2021 Year's Favourites SunNeverSetsOnMusic
Year's Favourites|2021
Black Acid Soul
by Lady Blackbird
Released 3 September 2021
Foundation Music Productions
*****
It has been nearly 18 months since LA-based Lady Blackbird dropped her debut single and signature song "Blackbird", an impassioned new interpretation of the 1966 Nina Simone classic. It was an astonishing appetiser for a promised debut album and was followed by a string of singles and remixes to further whet the appetite - all the while cheered along by no other than WorlwideFM & BBC6 Music's jazz tastemaker Gilles Peterson.
Titled "Black Acid Soul", the debut album does not disappoint. It opens (unsurprisingly) with "Blackbird" - an appropriate choice, not only because of the fine quality of the performance by the artist formerly known as Marley Monroe. The song has allowed her, after many decades spent around the New York and LA scenes without ever breaking through to mainstream commercial success, to adopt an entirely new persona from which to steer her career in a dynamic new direction.
The album mines the potent legacy of 60's and 70's songwriting for half of it's material but its success derives not only from these strong song choices: the other half of the material is new songs penned by her producer Chris Seefried and they hold up well. But the ultimate value that elevates this album above the "covers album" status is the voice of Lady Blackbird, supported by expert technical production, and inspiredinstrumental performances (including the magnificent Voices Of East Harlem choir on "Beware the Stranger").
The previously-released opening track is followed by a slow blues "It's Not That Easy" - a 1967 song originally recorded by by Reuben Bell with his backing group The Casanovas, then the first pair of the Lady Blackbird / Seegfried originals, a tenderly-delivered "Fix It" and the sultry "Nobody's Sweetheart", which features an elegant trumpet solo from the great New Orleans virtuoso Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews.
A string of covers follow: Irma Thomas' "Ruler of My Heart" (1963); "Collage" (a Joe Walsh/James' Brothers 1973 composition previously covered by Three Degrees, Golden Earring and the Breeders); a slow-burning blues of Sam Cooke's "Lost and Looking", and a definitive cover of Tim Hardin's "It'll Never Happen Again" (1966). Sitting among this group an original "Five Feet Tall", features vocal homage to Billie Holiday, and holds up well in strong company.
"Blackbird" aside, the other candidate for the most memorable song on this album is its final vocal track "Beware the Stranger" which Blackbird describes as "a re-rub of "Wanted Dead or Alive", a rare groove classic recorded by funk/gospel collective Voices of East Harlem in 1973 and co-produced by Curtis Mayfield. “It’s a version of a version!” she laughs. “We changed the title, the gender, everything!
The album closes out with the searing instrumental "Black Acid Soul" from which the album takes its name. It speaks of both the “Jackson Pollock jams” Seefried describes in the studio and the mantric soul evocative of hot buttered soul-era Isaac Hayes. Explaining how the song became the title and then, again, the vibe, Lady Blackbird says: “We used to hashtag #blackacidsoul, as our sub-genre of music. It just encompassed everything we were doing. It cemented all those ideas and genres in this made-up shit! “and because ‘ Blackbird’ is a great start to the album, because it gets dark and violent and goes somewhere spiritual, we wanted to tail the album with another expression of acid soul. So that became the title track at the end".
Lady Blackbird is suppored throughout by a cracking group of musicians, particularly:
Deron Johnson playing Steinway Baby Grand, Mellotron, Casio Synth;
Jon Flaugher playing Double Bass;
Jimmy Paxson playing Drums, Percussion.
Source: Lady Blackbird
NINE
by SAULT
Released 25 June 2021
Forever Living Originals
*****
The semi-anonymous collective SAULT took the world by storm over the past two years with a string of albums that were perfectly attuned to tihe times, musically and politically.
(For those who were away, SAULT released "Five" and "Seven" in 2019 and Untitled (Black Is)" and "Untitled (Rise)" in 2020)
The early albums were remarkable for their fresh soulful sound, production and creativity."Untitled (Black Is)" released on Juneteenth, perfectly capured the rage of the Black Lives Matter movement especially following the spate of police brutality, including the public murder of George Floyd, in America."Nine"s predecessor,
"Untitled (Rise)" maintained the rage, but was more dance-oriented and celabratory of black pride.
"Nine"'s lyrical content is often lighthearted and filled with child-like chanting, and more overtly British, with "London Gangs" setting the tone as track two, "Mike's Story and the humorous "You From London" taking a swipe at Americans' view of Brits.
Buiut there's a raw, lmost threatening edge to songs like "Fear" (three and a half minute chanted repettition of "The realest pain/
Pain is/ the pain is real"and "Bitter Streets" - a sweetly-sung, but dark warning tha will resonatw with minorities worldwide (Bitter streets/These roads ain't for the weak/Bitter streets/Don't fall asleep") and "Alcohol"Oh-oh, alcohol (Alcohol)/ Look what I've done (Alcohol)/ Oh-oh, alcohol (Alcohol)/ Look what I've done (Alcohol)/ Battle of the pain when I take/ One step forwrd, two steps back/ Oh-oh, alcohol/ This time, you won/ Oh-oh, alcohol/ Only supposed to be once"."Nine"'s finale "Light In Your Hands" is perhaps SAULT's most surprising song of the entire repertoire - certainly their most inspirational and optimistic.
The song begins with Cleo Sol's soaring vocal, singing "Without love it's hard for you to give it a try/ So many promises that turn into lies/ Don't wanna start again and give someone a chance/ Can't you see the light's in your hands?/ Without love it's hard for you to give it a try/ So many promises that turn into lies/Don't wanna start again and give someone a chance/Can't you see the light's in your hands?" which gives way to a male voiced monologue relating a you man's personal ordeal: "When you think about it, I never really had a childhood/ I was constantly on the edge, constantly on edge/ Throughout my whole childhood / But, we just, we grew accustomed to it/ To the point now we're adults and we got thick skin/ You shouldn't have to have skin as sick as ours, you shouldn't/ We shouldn't have had to grow up with that".
As SAULT's fifth five-star in just two years"Nine" is nothing short of astonishing, placing the group among the greats of popular music, perhaps unrivalled since Stevie Wonder's classic run of albums for Motown from "Music of My Mind" (March 1972) and "Talking Book" (October 1972) through "Innervisions" (1973) to "Fulfillingness First Finale" (1974), "Talking Book" (1975) and "Songs In The Key Of Life"(1976).
‘Nine’ will only be available to stream and purchase for 99 days, i.e. until Saturday, 2 October 2021m however a YouTube stream remains accessible
Sun Sever Sets On Music
Promises
by Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, London Symphony Orchestra
Released 27 March 2021
Luaka Bop Records
*****
"Promises" is the astonishing across-the-generations collaboration between young, Manchester, UK producer Floating Points (known to his mother as Sam Shepard), veteran US Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (best known for his work with John and Alice Coltrane) and the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO).
It is a seamless, timeless work of collasboration, five years in the making; 46 minutes of bliss in the form of a suite of nine connected Movements.
Floating Points surpassses all expectations (notwithstanding the quality of his previous releases (particularly 2019's Crush, one of sunneversetsonmusic's 2019 Highlights). He is the central figure, whose gorgeous keyboards and electronica are the binding elements throughout. But, rarely has free jazz, electronic and symphonic music been combied so delicately and seamlessly.
The session opens with the tones of what sounds like a vibrophone, but is in fact a harpsicord, with piano and celeste tracked on top, then slowed down 25%). This is soon joined by Sanders' mellow saxophone - the full-force blowing for which he is so famous does not feature here.
The harpisicord arpeggio is used repeatedly throughout the work, particularly at the opening of each Movement. This grounds the entire set by always allowing the music to return to and emerge from a common point.
The early four Movements seem to grow progressively quieter, until they achieve a calm that might have been borrowed from Max Richter's "Sleep". But near the middle of Movement 4, Sanders saxaphone stirs in a sustained duet with the harpsicord that is sustained until near the end of the following Movement.
The music resets for Movement 6, but soon a brief reprise of sax gives way to the LSO's strings which transform the soundscape to cinematic levels, providing the first of two outstanding centrepiece tracks.
Movement 7, the second highlight, again builds from the familiar harpsicord arpeggio to which Sanders adds floating saxophone melodies, as he did in the opening three Movements. However, for a few minutes, by application of a combination of free-jazz sax and celestial electronic effects, Shephard and Sanders conjure an almost mystical, transcendent sound.
It is hard to imagine another release that will surpass Promises in 2021, for album of the year
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CARNAGE
by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Released 25 February 2021
AWAL Recordings
*****
Carnage, the new album from Nick Cave & Warren Ellis follows Cave's 2019 masterpiece Ghosteen, but this time atound he has recorded without the full Black Seeds line-up, only his long-trusted sideman Ellis.This is only the second time in their storied careers, that Ellis ands Cave have shared the billing in this way, first having been the 2015 soundtrack for the motion picture"Far From Men / Loin Des Hommes" Like it's predecessor, Carnage is another immersive journey into Cave's apocalyptical twilight universe. And although the album's title suggests that the pandemic might be the subject, it does not appear to be Cave's sole inspiration or focus here: the influence of the US presidential election, the death of George Floyd and other externalities are evident and for the large part, personal and universal perspectives elevate the work.
In the album opener "Hand of God", the singer throws himself into a river, inviting the mercy of God's saving hand, singing: "There are some people who aren't trying to find anything / But that kingdom in the sky". It is a quest that he returns to repeatedly in these songs.
The steady pulse of Cave's piano and the soaring, arabesques of Ellis's guitars interweave for "Old Time", a road-movie-in-song that recalls a glorious past relationship, perhaps with someone who is now deceased. Cave sings" "Wherever you are, darling, I'm not that far behind".
Surprisingly too, even the title track refers not to the pandemic but to the Cave's childhood witness to the casual violence of a backyard chicken slaughter, and other autobiographical memories.
"White Elephant", the centrepiece of this set, is an allegory of the Trump Predicency, begining with grotesque descriptions of an obscene political nightmare in which white supremecy is dominant. Cave warns that even though the menace has been rendered impotent, the threat remains: "I'm an ice sculpture melting in the sun / With the memory of an elephant / Evaporating before your eyes / And becoming a great grey cloud of wrath / Roaring my salt upon the earth / I will shoot you all for free if you so much as look at me".The music turns from foreboding to euphoric as the narrative of "White Elephent" shifts, and this mood is maintained, elevating the remainder of the album to a devotional mood.
Dirge-like,"Albuquerque" refers as much to the futile plight of emigree as it does to travel limitations imposed by the pandemic: “And we won’t get to anywhere, anytime this year, darling, unless I dream you there … unless you take me there".
"Lavender Fields" is sung to the backing of sombre church-organ, a song of mystical journeys through life and beyond, with lavender a metaphor for life itself: "Once I was running with my friends/ All of them busy with their pens / But the lavender grew rare, what happened to them?"
Cave reintroduces the opening lines of the opening song, "Hand of God": "We don't ask who / We don't ask why / There is a kingdom in the sky."
"Shattered Ground"is a song of goodbye to a lost love, delightfully represented by the moon, a traditional font of madness: “There’s a madness in her and a madness in me,” Cave sings, “And together it forms a kind of sanity.”
The album concludes with "Balcony Man" ("two hundred ponds of packed ice, or blood and bone, leaking in the morning sun") declaring "This morning is amazing and so are you / You are languid and lovely and lazy / And what doesn't kill you just makes you crazier."
And so, as witnesses to the Old Testement-infused nighmares of Nick Cave's imagination, perhaps we too become crazier with time.
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Yellow
by Emma-Jean Thackray
Released 9 July 2021
Movementt
*****
Bandleader, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Emma-Jean Thackray was born and raised in Yorkshire but is today a resident of Catford, south-east London. Her 2020 EPs Um Yang 음 양 and Rain Dance marked Thackray out as standard-bearer of a spiritually-minded, dancefloor-angled take on jazz that stood at a slight remove from the broader UK scene.
Pitchfork describes her debut album Yellow, as "a fascinating blend of spiritual jazz and brass band that can sound full-on psychedelic while staying grounded in its clever arrangements".
Their review continues: "In a world of musical utility, it is incredibly satisfying to come across an album as supremely impractical as Yellow, the full-length debut from English bandleader and producer Emma-Jean Thackray. It’s so deliciously circuitous that it develops its own gravitational pull. The album takes inspiration from a number of modish sources, including Flying Lotus’ wonky beat sorcery, the mystic jazz of Alice Coltrane, Roy Ayers’ sunshine-soaked funk, and Sun Ra’s cosmic overload. At times, the result is not that far from Kendrick’s towering To Pimp a Butterfly or the jazzier shade of Tyler, the Creator, as witnessed on Flower Boy.
But Yellow splits off into its own lane thanks in part to Thackray’s overarching lysergic bliss. She says she approached the record “by trying to simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience,” which explains a lot: Yellow is fascinating and profoundly befuddling, a voyage deep into nowhere in particular. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings—when you’ve got “Sun” pegged as a kind of disco number, for example—Thackray throws in an impetuous chord progression or rhythmical stutter to pull the ground from under your feet.
The album’s other distinguishing characteristic comes in its use of low-end brass and, in particular, the liberal employment of the sousaphone. Its sonorous parp comes across like a trad jazz send-up of modern producers’ obsession with electronic sub-bass. As a teenager in Yorkshire, Thackray was the principal trumpeter in her local brass band, a musical tradition often associated with the North of England. The use of brass here, with the sousaphone joined by the trombone, trumpet, and saxophone, seems to call back to that era, giving her cosmic jazz a fascinating Northern English (and New Orleans) tint. Thackray has previously wondered whether “some Yorkshire white girl” should participate in the Black American musical tradition of jazz. This, perhaps, is her answer, with the tremble of brass making Yellow something more than a straight copy of someone else’s musical innovation".
Source: Pitchfork
Space 1.8
by Nala Sinephro
Released 3 September 2021
Warp Records
*****
Space 1.8 is the outstanding debut album from UK-based composer and harpist Nala Sinephro, yet another prodigous new talent to emerge from the creative melting pot of the UK's contemporary jazz scene. Sinephro is supported throughout the record by Dwayne Kilvington (aka Wonky Logic) on Bass and Sons of Kemet's Eddie Hick on drums. But the substance that underpins the album's eight enumerated soundscapes (platonically named from "Space 1" to "Space 8") is produced from the multi-layering of Sinehro's harp and modular synths. The music is evocative but restrained, demonstrating an unexpected level of creative self-control othat reveals an artist who seems to have emerged fully formed on debut.
Other artists credited as lending support on the album include: percussionist Jake Long; guitarist Shirley Tetteh; keyboardist Lyle Barton; saxophonists Nubya Garcia, James Mollison and Ahnanse; and bassists Rudi Creswick and TWM Dylan
Comparisons will inevitably be made with the ever more influential mother of the jazz harp, Alice Coltrane, who is undoubtably an inspiration and influence. These are appropriate, because Sinephro's work is similar in its approach - and overall, possibly more accessible to many listeners.
Sinephro's Bandcamp entry describes her as "fus(ing) meditative sounds, jazz sensibilities, folk and field recordings. Her musical practice is rooted in the study of frequency and geometry and guided by the premise that sound moves matter."
And in it's review of the album The Guardian noted that "Sinephro grew up in between the birdsong of Belgium and the humid tropical soundscapes of Martinique. In her early 20s she saw off a tumour, informing her interest in music as medicine."
Sinephro conjures a world of her own, with compositions that are a healing balm troubled times.
Sun Sever Sets On Music
Jessup Wagon
by James Brandon Lewis
Released 7 May 2021
TAO Forms
*****
James Brandon Lewis does not take the easy road. Having forged a singular sound on the tenor saxophone, he could simply devise settings that showcase his brawny tone. Instead, he has rooted his recent music in extramusical research. The harmonic structures of last year’s quartet date, Molecular, arose from his studies of the DNA helix.
If Molecular dealt with the influence of nature, then Jesup Wagon deals with nurture. Since childhood, George Washington Carver’s combination of scientific and creative inquiries has been a template for the saxophonist’s own multidisciplinary pursuits. Each of the album’s seven pieces refers to an aspect of the dedicatee’s legacy, which extended beyond the practical application of scientific, musical and painting skills to visionary proposals to transform society.
But while the record’s narrative presents a series of teaching points, the music is anything but pedantic. Lewis’ vibrato-laden, solitary introduction to the title track sets the listener up for tragedy, only to have his band march jubilantly in, banishing his blues like a New Orleans parade. The interlocking gimbri (Moroccan bass lute), cello and cowbell groove of “Lowlands Of Sorrow” covers ground in a hurry, bucking and loping while Lewis and cornetist Kirk Knuffke float ragged, soulful cries over the top. And “Arachis,” which is named for Carver’s most famous research subject, the peanut, builds from ballad to blowout in classic Albert Ayler-esque fashion.
Source: Downbeat
Mother
by Cleo Sol
Released 19 August 2021
Forever Living Originals
*****
Cleo Sol has arguably been among the most interesting and prolific artists during the recent period, as the world has been assaulted by pandemic and shaken by resurgent racism, each giving rise to unprecedented social disruption: and all occurring in an era when the technologies and ownership of communication and media are changing constantly. The social and political outcomes of this era are likely to take generations to unravel and Cleo Sol's contribution to consciousness-raising as a member of the enigmatic UK soul ensemble SAULT will be an important piece of this period's musical heritage.
On the other hand, her solo albums are entirely different creations, reflecting personal relationships and influences.
Her sophomore new release"Mother"is an emotional and thoughtful response to the birth to her first child, in June 2021, which was reflected in a post to Instagram in which she wrote: “I became a mother this year and it’s been the most transformative, uplifting, heart-melting, strength giving experience thus far that led me to write this album. We worked with a small team of hand-picked individuals, who helped make this music so special and whose intentions were aligned with the honesty I was looking for and who trusted that vision.”
Working again with producer Inflo (whose work with the likes of Michael Kiwanuka, SAULT, Little Simz, Jungle has made him legend), the album is like a collection of tenderly sung diary entries, prayers and lullabies. However, the lyrics don't sugar coat the pain within; these songs deal with personal relationships, especially of the mother-daughter kind.
Opening track "Don't Let Me Fall"is sung daughter-to-mother: “We were kids under the sheets / In this hoarded house / There’s no hope in these rooms of looped dreams / All these pictures looking at me / Mothers don’t leave.” The song's extended instrumental passage fuses seamlessly with "Promises" revealing a sad breakdown in the relationship: "We get closer, but not close enough / Why'd you have to leave? / Why'd you have to go?", she sings.
After this bleak start, some hope is restored in "Heart Full of Love", where Sol prays "Thankyou for sending me an angel straight from Heaven / When my hope was gone, you made me strong".
"Build Me Up", the first of the two eight minutes long centrepieces among this collection, is a painful plea for a partner's selfless attention.
However, the songs for the remainder of the album, are affirming.
"Sunshine" ("You make me feel alive") offers optimism, even in a foreign land.
"We Need You", "Don't Let It Go To Your Head" ("love is stronger than fear") and "Music" ("But life is yours / Dont let them take that away") each offer the encouragement of a parent.
Even the gently sung lyrics of "23" belie it's subject matter, a mother who won't grow up and take responsibility.
The second of the eight minute set pieces, "One Day" brings joy with the lyric "And it feels as if I was born to be free / Flyin' higher just you and me" and the penultimate song,"Know That You Are Loved" extends a heart-warming sentiment: ("Know that you are loved / Even if you don't love yourself"). Finally, "Spirit" closes out the album triumphantly, building from minimalist piano and sofly sung lyrics at the opening, to fully-voiced vocals and and exhuberant horn-filled backing.
