Send "Simon Bookish " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Almost Cool |
 Simon BookishEverything/Everything (Tomlab) Simon Bookish is the nom de plume of one London-based composer Leo Chadburn, and Everything/Everything is his third album in as many years (although it's his first for Tomlab). He's done remixes for Franz Ferdinand and Grizzly Bear (among others) and has been a guest musician with Patrick Wolf, Saint Etienne, and Leafcutter John. Toss in a single titled "Terry Riley Disco" and his range of influences and collaborations paints a pretty varied picture. While his previous releases were largely written for synths, this newest work is scored mainly for sax, brass, piano, organ, and a mixture of live and electronic drums. It's certainly pop music, but blends in bits of minimalism, disco, over-the-top cabaret, and a few other styles. Lyrically, it's adventurous, and like the last name of his pseudonym might suggest, a bit high-minded. Considering it's a concept album about the overwhelming amount of information that bombards us every day, it should come with no surprise that he sings about everything from chemistry to typography. So, it will no doubt seem a bit pretentious to some (especially considering it's sung in a cool British croon), but I've always found literate pop music to be fairly entertaining provided it's not completely overdone. That's largely the case here, and the release opens with one of the best songs on the album in "The Flood," as choppy programmed beats and intertwining horns and piano race behind Chadburn and some female background vocalists. About halfway through, it flips the switch into a woodwinds and piano dance-pop piece that pulls in melodic cues from Steve Reich. "Portrait Of The Artist As A Fountain" is just as good, although it takes a different route with a robotic bass, another chugging beat, and some minimal melodies for the almost spoken-word first half before again launching into a delightful ending that again finds some amazing horn arpeggios dancing in line with the steady beat....full text |
| Pitchfork media |
| In a musical economy where ideas are the sole currency, Simon Bookish would be doing the Scrooge McDuck backstroke through a pool of cartoon coins right about now. The man's recordings abound in little innovations, both sonic and lyrical, and if Everything/Everything sounds particularly heavy on them, that's no coincidence: the record, a self-described "big band song cycle," deals with the onslaught of information in this modern age. Accordingly, the music on Everything runs the gamut, with touches of kraut/motorik ("Portrait of the Artist as a Fountain") and Gang of Four-descended post-punk ("Alsatian Dog") rubbing up against plenty of Reich/Glass modular flourishes (a good two-thirds of the tracks) and even a splash of the baroque ("Il Trionfo del Tempo...[Ridley Road]"). Much has been made of Bookish's decision to eschew the electronic instrumentation that dominated his first two albums-- 2006's aggro-electro opus Unfair/Funfair and 2007's frequently brilliant if uneven Trainwreck/Raincheck-- in favor of the more organic sounds of the pianos, saxophones, Farfisa organs, harps, and chirpy brass section that color Everything. By and large Bookish employs his new toys to good effect: the polyphony of voice, backing chorus, piano, and brass during the refrain of opening track "The Flood" sounds positively euphoric, while "Synchrotron" drops thick, excited sax over rolling piano and a bed of Stereolab-like Farfisa to emerge as one of the record's highlights. This kitchen-sink musical approach makes sense in light of the subject matter, which, while it might not encompass everything, sure comes close. "Carbon" builds a chorus out of Albert Einstein's apparent words to Buckminster Fuller-- "Young man, you amaze me!"-- tucked between imagery of various forms of the life-giving element. "A Crack in Larsen C" uses a disintegrating ice shelf as a springboard for a moody meditation on end times ("Will the future crash in the next five minutes/ And if it does, will we be burning or frozen?"), while "Victorinox" has Bookish seemingly commenting on the Swiss policy of neutrality one moment ("Try to ignore the drum sound...the place where you live is under attack") and delighting in wordplay ("Monstrous animosity/ Rhinoceros of animus") the next....full text |
| All music |
| Switching from electronics to live instruments for his first album for Tomlab, the science-informed concept album Everything/Everything finds the wonderful work of Simon Bookish -- somewhere between the informed wryness of Ivor Cutler and the continuing impact of David Bowie's archly English romanticism -- in full flight. With the music provided by orchestrations from woodwinds, strings, brass, and much more besides, the feeling is one of playfulness, a resistance to and celebration of easily grasped pop forms and a sense that the world is there to be amused at and with. Even so, there are a couple of overarching models or two Bookish can't quite escape -- Stereolab is almost the gimme, thanks to songs like "The Flood" and the juggernaut of "Alsatian Dog" suggesting the meta-'60s pop of that group well at work, but with Bookish's none-more-English vocals in place of Laetitia Sadier's understated calls. The feeling overall is of self-possession -- there's a confidence in the sound, an inversion of "indie" as either withdrawn moping or rehashed anthemicism in favor of playful and direct collage. Therefore the smoother feelings of "Dumb Terminal" play perfectly against the stiff art-jazz breaks on "Carbon," and "Il Trionfo del Tempo"'s dramatic sound textures against Bookish's spoken words. ...full text |
| Music OMH |
| Even with a couple of albums under his belt, Simon Bookish's recordings have always played second fiddle to his performances. Live, he's an extraordinary one-man electronic cabaret act; prowling the stage in Nico biker boots and horn-rimmed specs, and berating the audience over minimalist beeps and drones with outlandish proclamations in a plummy monotone. But in the absence of a live audience to play against, his first two albums strayed too readily into over-conceptualised doom; and with the exception of a few stand-out tracks, conveyed the impression that they had been written by computer algorithm rather than by flesh and blood. On Everything /Everything, Bookish emerges as a fully-fledged recording artist, still challenging and provoking his audience, but communicating for the first time with real emotional resonance. Gone is the bedsit-bound ProTools backing in favour of live instrumentation (saxophones, brass, piano, organ); elaborately scored and sliding seamlessly between classical, jazz and experimental styles....full text |
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