Violent is an urgent, visionary record which finds one-man pop operation Talk Less Say More (London resident Matthew Jennings) laying down a marker for how daring pop can sound in 2014. Ten discombobulatingly anthemic songs are laced with an exuberant lyrical and sonic wit, yet are held together by a distant sense of dread. 

Despite this uncanny darkness, it’s clear than an enormous amount of fun has been had making Violent. The instrumental pallet is huge, with (amongst much else) vocoder rubbing up against timpani; brass duelling with guzheng; fretless bass, slap bass, double-tracked guitars and triple-tracked sax. Such exuberance remains in the service of the song though - and it’s testament to Jennings’ songwriting ability that he can make the listener laugh out loud one second and despair the next. 

Opener ‘When The Storm Came’ hits with all the invention of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and explores an evental eruption from multiple temporalities: a cubist-pop take on a relationship, revolution or both? ‘Cantona’ weaves together a chance encounter with the footballer-cum-actor-philosopher with a painfully honest account of embodied sadness: a dystopian glam romp befitting of its titular hero. ‘Becoming An Island’ considers time and memory with washes of gorgeous ondes martenot and woodwind. ‘Yeah, That’s Right’ sees soaring guitars propose some kind of cosmic acceptance. 

The second in a proposed trilogy (begun by England Without Rain), Violent combines restless experimentation with stunning songcraft. Crammed with sonic thrills and thematic ambiguity, it’s another triumph for Talk Less, Say More and we’re honoured to be releasing it.

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Talk Less Say More - Violent

As album titles go, <strong>Sunscraper</strong> sets the bar pretty high. But there's no need to worry - this is an album that totally succeeds where Icarus failed. It is, in a word, massive. And in a few more words it's euphoric, symphonic, sublime and ridiculous. It goes where few albums would dare to tread; a masterpiece of doom metal that effortlessly plumbs earthly depths and scales celestial heights. It's emotionally powerful too: by far and away the most vocal-centric Empires album yet, it expresses both desperation in the face of eternity and immense joy in love and human kindness.

Musically, it's the most diverse <a href="http://recordsonribs.com/artists/alltheempiresoftheworld/">All the Empires Of The World</a> album to date. It begins in near silence, swelling from synth led ambience to crunching guitar to folk harmonies. The first half of New Alexandria romps along at a rollicking pace befitting of that punk rock we hear so much about nowadays. Fortress opens with a chug every bit as satisfying as anything by early Pelican, defying you not to nod your head and screw your face. And closer Low Devil shows that singing plus acoustic guitar doesn't necessarily add up to insipid mobile phone advert fodder, being as it is a desperately haunting and totally disarming country-blues number. A stunning album.


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All The Empires Of The World - Sunscraper

From the album Violent. THIS RECORD IS OUT ON THE 9TH OF FEBRUARY.

Violent is an urgent, visionary record which finds one-man pop operation Talk Less Say More (London resident Matthew Jennings) laying down a marker for how daring pop can sound in 2014. Ten discombobulatingly anthemic songs are laced with an exuberant lyrical and sonic wit, yet are held together by a distant sense of dread. 

Despite this uncanny darkness, it’s clear than an enormous amount of fun has been had making Violent. The instrumental pallet is huge, with (amongst much else) vocoder rubbing up against timpani; brass duelling with guzheng; fretless bass, slap bass, double-tracked guitars and triple-tracked sax. Such exuberance remains in the service of the song though - and it’s testament to Jennings’ songwriting ability that he can make the listener laugh out loud one second and despair the next. 

Opener ‘When The Storm Came’ hits with all the invention of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and explores an evental eruption from multiple temporalities: a cubist-pop take on a relationship, revolution or both? ‘Cantona’ weaves together a chance encounter with the footballer-cum-actor-philosopher with a painfully honest account of embodied sadness: a dystopian glam romp befitting of its titular hero. ‘Becoming An Island’ considers time and memory with washes of gorgeous ondes martenot and woodwind. ‘Yeah, That’s Right’ sees soaring guitars propose some kind of cosmic acceptance. 

