andy stott: luxury problems

Following on from a pair of extended players released in 2011 (Passed Me By/We Stay Together) Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with Luxury Problems, an eight-track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's one-time piano teacher whom he hadn't seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened -- but after almost a year of studio work, the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. "Numb" opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped, but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more fucked. "Lost and Found" follows and deploys a growling rave bass line and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. "Sleepless" started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of Passed Me By, here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. "Hatch the Plan" ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low-end grind that probably doesn't quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow -- it's just a beautifully inverted pop song. The second half opens with "Expecting," the most recognizably "Stott" moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at half-speed; those heavy kick drums sucking in everything around them. "Luxury Problems" offers up the album's most quietly euphoric moment; conventional arrangements and drum loops are disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the Box" fucks with the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbearably-beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Air Studios.

Andy Stott - Sleepless