Monthly Playlist: January 2023: Mentrix, Kahil El’Zabar, Sara Noelle, Your Old Droog, Onoe Caponoe…
January 31, 2023
CHOICE MUSIC FROM THE LAST MONTH: TEAM EFFORT
The inaugural Monthly Revue playlist of 2023; a choice selection of tracks from the last month on the blog. Curated by Dominic Valvona with Matt Oliver on the Rap Control once more, and music from reviews by our latest recruit Gillian Stone plus Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea and Graham Domain. Expect to hear the unexpected.
TRACK LIST//
Mentrix ‘Be Mahsa Be Nika’
Meadow Argus ‘No Company’
Anton Barbeau. ‘Dollis Hill Butchers’
Guided By Voices ‘Wild Kingdom’
The Wot Nots ‘Oi!’
Wings Of Desire ‘Runnin”
The Gangsta Rabbi ‘Ana’mika (138the Entr’acte)’
Neon Kittens ‘Chalk’
Smuts ‘Kalashnikova’
Dyr Faser ‘Life Form’
Earth ‘Rocker’
Xqui Ft. Bettina Schroeder ‘I Have A Knife’
Flexagon ‘Fort Saumarez: MP2’
George Winstone & Ben Monder ‘Part I’
Liela Moss ‘Empathy Files’
The Good Samaritans ‘Onughara’
Phil Ranelin & Wendell Harrison. ‘Genesis’
Fliptrix/Onoe Caponoe/Ramson Badbonez ‘SM58’
Masai Bey/BMS ‘I.a.a’
Micall Parknsun/Jazz T ‘Still…’
Dexter Dine ‘Sunshine In A Can’
Elise Preys/Marc-Antoine Perrio ‘Petites Heures’
Bjorn Magnusson ‘Everybody’s Got Something’
Designers ‘Moulindjek’
dal:um ‘Dot’
Clamb ‘Glittering Watermelon Oracle – Live’
Justo The MC/Axian ‘Autopilot’
Skyzoo/The Other Guys ‘Bodies!’
Carlos Nino & Friends ‘Drum Solo +, “Sounds Like Memory…”‘
Ghostwoods ‘Terminus’
Kety Fusco ‘2072’
Raul Refree ‘La Plage’
Esbe ‘Coventry Carol’
Sara Noelle. ‘Blooming Yucca’
Kahil El’Zabar And The Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ‘Harvest Time’
Beats & Pieces Big Band ‘Op’
Galactapus ‘Radio Kolossos’
Oddisee ‘Many Hats’
Upfront MC/Badhabitz ‘Stay Afloat’
Your Old Droog ‘Here’s Johnny’
Onoe Caponoe ‘Pet Cemetry’
The Perusal #38: David Lance Callahan, Designers, Anton Barbeau…
December 5, 2022
Dominic Valvona’s Album Roundup
A final roundup of eclectic and interesting new albums released at the end of last month and in December.
David Lance Callahan ‘English Primitive II’
(Tiny Global Productions)
As the current political shit show moves on at a rapid pace, with even 24 hours now seeming such a ‘long time in politics’, music makers can quickly seem out of step with the changing circumstances, upheavals and latest outrage. Unfortunately the climate in the UK has been bleak for a good many years, and so when David Lance Callahan originally set out on his address to the nation last year the despondency mixed with anger held: and still holds today, even if it has got a lot worse.
The former mover of both The Wolfhounds and Moonshake bands, Callahan wears his own name whilst retreading and reflecting the psychogeography and rich maverick history of England; the positives of which (social experiments and Bevin’s state institutions) are balanced against the overwhelming negatives.
Mostly recorded during the same sessions as English Primitive I, which felt like a modern lens angled at an eclectic Commonwealth style soundtrack, set to Punch and A Rake’s Progress. In the same vein round II in this repurposed folk mode uses a similar dirt music, African, Arabian, psych and Southern swamp boogie sound and that (for most of the album) winning male/female vocal delivery: a disarming it must be said, often harmonic, union that articulates tragedy, alarm, plague and even murder.
It begins with the pent-up grievances of a “regular person” played out to rusty Benin guitar fuzz and facemask shaking Mummers, ‘Invisible Man’. It’s as if The Pop Group shared bread with Francis Bebey on a churned kick of primitivism, on this load-bearing opener.
Hanif Kureishi’s iconic ‘Beautiful Launderette’ is repurposed as a metaphor for the sleazy enterprise of laundering ill-gotten gains and the proceeds of crime (from Russian oligarchs to financial rip-offs, the drug’s trade and kleptomaniac tyrants, civil servants and politicians). London being the leading epicenter of such a rotten trade comes in for a kicking to the music of Afro-post-punk and a stoner Doors. A ‘rant at the government’, ‘The Parrot’ uses various avian Scarfe-like sharpened ink pen cuts at the enablers that fail to be held to account. Musically its swamp boogie, a hint of Rhyton, Mick Harvey, David Cronenberg’s Wife and Canned Heat moving to a menacing backbeat and scuzz of tangled whining guitar.
