It’s another Wednesday so what does that mean? Another Kleptones album, the third – LO – accurately described because this has low downtempo moods – I hinted at that on one of the previous posts. Ranging from Daniel Johnston, Pigface, David Byrne, Mark Kozelek, Richard Thompson, Bill Withers, Sonic Youth, Leonard Cohen to Beth Orton via William Orbit – and spanning genres from dub to neo-folk, trip hop to breaks, slow funk to neo-classical, ambient to neo-soul and beyond.
There’s a lot of floating and water references here (rivers, seas, icebergs) and indeed the rest of the albums but it feels more prevalent here. It flows along like a the heart of a dark river, a stygian deep undertow. Floating like a vine leaf, indeed 😉 I’ve talked and made musical narratives before about the mythology and symbology of rivers and the sea so anything like that resonates deeply with me.
Water is mysterious, dark, unknown, dangerous but also where life comes from, and rivers are usually about journeys either physical or spiritual. It’s not accidental that you cross a river to get to the Underworld in the Ancient Greek pantheon, they are boundaries but also liberation..
“I’ll shoot you then you can shoot me… all blood flows into the sea”
Man Overboard
My favourites that I’ve already played are the closer, the baroque jazz (!) meets U-Ziq of Today’s Room played on the latest podcast, and Storm Water (318) with it’s outtake samples of Beth Orton on William Orbit’s ambient classic Water On A Vine Leaf, with slide guitar and beats drifting along. Also played Be Aware (314) – the beautiful track that feels like a cinematic closer hanging in space with the Eno-esque slide guitar but is actually at the start of the album. It’s featuring the much missed Bill Withers on Use Me, ‘beware what you listen to, beware what you believe’‘. Very timely messages.
In the ‘to play’ stack are Free Rotation which feels like folk rolling in on itself, like some time-lapse diurnal churn with Mark Kozelek mournfully covering John Denver’s Around and Around – again about time “Still I love to see the sun go down and the world go around.”. And also Endless Dawn with it’s meandering flowing tendrils and the sample I really should recognise but don’t.
As a side note – I wasn’t intending to make every post about the quadtriptych/quad-trilogy of Kleptones albums OV/ER/LO/AD an analysis of each one, but it’s turned out that way – so in pure George Lucas style I’ve added some of my favourites to the post about Kleptones – OV and where I played a track from Kleptones – ER (oops I played a demo not realising it just had a name change!) Sadly I didn’t know about AD til fairly recently so I’ve got to play catch up on the fourth and final album, which I will rectify in an upcoming mashup podcast.
And a bit like the Key to Time (hey obscure Who reference) tracks from this album are scattered across 7 podcasts over the last few years, so I’ve finally tracked down where I played what – a bit like River Song, it’s chronologically all over the shop (Ed: more Who references? Flux that!).
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