Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Walls IDM Cream, 8 Aug 2007
Perfect music. This is a superb mixture of glitch electronica, electro-pop and indie songs. Fans of The Postal Service, The Notwist and Styrofoam should snap this up fast. The beauty of Fractales Parts 1 and 2 alone will bring tears to your eyes. If you don't like this, what are you doing listening to electronica anyway?
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Without walls, 15 May 2008
Despite his reputation as arch studio boffin, producer Sascha Ring - aka Apparat - makes unapologetically beautiful music. Unlike some of his IDM peers, Ring is not interested so much in abrasion or near-mathematical deconstruction, but with music that swells and soars with classical grandeur. Among current producers, he bears a resemblance in tone to Ulrich Schnauss (although the production is more technically impressive), or a less cluttered Chris Clark. Moreover, some of Walls` latter tracks build on Bladerunner-style futurism into the sonic blur of shoegaze, recalling Slowdive or, most of all, M83's brilliant `Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts`. Like these latter acts, Apparat embues the vivid, fractal soundscapes with a pop sensibility, using vocals on roughly half the tracks - largely successfully.
`Not A Number' opens `Walls` with the unashamably trippy flourescent swirl of the album cover, embellished with some vaguely orientatal strings. `Hailing From the Edge' is more contrived, one of the vocal tracks that seeks a Timbaland electro sleaziness - with the apparent intention of sounding like an edgier Junior Boys - but coming off like a Justin Timberlake album out-take. `Useless Information' picks up where the opener left off, with traditional orchestrations underpinning the cloudburts of acid effects and nebulous synths.
`Limelight' is more sonically adventurous, with fractured shards of vocal peppering between cavernous beats and other thunderous percussive effects, redolent of Kelpe's `Sea Inside Body`. `Hold On' is a closer to the R&B pretensions of `Hailin' from the Edge' but less conventionally so, built over a mutant booty shaker that is too warped to dance to. Better still is the two-piece suite of `Fractales', a psychedlic mash up of speeded up synths and ephereal textures.
But in fact it is the final third of `Walls` that works best, starting with the slow-mo digital pop of `Birds', part-Postal Service, part-Junior Boys, but more abstract than either of those acts. `Arcadia' too builds a vast, spacious neon world around a Thom Yorke-esque falsetto, in an future pop masterpiece worthy of the Flaming Lips' `Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots`. `You Don't Know Me' returns to the Vangelis-inspired cinematics of M83 while `Headup', another highlight, builds into a breathless shoegaze crescendo worthy of Slowdive or Blonde Redhead.
Despite a few misses, `Walls` is a fine album bucks a trend in which electronica seems increasingly entrenched in a creative cul-de-sac. If you like this, check out some of the aforementioned artists and albums, especially M83's `Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts` (but not their disappointing follow-up `Before the Dawn Heals Us`, or perhaps (Chris) Clarke's `Body Riddle`.
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