 |
MH-230 cLOUDDEAD - Ten  Ten finds cLOUDDEAD building on all of the elements that defined their debut: razor sharp vocal interplay, quirky found sound samples, ambient drone dreamscapes, lyrics that walk the line between observational and confessional, and a fair share of nosdam drums slowed to a growl. Doseone and why? never take the cheap way out. Their lyrics may range from blurry and buried to sharp and surfaced, but each and every line has meaning. The music and production are collaborative, featuring Doseone's knack for bottling emotion, why's self-taught multi-instrumentalist efforts, and odd nosdam's flair for borrowed genius. Individually, Doseone, why? and odd nosdam are as prolific and fearless as anyone in today's new music scene, but together as cLOUDDEAD they are able to create music that captures all of the promise of their individual talents in an unequaled sound. |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Reviews Summary |
| All must hail - BBC / A brilliant swan song - CMJ / Genuinely original - Uncut / Catchy and sublime - Under The Radar / Unquestionably, cLOUDDEAD have arrived - Pitchfork / It’s golden - Magnet / Original and eccentric - Alarm / Strident and sophisticated - Grooves / Promising and satisfying – Stylus |
| Ten - cLOUDDEAD's second album - is at times phenomenal, seemingly haunted by the ghosts of a thousand dead genres. odd nosdam's soundscapes bristle and crackle with the memories of antiquity: vinyl surface noise comes alive with rhythmic possibility, wheezing organs push out their last breath with a defiant splutter, drum machines cough and hack up their lungs. On "Dead Dogs Two," spectral melodies are buoyed up by Doseone and why?'s skewed, fractured narrative about seeing dead dogs by the roadside. This soon becomes a meditation on life and the band's native Oakland, before plunging into a Ballardian coda which explains that "We secretly long to be some part of a car crash / Long to see our arm stripped to the tendon / The nudity of swelling exposed vein webbing the back of your hand." Other tracks are similarly broad in scope: "Son of a Gun" is a secret history of political assassination ; "Physics of a Unicycle" ties together Da Vinci, monkeys, Edison and time machines and throws them into a woozy, drunken groove pieced together from spoken snatches of sound, a swaying organ and lurching, unsure beats. If this is, as they insist, cLOUDDEAD's last album, they're going out in style. - Sunday Herald |
1XLP/Out Of Print