N-n-n-n-n-n-brand new LPs from the Slott and the Lone

Edit: Lone's album is mentioned in my top ten electronica albums of 2009. 

N-n-n-n-n-n-finally, Mike Slott has coughed up a debut mini-album. It's called Lucky 9teen and if I was going to mark it out of ten, I'd give it n-n-n-n-n-n-twenty six.

Opening with hymnal chords and excitable cheering, the record spins us through broken hip hip that digresses through muddy puddles of jazz and beguiling troughs of 80s synthorama.

He's produced more than a handful of tracks with Hudson Mohawke in the past, although if Mohawke's music is patchwork slacks reeking of doobie smoke, Slott's sound is a bit more suited and booted and sporting a sparkly bow tie.

Listen to Mike Slott's Lucky 9teen at Boomkat. Keep an eye on the Slott: he's not just making new electronica: with the likes of Dabrye and Rustie, he's busy inventing it. N-n-n-n-n-n-good work.

While I'm musing about broken beats (do people still say that these days?), let me point you towards Lone's Ecstacy And Friends. Lone is Nottingham's Matt Cutler and a label-mate of Lukid. He has ripped a few pages from Bibio's sun-bleached book and produced an album of such melodic heat, it will leave your skin cripsy and sizzling like an inattentive beach bather.

I'll warn you now though: the kick drum hits so hard, your crap computer speakers will wither wretchedly. Catch snippets of Lone's Ecstacy And Friends here.

Vive la crackle: Kraftwerk drop a klanger with Der Katalog

So then, Kraftwerk's classic bleepiness has been digitally remastered in the form of The Catalogue, an eight-album box set.

Ralf Hütter has been digitally storing the Krafty ones' crumbling old master tapes for some time, so it was inevitable that some kind of redux release would end up on our shelves.

Now, don't get me wrong. Sometimes, remastered things make sense. The extra shiny bits in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind are quite nice. I much prefer the 1,400 page version of Stephen King's The Stand, if only for the trailblazing anti-hero Trashcan Man.

But what's wrong with analogue fuzziness? You wouldn't attempt an 8 bit version of Eno's Music For Airports and you wouldn't scrap your Minimoog because it oscillates too much.

I'm being too old fashioned and grumpy, and anyhoo a major music magazine has already beaten me to it with this withering review:

"Sadly, the remaster is a fiasco. The soft tones of Computer Love become sharp, the wide spaces of Home Computer contract into tunnels, and Pocket Calculator bears down on us like a spiked ceiling in a horror film.

"Equally poor is the remastered Radio-activity, where atmospheric crackles and hisses have been removed by noise reduction software. For pity’s sake, they’re part of the music!"

Kelpe and Klimek: from the faded to the filmic

Cambio Wechsel is the third album from Kelpe (pictured), who, as you can see from that link, needs to update his website.

There's plenty of head-noddingness to the ambience, especially with the thin Woodstockian groove of After Gold and the Prefuse-infused buzz bass of Eye Candy Bath.

The seaside cheefulness of The Blankout Agreement is a little underwhelming, but spiralling from psychedelia and radiophonic samples to post-rock hip hop in the course of one album is pleasing - in fact, it's frequently scrumptious.

The whole effect is like listening to a postcard from a long forgotten era, and you can just make out the words Music Has The Right To Children on the postcode. I just wonder if it's sometimes a little too slight and faded.

Klimek also throws an album at us this week, in the expansive shape of Movies Is Magic.

It's filmic. Crikes, I've called Klimek 'filmic' before, but that's the whole point of this album. The idea of producing an album of cinematic audio vistas is not new - just ask David Holmes - but this is epic stuff. It's pretty much what I imagine it's like to hear the whole universe at once.

Tracks like Pathetic And Dangerous and the fabulously-titled Exposed To Life In It's Brutal Meaninglessness sway and wash against the surround-sound speakers.

Others, such as opener Abyss Of Anxiety (Unfolding The Magic), are darker, danker, and much less multiplex, giving this album much more crunch than ambient music often offers.

68 million light years into inky space: Hyperdub is five

If this decade leaves one solitary thing lingering in the world of dance music, it's the evocative urban hauntings of dubstep.

Somehow mashing the bassment ghostliness of slower Massive Attack and the simple languar of techno circa Trance Europe Express, dubstep has trodden a stubborn path.