Stylistically, the album sits close to the five SAULT productions however Sol's restrained gospel vocals are the standout element here, at times evoking Dione Warwick and Roberta Flack, she invites the audience to fully appreciate the lyrical content. If there is a criticism, it is that although the lyrics to the majority of the songs are positive, a melancholy unnecesarily permeates the entire project. The production might have benefited from a more lively sound pallate, as one world imaging Burt Bacharach and Hal David, for example, achieving in previous times.
Nevertheless, this is an outstanding release that, SAULT's overt socio-political references are left alone, so that Cleo Sol is clearly and magnificently heard, as a solo artist once again.
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The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running For Their Lives
by Anthony Joseph
Released 7 May 2021
New Amsterdam
*****
British-Trinidadian poet/musician/author Anthony Joseph’s latest album contains multitudes. Operating as a dedication to poetic ancestors and a coming together of musical generations, The Rich are Only Defeated When Running for their Lives is also an almighty jam. Recorded live last August, it shows off the prowess of a team of master musicians (Shabaka Hutchings among others) from Paris and London. Jason Yarde, who also produced Joseph’s 2018 album is credited as producer/composer/arranger – to startling, albeit intimate, effect.
Running throughout the release are inter-connected themes: memory, place, belonging and acts of homage. Opener, “Kamau” pays respect to the lauded Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite who passed away in February last year. Brathwaite was an important influence on Joseph – the two writers met several times. On “Kamau” Joseph compellingly conveys not only the nature of Brathwaite’s aesthetic, but the full potential of a Black surrealist poetics, in an urgent, clipped diction against a rousing musical soundtrack which features Hutchings on bass clarinet.
When asked to convey the essence of Brathwaite’s “energy” in a 2018 interview, Joseph used the words “audacious … muscular,” while also noting the late poet’s capacity to “give voice to the voiceless.” A similar description might be used for Joseph’s new album, in its evocation of the post Windrush generations’ search for belonging — a story that soon becomes Joseph’s own (“Calling England Home”), in the recounting of familial grief (“The Gift”) and in the expansive grooves and storytelling on “Maka Dimweh”, a poem/song that universalises the tale of a Guyanese soldier.
One of the album’s most striking cuts, “Language (Poem for Anthony McNeill) once more memorialises another key figure in the Caribbean literary landscape: McNeill, a Jamaican poet known for his radical modernist aesthetic, deeply influenced by jazz, who died before his time in 1996. The 10-minute plus groove shows the band to full effect, as Joseph compellingly conjures something of McNeill’s gift and the potential of “language rooted in the drums…the cry of the horn.”
In fact, the entire album might be understood as part of Joseph’s engagement with his Caribbean musical and literary roots; the somewhat mysterious album title, for instance, comes from the Trinidadian writer, philosopher, historian and socialist activist, C.L.R James’ book on the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins (1938).
To Yarde and Joseph’s credit the musicianship never falters, even when conjuring deeply contrasting moods. See, for instance, the foregrounding of a formidable horn section of top-level saxophonists of very different aesthetic stripes (Hutchings, Yarde, Colin Webster – a longstanding Joseph collaborator and Denys Baptiste, whose credits include McCoy Tyner and Billy Higgins). “Calling England Home,” for example, is carried along by a sleepily evocative 60s horn-driven dancehall ambience, entirely in keeping with the song’s lyrical focus.
Note too, Rod Youngs’ sensitive drum parts, which coalesces to great effect with Andrew John’s bass throughout the album. Youngs is a previous Gil Scott-Heron collaborator, while London-based bassist and composer John has played on six of Joseph’s previous albums. Guitarist Thibaut Remy, who composed ‘Calling England Home’, performs with the Awalé Jant Band. There are the fragile interruptions of French jazz pianist, Florian Pellissier, while contributions from veteran percussionists Roger Raspail and Crispin Robinson provide further grit, delicacy and depth.
credits
released May 7, 2021
Anthony Joseph - Vocals
Andrew John - Bass
Thibaut Remy - Guitar
Rod Youngs - Drums
Florian Pellissier - Piano/Moog/Organ/Rhodes Piano
Jason Yarde - Alto & Baritone Saxophone
Shabaka Hutchings - Tenor Saxophone on ‘Swing Praxis’/Bass clarinet on ‘Kamau’
Denys Baptiste - Tenor Saxophone & Bass Clarinet on ‘Language’, Tenor Sax on ‘Maka Dimweh’ & ‘The Gift’
Colin Webster - Tenor Saxophone on ‘Kamau’ & Swing Praxis’, Baritone Sax on ‘Language’
Crispin Robinson - Bata Drums and Percussion
Roger Raspail - Percussion on ‘Maka Dimweh’
Source: Bandcamp
Mood Valiant
by Haiatus Kaiyote
Released 14 May 2021
Brainfeeder
*****
Eschewing Melbourne's pandemic lockdowns and having overcome breast cancer (the disease that took her mother a a young woman), Haiatus Koyote's lead singer Nai Palm (Naiomi Saalfield) took it apon herself to contact Brazillian Legend Arthur Verocai, whose 1972 eponymous debut album had been doing the rounds of the cognoscenti in Melb. and had impressed the band.He agreed to work with them and with no clear plan in mind, other than to work with him, she convinced the band to fly to Rio to record. The result is further musical progression forthe band, adding unique colour and depth to their music.
Whereas previous albums were so brimful of ideas that at times it was as if each band member had started in a different place in each song. For the first time, Mood Valiant presents a set that is still complex but begins to find comfort in letting a little cohesion break out!
The album opens with a 35 scond orchestral prelude and overdubs, suitable for an Avalanches album and a short track "Sip Into Something Soft" with Nai Plam's woozy vocal soon dominating. "Chivilry Is Not Dead" follows, a tongue in cheek send up of sexy songs everywhere with over-the-top erotic descriptions applied to plants and insects: "If I were a hummingbird/Your wings would beat like thunder/Orbit in a flight display/As if to gently say/Kiss the flowers ultraviolet/We could get lost or we could find it alive with'.
Many of the best moments are provided courtesy of Verocai, who to the surprise of the band had invided some cracking Brazilian string and brass musicians to the studio. According to Mai Palm, the Brass Section had a big party as theyrecorded and the strings brought the studio to tears. Listening to the recordings, its's easiy to understand.
Nai Palm delivers the vocals with sultry grace, arcing attitude and good humor.
The Brazilian influences are strong in the body of the album with Arthur Verocai's intrumental contributions in evidence through "And We Go Gentle", "Get Sun" and the instrumental interlude "Hush Rattle".
Nai Plam's passion and range are displayed spectacularly during "All The Words We Don't Say" and "Rose Water", cutting through the complex rhytms od drums and guitars.
Propelled by funky guitar and kick drum, Red Room is sultry, soulful and evocative highlight. "I got a red room/It is the red hour when the sun sets in my bedroom/It feels like I'm inside a flower/Feels like I'm inside my eyelids/And I don't wnna be anywhere but here").
"Sparkle Tape Break Up" is denser and less melodic that most other tracks on the album, and falls flat in this conxt. It is possible a more suitable song for live performance.
"Stone of Lavender", the penultimate track, once again marries Nai Palm's emotional vocals and Verocai's masterful orchestration asnshe sings "Take me far away from myself
Rest, don't rest like everyone else/I don't wanna be small, I wanna be full of life/We can weave all things together and be alright, ooh/Please believe me, please believe me when I say/I know that I know we could get over, only if we wanna"
The album closes with the playful "Blood and Marrow" which is unfortunatly spoiled by a high pitched "Yip!" that repeats intermittently during the song.
All in all, Mood Valiant is a bit of a flawed masterpiece by a renowned live band that remarkably may only be beginning to find it's place as a recording artist.
Sun Sever Sets On Music
1940 Carmen
by Mon Laferte
Released 29 October 2021
UMG Mexico
*****
Since releasing Desechable, her 2011 debut album, Chilean singer/songwriter Mon Laferte has created an ever-evolving pattern across popular music. She has traversed the worlds of pop, Rock en Español, indie rock, cumbia, ranchera, mambo, salsa, psych, and bolero. 1940 Carmen follows her Latin Grammy-nominated Seis by a mere five months (which was reviewed in SunNeverSetsOnMusic's May 2021 playlist). Written and recorded in Los Angeles from March to July 2021, the ten-song set is titled after the address of the Airbnb where Laferte was staying while she wrote and cut the album, half of it in English.
Laferte plays all of the music here along with her band's musical director Sebastian Aracena.
The songs seemingly journal her four-month stay in L.A. during which time her goal was to become pregnant. While 1940 Carmen is mostly uptempo and optimistic, it nonetheless reflects Laferte's particular gifts as a songwriter capable of juxtaposing conflicting, even contradictory emotions and psychological states as well as imbuing physical landscapes and personal interactions, no matter how brief and/or casual, with profound implications.
Though a 180-degree turn from the Mexican regional music employed on Seis, 1940 Carmen is every bit its equal in creativity, emotional depth, and execution.
Source: AllMusic
Vexillology
by Guedra Guedra
Released 12 March 2021
On The Corner
*****
From the spiritual polyrhythms of gnawa to the looping vocalisations of Sufism and the percussive tessellations of Berber folk, the world of north African cultures meet in the music of Morocco. Producer Abdellah M Hassak, AKA Guedra Guedra, has taken these rhythms as the core of his work. His name comes from the Berber dance music performed on the guedra drum; his debut EP, 2020’s Son of Sun, explored these diffuse roots through a dancefloor filter, with added field recordings and electronic Midi sequencing, a junglist collage that straddles tradition and contemporary dance musics.
Guedra Guedra: Vexillology album cover
Guedra Guedra: Vexillology album cover
Hassak’s debut album, Vexillology, extends this idea over the course of 13 propulsive and complex tracks. Seven Poets samples a group chant over birdsong and snappy hi-hats that evoke footwork’s stacked rhythms – encompassing the dancefloors of Chicago and the desert-scape of Berber song. The Chicago sound also leaves its mark on the bouncy Stampede Step with its shrill flute melody and growling bassline, and Aura samples the chants of the Zayane mountain community: chopping their circular incantations over rumbling sub-bass, the effect renders them as verse and a kind of crowd sound.
Instead of simply pasting decontextualised field recordings over bright electronics, Hassak integrates these folk elements into the mix and allows them to breathe. He incorporates the clatter of the bendir drum on the rollicking Aura, a smattering of hand claps over the house piano of Cercococcyx, and the shrill arpeggios of the taghanimt flute on the drum machine-heavy 40’ Feet. In this way, Hassak weaves tradition into his own interpretations of dance, allowing space for the acoustic to interact with the electronic, not remixing the former beyond the point of recognition (a common pitfall in this type of work). On Vexillology, Hassak extrapolates the underlying rhythms of the north African diaspora to present a new realisation of this enticing, pervasive pulse.
Source: The Guardian
Golden Seams
by Midnight Roba
Released 29 January 2021
Sonder
*****
MidnightRoba's solo debut album, Golden Seams, marks the return to music, after many years away from the scene, of the artist who made her reputation as the voice of UK trip-hop trio Attica Blues,
So-named for the seminal 1972 Archie Shep album) Attica Blues released two albums, the first on Mo Wax in '98, the second, Test, Don't Test in 2000 on Columbia.
Roba has also worked with King Britt on Moksha Black 09 and As It Should Be and with Ben Marc on his upcoming release "Breathe Suite".
Golden Seams is a collection of 9 original compositions by Roba, who contributes vocals, keyboards, drum programming and drums throughout the album, but is accompanied by various other artists on individual tracks including American jazz pianist Jason Moran on "Bitter Boy".
Mixing and production is credited to former Attica Blues member Tony Nwachukwa..
Opening track "Self Doubt" is a beautifully constructed blend of intertwined vocal and instrumental lines, in a song that describes self-doubt: "In the dark of night, you creep inside / Plant your seed inside my head / Cycling thoughts, they twist within my cells I can't free myself ... Overthinking I / Why can't I let it lie? / Why?"
The mellow mood continues with "Reminded" whose smooth, low-range vocals invoke Sade, Joan Armatrading or K.D. Lang, recalling a past relationship and asks "How does it feel to you now?", and admitting "Although we didn't stand the test of time ... So grateful for all the love we shared ... Remembered, not with bitterness, but joy".
Close relationships also dominate the succeeding songs: "Don't Let This Change" ("Always you that comes to mind when I need insight"); "Shelter Within" (""Be my shelter from the storm / Hold me tight in your warmth") and "Safe With Me" ("Feel these arms around you close / Shield your heart / I won't let go").
The pace and focus of the set shifts to an entirely more urgent setting for "Bitter Boy", which is described as a song in two parts; a Mother's Plea and a Mother's Lament. Part I- a cry of the loss of innocence and the truths faced by parents of black children; the conversations that need to be had to protect them and the helplessness of not knowing if it will be enough.
The instrumental "If Time Heals" provides a gentle interlude release after the tension of "Bitter Boy" but when Roba;s vocals return for "Be Still" we find her at the top of her register singing "Be still, my beating heart / Pray you don't betray this cooled exterior".
Title track "Golden Seams" concludes Roba's triumphant return and speaks of "The rebuilding of a soul ... Don't be shy to show with pride / The mark of what you have repaired / Golden seams will trace the dreams".
If this song is a reference to her own return to performance, then dhr should indeed be proud, as golden seams are all that is in evidence.
Sun Sever Sets On Music
Vulture Prince
by Arooj Aftab
Released 23 April 2021
New Amsterdam
*****
Brooklyn based artist Arooj Aftab, who is of Pakistani family heritage, envisioned an “edgier” and “more fun” update on the fragile soundscapes of her second record, she recently told NPR. But while she was still in the middle of writing, Aftab’s world was buffeted by tragedy. At home, she lost her younger brother Maher, to whom the new album is dedicated. Outside, a world already embattled with a rising tide of hate and conflict was now struggling to grapple with a global pandemic.
To cope, Aftab reached for the familiar Urdu ghazals and poetry that populated her genre-defying 2015 debut Bird Under Water. The closest thing South Asia has to the blues, the ghazal is a musical form steeped in loss and longing—a subcontinental language of love both mortal and divine. On Vulture Prince, Aftab fuses the ghazal’s existential yearning with minimal compositions that draw from jazz, Hindustani classical, folk and—on one song—reggae to create a heartbreaking, exquisite document of the journey from grief to acceptance.
Intended as a second chapter to her debut album, Vulture Prince takes the airy minimalism and virtuosity of Bird Under Water and strips it down even further. Five of the seven songs here lack any form of percussion, propelled instead by the soft intensity of Aftab’s voice and the delicate cadence of strings and keys. Gone too is the traditional Pakistani instrumentation, replaced by a filigree of gentle violin, harp, double bass, and synths. At the center of it all is Aftab’s powerful voice, suffused in a sorrow so deep that it seeps into your bones.
Source: Pitchfork
Medieval Femme
by Fatima Al Qadiri
Released 14 May 2021
Hyperdub
*****
Fatima Al Qadiri returns to Hyperdub, with a suite inspired by the classical poems of Arab women.
Medieval Femme invokes a simulated daydream through the metaphor of an Islamic garden, at the border between depression and desire, where the present temporarily dissolves, leaving only past and future.
Since "Shaneera" her last release for Hyperdub - a homage to hometown friends and a celebration of regional queer influences - Fatima recorded the soundtrack for French Senegalese director Mati Diop’s Cannes 2019 Grand Prix winning feature Atlantics. The restrained soundtrack to Diop's supernatural storytelling, sympathetically mixes neon drones and the faint outlines of Arabesque melody, intensifying Diop’s journey between worlds, rendering the complex emotions of the film.
Medieval Femme expands on ideas instilled from Atlantics to capture a fully realised, dreamlike setting, shaded with colour and subtle friction. The theme of the album is the state of melancholic longing exemplified in the poetry of Arab women from the medieval period. Fatima seeks to transport the listener to a place of reverie and desolation, to question the line between two seemingly opposite states and rejoice in celestial sorrow.
Source: Bandcamp
Circling Time
by Kutcha Edwards
Released 9 July 2021
Wantok Music
*****
'Circling Time' is the fifth studio album from singer, songwriter and Mutti Mutti man Kutcha Edwards. The country, blues, roots, jazz and soul infused album is a powerful showcase of Kutcha's singular voice. Lyrics reflect on the singer’s past and his inspirations in the present.
‘’In telling my story, I believe I’m telling my family’s story. Within the structure of family there are members whose role it is to protect country. For others it’s to protect the memories such as photos. I believe I have been given the responsibility to protect my family’s Songline,’’ Kutcha says in an album statement. ‘’Justice, heritage, forgiveness – all are words that resonate with me deeply. It’s my role to give songs meaning so that they can continue to connect my family and all my clans to country. This album is filled with spirit. It’s this spirit that I need to share and pass on so we can begin to heal and understand what our ancestors have passed on to us… the true meaning of ‘Circling Time.’’
At the heart of the album is the single 'We Sing', featuring a chorus of nearly one hundred voices, including Archie Roach, Paul Kelly, Judith Durham, Emily Wurramarra and Emma Donovan. Each singer was recorded remotely from across the globe during 2020, but brought together in the recording, a reflection of the spirit and connection central to 'Circling Time'.
'Excuse Me Mrs. Edwards' is an equally moving moment, a musical celebration of Kutcha's mother. And the recently released single 'Singing Up Country' is a soaring ballad that celebrates Kutcha’s connection to family, his ancestors and the land
Source: 3rrr
Eldorado
by Pat Jaffe
Released 20 March 2021
Patrick Jaffe
*****
Recorded in Reykjavik, Iceland, this is a highly impressive debut album from a thoughtful and sensitive musician. Melbourne pianist Pat Jaffe, 22, has nine of his compositions here, two of them accompanied by a string quartet. To describe the album, terms such as refinement and understatement come to mind. The music is peaceful and ruminative but, under an apparently seamless surface, there are substantial nuances which are very subtle and exquisite. In the two pieces which include the Siggi String Quartet, the strings are skilfully employed to effectively amplify the pianist’s most expressive moments. Jaffe is obviously an accomplished jazz pianist and arranger, but there are few signs of conventional jazz references, such as the blues, which some consider to be essential to jazz. Instead the flavour of the music suggests the twilight zone between jazz and contemporary classical music.
Source: Weekend Australian 20 March 2021
Hope
by Nat Bartsch
Released 14 May 2021
ABC Music
****-
Melbourne pianist Nat Bartsch wrote most of the music on her new album during one of the most challenging years in living memory, encompassing the Black Summer bushfires, a global pandemic, multiple lockdowns and intense socio-political division.
Bartsch called the album Hope, and she says, spent much of 2020 navigating the space between hopefulness and hopelessness. But while the compositions may have been born out of sadness, frustration and uncertainty, the music itself exudes an air of quiet optimism.
In many ways, the new tunes are an extension of those found on Bartsch’s lullaby albums, with simple but affecting melodies pinned to gentle ostinatos. This time, though, the composer has employed strings and subtle electronics to enhance the music’s textural and emotional resonance. Listening to Bartsch’s music is akin to feeling a reassuring hand resting on one’s shoulder. It’s music that invites contemplation, and that radiates tenderness, empathy - and yes, hope.
Source: Melbourne Age 17 May 2021
Musso
by Ausecuma Beats
Released 5 November 2021
Music In Exile
*****
When you mix Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Cuba and Australia, you find yourself with many cultures. We represent Africa, sure, but also we represent diversity. That is the essence of Ausecuma Beats. We want to come together, to bring all people together to share the knowledge of what we have learnt.
We all see the hard work that lies ahead in the future. It’s not easy, and we all have different ways of thinking. But there is also something we all share, and that is humanity, and family. We have to teach our children, to help them on their journey.
This album can be defined by the song Tombo. It’s about giving respect to your teacher. All the knowledge we bring to this album has come from someone who in their turn gave it to us. If you like the music, you hear it, you dance, great! But remember, someone created this, they gave it to us, and now Ausecuma Beats are giving it to you. So we dedicate this album to our teachers.
