a few weeks have passed, and i have managed to do a devilish deal with the limited cardboard packaging and extract the contents without too much damage, so what of the music ?
well, if you follow the ireallylovemusic groove then you may have noticed that i jump around a fair bit.
one week i will be plugging away for indie guitars, and the next, dirt filled electro excess, with anything else in-between getting some space in the playlist depending on the weather/mood/tv schedule.
so taking all that into consideration, i guess it comes as no surprise to find out that i genuinely think this to be the best unkle album yet, and i bet that there a lot of people who are finding it hard to accept that of the original team, it’s james lavelle that is still making music that’s listenable, beautiful and emotional, as opposed to experimenting with the latest hip hop micro-genre that no-one outside of a restricted postal region gives two hoots about.
in fact, for this phase of the unkle project, dynamic duo, james lavelle and richard file, have honed their cinematic dance rock-noir production techniques that they hinted at with the techno-sheen of previous album, never, never, land, to a degree that i would never have expected. where things are drastically different to the last album is the hanging out with the lords of fuzzed up bass lines queens of the stone age set, which has definitely given the whole album a very welcome dirty, harder edge. recent interviews have revealed the difficulties james has faced in recent times (financial ruin, drugs of course, and parenting !), and when you hit certain areas of the album is not hard to hear the influences and the impact such life changing events can have on your overall persona.
so, for a major part of the album, guitars are left to make a noise, bass lines rumble and threaten, and real drums keep it all together, with the addition of studio overdubs, and subtle samples delicately scattered here and there (fact fans : 2 david bowie samples on one album !)
this new awakening could of course cause a rift amongst the legions of followers as the foundation of the band has always been the love of the groove, and lavelles world striving dj sets have kept many a dance floor throbbing, but the clues as to his love for rock were always there. whether it was in the unlicensed use of well known rock samples for the stream of unklesounds mixtapes, or his choice of previous guest vocalists (hello thom yorke etc), making it a natural progression to make a solid rock album, with consistent mood and feel as war stories plays like a complete album – and not just a set of tracks lumped together.
however, with an unkle album it’s never just about the music is it ? there is the small matter of the guests that james calls upon to add weight to the meaty sonics.
and for war stories it’s a definite case of the allowing the hidden edges of rock-n-roll into the party.
there’s josh homme of course doing his thing all over the fuzzed up urgency of restless, the cults ian astbury giving it his best vocal performance in many a year, for the well received burn my shadow track and album epic album closer when things explode, the spooky doubled up vocals of autolux on the peter hook styled bass line of persons and machinery that has more in common with underground 4ad bands of the 90s than anything else, and the expected appearance of massive attacks 3d giving it his whispered intensity for the ambient sounding twilight. expected due to the fact that as well as creating the gothic styled artwork across all the packaging (and there is plenty across the various formats/versions available) a lot of the sound of this album harks back to the soundscapes that massive attack crafted for their classic mezzanine album, as well as nodding its’ head to the missing in action masters of dark dance rock, death in vegas.
there is the same paranoid intensity, the same use of rock music dynamics, and a similar late night mood.
while cooler areas of the internet like to look down on james lavelle as nothing more than a well connected parasite with too many badly designed t-shirts, i for one, happen to think this is one of the best albums of 2007, and love it.
more detail : here