(Independiente, 2007)
Sonic cathedrals ahoy! It's Germany's top neo-shoegazer's third.
At time of writing, Ulrich Schnauss's label are in legal discussions with Guns N'Roses over claims of improper sampling on the Chinese Democracy LP. Not that you'd take the producer from the Baltic city of Kiel as the type to pick a scrap. Goodbye, for example, is a layered and dreamlike wash of shoegazing indie rock and synthesizers, with breathy vocals and the drifting-in-space tones of the Oberheim OBXa and other analogue polyphonia, and if an involuntary mental checklist of the Cocteau Twins, Boards Of Canada, My Bloody Valentine, Tangerine Dream, Slowdive and similar purveyors of inner flight soundtracks springs to mind, this is still a superior kind of aural brain bath that manages to sustain a sense of forward momentum. Stars and Medusa, for example, both manage to pack rumble and wallop, but songs like Einfeld approximate the settee-bound, Venusian pedalo-ride wooze-state arrived at by turning the heating on full and swigging a bottle of kaolin and morphine. Schnauss has said this was the third album in a trilogy that set out to blend indie rock and electronica, and that trilogy is now ended, hence the title. But as a man who's collaborated live with members of Chapterhouse, bets are he won't keep away from that washed out, reverbed sound forever.
Clive Prior
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 11/10/2009
Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place (City Centre Offices, 2003)
Global Communication – Remotion (Dedicated, 1996)
Slowdive – Just For A Day (Creation, 1991)
Matt Johnson's self-excoriating - but tunepacked! -classic.
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For connoisseurs of pop-as-rupture-in-the-space/time-continuum
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Belfast combo return unannounced, go sardonic pop-folk.
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