Albums
< Late Of The Pier
Fantasy Black Channel
words by Dean Driscoll
We've had the privilege at Loud And Quiet of having had a copy of Fantasy Black Channel for a couple of months. In some cases such familiarity with an album can make you tired of it before it's even released, so it's a special kind of record that still makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end with every listen. Late Of The Pier's album does just that, the excitement of each play-through undiminished. It is indeed a special kind of album.
Much credit must go to Erol Alkan for the way he's harnessed LOTP's exuberant genre-hopping sound into a beautifully paced long-player. Doing as excellent a job as Tim Goldsworthy did with Cut Copy on our other favourite record of the year so far, his instincts for a crafting a flowing set has been well-honed in his DJ career, and has obviously been of huge benefit to his skills as a producer. So like any other album of genuine brilliance, Fantasy Black Channel is programmed rather like a DJ set, the pace rising and dipping to create an enthralling experience, rather than the relentless, bludgeoning ordeal of many electro DJ sets, which is what this album could have ended up as in lesser hands.
But whilst Erol was so adept at making the most of Late Of The Pier's many talents, it is the band themselves who deserve to be shouted about longest and loudest. It's been some time since the UK produced an act of such talent, ambition and imagination. There's seemingly no genre they can't tackle - Fantasy Black Channel has its roots in techno, 70s prog rock, heavy metal, French electro, and 60s psychedelia, with several songs offering at least two genres in the course of their running time.
It's difficult to pick stand-out tracks in a collection this strong but special mention must go to Focker - a thrilling buzzsaw of a song which ends with a minute-long electro coda that manages to be everything Ed Banger Records wishes it was - the brilliantly nuts The Bears Are Coming and it's chunky percussive electro-funk - which wrongfoots the listener entirely with a left-at-the-traffic-lights diversion into some Pink Floyd star-spangled prog - and the psychedelic The Enemy Are The Future, a slow-burner which ends up being an indie-disco party you hope will never end.
Though they'll be classed as an indie band, there's very little in the way of what you could necessarily term as 'indie rock'. Mad Dogs and Englishmen is the one track which could arguably be said to sound like an 'of-it's-time' indie number, but even that's so much better than anything offered by LOTP's peers it's almost as if it was written just to prove that they too could be a conventional, mainstream top 10 indie band if they wanted. But they don't - Late Of The Pier are far, FAR more ambitious than that.
in stores August 189/10
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