound of the Kitsuné rejects pile.
Klaxons
Twin Flames (Polydor)
They might still talk an entertaining line in psychedelic claptrap, but Klaxons 2.0 – Ross Robinson at the helm; the batty energy of new rave replaced by guitars and a certain musical professionalism – sound all too normal. If this was a new Hard-Fi single no one would bat an eyelid, or give it a second listen.
James Blunt
Stay The Night (Custard/Atlantic)
Suffice to say, Blunt has gone a bit Mumford & Sons. Truly, these are the end times.
