65daysofstatic: You might not want to go…but what if you have no choice?

Title: One Time For All Time

Label: Monotreme

And so it begins. You’re here to be lead, really. This is an album that draws you in and a never lets go of your hand. It starts like a cross between film scoring Ennio Morricone and Squarepusher as the drilled percussion zips and unzips with a frantic air. Then it builds immediately from there towards an emotional high. I felt as though I was attending a rally for a dictator. The music offered glorious uplift but a real sense of danger alongside it: a right ol’dichotomy, and no mistake, guv. Uplift for the wrong reasons. Uplift to a place I really don’t want to go.

The drum and bass continued, combining synth noises and samples with organic fare including drums, bass and guitar, touching on a post rock epiphany and that building rotation, forever building.

Don’t be fooled by that, into into thinking that this music is a one-trick pony spouting a one paced message. There is plenty for the ears and head to get around here, plenty of variety, light and shade. The band play with space too but there’s always the frenetic. Always the energy build up knowing not where to turn or how to ground itself. So it just bounces off walls. A lot.

For the uninitiated, this is not a new album, though, it is a re-issue of the group’s 2006 album on vinyl for the first time.

The band itself couldn’t help but reflect upon it, “We have never worked with a record label as great as Monotreme Records and they never do vinyl half heartedly. It’s cool to finally have all that hyper-treble and scratchy confusion we recorded back in 2006 pressed onto heavy plastic to warm it up a bit. Plus this reissue gave us a chance to revisit our Radio Protector Polaroid project — a thousand 7” singles, each with a unique cover. We made a special booklet for this vinyl with images and titles for all 1000, finally bringing them together in the same place for the first time. Pretty happy with that.” 

For this LP reissue, of the 1000 pressed copies, 500 are on black vinyl and 500 copies appear on cream vinyl with a sepia splatter plus a large format 12-page colour booklet containing the images and titles of all of those 1000 individual Polaroid photos taken by the band and used to create unique sleeves for the sold-out limited-edition Radio Protector 7” single in 2006. You also get a copy of the album CD and a colour-printed inner sleeve.

Nice? Nice. Oh, and I love the quote found inside, on the sleeve, in amongst a host of other prose. I just picked out this bit, “Here is a record shop, here is where dreams are kept after they are broken.”