CD Reviews

Pinch & Shackleton | Pinch & Shackleton

Honest Jon's Records (2011)

By MICHAEL C. WALSH | November 29, 2011

3.5 Stars

Honest Jon's Records is nearing deity status within the pantheon of electronic music labels. After rattling off a clip of finely curated releases from a number of reclusive techno gods — with Ricardo Villalobos, Moritz von Oswald, and Actress amongst them — the London-based imprint has procured this golden calf from a pair of dub heathens. And though admittedly this bomb of a collaboration would've left a more vast crater buzz-wise had it dropped in, say, 2008 — when Pinch scorched the earth for dubstep as we now know it and Shackleton foraged in fields that still don't have accurate descriptors — to complain would be churlish. This release functions as a fully realized product because it sounds like neither of their previous exports, with both artists scaling back on their hard-nosed tendencies. The pair never allow the effort to fly far off course. For example: faced with a two-minute buildup of detached chimes and crunching drones, one would expect the track "Monks on the Run" to devolve into guttural womp. Instead, the duo skip into four-four territory, bearing doom but never pummeling. Most of the offerings here adhere to that formula, delivering 55 minutes of pit-in-your-gut tension from two of bass music's foremost masterminds.

DJ Shadow | The Less You Know, The Better
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Sepalcure | Sepalcure
Taste-making electronic music Web site Resident Advisor recently declared 2011 as Sepalcure's year, citing early buzz from this release, their debut LP, and solo releases by members Travis Stewart (a/k/a Machinedrum) and Praveen Sharma (a/k/a Braille).
Trans Am | What Day Is It Tonight? Trans Am Live, 1993 - 2008
Trans Am are distillers of guilty pleasures, mixing fat AOR riffs with sleazy electronic accents and a propulsive attitude typically reserved for arcade soundtracks. What Day Is It Tonight? covers the DC-area band’s 20-year history with high-quality, high-energy live cuts taken from their many tours.
Various Artists | Where the Action Is: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965 - 1968
More than three years in the making, the most recent installment of Rhino's legendary archival garage-rock series offers an amazingly comprehensive excavation of an absurdly fertile scene.
Various Artists | Nippon Girls: Japanese Pop, Beat & Bossa Nova 1966–1970
Girl-group records are great and everything, yet the countless compilations out there were becoming a little hit-or-miss until 2005, when the great Girl Group Sounds Lost and Found box set finally gave this diverse genre a proper taxonomy.
Various Artists | Casual Victim Pile: Austin 2010
The notion that regional musical flavors exist independently in American cities is quickly becoming an archaic truism, seeing as how the world really is a stage these days, at least in the digital sense.
Bearstronaut | Broken Handclaps
There's a distinct absence of wildlife or astronauts on Lowell electronica quartet Bearstronaut's latest release.
Avi Buffalo | Avi Buffalo
Look, I get it: the last thing we need right now is yet another band who can be described as “sun-baked,” “reverb-soaked,” or even just “psychedelic.” But Avi Buffalo (I know! An animal name to boot!) are worth your attention for a few reasons.
Goose Bumps 4.0 is an aural smorgasbord
Milled Pavement Records' Goose Bumps series of hip-hop/electronic music compilations comes to an end with a bang: The fourth and final installment has 66 tracks featuring 96 different artists over the course of four albums.
Review: Brandon Flowers | Flamingo
Brandon Flowers has gone on record saying he brought the songs on Flamingo to his fellow bandmates for the next Killers album and was given the brush-off.
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