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Chill Out |
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Artist:
Zero 7
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List Price: £9.99
Our Price: £2.69
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Artist:
Goldfrapp
You might expect the debut album from a woman who has collaborated extensively with Tricky and Orbital to be both wondrous and strange--and you'd be right to. What you might not expect is quite the depth of Alison Goldfrapp's beguiling, distracting 21st-Century noir visions on Felt Mountain. She and her fellow composer Will Gregory can mix in Brechtian cabaret, classical instrumentation, left-of-field electronics, decadent Gainsbourg-style French pop and the odd piece of whistling on just one track ("Felt Mountain"). "Oompa Radar" almost reaches Tom Waits heights of infamy, the way familiar instruments come together in such a simultaneously comforting and alienatin...
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £2.35
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Artist:
Moby
The great iconoclast of techno returns with a smooth, sacred and exhilarating record. Play's concoction of breakbeat rhythms, ambient mixology and inspired blues and gospel samples cry out across musical genres and histories, imparting a time-tested wisdom to beat-driven ears. Moby's devout faith--in both God and his own musical whims--give this approach a sort of legitimacy that another, less sincere artist would never have. That sincerity reverberates through the beats and instrumental eclecticism like a pulse. The soulful refrains and proclamations in "Find My Baby" and "Natural Blues" somehow nestle between straight-up dance-floor rave-ups ("Bodyrock") and melt...
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £1.21
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Artist:
Goldfrapp
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £2.75
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Artist:
Röyksopp
Melody AM, the debut from Norwegian outfit Royksopp, is widely being touted for "classic" status. Far from "just another chill-out" album, this is a richly textured feast of warm, late-night food for the soul. The songs seem to reflect the extremes of the environment they were produced in--the sorrowful "She's So", a tribute to almost 24-hour winter darkness of Royksopp's motherland, and the lilting warmth of "Royksopp's Night Out", a literal dance in the midnight sun. In the tradition of bands such as Air and Groove Armada, this is a sound that could almost make it to the dance floor--if it could bear to leave the comfort of the sofa behind. The infectious "Poor L...
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List Price: £6.99
Our Price: £0.01
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Artist:
Air
Moon Safari, the first album proper by this pair of middle-class Frenchmen, easily survives unscathed from its billing as that most deadly of sub-genres: dinner party music. True, Moon Safari, with its blatant bliss-provoking easy listening chimes, sits well beside Everything But the Girl's Walking Wounded or Portishead's Dummy, but the album is steeped in too much musical verve and gallic humour to become as dull as Chardonnay. "Sexy Boy", the first single, is a rock-out slab of electronica about a toy monkey, for instance--hardly the thing to discuss in polite society. This album's highs come with their two marriages with the contributing voc...
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List Price: £5.99
Our Price: £2.36
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Artist:
Air
French duo, Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicholas Godin's 1998 debut was a glorious anachronism. An analogue bubblebath of synths, saxophones, xylophones, fuzzy guitars and all manner of louche melodies it managed to be both original and utterly retro. 10,000 Hz Legend is the exact meeting point between wearying experimentation and heart-warming melancholia. There's nothing as charming as "Sexy Boy" or as generous as "You Make It Easy" but if you skip the first two tracks, which have more than a touch of Pink Floyd about them, there are a few twisted gems here. Amid the sprawling mass of shrill melody and Kraftwerkian computer voices that is "Lucky and Unhappy", the com...
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List Price: £6.99
Our Price: £2.59
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Artist:
Air
Talkie Walkie comes five years after their landmark Moon Safari and Parisian mood-enhancers Air are back doing what they do best. Famously shy of ever repeating themselves, JB Dunckel and Nicolas Godin have filled in the years with the poorly received follow-up, 10,000hz Legend (even they think it strange), and an eerily effective soundtrack to Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides. Nice enough in their own niche way, but a far cry from what people actually wanted. Happily, Talkie Walkie reunites us with the Air that we love: two hopelessly indulgent romantics with an ear in the past and an eye on the future. It's meltingly good stuff--a c...
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List Price: £8.99
Our Price: £2.58
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Artist:
Air
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List Price: £14.99
Our Price: £4.69
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