John Talabot fIN (Permanent Vacation)
5/5
By: Stan Morgan
When guitar bands release their debut album, they usually get forgiven if their sound is a little rough around the edges. In fact, they are often criticised if they are too pristine too soon. For electronica artists however, their debut is expected to be highly evolved, eclipsing everything that has gone before it, in line with technological progress.
For Barcelona-based producer John Talbot (real name Oriol Riverola), the way around this weight of expectation was to reboot his career. Previously releasing music under the name d.a.r.y.l., he ditched this moniker just as his skills were reaching their peak, and re-launched himself as John Talabot (the name of his college) in 2009. Since then he has released music, mostly in the form of 12” singles, of unerring quality, the most successful being ‘Sunshine’ which made it onto Pitchfork’s best tracks of 2009 list. The years of ground work have all been building up to the release of an album, which in the shape of fIN looks set to be his masterpiece.
Talabot has talked in the past of ‘musical philosophies’, citing artists such as Four Tet, Caribou and James Holden as examples of those with unique musical philosophies that have influenced his own. He intentionally makes his music detached from any time period, incorporating elements from all periods of electronic music and marrying them in such a way that the finished product is seamless. The uniqueness of his own approach becomes apparent quickly, as focus shifts between different genres, from the slow-motion grind of ‘El Oeste’ to the 90s trance of ‘When The Past Was Present’. Talabot is currently on tour with SBTRKT, whose debut album last year is probably the closest relative to fIN in terms of the combination of styles into a sound that is fresh and belongs solely to that artist.
His sound is a natural evolution of artists like Germans Booka Shade, taking their house style and cross-breeding it with the euphoric Balearic sound of Delorean or Teengirl Fantasy, accompanied by elements of African music and indie. It’s a combination that is used to devastating effect, using restraint to build tension that spans the length of the album, with only the most occasional moments of release. The sound is the aural equivalent of his hometown of Barcelona; humid, eclectic and most exciting after hours.
Vocals are used sparsely across the record, with fellow Spaniard Pional appearing on two of the album’s most successful numbers (‘Destiny’ and album closer ‘So Will Be Now’) and subtle vocal samples littering the rest of the tracks. His deft manipulation of both live vocals and vocal samples are something of a trademark, not as brash and in your face as purveyors of the cut and paste ‘New Vocabulary’ style like Purity Ring or Gold Panda, but instead using single samples and making them integral parts of the tracks, such as the chilling scream in ‘Oro Y Sangre’. As with all the best electronica, new subtleties buried within the production reveal themselves with every listen.
The title of the album isn’t intended to be as ambiguous as it may appear at first. Talabot has talked about this album being the end of a cycle of his career (‘fin’ being Spanish for ‘the end’), and that he might be about to ditch this moniker and start all over again. What is sure that whatever he chooses to do next, he will likely never make anything as astoundingly brilliant as fIN. Maybe that is why John Talabot might have to die, it’s always good to quit while you’re ahead; miles, miles ahead.
Artists in this article: John Talabot
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