King Creosote returns with his new record Astronaut Meets Appleman. It explores the tension and harmony between tradition and technology – between analogue and digital philosophies – and also invokes a feeling, King Creosote (otherwise known as Fife’s Kenny Anderson) says, of “being caught between heaven and earth”.
Astronaut Meets Appleman follows King Creosote’s breakthrough record From Scotland With Love (2014) and his Mercury-nominated collaboration with Jon Hopkins, Diamond Mine (2011). It arrives replete with a chamber-rock rabble and then some: harps and bagpipes come as standard, as does silence.
The first track to be shared is the album’s opener ‘You Just Want’. A seven-minute piece of hymnal drone-pop, its touchstones are the art of patience, scenes of mild bondage and Venus (in Furs). Elsewhere on the record, ‘Melin Wynt’ is a lilting bagpipe-techno odyssey. KC explains “It’s an anti-wind turbine song, from a place called windmill. There are no windmills there.” This sense of place, disorientation and absence (in space, time, nature, hearts) underpins Astronaut Meets Appleman – most literally, perhaps, in the silence that unfolds amidst crestfallen lullaby ‘Rules of Engagement’. Or, as he intones on philharmonic lament ‘Faux Call’, “it's the silence that somehow says it all”.
On Astronaut Meets Appleman, King Creosote is still upsetting apple-carts and dealing with the fallout, still appraising love and life, the moon, the stars; tide tables, bagpipe scores, zeros and ones; mathematics, ticking clocks and the beat of our hearts.