These New Puritans

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/may/30/these-new-puritans-popandrock?CMP=twt_fd

there is an undercurrent of Labradford circa E Luxo So in the song structures here, though the arrangements aren't nearly as sparse

Going to have to wait a bit on that due to morning work but I WILL hear that before lunch, dammit.

Also how did I forget you were a Labradford fan.

in fairness I only know that one album (but MAN that album)

Agreed! Trying to remember if that was the most recent one the one time I saw them on tour...

Just on my first listen now. Obviously there is a there is Talk Talk comparison to be made, but also there's a maybe little hint of Radiohead too in places? In the first half of the record anyway - I'm thinking of the offishness of the melody in Fragment Two, and it's also got that dusk-is-falling ambience that I associate with Hail To The Thief. Mostly though wow, this is just out there on its own. Going to take a while to digest cos it doesn't really boil down to one particular mood, it's quite complex in that sense. Some bits are full of this awful creeping dread and you've got things like those phantasmagorical voices rising up out of the murk in 'Spiral' which are pretty fucking diabolical, but then there's all these other feelings being introduced into it all the time, all those little harmonic shifts in the scenery, notes that puncture the gloom like shining shards of glass, certain passages that don't exactly sound hopeful but maybe do have have a sense of resolve about them... fuck shit fuck I wanna shut up now and listen more, this is awesome!

One thing I really love about this band is the amazing sense of place that you get from their music. Obviously the title of this album is pretty suggestive anyway but yeah, for me this is totally music of boggy brownfield sites, those shitty neglected places at edge of city, places that always seem to be lashed with rain or hidden by mist, or at least they seem that way whenever I've been birdwatching or walking or whatever there. But it's not just about the rubbish and ruin of our times, there's also this weird sense of history, secrets held in the mud and in the ditches, like lifting up a rusty shopping trolley and finding a bog-man in the mire beneath. I guess the Karl Hyde album is about the same edgeworld zone too, but this is so much richer and more mysterious.

That's what I hear in it anyway, always get reminded of those passages in Riddley Walker where they're at work wallowing around in the mud looking for scraps of mangled metal and finding all these redundant artefacts from our civilisation and then trying to piece them together to get some sort of understanding of how they got to where they're at now.

Listening now; predictably enough I'm fucking bowled over. The missing piece of the comparisons puzzle you're all trying to assemble upthread is quite possibly later-period Ulver, btw

V (Island Song) will be very, very, very hard to beat for song of the year

here's a stream for the curious: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/may/30/these-new-puritans-popandrock

Linked a few posts back...

that's true. nice one getting scik mouthy out of retirement as well, tnp - not many bands manage that nowadays

this album seems to ebb and flow - some tracks feed into the grander narrative, and some serve as climaxes in themselves. so it can be listened to as a whole and as a showcase for some amazing songs. which means it'll be making some severe inroads to both of my year-end ballots

Finishing my listen now, quite lovely. Not as monumental per se as Hidden but it doesn't need to be, and I enjoy it very well from the get-go. Glad there's still interest in these kind of approaches out there.

Really wish an interviewer would bother to ask them about the 20th century classical music they're influenced by because there's something a bit eyeroll-provoking about the parade of straw-grasping comparisons to whichever ambient rock band the listener happens to like best.

ok, the missing piece of the puzzle is *googles* arvo part!

Yeah, there's something to Part for sure in there.

file under: snarky comebacks that accidentally passed sincere comment

meanwhile the album's still very good, on track 7 now. when's the HI DERE liveblog?

I already listened to it in rapt fascination and am back on Weill

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/may/30/these-new-puritans-record-hawk

Decent interview here. I'm not sure I believe the bit about the bass singer but the bit about the hawk is insane. Can anyone actually tell which song it's on?

ok this is very lovely. and serious...i mean, most of the music i listen to is 'serious', maybe this is more like intensely studious.

so track #6 must be the hawk, huh.

Agree that classical composition would be a more fruitful point of comparison than rock, especially when the drums disappear. There's obviously a bit of Reich at the start of one song, forget which. There's some Italian horror soundtrack vibes there somewhere as well maybe.

Sorry my rambling upthread was a bit tangential and pointlessly personal, but I guess this thing lends itself more to imaginative interpretation more than having any sort of functional use. Can't dance to it, can't really use it at dinner parties, would sound shit in a car, can't even really relax to it. Think what I was getting at is that instead of being some Talk Talkish meditation on the spirit of Eden, it feels more like they're dealing with a particular manifestation of the messy cultural entropy at the end of history.

This thread title btw, when was the last time anyone listened to Navigate, Navigate?

I don't get why you couldn't play this at a dinner party, or say as background music in your headphones at work

Well I did listen to it at work, but I didn't really get a whole lot done while it was on.

it's the best background headphone work music i've heard in months. so many lush long tones on low brass & organ.

This sounds amazing on grey drizzly mornings, and it's a fantastic album to read to, but it works best on Sunday evening I've found.

Yeah I agree that the noise on Organ Eternal is probably the hawk. Incidentally I have 'flown' a harris hawk before and they a) go miles very fast and b) are fucking difficult to control so god knows how they managed in a recording studio.

when that shifting orchestral motif breaks through about 4:10 into V (Island Song) it's juuuuuuuust the greatest

as a youth I read a couple of falconry books and decided that I wanted a gyr falcon, but it never happened

Sunday evening = creeping dread at the thought of another week of drudgery, yes it would work for that

We're going hawk flying or something next month for my day's birthday. I'll take a speaker and play this at the birds, see what happens.

for those about to raaawk...

Get used to holding bits of raw meat and worrying that your face is about to be scarred for life.

sounds like an undergraduate cookout

TNP's next project

They're welcome to come kind my house and record the sound of the cats chewing at us because they want to be fed. That's ominous as fuck.

