Articles
2008 Ten Favourite Labels
Ten Questions Celer
Ten Questions Deadbeat

Albums
Anzio Green
Ariel Abshire
Osman Arabi
Arastoo & AEMAE
Asymmetrical Head
Benoît Pioulard
Bohren & der Club of Gore
Matt Borghi
Celer
Cubenx
Anders Dahl
Davis & Roux
Deadbeat
Feu Follet
Formication
Generic
Stefan Goldmann
Gultskra Artikler / Lanterns
Hauschka
Hexes & Ohs
Koen Holtkamp
I Am Robot And Proud
Illusion of Safety
Integral
Koen Park
Akira Kosemura
Koushik
Library Tapes
Lineland
Mamiffer
Melodium
Moon
Oppressed By The Line
Pillars and Tongues
Rumpistol
Kamran Sadeghi
Sans Serif
Signal Deluxe
Skogen
Saul Stokes
Matthew Sweet
Tapage
Thursday / Envy
Windy & Carl

Compilations / Mixes
An Taobh Tuathail II
Chaos Restored 2
DFPRMX
Kuniyuki
Message Subatomic World
Pero es olor en el cuarto...

EPs
Canyons!
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Cubenx
Dokuro
Fraction
Lee Holman
Ikonika
King Midas Sound
Michael Lambright
Library Tapes
Lilienweiss
MRK1
:papercutz
Spencer Parker
Poratz
Spartak + John Chantler
Andy Vaz

Oppressed By The Line: Soft Focus
Drifting Falling

Oppressed By The Line delivers a solid fifty minutes of blissed-out shoegaze on Soft Focus, Jon Thompson's sophomore OBTL outing and follow-up to The Cause of the Colour (ClubAC30) (the moniker came to Thompson, who grew up in a small town outside of Houston, Texas, when, visiting the Tate Modern in London, he encountered a painting by Yves Kleine under which he spotted a placard that read, “I adopt the cause of the colour oppressed by the line”). He's your quintessential bedroom producer who, using little more than a 4-track and a modicum of other gear, weaves polyphonic vocal patterns, guitars, vibes, drum machine beats, an occasional cello, and multi-layers of synth melodies into lush settings suffused with melancholic ambiance.

Entrancement sets in during the opener “Condensation” when the vocal cross-currents blow across a willowy, synth-pop backing. Feathery, Tears For Fears-styled vocals emanate from the center of guitar-heavy vortexes in “Solitude” and “I Can't Remember the Sound” while a Styrofoam-like melancholia permeates “Don't Bestow the Lesser Things.” The title of “The Stars are Sleeping” perfectly captures the song's twilight gentility and a wistful quality also emerges during the song's hypnotically repeating drift of chiming keyboard melodies, vibraphone accents, and organ washes. The vibrant “Thousands of Miles and an Ocean Away” is as panoramic as its title indicates, though the drums that appear halfway through bring the tune's untethered, galaxial character down to earth, and so too is the seven-minute, slow-burning epic “Shattering Glass Houses.”

The accompanying notes cite Ulrich Schnauss, M83, Styrofoam, and Lali Puna as Oppressed by the Line's kindred spirits, to which one should probably add Cocteau Twins, Tears For Fears, and Manual—which doesn't mean Thompson's Oppressed By The Line doesn't have an identity it can call its own. That it does and an appealingly elegant one too, but denying that it occasionally calls to mind the work of other artists would be disingenuous. Nevertheless, Soft Focus won't disappoint fans whose appetite for all things shoegaze can never be sated .

November 2008