Walls - Coracle

1. Into Our Midst
2. Heat Haze
3. Sunporch
4. Il Tedesco
5. Vacant
6. Raw Umber Twilight
7. Ecstatic Truth
8. Drunken Galleon

Walls waste no time in following up their widely acclaimed debut album (MOJO's #1 Electronic LP of 2010) with a glorious set of eight swooning slow trance tinglers for Kompakt. 'Coracle' is as cute as the name suggests, yet perhaps with a keener dancefloor edge than we've previously perceived from their music. The sleek Techno engine which drove this album's predecessor is fine tuned to a Balearic tempo, but with a trustingly Teutonic dancefloor efficiency. From the top of 'In The Midst' the groove steadily purrs at a chugging 110bpm while sublime shoegaze guitar repetitions unfurl across the long, straight road ahead. On cruise control, they pass into the lushly mirage-like 'Heat Haze' before the beat reappears to propel the heart-fluttering arpeggios of 'Sunporch' to almost giddy heights, and we plane across the gazing Techno scapes of 'Il Tedesco'. Down the line 'Vacant' is more blissed, coolly riding the brakes into the elated second wind of 'Raw Umber/Twilight' and the majestic kosmiche disco dissonance of 'Ecstatic Truth'...www.boomkat.com

Patten - GLAQJO XAACSSO

1. Ice
2. Crown 8vo
3. Words collided
4. a.m./soft focus
5. Blush mosaic
6. & our wild paths intersect
7. Fire dream
8. Peachy swan
9. Out the coast
10.Ndi bem
11.Plurals
12.Rubylith film

London-based Patten has been operating on the fringes of electronic music for a couple of years now, with some reputable CD-Rs and other low-key releases under his belt, but this debut album proper for No Pain In Pop is a revelation, presenting a prismatic vision of narcotic, wonked-out, grid-dissolving house aimed at the cerebellum rather than the dancefloor. It's reminiscent of all sorts of things - the slanted techno of Diamond Catalog and Container, the hyper-kosmische of Bee Mask, the most disturbed Omar-S productions, and particularly the rich, isolationist machine-funk of Actress. It's chopped and glitched up to high heaven, but its grooves are true - we refer you to 'Blush Mosaic', which sounds like Boards Of Canada trying to make Chicago jack tracks through a hydroponic haze, or 'Fire Dream', with its hovering Detroit synth pads subjected to intensive Hud Mo or Rustie-style processing. The aesthetic is perfectly honed and executed: dense 4/4 psychedelia that is just madly engrossing. 'Out The Coast' is incredible, arpeggios and miasmic vocal layers – the perfect soundtrack for sunbathing on JG Ballard’s Terminal Beach. Elsewhere there's a diffracted, broken hip-hop quality that suggests superior mid-90s IDM re-wired for the hypnagogic generation. Disorientingly complex but breathtakingly immediate too, this will surely rank among the albums of the year for fans of the f*cked up stuff...www.boomkat.com

Veronica Falls - Veronica Falls

01. Found Love In A Graveyard
02. Right Side Of My Brain
03. The Fountain
04. Misery
05. Bad Feeling
06. Stephen
07. Beachy Head
08. All Eyes On You
09. The Box
10. Wedding Day
11. Veronica Falls
12. Come On Over

At the end of the video for Veronica Falls' "Bad Feeling", Roxanne Clifford, the group's bob-haired singer/guitarist, clad in a dashingly fey polka-dot blouse, picks up an antique book-- the ultimate twee signifier-- and lights it on fire. Given indie rock's recent jangle-pop overload, and the comments that Veronica Falls have made in the press ("people like to romanticize about C86 [but] there were lots of rubbish bands associated with it..."), it's tempting to wonder aloud: is "Bad Feeling" the C86 version of that video where George Michael goes iconoclastic on us and sets his own leather jacket ablaze?

Well, maybe not, but at the very least it's a decent visual metaphor for the band's sound: expertly stagy revivalism with the slightest hint of mutiny. You could have said the same thing of Slumberland labelmates and fellow fresh-faced indie poppers the Pains of Being Pure at Heart when they first burst out the gates with Pastels badges on their sleeves-- the quartet's self-titled debut hits with the same sort of immediacy that that first Pains LP did. Both records do familiar things so well that, occasionally, momentarily, they actually trick you into thinking you've never heard anything like them before.

But, of course, you have. In fact, if you've been paying any attention to Glasgow/London hybrid Veronica Falls, you've actually heard some of these very songs before: The single "Found Love in a Graveyard" made the rounds almost two years ago, and then came "Beachy Head", "Bad Feeling", and "Come on Over" earlier this year. But after a run of strong 7"'s, their self-titled debut finally confirms that Veronica Falls are more than a singles band. Though they operate with a pretty limited sonic palette (boy/girl harmonies; dueling, reverb-drenched guitars; lots of tambourine), there's a sustained momentum over these 12 tracks that even manages to bring in some unexpected influences-- "Beachy Head" sounds like a zombified Mamas and the Papas thrashing at surf-punk guitars with shards of glass.