The name of this album is Musso; it means woman. We want to dedicate this album to those who gave us life. It doesn’t matter how strong we are, how tough we are, or how lucky we are in the chances we have been given. There is always someone who is worrying about us; there is no-one who can be thinking about us more than our own mother. So this album especially is dedicated to the women in our lives, and is sending respect to all women around the world.
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Source: Bandcamp
Hand To Earth
by Australian Art Orchestra, Daniel Wilfred, David Wilfred, Sunny Kim, Peter Knight, Aviva Endean
Released 8 October 2021
Forever Living Originals
*****
With an emphasis on improvisation, the AAO explores the meeting points between disciplines and cultures, and imagines new musical forms to reflect the energy and diversity of 21st century Australia. Led by trumpeter/composer Peter Knight, the AAO explores the interstices between the avant-garde and the traditional, between art and popular music, and between electronic and acoustic approaches.
Hand to Earth is a call to open ears: eluding genre, traversing continents and fusing ancient and contemporary. At its heart are Yolgnu manikay (song cycles), a 40,000+ year-old oral tradition from South East Arnhem Land, northern Australia. These songs exist to cross vast time and space, to continuously make the continuous – known as raki, the spirit that pulls all together, all performers all listeners.
Hand to Earth developed during an Australia Art Orchestra (AAO) residency in the remote highlands of Tasmania. Yolgnu songman, Daniel Wilfred, and Korean vocalist, Sunny Kim, formed an effortless rapport; their combined vocal approaches expressing a deeply human commonality whilst also invoking raw elemental forces. Trumpeter and composer, Peter Knight draws upon his minimalist influence to create a bed of electronic atmospheres that meld beautifully with these contrasting voices. The combination of Aviva Endean and David Wilfred’s evocative sounds transport the listener to previously unimagined sonic plains. Together the ensemble wields these mystical elements with a masterful improvisational touch that AAO is famous for.
Source: Bandcamp
We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway.
by Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp
Released 2 July 2021
Bongo Joe
*****
Founded in 2006 by Vincent Bertholet (Hyperculte), the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is a large-scale project. Designed as a real orchestra, the size of the ensemble has varied over time. Now with 12 members, 14 in the past or 6 at the beginning, the ensemble has scoured the stages of Europe to demonstrate that the formula "the more the merrier" has never been more true than on stage.
Whether in prestigious festivals (Paléo Festival de Nyon, Fusion Festival, Incubate, Womad, Bad Bonn Kilbi, Jazz à la Vilette) or on the four albums released since its launch, Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp a mischievous title in homage to traditional African groups - Orchestre Tout Puissant Konono n°1, Orchestre Tout Puissant Polyrytmo etc... - and to one of the greatest dynamizers of 20th century art) shows an incredible fluidity. The band embraces the forms of its musicians while pushing them to their limits. The result is a powerful, experimental, unstable and terribly alive, organic sound.
These characteristics can be found on We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway, fifth opus of the band. Built around twelve musicians, extirpated from their respective biotope, it develops a repetitive musicality which, deployed in successive waves, creates a feeling of trance. Mixing free jazz, post punk, high life, brass band, symphonic mixtures and kraut rock, their sound only goes beyond the limits of genre. Transcendental, almost ritualistic, the music is coupled with powerful lyrics, declaimed in rage against a world that is falling apart. Adorcist, hypnotic and post-syncratic, the Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, far from Tzara's manifesto, is somewhere between Hugo Ball's phonetic psalms, a Sufi procession that turns into a brawl and a voodoo ritual, but always with a precision proper to the monomania of an asperger
Source: Bandcamp
Hope In An Empty City
by Joseph Tawadros
Released July 2021
Joseph Tawadros
*****
Born in Cairo (1984) and a resident of Sydney since he was 3 years old, Joseph Tawadros is established as one of the world’s leading oud performers and composers. A virtuoso of diversity and sensitivity, Joseph performs in concert halls worldwide and is known for his brilliant technique, deep musicianship and joyous style of performance.
His drive to push musical boundaries has led to many collaborations with significant performers and a solid repertoire of innovative, original music.
He has recorded 14 albums, hass been nominated for Young Australian of the Year (2014) and received the NSW Premier’s medal for Arts and Culture, an Order of Australia Medal (AM) for his services to music and composition (2016) and 12 nominations and achieved four ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Awards (2012, 2013 and 2014) for Best World Music Album, and as a contributor to the Ali’s Wedding soundtrack album in 2017.
Joseph is acknowledged for expanding the oud’s notoriety and acceptance in mainstream western culture and has also been recognised in the Arab world, appearing on the judging panel of the Damascus International Oud competition in 2009, and taking part in Istanbul’s first Oud festival in 2010.
Joseph has been based in London through the COVID pandemic period but the majority of "Hope In An Empty City" was recorded in New York in June 2017 with an exceptional ensemble consisting of Jordanian Layth Sidiq (violin), Scott Colley (double bass), Dan Weiss (drums) and David ‘Fuze’ Fiuczynski (fretless guitar).
This release sees Joseph broaden the parameters of traditional Arabic music by inviting a crack Jazz players in to join the oud. The result is sheer delight - an album that will be ranked among the best of East-West musical fusion music.
Three beautiful, melancholy solo tracks "Everything Is You", "Von Brady" and final cut "Ya Lel (The Night)" were recorded in London in May 2021, during lockdown. In interview with Andrew Ford (ABC The Music Show 17 July 2021), Tawadros explained that these tracks feature longer oud solos than the artist has previously allowed himself, a direct result of changes to his playing style that have occured in isolation.
The songs and album title derive from the conditions of the pandemic, and has what Tawdros describes as “a distinctive individual energy from each player as they come together creating a new sound for Joseph’s compositions, with a cinematic breadth that will take listeners on an evocative and emotional musical adventure.”
Source: Joseph Tawadros Official Site
Restless Dream
by Bob Weatherall & Halfway, William Barton
Released 27 August 2021
ABC Records
*****
Restless Dream is a collaboration between Brisbane band Halfway and Kamileroi (Northern NSW) elder Bob Weatherall, with legendary Australian yiḏaki (didgeridoo) player, William Barton.
In 2015, they began to work on the writing and recording of an album of song-stories.
Aboriginal ancestral remains and secret, sacred objects are scattered across the globe, in museums both overseas and in Australia. In Aboriginal religious law, there will be no spiritual peace until the dead have been returned to the place of their birth and received their last rites in accordance with their traditions.
This album tells the story of the Repatriation of Aboriginal Ancestral Remains. Restless Dream is a very personal story, yet it touches all Aboriginal Nations as they grapple with the task of repatriation and reburial, just as it acknowledges those who have taken on the task of uncovering the past and advocating for the Rights of the Dead.
Bob and William are both friends of Halfway.
John Willsteed of Halfway says “Bob used to come to band practices, to listen to us play, and to share the summer nights and his stories. My ears sought out Bob’s words in the dark, the stories of his work: travelling to the other side of the earth; the arrogance and thievery of scientists and protectors; the overwhelming emotion of this job. A job which chose him. A tricky job, full of negotiation, responsibility, righteous successes and disheartening failures. And he was burdened with an overwhelming question: Who is going to carry this work on?”
Writer and performer Bob Weatherall adds, “We have a responsibility to uphold the fundamental rights of the dead to return to the lands of their birth, and to be given customary last rites in accordance with their culture and beliefs. Restless Dream will help to put an end to the injustices of the past in the true spirit of reconciliation and justice.”
The album was recorded at QUT in Brisbane in 2016, by Yanto Browning (Kate Miller-Heidke, Art of Sleeping) and mixed in South Carolina by Mark Nevers (Yo La Tengo, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Lambchop, Jason Isbell).
It is a blend of songs, stories and instrumentals; like a Halfway album and then some. Restless Dream has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council and supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Source: Halfway
Heaux Tales
by Jazmine Sullivan
Released 8 January 2021
RCA Records
*****
Jazmine Sullivan appeared to be nearing the release of a follow-up to Reality Show in August 2020 with the arrival of "Lost One," a welcomed disturbance in a post-Reality Show string of featured appearances, songwriting commissions, and compilation contributions. The bare and forlorn ballad was trailed three months later by the sneering and swaggering "Pick Up Your Feelings," another lean and efficient number with lyrics that read like straight talk and vocals that raise goose bumps. Heaux Tales, classified by Sullivan as an EP, landed the following January. The first two singles fall into the sequence with preceding spoken segments that relate to the lyrics in frank, uninhibited style. Almost all of the five other proper songs are similarly introduced with women discussing matters such as sexual and materialistic desire, power dynamics, rejection, and negative body image. Sullivan and her fellow writers likewise approach each of them from the perspective related in the interludes. Heaux Tales accordingly contains some of the singer's boldest verses. Ari Lennox's poetic revelation seems to impel her through "Put It Down," a sleek and tongue-twisting ode to a partner's bedroom prowess, and "On It," a Lennox-assisted soul-blues duet in which the curse words aren't half as strong as the threats and instructions. Talk about financial insecurity leads to the downcast and aspirational "The Other Side"; just when Sullivan couldn't sound more despondent, she turns on the subtle humor with "Soccer mom gettin' wasted/Hermès tennis bracelet/Bora Bora for vacation/I'll be anything but basic," sung like the thoughts of a suburbanite who escapes her unfulfilling life by listening obsessively to Rick Ross. Sullivan also throws an unapologetic pity party with H.E.R. on "Girl Like Me," a cathartic if down way to finish it off. The one male role is filled by Anderson .Paak, who in the low-key Southern funk of "Pricetags" can't resist getting played (a scenario rather different from the tryst illustrated on .Paak's Sullivan-supported Ventura track "Good Heels").
Given the brevity and makeup -- just over half an hour, with only 27 minutes of music -- Heaux Tales doesn't have the heft of her previous releases - 2008's Fearless, 2010's Love Me Back or 2015's Reality Show - but few contemporary R&B LPs twice its length are as substantive.
Source: AllMusic
Prioritise Pleasure
by Self Esteem
Released 22 October 2021
Universal Music
*****
Throughout Prioritise Pleasure, her second album as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor searches for a feeling she can rely on. Her stomach and heart seldom align. A callous lover makes her doubt herself. “Casual” texts from an ex evidently conceal ulterior motives. She has to check out emotionally in order to climax from a zipless fuck. Marriage and babies don’t appeal, yet other people’s still make her insecure. Even the nostalgia induced by a warm summer’s day can trick her into self-sabotage.
Pacing these shifting sands is exhausting. But simply by defining them, and acknowledging how normal it is for these contradictory states to coexist (especially in the lives of women, contorted by diet culture and dating), Taylor establishes a sturdy sense of common ground – one on which the makings of a stellar pop second act are taking shape.
Prioritise Pleasure (is) an album totally confident in its strange, brilliant vision: if there is a counterforce to all that instability, Taylor implies, it is in nothing but full-throated expression.(It) is a rare big pop album after 18 months of comparatively diminutive offerings from headline female pop acts.
On the title track, Taylor breathlessly lists her shortcomings over a choppy, earthy beat: “I shrunk, moved and changed,” she sings, a state of affairs that she immediately defies with a dizzying, moving chorus, It all comes together best on I Do This All The Time, which, improbably, melds the influence of Arab Strap, Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) and Lisa Stansfield into song-of-the-year material.
Self-Esteem’s second album shows that it is never as easy as all that. It’s a powerfully intense record that some may recoil from; confrontational and liable to catch you off-guard as Taylor crisply extracts gutting truths from the general murk of self-loathing, never sugarcoating grimness nor over-egging her attempts at self-affirmation. Despite the imperative contained in the title, the album doesn’t preach but invites you in, suggesting pleasure as a collective vision born of shared confidences. It’s remarkable.
Source: The Guardian (Laura Snapes)
La Panthere Des Neiges (The Snow Panther)
by Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
Released 17 December 2021
AWAL Recordings
*****
The film (by Marie Amiguet and Vincent Munier) that this soundtrack accompanies is essentially about hidden, mysterious and shape-shifting nature. Munier, one of the world’s most renowned wildlife photographers, takes novelist Sylvain Tesson with him to the Tibetan highlands, a terrain they explore over several weeks.
The film moved Ellis so much that he felt he “wanted to do whatever it took” to compose an original score, asking Cave if he might come in for a day – “he saw the film and stayed for four”. The result is an elegant, layered and affecting collaboration, a piece of work that allows for both space and nuance to create something quite philosophical and spiritual, as searching in impulse as the documentary itself.
A haunting atmosphere hangs over every piece, conjuring something alchemical that perhaps only the natural world can inspire, with Ellis and Cave clearly exploring tension – the conflicts present between the human and the natural world, and the watched and the watcher. L’attaque des Loups frames everything – with Ellis’s violin so emblematic of the ever-moving mystery of nature, dipping and dropping before soaring skywards. The gorgeous We Are Not Alone hears Cave’s crumpled baritone extoll “I was observed and unaware” – perhaps placing himself alongside some of the wildlife Munier seeks to find. That sentiment comes up again in the glitchy, minimalist Les Cerfs, amid radiant, elegant piano, and there are meditative whispers of “Where are you? Where are you?” that permeate the prayerful antelope.
There are many playful moments amid the prayerful, as on the transporting La Bête, and there is a tender delicacy to something like Des Affûts Elliptiques or Les Nomades. The measured piano melody on La Grotte marries beautifully with the violin’s, wrapping itself around it before drifting out, complementing something like Les Princes, and its lilting grace.
Les Yaks’ strings take on a menacing, but mesmerising quality, and La Neige Tombe glows in beauty, where the violin is simply its own voice, searching through the wilderness. Les Ours hears Cave in hushed tones – suggesting a tentativeness, of not wanting to displace what has been there for so long. This suggestion weaves throughout the record, morphing into a kind of sonic sparseness, an acknowledgement that we are, in fact, interlopers on this planet of ours. The interplay between permanence and impermanence is deftly drawn, culminating in the final two pieces, Un Être Vous Obsède and L’apparition: We Are Not Alone – wistful but optimistic – bringing to mind all that we have lost, and all that will remain, with nature as our greatest teacher.
Source: Irish Times
Passing (Music from and Inspired by the Original Motion Picture)
by Devonte Hynes
Released 10 November 2021
Lakeshore Records
*****
Devonté Hynes, the man best known for his recordings under the moniker of Blood Orange, is a born collaborator, and he’s been on a real streak with that lately.
In just the past few months, Hynes has worked with artists like Turnstile, Mykki Blanco and Wet and has also been scoring films - an inherently collaborative act.
In previous months Hynes had completed the music for two movies (Queen & Slim and Mainstream) and two HBO Series (In Treatment and We Are Who We Are). Now he presents the music for the excellent Netflix film Passing, the directorial debut from the actor Rebecca Hall that stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two mixed-race women in New York in the 1920s. Thompson’s character identifies as Black, while Negga’s character lives as a white woman. The movie is adapted from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same name, published during the "Harlem Renaissance", an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater and politics, in which the author was deeply entrenched.
Haynes soundtrack unobtrusively enlivens an essentially quiet story that emerges in a series of conversations between two light-skinned African American women, childhood friends, as they recount and discover their experiences as black women able to pass as white, in a racially-charged society.
Passing, though short in duration (only 21 minutes) is a sweet listen.
Source: Stereogum
KID A MNESIA
by Radiohead
Released 29 October 2021
XL Recordings
*****
Rising to prominence with the guitar-laden sophomore album "The Bends" (1995) and its ubiquitous single "Creep", Oxford-based Radiohead reinvented themselves for the follow-up, OK Computer (1997), a prescient depiction of 21st century alienation, which was soon regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time.
This stratospheric rise precipitated burnout, withdrawal and writer's block among band members and when they regrouped in January 1999 to record again, singer and creative force Thom Yorke was under the influence of electronic music by artists such as Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. Similarly, multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood had gravitated towards modular synths, avant-garde jazz and film soundtracks while guitarist Ed O'Brien was experimenting with loop pedals, sustain and other electronic instruments.
This restless creativity and a determination to break new musical ground challenged other band members and producer Nigel Goodrich alike, and (perhaps as a result of a brotherly bond established as Oxford schoolboys) the group skirted a break-up and embraced the new influences. The bands new music amplified the more abstract aspects of OK Computer so that a taut experimentalism now become the band's primary coda.
Having completed over 20 songs in the sessions, Radiohead considered a double album, but felt the material was too dense. Instead, half the songs were kept for the next album, Amnesiac, to be released the following year.
Kid A was released 2 October 2000 - a startling new sound for a mainstream "rock" band; a release considered by many to be as consequential as Dylan's conversion to electric (Rolling Stone) or Bowie's Berlin period (Billboard), but criticised by others for its electronic elements, by comparison with Eno, Pink Floyd and others.
Amnesiac, released 30 May 2001, was at the time regarded by most critics as inferior to Kid-A, an outcome that now appears to have been influenced by the fact that it was with-held.
Now, 21 years later, the two albums have been reissued together as "Kid A Mnesia" along with a third disc of previously unreleased material from the recording sessions (titled "Kid Amnesiae") and a cassette of B-Sides (titled "Cassette Two (Some B-Sides)"). An interactive experience with music and artwork from the albums, titled "Kid A Mnesia Exhibition", is scheduled for release in November for Playstation5, MacOS and Windows10.
Unsurprisingly (given the strength of the original two discs) these supplementary materials do not add to or even enlighten the legacy of the original.
However, even though Kid A appeared frequently in many critics top 10 lists for albums of the 21st century (but rarely, Amnesiac) this reissue reminds us of how well the latter stands up by comparison.
Listening to the albums again now, the then-startling innovativeness of Kid A is matched by Amnesiac's iconic songs including "Just Like Spinning Plates", "Pyramid Song" and "Morning Bell".
Throughout the intervening years, Radiohead has continued to release innovative and absorbing work - "Hail To The Thief" (2003), "In Rainbows" (2007), "The King Of Limbs" (2011), "A Moon Shaped Pool" (2016) - all to critical and commercial acclaim. As we struggle hopefully to overcome the scourge of pandemic and contemplate the increasingly dire climate warnings from the IPCC, reality seems to have already matched, if not overtaken Radiohead's vision which, at the turn of the century, was considered by many as alarmist or even paranoid .
As it is now more than 5 years since their last studio release, the longest break in their career, it is intriguing to consider the music they might they next produce, to soundtrack our blundering global trajectory - and when?
The Power Of The Dog (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
by Jonny Greenwood
Released 17 November 2021
Invada Records / Lakeshore Records
*****
If you don’t know what Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog is about, here’s a fun experiment: Try to guess its genre based on the music by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the chief classical aficionado in the world’s most respected rock band. Made using a chamber ensemble of piano, strings, winds, brass, and more, the soundtrack is quite grand, full of noble brooding and tormented ecstasy, all in a sternly beautiful modernist mode. These 16 brief yet substantial themes run over darkly lustrous slopes and ominous plains, with each landscape seeming to spill into the other. Their uneasy but graceful unity even accommodates the occasional starchy old avant-garde outburst. It’s all very 20th century and fine and European. Now, raise your hand if you guessed the film’s a Western. No one?
The clever thing is that once you know, you can hear it everywhere in Greenwood’s score: in the cantering acoustic guitar trail laid through sharp-peaked strings on “25 Years,” in the brass that evokes a harmonica’s call and fall on “Requiem for Phil,” and even in the chromatic enfilades of “Detuned Mechanical Piano,” which suddenly seems less like Conlon Nancarrow and more like a player piano running amok in a saloon. Throughout, Greenwood uses the steeliest points of the classical canon to carve canyons and buttes into the hard, treacherous shape of a psychological metaphor.
Of course, this is not his first rodeo, in several senses. Greenwood has scored many films, particularly for Paul Thomas Anderson. Like the latter’s There Will Be Blood, Campion’s movie is also set in the American West at the moment when its physical frontiers began blurring into legend. That score superficially resembles Greenwood’s music for The Power of the Dog, though it was more busily cinematic, grandiose—and, yes, stereotypically masculine.
