Long a member of the Anticon crew, producer and turntablist DJ Mayonnaise picks his long dormant solo career back up with the solidly downtempo, almost entirely instrumental chillout album Still Alive. There’s a loopy (in both senses of the word) homemade quality to the album, on which every song crackles with some type of lo-fi extraneous noise, not all of which sounds entirely intentional. Otherwise, the songs are constructed out of familiar elements like the Ennio Morricone-style reverb guitar sample that underpins “The Windham Song” and the Air-like twinkling keyboards that decorate most tracks’ upper registers. That said, DJ Mayonnaise does a fair job of keeping the potentially over-familiar arrangements and samples from coalescing into just another bit of negligible atmosphere for a boutique hotel bar near you, through unexpectedly tuneful melodies like “Easily Distracted” and the album’s one stylistic departure, the sneering Bush slam “Strateegery.” – Stewart Mason
more »