Music: Albums

By Unknown Author

Ultrasound: Everything Picture

Every so often comes a debut album so perfectly formed it makes you shiver. every so often there comes a sound that moves delicately between raw emotion and gentle harmony. Rarely do the two combine, but then a release so eagerly anticipated as this always had to be something special. Everything Picture huge, sprawling, naked epic of an album, including the wonderful Stay Young in its track listing. Tiny throws his voice around with extravagant carelessness as the music draws you into a world of distortion and harmony, despair and hope. Welcome to the world of Ultrasound. Because it's their debut, the band have been allowed to release a double CD album, with the typically self-deprecating, Sentimental Song, "Romantic as a glitter ball," while the psychedelic drive of Fame Thing is on a par with the anticipation and idealisation of youth in Stay Young. Floodlit World and Suckle make up the quota of well known tracks, but the album works less on the grounds of singles and background tracks, more as a whole picture. The title says it all really.

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Hood: The Cycle Of Days and Seasons

The much-anticipated release of Mogwai's Come on Die Young album has left the public more susceptible now than ever to the delights of Post Rock. Hood's new album couldn't come at a better time. But don't expect a carbon copy clone of Mogwai's instrumental guitary caterwauling: Post Rock is as eclectic as it is progressive. Hood's ever-evolving epic musical journey splices the traditional lo-fi guitars with all manner of more classical instruments, often played as few others would dare, weird noises, sampled effects and electronic drum beats. All this and yet more; understated yet emotion-laden boy-girl lyrics, provided we overlook the over-obtrusive moral message on otherwise standout track The Cliff Edge of Workaday Morality: "I can't understand how people who are supposed to be intelligent can be so cruel to others". Recorded in a converted Victorian school building in Yorkshire in the summer of 1998, the album has an earthy, everyday feel, betraying its origin with interspersed atmospheric sounds of summer and countryside church bells. A true work of genius, The Cycle Of Days and Seasons is impossible to encapsulate in the space of a few lines, and impossible to take in an the first or even the twenty-first listen. Sit back, relax and absorb the alternative soundtrack to the impending summer.

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