The Power of the Dog marks Campion’s return to cinema after 12 years and a stint in prestige TV with Top of the Lake, a chilly crime drama set in her native New Zealand. Though her filmography is merrily idiosyncratic, she’s especially known for reviving the romance of Old Hollywood period dramas with incisive contemporary characterization, and with the perspectival benefits of not being some cigar-chomping man. She also seems drawn to the pungent tidepools of humanity that form on the borderlands of the social and the wild.
In The Piano, Campion’s 1993 breakthrough, a woman with a daughter marries a landowner in a remote part of mid-19th-century New Zealand. In The Power of the Dog, a woman with a son marries a rancher in a remote part of early-20th-century Montana, unleashing the havoc of feeling into the manful, stunted world he inhabits with his brother. Throughout, Greenwood’s music mirrors the counterintuitive sensuousness and sophistication of Campion’s casting (extra credit if you guessed Benedict Cumberbatch as the lead cowboy); he cultivates a consistent sense of disturbed introversion through the plosive box step of “Prelude,” the reaching brass tendrils of “The Ravine,” and other tinctures of wonder and dread.
In a way, Radiohead have always been a postmodern prog-rock band, with sleeker taste and different tech than their ’70s forebears, but with a similar interest in smuggling Stravinsky and Messiaen into popular music. Greenwood must be the only artist who has both headlined Coachella and collaborated with Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer whose turbulent tone clusters he often evokes in The Power of the Dog. When those shivers course through the strings, it might be the cry of night-veiled coyotes or a wail at the edge where one world ends and another begins. That double image perfectly exemplifies Greenwood’s own synthesis of pulp-Western brawn and refined symphonic emotion.
Source: Pitchfork
Black To The Future
by Sons Of Kemet
Released 14 May 2021
Impulse! Records
*****
"Black To The Future" is the major new album from The Sons of Kemet, arguably the UK's premier creative musical force of the moment (and remarkably just one of bandleader/saxophonist Shabakja Hutchings' three musical projects - he also fronts Shabaka and the Ancestors and is a member of The Comet Is Coming, performing under the stage name King Shabaka).
“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.”
Since their 2013 debut LP Burn, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene - deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music.
On Black to the Future, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet are at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message - welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s Your Queen Is a Reptile) to further contextualise the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory.
If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem - a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn't meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it's descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that's more than what you'd have if you considered the music or the line separately.”
All songs here are laden with great depth of purpose and content. Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks in the Bandcamp entry for this album, which SunNeverSetsOnMusic reccommends to you: best read as you listen to each track.
Shout Out! To Freedom
by Nightmares On Wax
Released 29 October 2021
Warp Records
*****
Sliding into middle-age, Nightmares on Wax hits upon a hot streak – aided and abetted by the considerable talents of Greentea Peng, OSHUN, Haile Supreme, and Shabaka Hutchings
At fifty-one years-old, Leeds-born George Evelyn has now been releasing trip-hop and techno records as Nightmares on Wax for thirty whole years. Influenced at first by the b-boy and rap scene of his home city, he was an early signee to Warp Records and soon became a key figure in their glitchy rise to dominance.
But while Aphex Twin and Autechre pursued more challenging and propulsive sounds, Evelyn plunged towards far warmer territory. With records like 1999’s Carboot Soul, a nostalgic, crate-digging soundtrack to many a toke, he became a legend in the downtempo scene to follow.
As anyone who’s dabbled in a ten hour Lo-Fi-Beats-To-Study-To mix on YouTube knows, music which is laidback to the point of sedation can feel blissful and utterly inconsequential in equal measure. Even a craftsman like Evelyn began the last decade somewhat drifting, releasing albums which sounded soothing to the point of snoozing. But it’s a joy to announce that Nightmares On Wax is on something of a hot-streak. It began with 2019’s Shape The Future where he adopted the Avalanches-Gorillaz approach of bringing in a gamut of guest-singers and MCs, a formula he returns to with even greater success here.
The press which has surrounded this latest album emphasises that it was made by a rejuvenated creator. For him, the pandemic came at the end of ten years of relentless touring and a cancer scare. Like many people, the 2020 lockdowns brought Evelyn a chance for pause and self-reflection. He began writing with the focus of a man working on his final testament. The album which came from those sessions does indeed sound like one made by an artist deeply engaging and in love with his own music again. Frankly, Shout Out! To Freedom.... is a joy to listen to, packed as it is with warm tones, a boat-load of guest-stars, and an eclectic sound which dips between dub, rap, and house.
The guest stars certainly help keep the mellow vibe consistently fresh, from the deep-voiced neo-soul of OSHUN to the repeated presence of New York roots-reggae artist Haile Supreme, who brings the ghost of Curtis Mayfield to closer ‘Up To Us’.
Less a lockdown record and more a post-lockdown record, various lyricists return to themes of freedom – physical and otherwise. Singing about 5G and fluoride in the water, buzzy Londoner Greentea Peng skirts around questionably conspiratorial themes on ‘Wikid Satellites’, but the sound of her voice is such a harmonious match for Evelyn’s horns and pianos that, together, they even make libertarianism sound sexy.
The star of the show though is London saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, who totally hijacks ‘3D Warrior’ with a subterranean groove which turns the album briefly into a Comet Is Coming LP. That’s not to diminish the skills of Evelyn though, who is still more than capable of bringing the goods without assistance, as he shows on early highlight ‘Imagineering’, a track which takes you on a journey straight to the Cuba of Buena Vista Social Club, but hands you a couple of brownies for the trip.
The song and the whole album are testament to the fact that – even with largely-instrumental, crate-digging music – when the creator is making their songs with a smile, you’ll feel it. Oh, you’ll feel it.
Source: The Quietus
Devil's Workshop
by DJ Format
Released 30 April 2021
Project Blue Book
*****
"Devil's Workshop' came to my attention when I heard "Brainstorm" a song that places a transatlantic-accented male (think Cary Grant) introduction ahead of a rock-god's vocal dirge "I'm so tired and worn out/ I feel like quitting the game and gettin' out ...". It sounds like a Doors song from another dimension, an arresting introduction to a thoroughly enjoyable set that finds a comfortable balance between nostalgic indulgence and contemporary innovation. Unlike DJ Format's previous work, which has been frequently in conjunction with long time collaborator Abdominal, typically as an MC spitting rap monologues over driving beats, he has created an entire universe of mood and sound here that seems as if it was recorded on analogue tape in a seedy Detroit basement in 1967., but of course is the product of the best of modern studio techniques
At heart, this is a soulful jazzy album, in which spoken word is treated as another instrument amid rich orchestral arrangements. There's no particular narrative or message to deliver, but ther's a definate groove that permeates the entire project.
The closest comparisons that spring to mind are in the mix of humor and creative rock parody of the early 70's by the likes of Frank Zappa and Flo and Eddy.
Throughout, the music is intense and psychedelic but generally remains mellow as tracks flow seamlessly one to the next. It's all a bit over the top in the old-school manner of prog-rock which results in it seeming somehow familiar, an amalgamation of the music of a past era brought up to date with the sensibilities of a creative, contemporary DJ and the techniques of the modern studio.
Sun Sever Sets On Music
I'll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute To The Velvet Underground & Nico
by Various Artists
Released 1 October 2021
Verve
*****
When it was initially released in 1967, The Velvet Underground & Nico sounded less like an album ahead of its time than music that had appeared out of time and out of nowhere. There was some context for the sinister but dreamy pop of "Sunday Morning," the tough R&B of "There She Goes Again," and the Teutonic girl group accents of "Femme Fatale," but the dark themes, ferocious attack, and moral ambiguities of numbers like "I'm Waiting for the Man," "Venus in Furs," and "Heroin" were strong meat and without precedent in rock & roll. Brian Eno's famous quote about the album has become one of rock writing's greatest cliches - "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band" - but it does speak to the fact that the few who embraced the album did so deeply and passionately.
If time and changing tastes have allowed the record to evolve from a curiosity to a widely acknowledged classic, its style and personality remain unique. Producer Hal Willner, who took the tribute album to the level of an art form with projects like Amarcord Nino Rota, Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films, and Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, had long planned to pay homage to the Velvets' debut, and it was a project he was working on at the time of his death in April 2020. I'll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico, doesn't play like a grand conceptual reimagining of the original album's themes in the manner of Willner's most ambitious releases. Instead, he allowed each artist the space to explore one of the LP's songs and find in it what they will, and the strength of I'll Be Your Mirror is how the performances often find a middle ground between the formative vision of the Velvet Underground and the viewpoint of the artist taking their turn with the music.
Bobby Gillespie and Thurston Moore's cover of "Heroin" is more of an homage than a reimagining, and Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen approach "Femme Fatale" as if they think they can out-gloom Nico, but Andrew Bird and Lucius offer a remarkable take on "Venus in Furs" that strips away its noise without compromising its tension, Courtney Barnett takes the prettiness from "I'll Be Your Mirror" and makes it sound all the more organic and heartfelt, and Matt Sweeney and Iggy Pop take a deep dive into the maelstrom with "European Son" that actually outworks the original's terminal pulse.
More than 50 years after its release, it seems there isn't much new to be said about The Velvet Underground & Nico, and I'll Be Your Mirror doesn't challenge that notion. But it does allow a number of worthy artists a chance to see themselves reflected in these songs, and it's a labor of love that's engaging and from the heart.
Source: AllMusic
Mirage (EP)
by Glass Beams
Released 25 June 2021
Research Records
*****
Recorded at the beginning of 2020, Mirage is the first release from the Melbourne artists Glass Beams, comprising four compositions that blend a profusion of sounds and influences.
Glass Beams (whose true identity appears not to have yet been revealed) says:"I was looking for new energy & inspiration to write a bunch of new music. I recalled a childhood memory of my parents and I watching a DVD they had bought: ‘Concert For George’ (a tribute concert for George Harrison from the Beatles). George’s long time collaborator and friend Ravi Shanka put an Indian Orchestra together for that concert, and even though I hadn’t even started playing music at the time that I watched this, the sounds really stuck with me.
My father was born in India and moved here when he was 17, and after recalling this memory I decided to look up musicians from my father’s hometown and surrounding areas. I found a wealth of Indian classical, disco and pop music that formed the building blocks for this record. As soon as I had that vision of what I wanted to write and why I wanted to write it, the songs just flowed out really."
The album's opener and title "Mirage" arrives with a coiling vocal mantra that conspires with a sliding bassline and transcendent synthwork, reminiscent of early 70’s prog jams, yet inverted and futuristic.
"Taurus" is a brisk arrangement, steeped with spaghetti-western elements and space-jazz to pave the way for the agile "Kong".
Rife with psych-fusion guitar phrases and instrumentation, "Kong" unfolds like a forecast lysergic voyage.
The finale "Rattlesnake" nudges the serpent with intergalactic scales and spellbinding riffs.
We may not know much about the enigmatic Glass Beams but "Mirage" is one epic inauguration, leaving the listener with more questions than answers.
Source: Bandcamp
What We Call Life
by Jordan Rakei
Released 17 September 2021
Ninja Tune
*****
.
"What We Call Life" is influential Australian expat artist Jordan Rakei's 4th album, and is a masterful followup to 2019's "Origin", which featured in SunNeverSetsOnMusic's June 2019 playlist.
I's a personal, introspective album that deals with family life, separation and relationships but it is a;lso enjoyable as a soulful, immersive sequence.
Its lyrics concern the lessons that the New Zealand-born, Australia(Brisbane)-raised, and London-based artist learned about himself during therapy, a journey that began two years ago when he started reading about the ‘positive psychology’ movement. These themes manifest on songs like lead single “Family”, which Rakei says is “the most personal” he’s ever been with his lyrics. “I wanted to hit my vulnerability barrier and be really honest. It’s about my parents’ divorce in my mid-teens but still having love for them no matter what,” he explains.
On ‘What We Call Life’ Rakei dives deeper into his sound world, merging electronic with acoustic, and rugged grooves with ambient atmospheres, to create something richer, more detailed, and more textural than before. Rakei, already a practitioner of meditation and mindfulness, was curious about the potential of using therapy for further self-discovery. During the process, he began to learn more about his behaviour patterns and anxieties, and addressed his long-standing irrational phobia of birds – a fear often associated with the unpredictable and the unknown, and something explored in the album’s creative direction and visuals. “As we worked through it, it made me realise I would love to talk about the different lessons I learned from therapy in my music: about my early childhood, my relationship with my parents and siblings, becoming independent in London, being in a new marriage, understanding how my marriage compares to the relationship my parents had”, Rakei says.
Source: Bandcamp
What's Real? (EP)
by JK Group
Released 11 October 2021)
La Scape
*****
JK GROUP IS:
A collective of forward-thinking "jazz" musicians from Australia. We owe our thanks and gratitude to the founding mothers and fathers of the music people call jazz. We respect and continuously study their legacy whilst embracing our current surroundings in making music that honestly reflects our time and space.
THIS RECORD IS:
The second batch of tunes we hit record on, though the sessions could not have been more different to the first. Where The Young Ones was meticulously planned, this recording was made on a whim as the busy touring musicians happened to line up their respective touring schedules at the same time. Many of the songs were just sketches, musical experiments that were leaping off out of the territory of the first record and pushing the sound in a number of different directions at once. Some tunes were still in progress right up until the moment of recording, and one was written on the spot in the studio. There was no focus or talk of outcomes for a future release. As with all experiments, some songs did not make the cut. But the selections that have made it onto this vinyl really capture the magic and spontaneous energy of the session with the musicians in full flight, in sync. We welcome Phil Stroud to the collective to offer up a rework of one of these tracks, and further deepen the dialogue between jazz and electronic music.
THIS MUSIC IS:
Conceived, written, recorded, and printed on land that historically belongs to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge the traditional owners and pay our respects to Elders, past, present, and emerging.
THIS LABEL IS:
Contributing to healing our natural world through planting trees and reforesting land back to rainforest in Australia in conjunction with Reforest NOW.
Source: Bandcamp
For the first time
by Black Country, New Road
Released 5 February 2021
Ninja Tune
*****
Black Country, New Road have created a storm of excitement in the UK music media with the release of "For the first time", their debut. UK indie music website The Line of Best Fit described the album as "dense, beautiful and bursting with maturity, atonality and harmony". There's a raw, almost visceral quality to the music that is partly attributable to the pervasive influence of klezmer music throughout, but particularly in "Instrumental" and "Opus", the opening and closing tracks respectively. The music has been captured in a clean, open mix that highlights drums, vocals but clearly separates all other instruments.
Formed in 2018 following the disollution of a similar band "Nervous Conditions' following sexual assault charges against one of its members, this young, seven-piece comprises Isaac Wood - vocals, guitar, Tyler Hyde - bass guitar, Lewis Evans - saxophone, Georgia Ellery - violin, May Kershaw - keyboards, Charlie Wayne - drums, Luke Mark - guitar.
Black Country, New Road mixes the spirit of free jazz, the attitude of punk and the lyrical freedom of prog-rock. This wide setting should allow them to develop without constraint: only time and future releases will reveal whether this is blessing or curse. However, having studied music from an easrly age, the band members is greatly are reportedly eager to move on to a follow up and based on the evidence of this debut, is they will likely make exciting choices.
SEIS
by Mon Laferte
Released 8 April 2021
Universal Music, Mexico
*****
Chilean singer and songwriter Mon Laferte is no stranger to change. She has embraced it in so many areas of her life and work that it seems an aesthetic principle. Early on, she recorded and performed as Monserrat Bustamente, a straight-up Latin pop singer. In 2007, she immigrated to Mexico and started playing rock. After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2009 and beating it, she changed her name to Mon Laferte, and began recording in an indie rock style that netted her a Latin Grammy for 2015's Volume 1. 2017's hit La Trenza showcased her embrace of Latin American song traditions in a modern recontextualization. 2019's Norma, an intensely personal album, focused on heartbreak through different dance rhythms with wildly contrasting instrumentation and arrangements including 1940s big band mambo, rockist psychedelic cumbia, and '70s boleros and salsa.
Seis, her sixth album, is rooted in Mexican folk traditions. After the onset of the pandemic, Laferte moved to Tepoztlán. She saw a documentary on the life of iconic ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, who spent her final years in the bucolic town. Vargas' music spurred Laferte to explore a wide range of Mexican styles in her writing. These 14 songs run the gamut from rancheras and mariachis to boleros, bandas, and corridos tumbados. Laferte bookends the set with contrasting versions of her harrowing commentary on gender violence titled "Se Me Va A Quemar El Corazón." On the first, her grainy, angry, yet vulnerable vocal is accompanied only by guitar and bajo sexto. She revisits her "La Mujer" in a duo with one of her earliest and greatest inspirations, Mexican pop/rock icon Gloria Trevi. Laferte hasn't sung it in years; she came to consider its lyrics too dysfunctional. Here she not only rewrote them and revamped the music, it is now a feminist manifesto adorned in a snaky bolero, saturated in reverbed guitars and brass. The women's contrasting voices are resplendent in immediacy, passion, and authority. "Esta Morra No Se Vende" is a bouncing corrido, while "Aunque Te Mueras Por Volver" weds theatrical bolero to classy pop with a rock band and an orchestral string section. The single "Que Se Sepa Nuestro Amor" is sung as an a unabashedly romantic ranchera with the legendary Alejandro Fernandez; the duo are accompanied by the all-female Mujeres del Viento Florido. The meld of Laferte's and Fernandez's voices delivers it with the conviction of a treasured standard. While "Se Ma Vida" is a slow-burning corrido, the closing version of "Se Me Va A Quemar El Corazón" is offered in a heartbreaking collaboration with La Arrolladora Banda El Limon fronted by singer Esaúl García. Seis stands with Norma as a milestone in Laferte's career. Each track is delivered with the consistency, care, honesty, and obsessive attention to detail that Laferte's poetic lyrics and melodies require. The humble presentation here contrasts with her songwriting ambition in what amounts to a truly visionary work of popular art.
Source: AllMusic
Irene
by Izy
Released 26 March 2021
Hopestreet Recordings
*****
Izy, pronounced eye-zee, is the world’s first Far North Queensland neo-soul supergroup, and their time has come. How did this improbable band come together? Three sensitive boys, seeking shelter from the cyclones and the heat and the homicidal jellyfish found themselves hanging out, swapping shifts in a music shop, jamming in a blues bar, selling ukeleles and distilling clandestine dragonfruit gin.
So reads Izy's Bandcamp bio - and hey, who am I to say it ain't so?
These days, Izy is based in Melbourne and although “Irene” is their debut album and follows the young band's impressibe debut sngle "Moon", released in October 2019.
Izy already shows great maturity, and appears destined to write an important chapter in the story of Australia neo-soul revival.
The band describes "Irene" as a 10 song collection of raw neo-soul grooves, rich vocal harmony and subtle jazz guitar. A stripped back, simple recording of a band killing it in a room. There’s a deep understanding of the canon of soul music on display here, with echoes of D’Angelo and Curtis Mayfield, but also a uniquely individual sensibility, rarely so clearly articulated on a debut record.
Deeply connected to their roots and their families, both the band and the album are named after Irene, Guitarist Ryo Montgomery’s paternal grandmother; an important source of support and comfort in the band’s formative years.
The band members have grown up surrounded by an eclectic range of mnusics and cultures. Ryo, bassist Warrigo Tyrrell and drummer Maru Nitor Zamatarro each cut their teeth young, playing with their parents in three very different musical families. Ryo grew up shifting between his mother’s home in rural Japan and his father’s blues bar in Cairns where he watched legends of guitar ply their trade and did his first shows. Maru was playing guiro in his parent’s cumbia band Los Caracoles before he turned five. Warrigo grew up jamming on Shadows covers and Aboriginal protest rock with his fathers and brothers, members of the Kalkadoon and Waanyi nations. Heritage is important to Izy and they bring these musical and cultural influences together proudly.
