Review: The Fall, Are You Are Missing Winner
Another year and another Fall album. The unexpected critical and fan acceptance of The Unutterable makes Are You Are Missing Winner the most anticipated Fall album in a long time, and features another completely revamped line-up, not that anyone but the most discerning Fall fanatic would notice.

As if in response to the anticipation, Mark E. Smith has characteristically done his best to quash expectations with homemade (read: bad) artwork, an illiterate title (presumably meant to read Are You Our Missing Winner?), and a thoroughly stripped down sound, though the early reports of production being notable only in its absence doesn't quite bear out. Surely, electronics have been dispensed with in favour of a thick, chunky electric guitar sound and acoustic drums, but the sound of Winner recalls Slates era Fall work, churning tunes and rockabilly beats. "My Ex-Classmates' Kids" thumps along with the best Fall raveups; "Bourgeois Town" melds some of the surrrealistic flaire of the Marshall Suite with a more focused musical direction; "The Acute" and "Hollow Mind," drawling, unnerving and acoustic, recall the subtler moments of the Brix era. The now-standard lengthy experimental section is taken up by the nine minute studio grab bag of "Ibis-Afro Man" featuring gibbering monkeys and a typically obtuse, barked narrative about eating a skunk.

Those hoping that "I Come and Stand At Every Door"'s appearance on Levitate signaled the dawn of a newer, more poigniant Mark E. Smith will be confounded; those who missed the shambling feel Perverted By Language will feel more at home.

Labels: reviews, the fall

Review: Charles Atlas, Felt Cover
Equal parts delicate, affecting, and distressing, Felt Cover, the latest offering from Charles Atlas (featuring ex-Piano Magic guitarist Charles Wyatt, former Rosemarys keyboardist Matt Greenberg, and Tony Conrad student Alex Kort) is an extended exercise in spirit-rattling tonal juxtaposition and spacious composition. Ten tracks of concerted piano, delayed guitar, treated trumpet, cello, and innumerable electronic washes and colors, Felt Cover is a more experimental and sonically varied work than the previous ambient release Play The Spaces, and more of a whole than Two More Hours, their startling debut. Progressing from the electronic swirl of "Miniature Lifeboats" to the skewed ice cream truck melody of "Another Movement," through the brushed drums reminiscent of Badalamenti in "Valdivia" and the echoing guitar work in "Minor White" worthy of Moon and the Melodies-era Cocteau Twins, CA recapitulates and recontextualizes a library of sounds both warm and unsettling. Brittle, nearly-subliminal touches on the album (courtesy of producer and ex-Swell member Monte Vallier) include a harrowing, barely-audible text reading that lays a menacing foundation beneath "The Light They Intend For You," and a recording of children that introduces the title track, an elegaic re-examination of Felt's "Magellan." "Imprints Lengthwise," the too-short closer, boasts a melody that would make Low cry.

The first CD release from Static Caravan (the original home of new 4AD signings Magnetophone and Sybarite), Felt Cover is an adroit consonance of the electronic and the analog, nostalgia and prescience.

Labels: charles atlas, reviews