A darkly disturbing prowl down memory lane, ‘Bear Factory’ is the album’s most serious drama. Back to the 1970s, in a world that’s described with the miasma of a David Peace novel, and the events that led to and around the murder of one of Callahan’s primary school mates is played out to plaintive melodramatic strings.
He who walked with astral beings and angels, William Blake and his famous London poem forms the literary food for the album’s finale, ‘London By Blakelight’; a walk across a manacled meta-layered city to a fuzzed drum beat and touch of John Johanna psych-blues-African-buzz.
Callahan’s worldly sound threads converge with a more idiosyncratic leftfield English (un)civil war commentary on a society gone to rack and ruin: one that’s mostly been fucked-up and over through self-sabotage. Part II of this rewired English, Gilbert & George- like stained glass-anointed gumbo extends on that ‘primitive’ vibe, the use of the word being a positive one, finding a familiar sense of the roots that bind us all.
Noémi Büchi ‘Matter’
(-OUS)
Exploding with a beautiful dramatic form of broken glass symmetry, the burgeoning composer and sound artist Noémi Büchi cerebrally and stunningly transforms the musical hallucinations of György Liget and the classical romanticism of the last century on the debut album suite, Matter.
Taking such symphonic inspirations as a starting point, Büchi thrusts this material into the contemporary and future with a centrifugal rotation of various electronic, metallic affects, sound waves and rhythms.
Mirrored and reflected back from states of stirring emotional intense gravitas and catharsis, the “matter” at hand is transformed out of the abstract into something more solid: a reification of feelings, anxieties and stresses you could say. Using an often-dramatic maximalist method in processing these moods, a perfect balance is struck between the harsher, granular and deep, even seismic, use of techno and the magical swells and pulls of pioneering classical music. But, as Büchi states in the accompanying press notes, this album is also a playful exploration of counterbalances and opposing forces too: like decay and growth; consonance and dissonance; the physical and ephemeral.
In pure sonic spectacle this translates into revolving suites of heavy Meta, more brutalistic scrunched and sharper focused intensity, and soundtrack sorcery – both the fantastical, kinetic Basic Channel like static-pelted ball-bearing beat driven ‘Measuring All Possibilities’, and Vangelis future world hallucination of unease, travail and alien mystique ‘Uncertainty Of An Undefined Interpendence’ would make great scores.
At times these tracks evoke illusions of chimed timepiece Baroque, set in some sci-fi environment, and at others, Jeff Mills conducting and warping the works of Igor Stravinsky. ‘Taking The Train With Mr. Shark’ travels down the stargate rails in the company of Mira Calix and Kraftwerk’s ‘Europe Endless’. ‘Screaming At Brutism’, as the title shouts, pounds away at the granite edifice of violence like the Pyrolator and Emptyset.
There is however as much beauty, light and hymnal stark release as there is the mysterious, the churned and weighted on an album that pulls together opposing forces to create a truly out-of-time, out-of-frame electronic symphony. Matter is a startling, intense and machine-sculpted debut.
Björn Magnusson ‘Nightclub Music & Ethereal Faith’
(Specter Fix Press) 16th December 2022
From an alpine location looking back at the mood music, emotional pulling atmospheres and moments caught in a reminiscing wooziness the Zurich-based artist Björn Magnusson seems to have encompassed a particular amalgamation of New York City arty aloofness and streetwise existential pain on his new album. For this is a songbook suffused by two factories of influence: Warhol’s and Tony Conrad’s. Lou Reed’s Transformer (a little throwback to the Velvets as well) and Conrad’s Theater Of Eternal Music circle and his drone conjuncture Four Violins come together, or threaten to come unstuck, on a both loosened and more intensified dissonant album that hoovers up the psychogeography of the city.
But within that framework lies a sort of no wave, Hansa Studio and jazz vibe, with both Nikki Sudden and Kid Congo Power’s Danny Hole (amongst a rafter of other instruments played) and the Swiss-Zimbabwean free jazz musician Tapiwa Svosve both on saxophone duties throughout. Never forceful or overriding the rest of the musical circle (which also includes Dean & Britta and Luna foil Sean Eden on guitar and of course Björn) those sax sounds offer both an atonal mizzle and freeform breathes and parped wails, strains and contortions.
When pulled together with Björn voice and songwriting this all sounds like a brilliant, sophisticated mismatch of Arto Lindsay, Hunky Dory and Heroes Bowie, England’s Glory, Chris Spedding, Low Cut Connie, Ariel Pink and John Cale in a well-worn city, gathered around a rolling barrel organ in some lower Manhattan bar, washed up and out, yet still capable of producing pop, rock and jazz with a certain off-kilter spirit of wistfulness, despondency and romantic disconnection. Something like that anyway.
As the RP blurb usefully summarizes, Björn’s almost final lyric, on the album’s swansong ‘Everybody’s Got Something’, says it all: “Sometimes the world is an oyster, sometimes an ashtray”.No better line is needed for an album that sits on the blues junction between a rambunctious and artsy NYC. There’s even a dreamily strung-out loosened piano with brassy resonance vision of the city’s leftfield auteurs Suicide and their own take on “America eats its young”, sleaze in leather and haunting polemic, ‘Ghost Rider’. You can’t get much more underground New York than that. And this tribune repurposes that cult jukebox turn for a wistful splice of hallucinogenic bar room philosophizing.
