Tag Archive for "The Knife"

DEATH RATTLE

There’s an enormous stack of electronic pop duos around. We get emailed a new one every week it seems, but few make the grade. You can take Eurythmics as the starting point and meander through various successful reincarnations ever since, but it’s an understatement to say that most miss the standards set by Lennox and Stewart some thirty years ago. So what is considered a good and bad standard? What is it that lifts something from just being that pretty fronting female vocalist and that (usually pretty ugly) silent guy and his computer/keyboard stood behind her, up to something that has the legs to last that bit longer? In today’s world, the computer can do so much that as long as you have a good female singer you can create almost anything, yet so many fall into the trap of cliches. Today’s recommendation meander through that same cliche minefield, but they successfully get through it with both legs in tact.

Welcome to the duo, Death Rattle. Firstly, we can congratulate them on selecting a brilliant name, but frankly – to paraphrase Shakespeare - a rose by any other name would still sound as sweet. We can confidently inform you that this duo are the real deal. They have received coverage from many serious corners of the online music press, including NME.com, Line Of Best Fit and The405, as well as several other music blogs in recent months, following the release of their debut EP, HE & I. This has lead to the buzzing Bristol label, Fear of Fiction, including them on their recent release, a limited edition run of 100 CDs, complete with screen printed artwork, which they delivered especially for the recent Record Store Day.

Death Rattle are the duo, Chris and Helen Hamilton, with the latter providing the kind of vocals that are equal parts warning and welcome. There’s a threat to their music throughout, but it’s the kind of danger that attracts as much as it cautions. Imagine for a moment if the Swedish duo, The Knife, had been busy having bastard children with some of your favourite artists. Hit in waiting, The Blows, sounds like the bastard child of The Knife and Austra, whereas the tunes, White Ropes or Do As You Please, sound like the offspring they’d had after a one night stand with Bat For Lashes. The tracks, The Dig and Fortress, have the kind of solitary introspection once found when Massive Attack were depressed. The list of comparisons is like an evening stroll through the dark woods of all the best ominous pop of the last 20 years.

This is serious stuff and should come with an over 18 age restriction, such is their towering, cinematic sound; children simply couldn’t handle this without it purveying their nightmares. They may well be just another boy/girl duo making brooding electronic pop music, but the scale of what they produce with a keyboard and computer is astonishing, elevated to the stratosphere by Helen’s arresting vocals. Their witchcraft is on a different level. They know exactly which ingredients to stir into their dark potions, with punchy beats introduced to lift the creeping mist and mantras that will hook you like a dependent addict. Few protagonists of this haunting pop music have enough range to break through the depression, but with Death Rattle you get atmosphere AND hooks. When you finally reach tracks such as The Fixer you even get the kind of energy normally associated with Sleigh Bells. The pitch black darkness has never been this packed with monsters before.

The latest single, White Rope arrived earlier this month and the second EP, Fortress, is due for release this week, via the Frontal Noize label. Throughout May they have selected tour dates around Europe, where we can imagine their sound being particularly embraced, before returning to play shows from the north to the south of England. If we can get them into our Great Escape showcase we will. You can download their tunes for free on their Soundcloud, which is both generous and will serve to help crank up their enormous hype. We suggest you head their next if you know what’s good for you, or should that be ‘bad for you’. Electronic duos may arrive as regularly as the midnight hour, but what this duo cleverly recognize is that the truly scary nightmares are also the most memorable. (MB)

DEATH RATTLE – THE BLOWS

DEATH RATTLE – THE DIG

DEATH RATTLE – DO AS YOU PLEASE

1 Comment

Published: April 30th, 2013
Author: Mike Bradford
Category: The Recommender
Tags: Austra, Bat For Lashes, Death Rattle, Eurythmics, Fear Of Fiction, Frontal Noize, Massive Attack, Sleigh Bells, The Knife

ASBJORN

5 Comments

We want to talk about subtlety today; admittedly not something that we’re perhaps best not known for, what with all the opinions and verbal machine-gunning that regular visitors might know us for. You see we really shouldn’t be into this artist. It goes against our otherwise consistent views about over-sized pop and the cliché minefield that today’s artist tiptoes through. Our first opinion when we hit the below play buttons was to consider this artist very similar to the band Hurts. This is not a good thing. A few years ago that same Manchester pop act initially earned their place on The Recommender too, following all the excitement around their début single, Wonderful Life. It was a delightful piece of noir pop that had us salivating at it’s classy understatement and style, however, a few months later their début album arrived and to suggest it was a let down was a massive understatement. Not only did the album of glossy clichés make us look like fools for backing them, but their desperate story unfolded in what turned out to be a slightly disingenuous third attempt at a career in music. Don’t even mention their ill-advised Christmas single! So if today’s recommendation are the new Hurts we should be running for the hills, right? Wrong, there is a subtle difference between them and the Manchester glory-chasers.

