Album reviews

Mercury Rev - Snowflake Midnight
Music Label: V2
Reviewer: J. Berry

Few would argue that Mercury Rev weren’t ripe for renovation. Their creative centrepiece – the peak-scaling, out-of-body psychedelic wonder of the late 90s, ‘Deserter’s Songs’ – is what continues even ten years on to steal breath from fans. And though follow ups ‘All Is Dream’ and ‘The Secret Migration’ refined the cinematographic elation of that template, ignoring the more freeform experimentalism of their earlier output, scoring genuine successes and ensuring their dramatic live shows remained essential draws, they became immediately familiar experiences. Jaws and their integrity were troubled with much less frequency. But few can have expected what would greet them when the white sheet was pulled back to reveal what emerged from the cocoon this time around. ‘Snowflake Midnight’ is in a few ways unequivocally Mercury Rev; the philosophical timbre of Jonathan Donahue’s vocals remain untainted, weaving through strands of sound like one of the natural elements, like the woodland talks to you in whispers. Dave Fridmann’s distinctively picturesque rock-face of sound is also still the backdrop, but the foreground twitches and throbs with a new chaos. While the horizon light of ‘Senses On Fire’ is pure Teutonic Chemical Brothers’ bliss. Praise should particularly given for returning to freeform consciousness of their early days without flailing shapelessly. A very strong and surprising piece of work.

 

Nitin Sawhney
London Underground
Music Label: Cooking Vinyl
Reviewer: A. Sargeant

Sawhey is one of those figures who straddle more boundaries and cross more divides than even the UN Secretary-General. So when we learn that his new album, ‘London Underground’ channels the anxious messages of a post 7/7 Britain into one united voice it shouldn’t come as any surprise. In some way the experience is rather like turning the dial on your old transistor radio and negotiating your way through a wave of jostling voices. Of course, they’re more smoothly segued than most frequencies you’ll come across on the radio, and they might even form something of the ‘collective consciousness’ the press-sheet describes, but the threshing of different thoughts and different feelings is a brave and credible challenge to the natural will of the media to build concensus off the back of violence. The violence that erupted from the carriages at Edgware Road has been equalled blow for blow by the violence we repeat with images and words and depictions of this ‘war’ on television. The fact that Sawhney draws on a prodigious range of influences, from dubstep, Brazilian, trip-hop, folk, flamenco, Asian, bossa, blues and jazz, and makes them sound like echoes of one explosion, is a testament to the diversity of our capital and to the artist who holds that range together. The purr of the record’s exotic rhythms and the gentle strokes of its calm, reflective melodies is a triumph of order over chaos. Sawhney and his guests may wish to destroy the camera that recorded the events that day, but they all clearly aspire to restore the beautiful images it had captured previously.