Tuesday, 7 February 2023

Some Day My Principality Will Come

A very brief EP review this time.  I don't often do record reviews for Nutshaft, but this time there weren't any gigs to speak of worth reviwing.  I'm doing a single track review this month, for similar reasons, so expect a micro-post.


GIVE ME MONACO – LUMINANCE EP (Emseatee Records)

 The artist states that this is the second of a pair of EPs “centred around destructive and regenerative elements within nature”, but like all good house and associated genres, it sounds like shiny unnatural machines being corralled by a sensitive human mind – lucky, really, because the water cycle is doubtless very cool, but you can’t really dance to it. You’ll have no trouble flexing a boogie muscle to ‘Basalt’, which pits a classic constantly tweaked acid-trance riff against some bright melodic figures that might have leapfrogged straight from an old Yellow Magic Orchestra album, whilst a breathy vocal fragment threatens to morph into A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’.  On the other hand, ‘Caldera’ – yes, all the tracks are connected with volcanic geology – has a sleeker rhythm with a likembe loop and disconnected vocal phonemes that might remind Thames Valley ravers of the much mourned Coloureds. If ‘Lahar’ and ‘Magma’ are possibly a little less memorable, the four-tracker as a whole is packed with warm bounce. As ingenious as it is igneous.


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