They describe themselves as "humble and hard working Gen-Z virtuosos who love their grandmas, representing an optimistic post-colonial version of Australian identity and music".
Ignorance
by The Weather Station
Released 5 February 2021
Fat Possum
*****
Tamara Lindeman’s shimmering breakup songs double as a rallying cry for our ravaged planet on this multilayered, slowly unfolding record.
Art often seeks to wring beauty out of pain - always at the risk of mawkishness or cliche. The Weather Station’s fifth album is an undertaking that succeeds - many times over.
It’s the sort of record whose victories deserve to be accompanied with trumpet fanfares: how Toronto-based Tamara Lindeman quietly revolutionises an old, familiar trope – the pop album about heartbreak, co-starring piano and strings – and makes it a rallying cry for our times; how she takes overdone old 80s beats and dusts them with the barest shimmers of jazz.
Such is the will-o’-the-wisp quality of Ignorance that it feels vulnerable to the glare of forensics. You don’t want to break open the music box in order to describe its workings. And yet: here is a left-field pop record full of muted fury and despair; one that never howls outright, but trickles out emotion in careful dropperfuls – in a partial vignette here, or a quiet epiphany there.
This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to
On Subdivisions, Lindeman hits the road. “Got in the car, and the cold metallic scent of snow caught in my throat as I reached out to turn on the radio,” she sings, just one of a handful of times this former folk musician and child actor resembles Bruce Springsteen. A song such as Atlantic finds her breathless: “‘My god,’ I thought, ‘what a sunset’,” she exhales. Tried to Tell You watches someone else’s pain closely. “I will not help you not to feel, to tell yourself it was not real,” she croons.
Thanks to a proclivity for acoustic instruments, previous Weather Station albums have found Lindeman making folk-derived songs. Here, she embraces synths, strings and percussion, making borderline soft rock sprinkled with the kind of intuitive, expressive instrumentation – courtesy of eight musicians – that Bill Callahan has brought to his most recent records. Talk Talk is an inevitable reference point, as well as fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell; producer Marcus Paquin (Arcade Fire) deserves a shout out. But Lindeman can sometimes feels like Christine and the Queens’ bookish older sister too.
This is an album whose bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to. A percolating pop tune, Separated, lists all the distances growing between two lovers – because of “all the work we had to do”, and “the things you thought you knew”.
Lindeman’s mild tones dissolve into a soprano whisper to confide “my stupid desire to heal every rift, every cut”. Even more galling, her other half sees no wound at all. The dissonant strings speak the pain the lyrics stop short of voicing.
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But even though there are divorce court proceedings on the stark piano ballad Trust, Ignorance is no ordinary breakup album. Whatever the people in her songs might be feeling about others, this is an artist who superimposes a second breakup on top of the first: anguish at the wanton evisceration of the natural world.
Weather stations are there to log the hard evidence in the mercury; to record the very real, very slow crawl of the coming apocalypse. And so Separated is not just about two people increasingly sleeping back-to-back; it’s about everyone carrying on as normal when we need radical, systemic change, immediately. It’s about the pain of gaps: between those who taste the emergency, and those – often beloved, sometimes just jerks on the internet – who do not.
The album’s opening track, Robber, sounds at first as if it’s describing the aftermath of a burglary. “The robber don’t hate you,” Lindeman advises. These are sound words for anyone traumatised by a break-in. Gradually, though, the song reveals itself to be a dissection of an economy based on theft – and our complacency or connivance in it. “He had permission,” Lindeman recounts coolly, as strings scythe around her, “permission by words, permission of thanks, permission of laws, permission of banks, white tablecloth dinners, convention centres – it was all done real carefully,” she seethes.
Her first weapon against all of this is exposing the lie we live every day – that everything might be all right. Her other superpower is feeling. Lindeman is eloquently undone by the flight of a bird on Parking Lot, by the blood-red of the sunset. Just as she urges someone not to deny their pain on Tried to Tell You, she spends Heart laying her own out. “I don’t have the heart to conceal my love when I know it is the best of me,” she declares: to a lover, to the world we are losing.
Source: The Guardian
Fly or Die Live
by Jamie Branch
Released 21 May 2021
International Anthem
*****
Within the first few moments of delving into the musical landscape of Jaimie Branch’s FLY or DIE LIVE, even the most adept listener can mistake the masterfully produced live album for a serenely tailored studio recording. It takes time to adjust and embrace the realization, leaving one with a morsel of envy for the crowd who were able to experience Branch’s music washing over them like gentle waves of a sonic river without any form of distance and barrier.
FLY or DIE LIVE was recorded in Zürich, Switzerland in January 2020, less than two months before the world was stopped in international lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can hear the confidence of Branch’s band, playing without fear or any semblance of anxiety, a marker of the past and the freedom of a pre-pandemic live performance.
The album opens with the title track from the band’s 2019 album Bird Dogs of Paradise. Drummer Chad Taylor opens the show (and both albums) with precise, spiritually potent mbira along with Lester St. Louis’ lullaby-like cello and Jason Ajemian’s artfully blended bass. The three bond as instruments become seamlessly interwoven, creating a melodic quilt of chimes and evenly dispersed rhythmic tones. Halfway through the song, Branch enters with sensual, drawn-out tonal
patterns that blanket the bright percussive performance.
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Things then move to “Prayer for Amerikkka pt. 1 & 2”, also the second track of the aforementioned album. The song has a moody, blues-based style with a heavy, eerie drumbeat under walking bass. Branch speaks to the crowd and introduces the song: “We wrote this song about a year ago. Shit was real fucked up at home and it’s still real fucked up. In fact, it may be much much worse…” The trumpeter’s show may have been a part of the pre-pandemic era, but it did not
give any airs about being post-racial. Branch’s song seems like a foreshadowing of the George Floyd murder, captioning the mounting pressure-cooker of America’s unrest. Branch and the band moan as she belts out lyrics with passion and frustration before moving into equally impassioned trumpet playing.
The band plays two more songs from the album, “Lesterlude” and “Twenty-Three n Me, Jupiter Redux”, before breaking off with “Reflections of a Broken Sea”. The song highlights a bit of Branch’s avant garde composing, disjointed circular rhythms bending and flowing on and off syncopation. “Sun Tines” opens with mbira once again, then the rhythm section before they all fall silent to allow Branch to play a spaced-out experimental solo. She adds echo effects, playing calmly and romantically, dancing with the silence of the room, before the band slowly begins to reintegrate itself back into the performance.
Branch and her band perform 19 songs. She introduces the musicians and begins to wind down the set on the 18th, “Love Song”. Ending with energetic, uptempo jazz on “Theme Nothing”, the band shows no signs of exhaustion after a two-hour set.
Branch is a special musician. She is charming, humorous, strong and an extremely talented trumpeter. The chemistry of her band is admirable. Branch knows how to curate a setlist to evoke the maximum amount of artistry, social justice and jovial fanfare.
Source: Feminist Jazz Review
Menneskekollekitvet
by Lost Girls
Released 26 March 2021
Smalltown Supersound
*****
Norwegian duo Lost Girls, artist and writer Jenny Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden, release their first album after collaborating for more than ten years. Volden has been playing regularly in Hval's live band for more than a decade, and their duo project goes back to an acoustic collaborative album from 2012, using the moniker Nude on Sand. Instead of resurrecting the previous band, Hval and Volden opted for a fresh start for their 2018 EP Feeling, taking nomenclatural inspiration from the 2006 graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and comics artist Melinda Gebbie.
For their first LP, Hval and Volden booked an actual studio (Øra studios, Trondheim, Norway), which they had never done before. Recording sessions took place in March 2020, even if they felt like the material wasn’t really ready for recording. This left a lot to improvisation, and so Menneskekollektivet was created in-between set structures and the energy of collective exploration.
Perhaps this is what makes Menneskekollektivet unique: The quality of trying something, to see if the structures fit. In a way this is a more physical version of what Hval has been exploring lyrically over the past decade in her solo work. The title is Norwegian and translates to human collective, which adds to the feeling of a recording made as part of a strange, improvised performance project.
The music flickers; between club beats and improvised guitar textures; between spoken word and melodic vocal textures; between abstract and harmonic synth lines. Throughout the piece, Volden’s guitar and Hval’s voice come across as equals, wandering, wondering, meandering. Sharing the space.
The writing process began with short, more concise forms, but then Volden brought in experiments with seasick synth loops and drum machines, and the work went off on a longer durational tangent, inspired by chance and intuition. This allowed for an unfinished, raw feel, and the song structures and words were expanded and improvised in the studio. Hval says: “There are lots of late night ideas at work, begun as half-asleep, slack vocal takes on top of something really strange Håvard has sent me. We both record before we know what we’re actually doing.”
Lyrics has a peculiar place on Menneskekollektivet. Hval felt she couldn’t write anything for this music that really mattered, and she decided to concentrate on words as performed situations, sometimes just talking into the mic, sometimes finding rhymes or musical phrases and using them like a bot or music software. Yet they relate to each other, like the many repetitions of “making me in opposition” on Love, Lovers build emotional complexity like a club track would build intensity with its drum machine pattern. Volden’s guitar somehow works in the same mode, building intensity with lines that are sometimes jarring, sometimes harmonic.
In this way, Lost Girls leave both form and content, music and words, suspended in a piece in the puzzle of human performance. A human performance that resembles a rave party, but after the party’s over and the music has been switched off. What is left is a collective inner monologue: The ravers have forgotten that the night can end, and as the sun rises, they slowly turn to stone, or melt down to water, or they are in the middle of some other metamorphosis that is more than just coming down.
Source: AllMusic
Love Or (I Heard You Like Heartbreak)
by Prequel
Released 19 March 2021
Rhythm Section Records
*****
"Love or (I Heard You Like Heartbreak)" is Melbourne-based Prequel's impressive debut album, which follows a series of impressive singles and EP's over recent years, appreciated by a dedicated and growing on-line fanbase.
In an interview with Purple Sneakers Prequel said that he didn't set out to make a record about love, but recognising that his strength lies in sampling and to break a period of writer's block without any new records at hand, he went back to his own collection, much of which was purchased when he was a teenager. "The suject (of love)... just sort of kept coming up."he says. "So I wanted to have an album with a narrative, with not only my mood and my style of producing, or the “Prequel sound” I guess, if there is one, but I wanted to have it flow as a story, as a narrative, and I wanted it to flow musically. I wanted it to encompass all of my influences".
In a way, this album reminds me of "The Reels"1982 release "Beautiful" (originally released on the low-budget label, K-Tel). They applied early (Fairlight) synth pop instrumentation and a deeply ironic, world-weary sensibility to a selection of middle-of-the-road songs, years before David Lynch's adoption of similar similar homage in "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks", and decades before the likes of Lana Del Ray. Reels' drummer Stephan Fiddock has said the the notion for the album came from his practice, as a boy, of listening to 45's at 33 to 'get the chords'.
Prequel is supported by:
Tamil Rogeon (Strings)“When Love Is New” & “I Tried to Tell Him”
Horatio Luna (Bass) “I Tried to Tell Him”
Josh Kelly (Sax ) “I’ll Never Stop Loving You”
Javier Fredes (Percussion) “I Tried to Tell Him” & "Unaware of Love”
Cazeaux O.S.L.O (Vocals) “Love Is"
Collapsed In Sunbeams
by Arlo Parks
Released 29 January 2021
Transgressive Records
*****
She may be saddled with being the Voice of a Generation, but the London singer-songwriter’s warm, conversational and observant debut justifies the hype.
It’s hard to know how to feel about the state of Arlo Parks’ career. The obvious response is to be hugely impressed: here she is, at 20 years old, surfing a wave of critical acclaim, the release of her debut album heralded by vast billboards around London and what’s effectively her own TV special, courtesy of Amazon. Not bad for someone who was hopefully uploading their demos to the BBC’s Introducing site a couple of years ago. Then again, it’s a hard heart that doesn’t also feel a twinge of pity. The poor woman has been stuck with the Voice of a Generation tag, a surefire way of lumbering an artist with expectations anyone would struggle live up to: “a term that can create problems for anybody,” as Bob Dylan – who should know – once put it.
Still, you can see how it’s ended up appended to Parks’ name with such regularity and despite her protestations. She calls herself an empath – someone deeply attuned to other people’s feelings – and has been lauded for writing about “sexual identity, queer desire, mental health, body image”, according to one profile. You read a lot of fans “speaking their pain” in the comments section below her YouTube videos. The problem is that it makes Parks sound painfully worthy, part of that recent eat-your-greens strain of pop that comes with a sense of earnest moral obligation attached: music that’s sold to you on the basis of what it stands for rather than how it sounds. And that would be a desperately unfair interpretation of Collapsed in Sunbeams, an album that needs no special pleading.
Lyrics are clearly Parks’ thing – so much so that she opens the album with a burst of spoken-word poetry. But as you listen, you realise she could be singing almost anything, and Collapsed in Sunbeams would still work. She has a lovely voice: airy, natural and unshowy, with a London-accented conversational tone that occasionally recalls a less flippant Lily Allen. Her writing with collaborator Gianluca Buccellati has an unhurried melodic fluency – Green Eyes and Eugene drift charmingly along – and they’ve hit on a sound that works: commercial without submitting to current pop cliches or blandness. There are crisp, looped breakbeats and subtle shadings of vintage soul, as when an organ rises gently into the mix on Too Good. Reverb-heavy electric guitar ranges from funk riffs to icy, Radiohead-esque figures to the heaving shoegazey textures of Caroline and crackly samples that betray her love of Portishead’s Dummy. Stripped of its vocals, the bass-heavy For Violet might have slotted neatly on to Mo’ Wax’s mid-90s trip-hop compilation Headz.
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The lyrics, meanwhile, tackle distinctly 21st-century anxieties. An lot of pop in recent years has attempted to deal with body image, mental-health issues or problems with sexual identity; so much so that you don’t have to be a terrible cynic to make out the sound of boxes being ticked. That isn’t the case here: Parks writes with a diaristic tone that suggests lived experience rather than a self-conscious desire to tackle the burning issues of the day. She has a great turn of phrase – “wearing suffering like a spot of bling”; “the air was fragrant and heavy with our silence”, “shards of glass live in this feeling” – and a desire to be, as she puts it, “both universal and hyper-specific”.
If you were minded to nitpick, you might suggest that she’s rather better at the latter than the former, that the broad brushstrokes lean a little on self-help platitudes of the “you gotta trust how you feel inside” variety. Her real skill lies in observing small, telling details: the depressed friend whose overload of makeup leaves her looking “like Robert Smith”; the “artsy couple” she watches arguing in the street on Caroline, “strawberry cheeks flushed with defeated rage”; or in the sudden switch to a blunt, colloquial tone. “You know when college starts again you’ll manage,” she counsels a friend struggling to live at home on For Violet. “I wish your parents had been kinder to you,” she tells an ex whose struggle with her sexuality scuppers their relationship.
Arlo Parks: ‘When you approach the world with vulnerability and openness, people return that energy.’
Arlo Parks on her superpowered empathy: 'It's hard, but it's opened my heart'
Read more
But then, why would you be minded to nitpick with a debut this good? It appears to announce the arrival of a major new talent, though you never know: the path of an artist stuck with the Voice of a Generation tag is fraught with pitfalls. You can succumb to self-importance, you can discover your skills lay in describing a specific moment in time and struggle to move on. But that’s the future, something that currently feels more imponderable than ever. Right now, Collapsed in Sunbeams feels like a warm breeze in the depths of a miserable winter..
Source: Alex Pedris, The Guardian
Not Your Muse
by Celeste
Released 29 January 2021
La Sape Records
*****
"Not Your Muse" is the sensational debut album for Celeste, this American-born, British-based singer and songwriter, who won the Brit Rising Star Award and the BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year awards in 2019, and was named the number-one predicted breakthrough act in an annual BBC poll of music critics, Sound of 2020.
"Not Your Muse" suggests that the hype has been warranted and the comparisons with Amy, Jorja and Adele appear warranted.
All songs are Celeste originals, with most cowritten by LA-based British songwriter Jamie Hartman.
'Not Your Muse' is a collection of powerful, self-assured songs, that command attention from the opener "Ideal Woman" in which she decares
"I may not be your ideal woman
The heaven in your head
The one that's gonna save you
From all your discontent
May not be your ideal woman
The freedom that you'd get
Please don't mistake me
For somebody who cares"
With that attitude and a voice to die for, I have a feeling that we're going to become very familiar with many more of these songs.
Far In
by Helado Negro
Released 22 October 2021
4AD
*****
Whenever Roberto Carlos Lange puts pen to paper, his whole world stops, then rotates in an infinite loop. Time stands still as he romanticizes his inner fantasies. For over a decade now, Lange’s work as Helado Negro has incorporated more of these fantasies, constantly metamorphosizing to incorporate the frozen world he’s plucking from.
For many, his welcoming acoustic-based 2019 classic. This Is How You Smile was the introduction to his world. Helado Negro’s cosmic inflections have always pushed his listeners into foreign territory – ones that are not so much murky or bizarre, but do rely heavily on suspension of hardened beliefs. His music transcends what other more widely-received folk artists like Devendra Banhart or Jose Gonazález are willing to explore.
His latest, Far In, pivots slightly away from the stripped-down feel of This is How You Smile, swinging the pendulum back to his electronic muse for an upbeat and starry-eyed chronicle. It’s his longest album to date – and first for big league independent label 4AD. Over the course of an hour and some change, Helado Negro moves away from any kind of concept, opting instead to focus on his heart and love in a time of confusion and hate.
Lange’s shaped vivid new worlds with his music before, and Far In continues that through his usual hybrid approach of singing in Spanish and English almost evenly. Either way, he’s still inviting us to experience his world in all its vibrance. This isn’t a new direction for Helado Negro, he’s used a lot of the same ingredients on previous entries in his catalog, most notably 2016’s Private Energy, but for Far In he lets loose a lot more those embellishments.
Reflecting on the fruit of his childhood, “La Naranja”’s sprite linings are akin to that eruption of citrusy zest that comes from peeling an orange. The ethereal piano and violin fill our ears like the scent of the fruit does our noses, and Lange’s personification of the orange isn’t lost in translation either – we forget those left on the ground and in the gutters, but they are still oranges. If we don’t act, the oranges will cease to exist, even the dirty ones.
He turns his gaze to the stars for “Gemini and Leo” a twinkling dance number about two lovers lost in their own world together. They twirl in unison above the Earth, captured in the picturesque desire to “dance like nobody’s watching,” while the world below them is unaware. He gifts himself the space to spin on that axis for some time with “Aguas Frias”, resulting in a meditation on climate change that isn’t just relevant but also heartfelt and honest.
There’s a lot of comfort and warmth to Lange’s albums. He’s a beacon of hope in almost every instance, a rarity these days. Far In handles weighty themes outside of love, such as the apocalypse, but Lange’s gentility is what we take from it. His presence is always thoughtful, sincere, never forceful or selfish.
“There Must Be a Song Like You” asks for a translation of the self to actual song structure – what songs make you, you? Negro’s not asking you, he’s suggesting you look for it, determine what makes you whole and unique.
Far In has an inherent kindness to it. Lange embraces his music like a parent does their child, and through that tight-but-tender hold he hopes to transmit these feelings of hope and change to his listener – no matter whether their proverbial cup is full or empty. He shares this reciprocation in “Outside the Outside” when he insists “My world only opens, when your world comes in.” Maybe that’s what the title is meant to represent. How far in are you willing to dig to find your true self? Helado Negro wants you to find out.
