It was a pleasure to behold John Roberts at the young and vigorous club XOYO last Friday. Glass Eights was released on Dial in October 2010 and was one of the more impressive musical offerings to appear throughout that year. Roberts’ live debut here in the UK merits yet another nudge of recognition for his debut LP presently.

The producer travels to us from Chicago via Berlin, a journey that is audible in the ten tracks of Glass Eights. We are listening to deep house; jazz-infused shyly dancing dissonance that has ample interesting transformations as well as a marrying and flowing narrative. The story is enjoyable in its quiet confidence, its delicate intricacy, as much as its pure essential simplicity.

It is a heartening thing when a long-player of house music can not only be recognized as a great creation within its own genre, but also then go on to transcend said genre and simply be known as a great album. Roberts’ house is a sad and enigmatic labyrinth that took a long and lonely time to build. Each track is a subtly lit room of black gloss, each one differing in dynamic. This enchanting monochrome is a teasing and mysterious insight into the dark side of a man’s mind. The electronic enticement never ceases to feel incredibly human and this idea of a personally expressive yet ever-elusive piece of work makes it continuously intriguing. John Roberts has carefully yet seemingly intuitively crafted his own unique structure here, leaving some parts exposed and some hidden. Glass Eights stands looming tall as a timeless and beautiful configuration.

John Roberts – Pruned

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image by libby robok

Although good albums take time to fully appreciate, any new material from Radiohead warrants an initial and impassioned emotional reaction. The publicity that surrounds the revelation of a new Radiohead album is as well deserved and authentic as you’re going to get in the twenty-first century; the excitement is still actually about the music.

This anticipation floods in and washes over but could never drown out its subject once the subject is here, playing out. The sounds of ‘The King of Limbs’ themselves only make a more powerful feeling of eagerness and energy as the album goes on. The first track, ‘Bloom’, really does feel like a flourishing and beautiful opening and nips all the press-associated expectancy in the bud. It creates its own feeling of anticipation with its own original ingredients and from this moment we are residing deep within Radiohead’s eighth aural world.

The second song, ‘Morning Mr. Magpie’, gets us listening ever more fervently with its underlying quickened pace and Yorke’s signature snarling. If you weren’t already captivated, there is now no escape. Here, reassuringly, the album definitely still feels like a band effort and excitement for future live shows builds and builds along with the growth of the song.

Tension is released with the initial, strummed, subtle outburst of ‘Little By Little’, only to be constructed again, as you might expect, little by little. Reinforced by its lyrics, track three seems to live as a teasing and flirtatious interlude, compelling in a hushed and playful kind of a way.

With fourth track, ‘Feral’, we get what we might have been expecting, taking into account Thom’s ‘office chart’, featured on Dead Air Space. Producers such as Burial, Zomby, Four Tet, Untold and Mosca can be seen on these playlists, and Feral fits more obviously alongside creations of the aforementioned, as well as still totally belonging on this here album, mostly because Radiohead helped pioneer and bring forward these echoes in the first place.

After a break from Yorke’s verse, we are rewarded with ‘Lotus Flower’; already it feels like a classic. Full of satisfying and startling subtleties, beautifully creepy vocal harmonies, kicking, chopping and changing drum beats and an overall feeling of a coherent Radiohead whole. Appropriately and timely placed, it feels like the centrifuge of the album.

Codex is haunting. It’s crackles and slight glitches make it seem like it is breaking. It’s kind of apocalyptic in this sense; the trumpets are definitely mourning something. Once again, we listen in the here and now but because of our history with Radiohead, we can’t help but imagine future moments when we will be able to relate this song to our own specific moment in time, as we have done so many times before, whether it was witnessing them live with friends or letting the band provide a soundtrack in a private place. This feat is in no way cheap; Radiohead’s gentle manipulation and our own molding of their treatment is a sophisticated and matchless process.

There are those trademark crisp and clear resonances which we now come to expect from a Radiohead album, like at the very end of the lovely ‘Give Up The Ghost’, after all it’s more primitive-sounding surroundings and swirling and looping, when noises seem to physically stride through your ears and you can feel every round, sharp shape of the sound as it passes in and around your head, tickling and scratching.

After the drifting, closing half a minute of giving up said ghosts, we are back in the bodied present with ‘Separator’, which awakens our heartstrings with it’s watery, dreaming layers. Two minutes and twenty seconds in, a melodic guitar slowly seeps through and we are reminded of those tender moments the band have perfected, when Radiohead manage to soak your body and mind with some kind of seventh heaven. It has brought a smile to my face every time I’ve heard it so far.

The King of Limbs is a beautiful offering from a truly special band, and it feels good to be around and listening as they go on to create, record and play in these living years. All hail to Radiohead, modest kings of most things.

Radiohead – Lotus Flower

If you fed Florence and her Machine a cocktail of mind-bending drugs, led them into a deep cave and asked them to play using cordless instruments it could end up sounding like Planningtorock‘s latest release. I’m a fan of the music and of the video. Fantastical and grotesque, it reminds me of Jim Henderson and Frank Oz’s unnerving fantasy puppet quest The Dark Crystal.

Whilst listening to the new Darkstar album it finally struck me that dubstep was dead. If I’d been slightly less optimistic in the past I would have sited such albatrosses as the formation of bassbin boy band Magnetic Man, last year’s Ministry compilation or Rusko’s entire career. Nonetheless to put a more positive spin on the situation what the Darkstar album articulated was the slick and definitive hybridisation of dubstep, either into the cryptic indie pop of the former or the heavily compressed neo-trance of Magnetic Man et al. These two parallel post-scripts makes absolute sense, one being a product of the apparent integration of the Hardcore Continuum into every sound student’s syllabus from Goldsmiths to Glasgow, the other a more straight forward cash cow plundering of a new genre. This polarisation of the academic and commercial was bound to rip the thing in half at some point, spilling the art school musings of the Kimbie/Blake axis on one side and Skream, Caspa and partnership onto the other.

However the real question worth asking is what is going to happen to dubstep proper. By that definition I mean explicitly British music that has emerged from a lineage of Jamaican dub, UK garage and sound system culture. With this purist rendition of the form no longer in fashion it seemingly offers up an opportunity for the creative core of the genre to regroup and rebuild something from its ashes, much in the same way techno has done successfully in the ‘post-minimal’ era. Nonetheless the question still remains as to where any modification of the genre is going to go.

The answer at first glance appears to be coming through. The recent embracing of Berlin’s lowslung house pioneer Kassem Mosse by Instra:mental’s Nonplus label and certain influential quarters of the dubstep fraternity seems to imply a shifting of gears is on the table provisionally towards 120bpm. Equally Bristol, the nation’s barometer of bass music, has been making initial moves in this direction with the ascension of both Joe Kowton and the Idle Hands label and the sonic experiments emerging from the city’s Multiverse studios. A tempo shift down from 140bpm makes sense. On a practical level it offers more space, the alchemical base element of dub, and creates enough of a shift to distance itself from the more commercial variants of bass music being developed above ground. Either way regardless of where it’s all heading it at least appears that the first moves are being played. Speculating of the dawn of a new age might be a little premature but nonetheless something is happening and it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on.