Pitchfork Media Review of Azeda Booth:
Consider the lullaby: sets simple melodies to simpler rhythms; sounds twinkly; native to habitats as diverse as the music box, the mobile, and the matronly au pair; makes babies sleepy. Synonymous with being soothed and coddled. Makes adult humans sleepy too, which presents a problem for bands who want to avail themselves of the lullaby’s somnolent power while keeping their audience alert. Because you know, when someone says that a band puts them to sleep, they don’t usually mean it as a compliment.
Azeda Booth’s solution is to render lullabies on the scale of anthems. The Calgary, Alberta, quintet’s starry meditations for laptop, synths, and guitars are as delicately formed and colored as soap bubbles, yet they drift with a paradoxically leaden sense of weight. They’ve created a signature sound that is both idiosyncratic and durable enough to sustain a whole album: Each track on In Flesh Tones is comprised of chirpily androgynous vocals (with hints of subterranean soul), ice-baths of beatific mood, and insistently sputtering glitch tracks that thread a thin wire of urgency through the indeterminately unfurling melodies.
In Flesh Tones should appeal to fans of the laptop-ier side of Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins (specifically, Adore), the Notwist, and Broken Social Scene– maybe imagine an album’s worth of “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl”– but these comparisons are insufficient, and this is a crucial part of Azeda Booth’s appeal. At a time when many popular bands’ touchstones can be divided without remainders into Blogger tags, there simply isn’t anyone doing exactly what these guys are doing right now. From the first fluctuating tones and galloping, hard-panning snares of “Ran”– even before the first airy gusts of singing appear– you feel yourself immersed in a profoundly intuitive musical vision.
Intuition seems to govern the songs’ general movement as well as their particulars– they are meandering yet memorable, a rare combination. Forget progression, this is osmosis. The syncopated lope of “In Red” flattens out into halting flourishes on the one-beat so gradually that the transition is all but undetectable. “First Little Britches” is a marvel of loose cohesion, with drifting refrains subbing in for verses, ambient tone beds for bridges, a few well-placed, shaggy claps for choruses. Furthermore, the individual tracks blur into one another cunningly– the frictionlessly skating chords that open “Big Fists” seem shaken loose from the shuddering electronic drum circle that caps “Numberguts”. This meandering quality might put off some listeners, but to my ears, Azeda Booth have figured out how to reconcile pop music’s infectiousness with ambient music’s nebulous aura, and have produced one of 2008’s most unique and immediately pleasurable albums.
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/azedabooth
MP3: Azeda Booth: Ran
– Brian Howe, August 26, 2008
About Oldfolks Home
Blending everyday noise, Oldfolks Home (a.k.a. Ricardo Lopez) creates a unique intermingle of symphonic soundscapes with intense rhythms, heavy bass and light, robotic voices. Lasers, bird-like guitars and telephone tones are complimented by whispering waves, applause and playful bells. Clanging racket and bottle cap shakers are used to fashion beautiful pattern, while the sequenced pace makes you want to dance and shake your hands.
Lyrics about ice slides, Japan, and inviting your employees on trips to Vegas will provoke you into the complex, often chaotic Oldfolks Home, where they create aural phenomenon out of things, ideas, and emotions, which may have otherwise been forgotten, thrown out or left behind.
Ricardo Lopez-Aguilar is a Winnipeg based producer, sound engineer, and songwriter. His first release as Oldfolks Home, We Are The Feeding Line, highlights a man and his machines (and Rebekah Higgs!) making the kind of celebratory electro-pop that will easily find its way onto your iPod’s playlist between Broken Social Scene and Radiohead. We are the Feeding Line spent 5 months on Earshot!’s National Campus Charts, charting top 10 on stations from Coast to Coast.
“All too often, bloggers complain about albums that are only as good as the single or lack diversity. Oldfolks Home accepts the challenge with well crafted electro hooks that seem incapable of sitting still. He does more in 8 songs than most bands do in a career, but never seems to stretch himself too far. Whether he tugs at your heart strings or makes you want to shake your ass, Ricardo seems ready to give you what you need.”
Bryan Acker, Herohill.com 2008
“We Are the Feeling Line is a fiercely adventurous experimental art-pop record that explores sound to the fullest extent. Lopez-Aguilar crafts his surreal soundscapes using both live instruments and electronically sequenced sounds, making for a record that serves as an interesting exploration of the relationship between musician and machine.”
Jen Zoratti, M.A.R.I.A. Quarterly 2008
“This record presents what seems to happen after forgotten ideas are exhumed and revived with a new perspective and an at-long-last energy.”
K. R., G. Love Magazine 2008
“[The] intimate charm on We Are The Feeding Line would be hard to miss. In the end, it’s like the pretty pink robot on the cover-electric but with a heart.”
Whitney Light, Stylus Magazine 2008