Eneathedevil

Ziotto, we agree this time. Especially on the analysis regarding the previous albums, as Further is indeed a great comeback and clearly surpasses all the other works of the last 15 years. Then I add: the worst is We Are the Night and the most underrated is Push the Button, which certainly has moments of absolute kitsch but also three or four top tracks (Hold Tight London, Marvo Ging, Surface to Air and then, damn, how brilliant is Galvanize? at the end?). This one is actually in the middle: it floats well without particular highs and lows and certainly deserves a passing grade. All in all, after more than 25 years at full throttle, they still maintain a respectable level (and that’s no small feat).

Truly inspired @[luludia], even if you’ve jumped on an already excellent review done by my dear old friend @RingoStarfish (a little tear of nostalgia). I give Paolino a vote of deference, even though it's not entirely my cup of tea.

Carsten is always difficult and hard to judge, amigo. It's true that here he gets pretty close to IDM and seems to follow up on certain works by Plaid and Pan Sonic, but there's always that stubborn tendency of his towards a very "cerebral" musical experimentation that does not completely align with my tastes.
Anyway, your analysis is precise and impeccable, as always.

I don't know, @[ZiOn], I haven't listened to it and I'm not sure whether to venture or not. The point is that the music director @macmaranza doesn't like it, and I trust his judgments because we often agree. But what terrifies me the most is the praise from @algol, whose tastes almost always lead him to realms I fear to explore (and his disdain often targets things I appreciate, like The Understanding by Röyksopp, which may not measure up to the first album but in my opinion has some high-class tracks, What Else is There above all). Are these two clues indicative of a proof? Who knows. Let's just say that if it were good, it would win the award for the album with the highest quality inversely proportional to the concept of the cover (terrifying).

You almost pique my curiosity to listen, even though I already know it and know it's not among the very few things in jazz that I would engage with. We've always been two neighbors on the same landing who say "Good morning" and "Good evening" when we step out of our homes to take out the trash and meet on the stairs.

Damn, I really liked the review, but then CAZpunctuationCAZ showed up with his poor knowledge of English and accidentally hit the mark, throwing the whole argument into crisis. Or part of it. I don’t know what to do anymore.
On the album, 5 stars. No room for discussion.

So, I have to say a series of perfectly useless things. The first is that this album is the first by AE to have a shade of red on the cover. Now, does this mean anything? No. However, in my beloved naivety, I had envisioned a new spark that would animate this latest work of the two crazy Englishmen. The second useless thing, related to the first, is that this is one of those albums where you get a taste of something as big as a house if you listen to the first track: now, it’s certainly an age-old trick to put the standout piece at the beginning, but here it transcends, as M4 Lema is an 8-minute continuum of remarkable autechrean class that seems to have found an incredible meeting point between the subconscious depths of their early records and the cacophonous noise of the later ones. At that point, you expect an album that continues this declaration of intent, but in the end, you discover that the rest is not only below par but qualitatively and quantitatively refutes the initial poetic statement (the average length of the tracks, aside from the opener, is about 5 minutes). Yes, there are enjoyable tracks, but ultimately the impression is that you would have spent that hour of listening more happily revisiting Incunabula and blasting through Aut Riche, Basscadet, Eggshell, Bike, and 444 one more time.

Bravo @[ZiOn] both for the quality of the review and the judgment (for me, anyway, three stars are more than enough).

No surprise in reading that opening: Menuck has always been like that, deeply rhetorical and banal when he decides to speak, both in the few snippets he sings and in the tedious speeches he bestows upon the unfortunate audience during concerts. Having seen him once at Spazio 211 in Turin (there in the role of frontman for Silver Mt. Zion), I can confirm that those few words spoken on stage were always a mix of grandiloquence and low-level rhetoric.
Fortunately, music doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand, and while I remain nostalgic for the times of Yanqui UXO, I have also enjoyed the latest releases. I've got this one queued up (for now, I'm getting hyped about the latest from Mogwai, who I believe continue to maintain excellent levels on the post-rock front).

Well, you say it can be enough for now, but after 6 years of silence from Heligoland, what’s the point of releasing just twenty minutes of music? For me, either you shut up shop or you make a grand comeback. And perhaps, considering that trip-hop was a phenomenon that made sense and could be contextualized in the '90s-2000s, it was better to leave it there or reinvent it by updating the sounds, like what happened with genres like shoegaze, which saw a revival 10 years later with post-shoegaze, or punk with post-punk, or hardcore with post-hardcore, even though we know that some are PRE, some are POST, without ever having been anything. NOTHING.
Anyway, Mezzanine is one of the greatest albums of the '90s. No discussion. We're talking about an album that includes Angel, Teardrop, Inertia Creeps, Exchange, Dissolved Girl, and Group Four; I mean, I don’t know if we’re on the same page.