JOHN TALABOT SO WILL BE NOW FEAT PIONAL

John Talabot's ƒIN is one of the most welcome releases I've heard this year so far. The whole album marks a darker detraction from his earlier, much lighter variant of house music, sitting as it is now in the pitch blackness of minor tones, minimalist beats, echoes, reverberting hand-claps and a spooky ambience that would do well to accompany the mood at a kind of Cafe del Mar at the end of the world.

But all that does by no means infer that ƒIN is bad. It is bad, as in good; it's good, as in great. Just be prepared for a darker outing: instead of a parasol, you'll need a torch.



Whilst I'd love to talk about the whole thing, let me just focus on one particiularly brilliant song from Talabot's latest effort. It's the wonderful 'So Will Be Now...' featuring fellow-Spanish outfit (and fellow Permanent Vacation label-mate), Pional.

It's the last track on the new album, and is almost like a study of how best to build up the atmosphere of a song. It's near-perfect, featuring light, mechanical hi-hats that flit above a low modulating bass, and a thin snare, accompanied every now and again by a hauntingly echoing clap that fits greatly with the synthesised sound flying in every now and again, a sound like striking an icicle with an electrolised tuning fork. There's this perfect breakdown in the middle of the song, where the beat disappears and all we hear is this vocal sample, gently dragged down an octave or so, to give it this androidiac sense of the middle of the night and loneliness.

The percussion in this, as to be expected of such a seasoned house producer as Talabot, is addictive, each different sound hitting a corresponding target in the brain. The samples. The gradual ascent of this fizzy, slightly saw-wave synth towards the end. The rise of sounds from that eerie minimal beginning to the finish, where it culminates in genuine dancefloor bliss before popping like some pleasure balloon into only a metronome of a beat and a hint of a sound, is genius and should not and cannot be disputed.

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• Check out John Talabot on SoundCloud
• More of John Talbot's music on his Myspace page (more traffic is now had on Tagged than Myspace, fyi)
• Check out his Facebook page
• FOLLOW HIM ON TWITTER
• (Permanent Vacation's official site)
• (And here's their Facebook page)

ERRORS PLEASURE PALACES EP

Errors are really good. Like, really good. I've been meaning to post this since this EP first came out, but. This two song EP is a whole lot of a good, and a great way to introduce yourself into the distorted guitar-slash-electronic echoness that characterises this Glasgow band.

The Pleasure Palaces EP is stunning. There's 'Auberchute Flyer', which modulates like some ambient dream and has this glossy tone that runs over one super echo of vocals. The synthesised bells are really lovely, giving it this heavenly quality. It's entirely unchanging throughout, stinks of delay and electronica, but is fabulously 'there'. Fades in, fades out. I'm on a cloud.

Then there's the title track. Have a listen.

(Aiya! I love the look of this video. The colours. Colour blocking. So S/S 2012. This isn't a fashion blog. Sorry.)



My Allah. This song is just unreal. You see the image above? The weird, rainbow cave? Well, if 'Auberchute Flyer' is the day music (or the morning-after-the-night-before) in this cathedralic cavern, then 'Pleasure Palaces' is its night time club tune. That iridal cave is the Pleasure Palaces themselves. The beat is in constrast to the no-beat of 'Auberchute Flyer' - and, sure it stands out more as a result, but it's damn infectious I tell thee. 'Pleasure Palaces' rises, falls, comes to climaxes with the mad harmonising choir of vocals that grows huge and actually gets into your blood. Then there's the simple, synth hook. Ah. It's pure bliss. And the ending to the song: the gradual slowing of some massive machine of music.

It's all I can do to highly recommend this EP and the subsequent album - Have A Little Faith In Magic - on which you'll find some more of the above in a similar vein, plus a little guitar action. I love Errors (who have been going for years, it seems - time to tell the world about them).

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• Errors on Soundcloud
• They also have a Myspace page (?)
• But you should follow them on Twitter, why not?
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WILD NOTHING NOWHERE EP

Having enjoyed the past grooves and mellow-jangly guitar scapes of Wild Nothing - the one-man-band that is Jack Tatum - I was pleased to see the new, two-track Nowhere EP floating around. I was even more pleased to hear it.

The haze dream of first track 'Wait' is an up-tempo foray into a quasi-psychadelic sound. Some ancient recording process has allowed Wild Nothing's new songs to sound like Beatles B-sides (at least for a few seconds in the chorus). There's a lovely little guitar lick in this one which, though far from towering, is rich and warm, but all too short. On a side note, is it wrong to say that this could be a sped-up Fleet Foxes basking in the sun? Perhaps it is.

Next we have the title track, 'Nowhere' - it's markedly different to previous work, which was speckled with more melancholy than it is now. The sunshine duster has gone to work on these songs, though within this song there is that sense of nostalgia that always brings with it a little sadness. There's an instrument used here that I can't quite pin down - sounds like some kind of mouth organ - but it is lovely. It smacks of innocent sunshine days. It lacks a sure hook, but it works great both as background music and active, have-a-listen-to-this-and-chill-the-eff-out music.

And in this grey weather (that we share occasionally with the wide blue of the sky) nothing could be more welcome than a prevarication of better times to come. In terms of weather anyway; let's not bring politics into this.



Have a listen above. Wild Nothing is definitely on my summer playlist. Which starts now of course, now that my winter coat has been voided finally. Let's all get into the groove of jangle-dream-haze-pop.

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• This is Wild Nothing on MySpace (why?)
• Wild Nothing has also been encylopediated on Wikipedia
• Oh look, Facebook too
• And why not follow Wild Nothing on Twitter? (though it's sadly neglected)
• [EDIT] Not forgetting the official