Customer Reviews

Hand Cranked

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bibio's followup to their equally excellant debut Fi this year has been more than most impressive. Bibio stands apart from any kind of folk-psych stuff ine could name mostly because Bibio sounds so entirely different from anything else in the genre. Using hand made intruments, baryard equiptment, & whatever else, Bibio combines these most unlikely primary sources and summons forth from them the feeling of living in a pastoral painting that the british progger Caravan might have taken residence in back in their earlier days. These composistions are always having at least 5 touches of sounds in motion, curling, & interacting with everything else in a almost Philip Glass-esque way, but of course again with sounds unlike anyone but Bibio can make. These are the breezes, rustlings, weavings of grassy plains, and sighs of invisible gnomes of an English countryside you've always seen but never heard. As such as well with such uniqueness, the production owes its roots not in the polish of say Yes or Steely Dan, but also neither the treble-busting lo-fi aesthetics of something like Darkthrone or Nuit Noire. Put more simpy, this is diy production but still done aptly enough for one to detect each little stir/melody that Bibio creates and never jarring enough to ever prevent one from just being carried off to sweet netherlands of sleep while listening to it.

Don't get me wrong, I love the first Bibio album, Fi. This one also has some nice moments and he has become more ambitious as far as his guitar playing and layering of melodies. The problem that I have is that every song seems to follow the same exact format, bringing in similar guitar parts at the same intervals song after song. Really no memorable melodies that stick with you. I was really looking forward to this after the original sound established on the first album as well, maybe I just set my expectations too high...

Bibio's second album, HAND CRANKED, mines much of the same area as his debut, FI, but with a noticable difference in sound. This time around, Bibio is much more wedded to folk music, though his sonic experimentation with it remains unabated. Thus, the cheery "Cherry Go Round" has much more of a rustic feel than anything on FI; "Quantock" and "Maroon Lagoon" show much more of a melodic interest, as opposed to the tone poems that populate his earlier album (though "Black Country Blue" certainly harkens back to that). "Marram" and "Woodington" have a soft melancholy surrounding them, while "Aberriw" actually adds some vocals into the layers of refracted guitars. The piano loops on "Above the Rooftops" wander around themselves, as if doing a jig. But, at his best (like on "Dyfi"), he blends nostalgia and bucolic living into a swirling mass of sound -- the countryside on peyote. A drifting, dreamy album.

This is a really special release which includes some of my favourite songs of recent years. For this second album Bibio has focused much more on his jangley finger picked steel string pieces which are bursting at the seams with rich hooks and melodies. These pieces are set against Bibio's unique backdrop of crackling warbling found sounds and field recordings. It's very apparent that each piece has been lovingly constructed with great attention to detail, however the emphasis is often on the imperfections which is what makes the Bibio vision such a brave one. I've heard many artists explore the theme of using field recordings and found sounds and old equipment as one off songs or mixed with sharper more produced sounds, here the aged sounds is consistent through out making it more of a painterly impressionistic vision and one with great integrity as the project seems to be about recreating a lost sound. One of the more interesting aspects of it is that it seems to be partially informed by dance music so the familiar looped samples approach is present but with the guitar parts treated this way instead of the usual beats which is quite post modern really.

Handcranked is however not as varied as his brilliant debut 'Fi' so this might not be the best introduction album as it is very similar in format throughout, guitar piece after guitar piece and while some of the pieces do fall a little short, the album highlights 'Marram, Zoopraxiphone and Quantock burn so brightly that you'll just be glad you bought it. An album to cherish .

Bibio's guitar playing is adequate, but any listening pleasure one might derive from that is ruined by the extremly bad recording quality. In this day and age of cheap digital recording equipment it's unbelievable that somebody produces a *whole album* that sounds as if it has been registered on a dictaphone with a worn-out tape. Sure, it's a fun sound effect, if used sparingly and with a certain purpose in mind. Track after track of guitar noodlings with scratchy highs and missing lows really starts to grate on both my ear drums and my musical sensibility though.

Maybe I am just not "avant garde" enough to get the subtlety of Bibio's approach. I rather suspect though that Bibio's is having a major laugh that people actually take his pseudo-folky recorded-in-one-day stuff seriously.