Was a bit worried that this would be just like the orchestral bits of Hidden repeated ad infinitum, but boy was I ever wrong about that.

think Nothing Else is the other standout, but who knows what'll emerge. whole darn thing probably

Really looking forward to reading Owen's thoughts on this, hope he runs into it soon.

This is really great. I definitely get some songs having this Labradford 'feel'. Talk Talk too. Really digging this so far. A lot to discover sonically as well, this begs for a headphones listen.

I listened to Navigate Navigate last weekend, love that record. Noticed some similarities with Swell Maps. But, yeah, it's like a different band than the one that made the last two albums.

I love "Hidden" to death! I love "Beat Pyramid" too.

My ears get picky when chamber music instruments are recorded in a natural way. A swirl of delay and pitch-shift here and there, subby kick-drum, but otherwise this record sounds like a recording of a concert, not an album. Which is awesome! But it makes me listen with a different set of ears, the same ears that listen to Erased Tapes and Bedroom Community and Corey Dargel and Olafur Arnalds and Simon Bookish and, like, recordings of chamber music. The same set of ears that never got into The Rachels'.

I have nothing bad to say about the record because the intention is honourable and the execution is excellent. But on the first couple listens, it's not what I'm looking for as a listener. Why not, I can't put my finger on immediately? Maybe it broadcasts its godparents too loudly, i.e. Gastr del Sol + David Sylvian + "Taphead" + Michael Nyman + Hindemith? Or maybe I don't like the way the drums and vocals are recorded so cleanly? Still, great band and I am a big fan. The last track is brilliant.

Love your take, thanks for this -- and to an extent I'd agree in that while the band has massively bootstrapped I do agree with you that it feels like they're still 'in process.' The Japan/Talk Talk comparisons in terms of arc are thrown around and all but at the same time, Japan's third was Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Talk Talk's The Colour of Spring -- ie, there was STILL more to come. Not that that would be guaranteed in TNP's case necessarily but I like the idea of this being yet another signpost in their progression.

Something that always excited me about Spiritualized and Blur's forays into chamber music-- on a theoretical level, bc I don't love either Let It Come Down or Monkey-- was that in interviews both J Spaceman and Damon Albarn had a rotten-child attitude toward the Concert Hall and instrumentation. Spacemen in the MOJO magazine saying "I told the arranger I wanted 12 French horns and no other brass" and Albarn saying "I hate violas tell all the violas to go home". Even if I didn't love the resultant music, I appreciated the sentiment, it was brash and fun and stoopid and I liked it.

Then, with "Hidden", it was as if that sentiment had come full-blossom, arrangement-wise. The amount of bassoon and taiko was perverse. The sonics of that album were thrilling and its building blocks were so unexpected and unprecedented. It had the effect of "this could be a piece of chamber music" and was performed as such at Barbican? and elsewhere? I missed it but heard it was ~amazing~.

I don't like x=y discussion-- especially comparing this band to Talk Talk which, with my low opinion of Talk Talk, is a disservice to TNP's much more crystallized intention-- but the end of "V" sounds like "Taphead" (or whatever that Talk Talk song is with the two minutes of drum vamp). "Spiral" sounds like "Let The Happiness In". [Another track] sounds like [that track from Camofleur]. There's a trumpet solo that could be a sample from "In A Silent Way". Compared to "Hidden", it is all so familiar? Instead of unexpected.

I read a little blurb that said that guy wrote everything out, all parts, before entering studio. It's possible that he didn't realize how striking these reference points are, while the record existed as notes on a page. It's something I'm familiar with, a client will say "make it sound like x" and just how much it sounds like x is kind of arbitrary, dependent upon studio and players as much as the limits of the arranger's own ingenuity.

And maybe I'm supremely off-base and just listen to too much David Sylvian and Gastr del Sol etc. and I'll fall in love with the record on third listen

especially comparing this band to Talk Talk which, with my low opinion of Talk Talk, is a disservice to TNP's much more crystallized intention

Yeah, agreed. I only find that valid in terms of evolutionary shorthand -- at most -- rather than explicit reference point or role model.

P/dull from the excerpts, for Puritans I detect much pleasure here, not enough work.

Bands have yet to crack Ferneyhough Transit.

Well, I disagree strongly with that idea. If anything, Ferneyhough is trying to take "intuitive serial sound creation" and box it into notation and classical music performance. The reverse is true. Ferneyhough has yet to crack a run-of-the-mill noise rock show or a synth jam. But that's what I like about Ferneyhough? I thought it was the point? That what he was doing was really dumb and time-intensive?

Sorry my rambling upthread was a bit tangential and pointlessly personal, but I guess this thing lends itself more to imaginative interpretation more than having any sort of functional use. Can't dance to it, can't really use it at dinner parties, would sound shit in a car, can't even really relax to it. Think what I was getting at is that instead of being some Talk Talkish meditation on the spirit of Eden, it feels more like they're dealing with a particular manifestation of the messy cultural entropy at the end of history.

― dschinghis kraan (NickB), Thursday, 30 May 2013 19:39 (2 days ago)

how much of the music you listen to has a functional use?

Maybe "functional use" isn't quite the right term for it but Nick's problem sounds a bit like the one I had with the Swans album from last year, in a "I really like this but I can't imagine many moments in daily life when I'd actually be able to listen to it".

At the time, Artrocker described These New Puritans as sounding like "Sheffield and Berlin synths, '90s alt rock Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo drones, Underworld beats; and all in the most contemporary of contexts".[citation needed]

In a 2010 interview with Barnett, Paul Morley described These New Puritans' new material as "very 1970, but also quite 1610, 1950, 1979, 1989, 2005 and 2070".[5]