The Lawless: Habit Forming

Adding “organic” when naming products is how the food industry moves towards something more accessible and symbolically local than its usual steely, unfeeling image. The Mille Plateaux label is hardly a corporate monolith, but presumably it’s doing the same thing, reaching for some crossover appeal with Mille Plateaux Organic after one decade of icy, brittle, standoffish glitch resulted in another decade of bankruptcy. The new descriptor refers to the ‘real’ instruments its releases now feature, and Habit Forming by Ross McLean– AKA Brighton’s The Lawless – is its debut. What press there is describes McLean as reaching for the moody grandeur of the spaghetti Westerns, but although this stuff is undeniably pretty and even occasionally stirring, Morricone it ain’t. Bonobo it ain’t, either: imagine “Terrapin” as a kitchen-sink palimpsest, with three minutes of ideas stretched out to a somnambulistic forty.