REVIEW: Monsters Build Mean Robots - We Should Have Destroyed Our Generals And Not Their Enemies

Self released on their own Nice Weather for Airstrikes label, Monsters Build Mean Robots have finally put out their long-anticipated follow up to their 2008 self-titled debut - number 5 in my albums of the year when it emerged not long after they did, a collection of subliminally arresting electronic post-rock tracks with a dark edge of political confrontation that focussed on global Government's warcraft.  On this second album their titular and lyrical leanings are still well into the left but this time they include materialism and a more personal existentialism across the five tracks.  As well as embellishing their vocal potency they have also changed their musical outlook considerably.  In their new incarnation there are no longer moments of sparse ambient flicker and glitch to build and direct the tensions and emotions, instead where it was once sounds sourced from the databanks of Leaf, Warp, and Kompakt, ambient signifiers that glowed throughout the tracks, here all that psychic energy is channelled through the sheer rapturous power of the guitar with reference to bands like Sigur Ros, Explosions In The Sky, and Arcade Fire.

The album features all the prominent post-rock landmarks you could need (exhaustive title included) and embellishes them with instinctive structures in miniaturised forms. No 10 minute + slow growing epics, just mini ones, bottled into pop songs.  Glockenspiel fills ripple up the soaring crescendos of Song for the Generals; the progress of Lament 77 is interspersed with detailed vocal nuances, spaces in the walls of guitars where inflections and backing can slip through. The composition of the songs is assured and confident which gives the band an air of authority important if your key lyrical stock is chastising those in power and standing up  as spokesperson for the disenfranchised.  Spearheading the band is the voice and guitar of Pete Lambrou - whichever update of Post.Rock.V.XX we're up to now, he's at the forefront of it, putting on bands around the South and fronting both MBMR and the more rock-centric Last Days of Lorca.  When he suggests that you burn down your home, in Psalm 57, you're inclined to take his lead and go through with it.  He's got a real lived-in sounding set of chords, got a bit of fire to his falsetto that sets him apart from the Jonsi's and Bellamy's of the world although he is capable of layering on the dreaminess and hollering up a bit of bombast when it suits, and more importantly, where it fits. Again: composition is the keystone to this album's success.




We Should Have Destroyed Our Generals And Not Their Enemies is being officially launched with a free-entry party is TONIGHT! at the Druids Arms, Brighton.

REVIEW: ISVOLT - A DISARO Compilation

ISVOLT - A DISARO Compilation
Robot Elephant Records
ORDER

This is the long-awaited DISARO artists compilation, released on London's Robot Elephant (run by the God Don't Like It guys), and if anyone approaches this thinking it will explain Witch House to them in one sitting, or offer them an easy in to the genre they're going to come out the other side even more confused or worse, more mentally compromised, than when they went in. This is a prism to fracture their preconceptions into seven shades of black light (or nine, if the analogy covers ever track on here) and drops subtle clues that there's a whole lot more to discover. No answers here, although this is a genre that constantly poses more questions and throws up more conundrums as part of its raison d'etre. This is essential, let's just make that clear right the now. As a guide to a genre it's a peerless companion to the multitude of mixes and blog comps out there, and as a label overview, its flawless.

Starting with the unholy blackened cacophony of †‡†'s Misery Walk it drops straight onto the beat with the scenery smashing bass howl of Party Trash. A bottom end that sucks up all the attention, bowling over the lightly played primitively pretty keys that would pick out a straight melody if they weren't getting blasted into a spidery scrawl. Next up it's the Arctic warehouse euphoria of Fostercare's Cold Light a track every DJ should keep in their box, the stuttering hi hat, echoic vocal exhortation and constant threat of a massive peak breaking out at any time cold be dropped into any set to redirect it and leave the field open to all sorts of directions out of it. Immense. //TENSE// sound like an overly buff IDM Blank Dogs. That deep lunged Ian Curtis intonation, sombre, but earnest and fronted by a muscular petrol headed throb that surrounded that metallic piston melody and oiled rhythm, the whole track unnervingly dirty, masculine and fetishistic. It's a sound that follows through into a more streamlined feminine version in Modern Witch's Your Life's A Movie, which flows along clean, supple lines but still retains a feral presence. Mater Suspiria Vision provides a rush trademarked ghost-drone, with possessed, shackled voices, chained to a bed of needling synth lines that overlap and slither forward into ///HORSE MACGYVER\\\'s Nod; one of the most invigorating artists, and the more ridiculously competent at conjuring a sense of dread from a few minimal tones drawn from short-circuited noise boards. Finally, and quite prominently, Raw Moans horrible ballad seals the set. Which is to say, it's a ballad in the style of, say, George Michael, but with a discordant atonal melody running at odds to the sighing vocal harmony, with the space in between filled with an aviary of mechanical birds, or a cave of robot bats,depending how occulty you want to take it. It's not occult at all, it just sounds healthily wrong, and a such is a fitting kiss off to the years most welcome label slash scene primer.

The album is released on Monday and to celebrate Robot Elephant are bringing Mater Supiria Vision, Fostercare and Robert Disaro to play the launch party at The Den + Centro. Pretty incredible line-up.