photo by Mr November (CC Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0)

I went to see Fog play their only UK gig for their new album Ditherer last week at The Luminaire (a rather nice venue in Kilburn). It was a really good evening, with some especially strange support from Napoleon 3rd and Team Brick. Both of whom were interesting and pretty damn fun, I certainly have the line

This is not my life, it’s just my day job.
The way I pay the rent

still stuck in my head from Napoleon IIIrd’s Hit Schmooze For Me. It was an evening of indie worker boy anthems.

You can stream the whole album here, in fact you bloody well should. It’s great!

It’s easy to capture how Fog’s sound has evolved on the album opener We Will Have Vanished where the song seems split into three even thirds lasting ninety seconds which build slowly up to a chaotic and complex arrangements. However, unlike in previous outings where there would be structures of pop songs giving way to free-er jazzier arrangements there is much more thought here (for once these songs were extensively demo’d) and thus each song hangs together in a way that earlier works didn’t Obviously there’s some loss of the organic and sparse genius that made much earlier Fog so intriguing but it does make the whole thing about three times more rocking and twice as memorable.

Might just be my album of the year, at least until Misty’s Big Adventure’s new record appears. Go and listen!

And if you want further reading, MusicOMH have a reasonable review and there’s a great interview with Andrew Broder (essentially Fog until recently) at Audiversity.