Gigwise.com - Album Review: City Reverb – ‘Lost City Folk (And The Grace Reunion)'

Eminent DJ and producer Chris Coco returns to the airwaves with his new project City Reverb and their debut album ‘Lost City Folk (And The Grace Reunion)’ (Dumb Angel Records).

Having played his part in the naissance of acid house frenzy of the late Eighties, the celestial foundation that Coco had built for himself has propelled him from proponent to preeminent of the DJ booth. Working with fellow forlorn and disenchanted Londonites, the conceptual bindings of post-modern angst and observational renderings of inner city life and the soulless characters that awash its ashen streets are what gives ‘Lost City Folk’ its inspiration.

Coco’s reputable turning of oxymoronic ambient dance still plays prominence throughout the album, yet instead of acting as an ascetic restraint, it produces an emancipated canvas for which an eclectic mix of sound and vision are applied.

The result is an expansive sound of earnest edifices: mixing low-key electronic whirls and intricate semi-morose synths, each track amalgamates into an overriding absorption of the spiritual abyss and subterranean homesick blues.

‘Everything Will Be Alright’ opens to the key of minimal Portishead-inspired dissipated beats; sparse additions of strung out guitar and rousing jazz horn sections accompaniment the metronomic drumbeats and electronic whirls that it is founded upon.

Coco’s vocal debut upon the record sways from time to time: melancholic and perspicacious to the overall work and concept of the album, he fits to the puzzle of minimal esoteric production. On the higher ranges he can be abortive as in ‘Everything Will Be Alright’, yet on tracks such as ‘City Of Lights’, he equates perfectly and unstrained to the Eighties dance resonations akin to Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip.

‘City Of Light’ does reach many levels of leftfield yearning: ‘Central Heating’ has a harder rock-based edge; ‘Seventy Three’ dabbles with soulful, nonsensical spoken word poetry; and ‘Star Power’ plays with cavernous Pink Floyd orchestration.

As a body of work, Coco et al. have created a thought provoking, exquisite and quintessential soundtrack to a Sunday morning renaissance of body and mind; delectable comedown lullabies that will aurally ease a generation consumed by excess and the solitudes of city life.

http://www.gigwise.com/reviews/albums/46334/City-Reverb---Lost-City-Folk-Dumb-Angel-Released-240908