Arms and Sleepers - Matador (2009)

01. Orly (01:06)

02. Matador (05:06)

03. The Architekt (04:44)

04. Twentynine Palms (05:35)

05. Helvetica (07:10)

06. The International (02:35)

07. Simone (03:12)

08. Kino (05:11)

09. Words are for Sleeping (Matador Return) (01:18)

10. The Paramour (04:37)

Twentynine Palms

"Enjoy the Silence : Forget what you've already known about any genres. Forget about your self defined frontiers of mind and let yourself fall down. What comes here is deeply out of what your mind could allow you.

Straight to the point I could say Arms and Sleepers combine about three to four different genres of music that move floently into each other; Trip-Hop, Post-Rock, Ambient Pop/Rock and Dark Lounge/Jazz. Sounds like a weird mix of anything that's possible in atmospheric music, but it's recorded so tenderly that you could really get into floating. Just imagine a meeting between Massive Attack and Sigur Rós, where MA creates the beats and Sigur Rós the fragile pianos and tender soundscapes without being too pretentious.

Matador is different to the album before, Black Paris 86. Arms and Sleepers are now working with more vocals (also with the singer of Uzi & Ari, as guest vocalist) and are definitely deeper and also darker. Epic vocal-lines subwoof the aesthetic ambition of the album, simple piano lines create the atmosphere just to be covered by a trip-hop-like beat that is showing us desparation and in the same way a chillout feeling. Extremely chilling appears the titles song Matador, as well as the three songs The Architekt, Twentynine Palms and Helvetica, which are in the middle field of the album (track 2-5).

All in all, there's just one word for this album: brilliant. The atmosphere is hard to describe but let me try it this way: chilling, melancholic, honest, sensitive, sympathic, vulnerable, divine. For me, it sounds like someone's walking through the corridor of a hospital and he's hearing the sound of heartbeats. He's walking into the street and into the dark world of a backyard. Then, he wakes up and he's looking back to the fascinating production of his fantasy, the dream - Arms and Sleepers." glassforest.blogspot.com

I copy pasted this review above from glassforest.blogspot.com.. it perfectly describes what the music of Arms and Sleepers is about and what my thoughts are on this album.

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