| TRI Records
It was with a little apprehension that I approached this, mainly
because their last mini-album, ' Oisheedy Anna', is the best I've heard
from a currrent band this year. It is almost perfect with it's spartan
& exotic instrumentations, so keeping with that high standard is
it to be?
'Song' kicks off with an almost trademark NOW motorik beat. A perfect
Euro-melody enters & buries deep into your mind. It's an epic track,
eleven minutes, that could make a great single.
'Dwellpoint' is the perfect foil, enigmatic & fleeting......
Song three, 'Relive the Food', cruises along & at one minute a great
chorus, that I wanted to hear more of, then goes into a Velvets-like
groove & Residents-like coda. More of that CHORUS please & that
would be right up there, with the best.
More singing please, which is of a high standard throughout & pleasing
non-cliched harmonies abound the whole thing.
'Sucksinewaves' reminds me of Slapp Happy, if they really got it together
with Faust.
Dense, angular & with a trippy-hop beat, verging on prog rock but
never obvious!!
When can we have lyrics with NOW's artwork?..I think it would help people
to get into them or are they destined to be mysterious in their watery
ways...?
'Lies are Up' is more sublime & comes over like a nu-folk song with
it's 'relationshit can be storyboarded' refrain.....
'No Feelings' sounds like it was left off the brilliant 'Oisheedy Anna'.
Inventive use of ethnic instruments add unexpected colour of The Residents
gone eastern. It's also a highlight.
'It's So' has shuffling funky groove that gives way to a Velvets-like
wail of distorted guitar, the only real noise on the album. Inbetween,
all play their parts & it just grows.
NOW need at least three plays to really click.
It all depends on your mood but don't give up on them because you'll
be rewarded with songs like the beautiful 'Here':
NOW get quite soulful in an English Temptations sort of way, which made
me reach for the Caravan albums but don't let that put you off.
Along with 'Relive the Food' - 'Here' is another highlight.
The last track, aptly, 'Last' ends the whole thing in under 45 minutes,
always a good move.
It has an early Velvets feel but builds into something different as
the harmonies kill off your cynicism into an uplifting conclusion &
what more do you want?
NOW's fuller sound, on this album, shows this could be great live.
There are always new things in the songs to discover & I suggest
you give them the time because the reward is a 'dream time experience'.
Norman Records
The Hepadaboo is the oddly-titled new album from Now. This is
what I call music!!one!1! Starting off with a ten minute tune that to
all intents and purposes sounds exactly like a far less confrontational
Suicide this London collective of about fifty thousand musicians then
proceed to wander their way through various reference points from No
Wave and funk to Stereolab and the United States of America with the
occasional krautrockian embellishment. It's a tad unfocused at times,
inevitable with a large group with so many disparate influences, but
for the most part these tracks are united by a real emphasis on groove
- something that they pull off very well. I'm quite enjoying this, seems
like it's more than a worthy follow-up to their past releases on Pickled
Egg and Disco_r.dance. CD only, all the way from Nippon!
Boomkat
A reliable resource for all the finest, quirkiest exploratory
electronic pop music, Japanese imprint Flau presents London-based septet
Now, a band who have notched up performances alongside Faust, Circle,
Tunng and A Hawk And A Hacksaw. Perhaps most impressive of all, last
february Mike Watt of The Stooges dedicated the entire duration of a
radio show to Now's music. Having a listen to the gentle motorik rhythms
of this most approachable of bands, it's pretty hard to imagine how
the likes of Faust and The Stooges might possibly be fraternising with
them, yet there is a voracious appetite for experimentation embedded
in these eminently digestible songs. Reasonably accurate points of reference
would be Hot Chip, early Stereolab and electronically-integrated post-punk
(especially on the drum machine-emboldened new wave of 'Lies Are Up'),
but opening track 'Song' is suggestive of a real sense of ambition underscoring
the band's work; it's an eleven minute odyssey of multi-instrumental
krautrock propulsion, sounding fantastic as an unlikely opener. Highly
recommended.
