THE LAST DINOSAURHooray! For Happiness
CD
There’s something a bit old-fashioned about Jamie Cameron and Luke Hayden, aka The Last Dinosaur. After all, the Essex-based duo – which expands to a band when they play live – is named after an extinct species. And despite being a) in a rock band and b) in their early twenties, both Jamie and Luke live in the countryside. Most astonishingly of all, they don’t use any kind of computer technology to record their music – something that is almost unheard of in this day and age. “It's all done on multi-track equipment and some microphones,” says lead singer Jamie, who has stuck with a trusty multi-track recorder ever since his teens. “Partly because I sort of like that it requires more effort,” he says, “Partly because change scares me, and partly because I imagine a less ‘warm’ sound is achieved using computer equipment.”
Luckily, nostalgia suits The Last Dinosaur, and there’s a suitably misty-eyed, pastoral atmosphere to their debut album, Hooray! For Happiness, which was mastered by John Golden (Sonic Youth, My Morning Jacket, Devendra Banhart) and is being released by Madrid-based label Dearstereofan. “We live in the country in Essex, which is my main source of inspiration and influence, clichéd but true,” says Jamie. “The woods, the fields, the windmill, the horses, the deer . Lyrically, I write about whatever I'm over-thinking at the time.” In its downbeat, introspective gentleness, the album defies its giddy title, and is impossible to pin down – ranging from propulsive almost-instrumentals, like album opener “Every Second is a Second Chance”, to the melancholy chamber-pop of “Maps". And there are some tracks – like recent single “Home”, a seven-minute, multilayered epic – which defy any sort of label.
The band’s influences are suitably disparate – they count Mount Eerie, Broken Social Scene, Rachel's and Max Richter among their favourites – but perhaps The Last Dinosaur’s aesthetic is best summarised by their devotion to Talk Talk, the Eighties synth-pop stars-turned-post-rock innovators. In other words, experimentation is the key. “I very rarely know how a song will end up when I start it, but then that's the most exciting part,” says Jamie. “The songs either begin as a little idea, which we then flesh out, or as a loop that gets layered onto.”
Their lack of musical foresight has paid off. Cocteau Twin and Bella Union label boss Simon Raymonde is already a fan, while John Sakamoto of The Toronto Star was equally enthused, describing them as “warm and confident and ‘jazzy’ in the way that, say, Radiohead could be said to be jazzy, i.e. by their determination not to be confined by pop’s rigid melodic structure." The Souls on Tape website put it best when they said, "Listening to The Last Dinosaur is like reverting back to a faraway childhood, full of innocence and soft-light pictures that cling to the memories of safety and comfort”.
So the future is looking bright for The Last Dinosaur, but Jamie and Luke aren’t resting on their laurels. Not only have they recorded a video for every single track on Hooray! For Happiness (see for yourself at www.myspace.com/thelastdinosauruk), but they’re also planning an outtakes record, various live dates and their second album, which Jamie promises will be “a very different beast”. As he puts it, “There won't be much time for rest in the near future. I plan on creating as much as possible until I can't create anymore!”
TEXT ADVENTUREI believe in lassies
CD
Once upon a time, computer games didn’t rely on graphics to suck you in. Once upon a time, the best games looked like this:
The first “Text Adventure” A game which relied on your imagination to unfold it’s magic, has formed the inspiration for our favourite release of the year so far. The second album by David Roy and Steven Scott, I BELIEVE IN LASSIES is a homage to lo-fi brilliance in a world gone pro-tools mad.
You see, it’s about addressing the simple things. IBIL is a record about girls by boys too shy to talk to them in person, and one that communicates in an aching swirl of acoustic and digital lo-fi, the longing of not only meeting that spry-eyed girlie, but actually being able to say hi.
What must be a crippling disability for David and Steven, is a blessing for the rest of us, as we get treated to 10 tracks bursting with the self-confidence that can only come from living in hope.
Crafted from acoustic guitar, Casio keyboards, circuit bent speak and spell machines, and live drums recorded to a “very, very old 8-track”. The songs have a layered aesthetic in the vein of Adem and Tunng. But this is more than an exercise in nerdy bedroom electronica: “I have tried to move away from that” asserts David. “The Golden Portion was very much sequence-based, computer-recorded, programmed beats, tons more keyboards and hardly any guitar. I felt it had been
done to death already, so i wanted to make a grander sounding folk record with loads more guitars and more vocals too”
Songs are as important to the boys as textures, and the melodies come at you with such self-assurance that you don’t know whether to meet them with a bear hug or duck for cover. With collaboration comes perspective, and Steven’s vocals liberate David’s soundscapes, adding a psychedelic edge in the vein of My Bloody Valentine, but with a dose of skewed realism. Lines like “I’ll be the scarf around your neck” (If It Could Talk It Wouldn’t Say Anything) make you gaze up from your shoes and focus instead on your breaking heart.
This yearning wistfulness can be traced through a number of influences; from James Taylor and Nick Drake, through to Ariel M and Jim O Rourke.
The record also pushes the line between analogue and digital instruments just a little bit further. Are the bleeps at the end of Pink Smoke, forged through Logic or a circuit bent keyboard? Is that a harmonium or a sine wave on If It Could Talk It Wouldn’t Say Anything? Is that a fast flowing stream or a microphone left on in a pocket. Really good records speak their own language, and ask you to investigate them to understand. And so it is with IBIL: complex textures and simple melodies conspiring to make it at once disarming and compelling. It’s music inspired by accidents, by finding beauty in the unintentional, the ‘wyrd’ in the everyday. David states his inspiration as “Whenever I hear something natural that has gone wrong or has been digitally manipulated. Like an old field recording of some birds or rain that has been distorted.”
Text Adventure is perfect pop, with a post rock sensibility: Gorgeous acoustic guitar lines hang hammocked in the mix between crackling static like an electronic rainstorm. The tracks come on like a series of commands strung together to create a whole gaming experience. Take Boobook (For R) which opens with three minutes of bossa guitar worthy of Eureka era Jim O Rourke before even a sniff of a lyric. Or Nothing is Wrong whose Mice Parade-esque guitar line warps into a digital portrait of the wintertime before bursting back again into full summer.
And yes it’s cute. But cute is what makes life worth living:
It’s the crinkle of an old kit kat wrapper in your pocket. It’s the rain. It’s the plastic bag snagged on a branch in a stream. It’s walking by a motorway on a grey day and staring at the clouds. Aesthetically simple, but as complex as you can make it.
“It’s like something beautiful gone wrong” says David modestly. Or very, very right.
