Cocteau Twins - Victorialand [320][MP3]

Victorialand

Label: Virgin Schallplatten GmbH

Format: Vinyl, LP

Country: Europe

Released: 1986

Genre: Rock

Style: Ethereal, Ambient, Dream Pop

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The premise of Victorialand is really a good one, and a great one for this particular band. It's essentially a concept album, in the best sense since they aren't trying to tell a damned story but rather are making a collection of songs aimed at invoking a concept. The concept is a simple one (as concepts should be), they're making a whole album of songs meant to sound like Antarctica or other polar regions. It's right in the title of the songs and the album itself (Victoria Land is the name of a British portion of Antarctica).Every song here plays toward the theme without exception, and if you know anything about their delicate gorgeous sound you should definitely be nodding your head in agreement that this fits them well. And you know what? They do it pretty proud.

The songs are without exception extremely pretty, and all sound like perfect soundtracks to montages of glaciers and icebergs. It is basically a success. Unfortunately though..... it falls victim to one major issue. That everything more or less sounds exactly the same. Not sort of the same. Exactly the same. All the tracks pretty much could at best be different movements of the same symphony, you could make them fade into eachother with little issue. Sure they have a pretty well defined sound, but nothing about their sound means that the stuff has to be this similar. After all one of the major strengths of Treasure was that every gem on it had it's own personality even if they were basically cut from the same sort of cloth. "Ambient Snowscape Aria" could be the descriptor of damn well everything here.

There's much they could have done to avoid this honestly, namely they could have dared to add percussion? Yeah, there's next to no percussion on here at all. They stick to this very very rigidly. I don't really know why they did either, maybe they thought drums would break the concept?? Beats me. Drums on some of these tracks would have gone a long way toward making some stand out from others. Overall it's a huge shame because the songs are all so gorgeous, they didn't just forget all the genius on Treasure, this is definitely the same band that made that one. Except they've stuck to one note through and through, a really wonderful note, but one note nevertheless. This might be better suited to actually being a soundtrack, a perspective it seems 100% tailored toward. But as an album it can't really be considered great.

This review was made by Zephos [http://rateyourmusic.com/~Zephos]

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Grouper - A I A : Alien Observer [MP3][320]

A I A : Alien Observer

Label: Yellow Records

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album

Country: US

Released: April 2011

Genre: Rock

Style: Experimental, Drone, Ambient

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The tools Liz Harris uses to make music as Grouper tend to be pretty basic: piano, guitar, synths, drones, hiss, and lots of reverb. If you've been following along with the twists and turns of noisy ambient music these last few years, this collection of elements may sound familiar, possibly bordering on cliché. But it's all in how you fit the pieces together. Despite sharing characteristics with a lot of other current music, Harris' has a distinctive sound that she pretty much owns. These short LPs, released at the same time and that share an overall aesthetic, sound beamed in from another realm, and they also sound like they could have come from no one else.

Part of the distinctiveness can be traced to Harris' voice, which floats above the music and can sound delicate and shrouded and mist and can also evince an approachable earthiness. Particularly on Alien Observer, she layers her voice in a way that occasionally brings to mind Julianna Barwick, but Harris sounds comparatively distant and less immersive. Her voice haunts these songs instead of leading them; it's a presence and not a personality, and the voice and instruments are in balance, serving each other without any one element becoming more prominent.

The other aspect that sets Grouper apart is an approach to sound that feels somehow both cruder and more sophisticated than the majority of the lo-fi crop. It's crude in the sense that it seems to hearken back to the dark, home-recorded songs of an earlier era. David Pearce's music as Flying Saucer Attack, recorded mostly during the 1990s, was often referred to as "rural psychedelia," and that description would fit this pair of records. This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them. The sophistication comes from the care in presentation. This music doesn't sound like it was built from mistakes or thrown together, it seems precisely ordered and arranged even while it's often muffled and warbly and distorted. Every sound exists for a reason.

Full review and more please follow this link [http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15332-a-i-a-alien-observer-a-i-a-dream-loss/].

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