The Rubber Room column is a weekly look at recent and notable releases that don’t fall into the rubric of traditional reviewed material—namely 7”’s, 12”’s, 3” CDs, EPs, cassette-only, DVDs and MP3-only releases.

Crooked Fingers
Sleep All Summer / You Must Build a Fire 7"
[Eastern Fiction, 2005]

The two tracks on this 7" were recorded live to mini-disc during a live show in 2004 when Crooked Fingers toured with the Delgados (whose Alan Barr and Emma Pollack appear here). Only Eric Bachmann's acoustic guitar and Barr's cello provide the music, while Pollack joins Bachman for vocals on "Sleep All Summer". Pollack's vocals work, but bring nothing new to the a-side. A cliched sentiment, but the cello adds a haunting aspect to the tracks not found on the recent Dignity and Shame renditions. With the lo-fi recording and new sound, the tracks are interesting, but not revelatory, takes on the more familiar versions.
[Justin Cober-Lake]

Undo and Vicknoise
Ten
[Factor City, 2004]

The main Factor City continue their exploration of the meeting point between genres: this time it’s the pointed and bulbous synth pads that typify trance mixing with the drag-lock-step of shuffle-tech. It’s a song that doesn’t sound that far off from previous outing’s “Sparow,” but it’s far more luminous, yielding a strong crescendo in the track’s latter half. The Iñaki Marin mix that follows it up on the B-side goes more towards the Get Physical side of things and might just be as good as it predecessor, if not better.
[Todd Burns]

Losoul
Brain Of Glass / You Know
[Playhouse, 2004]

An Alter Ego mix and a SuperMayer mix on the same 12”? Count everyone and their brother in, right? Much like Getting Even, though, it all looks better on paper than it does on the dancefloor. Ego’s mix of “Brain of Glass” falters via the repetition of a rather boring hook, amid an overbearing synth pattern that fails to yield in the path of inevitability. Too many hooks going on at once and not in that Basement Jaxx kind of way. The SuperMayer mix, on the other hand, fails from the exact opposite problem: it never gets up off the ground. Like a very low-rent “Wurz and Blosse,” it could do with a lot less subtlety and one heavy bass hit (that never comes) to set it on a different path.
[Todd Burns]

Heiko Voss
Call Me Killer
[Firm, 2005]

Apparently if Moby were German, all would be forgiven because many of the tracks are just as simplistic and naïve as the ones that found their way onto Hotel (“I’d like to be close to you / I’d love to be close to you / Ohhhh I’m sticking with you / Like glue” being the entirety of “Like Glue”). But unlike Moby’s productions, Voss has a few things in his favor: a) a decent voice, b) a tendency towards less “emotional” synth melodic motifs (the sonic tendrils in “Killer” sound more Junior Boys than anything else) , c) a tendency to switch up genres at will (“Sitting in my Song” could easily have found its way on Midnite Vultures and “Fade Out” is David Bowie unadorned), and d) is doing it on 12”, exactly what Hotel should have been.
[Todd Burns]

Imogen
Whiplash
[Areal, 2005]

The first release from this label that I haven’t really felt in a long while. What’s wrong here? It’s hard to say exactly: the beat’s plodding, the melodies are nice but don’t really hook into your brain, but I think it’s more accurate to say that this release has too much going on too be tracky and not enough going on to really entice listeners to give it a go on their headphones—a difficult middle ground. The title track is the one to keep, if you’re going to be searching this one out via digital means.
[Todd Burns]