This is Talk Less, Say More’s most focussed, emotionally literate and complex work to date, putting personal, honest reflection into an ingenuous and eclectic hypermodern setting. Pushing his distinctive vocal to the front and singing on every track for the first time, the record unblinkingly explores love’s sunlit glories as well as the strange chasms opened when it departs.

The Battle of Borodino updates the neon lights of 80s electropop with wide-eyed Italo synths, fuzzy guitar riffs and vocoders. Up close, Far Away combines deft lyricism and folk warmth with relentless thud of the Berlin techno minimalism, in one moment laying an explosion of shuddering breaks beautifully alongside looping guitars. Smeared impressionistic cello in Sensations Spring meld seamlessly with a Timbaland bassline, halting IDM drums and contemplation of the passing of things. Perhaps a hinge of the album, Roots Alive pushes Vangelis’ synthetic choirs over the snap and throb of a broken house beat, thrusting guitar chops over childhood recollection.

The closeness and beautiful restraint of All Dressed Up Like Love reads like a confessional - “I have been thinking about fear and the way it has of showing up around here/All dressed up like love”. Drawing the album to a close, Life In Cold Blood is a thrilling summation, shimmering bells trilling over a tender dub, a gorgeous conclusion to a gorgeous record. The yearning mantra “We’ll put our hoods up and walk in the rain” is perhaps a look to hope, maybe nothing more than a glance to acceptance, the open conclusion to so many unanswered questions.

For fans of Junior Boys, Subtle, The Knife, Timbaland as well as Leonard Cohen, the anarchist pop spirit of Giorgio Moroder. Minimal techno, pound shop electro.

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Cacophonous, intense music that bludgeons the listener into a state of ecstasy. Coming on like a hallucination inducing punch from their titular Sonny Liston, Elapse-O pass from the thrill of the initial hit into a disconcerted daze. That immediacy comes from the strident vocals, Songs About Fucking-esque drum machines and Fuck Off Riffs; the following disorientation from the Pita-like layers of textured noise and glorious attention to detail lavished on these songs.

Call ‘em a noise band if you will- but where so many of that ilk wallow in an inhuman sludge, Elapse-O’s music glories in the intensities of experience. This is thrilling, vital music from the young UK underground.

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EL Heath tells us: “The album was made in my freezing cold studio on a shit old computer and a lot of red wine. It’s about how whenever I went outside the cut-off point of the day seemed to be 4pm, like I’d be in town then suddenly it was dark and I lost all my energy. I would have plans in the evening and not do anything because of this lack of energy. It’s also about how all the colours in the scenery are simply hidden by the quality of light we get in the winter. It’s not that it is not beautiful, but the colours are hidden by this quality of light and, well, generally the lack of such light.”

We say: a melancholic exploration of a long, dark cold winter spent in the isolated countryside - a countryside which takes on something of a malignant presence following its more positive influence on previous Heath releases. These tunes are recognisably the work of EL Heath, but are sparser than his previous releases - at times approaching an almost unbearable melancholy.

The sounds are often onomatopoeic: a martenot sweep like a cutting wind, pianos like a crisp frost. But as anyone reading the above would realise, it’s as much a psychological as it is seasonal (though the two are clearly inextricably linked). Concerto yearns, Arvo Pärt’s “light passing through glass” distilled. Electric Storm creeps with brooding darkness. Chords is a gorgeous sigh. Inertia’s unsettling absences are the perfect soundtrack to dark times.

It could be viewed, perhaps, as a wintry response to Virginia Astley’s ‘From Gardens Where We Feel Secure’ (an album Heath adores) and the original intention was for the album to be released in the middle of this winter. And though late, the very fact we’re able to release this album is something of a personal triumph for Heath: a perilous hard drive, lack of desire and feelings of wintry discontent at times conspiring to halt progress.

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Double album, 24 tracks in total:
Part 1 - Survival Strategies For The Age Of Discontinuity (Tracks 1-11)
Part 2 - We Are The Market Makers. (Tracks 12-24)

Not one of the tracks goes beyond two minutes, yet each is rammed full of so many sharp ideas that it shames much longer tracks into whimpering submission. As a collection it runs the gamut of mostly electronically based sounds, think Mike Patton’s Fantômas via a overheated laptop: clattering breakcore, thundering gabba tantrums, intricate glitch, Captain Beefheart punching Venetian Snares odd-pop, raw ambience, chuckle-hop, stock-market-core, Zorn inspired jazzgasms, techno grind…well smart.

Artwork designed by Wayne Pashley.

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Gorgeous washes of ambient sound and experimental pop soundings from a lonely Salopian and his arsenal of synths/guitars.

A heart stoppingly beautiful Proustian evocation of the tranquility of the countryside: of following water, long childhood walks and glorious sunlight through fading trees.

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This is a record that works on a variety of levels. At first blush, it is a collection of fine indie pop songs, with the occasional acoustic interlude, songs that take the best twee tradition and run with it unapologetically. There are songs about animals having an olympics, about little plants and weird aspirations to be cars - birds tweet about.

