Bleep

This album features in the top ten albums of 2013

Matthew Barnes, aka Forest Swords, brought together one of the more brilliant EPs in recent memory in the form of 2010’s Dagger Paths released through No Pain In Pop, and his debut full length for Brooklyn-based Tri Angle records was no less spectacular. Reportedly mixed outdoors on a laptop in the Wirral countryside the artist calls home, the album is shot through with the sounds of natural noise and interference, lending expansive guitars and earthy hip-hop beats an environmental quality.

Lead track ‘The Weight of Gold’ is pushed on by a nagging guitar twiddle which summons up the ghost of Ennico Morricone, while the community vocals sampled on ‘Gathering’ once again prompt a sense of some abstract narrative occurring in an imaginary collision between the English countryside and the Wild West.

The distant sliding pan pipes on ‘Thor’s Stone’ and ‘Irby’s Tremor’ give a depth to Barnes’ productions, while the beats throughout are constructed from drum skins which sound more like household pots and pans than 808 machines. On ‘Anneka’s Battle’, the album makes its closest link with the sound many listeners will associate with Tri Angle, as crisp finger clicks and an R&B-tinged vocal recall the likes of Holy Other, but all in all this is a singular record which resists useful comparison and plays beautifully by its own rules.