Source: Beats Per Minute
Lava Love
by Zoe's Shanghai
Released 27 August 2021
Zoe's Shanghai
*****
Led by singer Zoé Renié Harris, the band has made a splash into the crowded neo-soul scene with their debut EP ‘A Mirage (Meant To Last Forever)’ 2019 - a deeply evocative sound and Zoe’s extraordinary voice gained them immediately the spotlight as ones to watch (“a worthy torchbearer for heady and hearty soul music”- Earmilk)
‘Lava Love’ was recorded in an old stable in the French region of Auvergne - known for its mountain ranges and dormant volcanoes, this region could not have been a more apt setting.
Lava and love portray in fact a dynamic flow of memory and meaning pouring out of Zoe’s Shanghai’s heart. In and out of the metaphor, Lava and love can be powerful, frightening, beautiful, dangerous and at the same time are essential elements that create fertile change and growth.
Through the 11 songs, the band evoke memories and pose questions - inner dialogues, life stories, encounters and relationships - ‘Lava Love’ depicts a kaleidoscope of moods and feelings, prompting the listener to open to the conversation: while each song presents a microcosm on its own, the album manifests itself in the shared musical experience - immersive music to listen to and enjoy with your loved ones.
Produced with Oli Barton-Wood (Nubiyan Twist, Joe Armon-Jones, Nilufer Yanya), the sound of ‘Lava Love’ brings together hypnotic melodies, groovy rhythms and thoughtful lyrics - fusing the essence of multiple music styles and forging Zoe’s Shanghai unique contemporary soul.
Source: Bandcamp
Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
by Little Simz
Released 3 September 2021
Age 101
*****
Little Simz is an artist with a lot to say and a entertaining way of saying it. On her soul-baring fourth album "Sometimes I Might Be Introvert"she backs her spoken-word monologue poetry with dynamic, state-of-the-art production from partners Inflo (Michael Kiwanuka, SAULT), MIles James (Tom Odell, Yuseff Days/Tom Misch, Cleo Sol) and remix specialist Jakwob.
Rap music is often let down by the spoken word content: too frequently a display of bellicose frustration displaces articulated rage however Simz avoids all such indulgencies with her originality, innovation, humour and flair.
The set opens with a grand military fanfare that develops into a swelling orchestral backing to the title track "Introvert" and the similarly lush "Woman" follows. Released in May, featuring Cleo Sol's guest vocal, it's powerful chorus "I love how you go from zero to one hundred/And leave the dust behind, you’ve got this/All action, no talk" will already be familiar to many but it is no less impactful when heard in this context.
Simz frequently sets her vocal against a striking background samples - on "Two Worlds Apart" she borrows Smokey Robinson's delightful 1975 cut "The Agony and the Ecstacy" and her delivery on "I Love You, I Hate You" competes with a male voice's incessant repetition of the song's title - and the album is punctuated by diverting Interludes (Little Q, Pt.1 - Interlude", "The Rapper That Came To Tea - Interlude"and "The Garden - Interlude", the latter pair delivered by British actress Emma Corrin in the voice of her portrayal of "The Queen". These technique help to avoid the monotony that is frequently a trap for spoken-word and rap albums. Interludes and innovative production notwithstanding, "Sometimes I MIght Be Introvert" is a mentally demanding set when listened to as a whole.
Surrounded by talented musicianship and production, the album might have benefited from the addition of instrumental interludes, such as those used by Simz peers SAULT throughout their series of successful albums over recent years.
Real Life
by Attacca Quartet
Released 9 July 2021
Sony Classical Records
*****
The Attacca Quartet was formed in 2003 with the aim of creating a new paradigm for the genre of the string quartet in the twenty-first century. They have held residencies at Juilliard and the Metropolitan Museum of Art — and collaborated with artists such as James Blake and Björk.
They remain enthusiastic about the possibilities the string quartet can offer. “What with today’s opportunities for mixing art forms, mixing genres, and expanding the horizons of classical music in composition and in playing — it’s a really exciting time to be a musician,” says violinist Amy Schroeder.
“We never think: ‘Can we do it?’,” says cellist Andrew Yee. “We just want to do it, and so we give ourselves the goal.”
The Quartet's debut album on Sony Classical, "Real Life" explores the quartet's interest in electronic music, and re-imagines tracks by prominent artists in this genre such as Flying Lotus, Squarepusher, Louis Cole, Anne Müller, Daedelus, and Mid-Air Thief.
While the album represents the quartet's first foray into electronic music, they are no strangers to innovative programming. Among their previous albums are a string quartet arrangement of Haydn's "The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross," and Orange, the first full-length album of works by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Caroline Shaw.
The quartet has always had a passion for electronic music. "I remember the first time I heard Flying Lotus’ music," says violist Nathan Schram. "It was a confusing combination of exhilaration, envy, and deep FOMO. His music is hyper-sophisticated, endlessly nuanced, and hits all the feels you didn’t know you had. It became one of my missions in life to find a way to bring this wild energy to our ever-growing Attacca universe."
For this album, the quartet had the opportunity to work with Grammy Award-winning composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and Snarky Puppy bandleader Michael League as well as co-producer Nic Hard.
Source: The Violin Channel
Of All Joys
by Attacca Quartet
Released 5 November 2021
Sony Classical Records
*****
An ensemble notably known for its interpretations of avant-garde repertoire, winning the 2019 GRAMMY Awards for its performance on Caroline Shaw’s album “Orange” (Pulitzer Prize for Music; 2013), the Atttaca Quartet experimented with electronic music on the album “Real Life” in early 2021.
Here it presents a more conventional, but unique album in its repertoire assembly, at the opposite ends of the historical spectrum, bringing together works by minimalist composers Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt as well as Renaissance works by Dowland, Allegri, Bennet, Clemens non Papa, Gibbons and Marenzio. The thematic unity that the performers bring out with great dexterity and musicality lies in the serene and almost spiritual sound aesthetics of these two worlds. One might imagine that going from Pärt’s Summa to Dowland’s sensitive” Flow my Tears” would be a clash, but it is not. The purified lines of the minimalist works are combined with the harmonic richness of the 16th and 17th century composers. At the heart of the work is Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. 3 “Mishima” with its circular rhythmic pattern, composed for the film “Mishima”: “A Life in Four Chapters” (1985) by Paul Schrader, based on the life of Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Meditative and at the same time full of vitality, the Attacca Quartet signs another beautiful sound realization and cements its approach, that is to say a redefinition of the string quartet and its repertoire.
Source: AllMusic
Un Autre Monde
by Naissam Jalal, Rhythms of Resistance
Released 5 March 2021
Les Couleurs Du Son
*****
"Un Autre Monde" (The Colours of Sound) is the work of quintet "Rhythms of Resistance" formed from a collaboration between Paris-born flautist Naissam Jalal, Saxophonist Mehdi Chaib, guitarist and cellist Karsten Hochapfel, bassist Damien Varaillon and drummer Arnaud Dolmen.
This double album is a recording of a live performance that marks the tenth anniversary of the group which has issued two previous releases" "Osloob Hayati" (2015) and "Almot Wala Almazaba" (2016).
This is a delightful recording, capturing a band in complete musical harmony with Jalal's voice and flute alternating as lead instruments.
Although the musician's Arabic heritage studied is never far from the surface, this is innovative contemporary jazz in the first instance. Jalal's parents are Syrian and after studying music from the age of 6, moving from classical to jazz she returned to Syria to study the Nay ( a shrill, Arabic twin reed oboe) at the Grand Institute of Arab Music in Damascus. She then lived in Egypt for a time, before returning to France.
The album is divided into two discs. The first is recorded with the quintet only. The second is recorded live, with the backing of Orchester National de Bretagne (National Orchestra of Brittany).
Her heritage and multi-culturalism is expressed beautifully in the spoken word passage at the opening of the final song of Disc 1.
"Chère France, terre de notre naissance / Comment te dire notre colère, notre douleur / Méprisés alors que nous sommes fiers / Divisés alors que nous sommes frères / Nous rêvons que tu es notre mère / Que pleine de tendresse / Tu nous accueille à bras ouverts / Comme Des enfants longtemps désirés / Car d'ailleurs, nous sommes d'ici".
"Dear France, land of our birth / How to tell you our anger, our pain / Despised while we are proud / Divided while we are brothers / We dream that you are our mother / That full of tenderness / You welcome us with open arms / Like Children long desired / Because besides,
Forever Presence (EP)
by Jelly Cleaver
Released 12 November 2021
Gearbox Records
*****
Forever Presence is the recorded debut of a new project by London-based guitarist, activist and producer Jelly Cleaver. Jelly has had an incendiary rise over the last year; she has received the Steve Reid Innovation Award (a partnership between the Steve Reid Foundation and PRS Foundation, that gives emerging artists that make outstanding music an opportunity to receive support in the form of a grant of up to £1,500 to help with creative goals and career development
mentoring from an experienced, successful working artist; previous winners include Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd) is a Serious Take Five artist (an annual talent development programme for emerging jazz and improvising musicians/composers produced by Serious, and funded by the PRS Foundation, Help Musicians, Arts Council England, and Serious Trust), was nominated for an Ivors Composer Award (is the UK's foremost celebration of creative excellence in contemporary classical and jazz composition and sound arts; part of the Ivor Novello Awards programme), and has been called “the next artist to make an impact on the London Jazz Scene” by Tina Edwards (UK DJ, Broadcaster BBC 3, Journo).
Yet in the excitement and movement of this jazz scene, Forever Presence takes a different path, focusing on the neglected elements of ballads and beauty to allow other emotions to enter the music. It pays tribute to artists like Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane and Dhafer Youssef, as well as taking inspiration from Jelly's contemporaries such as Moor Mother and Angel Bat Dawid.
Weaving together spiritual jazz, blues, soul, and psychedelic rock and accompanied by rising stars of the UK jazz scene, Forever Presence explores in five tracks the narratives of loss, love and the universe.
Still sounding less like an album and more like a sampler or taste of big things to come, this EP heralds the imminent arrival of an innovative ne artist, further expanding and enhancing the vibrant London jazz scene.
Personnel:
Jelly Cleaver - composition, production, guitar, vocals, synth, percussion
James Akers - saxophone
Lorenz Okello-Osengor - piano, rhodes, hammond organ
Katie Moberly - cello, electric bass
Hamish Nockles-Moore - double bass
Tash Keary - drums, percussion
Source: Bandcamp
Afrique Victime
by Mdou Moctar
Released 21 May 2021
Matador Records
*****
With "Afrique Victime" the prodigious Tuareg guitarist and songwriter rips a new hole in the sky – boldly reforging contemporary Saharan music and “rock music” by melding guitar pyrotechnics, full-blast noise, and field recordings with poetic meditations on love, religion, women's rights, inequality, and Western Africa’s exploitation at the hands of colonial powers.
If "Ilana" was a late ’60s early ’70s ZZ Top and Black Sabbath record – "Afrique Victime" is mid-’70s to early ’80s Van Halen meets Black Flag meets Black Uhuru. The ferocity of Moctar’s electric guitar and the band's hypnotic rhythm section are on awe-inspiring display “Chismiten” and the mournful yet incandescent title track. Elsewhere, Moctar finds inspiration in highlighting lesser-known facets of the group: “While people have gotten to know Mdou Moctar as a rock band, there is a whole different set of music with this band done on acoustic guitars, which we wanted to incorporate into this album in order to go through a sonic journey,” he says. Mdou pays homage to one of his heroes Abdallah Ag Oumbadagou, the legendary Niger musician and political revolutionary, on songs “Ya Habibti” and “Layla”. “Abdallah was a contemporary of Tinariwen and helped to pioneer the sound of Tuareg guitar music blended with drum machines and electronic sounds”.
"Afrique Victime" sounds and feels like a Tuareg hand reaching down from the sky, and we are very lucky for this chance to get lifted.
article.
Source: Bandcamp
Gold-Diggers Sound
by Leon Bridges
Released 22 July 2021
Columbia
*****
To borrow from a story told by songwriter Jason Isbell about his first meeting with legendary interpreter Bettye LaVette, Isbell shared LaVette’s disdain at being referred to as a “soul” singer. LaVette’s retort was that the music she sang was called “rhythm and blues,” but that everything she did was soulful.
Into this velvety stew we call “soulfulness,” you can safely stir in one Mr. Leon Bridges. From his threads, to his stage presence, to the way he arranges a song, and yes, to the way he sings it, Bridges exudes an interplanetary level of coolness and restrained sensuality that colors all that he does, without regard to genre boundaries.
Bridges’ debut album, 2015’s Coming Home, was a blast of retro Sam Cooke-styled set pieces, and his 2018 follow-up, Good Thing, was a more genre-hopping affair.
His third album, Gold-Diggers Sound, sets its own more singularly minded style. The album fits squarely within rhythm and blues boundaries, but with a late night level of bleary insouciance that belies the effort that likely went into sounding so effortless. The album’s title refers to the hidden L.A. studio/speakeasy that Bridges and crew decamped to for these recordings. The formula of dim lights casting a warm haze over half-drunk whisky highballs hits peak level on woozy tracks like “Motorbike” and “Details.”
The tripped-out chunky rhythms of “Motorbike” give way to a series of “zero-G” flourishes that take the song to a higher plane. A perfect three-minute slice of a song, with its signature line nailing its ethos: “we don’t stop, but the time do.” The sinuous line that runs through “Details” ups the unfair advantage of a song custom made for an opening salvo on a heart stealing mix-tape. “Who gonna please you like I do, and love every detail of you,” Bridges leads before sealing the deal with a ticking off of his lady’s finer points.
The six-minute-plus “Don’t Worry” showcases Bridges’ buttery vocals intertwining with guest vocalist’s Atia “Ink” Boggs’ grittier tone. While the prayerfully toned “Sweeter” addresses racial inequality through direct images, but delivered with a velvet glove of muted synths overlaid with a sax solo meant to soothe. The expertly titled closer, “Blue Mesas,” is a string-laden ballad of finding yourself lonely at the top. Way out past the outskirts of Bridges’ West Texas home.
On first listen, Gold-Diggers Sound may pass you by like Bridges’ lane changing motorbike and could even be mistaken for being on the slighter side. But it’s the “quiet storm” power of keeping things hovering just above neutral that gives the album its after hours glow and silky appeal. Make no mistake about it that Bridges understands the impact of bringing things down a notch and letting them simmer. Gold-Diggers Sound’s finest moments are the soft as a whisper ones. The sound of slipping into something a little more comfortable.
Source: UnderTheRadarMagazine
Rejoice (2021)
by Tony Allen, Hugh Makesela
Released 19 November 2021
Wourld Circuit
*****
I‘Rejoice’ is the classic collaboration between Tony Allen, the legendary drummer and co-founder of Afrobeat, and Hugh Masekela, the master trumpet player of South African jazz.
The record, released to great acclaim in March 2020, became the first posthumous release from Masekela, and the last release from Allen, who sadly passed away a month later.
For this Special Edition, World Circuit have gone back to the original 2010 mixes and added previously unheard parts from the 2019 sessions to create 8 reimagined bonus mixes. The CD and LP releases also feature a booklet with sleeve notes and photos.
Having first met in the 70s thanks to their respective close associations with Fela Kuti, the two world-renowned musicians talked for decades about making an album together. When, in 2010, their touring schedules coincided in the UK, the moment presented itself and producer Nick Gold took the opportunity to record their encounter. The unfinished sessions, consisting of all original compositions by the pair, lay in archive until after Masekela passed away in 2018. With renewed resolution, Tony Allen and Nick Gold, with the blessing and participation of Hugh Masekela’s estate, unearthed the original tapes and finished recording the album in summer 2019 at the same London studio where the original sessions had taken place.
‘Rejoice’ can be seen as the long overdue confluence of two mighty African musical rivers – a union of two free-flowing souls for whom borders, whether physical or stylistic, are things to pass through or ignore completely. According to Allen, the album deals in “a kind of South African-Nigerian swing-jazz stew”, with its roots firmly in Afrobeat. Allen and Masekela are accompanied on the record by a new generation of well-respected jazz musicians including Tom Herbert (Acoustic Ladyland / The Invisible), Joe Armon-Jones (Ezra Collective), Mutale Chashi (Kokoroko) and Steve Williamson.
Source: Isra Box
Sounds From The Ancestors
by Kenny Garrett
Released 27 August 2021
Challenge Records International
*****
Composer/saxophonist Kenny Garrett emerged as a distinctive voice on the national scene in 1978 with an undisputed aptitude for emotive melodic phrasing that led him to collaborations with Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey and Miles Davis.
With Sounds from the Ancestors, Garrett remembers the spirit of the sounds of African ancestors from church services, recited prayers, songs from the work fields, Yoruban chants and African drums, alongside tributes to Roy Hargrove and two drum pioneers — Art Blakey and Tony Allen — who all looked into the past to influence the future sound and evolution of jazz.
His music is characterised by technical facility, compositional flair, and an enviable ability to meld compelling rhythms with attractive melodies. All this remains as true as ever on his latest album.
As the album title makes clear, Sounds from the Ancestors explores his ancestral musical legacy, exploring a variety of musical styles from Africa and the African diaspora.
This is a similar approach to that taken by eminent young London-based musicians like Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Nérija, but with an emphasis on genres such as Afro-Cuban jazz, Black American gospel and R&B. Miles Davis’ album On The Corner is an accredited influence, but mostly for its inventive approach towards extending the jazz vocabulary. This is much more melodic music that sits comfortably within the modern jazz tradition.
In addition to Garrett’s group—Vernell Brown, Jr. (piano), Corcoran Holt (bass), Ronald Bruner (drums) and Rudy Bird (percussion)—the album hosts many guest musicians including vocalists Dwight Trible, Linny Smith, Chris Ashley Anthony and Sheherazade Holman.
The songs are all written by Garrett with the exception of a brief interpolation from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. This appears in the initial stand-out track, Hargrove, that also features the greatest number of vocal contributions, including from Garrett himself, over a rhythm that steadily progresses from a hard bop beat in the tradition of Roy Hargrove to something more Coltrane-like.
Source: London Jazz News
NOW
by Damon Locks, Black Monument Ensemble
Released 9 April 2021
International Anthem
*****
Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble’s new album "NOW" was created in the final throes of Summer 2020, following months of pandemic-induced fear & isolation, the explosion of social unrest, struggle & violence in the streets, and as the certain presence of a new reality had fully settled in. Set up safely in the garden behind Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio, the music was recorded in only a few takes, capturing the first times members of BME had ever played or sang the tunes. For Locks, the impetus was more about getting together to commune and make art than it was about producing an album. In his words: “It was about offering a new thought. It was about resisting the darkness. It was about expressing possibility. It was about asking the question, ‘Since the future has unfolded and taken a new and dangerous shape... what happens NOW?’”
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist, musician, and deejay. Known for decades of varied projects in Chicago’s underground music & art scenes.
Black Monument Ensemble was conceived as a medium for Chicago-based multi-media artist/activist Damon Locks’s sample-based sound collage work, but has evolved from a solo mission into a vibrant collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers making work with common goals of joy, compassion, and intention. Galvanized by Locks’s conceptualizing, poeticizing, and guiding vision, the contributors come from all facets of the diverse wellspring of Black artistic excellence in Chicago, bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to uplifting, anthemic, and highly animated musical performance.
Source: Bandcamp
Love and Hate In A Different Time (EP)
by Gabriels
Released 29 October 2021
Atlas Artists
*****
Gabriels is an LA based group fronted by former American Idol finalis (placed 5th, 2011) Jacob Lusk, a gospel singer and choir director and producers Ryan Hope and Ari Bazoulian. "Love and Hate in a Different Time", the band's debut, released in December 2020 but only now getting the attention it deserves (following enthusiastic endorsement by Sir Elton John), is a timeless-sounding R&B classic that the band describes as "about how we appear to be losing the ability to peacefully be together in a space and express ourselves. Together. We have always endured agendas of hate, hardship and war but we have in someway always found a way to be together and put aside our differences. However in recent times with the development of the technology / disinformation it appears this is tested".
