Everything Everything
Raw Data Feel
★★★★
When Everything Everything called their sixth album Raw Data Feel, they weren’t kidding. The Manchester artcore band employed data in various forms to colour the record: at one point they fed the text of Beowulf, 400,000 4chan comments, the teachings of Confucius and LinkedIn’s terms and conditions into a computer and took the rambling results for their lyrics. The result is a tender expression of the confusion of being alive at a time when technology is encroaching on humanity.
Of course there are Everything Everything bleeps and bloops throughout; the band are no strangers to collaborating with technology to produce something alive and affecting. “Teletype” is the most explicit about this mechanical fifth member of the band, glitching the album into existence and asking, “So what do you want? So many big old lies to choose from.”
An inquisitive record reckoning with the synthetic and the natural – there’s a lot to take in but it is an upbeat journey with a philosophical bent.
Stream: Born Under a Meteor, Teletype, Bad Friday
Lykke Li
Eyeye
★★★★
Forgoing the giant, rich sounds of her previous work, Swedish musician Lykke Li’s Eyeye is a sparse, frost-tinged album of stripped-back break-up songs.
The harmonies on “Highway to Your Heart” bring a warmth to the song that is almost heart-breaking in its desire to find a way back to someone you have drifted from, the cascading twinkles behind them recalling a poignant moment in an 80s teen movie.
Poor Lykke can’t catch a break on this eight-song record. “Happy Hurts” deals with the knowing sadness of being the other woman. “Is it only in the movie you love me?” she wonders on the devastating “5D”.
It is a yearning, pleading album and somehow the emptiness of the songs make it feel even sadder than the words Li is singing, the space between lines echoing like the canyon she feels between her and her lover.
Not one for when you’re in a good mood, then, but if you are heartbroken and wallowing, Eyeye is a gorgeous addition to your rotation.
Stream: Highway to Your Heart, You Don’t Go, 5D
