CD Review: Sketches For Albinos, …That City Is A Liar

Often, when people come across a band - or in this case a multi-instrumentalist - who they’ve never heard of before, they tend to ignore what is written about them. But why is this? Hecklerspray can only assume it’s down to people not having the bottle to explore something potentially fresh and exciting. Instead they’d rather be fed the same recycled crap again and again.

Prime examples include the cover of the NME every week. Once a flagship for exposing music, now all it contains is dire indie filth. How many times can it put Pete Doherty on the cover? Not enough evidently. Sketches For Albinos is an artist we already have a great amount of time for. After filtering out the rubbish in our MySpace Trawl feature, we were fortunate enough to discover this particular artist. Once we dug a little further into Matthew Collings aka Sketches For Albinos' discography, we discovered a great wealth of music that was waiting to be heard. Released on the Ropeadope label, this digital-only release has been ringing in our ears for a good few weeks now. Instead of listening to the album once and drawing our opinions from it, we found that each time we skipped back and forth through the nine-track record entitled …That City Is A Liar, we'd find something else that our ears previously hadn’t picked up. Many layers of beautifully woven melodies come creeping in and out at various points of the record, always making you want to listen that little bit closer to see if any more nuggets of joy can be found. 

Iceland is not typically known for producing music that is loud and noisy. We’re sure there is someone in Iceland producing 300+ BPM drum n bass, but hecklerspray’s general ignorance means we’ve only been exposed to Blindfold, Sigur Ros and everyone’s favourite journalist-bashing nutjob, Bjork. Each of these respective artists brings different elements that have made them well known. Sketches For Albinos also possess something different which hopefully more people will be exposed to sooner rather than later. A typical multi-instrumentalist usually makes ropey-sounding music to try and create the illusion it’s all done by a band, just so they can turn around and say “Haha - no you fool, I did it all because I am talented in more ways then you will ever be.” Well possibly, not but they probably think it. 

Combining post rock sounds with glitchy and broken electronics is a bold step and one that we firmly believe works. Opening track Tanzen Als Gabe Es Kein Morgen - translations anyone? - starts off with an almost post-indie approach, if such a thing exists. Hopefully we can do an NME and create our own dodgy-sounding genre. What we can only assume is off-sounding – but still effective electronic drums are put in to take us onto the next song and our favourite track on the album.

Haruki begins with a sulky-sounding acoustic number that begins to weave itself into the gentle pattering of drums and effective use of everyone’s favourite instrument - the xylophone. While all these elements gently swirl around and combine effectively there’s one more ingredient to be added. The human voice. Typical Sketches For Albinos tracks don’t contain much singing. To an extent this law remains the same, no clear vocal is evident apart from a chant-like chorus that slots in perfectly completing the jigsaw.

Instead of singing, an option has been taken to use spoken word samples and slot them in. Thankgodeverything'scomplicated contains the ramblings of a women describing what she can see around her. If you have any records that mention anyone talking about eating Icelandic chocolate, then we’ll give you something from the office. A chewed pen maybe. Not since listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor have we heard spoken word used so perfectly underneath a gentle bed of acoustic music. 

What we also like about this record is how certain tracks seemingly broadcast images into our minds. Anna Karina is such a song. Despite clocking in at 88 seconds, it is a one-instrument song full of bliss and prettiness. Imagine a scene in a film where some kind of heartache has happened. Drop all the dialogue as two characters go to make-up; with this song in the background it is the perfect song to fit the image. If not a film then we could ramble off more places where this song could be used.

Songs on this record deserve to be heard by more people then the small community of fans that Sketches For Albinos has at the moment. Like a fine piece of literature, …That City Is A Liar should be shared and passed onto as many people as possible. Its sheer warmth and beauty will move anyone who has ever had a flicker of emotion.