It has nodded like a gentleman toward the grime-ridden streets of urban R 'n' B and even (via Burial) tipped its hat toward bassline diva vocals. But the genre has remained true to itself - and, some would argue, a little stuck in the groove of late.

Still, that hasn't stopped leading label Hyperdub releasing Hyperdub 5. As you have already deduced, it's a five year celebration of the label that kicked off with Sign of the Dub in 2004 by label boss Steve 'Kode 9' Goodman (pictured).

The compilation features some exclusive gems and old favourites (some of which are on CD for the first time), from the cardboard beat of Zomby's Tarantula, to the heroin-hazed Psycho stabs of Kode 9's Time Patrol, to the broken vocal swoops of Burial's Fostercare (think Maxinquaye flung 68 million light years into inky space).

It's the first time Burial's dug up anything new since Untrue in 2007, and for that alone, Hyperdub 5 is worth more than a few of your pennies.

Mixin' ma tunesies: Flying Lotus, Rustie and The Black Dog

I've had a strange mixture of two songs stabbing my eardrums all day. The first is Getting Away With It, the melancholic Pet Shop Boys-sprinkled pop song from Electronic. The second is My Humps, the paean to road calming measures by the Black Eyed Peas.

The result is an insistent and disturbing image of Johnny Marr rubbing me all over with his strangely misshapen mammaries. Like being tickled with rubber bags full of gerbils, only in a bad way.

All of which is distracting me from some important record releases about which you, my newly disturbed reader, should know. Each of these feature remixes and are 47% more successful than anything offered by an Electronic / Peas combo.

Last year, Flying Lotus was basking in the glory of his album Los Angeles when he offered us a 12" of strange remixes. If you're quick, you can still pick up copies of Shhhh! It includes, among others, a dirty snare-smacking version of Mr Oizo's Stunts ($tunt$ is the most immediate track here), a drastic scratch mix of J Dilla's Lightwork and a seriously widescreen bass-wobbling Promiscuous Girl by queenzilla of the perfect pout Nelly Furtado.

Rustie's Bad Science EP (Rustie pictured above) is further evidence this young whipperbleeper should be a lot more famous than he is. Bad Science offers up bubbly 8-bit hip hop mentalism, including a reconfiguration of one of the best tracks of 2008, Zig Zag, while still being breathy and prowling like a robot stalker. The whole thing pretty much sounds like Zig Zag, so if you've got that, get this.

And finally, there's an EP from The Black Dog called We Are Sheffield which pours remixes over your speakers until you'll be mopping up massive basslines, glitch techno and warm mellowness from your newly shampooed carpet. It's worth it alone (sadly alone, if I'm honest) for the epic yet moody Autechre remix.

One man twanging: Squarepusher's Solo Electric Bass 1

Squarepusher's Solo Electric Bass 1 is the four-cornered junglist only with a bass and a bass amp. One live event in front of an appreciative French audience. One take. One man twanging.

And it bores the eyelashes off me. It's noodlier than Wagamama, with far too few forays into 70s police show slap bass where maybe we would get a sense of the rhythmic unstructure for which Squarepusher is renowned.

I accept it's a technical triumph, but it's so pastoral he might as well be playing a harp.

Next up it's a 40 minute digeridoo solo from Aphex Twin, then 808 State on the saxomophone and nothing else, finishing with a huge Orbital opus featuring only Alison Goldfrapp's vocals and nothing else.

Actually, they all sound quite good. But you get my point. It might get his new-found Radio 4 audience tapping their loafers in gentle appreciation, but why the drill 'n' bass without the drill?

And that's the crux: if it's Squarepusher without the pusher, it's just square.

Burial and Four Tet's Himalayan percussion party

You know when you see something in the corner of your eye? A dancing clown, an robed pensioner spreading curses, an orphan boy from 14th century Cornwall miming the world 'help!' over and over again?

Maybe it's just me and my freakish imagination. But sometimes, things skip your attention. They're there, but they flit from your attention and remain a glimpse, forever to be neglected by your fading memory.

Burial and Four Tet's joint 12" is one of those such things. I totally missed it when I should have been blogging about it.

The south London dubstepper slapped down two tracks with the inner London post rocker to likeable effect with double-A-side Moth / Wolf Cub.

