{"id":4981,"date":"2010-01-08T13:47:44","date_gmt":"2010-01-08T13:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejoycollective.co.uk\/blog\/?p=4981"},"modified":"2010-01-08T13:47:44","modified_gmt":"2010-01-08T13:47:44","slug":"underpass-disorienteering-urban-planning-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/review\/underpass-disorienteering-urban-planning-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Underpass – ‘Disorienteering’ (Urban Planning Records)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ItThere’s a track on this, the excellent debut album from Cardiff’s sonic boffin Underpass, called ‘Electric Legoland’. It’s perfectly named: miniature blocks of primary colours beep and scrape, stab and whirr around the plushly crumpled beats, circling, stacking and rearranging themselves to great, itchy effect. It’s the most glitchy, abrasive song on ‘Disorienteering’, but even so, fits in perfectly with the self-contained air of mangled opulence, an atmosphere that manages to combine lushly crafted layers of sound with fidgety noises that nibble like gremlins.<\/p>\n

It’s a long, enveloping listen. The first half is a relentless succession of feel-the-quality electronica ghosters, and if there’s a slight lack of variety in the “sonic swathes with beats that kick in, drop off, then kick back in” template you can at least luxuriate in the woozy, propulsive smartness on offer. There’s a fair amount of guitar here too, though it mostly creeps in as one more layer in the addictive mix of gleaming sounds and tetchy snags.<\/p>\n

It’s in the darker second half that ‘Disorienteering’ drops its heaviest payloads. Two songs feature serial collaborator and Right Hand Left Hand\/Ratatosk dude Rhodri Viney on vocals and guitar, and while ‘ZombiesAteMySadness’ wrings great, quiet pathos from its bleak and insistent murmuring, ‘Hold Your Dreams In’ is pretty phenomenal: soft, Mogwai-style vocals over machine hum and rolling guitar lines lead to the title repeated over and over as bleeps swoop and hassle the refrain. It’s sad and beautiful and brilliant. Bonus track ‘Man Of The World’ almost tops it though: the Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac song shorn of any hippy self loathing and recast as a bright flare of colour, the main riff fizzing and heading into the sky. A giddy end to an hour of substantial, big hearted machine music. You’re advised to buy.<\/p>\n

(CD released in shops 25th of January, or you can buy now from http:\/\/underpass.org.uk\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a track on this, the excellent debut album from Cardiff’s sonic boffin Underpass, called ‘Electric Legoland’. It’s perfectly named: miniature blocks of primary colours beep and scrape, stab and whirr around the plushly crumpled beats, circling, stacking and rearranging themselves to great, itchy effect. It’s the most glitchy, abrasive song on ‘Disorienteering’, but even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[747,459],"tags":[1032,1030,1037],"class_list":["post-4981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-releases","category-review","tag-rhodri-viney","tag-underpass","tag-urban-planning-records"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4981\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonnyjaniero.com\/thejoycollective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}