'As High As The Sky' (Wagon Repair) from canadian dj/producer The Mole is a great debut album :
I really can’t enthuse about this record enough. It’s a diverse house album with quality tunes throughout, and also manages to approach the dance music holy grail: you can actually listen to it start to finish without reaching for the skip button. All in all, it kind of makes you glad that Tyger and Danuel got their studio robbed. Sorry, guys.
As High as the Sky rarely falters or stalls, moving seamlessly from awfully danceable to quite danceable and back again. This structure, though, does seem to stunt some inter-track growth: songs, while not formally mixed, often arrive fully formed and vary minimally throughout long runtimes. The clever emotional tricks-- "hey wait...awww yeah"-- he pulls during "Ain't the Way" disappear somewhat as the album rounds into full swing. But As High as the Sky does find a sixth gear, peaking with its final four tracks, right down to the lock-the-doors-club's closed breakbeat-isms of "When It Tastes So Good You Deserve It", which sounds like Prefuse 73, exhausted and drooping. It is a conflagration of the vaguely familiar-- trite phrases, muscle-memory guitars, rumbling bass sequences-- that de la Plante guides to enviable heights.
As high as the sky' weaves super fresh techno and house production techniques into a selection of funked licks and cosmic disco vibes to blur the edges into a beautifully effective floor working set that references Theo Parrish, Moodymann, Beppe Loda, Larry Levan, Ron Hardy and all those other geniuses of the floor but enhances the whole lot with some subtle treatments for a devastating effect. A very highly recommended double pack of juicy discoid goodness.
01 "Intro" 02 "Still In The Corner" 03 "Ain’t The Way It’s Supposed To Be" 04 "Alice, You Need Him" 05 "Hey Girl (I Feel So Good)" 06 "Baby You’re The One" 07 "Gracias A Los Ninos" 08 "Like The Way" 09 "Smiling And Running" 10 "Knock Twice" 11 "When It Tastes So Good You Deserve It"
(Liabiliy Webzine : "Si les influences de Gonzalez sont connues - ses guitares doivent beaucoup à Kevin Shields, ses ambiances à Brian Eno -, il les met ici au service de chansons nettement plus pop qu'auparavant, sur un album à l'ambition mieux maîtrisée.")
(M-La-Music:"Toutes ces influences digérées en dix ans, et son talent en guise de plus value, font de cette collection de touches personnelles un album authentique, gracieux et lumineux.")
(XSilence : "[...]le français nous sort tout de même quelques morceaux de bravoure, puissants sans être pompiers ("You, Appearing" qui ouvre le disque, l'hommage fidèle et réussi aux eighties qu'est "Skin Of The Night", ou encore le grandiose et technoïde "Couleurs", ainsi que "We Own The Sky" et "Too Late", littéralement lunaires.")
(Allmusic : "As super-stylized as its sounds and emotions are, Saturdays=Youth always seems genuine, even when it feels like its songs are made from the memories of other songs." )
Tracklisting :
1."You, Appearing" 2."Kim & Jessie" 3."Skin of the Night" 4."Graveyard Girl" 5."Couleurs" 6."Up!" 7."We Own the Sky" 8."Highway of Endless Dreams" 9."Too Late" 10."Dark Moves of Love" 11."Midnight Souls Still Remain" 12."Until the Night Is Over"
Le duo suédois Sebastian Mullaert & Marcus Henriksson a enfin sortit son debut album intitulé "Animals" sur le prestigieux label de Sven Väth : Cocoon Recordings. Il s'agit d'un double album (dont on peut lire la critique ici) composé de nouvelles productions (on aurait pu s'attendre a une collection de leur nombreux singles sortit entre 2007 et 2008) dans la veine tech-house-trance-dubby sur la première partie mixé; et d'une palette de titres plus ambient sur la seconde.
Un gros morceau donc a se procurer d'urgence.
Tracklisting:
DANCE CD: 1. Yesterday Bells 2. Cow, crickets and clay 3. Hitchhiker’s Choice 4. Loud 5. We All 6. 33000 Honeybees 7. Jamaica 8. View of a juggling ball 9. Giant hairy super Monster 10. Hypnotized 11. Animals 12. In a distance
AMBIENT CD: 1. Old Water 2. Windows 3. City lights 4. Six arms and one leg 5. Swamp Op 6. In the shade of the sun 7. Stations I 8. Stations II 9. Stations III 10. Even the wind seemed in deep sleep 11. Europhonia 12. Feeling in spring beside the dressing table 13. Seconds (Colour & Sound) 14. Outro Minilogue: http://www.minilogue.com/ http://www.myspace.com/minilogue Cocoon Recordings : http://www.cocoon.net/
Articles