Around the start of the year we had nearly an entire month of posts dedicated to music that had all arrived from Denmark. At that time we had ourselves a useful source based in that country throwing handy tips our way. Here we are heading into the last quarter of 2012 and once again we seem to have Denmark back on our radars. Just a few weeks ago we completed a post about the exceptionally decent MØ, from Copenhagen, but today we turn our spotlight to yet another solo artist from Denmark. Asbjorn – full name Asbjorn Toftdahl – gives this blog it’s second spell of Danish dominance in a single year. No prizes for which country wins 2012 as far as The Recommender is concerned, as the Danes have absolutely smashed it this year. This 19 year old is yet another fine example of just how much Denmark does pop music better than any other country right now. It’s not that the UK, or the US, or Canada, or any other of the traditional pop giants, aren’t still churning out thousands of new pop artists each year, it’s just that it is only on the rare occasion that they have produced pop of this quality, and at this rate, in the same wonderful way Denmark has. It’s absolutely astonishing and Asbjorn continues the class.

But is he the Danish Hurts, and if so, then why would we spare him our time? Well, there are definite similarities, as this guy is undeniably very, very pop. He even cites Britney Spears as one of his major inspirations and his music reflects the grand designs and polish that pop requires. Like Hurts, he occasionally wallows in a dark gloom and occasionally he soars skywards, with productions that include strings and a choral backing. This is very much dramatic pop music, of the kind that requires big expensive videos. The subtle differences come when you step away from the singles to the album – his debut, Sunken Ships, arrived earlier this year, however, we’re pretty sure that you won’t have heard of Asbjorn quite yet. You see, he’s doing this without the major label involvement and we think that’s where the real differences are located. So often major labels will fuck around with a pop artist like this, forcing him into the teen markets that his obvious good looks will no doubt attract. Sure these labels do a great marketing job, as they get him to the audience that they believe he is set for, and the budgets they throw at videos run as skywards as his songs, so they can prove useful, but they demand tweaks and changes to the songs and something so often shifts in the artist’s integrity at that particular junction. Hurts got to that same junction and took the wrong path. They gave it up. Asbjorn’s path is still all his own.

Now you might argue that when comparing Hurts trajectory and current position to his – both have released their début albums after all – he comes off looking worse. That’s entirely fair, but we aren’t here to focus on his commercial success, we’re only focused on the music, and with Asbjorn it really is sublime. His track, The Criminal, is a great place to start, sounding like he’s covered the hit Robyn never released. It’s beat whip-cracks back and forth from the outset and his styled voice drifts between the scales so sweetly. It’s a great example of how to master wide open key changes in a pop song. He’s not afraid to break the song at it’s halfway point before the fizz is jammed back in. The album’s opener is Bones Bad Bones, which he picked as his latest single, having released it in recent weeks. It’s another example of how to do pop music that is pulled taut, although he knows how not to over-stretch it. It has drama played out over more of a percussive beat, which shows us he is able to deliver the same key changes and pop structure in a more organic song. Songs like I Am A Dancer, Hunger and Brushstrokes drift around your headphones as if he’s pushing an atmosphere between your ears. Just like The Criminal, tracks like Rainbow Chalk, Strange Ears and the impressive, climactic She Is A Hurricane continue the mature craft on offer, but over a faster beat, giving us his most pop moments. As brittle and emotive as his voice can be there’s a warmth among the melancholy tones. It’s like finding comfort in your own company.

We got in touch with his manager earlier in the year and he explained that Asbjorn had “ambitions to definitely release internationally, but the primary concern right now is to make the best possible album and establish Asbjorn in his home territory“. To back this up, he has been busy touring the album in Denmark and a handful of dates are still available over there as we run to the end of the year. His music is surely primed for a decent live show, with a confident front-man. He confirmed that all sounds are played live using an additional four musicians, so that will increase the percussive feel that he applies to his pop. He really has made a masterful album, incredibly strong for a début never dipping in quality or ideas. He plays it so cool, always taking the listener on an emotional journey. In truth, he has succeeded in delivering dramatic pop music of a kind that Hurts once made before the label interfered, but more comparisons with the likes of The Knife and a strong match with Robyn, should prove to be more accurate and useful, securing this corner of pop for the Scandinavians. We imagine that Hurts take their tea with so much sugar that they can stand their spoons up, and although this guy isn’t removing the sweet taste entirely, his audience demographic is much broader – if anything, this is Hurts for adults. (MB)