The foreboding silhouette of the Dragnet returns this week to ensnare a solemn-stepping Pariah, the martyring lovers of Walter Jones’ addled imagination and the lazyfish meanderings of Beach Fossils.
Pariah – ‘Detroit Falls’, ‘Don’t Go’ and ‘Jelly Baby’
(via No Pain In Pop)
When Arthur Cayzer’s ‘Detroit Falls’ shuffles into earshot all soul-sung and pining, the last thing you expect is for it to turn into a low-slung, post-Dilla strut of nowsound, but that’s exactly how things unfold. The 21-year-old Londoner has heroes, clearly – ‘Don’t Go’ is all urbane and spare and fine like an emotionally-delayed MJ Cole, while ‘Jelly Baby’ flares up in fits of grime-y, hyperstepping synth – but Cayzer displays a poise absent from so many young beat hopefuls and in doing so becomes the latest reason to fall desperately in love with those splashing in the crystal clear peripheries of dub’s murkier waters.
Walter Jones – ‘I’ll Keep On Loving You’ b/w ‘Living Without Your Love’
(out through DFA this week)
I’ve been playing CD-ripped, 320kbps versions of these out for a while now, so I’m quietly ecstatic that Walter Jones’ sublime double-shot of deep house is finally released on wax this week through DFA. ‘I’ll Keep On Loving You’ is unbeatable: despairing synths giving way to Depeche Modish rib-ache bass leaps and clubland’s eternal anonymous diva, pledging loyalty to a love affair so rotten and desperate it seems to knock her teeth out on its way up through the mix, voice emerging in a round wail, wordless and echo-drenched. ‘Living Without Your Love’ is the alternative in both none and every sense of the word, the b-side’s rendering of an existence without that rotten, desperate love affair only marginally less gloomy. There is loneliness, tempered by the Ubik-empathy of drugs, but reinforced by their sudden flight and unbreachable clubland bass volumes; and there is everything else. Walter works because he sits in between, filtering the two, a blameless deity of disco perfection.
Beach Fossils
(at MySpace)
It’s not hard to see where Beach Fossils are coming from – I wonder how long it took the Brooklyn shuffler(s?) to decide to name the three tracks at their MySpace page ‘Vacation’, ‘Daydream’ and ‘Lazy Day’. Not long? Not long – this is fleeting, capricious lo-fi amble, conceived of as rapidly as it’s been laid to dusty four-track. Whether by default or design it lends Beach Fossils a scant sting that casts them adrift from the noisy clutter of most home recording projects. Bass nudges away nobly and totally unaffected, drums are happy lax, palimpsest guitars chirp the aimless gallivants of birdsong, while whoever it is that’s behind Beach Fossils feeds his voice carefully through echo and tremor like polite TV interference insisting you leave the house, go away, go outside.
