Record: Varmints
Label: Moshi Moshi
Year of Release: 2016
Sounds like: Art Pop,Progressive Pop, Experimental Electronica, Modern Classical
Scotland/England
Anna Meredith is an Scotish (English born) multi instrumentalist and producer graduated at the Royal College of Music and awarded different prizes throughout her career. Varmints is her debut album, though not her first work in music; she has been linked to the BBC audio works for nearly a decade and had collaborated with people like Goldie or Shlomo, and made music for proms written by dudes such as Phillip Ridley, Varmints won the Scottish album of the year, something huge given that Scotland has an enormous history of amazing composers and long plays that they bring to this world, basically year by year. Varmints is an experimental album full of synths, orchestration, strings, wind instruments, beat boxes, and some vocals (not a lot) where Meredith give us a tiny glance of her broken, soft, contracted and very British voice
Does it work?
Regina Says: I listened to this record with a bunch of different preconceived perceptions,mostly 'cause I had heard different opinions on it , the two most frequent were certainly clear: it was very good and risky record, but also a very complicated one, which is great since I love challenges and be challenged by music, I kinda hate it when people say things like ''i wanna hear something nice ´cause I do not have too much time'' or, when it comes to books, ''I don't have that much time so I wanna read something that I might find enjoyable'', it is awful, because...,you know, that is pretty lazy, I mean, things aren't that easy, and sometimes you will need to unravel some stuff till you decide whether you enjoy it or not; and it is like, a great thing to do. I mean, some of the albums that we have reviewed here go into that vein, they have taken me 3 or 4 times to find out magic or poorness in them.
Music works like that. Anna Meredith's Varmints is a pretentious album, a very pompous one, yes, it is. But it some how manages its pretentiousness to a solid state that doesn't feel forced nor annoying at all. There is nothing worse than something (or someone) pretentious that does not hold its pretensions/presumption. This album does it, and it does it very well. The sounds, the vocals, the most irritating things like the chords and all the orchestral stuff, they disarm you and give you a very elaborated and (maybe) overproduced album, yet a very emotional and thrilling one. Meredith didn't fail. She is a keeper.
Rate: Highly Recommendable
Hugo Menanth Says: Anna Meredith's music, in this album, is nothing but avant pop, it is pop that you feel like something else. The ''themes'' that compose it, feel kinda plastic and obviously processed, but spiced with a tinge of humanism that xylophones, tubas and celos provide. This clash between electronica and instrumental/neo classical music is not really new, some people, even from the new age era, have done it before. The good thing about Meredith is that her music is personal and private, it really captures the term ''avant garde'', it doesn't sound like a recycled formula, it sounds like an electroencephalogram of her brain, in which we see all her ideas,bright spots of noise and color that float from one hemisphere to other, she seems to be kinda crazy, and I'm glad she is. The way she put all those ideas into music is something really respectable and pretty, the energy of her sound puts you in a state of reverie that lasts for long. It's repetitive, dramatically programmed, and unable to be hated.
If you can see her live, do it, so synchronized and perfect.
Rate: Very Good