Amoeba Music – Unsung Sundays https://unsungsundays.com What you should be listening to. Sun, 10 Apr 2016 02:04:59 +0000 en-CA hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.1 The Field: Follower https://unsungsundays.com/album-reviews/field-follower/ Sun, 10 Apr 2016 12:01:24 +0000 http://unsungsundays.com/?post_type=album_reviews&p=1021 On his fifth album as The Field, Axel Willner continues to find joy in the loop, but succeeds largely because he’s making it more muscular than he’s made it before.

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Alex Willner makes techno music, to put it bluntly. But he has a distinct specialization in the loop, the rhythmic sample that repeats from the beginning of a track, often until its end. The loop is what made Willner’s work as The Field popular, and it’s his ability to experiment with each sample for seemingly endless periods of time that makes him different from his contemporaries.

Most loops repeat well for a couple minutes before another loop is revealed. DJs make career of this: one sample slowly bleeds into the next. The Field does things differently: a loop will easily fill an entire eight-minute track, with minor permutations and changes in beat affecting everything surrounding it. It’s atmospheric electronic music, less subtly called techno, at its absolute best and most coherent.

That’s not to say that The Field is resting on his laurels: Willner has made these tracks his most muscular yet. Monte Veritá is a great example: a swirling bass line in its middle occupies the centrepiece of the song, despite almost sounding like an electronic version of a discordant and polyrhythmic Meshuggah riff. It’s not a breakdown, and it isn’t a drop — in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find any real drops on the record — but it’s s feeling of disarray and of muscular motion.

As the loop repeats, it slowly gains its footing against a backing track that begins to catch up to its rhythm, and by the end of the track, the dance has continued unabated as multiple other electronic parts have entered the fray before suddenly leaving it, or joining the rest of the cacophonous layering and madness.

And so it goes.

For fans of Axel Willner, not much of this is going to sound new. In fact, there are no new boundaries broken here. For a man who could arguably change the way we see music with just a few tweaks of some digital knobs, Willner is playing it remarkably safe.

But for newcomers to his music, he has made a strong, powerful statement about his breadth and depth as an artist. This is the most provocative Field album yet, one that’s rich in detail and requires close listening with a good pair of headphones to fully understand.

Will it change the world? Not this time around. Instead, it feels like Willner is gathering our attention and reminding us what he’s capable of doing. The Follower is an impeccable record, and one that inspires hope in Willner: maybe next time, he’ll surprise us with re-invention. For now, he’s got a commanding grip on the genre.

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Ghost Wave: Ages https://unsungsundays.com/album-reviews/ghost-wave-ages/ Sun, 08 Sep 2013 12:04:13 +0000 http://unsungsundays.com/?post_type=album_reviews&p=961 Ghost Wave’s Ages is a catchy rock record that fans of Black Record Motorcycle Club and garage rock are going to love.

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In tone and garage rock mentality, Ghost Wave remind me of Black Rebel Motorcycle (who have been featured two times on Unsung). Both bands are playing off the noise and pop rock trends that were popular during the grunge area, but Ghost Wave has a 1970s flair to it that BRMC sometimes misses.

Horsemouth is the perfect opener that lets you know exactly what to expect. Don’t like Horsemouth? Skip to the next album on today’s list. I Don’t Mind keeps moving with the same sort of flow, but it’s a little more fun. Pick any track from the album, though — Here She Comes, Teenage Jesus, Orb, it doesn’t matter. Every one of these songs is very clearly from the same band and off the same record. It’s consistent.

The songs don’t quite suffer from sounding the same, but if you’re just listening to a few tracks while folding the laundry, they could blend together. I’m not sure if that’s a bad thing or if it just means Ghost Wave knows exactly what they’re good at, but I’m willing to go with the latter. Ghost Wave know exactly what they’re doing, and Ages is a phenomenal record for it.

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