The band describes the associated video as "a history of the complex relationship between the film camera and people dancing together. How we used to be able to get through things in the worst of times and has this development of technology been a good thing? Has it in fact caused us to lose this sensibility of being able to put differences to the side and just be together peacefully? The effort we would go to connect with each other / compared to now the super fast throw away instant feel these moments have become."
In a review of Gabriels' recent London show, the Spectator described the band as "Joyous perfection from a band that's sure to go far ... pitched perfectly at that place where adult meets euphoric".
The unique character of Gabriels' music is underpinned by the marriage of Lusk's extraordinary command of Gospel & R&B, with Hope and Bazoulian's expertise in soundtrack production (and a stunning cameo vocal by Ashley Sade on "Loyalty"). A short scan of the producers' Bandcamp reveals a ten year history of soundtracks, together and with other collaborators, as "appraiser".
Hopefully, a full LP will follow - Lusk and Co. have far too much talent to remain hidden away in obscurity any longer.
Source: Bandcamp
Bloodline (EP)
by Gabriels
Released 3 December 2021
Altas Artists
*****
Following breakout success in late 2020 with debut EP ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’ - a record that’s garnered acclaim from Elton John, and landed the LA outfit appearances on Jimmy Kimmel and Jools Holland - Gabriels return this winter with four tracks of brooding nu-gospel on the ‘Bloodline’ EP.
It’s also the band’s first release since their sensational performances in London this autumn, and finds them in the kind of expansive form those dynamic debut shows had signposted.
Gloomy brass, smooth double bass and a swooping string section carve out a vivid atmosphere on lead single ‘Blame’ – a track that wouldn’t sound out of place playing over the closing credits of Succession, so squirrelling are its tightrope-walking melodies and sharp, shrieking string crescendos. Powerful vocalist and noted choir master Jacob Lusk - who recalls both Anohni and Sam Smith in equal measure here - is in mercurial form as he navigates a tonal shift with the lyrics “Not a slave if I’m already free, not a captive if it’s where I want to be.”
“Ain’t love a hypocrite?” Lusk bellows, in ear-catching fashion, on the death-crawling opener ‘Innocence’ – a menacing fusion of droning piano chords and rumbling orchestral drum hits. ‘Stranger’ then marries electronic whirrs and throbbing sub-bass with traditional instrumentation such as horns, gliding violins and bright pianos, in a manner that recalls the experimental works of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – before a dynamic shift is roused off the back of Lusk’s harmonised vocal projections. Closing track ‘Bloodline’, meanwhile, is a smoky odyssey that conjures an image of whisky-stained jazz bars in old Hollywood movies. The track offers a brassy lurch as Lusk howls: “Your ancestors blood fed the soil and the sand.”
While it flaunts a distinct sound that feels at once contemporary and steeped in American musical history, this second EP lacks a rousing anthem to the effect of breakout track ‘Love and Hate in a Different Time’. But that’s more to the band’s power. ‘Bloodline’ is an EP that offers a greater insight into the master craftsmanship of a project that is proving increasingly captivating.
Source: NME
Sgt. Culpepper
by Joel Culpepper
Released 23 July 2021
Pepper Records
*****
Hailing from south-east London, with a unique soulful voice and explosive showmanship, Joel Culpepper’s star is rising. His sonic palette blends an array of genres and influences, that looks back to the greats whilst simultaneously absorbing London’s contemporary musical landscape. His charismatic Colors Studios performance of ‘Woman', the standout cut from Joel’s 2017 EP ‘Tortoise’, has amassed over 13 million views on YouTube (and counting).
Joel's debut album, 'Sgt Culpepper’, is an incredible modern soul album and the product of a two-year undertaking which saw him attract an array of respected producers and musicians from the UK and beyond, a testament to the reputation he had already built as a dynamic songwriter and performer among his contemporaries. With executive production from Swindle (Ezra Collective, Mahalia), mastering from Joker (Stormzy, Kojey Radical) and with co-productions that include the likes of legendary pop producer Guy Chambers, Raf Rundell (The 2 Bears), Shawn Lee (Saint Etienne, Kelis), and Tom Misch, Sgt Culpepper is a demonstration of the power of community, mingling self-reflection with wider social commentary. The record is split into four chapters: The Battle, which includes previous singles ‘W.A.R’ and ‘Return’, The Surrender, embodied by recent single ‘Poetic Justice’; The Love and The Lesson.
Joel’s desire to forge a sense of collectivism was the lifeblood for 'Sgt Culpepper', resulting in the diverse roster of talent attached to the project. As well as the aforementioned names, the record includes production from the likes of British multi-instrumentalist Redinho, South London rapper and Roc Nation signee Kay Young, Linden Jay (Poppy Ajudha, Rejjie Snow), and Grammy-award winning songwriter Jimmy Hogarth. "I've been inspired by how the UK jazz and Grime scene supports each other, it’s similar to what happens in the states. Collectives like Odd Future, Aftermath and the earliest being Motown. It’s soul’s turn to band together here, likeminded independent musicians working to support the scene and each other as a whole.”
Through charismatic storytelling, personal epiphanies, and the formation of a new creative collective that underpins his craft, 'Sgt Culpepper' ushers in a new era for Joel as an artist.
Source: Bandcamp
Prayer For Peace
by Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange
Released 3 December 2021
Get Together
*****
After a steady rise to international recognition through 2 LPS and several EP’s already since 2018, Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange (from their base in Melbourne) joins the Get Together family for their first recording session in Europe.
“Prayer For Peace” - An 8 track journey through atmospheric scenes, broken to deep four on floor rhythms and colourful top lines. From the Jazz-funk inspired 'Prayer For Peace' to the infectious Boogie twilight of 'Cadillac’ this is a record that is equally well suited to dance floor applications as it is to an intimate night with the turntable spinning and the sensual herbs burning.
This Recording represents the Berlin chapter of the Zeitgeist Freedom Energy Exchange. The curated jam band moniker of Ziggy Zeitgeist, the experiment having emerged from the murky depths of the Melbourne underground. Zeitgeist arrived in Berlin in summer 2019 wasting no time in assembling a talented and diverse group of assorted freaks from many corners of the world to bring their own languages, melodies, rhythms and swagger on this cross continental meeting point.
This session captures the raw energetic fusion of such diverse and innovative musicians scene co-existing in the Techno capital of the world. This city already has its own sound, its own attitude. It's no wonder artists gather from every corner of the world to discover themselves through the lens of the city. That is the sound of the ‘Zeitgeist Berlin era’ the group explores deeper, darker sounds of the club emerging from their signature hip slinging disco, funk fusion.
For such an occasion the recording was engineered and mixed by platinum producer / engineer Axel Reinemer in the esteemed Jazzanova studios. 3 days of steamy Berlin summer looking over the ring-bahn towards the swamps of the Tegel Forest to the north. Spiritual jazz interludes flirt delicately with bouncing Brazilian rhythms. Psychedelic dub-grooves meander before exploding into bursts of finessed energy, before locking into steady and deep-house rollers.... All live, All together in the room, all real human spirit imbued in every note, with the level of production to easily stand up on the club system This is the kind of record that is as diverse as it is essential in every serious collectors artillery.
"To the poets, free thinkers and anarchists of Berlin, always stay radical." - Ziggy Zeitgeist
Source: Bandcamp
Intra-I
by Theon Cross
Released 29 October 2021
New Soil
*****
Theon Cross' new album, Intra-I, finds the gifted tuba player and composer creating a sound system powered by breath. This unique record is an uplifting celebration of Black music that, thanks to Cross' pioneering approach, helps to redefine the sonic possibilities of the tuba.
Reflecting his own heritage, the young virtuoso melds jazz with dub, hip-hop, soca, grime and other sounds connected to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Additionally, the record - which features Remi Graves, Shumba Maasai, Afronaut Zu, Ahnansé, Consensus and Oren Marshall - is Cross' first music to include collaborations with guest vocalists, adding a further new dimension.
Theon Cross is at the forefront of the thriving London jazz scene. In 2015 he released solo EP Aspirationsand in 2019 followed it with his acclaimed debut solo album, Fyah. In addition to his solo endeavours, Cross is a core member of Mercury nominated group Sons Of Kemet and has collaborated with Little Simz, Stormzy, Moses Boyd, Nubya Garcia, Kano and others. An incredible live performer who's constantly looking to push boundaries, Cross participated in SXSW Online earlier this year by playing a live set from Abbey Road Studios and, using motion capture technology, as a 3D digital avatar in a VR showcase.
Source: Bandcamp
WEB MAX
by Web Web, Max Herre
Released 27 August 2021
Compost Records
*****
The fourth album by Web Web “WEB MAX” is a great spiritual jazz work - sometimes floating, sometimes soulful, always intense, and a wonderful homage to early 70s Jazz. Web Web mastermind Roberto Di Gioia is accompanied for the first time by Max Herre as a composer, musician, and producer. Both came together with guest musicians such as Mulatu Astatke, Brandee Younger, Charles Tolliver (Strata East), and others to deliver a virtuoso masterpiece.
The album's genesis can be traced back to the winter of 2014: German rapper/producer Max Herre and Italian-German pianist Roberto Di Gioia played a tremendous show together. The two had been guest musicians at a few gigs for Gregory Porter, who in turn kindly accepted their invitation to perform at Herre’s MTV Unplugged session (produced by Herre alongside Di Gioia and Samon Kawamura as production team KAHEDI). Porter’s approach to the jazz quartet inspired Max to reflect how a rap artist could work in a more freely-flowingmusical environment. Di Gioia’s inspiration was a bit more straightforward: in the 80s, Di Gioia had played with jazz legends like Woody Shaw, Johnny Griffin, and James Moody, but he’d largely left the jazz stages of his early years behind - just one random jam session with Porter’s musicians during soundcheck relit his passion immensely. A short time later, Herre called Di Gioia saying “Let’s get a spiritual jazz session going.”
Now, six years later, the album WEB MAX is the amazing result from the spur of that moment. It is a wonderful homage to the cosmic open-mindedness of early 70s jazz, to the transcendent sublimity of spiritual sound.
WEB MAX is the fourth album in four years by the highly acclaimed Web Web quartet, consisting of keyboardist/pianist Roberto Di Gioia, saxophonist Tony Lakatos, bassist
Christian von Kaphengst, and drummer Peter Gall, all of them longtime performers of the highest virtuosity, signed to Michael Reinboth’s Compost Records.
Source: Bandcamp
This is a Mindfulness Drill: A Reimagining of Richard Youngs' 'Sapphie'
by Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
Released 25 June 2021
Jagjaguwar
*****
The great indie label catalogue revival is in full season as Mercury enters retrograde for the second time this year (which friends tell me is an excellent moment to reflect upon the past, with the universe rewarding patience and understanding).
In March this year, four decades of 4AD signalled in the mammoth compilation Bills & Aches & Blues, where their stars-of-new – the likes of Dry Cleaning, Maria Somerville and Tkay Maidza – reimagined their favourite parts of the label’s history, from Pixies to His Name Is Alive. 15 years behind them in time alone comes Jagjaguwar, gathering pace, with this discreet-at-first glance – but vital – offering as part of their own “JAG25” birthday celebrations.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s This Is a Mindfulness Drill is a quietly contemplative song-for-song rework of Richard Youngs’ 1998 album Sapphie: a record of remarkable purity and solace, originally released on Oblique Recordings before being picked up by Jagjaguwar at the turn of the century. Its three tracks of sparse classical guitar and voice span 37 minutes with a droning brittleness, never needless, both weightless yet battered and bruised, heart-breaking yet life-affirming for the folk revivalists and ambient auteurs alike. It’s the kind of record whose meditative brilliance you wonder and worry might escape you today, should 20 years of repeat listening be so inexorably woven into an album’s being that time is the only spade needed to bury an underground classic.
Enlisting the help of Moses Sumney, Perfume Genius and Sharon Van Etten, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble’s covers build on the original’s gentle fingerpicking into an abounding brass lull, always one restrained moment away from ecstasy. Sumney’s craquelure falsetto dismisses the modesty of ‘Soon It Will Be Fire’ for a concerto, turning exposition into an immediate soft centrepiece. The solitary sage at the heart of Youngs’ ‘A Fullness of Light In Your Soul’ is transformed from “Your picture is still on my wall”-era Daniel Johnston with Mike Hadreas’s gentle confidence, while Van Etten’s still vocals on ‘The Graze of Days’ swarm into mandatory deep listening.
Throughout a remarkable tribute, the only misjudged element is the edited album title. But in Youngs’ words, “reimagining anything is unimaginable”. Across a record heralded as one of the most important, unheard treasures of the last half decade of the twentieth century, what breaks through now is no less a mystery than it was then. Even framed in communality, in contradiction to Youngs’ solitary masterpiece, this rework of Sapphie still feels like a deeply personal thing, leagues beyond some cake and candles for Jagjaguwar.
Source: Loud and Quiet
Breathe Suite
by Ben Marc
Released 1 October 2021
Innovative Leisure
*****
Ben Marc realised music was going to be his life. He studied classical double bass at Trinity College London. He duly went on to work with artists, including Macy Grey, Amy Winehouse, Dizzee Rascal, the Charles Mingus Big Band, Jimmy Cliff , Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke, Afrofuturists Sun Ra Arkestra and grime legend Dizzee Rascal.
But Ben Marc has long blurred musical worlds and criss-crossed boundaries. On double and bass guitar, he flits between jazz, classical and electronic music, whether playing on Greenwood’s award-winning score for the film The Master or touring with Mulatu for over 10 years, as well as working with the likes of Matthew Herbert & Charles Mingus.
But as a producer and multi-instrumentalist at the leading edge of the UK jazz scene, Ben Marc is now stepping into the spotlight with his debut solo project that recalls the likes of spiritual jazz legends Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders.
His first foray is tentative : Breathe Suite is an EP of just nineteen minutes and four pieces - Breathe Suites A and B and Breathe Improvs A and B.
"Breathe Suite A" features a stirring arrangement of strings, keyboards and drums and lyrics that speak eloquently of the perpetual struggle of the oppressed: the song's chorus "I'll raise my voice / You raise your hand / I'll hold the truth / Until you understand" (and repetitive chanting of the word "Breathe") is delivered by a chorus of kids voices while the optimistic verses are sung by magnificent London vocalist MidnightRoba (see footnote): "One day we will breathe / Soon will come the time / Every life that's lived / Will be valued as their lives / Dismantling what has been ingrained 400 years"
"Breathe Suite B" features the same children's chorus, but otherwise spoken word content by London grime / triphop / jazz artist Rarelyalways.
Footnote:
MidnightRoba's solo album "Golden Seams" was included in SunNeverSetsOnMusic's January 2021 playlist.
Source: Bandcamp
Visions Of Light
by Ishmael Ensemble
Released 6 August 2021
Severn Songs
*****
Ishmael Ensemble is the UK (Bristol) based collective led by saxophonist & producer Pete Cunningham. Visions of Light is their second album, succeeding their 2019 debut, "A State of Flow". The album opens with a short, ambient "Into" in which we encounter Cunningham exploring the lower registers of his tenor sax, amid a rising swell of harps and synths. But the piece is cut abruptly short after little more than a minute: it's as if the artist has made a false start. "Feather" which follows, resets the course and builds a moody vibe that sets the scene for the introduction Holyseuss Fly's soaring vocals. The lyrics are banal (When I hit the ground / You laid a mattress down / It was gold with feathers / I tripped and remembered ) but the track is a powerful statement of intent recalling and updating Brisolian precedents of Elizabeth Fraser / Massive Attack and Beth Gibbons / Portishead, whose influences are heard throughout this album.
The opening half of "Wax Werk" presents the rapidfire clacketty-clack of drum, bass, synth attack of Krautrock before it is overwhelmed by Cunninghams wild saxes. The shuffling musical elements of instrumental "Soma Centre" start out indistinctly but thier individuality seems to clarify as the song builds momentum and intensity. "Empty Hands" (featuring disturbing lyrics) maintains this intensity. "Looking Glass" features fellow Bristol artist
STANLÆY and "Morning Chorus" is another percussion-led piece reminiscent of Four-Tet or Atoms For Peace. The short piece "Visions of Light" features meloncholy vocals and dreamy instrumentals from Chris Hillier, while "The Gift" shifts back to a more uptempo groove, with Tiny Chapter providing the ethereal vocals. Holyseuss Fly returns on vocals for the album-closing "January".
"Visions of Light" is a solid sophomore album from "Ishmael Ensemble" but the group's influences remain close to the surface. Cunningham is featured on all tracks, however, the structure of the Ensemble otherwise allows a wide range of vocal and instrumental approaches going forward, with the potential for the Ensemble to establish a voice of its own, so as stand alongside contempories such as Moses Boyd and Sons of Kemet, rather than influences such Massive Attack, Portishead, Four Tet, Thom Yorke etc.
Source: Bandcamp
Slowly Rushing
by Safire, QQQAkane
Released 27 August 2021
Heavy Machinery Records
*****
Slowly Rushing is the debut LP from Melbourne multidisciplinary duo Safire & QQQ Akane, in a collaboration bound by creativity and community. They act as the glue connecting people, experience and art; leveraging their craft of audio and visual design to stew a melting pot of forward thinking cool sh!t.
Collaboration is key when identifying their artistic practice. They seem to have an organic knack of creating parties/raves, record labels and releases, technical masterclasses and inclusive artistic spaces that place emphasis on community.
As artists independently, they have hit their respective heights. Ben Safire has toured extensively throughout Europe and Asia, representing Australian Drum and Bass on a global scale. As a musician and event curator he has built the foundations of bass music in Melbourne, collaborating locally and internationally with Noisia, Alix Perez, Dub Phizix, Zed Bias and DLR, to name but a few.
To limit QQQ Akane as a visual artist would be an injustice. While she is well known for her creative collaboration with Metalheadz boss Goldie and visual art with record label Plasma Audio, QQQ Akane is an enigma of creativity that flows from fashion and dance to vocalism and music production.
Slowly Rushing is the debut long play from the seasoned duo. The album feels like the soundtrack to a warm night, sharing food on a big table with your friends and family. A dinner where the conversation is as filling as the meal. Before you know it, the table has disappeared and made room for a hazed-out dance floor, exploring non-verbal communication and telekinetic meditation.
Slowly Rushing broods warmth, taking notes from jazz, dub, hip-hop and bass music to hypnotically wrap around your consciousness like a snake to a snake charmer. QQQ Akane calls on her indigenous Amami roots of storytelling and musical styling, that simultaneously feels grounded whilst taking you further down the rabbit hole.
Safire and QQQ Akane have created their own world, a dinner party if you will, all they ask is you bring a plate and enjoy.
Source: Bandcamp
People Need People
by Nicola Conte, Gianluca Petrella
Released 26 February 2021
Edizioni Ishter
*****
New music forms contaminated by various genres characterize our globalized world’s recent history; the intertwining of individual experiences creates new collaborations, as in this specifc case. Sixteen years after the release of “New Standards” (2001, SCEP336) Nicola Conte meets again his friend and colleague Gianluca Petrella, an eclectic Italian jazz scene talent, open to new experiences and collaborations: this encounter let to the publication of three new 12” EP’s in only three years, plus the recent single “The Higher Love” and the release of “Let Your Light Shine On” by Nicola Conte & Spiritual Galaxy.
The exchange between the two musicians / producers takes place not only on a songwriting level but also on a research one: vinyl rarities, the diggin’ activity, the use of samples, sounds, rigorously vintage instruments and sounds deliver a product brave enough to communicate the club culture enthusiasm to conquer a new market capable of soliciting new interests in the nu-soul and jazz scene. From Detroit future dance to afrobeat and spiritual jazz through a nu-disco sound, the unique vibe of “People Need People” drags us in search of deep music in a spiritual and mantric context. In a peculiar historical moment Nicola Conte and Gianluca Petrella send a message of hope, of aggregation and Universal Love. A feeling of elevation and solidarity is shared Through Raashan’s poetry, something that can predict winds of change for humanity, a feeling that flows from a higher love.
