A year or so on from the well-received and heavily promoted release of debut Please Keep Moving Forward, we come to the latest release from Coreline. Over the course of the past year, something more of a live “show” has become the norm, with moments of great laughs and cardboard robots making for a rather more interesting live show than many noise artists. Has this made any difference to the recordings? Well, in some ways, yes.

Coreline

Exact Science Is Not An Exact Science EP
Label: self-released
Catalog#: not on label
Buy from:: no longer available
8/10

Opener Noise To Signal opens impressively, with bursts of scattergun noise and breaks exploding across the speakers, before things settle down, comparitively, with an urgent, pulsing beat sweeping all before it. What is interesting is the lack, in the main, of what have become Coreline’s trademark – mock-orchestral synth lines.

They aren’t far away, though, as they are nestled within Are You Sure Your Body Can Stand It – in short bursts, at least. Otherwise it is a pulversing noise track, a hailstorm of beats and B-Movie samples whose only flaw is that it goes on for that little bit too long. Earth Can No Longer… was trailed to a handful of DJs a while ago, and is something of a departure again in being all glitchy-breakcore and recurring samples, again with the “strings” buried deep in the mix. Hardly dancefloor fodder, but it might be fun to try…

Ten Seconds brings us back to more familiar Coreline territory, with it sounding much like the last album – very polished, very clean, and technically accomplished. A good tune, too. Coreline Builds Better Robots has a great title, and is unusually for this artist built around the basis of a 4/4 (ish) beat. It also has huge, cheesy synths taking over mid-track, with what sounds suspiciously like crowd noise also sampled in. Is this a bid for “stadium noise”?

Perhaps inadvertently, this idea is continued into the Keef Baker remix of Dance Electric, which sounds for all the world as if it should be played with a packed dancefloor going mad to it, arms in the air. It is the sudden burst into life of the synths and picking up of the pace, I think, that does it. Amazing stuff. The PCP Principle go for a relatively straight take on Are You Sure Your Body Can Stand It, even with mellow piano-led sections that provide an occasional break from the mayhem.

This is a great EP from Coreline, with more variety than before, and a few interesting pointers for where he might go next. One thing is for sure – it won’t be boring…