The second in a proposed trilogy (begun by England Without Rain), Violent combines restless experimentation with stunning songcraft. Crammed with sonic thrills and thematic ambiguity, it’s another triumph for Talk Less, Say More and we’re honoured to be releasing it.

Talk Less Say More - Cantona

Talk Less Say More - Oh Hi

Violent is an urgent, visionary record which finds one-man pop operation Talk Less Say More (London resident Matthew Jennings) laying down a marker for how daring pop can sound in 2014. Ten discombobulatingly anthemic songs are laced with an exuberant lyrical and sonic wit, yet are held together by a distant sense of dread. 

Despite this uncanny darkness, it’s clear than an enormous amount of fun has been had making Violent. The instrumental pallet is huge, with (amongst much else) vocoder rubbing up against timpani; brass duelling with guzheng; fretless bass, slap bass, double-tracked guitars and triple-tracked sax. Such exuberance remains in the service of the song though - and it’s testament to Jennings’ songwriting ability that he can make the listener laugh out loud one second and despair the next. 

Opener ‘When The Storm Came’ hits with all the invention of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk and explores an evental eruption from multiple temporalities: a cubist-pop take on a relationship, revolution or both? ‘Cantona’ weaves together a chance encounter with the footballer-cum-actor-philosopher with a painfully honest account of embodied sadness: a dystopian glam romp befitting of its titular hero. ‘Becoming An Island’ considers time and memory with washes of gorgeous ondes martenot and woodwind. ‘Yeah, That’s Right’ sees soaring guitars propose some kind of cosmic acceptance. 

The second in a proposed trilogy (begun by England Without Rain), Violent combines restless experimentation with stunning songcraft. Crammed with sonic thrills and thematic ambiguity, it’s another triumph for Talk Less, Say More and we’re honoured to be releasing it.

When The Storm Came

Violent

Honest

It is a collection of brief encounters, which hinge on the slightest details and gestures: a written note, a fleeting facial expression, a fluttering of eyelashes. Little measurements that occasionally tip the scales.
 
In contrast to 2009's To Leave A Mark, Little Measurements is an album of collaborations. EL Heath contributes gorgeous ondes Martenot counter-melodies to the opener, A Year, and warm, sustained notes on the accordion to the closing track, Unwritten By Hand. Talk Less, Say More appears on The Visitor, providing fizzing drum beats and synth drones. James Taylor, formerly of Silver Gospel Runners, embellishes Not Aware and No One Else with delicate flourishes of slide guitar. Tim Wright of Neume Audio adds clarinet (Your Answer), glockenspiel (Little Measurements), and haunted attic sounds (From A Room) to the mix.
 
Tim Wright is even more prominent in his role as producer. Throughout the album, his subtle use of panning, sampling, and delay effects creates an intimate, and at times unsettling atmosphere. 

Little Measurements is a wonderful record, mature in execution, stunning in detail and shadings of light and dark, beautifully and lyrically evocative. A completely affective experience and one to be savoured.

A Year

The Visitor

Surfacing is the startling self-titled debut album from this exciting Nottingham band. Across five tracks of crackling electronics and insistent beats it hints at presences beneath everyday perceptions: uncanny temporalities and violent becomings that threaten to disrupt life – the ‘horrors’ that bourgeois society tries to suppress, but which will necessarily triumph one day.