Wolf Cub is a gamelan-mashing grower of a tune and sounds like a percussion party in a Himalayan village. It has the comforting sounds of Four Tet (picture by watchlooksee) and that woody deepness of Burial.

It's a little samey, so thank goodness Moth is an epic. A light step beat and a standard trance keyboard line gives way to a spacious ambient hymn set to a crisp trance backing and wispy vocals that flutter about your ear.

Dubstep heads may not like it, because the Tet-ness of it all lightens it up somewhat. But stick Moth onto your car stereo as you bound down the M1 to a summer festival, and you'll be totally in the zone. Just don't run over any eerie Cornish orphans.

M*therf*dding Risil is not the m*therf*dding shizzle, m*therf*dders

Risil's album Non Meters (pictured) is the only album in the world* that can only be described with a four syllable word: polyrhythmic.

It's a collaboration between (pay attention now) Prefuse 73's Guillermo Herren, Hella's Zach Hill, Battles' Tyondai Braxton (no, not the hit singer of Unbreak My Heart), Tortoise's John McEntire... oh and blah blah blah, about a thousand other people.

With such talent on display, and with a band name sounding like it was dream up by Snoop Dogg, you'd expect more than just expansive, lurching psychedelia that doesn't quite gel.

There Has To Be is the soundtrack to half my nightmares, and the frenetic drumming on Zantra is most pleasing. But, Risil is not the shizzle.

Speaking of Snoop Dogg, you know Dogg After Dark? The programme where Calvin Broadus Jr gets it aaawwwn with bee-yatches, young hippety-bling superstars and besuited gangsters? That's my house every night.

Without the women.

Or the gangsters.

Or the hop hop.

Or the television coverage and numerous producers giving it the sheen of credibility, when in fact it's just a West Coast version of The Word.

*there may be one or two others.

Someone call an Ambivilance: Bibio thrills as a radio star

Edit: This album is mentioned in my top ten electronica albums of 2009. 

If you don't buy the new Bibio album, you are stupid and you deserve to be pushed off a cliff by someone disappointing like Cash In The Attic's John Cameron.

The LP Ambivilance Avenue stretches two meaty legs across the decades, from sepia-smeared yesteryear summer pop, to future-bastard electronica that would make Justice control-alt-delete.

A little bit of me - the fascist bit of me that stomps on hamsters and sets fire to people in Father Christmas suits - shivers with disgust at the folky leanings of Bibio. But I'm a grown man now, and I am learning to accept that I can't always have it my way.

However, the bit of Bibio that is techno / IDM makes me want to caress him, have his children, buy a caravan with him, divorce him, split my CD collection with him, not talk to him for fourteen years, and following his plastic surgery to become the world's first human / camel freak, then sleep with him unknowingly in a one-night stand blinded by drunkenness and a half-watched DVD of The Story Of The Weeping Camel.

This kind of shizzle is the sort of shizzle that should be all over the radio. Even if you don't like Bibio (and you should), if you give a stinking damn about well-produced music, you should give Ambivilance Avenue a listen. In fact, if you have ears, you should be listening to this album right now.

No, actually, even if you don't have ears, you should give Bibio a listen. Even if you were run over by an angry tractor driver, and all you have left is a spleen, half an eyeball and the inside of your left knee, you should damn well give Bibio a listen.

Let the music speak for itself at Warp Records. Mind that cliff, now.

Trouser-goosing Snares, menacing woodwinds and dribbling my tongue at Björk

Venetian Snares has turned in a brand new EP, Horsey Noises, to go alongside recent splooj-guzzling album Filth (which I writted about here).

The eponymous title track sets some commercial vocals (asking a horsey girl to make horsey noises) against loose drumming and a trouser-goosing bassline. Just when you think he's cantering through some abstract DJ Food-isms, he cracks it up to full-on rave. Aphex Twin tried vocals when he sang about milkmen in the mid-90s, and this is exactly the same wrong side of deranged.

Meanwhile, music technology geek Monolake (pictured) has taken time out from designing midi controllers (no, please, don't click away) to produce his first new material since the 2006 album Polygon Cities.

His new single is called Atlas / Titan, and the two dub-inspired techno tracks are as massive as they sound. The bass on Atlas bangs its fists angrily before the woodwind - yes, woodwind - adds a whole new level of growling menace. It's Autechre in a bloody bad mood. Flip-side Titan is as joyfully dark, but a little duller.

