| fbcfabric & Reindeer - 'It's Not Who You Know, It's Whom You Know' (Buttercuts) |
[Aug. 30th, 2005|10:56 pm] |
It's hard to find useful information about these guys, except that they're British, their names are fbcfabric & Reindeer, and that thing above is the gramatically-pedantic title of the record. It seems that fbcfabric (or FBC Fabric, damn these modern kids with their fancy lowercase spelling) was making this record on his own with some guest appearances from his buddy Reindeer, and it turned into this collaboration.
I'm coming to this without much context, I'm one of those people who gets into a lot of stuff via label connections, touring connections, namechecks, people on the internet raving about things, whereas this I know fuck-all about. Except that the album comes in a cute little black fabric bag (literalism, like it), with the tracklisting on a sewn-in pretend washing instructions label on the inside, and a smattering of pertinent info printed on the CD itself. I picked it up because of a boomkat review that dropped in my inbox and ticked several of my favourite 'potential purchase' boxes, including 'cLOUDDEAD', 'leftfield' and 'ooh, fancy packaging'.
What we have here is, broadly speaking, a 'hip-hop' album built in some part from avant-rock sound sources. It's hip-hop, but through those fuzzy backpacker lenses where the purity of the phat beat often gets sacrificed for abstract sound collaging. As an introduction then, the first track proper ('Soulsuck') rides in on a neat little Boards Of Canada-ish melody, and it's not just the nasal nature of Reindeer's delivery that might put you in mind of Themselves. Lyrically though, this is less impenetrable than Doseone; this is more like being ranted at by an end-of-the-world preacher in the street, Reindeer running through a litany of shit that pisses him off about 21st-Century society, be it Big Brother or capitalism, and the track is probably most notable for the line 'if God had big tits and a fast car, we'd all buy in'. If you can get past the style of the vocals here you could be in for a treat.
It's followed by a pretty, shimmering instrumental of the kind Telefon Tel Aviv were peddling last year, and then on via a crackling rain-based interlude into the twanging guitars of 'Passenger', and Reindeer's back with more melancholy observations about how 'we all brave face it for the most part'. As the album continues on past the gorgeous 'Extended Placement', more interludes, and the reverberating bass of 'Mask Of Sanity' you could probably play a game of picking out avant-rock/hip-hop references...RJD2, Sole, Sixtoo, Tunng, even Múm on occasion. It also reminded me slightly of the perenially obscure Brighton types Mummy Fortuna's Theatre Company. A quick glance at the album site's acknowledgements page cites the likes of Godspeed, Set Fire To Flames, Tortoise, Esmerine, Low, Jaga Jazzist and the Black Heart Procession, presumably as sample sources, and for that reason it's probably better to come at this from a leftfield rock angle than a hip-hop one. What Fabric doesn't do here is provide you with a constant beat, it's constantly dropping out for passages of ambient tinkering, and that's really what helps sustain the interest over the length of the record.
A good example of this is the first track of the final part (oh yeah, it's in three parts), 'Shake The Hand Of An Unsuspecting Victim', which has two periods of full-on strings-and-everything glory (the latter burst of which features the apex of Reindeer's rantings...'Another suicide in the financial district', decrying 'live internet executions' and 'a capitalist hip-hop ethos') surrounded and separated by passages of barely audible, clanging Constellation/Kranky atmospherics. This is a good thing, in case you're wondering. It even goes a little bit trip-hop, but that's okay, we can talk about that again now. This track is followed by the 11-minute album centrepiece (can you have a centrepiece at the end?), 'Please Call Stella', a bona-fide, claustrophobic, tension-building post-rock epic composed mostly of samples with some live guitar thrown in. It's really rather good. And what better way for an obscure independent album to end than with an ambient final track entitled 'And Then John Peel Died'?
There's nothing particularly new here, it's not the next big thing, and maybe in a way that's what's so good about it. It's just a guy making the music he wants to hear from the records he likes, like a really good mixtape, and letting his mate play with it. It's grim on occasions but it's also beautiful. There's a significant chance you'll find the music dull or Reindeer's voice impossibly grating, but it's certainly worth checking out if you're a lover of shit that can have the word 'avant-' stuck in front of it and if, like me, you need a soundtrack to those grey-day bus rides.
Some tracks:
Soulsuck
Passenger
Shake The Hand Of An Unsuspecting Victim
And more info:
album site...fbcfabric.com (has more clips)...Buttercuts (label site, has the video for 'Soulsuck') |
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