Vital Weekly
The line up of Now is quite big, counting currently seven people.
They each an instrument, such as synthesizer, voice, guitar, cello or
bass, and all but one are credited with percussion. Yet the first piece,
'Song', open with a rhythm machine, which seems to be playing a dominant
role in most of the other pieces. With my usual vivid imagination, I
see them all pressing one 'start' of the machine. 'The Hepadaboo' is
their second CD and they played with Damo Suzuki, Charles Hayward, Salvatore
and Kaori Tsuchida. They say themselves they play 'krautrock for the
21st century' and there is indeed that ongoing motor-like driven sounds
that one gets with this music, but Now knows how to update the seventies
machine rhythms to the new millennium with an unmistakable poppy lo-fi
sound. Recently I played something by Stereolab, simply because I found
it and never heard their music properly, and their music shares similarities
with Now. The multiple male and female vocals, the rhythm box, the sometimes
sunny tunes. This music is quite nice, but also perhaps a bit too much
indie rock for me, and falls outside these pages. But surely a pleasure
to hear.
News2Music
The line up of Now is quite big, counting currently seven people.
They each play an instrument, such as synthesizer, voice, guitar, cello
or bass, and all but one are credited with percussion. Yet the first
piece, 'Song', open with a rhythm machine, which seems to be playing
a dominant role in most of the other pieces. With my usual vivid imagination,
I see them all pressing one 'start' of the machine. 'The Hepadaboo'
is their second CD and they played with Damo Suzuki, Charles Hayward,
Salvatore and Kaori Tsuchida. They say themselves they play 'krautrock
for the 21st century' and there is indeed that ongoing motor-like driven
sounds that one gets with this music, but Now knows how to update the
seventies machine rhythms to the new millennium with an unmistakable
poppy lo-fi sound. Recently I played something by Stereolab, simply
because I found it and never heard their music properly, and their music
shares similarities with Now. The multiple male and female vocals, the
rhythm box, the sometimes sunny tunes. This music is quite nice and
falls outside these pages. Surely a pleasure to hear"
Ondefixe
A l'image du label ami Moteer qui a tendu la main à Minimum
Chips, flaü diversifie son catalogue et le poppifie à demi-mots en accueillant
le quatuor protéiforme Now. Mais la pop de ces drôles d'oiseaux, cheap
et atypique, difficilement étiquetable, ne se laisse pas facilement
apprivoiser.
Comme chez Minimum Chips, l'influence Stéréolaborantine est sondable
mais pas explicite. On la trouve d'entrée de jeu sur un Song qui nous
fait croire à une possible joint venture entre la bande à Laetitia Sadier
et les éternelles enfants d'Au Revoir Simone, qui se paierait une reprise
indigente de Can. On retrouve ici un amour doucement clamé aux synthés
et boîtes à rythmes antiques et bon marché ; ces dernières imprimant
11 minutes durant, un rythme rudimentaire, imperturbable et binaire.
Mais cette ascendance Stéréolaborantine que l'on retrouve sur Here s'estompe
au profit d'une électro-pop fraîche et innocente, souvent colorée à
coup de choeurs insouciants (tu-tu, ooooh-oooh, la-la, en veux-tu en
voilà !), infiltrée de guitares vaguement shoegaze (Dwellpoint) ou délivrant
des petits riffs funky comme autant d'échos au groove d'A Certain Ratio
(Relive the food). Cheap, candide et un peu brute de décoffrage (voyez
donc l'ingénu Lies are up !), leur musique se dote de petites touches
d'exotisme (ukulele et mbira), goûte aux joies de la dissonance (No
feelings), de l'âpreté (Its so), mais ne se révèle véritablement convaincante
qu'en toute fin de parcours, avec un Last propulsé par des orgues et
illuminé de glockenspiel, concurrençant derechef la pop stratifiée de
Caribou.
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