Finally, Icelandic princess Björk has offered us many treats on her new album Voltaic. She has filmed her tour promoting her last album Volta, where her vocals soared above the abstract atmospherics of LFO's Mark Bell, but she's decided that's not enough.  She has also rammed in about 92,000 other discs, including Volta music videos, a one-take live set recorded before Glastonbury 2007, and a swathe of remixes from the likes of Simian Mobile Disco and Matthew Herbert.

It's probably the most comprehensive album and DVD package ever to exist. Well, okay, it's probably not. But you should buy it because you're in tongue-dribbling awe of Björk's ability to be both a superstar and relentlessly uncompromising.

Why, H, why did it all have to end?

This week, I have been mostly feasting on Moderat.

Moderat is a portmanteau. A what? Exactly. It's a perfect marriage of two Berlin musicians: the cold, hypnotic Modeselektor (described by the duo as "Russian crunk") and techno entrepreneur Apparat.

They last hammered together an EP, Auf Kosten Der Gesundheit back in 2002, when the world was still newly mourning the demise of Steps. Oh H "Ian" Watkins, where are you now? Sob...

...where was I? Oh yes. Anyhoo, a month or two back, Modeselektor and Apparat picked up their rusty nails and hammered together something much more impressive. A whole Moderat album (pictured).

Moderat is all-analogue, recorded where Bowie put Heroes to tape, and it piddles pop sensibilities up against a drizzle of dubstep and a serious slab of sub-atomic bass woofery.

It is melodic and (yeeks) catchy, and brings to mind Apparat's work with Ellen Allien. The album's got a touch of icicle on its edges, though, and the German rapping may well turn you off when you ogle some of the tracks on their MySpace page.

Waxy tip-off: turn up the High Contrast

Time for a lesson: here's the history of drum 'n' bass in fast forward.

Get a crayon, put its waxy tip on early rave, then draw a squiggly line from early 1990s ambient through the breathy jungle of LTJ Bukem all the way to the harder percussion and stepping basslines of High Contrast. End of lesson.

High Contrast is still banging out the choons, although his new best-of compilation, Confidential, has somewhat underwhelmed the BBC.

HC's punchy snares land with a satisfying snap, like a wet towel in a changing room. In his own way, his chord progressions and song structure are -- and I need to whisper this -- as comfortably recognisable and as nicely predictable as Coldplay. He's not afraid of the commercial end of his chosen genre, but what separates him from Coldplay is, well, High Contrast isn't a twazmuppet who covers his hands in multicoloured electrical tape the name of world peace.

He could always draw on his hand with a crayon.

High Contrast's Confidential is a double disc. Once side of the coin is the sprightly d 'n' b we're used to, such as the skipping, airy Return Of Forever (eighties bassline ahoy). The second half is a whole pile of remixes with some big hitters like Missy Elliot and Eric "Teaching Madonna How To Make Fame-Inspired Promo Videos" Prydz.

On this second disc, I can forgive him the odd Adele remix because his Utah Saints reworking is a total monster of a track. Again, his downfall could be his commerciality... but it's so much fun.
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The record label that spawned this Welsh bass-stepper, Hospital Records, puts out a jolly good podcast - seek it out on an iTunes near you. In the meantime, bag yourself some Confidential information here.

You may put your crayon away now.

Harmonic 73: Prefuse goes all oversensitive on us

Okay, you've got Prefuse 73's scatter-gun beat collection Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian. What next?

Well, quite a lot as it happens. Mr 73 is also a part of Diamond Watch Wrists, a collaboration with members of overblown rock lizards Mars Volta and Hella (their album Ice Capped At Both Ends is out now). He's also teamed up with a Catalan singer Eva Puyuelo Muns for his latino-tickled Savath y Savalas moniker.

And so to this week, when Prefuse 73 releases an EP The Forest Of Oversensitivity. Prefuse is quite happy for you to have music for free, and he has given permission for track Preparations Kid's Choir to be given away here. Yes. He's given permission. Take note, Blogger Big Brother.

The five tracks on The Forest Of Oversensitivity are ethereal remixes of Ampexian album cuts. It's either melancholic harmonics with choir voices sliding down the speakers like melted Dali clocks, or old-P73 click-hop that we've come to know and love. Buy it from Boomkat (digital or vinyl only) here.