Yet listen closer and their is something very odd going on - these are songs about the miseries and joys of life (and death) that assume a occasionally sugary disguise, catching you unawares.

There are real love songs here, real songs of dread, honest to goodness realism about disappointment and thoughts about relationships - but there is also a song about the sun having his hat on. But this sun is deeply unhappy. Then again, there is a bit about losing the little things like cigarettes and the big things like love.

What? Lots of fun and lots of depth? Yes, indeed and odd like a pile of jackals. But you’ll see, in the weird and magical happy/sad kingdom of We Show Up On Radar.

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The Other Side of Fabulous Florida is precisely The Other Side Of Fabulous Florida, compared to it’s insane siamese twin.

It opens with a pure and unapologetic pop song, that could have been lifted straight from Clouddead’s Ten. Fragile X lets David Lynch’s walking bass talk to John Zorn, while Furballs skips through the local Toys ‘r’ Us. Pancakes and Waffles comes over all vintage AFX: a robot talks about love while analogue synths drift over the intricate drums, all belied by a demented electronic woofing. Return of The 100mph Dog rides a dark dada carousel into the night of broken toys and wide-eyed oddness. Wrapped up in ten minutes, it exudes confidence and an ear for an ear-worm of a tune.

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A thumb to the eyes, followed by a kick to the groin: all low blows and dirty fighting, The Night Of Long Knives is a perilous dash between relentlessly skittering breaks and hammering gabba bass.

Alligator Fuckhouse does what it says on the tin, a waking nightmare of thuds, circuit bending and endless cymbal crashes. In Last One… ragged string loops and shredded amens fight through dense thickets of bleeps and future noise. Speak For Yourself Moron witnesses a hardcore shout off over a intensely puerile melody before the duo choke the life out of bank of effects units…a throughly worthy punch to the lug holes.

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Never To Alight is a record of sparse, honest, intimate and beautiful songs.

It is a record of and for the liminal times: one of dawns, twilights and sunsets, almost glances and trickling epiphanies. It is a record of things half-remembered or half-forgotten; of fallen leaves and lost places, of ghosts and unopened attics, of joy, dread and longing. It is a record of old letters, pressed flowers and single battered photographs. It is a record of the mysteries of age, time, memory, love, loss and death: utterly transcendent even as it teeters on the edge of the abyss.

Lyrics

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Going to Jib Choons… was originally released on Good Name For A Racehorse Records in October 2006. It consists of 8 long pieces and 8 shorter sound collages. The fulfill David Lynch’s requirements for house band…while the former fulfill the same request from Pierre Schaeffer.

It veers from bombastic to whatever the opposite of bombastic is and constantly challenges and surprises the listener; from full blown messy psych freakouts to grubby pastoral kraut…

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Originally released on Good Name for a Racehorse Records (GNFAR) in July 2006.

It consists of 5 long tracks which spiral past distant galaxies and plunge to the darkest depths of the human psyche, feeling out the contours of kraut and unhinged space-rock.

One of these five - Gusset Bastard Grip - is something of a rarity in the Strap The Button catalogue in that it features vocals. These vocals sound somewhat like Brian Ferry undergoing a nervous breakdown.

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Om!‚ This syllable is this whole world.
Mandukya Upanishad

There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacings of the spheres.
Pythagorus

Thus all music - since its thought is upon melody and rhythm - must be the earthly representation of the music there is in the rhythm of the Ideal Realm.
Plotinus

There is a hierarchy of number from the One Himself down through the numeri. All music contains in some way the divine patterning.
Augustine

Two obliquely named tracks, each half an hour long, stretch out like vast oceans. Centred around variations of a single omnipresent and pulsating note, the record rewards patience, attention to detail and your own quietness. It is a breathtakingly gorgeous meditation on distance and time, as well as sound itself. The listener is cast adrift in a gradually evolving organic soundscape of glacial echoes, smeared synthesisers, glittering electronics and distant chimes, while the sound weaves into your environment, becoming truly ambient. Simply put: this is beautiful work.

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It’s about time. And also space. And also loss. Loss that is the result of either of those things.

The End (Has To Start Somewhere) is about hip-hop as the apex of evolution and the profound absurdity of eternal recurrence (maybe). Kicking Logic considers parallel dimensions and ponders the mystery Schrödinger’s cat over a popping g-funk whistle slice up. Time Flies dwells on life’s glorious contingency and the death of snowmen. The Quarterbeats plays the idea of time signatures as being the signatures of time qua time.

Yet it is not all speculative metaphysical hi-jinks. St’s Patrick’s Well features the most sublimely melancholic vocoder chorus since Laurie Anderson’s avant-hit ‘O Superman’. Oh No is a rapped lament for childhood trees and opportunities missed. Things end with a dark turn: Arctic Fox is a beatless midnight stalk, that recalls the collaboration between Kode9 and Space Ape in its sinister ambiguity - “I never knew a moral to keep me warm at night”, spits our anti-hero, while the colossal darkness and icy ambience whips around him.

In short, this simply is brilliant.

Lyrics

Artwork designed by Wayne Pashley.

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