{"id":660,"date":"2007-07-24T22:29:04","date_gmt":"2007-07-24T21:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/?p=660"},"modified":"2007-07-24T22:29:04","modified_gmt":"2007-07-24T21:29:04","slug":"unkle-war-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/?p=660","title":{"rendered":"unkle &#8211; war stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content=\"text\/html; charset=iso-8859-1\"> <META content=\"MSHTML 6.00.6000.16481\" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE><\/STYLE> <\/HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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 ?<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>well, if you follow the <EM>ireallylovemusic  <\/EM>groove then you may have noticed that i jump around a fair bit.  <\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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  <STRONG>unkle <\/STRONG>album yet, and i bet that there a lot of people who are  finding it hard to accept that of the original team, it&#8217;s <EM>james lavelle<\/EM>  that is still making music that&#8217;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.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>in fact, for this phase of the <STRONG>unkle  <\/STRONG>project,&nbsp;dynamic duo,&nbsp;<EM>james lavelle<\/EM>  and&nbsp;<EM>richard file,<\/EM> have honed their cinematic dance rock-noir  production techniques&nbsp;that they hinted at with the&nbsp;techno-sheen of  previous album, <EM>never, never, land, <\/EM>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 <STRONG>queens of the stone  age <\/STRONG>set, which has definitely given the whole album a very  welcome&nbsp;dirty, harder edge. <\/FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>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&nbsp;your overall persona.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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 <STRONG>david bowie<\/STRONG> samples on  one album !)<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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&nbsp;lavelles world&nbsp;striving dj sets have  kept&nbsp;many a dance floor throbbing, but the clues as to his love for rock  were always there. whether it was&nbsp;in the unlicensed use of well known rock  samples for&nbsp;the&nbsp;stream of <STRONG>unklesounds <\/STRONG>mixtapes, or  his choice of previous guest vocalists (hello <EM>thom yorke<\/EM> etc), making  it a natural progression to make a solid rock album, with consistent mood and  feel as&nbsp;<EM>war stories <\/EM>plays like a complete album &#8211; and not just a  set of tracks lumped together.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>however, with an <STRONG>unkle<\/STRONG> album it&#8217;s  never just about the music is it ? <\/FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>there is the  small matter of the guests that james calls upon to add weight to the meaty  sonics.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>and for <EM>war stories<\/EM> it&#8217;s&nbsp; a definite  case of the allowing the hidden edges of rock-n-roll into the party.  <\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>there&#8217;s <EM>josh homme<\/EM> of course doing his  thing all over the fuzzed up urgency of <EM>restless<\/EM>, <STRONG>the cults  <\/STRONG><EM>ian astbury<\/EM> giving it his best vocal performance in many a  year, for the well received <EM>burn my shadow <\/EM>track and album epic album  closer <EM>when things explode<\/EM>, the spooky doubled up vocals of <EM>autolux  <\/EM>on the peter hook styled bass line of <EM>persons and machinery <\/EM>that  has more in common with underground 4ad bands of the 90s than anything else,  and&nbsp;the expected appearance of <STRONG>massive attacks<\/STRONG><EM>&nbsp;  3d <\/EM>giving it his whispered intensity for the ambient sounding <EM>twilight.  <\/EM>expected due to the fact&nbsp;that as well as creating the gothic styled  artwork across all the packaging (and there is plenty across the various  formats\/versions available)&nbsp;a lot of the sound of this album harks back to  the soundscapes that <STRONG>massive attack<EM> <\/EM><\/STRONG>crafted for their  classic <EM>mezzanine<\/EM> album, as well as nodding its&#8217; head to the missing in  action masters of dark dance rock, <STRONG>death in vegas<\/STRONG>.  <\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>there is the same paranoid intensity, the same use  of rock music dynamics, and a similar late night mood.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>while cooler&nbsp;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.<\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><EM>more detail<\/EM> : <A  href=\"http:\/\/www.unkle.com\">here<\/A><\/FONT><\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><\/FONT>&nbsp;<\/DIV> <DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><\/FONT>&nbsp;<\/DIV><\/BODY><\/HTML><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ireallylovemusic.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}