“People Need People” is more than just a new album, it’s a collective experience wisely directed by Nicola and Gianluca that sees the participation of numerous artists from different parts of the world: Raashan Ahmad (USA), Nduduzo Makhathini (South Africa), Magnus Lindgren (Sweden), Débo Ray (USA), Bridgette Amofah (England), Abdissa Assefa (Finland/Ethiopia), Teppo Makynen (Finland), together with young Italian promising stars Davide Shorty, Carolina Bubbico, Tommaso Cappellato, Seby Burgio, Marco Rubegni, Pasquale Calò, and the already known Pasquale Mirra and Simone Padovani. “People Need People” is the mature fruit of an unstoppable and constantly evolving work of research and exchange that’s been able to break down every possible distance during its long and complex making-of process. The songs taken from the previous EP’s have also been further revised, reworked and expanded, with the addition of six new tracks. Looking at the past and fetching sounds, rhythms and instruments typical of
tribal / African traditions, soul / spiritual jazz and cosmic music from it, Nicola and Gianluca have performed an operation of strong contamination with modern electronic sounds, disco and hip-hop, creating a completely original hybrid. Their goal is to accompany the listener through a collective spiritual elevation path, guided by the only true universal language: music. In a historical period marked by contrasts, lack of communication and forced social distancing, “People Need People” proves to be even more essential and necessary.
Source: Bandcamp
Almeria
by Jessica Lauren
Released 4 May 2018
Freestyle Records
*****
Since the early 1990s, keyboard player Jessica Lauren has been a familiar part of London's alternative music scene. Jessica's keyboard skills have augmented the live performances and studio recordings of world renowned artists such as Jean Carne, Tom Browne, Dexter Wansel and James Mason, Japan's United Future Organisation, and UK soul diva Juliet Roberts.
Her previous Freestyle album 'Jessica Lauren Four' (2012) highlighted Jessica's minimalist approach, something rare and refreshing in the jazz world: she instills her compositions and playing with a refined sense of space which makes her music as much about what she doesn't play as what she does.
The albums' opener - Kofi Nomad is a deeply percussive afrocentric epic, featuring the beautiful baritone saxaphone of Tamar 'Collocutor' Osborn, one of the most in demand woodwind players working today, underpinned by a powerful foundation of percussion courtesy of Richard Ọlátúndé Baker, Phillip Harper and drummer Cosimo Keita Cadore.
Jessicas' amazing skill for writing simple, understated yet superbly memorable and catchy hooks remains undiminished. Highlights in this new collection are almost too numerous to mention, but Amalfi is a breezy bossa, which conjures up images of easy living days and sun dappled Mediterranean coastlines, whilst the angular and brooding Simba Jike has something of an Eddie Harris style deep, dark groove over which Jessica riffs and solos beautifully on grand piano - and Tamar once again blows freely, whilst 'level' Neville Malcolms' upright bass figure roots the entire thing in a solid, almost primeval sound.
The albums closing statement Argentina is a masterpiece of pathos and perfectly demonstrates Jessicas' approach which is almost akin to a minimalist architecture style of composing and playing, such is the strength of its atmosphere and subtlety.
Source: Bandcamp
Keyboard Fantasies (1986)
by Beverly Glenn-Copeland
Released 1986 (Reissued 2021)
Transgressive Records
*****
By the mid-'80s, Beverly Glenn-Copeland had been best known as a starring actor in the Canadian children's program Mr. Dressup, in addition to providing guest vocals on records by iconic singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn and other folk artists. He had also released two obscure albums of poetic folk-jazz at the beginning of the 1970s, then a slightly funk-tinged soft rock EP in 1983. He recorded Keyboard Fantasies solely using a Yamaha DX7 keyboard and a Roland TR-707 drum machine -- a very restricted set-up by current standards, but one which Glenn-Copeland felt had limitless possibilities at the time. Channeling the practicing Buddhist's feelings of peace and solitude in the surrounding woodlands of his home in Ontario, the music is relaxing and meditative, brimming with joy and comfort. "Ever New" starts the album with a trickling stream of gentle notes, before a distinctive melody forms, and Glenn-Copeland's warm, friendly, slightly warbly voice sings lyrics which praise nature and welcome people of all ages, viewing life as a period of eternal youthfulness and hope. "Winter Astral" is beatless and wordless, but its brassy melodies are bold and valiant, encouraging the listener to put aside fear and live a fulfilling life. "Let Us Dance" is the most playful and childlike selection, with a steadily paced waltz tempo, parping keyboards, and Christmas-like electronic bells accompanying Glenn-Copeland's double-tracked voice. Finding strength and motivation in the sunshine and the serenity of nature, he feels excited to travel the road ahead of him. Following two instrumentals, including the downright snuggly "Old Melody," the album ends with "Sunset Village," a truly soothing song with simple yet empowering lyrics ("Let it go, let it go now, it's okay"), tying with "Ever New" as the album's most blissful, touching moment. Self-released as a cassette in 1986, Keyboard Fantasies largely remained an unheard curiosity for decades until it was rediscovered by music collectors during the 2010s, leading to several reissues and prompting the septuagenarian artist to tour internationally for the first time and record new music. More than just a wholesome story about an artist who found success late in his career, Glenn-Copeland's music and life experience speaks to the power of maintaining a positive outlook and remaining true to one's unique vision
Source: Bandcamp
Happier Than Ever
by Billie Eilish
Released 4 June 2021
Darkroom/Interscope
*****
"A subtle triumph in the face of overwhelming pressure and expectations, Happier Than Ever is the sound of an artist coming into their own. Without losing any of the experimental, genre-blurring spirit of her Grammy-conquering debut, Billie Eilish elevates her trademark sound and expands her scope with the assistance of her producer-brother Finneas. In addition to baring her soul with increasingly confessional lyrics, she's also strengthened her delivery and range, taking inspiration from jazz and vocal pop greats of old like Julie London and Peggy Lee, lending a timeless air to tracks like "Billie Bossa Nova" and "my future." With this sophomore set, Eilish steps out of the shadows of When We All Fall Asleep, transforming from the creepy little sibling that freaks out the neighbors into a poised and confident young adult with existential issues aplenty. Growing older (relatively) and wiser in the years following her breakthrough, she processes the flood of experiences that come with a swift ascent in the public eye. Reflecting on the pitfalls of being famous, the introductory "Getting Older" reveals the immense pressure and associated dangers of the limelight, setting her insight and measured optimism to a delicate electronic heartbeat. Later, she charts her struggles in a male-dominated industry and details encounters with predatory men and misogyny on the scathing "Your Power," an indictment of exploitation disguised as a gorgeous acoustic ballad, and on the striking interlude "Not My Responsibility," she confronts critics and toxic opinions atop ominous synths and atmospheric haze before calling out media objectification on the hypnotic "OverHeated." Beyond these emotional trials, Eilish leans into the album's title, realizing her own growth, hope for the future, and newfound feelings of self-love and self-empowerment. The nostalgic Bristol-scene trip-hop vibes of the dubby "I Didn't Change My Number," hit single "Therefore I Am," and the boom-bap-lite "Lost Cause" offer mischievous diversions from the otherwise moody meditations, but a trio of dynamic standouts steal the show. Throbbing to life with deep bass and a thick beat, the lustful "Oxytocin" is a club hit in the making, nailing the pleasure centers like the titular hormone, while the cautionary "GOLDWING" lures listeners in with an angelic hymn before skittering to life with tribal flair like early-era Björk. On the title track, Eilish begins with an old-timey vocal showcase that explodes into a '90s alt-rock rager, complete with cathartic kiss-off lyrics, crashing drums, and jagged riffs. In these moments, Eilish reclaims a bit of herself and hones her perspective, effortlessly playing with a wide range of genres in the process. Delivering on the promise of her industry-shaking debut with confidence and grace, Happier Than Ever has the markings of a big career moment, one that signals artistic growth and hints at even more greatness to come".
Source: AllMusic
Ursgal
by Enji
Released 25 June 2021
Squama
*****
On her second album Ursgal Mongolian singer Enji creates a unique blend of Jazz and Folk with the traditions of Mongolian song. Currently based in Munich, her lyrics tell personal stories about unbearable distances, the oddness of being on earth and the simple truths in life.
She’s accompanied by Paul Brändle on guitar and Munguntovch Tsolmonbayar on double bass.
Born in Ulaanbaatar, Enji grew up in a yurt to a working-class family. Having always been drawn to music, dance and literature, she initially wanted to become a music teacher with little ambitions to compose or be on stage. A program by the local Goethe Institute sparked her passion for Jazz and eventually led her to become a performing artist. Inspired by the music of Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and Nancy Wilson, Enji started writing songs of her own, cherishing this newfound means of expression. Ursgal is the first record featuring her original compositions.
Further details of Enji's path to prominence may be discovered in a Bandcamp Daily article.
Source: Bandcamp
Home Video
by Lucy Dacus
Released 25 June 2021
Matador Records
*****
Lucy Dacus' sophomore March 2018 record "Historian" was received with universal acclaim and featured as one of SunNeverSetsOnMusic's favourites. She came to further prominence in October the same year for her contribution to boygenius, a trio she formed with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker.
Dacus returns this month with her third full length, another set of remarkable new songs that focus entirely on the relationships of youth, singing in a controlled, sometimes sweet monotone against a grainy, folk-rock or synth backing band.Many songs deal with the passion of youthfuil relationships.
The album opens with "Hot & Heavy": "Being back here makes me hot in the face
Hot blood in my pulsing veins
Heavy memories weighing on my brain
Hot and heavy in the basement of your parents' place" and concludes with "Triple Dog Stare" in which the young lovers seem to have taken off - "They put our faces on the milk jugs / Missing children 'til they gave up / Your mama was right, and through the grief / Can't fight the feeling of relief / Nothing worse could happen now"
Between these bookends, "First Time" deals with first love ("you can't feel it for the first time a second time"); "Christine" with religion and marriage; "VBS" with the dark undercurrents (and Vacation BIble School); "Cartwheel" with physical and emotional change; "Going Going Gone"; "Partner In Crime" with an underage relationship; "Brando" with the joys of skipping school for the afternoon movies but never really knowing your partner; "Please Stay" a plea not to break up and
"Thumbs", the centrepiece of the album, tells the story of accompanying her nineteen year old friend to bar to meet up with her estranged father, who she hasn't seen since fifth grade, the song's chilling chorus conveying the broken relationship between father and daughter:
"I would kill him / If you let me / I would kill him / Quick and easy / Your nails are digging / Into my knee / I don't know / How you keep smiling".
Other songs are similary revealatory, capturing recollections of adolescence in all its intensity, the milestones and minutae of youth and young adult life.
Home Video is a timeless, rewarding and articulate album that captures the intensity and agony of adolescent rites of passage.
MAN MADE
by Greentea Peng
Released 23 July 2021
Universal Music Operations
*****
outh Londoner Greentea Peng vibrates a little differently from the rest of us. Genuinely – her debut album was purposely recorded at 432Hz (and not the industry standard 440) because of the frequency’s much-discussed soothing properties.
Within lies a hazy miasma of jazz, righteous reggae, easy-going hip-hop and vintage neo-soul in which the echo effects of dub and the swirl of psychedelia hand off to skitters of drum’n’bass. “Krishna and Jah” keep watch over the recording studio.
Anchoring all these inputs and 18 producers is Aria Wells herself – her voice, featherlight even in anger, weary in the best way – and her concerns.
Free My People is self-explanatory. “Babylon, won’t play your game,” she sings on Maya, a standout. Suffer is a succinct track about the commonality of suffering, built on an elegant little recurring arpeggio.
Atmospheres, healing and processing society’s messages are the point here, rather than hits.
But Wells doesn’t lack for tunes, which ebb in and out. Dingaling in particular distils Greentea Peng’s essence into an accessible form.
Man Made can veer towards aimlessness and self-parody – “Eat some shrooms,” Wells sings, ruining the jazz piano vibes on Party Hard Interlude. But the overarching charms of this record aren’t overly diminished.
Source: The Guardian
American Siren
by Emily Scott Robinson
Released 29 October 2021
Oh Boy Records
*****
Like an alluring invitation to weary souls everywhere, Emily Scott Robinson’s new album, American Siren, calls upon the lost and lonely amidst a national breakdown. The 10-track collection is her first release as part of John Prine’s infamous imprint, Oh Boy Records. Seductive in its sparseness, the artist’s third effort leaves necessary space for her sharp-witted songwriting to shine.
Robinson has stood proudly at the helm of her music career since her 2016 debut, Magnolia Queen.
Having come into her authentic artistry with great poise, American Siren presents an expressive vocalist and intuitive instrumentalist. But, the stories told between these tracks remind her ever-growing audience that Robinson is first, and foremost, a storyteller.
Written almost entirely in isolation while the COVID-19 pandemic stormed outside her window, American Siren is a hand-crafted collection of songs that, together, chronicle the collective experience of a vast nation facing unprecedented polarity. Universal sentiments reside within these seemingly unique perspectives, attempting to bridge the gaping divide that veils the commonality between us.
Source: American Songwriter
That Secret Sauce
by Jerome Thomas
Released 9 July 2021
Rhythm Section International
****-
With his debut release for Rhythm Section International, Hackney-raised Jerome Thomas is declaring the dawning of a new age for British soul music.
Jerome’s school was a home filled with non-stop music; whether that was bootleg CDs of Rare Groove from East London’s Sunday markets to late 90s R&B on The Box or family favourites; Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Al Green, Chico DeBarge, Jill Scott. He learnt his prodigious vocal craft of ad-libs and harmonies by listening to Brandy’s ‘98 LP ‘Never Say Never’ on repeat.
Working with a live 6 piece band of assorted ages and musical backgrounds from rock to classical jazz, Jerome’s sound is a 180 degree turn from the direction of travel of UK RnB which has trended towards producers tracks made inside the computer. Jerome composes the pieces, then allows space for interaction with his long term musical collaborators. The ‘organic decisions’ open up the scope of his music as they jam and record. The result is a sound that could been made in the 70s, the 90s or the 00s. He’s the new blood of the sophisticated British sound that traces back to artists like Mica Paris, Soul II Soul and Omar.
For Jerome, music has literally been a life saving vessel for self expression. Like 1% of the population, he has a stutter, which disrupts the fluent flow of his speech. The stutter disappears when he sings, freeing his voice as it’s transformed into an instrument. As an introverted, intuitive Pisces, the songwriting process lets him explore and express his internal cosmos; “a lot of my songs are like diary entries addressed to people I haven’t been able to talk to or speaking about desires I am too embarrassed to talk about”. Jerome describes his sound using the acronym FOE, standing for “Freedom of Expression” and “Fusion Of Everything”. His music is a space for him to dissolve boundaries and binaries.
“As soul beings we are all a mixture of masculine and feminine; a mixture of our Mum and our Dad”. His fine falsetto explores a register that can read as masculine or feminine. The romantic story that runs across the two vinyl sides of “That Secret Sauce” is told without specifying a gender point of view. As Jerome says “we all experience the same thing with romantic situations, so I didn’t want to pin it to one side”. Like many of the great soul records, a close listen to “That Secret Sauce” reveals it’s romantic narrative; from first meeting to sexual infatuation to the dissolution of the affair, the breaking up and the moving forward - keeping your energy clear. It’s a tale as old as time, retold.
Source: Bandcamp
Source + We Move (Hi Res)
by Cleo Sol, Others
Released 22 October 2021
Concord Jazz
****-
Nubya Garcia's 2020 album SOURCE was among many critics' top 10-lists last year, including our own SunNeverSetsOnMusic 2020 Favourites. Following its release many of Garcia's peers released remixes of each
The song order does not replicate "SOURCE", one of it's songs ("Before Us: In Demerara & Caura") is missing and another "la cumbia Me Esta Llamando") is worthy of two new takes. Two additional remixes - Makaya McCraven's version of"Source" and Mark De Clive-Lowe's remix of "The Message Continues" are not included.
As AllMusic noted, Source, was a stunning, kaleidoscopic work that explored the connections between the thriving modern (UK) jazz scene and the composer's Afro-Caribbean roots, harmoniously blending dub reggae, cumbia, neo-soul, and several other genres into a powerful meditation on family history and identity.
Source: We Move is a short but diverse remix collection, further expanding the scope of the original album while keeping its message intact and continuing to honor Garcia's heritage.
Broken beat pioneer Kaidi Tatham starts off the set with a sparkling revision of "La cumbia me está llamando," which subtly shifts through different rhythms before landing at a heart-racing conclusion filled with shuffling percussion.
Nala Sinephro's brief, wondrous mix of "Together Is a Beautiful Place to Be" plucks some of the original's saxophone and places it in an orb of harps and echo effects, along with some momentary drum breaks.
DJ Harrison's "The Message Continues" collides more killer breakbeats with filtered sax melodies, basking in effortless good vibes.
Georgia Anne Muldrow and KeiyaA both inhabit more abstract spaces with their trippy reworkings of "Boundless Beings" and
"Stand With Each Other" respectively: Muldrow goes for a wonky Los Angeles beat scene approach, frequently fading the beat in and out, while KeiyaA loops pitched-up, chattering voices and threads the track with dubby, pulsating beats.
Suricata ("La cumbia me está llamando feat. La Perla") and Dengue Dengue Dengue (Source") both explore the cross-section of dub and electro-cumbia, with the latter's mix holding the heaviest bass weight.
Finally, visionary drummer Moses Boyd ends the set with a phenomenal drum'n'bass reworking of "Pace," comfortably setting Garcia's cascading saxophone to slamming breakbeats and trickling guitars.
While Source was an epic labor of love that clearly felt like the culmination of extensive soul-searching and constant refinement of the artist's craft, Source: We Move is far more spontaneous and off-the-cuff, recontextualizing snatches of the compositions in the postmodern tradition of hip-hop and dance music culture. The remix collection is considerably more fragmented than the cohesive original, but it's no less forward-thinking, and is well worth the time of anyone who was bowled over by the proper album.
Source: AllMusic
Skin
by Joy Crookes
Released 15 October 2021
Sony Music
****-
"Skin" is an impressive debut album by London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes, who although still stylistically influenced by her heroes (especially Amy Winehouse) still manages to stand out in the city's over-crowded, highly talented field of nu-soul female vocalists.
That's because she is overflowing with musical and lyrical vitality and possesses the happy knack of the very best writers and composers, to be able to commit her ideas to song in a way that makes the results of the combination of music and lyrics seem as if they were somehow inevitable.
Simultaneously, she marries the local to the universal and the personal to the political, broadening her reach and appeal.
It’s an album eight years in the making, capturing the South London musician’s journey through adulthood as she greater establishes her identity in her past, present and future, all while gazing out at the constantly-changing socio-political world surrounding her. It’s full of the intricacies and detail that have pedestaled Joy Crookes as a blossoming artistic force, full of the personal intimacy that sits within her lyrics, her production, and the visuals that tie them together. In all, Skin is an album that showcases every single facet to Joy Crookes: “This is an album about my identity,” she confirms.The songs are frequently autobiographical, drawing upon her Bangladeshi-Irish heritage and South London beginnings.
It’s an album eight years in the making, capturing the South London musician’s journey through adulthood as she greater establishes her identity in her past, present and future, all while gazing out at the constantly-changing socio-political world surrounding her. It’s full of the intricacies and detail that have pedestaled Joy Crookes as a blossoming artistic force, full of the personal intimacy that sits within her lyrics, her production, and the visuals that tie them together. In all, Skin is an album that showcases every single facet to Joy Crookes: “This is an album about my identity,” she confirms.
Source: Pilerats