Tock Tick

A Certain Ratio's It All Comes Down To This is one of 2024's most played albums round these parts. Last week they announced the release of a 7" single, a song and a dub of the song recorded during the sessions for the album with producer Dan Carey- Clockwork Orange. ACR have refused to stand still and repeat themselves. This song shows them continuing to break new ground- it kicks into life with Jez's FXed voice intoning, 'tock tick tock tick', and a grimy industrial groove, a bassline that buzzes ominously and then a second Jez vocal, verses and choruses about cruelty, hatred and a clockwork orange. The distorted, grinding rhythm nods to one- time Factory label mates, early 80s Cabaret Voltaire, but this is still very much ACR being no- one else but ACR. 

More new music? I shared Er... Hello? by OBOST earlier this year, an absurdly accomplished and wonderful album made by seventeen year old Bobby Langfield and an EP of remixes of his song I Don't Want To Be Alone (including one by Richard Sen whose forthcoming album India Man promises to be one of 2024's highlights). Bobby/ OBOST has recently remixed the work of a classical pianist Christian Blandford, taking tracks from Christian's album The Waves and editing/ remixing them into one piece, The Waves (OBOST Unification Mix). There's a minute of juddering, out of time and out of sync sound, pianos glitching, and then it all suddenly snaps into place- a drum track rattles away, layers of piano and synths come and go, all flowing onwards and together/ against each other. Really good stuff. Find it here. 

Let's complete a Tuesday new music trio with Sheffield's Crooked Man whose It's My Pleasure- Part 4 came out at the end of last week in three versions- a lush, mid- tempo nine minute main mix, an instrumental and an acapella. There's a lot going on, layers of synths, drums, ripples of sounds, a house vocal, and an insistent groove that grows increasingly percussive and intense. The EP is at Bandcamp. In a neat link to the Cabaret Voltaire sounds of the ACR song that opened this post, Crooked Man aka Richard Barratt was one half of legendary Sheffield bleep techno pioneers Sweet Exorcist along with the Cab's Richard H. Kirk. Cab it up. 

Er... Hello?

A friend sent me this recently, an album from January this year which deserves to be heard more widely- OBOST's Er... Hello? OBOST is multi- instrumentalist Bobby Langfield, just 17 years old and currently studying for his A Levels. Bobby has grown up in a household where the music of Andrew Weatherall, Kraftwerk, Paranoid London and Red Axes was a constant backdrop. Bobby, as OBOST, sings, writes, records and mixes. That this is a debut album, thirteen songs across a slew of electronic styles, is one thing- that it's been made by someone so young is something else. 

Er... Hello? album opens with You Messed With Fire, acoustic guitar chords and the thud of a kick drum and then a wash of guitars, synths and a very distorted voice, everything swimming and swirling around as the kick keeps things moving forward. The sound of fingers on guitar strings appears, handclaps and wobbling synth parts and that voice, never clear enough to hear what it's saying. It's a nicely disorientating start followed by some slowed down electronic pop, I Don't Want To Be Alone, Bobby's voice and machines pulling off that trick of electronic euphoric melancholy- synths that suggest good times with minor chords and lyrics that hint at something else. Over the course of the ensuing eleven songs there is FX and sample driven electronic music, drum machine driven cosmische, experimental instrumentals, glitchy pop that calls to mind The Xx, rippling synthlines and on Another Type Of World, alienated synth pop with double time drum machine and eventually walls of noise.

The second half of the album spins even further and more wildly, a range of styles and sounds on offer, all the while the fizz and clatter of keys and drums set against the doleful vocals. Penultimate song Hurry Up has a wall of Daniel Avery style drone and static and then the judder of synths and hiss of hi hats, a techno workout. The album finishes with Lips Fade to Blue- it starts with the crackle of vinyl and an acoustic guitar part circling as Bobby sings a lament, and then shifts somewhere else, 80s synth pop colliding with 21st century electro, that dissolves into a mess of repeating loops and FX. You can get it at Bandcamp. 

Since Er.. Hello? came out OBOST has followed up with Apollo, a track in two versions, DanceApollo and DubApollo. Both here and free/ name your own price. The Dub version is eight minutes of clashing sounds and samples, thudding drums and eventually some very gnarly slo- mo sounds. I Don't Care For You came out at the end of 2023, an EP that included this song, Look Inside Your Mind. All of this is highly recommended.