The Beat Surrender

JC Le Saout is the man behind the Wax Tailor moniker and he returns with a follow up to his critically acclaimed debut Tales Of The Forgotten Melodies, which sold 60,000 in his homeland, he has also spent a hundred weeks in the iTunes Electronic Chart where he still resides today.

Which isn’t a bad effort to say that he did all of this himself, licensing the album out to Decon in 2006 and taking the album on the road with a four-piece band to support him on stage. It’s often said that coming up with a debut is easy; it’s the follow up album with less time to work on it that really tells you about an artist.

Listening to Hope & Sorrow is an absolute joy and proves that he hasn’t been phased by the success of his debut, for me it’s a complete album, very cinematic and with some smouldering atmospherics that weave around the edgy beats, in short it’s as successful a follow up as you could have dreamed of from him.

The comparisons are obvious and deserved when you listen to this album, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t original and rewarding in it’s right, yes his heroes may well appear to be DJ Shadow, Aim and RJD2, but on this sort ogf form they should be considered contempories rather than someone he’s aspiring to, as he’s very much in their league.

Hope & Sorrow opens with a fuzz, then a spoken word explosion of samples and gentle beats that set the agenda for the rest of the album. Every singletrack adds some form of value, right down to the ever so short Radio Broadcast and Beyond Words which are based on beats, samples and words and last around a minute each.

Although his beats and atmospherics steal the show to a degree he’s brilliantly brought in some vocalists to give the album a superb lift to the next level. The Way We Lived is a soulful track that has a real classic feel courtesy of Sharon Jones vocal.

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