Album reviews

Frightened Rabbit -
Winter of Mixed Drinks
Music Label: One Little Indian
Reviewer: A. Sargeant

Whilst ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ was the sound of one surly, loathing misanthrope, ‘The Winter of Mixed Drinks’ is by contrast the sound of man leaving his body and ascending into some kind of personal heaven. But as with any birth, it’s not without it’s pain. But it’s not the crude, self-pitying pain of ‘Organ Fight’ it’s more the glorious, heroic type, the type Errol Flynn would be proud of, the type the A team would be proud of, the type that finds its relief not in grief but in the foaming, mighty breath of the brine.

Each thundering guitar strike, each punch on the drum and each chiming, screaming anthem pours over the listener in a big, wet dripping wall of sound, from point of entry, ‘Things’ to the unimaginably turbulent ‘Living In Colour’.

What defines a man, asks Hutchinson on the album’s growling opener. Is it the pointless artefacts, the useless objects we carry around with us like air supply, the suffering we endure, our Sunday Best? Or is it the sum total of what remains when we reject these things or when the cruel hand of separation cuts us off from those we love? It’s only in being told to get lost that we find ourselves again. The album is a magnet-splitting, skin shedding, ear splitting tale of redemption in which the body is a burden and salvation lies only in a man’s sweaty palm as he grips the neck of his six-string and screams out in a briny wilderness and it’s told in most beautiful cries of drowning. If bloodlettings were all as compelling as this, we’d all be donors. Everything comes out in the wash. Only the misery remains ..

Bodi Bill - Two In One
Music Label: SinnBus
Reviewer: A. Sargeant

Dismissing the band as a pair of Berlin-based ‘electro-rockers’ might give the impression that what we have here on ‘Two In One’ is a pair of fairly camp, anodyne and inaccessible geeks with plenty in the way of vintage gear but little in the way of actual songs. And that couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst the chirpy and rather fidgety bubbles and squeaks of tracks like ‘Be Home Before Dinner’ and ‘I Like Holden Cauldfield’ might present them as a Kraftwerk /Erasure sandwich, the haunting and minimal ambient layers that make up ‘Tip Toe Walk’ and ‘Depart Tropical’ give that same elegant, filmic quality that best typifies artists like DJ Shadow, Goldfrapp, Daniel Nakamura and Zero 7 and the slow, whimpering strings that support more progressive tracks like, ‘Traffic Jam’ only deepens the impact, the tunes buzzing with all manner of curiosity-shop dynamics from plucked piano strings to marimbas, tables and wotnot.

Bodi Bill's ‘Two In One’ is as buoyant and eccentric as bands like Psapp, as sizzling as Hot Chip, as meticulous as Mozart and as snazzy as Hall & Oates. It’s the thinking man’s electro: more elegiac than electric and more brow than beats. Beautiful. If you like the Junior Boys, you’ll love this.