Caw-Caw Music

It’s hard to deny what a straight-up bundle of joy the most recent rebirth of the blues has been. Whether it’s Mumford & Sons mingling bluesy moonshine with UK folk and alt-Americana, Amy Winehouse’s gin-soaked 60s soul take on proceedings, Jack White’s guttural, fire-filled side-project The Dead Weather or Seasick Steve’s shotgun shack shimmy, the passion-infused genre is music at its most exhilarating, revealing and powerful. Son of Dave – the nom-de-blues of one Benjamin Darvill – knows this more than most.

Shake a Bone is Darvill’s fifth solo record – not counting the handful he made in the 1990s with his former band, Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm hit-makers the Crash Test Dummies. A close sonic relative of the one-man whirlwind that is the aforementioned Sir Seasick – but with noticeably more beat-boxing – Canada-born Darvill’s own harmonica-heavy and grunt-laden style also contains hints of the dusty south London gypsy stylings practised by gospel-punk collective Alabama 3.

Relying heavily on basic 12-bar blues and huskily intoned lyrics about wayward teens (She Just Danced All Night) and busted sets of vintage wheels (Broke-down Lincoln) over stripped-down shuffling, it’s pretty obvious that Darvill isn’t particularly concerned with reinventing the musical wheel. That said, there is something terribly satisfying about the primitive nature of his yelps and purrs and the relentless pounding of the lo-fi drumbeat. Every song seems to have been infused with a steamy, clandestine hoe-down atmosphere, making the dozen tracks on the record sound as if they belong more to a blistering, intimate live show than they do a slickly produced album.

Recorded and mixed by hardcore legend Steve Albini, with Darvill on production duty, the immediate yet lived-in feel of the record is perhaps no surprise. Gentler numbers, like saucy slow-burners You All But Stay and Guilty, sit in comfortable contrast to the record’s rowdier moments, of which the funk-inflected Ain’t Nothing but the Blues and the beat-box-driven Undertaker are chugging, grinding dirt-pop highlights.

Despite what over-analytical spoilsports might have you believe, Rochdale masters of electronic experimentation Autechre are a uniquely visceral entity. At their most tangible, indeed, the duo – long-time pals Sean Booth and Rob Brown – are less mathematical, intelligent dance music nightmare, more punk-spirited joy to behold.

For nearly two decades, across 10 albums, the acid house/original electro/hip hop-schooled Warp stalwarts have deconstructed techno and beyond into fascinating, ever-evolving abstract shapes. Oversteps is certainly no exception to their outwardly difficult aesthetic and could, on initial listens, get thrown in with unforgivingly tricksy 2003 set Draft 7.30.

Disregard the fact that the song titles largely resemble a Scrabble game with a corrupted Eastern European supercomputer, however. Beneath the icy exterior, deceptively warm hearts beat, rushing synthetic blood at thresholds with almost maniacal glee as they smash apart linear constraints.

Those already familiar are swiftly on reassuring ground. Second track ilanders is classic Autechre, lunar synth lines partially harking back to feted 1995 release Tri Repetae’s affectingly eerie atmospherics, fractured beats built and demolished with sentient android accuracy. It’s engrossing, an alien landscape you simply can’t extricate your ears from, every barbed glitch progressively snagging further wisps of your hearing.

There isn’t, it’s accurate to report, much immediacy here. But that was never Autechre’s forte. True to form, the immersing osmosis of repeated plays is the only method of absorbing Oversteps’ depths. A few moments do land instantly, though: known(1) re-imagines then mechanises ancient oriental zither strains with the unfolding beauty of an origami swan; O=0 chimes and tingles with Philip Glass-worthy dexterity; st epreo’s dense thicketed beat undergrowth grabs your cochleas.

And once Yuop evaporates into the ether it’s more than apparent why many people don’t exactly get Autechre, even plentiful converts who assume that they do. Perhaps Oversteps’ mantle even nods to the extra unnecessary layers of deep rumination their wares often attract. But by maintaining a ferocious appetite for streaming across territory few electronic musicians possess even a perception of, Autechre continue to test themselves and listeners alike with stunningly intricate results.