Rain Machine: Rain Machine
A self-titled endeavour from Rain Machine
Saturday, 24, Oct 2009 05:03
Anti, out now.
In a nutshell...
Visionary uses too wide a palette
What's it all about?
It's about women and injustice and human needs and all the emotions these things generate in the album's erstwhile singer/guitarist/composer/hero. The sounds are large, designed for epic sing-alongs, while the lyrics adopt TV on the Radio's blues-influenced rhythms and tricks to surprise you and beguile you.
Who's it by?
Kyp Malone is the guitarist and vocalist for TV on the Radio as well as a member of numerous other side-projects. Here he braves the wilds of solo-land and attempts to carve out what the jacket-blurb promises to be an "unflinchingly original" soundscape. Coming from musical power-quintet TV on the Radio (who have just announced that they are going on a year-long hiatus) Kyp brings many of the tricks he learnt as their singer and guitarist with him, while adding some innovations of his own.
As an example...
"It's a glass with some chrome/Just some rocks and some crow/Just some rocks and a crutch reverb/It's a hi-hat, a click and the crush of the contact/Do you know your worth?/Just mud." - New Last Name
What the others say
"Moving out of the shadows, Kyp is involved in his own extra-curricular projects these days, twiddling the knobs on Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson's recent album - a record of absolution that this, Kyp's own solo offering, shares a turbulent spirit with. Rain Machine is introspective - to the point of being painfully earnest." - NME
"Unfortunately, Malone allows his muse to send him entirely too far afield over the second half of the album, where his art-damaged insularity ossifies into pure self-indulgent torpor. No one will ever mistake TV on the Radio for tight-fisted, two-and-a-half-minute popsmiths, but three of Rain Machine's final six tracks run eight minutes or longer, and we're not talking about danceable funk workouts here either." - Pitchfork
So is it any good?
Imagine that music, all music, is a huge, expansive trade fair and you are walking through it. Hearing the sound of drums and an African-influenced barbershop quartet you stray to a table to find TV on the Radio. Their stall monopolises an unfeasibly large part of the fair, showing off a huge variety of products, but as you walk through it you find that - somehow - everything is united by the very strangeness of its variety. It's like one of those apocryphal pound stores where every product is useful.
You go for a coffee and eventually the drums and interlaced voices fade, so you feel ready to go over to Rain Machine's stall. There again you see the same level of variety, but in a much, much smaller more intimate space. The effect is hypnotic and also acutely disorientating. "How", you think, "how could this gentlemen have so many things? And why does he want me to see all of them at once?"
You don't know. So you look at Kyp Malone who smiles at you and explains that to air his grievances he needs a huge space to play with. He doesn't feel limited by being a solo artist, but it seems he's trying to prove this to you by looping, feedbacking and iterating his sounds until his album might as well be that of a quarter or quintet. Diet-TV on the Radio.
Sure, some of the songs - Driftwood Heart, New Last Name - are roaring, stirring pieces. It's not William Blake, but it has a certain prophetic air and the music is gothic in its intricacy. Malone is a good enough composer to make even the light fuzz of simple strings engaging. His problem is not his creativity, its his sense of his own importance. The curse of all solo artists is that, sometimes, they stray too far and become too ambitious. To be solo is about being singular, not aping a much larger entity, and yet that's exactly what Malone attempts here.
You'll come back to his stall from time to time, but in comparison to TV On The Radio's sprawl it feels awfully lonely.
6/10
Jack Clark