Zeitgeist. Caned & Able - Smoke
Cheesus, I feel quite wasted after that! In fact, it's probably the furthest gone I've been sober, since the night I slept in the dub tent at Glastonbury back in the [koff] early eighties. Yes, Patrick Bird and Martyn Savigar have returned with a truly bizarre and captivating set of mishity mashups, mixes, loops and doohickeys, quite unbecoming in anyone over twenty one.
They've brought along a few people who were once nearly famous such as former Specimen and Siouxsie & the Banshees guitarist Jon Klein and drummer Chris Bell, who I once saw playing with Spear Of Destiny. They were shite. Dead people being easier to work with, there's also appearances from Billie Holliday, Marc Bolan and John Peel. It's a strange old world where the ghosts of Astralasia and Future Sound Of London take Moby outside for a good kicking, then proceed to show the world how This Sort Of Thing should be done.
And it's ended up the kind of album that just lives permanently in your hi-fi and slowly drives away your few remaining friends as you tell them how they Must, I Repeat, Must, listen to 'Orchestra' through headphones. That's when you're not extolling the far out alien rock of 'Deuteronomy' or the sublime Billie Holliday sampling in 'Trav’lin Light'. For sure, there are a couple of tracks where the spectre of a Guardian readers dinner party looms into relief, but if you bat those aside, there is a wonderful adventure here for all to enjoy.
If you want to pick one song to demonstrate the wonders contained herein, go for 'Deaf Aid', which features Canadian jazz chanteuse Anna Jacyszyn, and prepare to be gently blown away into another world.
Cue the music with Cuemix
So when the smoke is gone you can see clear again… When I listened to “Smoke” by Caned& Able for the first time I really was speechless. This album is a very multilayered three-dimensional labyrinth of styles and sounds.
But don’t get me wrong I am talking about a labyrinth that you joyfully get lost in – a journey into laid-back music with a massive background.
Kicking off with a mixture of dubby ambient style the album metamorphoses into a kind of cinematic trip-hop and later on intelligent hip-hop album with a never heard before deepness. It’s amazing how they change styles, tempo and the atmosphere without loosing the leitmotif of the album. Eleven songs that nearly all could be named a hit, all together as an album a revolution.
The way they arrange and produced the tracks are genius, with the appearance of guest vocalists and musicians this album becomes a ceremony of wonderful music.
Music that will make your day and clear your mind and make you addicted.
Maybe you might say that all of this sounds too enthusiastic – maybe but I guarantee you; you will get lost happily in the deep “smoke”
One of my favourite albums in 2008!
