Showing posts with label Hands In The Dark Records. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hands In The Dark Records. Show all posts

Friday, 22 January 2016

Friday Cankun Gold


Here is a Friday night fry-out for you. I think this actually came out in 2014 (or at the latest early 2015) but Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold, from Vincent Caylet’s electronic sultan outlet Cankun, is a bursting blast of hypnotic bliss. I picked it up from French label Hands In The Dark a little in the New Year binge (when looking to buy Housewives’ brilliant record Work – a much belated review soon, seeing as it was one of my fave albums of 2015). There is a sonorous drone ever-present in Cankun’s music, which can either send off psych fumes of hedonism and galactic excess (‘System’), or delve into a more intoxicated RnB spiralled drawl (‘Tyreu’). But there is a maudlin side to these woozy sojourns, a wistful stasis of weighed-down chagrin, that punctures some of the more upbeat (albeit laid-out) jams. ‘Moyit’ seems intent to lurk in the murkier shadows of melancholy before breaking out into a disco shudder; ‘Cuts’ uses its first minute for a sepulchral buzz and incongrouous hustled beat before the sunlight breaks the surface. The truest change in direction for me is penultimate ‘Trezz’, an oscillating rumination with gentle piano and languid, ricocheting guitar warbles with looped feedback drowning in the ether – it’s like listening to a yacht rock groove caught in a submarine marooned in a Bermuda Triangle of buzzing disparate parts. An unexpectedly febrile find, you can pick up Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold here – see off the week in a phaser blaze.

Tuesday, 7 May 2013

Flannel Robes


For a band raging against sitting still, with releases pushing towards the upper echelons of a hundred on just about all formats and through all labels, including Olde English Spelling Bee (whatever happened to those guys? A serious question there), Not Not Fun, Night People and Woodsist, waiting almost a year for a new Robedoor release feels like being spurned by your S&M-fixated lover. The LA droners lick those wounds though with Primal Sphere, the upcoming album the duo have coming out on Hands In The Dark Records. Their brand of electro-doom secretions doesn't deviate far from the Robedoor norm on the new LP, but therein lies their charm - they are truly insidious, their slight transgressions worming their way throughout a prolific oeuvre so that the beginning and end become indiscernible. Plus, on a track like 'Flannel Shroud,' you can get your undead shuffle on - nothing like a funereal dance number for the apocalyptic ages.


You can preorder Primal Sphere here - highly recommended. And brilliant cover art too.