Safety Scissors :: Soulo :: Dntel :: PLUG RESEARCH

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American label Plug Research puts out some unusual music, it’s fair to say. Sure, you can wander into the lands of electro-acoustic music or sound art and find something that probably sounds more foreign to your ears than any of this, but I still stand by my claim. The music is unusual because it is incredibly hard to pigeon hole. The genre-obsessed may find themselves having a hard time coming up with apt labels for most all of the label’s catalogue. Influences from jazz, techno and musique concrete, are often apparent in equal parts within a single track, not just across an album. Pop sounds and structures are often mashed up under strange tunes of uncertain pitch, dissected acoustic instruments and even vocals. Their three most recent releases all stand up as great examples of these kinds of shenanigans.

The only Safety Scissors stuff I had heard prior to Parts Water was his EP on Force Tracks, which I’d describe as fairly typical of that label: dubbed out tech-house. This album, then, came as quite a surprise. It begins with “Two Letter U’s”, a swinging thing with a slow groove pushed forward by stabs of what may have once been a horn section. The feel is fairly driving, but constantly falling back to a scattering of digitally mauled sounds. As the track develops a jokey organ solo bursts out of nowhere, followed by a vocal part that sounds more like a recording of a slightly disappointed drainpipe.

Not quite what I was expecting, I have to say. I had been told that Safety Scissors sings on this, and plays some guitar, but I wasn’t really ready for the light-hearted mash up that constitutes most of Parts Water. The tech elements I was anticipating are there, particularly on the full blown song “Stormy Weather” and the instrumental dub out “Before(Less)”, but they are only a relatively small part of the whole proceedings.

While loads of fun, a lot of the tracks on Parts Water sound a little awkward and lacking in a mood that pulls the interesting elements together. Probably for this very reason, I found the vocal tracks to be the most successful on the whole. If you are not one for words in your music, then steer clear.

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Of the three releases I’m reviewing, Soulo’s is probably the most straightforward. It is a “mini-album”, which basically means although you have 10 tracks, all up you get about 27 minutes of music. Despite the short length, they manage to cram in many ideas, and never at the expense of a well structured melody.

The aptly titled “Simple” is indicative of the majority of the tracks here. Distorted and slightly chaotic noises introduce a much more mellow piece, with upfront synth melodies and pastoral guitar intertwining against a back drop of drum machine sounds and some distant sound effects.

Overall, Soulo’s first release has a feeling of a certain technical naïveté, or at the least melody and harmony and an overall mood seems much more important to them than the detailed production work that typifies a lot of modern electronic music. Add that to the use of guitar (and other non-electronic instrumentation) and you have something that would appeal to a fan of bands like Tortoise, Stereolab or even the High Llamas as much as to a fan of electronic music. Naturally enough the two fan bases are not without overlap…

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The first “proper” Dntel album, Life is Full of Possibilities, might be ripe to cross over in a similar fashion. The album is something of a document of various collaborations with musos, with half of the tracks centred on contributions by vocalists from a variety of indie bands. The results marry two particular interests of mine in a way that really does my head in: the sort of rainy day atmosphere shared by bands like Slowdive, Hood, or the Sea & Cake; and the adventurous, nerdy hi-jinks of someone like Vladislav Delay or even Atom TM. Songs build in mood, only to be swamped by dramatic chords which are in turns slashed into ragged shapes and stammer away. Beats often find an unlikely middle ground between the jittery funk of modern R&B and the crunchy stumblings of Autechre.

Because of the number of contributors and the slightly maudlin angle of the song-writing, Life is Full of Possibilities might give some older listeners flashbacks to This Mortal Coil. It is fair to say that Dntel’s strong point certainly isn’t fun. Regardless, things never get too precious or pretty sounding. Rhythm sections often kick solidly and loud bursts of sound make sure you’re not dozing. The album also cleverly saves some of its most energetic moments for towards the end, when Dntel drops a surprisingly straight up techno track, followed by the up-tempo song “(This is) The Dream of Evan and Chan”. The latter features massive walls of distortion cut into abrupt jabs of sound against the building rhythms and the pop vocals of Benjamin Gibbs. Even in the very nice final tune, reversed orchestras surge through unexpectedly and Paul Larson’s guitar jumps like the funkiest faulty CD player.

Plug Research