Mica Levi—Ruff Dog

Over a decade ago, Mica Levi released Filthy Friends on MySpace—a mixtape the Observer called ‘a shortwave transmission from the year 2020’. Well, 2020 just came and went, and very little on the radio even came close to it. In the past decade, Levi’s work continued to look forward, habitually pushed its own boundaries, and garnered an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe win in the process.

Levi has always erected a cordon between their modern classical and avant-pop sensibilities. The former, award-friendly stuff, has always released under Levi’s birth name; the latter under an alias, Micachu. Ruff Dog is the clearest confluence of these two styles, and Levi’s first non-soundtrack solo LP. In the context of Levi’s career this is a significant moment, like an artistic self-shedding or actualisation. No longer the collaborator or the craftsman, Levi has seized an opportunity to leap into unfettered, uncompromised creativity.

Ruff Dog, at a slim 25 minutes, straddles every style of Levi’s career. Centrepieces of the album are shoegaze monoliths which stretch the extremities of overdrive. ‘Wings’ is as captivating as anything put out in the genre’s heyday, a mellow piece awash with slow, mesmerizing oscillations of noise. Elsewhere ‘Pain’ captures the spirit of Xinlisupreme, a brutal track which climaxes in the album’s sole moment of excess and extravagance; Levi shredding their pipes as the music collapses into ecstatic chaos.

Elsewhere, Levi gathers loosely-associative sounds into dense, dial-twiddling electronica which would’ve felt right at home on Magic Oneohtrix Point Never. ‘One Tear’ is the clearest example; a cutlet of Heart FM that someone forgot to put in the fridge, patterned with colourful but dangerous-looking blooms of mould. Little production grace notes belie precision behind these tracks’ looseness. The most overt case is ‘Chains Baggy’, which supplements its uneasy atmosphere with a cheekily-deployed iPhone alarm tone.

And it’s not all bells and whistles. ‘Cold Eyes’ and ‘Ride Till We Die’ are minimally-arranged, emotive and stripped-back sketches that feel like a fulfilment of the promise of early Liz Phair. Vocals are still obfuscated in post-processing, though. Wouldn’t want to take all the mystery out of it.

Appropriately for the last year, Ruff Dog feels quite lonely and cobbled together. You can imagine recording time being snatched between periods of restricted movement, downpours of bad news, mastering taken place in a dark bedroom. But the album soars, free from any concessions to creative partners, and benefits from the unpredictable jitteriness that made Micachu a name all those years ago.

Ruff Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Mint Field—Sentimiento Mundial

The cover of Mint Field’s Sentimiento Mundial is unassuming; a camouflage of desaturated pastels mustering semi-coherent suggestions of shape. But the longer you look, the more it reveals a plumage of vibrancy and fine detail, a Klimt-like depiction of fog-swathed blossoms. The album itself works similarly, gathering like mist until it utterly engrosses you.

Sentimiento Mundial feels modest, ascribing a greater value to listeners’ experiences than displays of virtuosity. Vocalist Estrella del Sol performs stunningly in every song, but barely raises her voice above a whisper (channelling of the tender power of legendary vocalist Jarboe). Callum Brown’s drumming is tight as a whip and invisibly energetic; a heartbeat which has been assimilated into the other assorted gurglings of the body, but without which the album’s vitality would be lost. Sentimiento Mundial as a whole gestures towards krautrock—in groovy repetition, but also in understated, seemingly effortless precision. It’s the introvert’s version of the guitar solo; a performance in which not a foot is put wrong from start to finish.

Precision isn’t everything, though—and krautrock is a limiting comparison. Sentimiento Mundial is freakier and more lysergic than most music from that scene. If Mint Field have exhumed the bones of neu!, rather than slavishly piece their skeleton back together, they’ve made a pagan effigy and slathered it in flying ointment. The entire album is peppered with unassumingly bizarre touches. Opener ‘Cuida Tus Pasos’ has a shade of Jandek’s “first acoustic phase”; pitting its vocal and guitar melodies against each other for a tone of isolation, miasma and malaise. This easy dissonance can be heard throughout, and later cleaves ‘No Te Caigas’ into discrete halves. ‘Nuestro Sentido’ feels—impossibly—like an MTV Unplugged version of My Bloody Valentine’s Isn’t Anything.

