| A chilling American counterpart to M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, Audio Noir is a creeping slab of pink-noise electronica - synths bleed out over glacial cadences, sunken samples and heavily processed guitars that sound more like tortured apparitions than six-stringed soldiers. William Octavius Marshall's most obvious antecedent influences are Bristol's big three: we hear bits of Massive Attack's coldly calculated terror, Portishead's otherworldly seclusion and Tricky's clambering paranoia percolating beneath the surface of the Angelo Badalamenti-sampling/aping "Monochrome," or underscoring the static grooves and prickly percussion of "Vacant/Panic." He may be a demonic presence on the dancefloor, but Marshall is first and foremost a hip-hop artist, albeit one whose worldview is skewed towards the macabre; "Before You Go Away" and "Cellophane" crawl around in the grime and murk of the underworld, only to be refracted through funhouse mirrors once they arrived at the dealer's crib. In a social climate where we often mistake lust for love and vanity for compassion, Marshall stands as a guardian of the heart's precious mettle - living proof that the austere can be heartfelt and the heartfelt can be excruciatingly painful. A blood and guts vision of our future-primitive romanticism, Audio Noir is either hip-hop for the new millennium or the electronic form's final descent into Victorian madness. - Splendid |
2XLP/Out Of Print