On the cover is Francesco Salviati’s depiction of karios readying his arrow. For the Greeks, kairos referred to the concept of eventful time: a time pregnant with all other times; a time that interrupts the linear flow of chronos. This feeling of boundless possibility in the present carries across to the album’s sonics, with Surfacing taking in rhythms from the dancehall to the Berlin wasteland; post-punk urgency; and moments of oblique beauty. ‘Surfacing (Susanna’s Song)’ opens the album with sharp, rhythmic stabs and a rumbling bassline, while wildly distorted vocals announce that ‘we'll take back what’s always been ours’. Who this ‘we’ is remains unclear: the colonized? The dispossessed? Nature? The proletariat? The theme of imminence continues to ‘Hypocalypse’ (a term borrowed from Luther Blissett’s novel Q, in which it refers to the end of the world, brought about from below), which repeatedly asks the listener if they’ve ‘heard the news recently’ as ‘it’s so much louder than it used to be’. ‘Amaurot’ and ‘Melancholy of Fulfillment’ showcase Surfacing’s more melodic side – the latter a strange, alien tale of bodily abjection sung over a haunting pitch-bent vocal loop: ‘Like shrapnel I’ll remain/A memory and a ghost/To remind you of love’. ‘Her Smoke Rose Up Forever’, meanwhile, dares to hope: a triumphant riff emerging from eerie drones and desperate incantations before a rollicking finale reminiscent of Fuck Buttons at their most urgent.

This is exciting, urgent music for uncertain times. Something is surfacing.

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Surfacing (Susanna's Song)

As album titles go, <strong>Sunscraper</strong> sets the bar pretty high. But there's no need to worry - this is an album that totally succeeds where Icarus failed. It is, in a word, massive. And in a few more words it's euphoric, symphonic, sublime and ridiculous. It goes where few albums would dare to tread; a masterpiece of doom metal that effortlessly plumbs earthly depths and scales celestial heights. It's emotionally powerful too: by far and away the most vocal-centric Empires album yet, it expresses both desperation in the face of eternity and immense joy in love and human kindness.

Musically, it's the most diverse <a href="http://recordsonribs.com/artists/alltheempiresoftheworld/">All the Empires Of The World</a> album to date. It begins in near silence, swelling from synth led ambience to crunching guitar to folk harmonies. The first half of New Alexandria romps along at a rollicking pace befitting of that punk rock we hear so much about nowadays. Fortress opens with a chug every bit as satisfying as anything by early Pelican, defying you not to nod your head and screw your face. And closer Low Devil shows that singing plus acoustic guitar doesn't necessarily add up to insipid mobile phone advert fodder, being as it is a desperately haunting and totally disarming country-blues number. A stunning album.


Fortress

Through The Forest, To The Shore

Sunscraper

Sundown

New Alexandria

CVRSVS III

CVRSVS II

CVRSVS I

Auckland

Canticle

Alight, Alight is Les Étoiles’ most beautifully unadorned album. With only sparse piano arrangements for accompaniment, these songs have a quiet intensity that brings to mind not only the solo work of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis but also early Low at their most austere.

Alight, Alight is a collection of thoughtful reminiscences of time spent in Wales, London and Shropshire and, in the case of ‘Where We Will Live’, a dream of an idyllic life in rural Italy.

Featuring songs both old and new, with only the opening track ‘Empty Carriage’ having been heard before, Alight, Alight serves as a fitting retrospective of David’s songwriting to date. Even the title recalls that of his first album and suggests the closing of a circle, or the completion of a long journey home.

Empty Carriage (Return Journey)

All The Empires Of The World operate on that strange threshold between ambient music and Very Loud Metal Music. They shift effortlessly between drifting atmospherics, cataclysms of downtuned sludge, shimmering clouds of shoe-gaze noise, creeping ur-Sabbath squeals, seismic low frequency jams, single guitar meditations, beautiful post-rock dashes and transcendental riff worship.

This record is strictly undefinable. While reference points can be given - ritualistic noise, colossal riffs, beautiful evocations, hazy delayed guitar, pealing chords, remote vocals, tension, release, eruption, heaviness, light - it is the careful combination of these elements that makes it a rare joy.

Mark tells us that:

This record is a testament to finding the best in everything - it was influenced by my brother and two sisters and their complex and wonderful lives. Denial of the spirit is denial of the self.

