An Awesome Wave
The Mercury Music Prize winner is, for
once, a wonderful record. With their
debut, Alt-J have managed to tread
the path between accessibility and invention, and fair play to them. I had been waiting for this for ages, ever since
my brother gave me a demo of the utterly wonderful geek-gem ‘Breezeblocks’
about two years ago. A rerecorded
version of that song appears on this album and it is undoubtedly my favourite
individual track of the year by any artist: quirky indie guitar, rumbling bass,
layered vocal interchanges, odd electro.
Wow. And the album as a whole
follows this pattern. ‘Something Good’
carves a lilting little tune out of waves of piano, ‘Matilda’ is a simple
acoustic guitar song, though you’d never know it with all the keyboard samples
giving meat to its bones. The a-cappella
opening of the masterful ‘Fitzpleasure’ explodes into drive bass, then take a
left turn through piano ballad and plinky guitar, only to come full
circle. The eastern riff underpinning
the xylophone dappled ‘Taro’ is another standout moment. Utterly wonderful. These are just my favourites; this is truly
an album without a weak track.There was lot of hype about Alt-J, but it really was justified. The originality and invention here is staggering, but the fact that they have managed to experiment so much and yet appeal to a wide audience, gain radio play, etc, is just as remarkable. A stunning debut record; it would have been number 1 on my list in both 2010 and 2011, which shows how much I love the next two records…