Girls! Arse! Drink! Veckatimest!

Do watch the video for my favourite song of the moment, Two Weeks. This dazzling piece was masterfully directed by Patrick Daughters, who also did Feist's annoying but watchable 1234. It was pointed out to me by the absolutely smashing chap and Greenroom exhibition co-conspirator Heroes Of Lego.

Every day I bathe in electronica. I shampoo with bleeps and glitches. I rub analogue ambience into my scalp because I'm worth it.

So when this month's big new Warp Records release is from -- shock -- a guitar band like Grizzly Bear, my skin goes wrinkly and my bubble bath goes flat.

But, actually, I don't mind Grizzly Bear's new LP Veckatimest (mentioned previously on this blog here), from which Two Weeks was taken. In fact, I'm thinking of using this instead of my usual conditioner.

Veckitamest shimmers with melody. It cuts reverberating arcs from simple sun-drenched songs to psychedelia-infused experimentalism. It is, quite simply, the best album to buy right now if you like Animal Collective and Panda Bear.

The video, incidentally, uses no special effects. Grizzly Bear glow from within like human fridges. It's a pretty cool party trick, although the hum gets annoying after a while.

Murcof's amorphous star clouds at Futuresonic 2009

Murcof's latest gig was so good, my eyes were crushed underfoot and smeared all over the wrecked remains of my eardrums.

The abstract minimalism of Mexico's premier glitch artist was accompanied by specially commissioned visuals from AntiVJ at the opening night of Manchester's Futuresonic festival.

And what visuals. A ball of shining dust throbbed and burst into an insectoid terror, at one point exploding with such ferocity, half the audience phoned their mummy. A grand vista of the universe, falling like fairy dust on the wide-eyed punters, swelled into an intense three dimensional world of amorphous galactic star clouds. Blue vertical lines harped and bowed, harsh squares graphed across the width of the stage, and dozens of hearts lurched as a black hole threatened to explode from a seething cloud of white light.

Murcof (photo by Conny Fornbäck) were no less impressive.Death Of A Forest's horror-film chords drew cold fingers up spines (copyright: every horror writer ever). Cosmos 1 or 2, whichever one it was, sounded organic and reedy then thundered to a grandious crescendo. The thin, snapping beats of Cielo and Mir sliced through the RNCM's pristine sound system, and each bass drum kicked harder and deeper than the last.

Support came from Johan Johnannsson, who I could take or leave with his basic string quartet / piano / loops set-up, and Denis Jones, who bristled with beardy beauty as he delivered a folktronica set that was simplistic in intention but full of complex twitches and layered samples.

Hungarian cattle explosion: comparing Venetian Snares

Shall I compare Venetian Snares to a summer's day? He art less lovely and less temperate. Rough winds do shake from his bassbins of doom.

Bill "Will-I-Am" Shakespeare was a massive fan of percussion destructionist Venetian Snares, and no doubt has bought his latest album Filth on the basis of my li'l preview back in March.

Here is what other blog-botherers are saying about the album.

Tiny Mix Tapes lauds Filth as "the most accessible Venetian Snares record he has released since the critically lauded Hungarian album" and claims Mr Venetian Snares "is to Pendulum what Eminem is to Asher Roth." I'm not too sure who Asher Roth is, but guessing from the simile, his his teeth glint more than the Olsen twins' cold, glassed-over eyes.

Noiz says Filth is "interesting", while Alt Sounds finds the album "more confusing than chinese writing"and challenges you to "try dancing to this album without looking like a complete and utter mental."

The Sonic Minefield has a way with words which could earn them a Fat Roland badge of honour.  The site declares one beat "donk worthy", while another is a "low-slung dirty groove that gets shit swaggering like a Windowlicker-esq sex scene in a run down industrial estate."


Wrap your ears around Venetian Snares' Filth and let me know what you think in the comments section. The best, most poetic description wins a two week holiday ideally suited to Mr Snares' music - in other words, a fortnight buried under six feet of charred beef in a Hungarian cattle explosion.

Stick it up your bum and it plays a little tune: what I think of AGF/Delay's new album

Breaking news. Electronic music fell foul of swine flu when Four Tet cancelled a gig.

