CS + Kreme - Snoopy

one dude doing electronics (laptop/keyboard/something with twisty knobs) the whole time, the other dude alternating between playing bass/singing and using some kind of sequencer, depending on the song

lol sorry that's so vague. i didn't go up and look at their gear table.

if you still follow me on instagram there's a short dark video of them playing on there

I'll check it out!

I think they actually played two shows at a cafe in Iowa City? I was almost audience member #7 but didn't come up with something else to do on a mini-vacation and wasn't going to drive two hours each way for just the show

I saw the London show which was very good, but they certainly left the fans wanting more - it was only a 45 minute set.

nyc show was good if marred by poor sound imo

new material evoking demdike stare and hype Williams

snoopy material sounded huge. Overall more aggressive than I anticipated but better for it I think

seeing them saturday in LA

New album!!

https://csandkreme.bandcamp.com/album/orange

Snoopy is hard to follow up. The same brilliant musicality is lavished on Orange — a combination of unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments — giddily imbued with the dark arts of ritual and seance. But Orange is more gripping, focussed and urgent, more intense and ambitious. Next level.

Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense.
Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We're deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter.
Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover.
Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues.

Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm.

Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It's reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way.

Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing 'Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe.

Similarly Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water.
It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.

Hmmm, this sounds pretty good so far, but I have to give it a few more listens before I commit to buying the record and paying for exorbitant international shipping. On first pass, "Bassline" and the Bridget St John one stuck out the most, but I'm missing some of the Jon Hassell-meets-Coil weirdness of the previous work. As the press release says, Snoopy is a hard record to live up to.

OK, I take it back, definitely some Coil moves on "Would You Like A Vampire." Maybe I'll buy this after all.

The first two tracks are very twitchy, like they've switched out Snoopy's 'clammy dread' for 'panic attack'

i didn't gel with the first two or three tracks. it felt like yet another overly introspespective 'lockdown' session, when that is probably the last thing i'm looking for currently, or maybe i just wasn't in the right mood. But then 'Mandarin' won me over and 'Would You Like A Vampire' is up there with the best they have recorded.

going to go in for a second round.

yeah I'll have to return to it. listening first thing in the morning was not a good call

Took me at least five listens to fully appreciate Snoopy. Only listened to this one once but it does feel a bit more introspective and moody than Snoopy, which was of course plenty introspective and moody already. That's what I'm after during the winter months tho

Given the cost to ship a double album overseas, I really wish artists would consider pressing up a few hundred CDs for us plebes

I love this on first listen. Does feel even more claustrophobic, perhaps, but I was listening whilst cleaning my extremely messy office, so yknow.

This is really growing on me

this feels like the fraught escape from the mirrored nightmare chamber you were trapped in in snoopy

some fairly disturbing shit tbh especially “shred”

https://www.ursss.com/2022/06/cs-kreme/

Hadn't seen this before (concert from earlier this year, has some tracks from Orange).

at this point i think this can only be called a massive disappointment. unfair i know, but still. only thing that comes close to snoopy is the vocal track near the end with the acoustic guitar. will relisten soon, but realized that i have not thought about this album at all after listening to it every day when it came out, waiting for it to reveal itself, but now i think there's no there there, sadly.

Gonna have to disagree with you here. I'm enjoying it more with every listen.

I'm with paolo. I was initially a tad underwhelmed, but I've come around to thinking it's almost as good as Snoopy

same!

FYI don't know if anyone in the states is waiting for vinyl but I just got an email notification that mine shipped

I've also found it pretty hard to grasp. I've listened to it a few times from front to back, but cannot recall anything in particular other than a vaguely grim oppressive atmosphere and the striking cover.

Not even "Would You Like A Vampire?"

I wouldn't say that the release is a massive disappointment to be clear. Vagueness can be a worthy aesthetic in its own right, especially their version, which is disconcreting, mundane, horrific, occasionally revelatory. They're definitely channeling a structure of feeling. I think someone upthread mentioned Snoopy as a pandemic soundtrack. I can think of any number of other dystopian, yet ungraspable conditions we're living through.

