Music
Moby trades anger for more gentle angst while The Breeders are back with their first album in a decade
Album reviews, plus Jim Gilchrist previews the Aberdeen Jazz Festival
Following two albums of punk invective recorded with the Pacific Void Choir – These Systems Are Failing and More Fast Songs About The Apocalypse – Moby has learned to stop worrying and love the world, taking a more holistic approach with this trip-hop-influenced suite of zen electronica.
Everything Was Beautiful and
Nothing Hurt, titled after Billy Pilgrim’s epitaph in Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical masterpiece Slaughterhousefive, comes for you by stealth, pairing Moby’s mutterings with soulful female vocals to calming, comedown effect, like a less claustrophobic, misanthropic Tricky. Recent single Like A Motherless
Child is built around the old spiritual lament of the same title, while the ambient blues of A Dark
Cloud Is Coming is soothed by cool piano, and stately synthesized strings accompany his pessimistic confessional The Middle Is Gone .The bpm increases a touch on The Sorrow
Tree but the light, trippy dub rhythms are as mesmeric and blissful as the rest of the album.
This Wild Darkness even tugs at the hem of Leonard Cohen’s garment, with Moby’s semi-spoken lead backed by a choir of female sirens, delivering the gospel incantation “in this darkness, please light my way”.
The prevailing mood is entirely different on The Breeders’ first album in a decade, for which frontwoman Kim Deal has reconvened the band’s Last Splash line-up of bassist Josephine Wiggs, drummer Jim Mcpherson and her twin sister Kelley Deal, with whom she trades those signature off-kilter harmonies, while delivering her intoxicating lead vocals as either a breathy, unsettling croon or in tough, flinty punk doyenne mode.
All Nerve is a taut, alert, abrasive album for distrustful times. The band keep the garage punk slammers to a minimum and there’s nothing to trouble the indie disco dancefloor 25 years on from Cannonball. With its Killing Joke basslines, Metagoth harks back to label 4AD’S dark gothic output through the 80s, Howl
at the Summit is punk doo-wop around which grungey guitars circle malevolently, while Spacewoman sounds like a doom-mongering Blondie.
But things are never darker nor doomier than on Walking with
the Killer, where Deal adopts the persona of a young murder victim with a mix of innocence and belated enlightenment: “I didn’t know it was my time”. Although the results are not as dark,
The Low Anthem’s latest album was conceived in trying circumstances, following a tour van crash in which
they lost much of their equipment. So out went the resonating Americana epics recorded in large warehouse spaces and in came a much simpler palette of mostly acoustic instrumentation with delicate electronic filigree touches.
In contrast to their usual collaborative layering of sound, The Salt Doll Went to Measure the Depth
of the Sea was written largely solo by Ben Knox Miller while bandmate Jeff Prystowsky recovered from his injuries, and there’s a sense of selfcomforting in its breathy, dreamy, sometimes flimsy fragility.
Another serious accident delayed the release of Zed Penguin’s debut album as mainman Matthew Winter took time out from music to recuperate. Winter moved to Edinburgh from Australia 14 years ago, graduating from solo gigs seated on a homemade amp to full band status, soaking up the sounds of his adopted city along the way. A Ghost, A
Beast will find favour with fans of the jangling post-punk sounds of Josef K, while the jagged maelstrom of Violent
Night follows the Captain Beefheart crumb trail to the more angular likes of The Fire Engines.
The light, trippy dub rhythms of The Sorrow Tree are as mesmeric and blissful as the rest of the album