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Album Review
by SashaS
12-3-2003
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| Appliance audition for 'Solaris' OST... |
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Appliance: 'Are You Earthed?'
(Mute)
Appliance: rainbow over autobahn to another windmill
Someone wrote recently that today’s youth has, music-wise, only nostalgia to look forward to. Perhaps but the paramount is what is culturally rebuilt out of collapsed history. Right now… well, we’d rather avoid repeating disses, observations and doomsaying – you know the score… Let’s put it this way: women and artists dig compliments over the truth, as much as the record business is – an industry.
Degrees of falsehood can be observed all around and anyone interested in beauty has to wonder where are all the mind’s eyes focusing? I started thinking of Berlin at the concert by Black Box Recorder because the lady fronting them, Sarah Nixie, so much recalls ‘dames’ such as Marlene Dietrich by having muted class while magnetizing like an ‘Ice queen’ charm of being desirable but unavailable and untouchable. Subtly toying with sexy kitten imagery, she is slick, sophisticated, frau fatalische, clever, teasing over music that simply adds to the whole feeling of cyber cabaret… (Is she so darn fancy-full to appear better than Dido and leave Alison Goldfrapp miles behind? – hormones muse.)
Whilst BBR are fond of some long gone time, more modern reference is offered by Appliance on their new album ‘Are You Earthed?’ – Neu Welle, the 1980s wave of German bands, and in particular, if memory serves right, Palais Schaumburg. They used to marry German tradition of experimentalism with more rock idiom while being melodious. Well, no surprise to find out that ‘Earthed?’ was partly recorded in Berlin.
Appliance began in early 1997, setting up their own Surveillance label to issue their debut EP ‘Organised Sound’, followed by a number of small London based indie-co releases before signing to Mute in 1998. Debut album, ‘Manual’, was released in September 1999, supplanted by mini-album ‘Six Modular Pieces’ (2000) and ‘Imperial Metric’ (2001).
The threesome of James Brooks, David Ireland and Michael Parker’s follow up to the ‘Metric’ is an album that plugs its electronic tentacles across the universal sockets. The entire album feels like mapping the furthest reaches of space that are as much inner as conjured; its sonics are not as dark as the previous disc, there is brightness in its techno-heart that is beating coolly, precisely but still warm and inviting.
The wavy, curvilinear, open vistas are flooded with visions at twilight. It’s somewhat unreal, alike watching sunset at Key West, as fluid as the ocean reflecting it on ‘Tuesday Is Nearly Over’; there is cyber-indie spirit of the recent 45-er ‘Go Native’, it gets all psychedelic-cum-groovy on ‘Fruit Of The Sea’ and moodily instrumental on ‘Mountains 1’. ‘As Far As I Can See’ carries the essence of a dazzling guitar line to a vertigo-inducing peak. ‘Violins’ ticks along spellbindingly while the vocal glides over the cranial canyons.
‘The Blue Rider’ deploys a soul bassline to (instrumentally) cruise an autobahn. ‘88’ presents James’s spoken word over a mesmerising loop that is not lacking on details, slowly taking you higher and higher until it leaves you hanging for your dear senses. ‘Mountains 2’ ferries you further into the distance until ‘Are You Earthed?’ takes you all the way to the event horizon. Head-wire for sound, close your eyes and ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ imagination.
‘Earthed?’ Ladies and Gentlemen, we are floating in space… the cerebral one.
8/10
SashaS
28-3-2003
Appliance’s album ‘Are You Earthed?’ is released 10 March 2003 on Mute
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