"Would You Like A Vampire?" does feel an like exception on Orange. There's a sense of release when it finally arrives. Maybe it's comparable to the final minutes of "Mount Warning" in that respect. But somehow I don't recall it as strongly as the atmosphere that they build up before, then there's that image of the seaweed looking fetid and dead, maybe still swarming with some kind of bacterial life. Both hyper-realistic and allegoric.

I was maybe thinking of picking up it up on vinyl, even just for the cover image, which I bet looks pretty impressive on the sleeve.

Good post! And good points. I'll concede that, though I've probably listened to Orange close to ten times, which is a lot for me, I rarely have the patience for "Storm Rips Banana Tree." I just don't think it totally justifies its sidelong status, and I think perhaps this is where the vagueness you speak of falls short for me. I'm sure there are situations for which this track is perfect, but I haven't found them yet.

i mean it is still well made, and i know it is unfair to compare to snoopy which is singular both in its content and the context it found itself in

but still, there is not a lot going on underneath the well-done sound design. one stays on the surface with this record, maybe intentionally. it's like walking around a city with mild drug withdrawals or something. just does not have the enveloping quality of snoopy at all. but being twitchily outside was what '22 was all about so maybe they captured the zeitgeist again

it's like walking around a city with mild drug withdrawals or something

sold!

I cant tell if its not as good or not, I find it really discomfiting to listen to. not in a way where I think there's something wrong w it, but in a way where I dont find myself pulling it out much because its too effective at unsettling me haha. idk I like it a lot but also have a kind of fear of it

yall are just writing very tantalizing ad copy at this point

Orange is way too unsettling for me to have listened to during lockdown. Snoopy was just unsettling enough

I forgot I ordered this lol. Unsettling mysteries incoming.....

Deej OTM. I decided not to listen to this album any more because it just vaguely upset me.

there is a real queasiness to it. i’m drawn back to it though

"this album makes me feel bad and i don't want to listen to it ... maybe this is good" never change yall

i kid i kid, but still, it's not like snoopy made me feel good or anything. it's not about feeling good, it's about the quality of feeling bad, and on that measure snoopy succeeds via a sort of dream logic, this is a bit surface level to my ears, but will give it some more spins.

if you like 'orange' i feel like rabit's recent oeuvre is hitting the same zones

I think of this band as being mainly good bc of artfully juxtaposed surfaces so when ppl say 'this one feels surface level' im like well yea

playing in London on March 31st (sadly I'll miss them yet again): https://ra.co/events/1661923

i like orange more than snoopy!

danker, scrapier. you can’t imagine anyone calling it “illbient”.

i obviously apologise unreservedly for using that word.

orange is my new workout music btw not joking

despite knowing the artist I have always misread this thread title as “CS plus Kreme minus Snoopy”, thank you for listening

illbient is good, tho?

snoopy is cool because it is pretty traditional in terms of instrumentation, but super otherworldly in its effects. more badalamenti than anything else, really. or like certain moments in harold budd's catalog - like you can sing "where did blueberries go" over this track pretty easily!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo0ng_0NYnA

relistening to orange, it's unfair to compare it to snoopy. it has its own thing going on. and that thing is really bad, to me. i will say it's rare for me to actively loathe music, usually it's just boring, so they have accomplished something real in that sense.

I'm actually surprised by how polarizing this record seems to be. It isn't exactly leagues apart from the previous album

i think it is at least a league apart. to me it does feel like a very different thing from Snoopy.

as someone who has had trouble totally processing orange I definitely don't think its 'boring'

i feel like walking around Glasgow in early March would probably be a good way to "get" it

i'll try that tomorrow Tracer.

d-40, me neither; wasn't as clear as i could have been.

anyways. still one of the best acts out rn i think. and 'vampire' is truly excellent