A New Line (Related) – Our Lady Of Perpetual F**king Succour EP
One of my wife’s friends came to the house recently to collect her to go to a wedding asked me what I planned to do with my evening. I said that I’d probably be playing music. “Oh, lots of hip-hop is it?”, to which I replied, “No… I don’t do hip-hop. The closest I get to hip-hop is trip-hop”. It’s pretty much the same story with a lot of dance music too – I don’t own any house, garage, kitchen or en-suite. Okay, so I lied about the en-suite…
At the root of it all, I seriously struggle to get into formulaic, another-one-rolled-off-the-iMac drivel which tends to flood the airwaves. You know the kind of stuff – the guy comes on (I’ll refrain from calling him a ‘vocalist’, since many of them don’t appear to sing), usually moaning about his “ho” or how he’s going to “pop a cap in yo’ ass”, and generally sounding unpleasant – and then suddenly a female voice appears out of nowhere and steals the chorus. Quite frankly, it’s been done several hundred-thousand times already and will probably be done several million more. Coming to a Spotify account near you soon…
Dance artists don’t generally release tunes with a title that sounds like a rather unholy church. This release, from the rather lovely Home Assembly Music label based up in Yorkshire, will more than likely turn a few heads. Firstly, it follows hot on the heels of The Declining Winter’s “Home For Lost Souls” album from earlier this year and also Peptalk’s avant-garde “Islet” release. I mention these because all three releases stem from very different corners of music. With the “Our Lady EP”, A New Line (Related) have produced an EP of minimalist techno, which wouldn’t be out of place at 3am in a basement club somewhere. Although there’s an element of chill-out to the overall sound, there’s also a hedonistic late-night feeling of being more than a little jaded. The title track takes a overlapping synth beat, which remains solid throughout. Sounds interject throughout the track and punctuate here and there. I particularly like the resonating synth sound and also the repetitive hi-hats and almost breathing-like quality throughout, like the sound of a man trying to escape a busy street during the early hours of the morning.
“Belle Ile En Mer Dub Night” takes a similar path, with recurring hand claps throughout, along with a synth which ‘winds’ itself around the other instrumentation. With laid-back beats, it builds nicely, evolving into another late-night club tune. “Nobody’s Been In Touch” is possibly my favourite track here – and at nearly nine minutes, it’s also the longest track on the EP. During the first couple of minutes the music builds, slowly adding layers until around four minutes in when it becomes the basis of a low-key dance-floor tune.
“They’re Burning Northerners Fifteen At A Time And Firing Them Into The Sky To Light Up London” finishing things off – and who can argue with a title like that? It’s a track which slows things right back down again. Things step up a notch at around 3 minutes as the track takes on a new life, blending distorted loops over a relaxed chill-out beat.
~An additional set of five remixes is available as a free download with the 12” single. Available now as a limited-edition 12” single, limited to 300 copies.~