Given the group's penchant for ghosts and reverb, it's tempting to grab for a familiar collection of low-hanging adjectives: dreamy, ethereal, haunting-- except that, actually, Veronica Falls is none of these things. There's a striking physicality to these songs, and Guy Fixsen and Ash Workman's production makes every tambourine beat hit with the clarity of a shattering window. The guitar sound is immaculate: Clifford and James Hoare's strings don't jangle so much as bristle-- taut chords that dart restlessly in and out of each other's way. There's a clarity of texture-- a specificity even-- to every element of the band's sound. Which makes it something of an anomaly: shoegaze that looks you square in the eye.

Thematically speaking, shit's dark. There's a song called "Misery", there are not one but two songs in which the narrator's lover might be a ghost ("Graveyard", "Bad Feeling"), and though "Beachy Head" might sound like a carefree postcard from indie rock's current backdrop of choice, it's actually about jumping off a cliff and drowning yourself. Thankfully, the record ends on a high in every sense: "Come on Over" is perhaps the most hopeful-- and best-- track the band's got to their name. "Crimson and clover, I'll touch your shoulder," Clifford sings over the mounting tension of a furiously strummed guitar. It's the Veronica Falls aesthetic in miniature: the ghosts of pop past conjured convincingly and intimately enough to feel like flesh and blood...www.pitchfork.com

Paul White - Rapping With Paul White

01. Intro: We Make A Lot Of Noise
02. Right On
03. Trust ft. Guilty Simpson
04. Run Shit (ft. Marv Won)
05. One Of Life’s Pleasures (ft. Danny Brown)
06. The Doldrums
07. Life Is Flashing Interlude
08. Stampeding Elephants (ft. Moe Pope)
09. Rotten Apples (ft. Tranqill)
10. Thirty Days
11. A Weird Day (ft. Homeboy Sandman)
12. African New Wave
13. Indigo Glow (ft. Jehst)
14. Dirty Slang (ft. Guilty Simpson)
15. A New Way
16. Evasive Action
17. Wily Walruses (ft. Nancy Elizabeth)
18. Outro: We’ll Never End

Bonus Instrumentals:
19. Trust
20. Run Shit
21. One Of Life's Pleasures
22. Stampeding Elephants
23. Rotten Apples
24. A Weird Day
25. Indigo Glow
26. Dirty Slang

In case the album title's got you thinking otherwise: Paul White is not a rapper. He's a producer from London, a designation that, these days, might bring to mind dubstep and UK bass-- but despite some enthusiastic co-signs from publications that orbit around that scene, White ain't part of it. He works in sticky, abstracted hip-hop rhythms coated in THC resin; 2009's The Strange Dreams of Paul White, one of his earlier full-lengths (all of which can be heard on his Bandcamp page) found Captain Beefheart bumping up against weirded-out boom-bap.

Those previous releases felt homemade and somewhat amateurish, a distinction which makes Rapping With Paul White a bit of a coming-out party: there's equal parts mutant funk and dusty beats here, but it sounds like White's first true statement of purpose, his own preferred introduction to new listeners. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's also his first LP that largely features guest vocals (this is where the Rapping comes in); White's gathered names both recognizable (Danny Brown, Homeboy Sandman, frequent past collaborator Guilty Simpson) and not-so-recognizable (Marv Won, Moe Pope, Tranqill).

So this is a record that depends as much on what the spitters bring to the table as what White cooks up in the lab-- and, unfortunately, the rappers don't exactly come correct. Considering how he and White have a past history of collaborating, you'd think that Guilty Simpson and White would be firing on all cylinders by now; instead, the Detroit hardhead unfurls cliché after cliché and drops vague, autobiographical teases that don't reveal much in particular. (Though he gets points for the "murdering mic's like Conrad Murray" line in "Dirty Slang".) His performances are uninspiring enough to think that of last year's full-length collab with Madlib, the cleverly titled OJ Simpson, relied solely on 'Lib's beatcraft.

Fellow Motor City spitter Marv Won rides the chant-knock of "Run Shit" ably, but spoils the broth by getting corny about Heath Ledger; Queens native Homeboy Sandman, on the other hand, basically recounts a trip to England on "A Weird Day", which is about as thrilling as it sounds. Even Danny Brown, another Detroit rapper that is having a very good year with his excellent, audacious XXX mixtape, is smothered by the spiraling carnival melodies and game-show filth of "One of Life's Pleasures", his trademark excitability barely registering. The only rapper that comes out of this unscathed is White's labelmate Tranqill, whose cadences on "Rotten Apples" match well with White's searing, void-creating beat.

There are instrumental versions of Rapping With Paul White out there and I strongly suggest seeking out those versions, if only to feel the blunt impact of White's strongest moves (the spooky claps of "Trust" and "Indigo Glow", in particular). You could take a rap-less version of this LP and convince your friends that it's a beat tape from Madlib or Oh No, a quality that speaks as much to White's influences as it does his lack of a specific identity. Thing is, copping to Stones Throw influences almost seems quaint these days, as anyone with an ear to the ground has noticed that much of the underground hip-hop that's in vogue relies on quiet introspection, stronger drugs, and ambient, eerie beats made by people who inexplicably refer to themselves as Friendzone. The fact that Rapping With Paul White sounds so old-head suggests that the "Stones Throw sound," made most popular by the late J. Dilla's inimitable Donuts, is on the verge of transitioning from old school to just plain old...www.pitchfork.com