Not only do Mint Field pull these excursions and experiments off, they preserve beauty and coherence through them. A great vocabulary serves both scientists and poets alike. The tools don’t dictate the job. Some musical experiments are like sitting through a linguistics lecture; Sentimiento Mundial is like reading Emily Dickinson.

Sentimiento Mundial is available for purchase and streaming here. Releasing 25th September.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

astroskeleton — The Lives of Perfect Creatures

The cover of The Lives of Perfect Creatures and its first jagged bars are quite deceptive. We meet animal eyes in the goofy, almost meme-like image of two grinning dogs. We hear sounds which recall the buoyancy of Public Service Broadcasting's The Race for Space.

But this is no chest-thumping celebration of mankind's stretches into outer space. Nor is it arch or cutesy, Lassie in album form. This EP's sole aim is to condemn our exploitation of test animals like Chernushka, Laika and Gordo. How, in our single-mindedness, we sent innocent beings to their death.

Wisely, the album refuses to put words in these animals' mouths, instead asking them questions. We don't get, 'you had no idea what you were getting in to'. We get 'did you ever comprehend?' A small but important distinction. To appreciate a dog's mind as unreachable is to display it respect. That's not to say astroskeleton shirks the issue at hand. He asks if dogs yelped as they burned in re-entry. Pain, after all, is a universal instinct.

Plenty of screaming guitar work ensures enough high-frequency action to interest curious pets. And in 'connect the dots', it's like the music itself is mimicking a howl. These flourishes dispel fears the album relies too heavily on lyricism over musicality.

A concise, conceptual blast of post-punk which soars as high as its subjects.

Listeners seeking bold new horizons should explore The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The Lives of Perfect Creatures is available for stream and purchase here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Toy — Happy in the Hollow

Toy, The Horrors’ gloomier younger brother, have been guilty of not living up to the promises that their self-titled debut deafeningly announced back in September 2012. Since then, 2013’s Join The Dots and 2016’s Clear Shot felt too easy, resting in-between mechanical krautrock rhythms and swirling shoegaze. Although very ‘in vogue’ over the last seven years, Toy never struck the balance between great songwriting and spectacular walls of sound that their first full-length managed.

However, Happy in the Hollow feels like a watershed moment for the Brighton band. Having split with Heavenly Records in 2018, signing with Tough Love and then releasing their first self-produced record, Happy in the Hollow was always going to be a make-or-break album.

The first track, ‘Sequence One’ instantly feels more direct than anything on their last two releases, maintaining the fingerprints of their well-documented influences, but with a greater emphasis on melody and a much more confident and convincing vocal performance from Tom Dougall. This song is emblematic of the album generally, as melody seems to have been the key driving force behind much of the songwriting on Happy in the Hollow. This is refreshing to hear, and gives the band a vitality that hasn’t been present since 2012.

There are still moments where Tom’s thin and ghostly vocals can’t quite go toe to toe with the rest of the band’s instrumentation, such as on the track ‘Energy’, where the rattling pummel of Charlie Salvidge’s drumming and the angular post-punk stylings of the guitar line make the vocal performance seem rather limp. On the song ‘Strangulation Day’, the sustained synth notes allow the vocals to take center stage, but they are just not quite strong enough to carry the song. Mercifully, this is one of the shorter tracks on the album.

However, this record is definitely a step in the right direction for the band. The focus on melody has bolstered both the jangle-pop sensibility of tracks like ‘Mechanism’ and ‘You Make Me Forget Myself’, as well as the extended soundscapes in ‘Jolt Awake’ and ‘The Willo’. The latter track reveals a new side of the band’s sound, taking influences from sixties and seventies folk rock bands that give the album much more focus, reigning in the slightly more indulgent psychedelic freak-outs that they were guilty of on previous efforts. 

Happy in the Hollow is ultimately the documentation of a band finding a more unique and definitive sound that relies slightly less on wearing their influences on their proverbial sleeve. Stepping into uncharted territory, both personally and musically, has reignited that spark that many saw when the band first erupted onto the scene. Is it flawed? Yes, but Happy in the Hollow has a claim to being the band’s most coherent and engaging release to date, proving we’re not quite finished playing with this particular toy just yet.

Curious newcomers should seek out Toy’s self-titled album TOY, their single ‘Left Myself Behind’, and the ‘Make It Mine’ EP. Happy in the Hollow is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words by Jack Dice