Mexico City has been, if you weren't already aware, a ghost town. The Pasaje America venue was to play host to a Four Tet gig, but it has been closed like everywhere else.

If you spot any symptoms of the pig disease killing off electronica, please get in touch, In the meantime, please don't let your mp3s go near any other mp3s, and if your music makes you sweaty, consult a doctor.

Personally, I don't like the look of AGF/Delay's recent album Symptoms (pictured). In this case, the Symptoms include light-touch electronica, plodding minimalism and vocals that waver between ethereal and sultry

Although there's a track called Outbreak, there's no chance of sweats with this album; it barely steps beyond walking pace. The whole thing leaves me a little cold (and shivery). Vladislav Delay should stick to writing songs for the Scissor Sisters.

Enough meanderings. I'll let you quarantine your CD player. In the meantime, I'm off to stick a themometer up my bum.

Two Fingers drops seven shades of gangsta

Hip hop experimentalist Two Fingers has "dropped" a "phat" one.

As I explained in this post in January, Two Fingers is blunted beat bossman Amon Tobin and fellow Brazilian beat-botherer Doubleclick. Their debut album, also called Two Fingers, hit the "streets" in April.

And it's a right cracking listen. Er... I mean... it's a "sick" record.

The presence of MC Sway (pictured above with Doubleclick and Tobin) and grimesters like Durrty Goodz leads you to think this could be a two dimensional hip hop offering. In the hands of the Tobin, however, that was never going to happen.

Instead, among the lightning rhymes, the Two Fingers album is a glistening techno monster that tunnels to the scuzzy depths of synth buggery (on Keman Rhythm and Bad Girl, for example) and claws its way to the hilly heights of progressive big beat (on That Girl) and ketamine-drenched Timbalandia* (on Not Perfect).

It feels like we've got back the Amon Tobin of old, apart from two inescapable factoids.

Factoid A: Amon never went away. Factoid B: it's not old Tobin at all. Thanks to Doubleclick, this album is truly modern, gloriously harsh and beautifully experimental. Or, in the dialect of the "hood", it's somewhat "brap", seven shades of "gangsta" and it most certainly has got "da goods".

Innit.

* noun. In the style of producer Timbaland.

Everything She Touched Tur-- oh she's gone already

Beats overlord Guillermo Scott Herren is back with a fifth album under his Prefuse 73 moniker.

Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian is the sound of a man dipping his toes into various colourful pools of smokin' beats without ever getting totally immersed.

The hip hop sensibility that underpinned his debut Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives has been spat into the wind here. Instead, we have crunchy, Clark or Vibert-style electronica, sprinkled with shiny aaahs and swooshes to give it a rather false-sounding heart.

My beef is that there are about a hundred million billion trillion tracks on here, and most of them last barely more than two nano-seconds. As soon as your head is nodding to one particular diversion, the CD starts shouting "next track! next track!" at you.

That's not to say the majority of the beats aren't oodles and oodles better than stacks of other junk out there. He recorded this to analogue Ampex tape, hence the album's title, and you can feel the warmth if you stand close enough.

So Herren remains the Mega King Of All The Beats. It's just a shame he won't hang up his coat and stick around for more than one quick cuppa.

Mr Scruff's dried rabbits, LD's deep woofs and Mujava's drained drums

Here are some tracks that ought to be caressing your pretty ears right now.

Potato-drawing tea evangelist Mr Scruff (pictured) has teamed up with preacher's son Roots Manuva for a track called Nice Up The Junction. It's a solid piece of dub skank with some meaty "wooh" action, and the video features a jumble sale flogging used tea bags and "dried rabbits".

Dubstep label Hyperdub lit a really slow fuse when they let LD loose on new 12" Traumatic Times.  With its deeply woofing bass, the title track is so low-down, it's doing the limbo underneath your carpet. Flip side Woodblock is a slap round the chops in comparison, and is worth hunting out for its simmering, insistent, rolling techno.

And while I'm a techno tip, if you come across Boy 8 Bit's remix of Mujava's Township Funk, it's worth stopping to say hello. I should point out that Township Funk is minimal house music's version of Rihanna's Umbrella: it's simply massive. Boy 8 Bit magnifies the moodiness. eliminates the tribal drums, and uses menacing synth lines to drain any possible happiness from the track until the glass is indeed half empty. Stupendously, stunningly stern.