• Text size      
  • Send this article to a friend
  • Print this article

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Trouble (Polydor)

As the recent Punk Britannia celebrations on the BBC have only confirmed, even the last real revolution in pop was essentially musically conservative.

Only on its margins did punk have any interest in experiment. Guitar boys and soul girls still command much of the market 35 years on, so the bedroom laptop lads really need to be nurtured.

Orlando Higginbottom, the son of an Oxford music professor who trades as TEED, is not as inventive as either Oli Sabin (aka Unicorn Kid) or James Blake (James Blake) to my ears. He does however have a good ear for really good noises. The bass throbs, rhythmic pulses and bubbling treble pings on these 14 tracks are as fine examples of the sort of thing you can do with synthesisers and computers as you will hear. Young Higginbottom deploys them with infinite variety too, which means that the album never bores. Panpipes is a percussive delight and Tapes & Money features the briefest sample of Funkadelic's ubiquitous One Nation Under A Groove before the dancefloor-targeted American Dream part II is followed by the layered voices of Closer. Clever sequencing in many senses.

Commenting & Moderation

We moderate all comments on HeraldScotland on either a pre-moderated or post-moderated basis. If you're a relatively new user then your comments will be reviewed before publication and if we know you well then your comments will be subject to moderation only if other users or the moderators believe you've broken the rules, which are available here.

Moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours. Please be patient if your posts are not approved instantly.