Nuggets - 27 August 2008

Sonny – The Spirit of Elegy
By Simon T Diplock
‘The Spirit Of Elegy’ barely registers on regular sonic scales. The work of one mysterious London resident, this is a disc almost filled with more silence than sounds, a record that brings empty chapels and chilly halls to mind, and an album that gets so sparse in places that it threatens to inhabit the same dreary space as those supposedly relaxing tapes of whale song and gently gusting winds. Ok so it hasn’t been made, slaved over for two years by all accounts, to grab people by the scruff of the neck, but even at its most stirring the ambience here is little more than a whisper. Atmospheric but utterly ignorable.

The All New Adventures Of Us - Best Loved Goodnight Tales
By Steven Fanning
Reviewing this is a bit tricky. It’s kinda like taking a sick puppy to the vet to be put down, you don’t wanna do it but it’s the right thing to do. TANAOU are like this. They’re cute and smiley and utterly inoffensive, but at the same time as dull as fuck and bland as blamanche. All the tunes sound effectively the same, like a watered down Belle and Sebastian without the wit, but endearing all the same. And now your reviewer feels bad for dissing them. This is the puppy problem. Ah, dammit, turn the damn stereo off…problem solved.

Bomb The Bass - Future Chaos
By Steven Fanning
It’s been quite a while since Bomb The Bass last bleeped and beeped something new, so the return with ‘Future Chaos’ of Tim Simenon and his merry band of collaborators is quite intriguing. There’s a varied bunch of singers lending their voice to this, notably Jon Spencer and the tireless Mark Lanegan, who just can’t seem to stop working. Musically, this is a bit Depeche Mode, a bit Massive Attack, and considering Simenon has worked with both of these hardly surprising. The production is as you’d expect – flawless. ‘Future Chaos’ is a dark and trippy instalment in the Bomb The Bass story and worthy of a slot on the stereo sometime, probably late at night.

Soft Cell – Heat: The Remixes
By Eddie Robson
Remixing old tracks is often a peculiar business, as you lose the aesthetic of the original track and cut it adrift from its period. The major problem with this remix album is that the remixers are plainly influenced by Soft Cell and other early 80s electro, and they either try to take the tracks somewhere new with uncertain results, or they do something that’s sort of similar but ultimately not as good (why waste your best ideas on a remix?). Either way, much of this sounds like average electro and house with Marc Almond’s voice over the top. Some tracks pull off something interesting, like The Memory Band’s work on ‘Youth’, but too often this feels like someone pretending to be Soft Cell whilst remixing Soft Cell, and what’s the point of that?