Faultline: revamping an aesthetic soundscape

Johnny ‘Rotten’ Lydon recent comment on there being only good and bad music with the latter’s easy identification with “bad haircuts”. I have no idea what hairdo Faultline’s David Kosten sports (nor it is of any importance) because this is an ace album. ‘Your Love Means Everything’ is a supplant to the 1999’s ‘Closer Colder’ that was showered with plaudits. This one deserves even more.

The previous album was a sparse and atmospheric journey while ‘…Love…’ is a more rounded and amenable affair. These are pop songs that seethe with quality, shimmer with expansion in the world bogged with its sonic confines, ventures into fields of sonic dreams… Alternating instrumental cuts with vocal tracks Kosten takes you on a celestial trek and back…

The launch is with the title track – an ethereal piece that is so quietly elegant to attach itself to your memory-box as if it were an industrial Band-Aid, and lands back with ‘Part 2’, this time sung by Coldplay’s Chris Martin. He vocalises ‘Where Is My Boy?’ as well and does another impressive job.

There are two more name guests, Wayne Coyne (of Flaming Lips) and Michael Stipe (of REM, naturlich). Coyne handles ‘The Colossal Grey Sunshine’ in a more sedate (than his usual) way but it is Stipe who provides the biggest surprise. Cover of the Brothers Four’s ‘Greenfields’ is delivered in a crooning fashion and so deeply felt that at the first listen (without looking at the credits) one might think it is David Bowie!? Anyway, how Kosten managed to attract his star-guests is – by asking.

‘Your Love Means Everything’ is a bit melancholic, a wee ambient, a tad space-rocking and entirely motivated by innovation; this is a feral soundrama to fuel anyone’s fantasies, to tickle curiosity, to raise hope, to provide another (of very few) reasons to be cheerful. Check out ‘Sweet Iris’ and find yourself lost in a sound-surround that counterpoints atmo of a sci-fi soundtrack-like with funky breaks...

Whatever gives me, some more, more, more…
~ ~ ~

Update 2004:

The above album was released by Blanco Y Negro/WEA two years ago [our review's date is 16 June 2002] but its creator didn’t think it got a proper shot/promotion. Now licensed to EMI, some songs have gone - such as ‘Bitter Kiss’ (guest vox by Jacob Golden) and ‘Missing’ - to be replaced by ‘We Came From Lego Blocks’ (voc. by Vordul Megilah, claims my ACD [Advance CD] while the official site names vocalist as Cannibal Ox) and ‘Wild Horses’ (vocal by Joseph Arthur), a version of The Stones’ classic that sounds like a complete rock-stoner!

There is also extra track here, the 13th cut, ‘Biting Tongues’, fronted by Ras B.

Justifiable re-vamping, with a new cover, the mark remains the same.

8/10