...Will Be Laid To Waste [AJ Cookson Remix]

I'm Coming Back In A Minute, I Gotta Eat Something. I Like Your Bovril Mate (2nd Opera). Put Em Up. Obviously Sking For A Bit.

Talk Less Say More - Talk Less Say More (Three Birds)

Bonfire Night

Talk Less Say More - Things To Do With Your Hands At Parties

Talk Less Say More - Bonfire Night

Lathe Of Heaven

They Will Not See Through The Darkened Glass

A Trap For Giants

Not one of the tracks goes beyond two minutes, yet each is rammed full of so many sharp ideas that it shames much longer tracks into whimpering submission. As a collection it runs the gamut of mostly electronically based sounds, think Mike Patton’s Fantômas via a overheated laptop: clattering breakcore, thundering gabba tantrums, intricate glitch, Captain Beefheart punching Venetian Snares odd-pop, raw ambience, chuckle-hop, stock-market-core, Zorn inspired jazzgasms, techno grind…well smart.

Survival Strategies For The Age Of Discontinuity

Little Dusts

Upper Magdelana Tapaculo

Talk Less, Say More once again effortlessly connects the abstract with the concrete in this album of glinting futuristic glitched hip-hop. Raps about quantum mechanics, suicidal mathematicians, Zeno’s paradoxes as well as home towns and girls being, you know, sometimes quite difficult to understand. Wonderfully skewed, weird and utterly unique, something like Timbaland meets the Copenhagen Interpretation with Kool Keith on vocals.

A Rose In Winter (Arctic Fox Part 1)

Talk Less Say More - The Shrug

Six is witness to the pure joy of hip-hop as a genre, nodding in the direction to Dilla’s soulful warmth, off centre beats and eccentric production yet combining this with the electronic moods and glitched detail that recalls Prefuse 73 and the recent bouncy post-dubstep output of Hyperdub. Its brevity is its virtue: snappy, catchy and riotously inventive, the panic of Floss Hates Prime Numbers opening into the reflective spaces of Farewell To Floss while the heady party of Floss Is Full Of Surprises swaggers on.

Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation

Another masterful weaving of the personal and the natural from EL Heath. But for perhaps the first time on record, the emphasis with Wind, Thee Wind – his third release for Records on Ribs – is heavily on the former. This mostly Martenot work is born of the depression of the end of a relationship whilst – as ever with Heath – reflecting the sublime melancholy of the countryside around the Wales/Shropshire border. The EP opens with two of his most ambient tracks yet in which sparse, yawning sweeps of Martenot bring to mind Aphex Twin’s ambient works. Then comes Thee Wind, Thee: a brief but devastatingly effective spoken word rumination on life’s inevitable movement. The unrelentingly sparse Monodrone and Wind, Thee Wind return to the earlier ambient beauty to close out this short, and brutally beautiful meditation on Heath’s consistent themes. Recommended.

MonoDrone

Like a less pastoral Canterbury Scene record, Mash relentlessly perverts generic conventions- rocking like a mother and bewildering and overjoying in equal abundance.

Slow Priest Turns The Mummers On

Syd Barrett does indie pop: songs about animals and their sports days, the sun with his hat on and wanting to be a car. Not to forget ruminations on turbulent personal relationships, melancholia and mortality.

The Sun Has Got His Hat On

An album that nearly failed to see the light of day: a spare melancholic rumination on the idea and reality of an unforgiving winter. Walking to the cell of Father Zosma through the crisp snow.

Chords

Strap explore the edges, the limits and the outlines in a record that is by turns dreamy noise, deconstructed post-rock, slow-burning kraut, sublime improv pop, frenzied prog and galloping white noise psych. 

1.618 Coventry Carol

Silent Night

O Holy Night

Away In A Manger

Good King Wenceslas

Carol Of The Bells

It Starts With Secilia

Heavy Air - Out Now! http://recordsonribs.com/artists/blueducks/heavy-air


Blue Ducks - Four Inches Of Water

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