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This album couldn't have come at a better time for me. No doubt because I'm repulsed by most of my "friends" lately and thus almost never go out dancing anymore, I've become attracted to the more post-rocky strain of dance music — Matthew Herbert, the incredible Neu! reissues (hey, I can dance to them), etc.
To this end, I've unsurprisingly turned to Simon Reynolds for guidance. In "Blissed Out," he compares Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden (an album I still haven't heard) to John Martyn's Solid Air (dig that title), Miles' Sketches of Spain and In A Silent Way, Roy Harper's Stormcock and "the aquiline, empty soundscapes of ECM's neo-jazz," all of which I've acquainted or reacquainted myself with in the past six months.
Now here comes Norwegian Molvaer who seems to sum up all these impulses with his second album. It's damn near an "End of Me" apotheosis: "Tragomar," is named after "a restaurant on the beach of a fishing village in Northeast Spain" and may mean "swallow the sea;" "Kakonita" was taken from the soundtrack of a film about polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who sent two Inuit girls back to Alaska after parading them around Hollywood; "Vilderness" has Molvaer editing tapes of his band the way Teo Macero did on Miles' '70s output; the title cut is influenced by the funky delays of Basement Jaxx. Molvaer's trumpet cries out over it all with occasional drum 'n' bass for undergirding.
For all the cool, menthol-cured winds this stirs up, though, I still prefer the dense thickets of Miles' urban voodoo (better for working out) and Basement Jaxx's jagged little pill (better for, well, dancing).
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