Five years on from Björn’s Almost Transparent Blues debut and the wait has been worthwhile, with an album of lived-in dreams and momentary abstract feelings captured for posterity on a sort of new wave suite composed for the iconic meeting spots and streets of an almost romanticised New York boardwalk. A great album to finish the year off on.
Orchid Mantis ‘How long Will It Take’
Bleached by the sun over time and through various hazy sepia lenses, the placable recordings of the Atlanta artist Thomas Howard languidly bleed into a number of musical genres. Dream pop, lo fi, the psychedelic, surf and indie all merge with the field recordings of subway and airport lobby limbos to construct an attenuate-layered soundtrack to a world of wistful plaint, transient yearns and drowsy, if deeply felt, romantic sentiment: “You have my soul forever, and always.”
Under the Orchid Mantis moniker, Howard has been somnolently and dreamily applying that method since 2014, releasing six albums and a number of EPs in that period. How Long will It Take – a generous fifteen-track offering – marks his seventh expanded release of sun bendy enervated, affected and mirage trippy pop songs that embrace a certain lucidity and disarming quality of nostalgia for the early noughties wave of lo fi washed-out warmth.
On each wave, both brushed and mono-tunneled drum beat, and evaporated effect Howard seems to go with a very nice bendy flow. That’s not to say there’s a lack of direction or focus. Oh no. Just a more veiled and dappled intimate softened sharing of waking moment’s anxieties, the nature of our world and declarations of love.
If phases and flanged blurred suffusions of Cass McCombs, Yoni Wolf, epic45, Summer Heat, The Drums and laidback later 70s California ocean view singer/songwriter material grabs you, then Howard’s Orchid Mantis alias will snuggly wrap its arms around your lugholes and work its inquiring magic.
Designers ‘S-T’
(We Jazz Records)
Another month and another freshly assembled addition to the leading Scandinavian-based label We Jazz. This time it’s in the shape of the impressive geometric and architectural imbued/inspired Designers trio.
An international hailed group based in Nantes, the trio’s Belgium composer and double-bassist (also a very dab hand at the piano) Joachim Florent is joined by the Finnish pianist Aki Rissanen and Australian drummer Will Guthrie on a debut album suite of both patterned and freer empirical mod pieces.
Florent’s accompanying quotes set the scene and theme for this eight-track work of various jazz and semi-classical styles. The defacto instigator, leader found that his piano studies back in 2019 were, happily, but unintentionally resembling what he called a “pretty” geometry. Further on, Florent chanced upon the often surreal, imaginative architectural photography of Filip Dujardin. Rather than building blocks though, the Designers turn clever forms into feelings, reflections and melodic atmospheric journeys to vaguely geographic locations, landscapes: The opening, stirring and subtly Middle Eastern/Arabian ‘Lebanon’ being one such example; a camel motioned caravan through a soft Yusef Lateef, Tarek Yamani and Ahmed Jamel Trio scored trinket percussive and trickled piano notation market place. I’ve no idea what or where ‘Moulindjek’ is but it sounds very mysterious with its dabbed and busier plinks and plonks, country-bowed graceful evocations, glissando and fluctuations.
Elsewhere there is a reference to the iconic Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt’s “tintinnabules” compositional process and writing technique. Translating as “bells” more or less, and borrowed from the Catholic liturgy, it also translates as “crosstalk”, when two voices come together to form something inseparable, or, when pairs of notes are constructed one against the other. In this capacity the trio invoke the technique on the reflective, spiritual jazz hinted and serious minded ‘Tintinabulisme’ piece.
Touches of 60s period Blue Note, the Bad Plus, Keith Jarrett and the Neil Cowley Trio can be picked up across an album of poised thoughtfulness and more playful freeform musicianship. He geometric waters are both choppy, heightened and yet equally in a legato style throughout. Florent uses every inch of the double-bass to offer a foundation, a rhythm, a droning or sonorous bed, but also springs into action on occasion and quickens into a blur during one particular near solo act. His foil Rissanen’s piano seems to overlay itself, yet also displays more singular accentuations, descriptive patterns or trickles. And Guthrie’s drums seem to sizzle and simmer beneath the surface, yet also dish out tumbles, tight breaks and more loose percussive displays of skill.
A sophisticated, movable synthesis of balanced geometry awaits on an album of fluctuating tides, climbs, spiralled descents and even a little positivity – see the ‘White Keys’ finale, a dash and simmering charge in the right direction. The Designers set down quite the marker in that European semi-classical jazz vogue.
Greg Nieuwsma & Antonello Perfetto ‘Chase ritual’
(Cruel Nature Records)
Connecting in Krakow as members of the progressively experimental Sawark before an eventual disbandment, the Midwest American and Neapolitan bred musicians Gerg Nieuwsma and Antonello Perfetto formed the Corticem partnership before sporting their own birth names in a new avant-garde chapter.
Last year’s Aquarium album cemented a reputation for both playful and strange experimentation and exploration. The latest, Chase Ritual, strays into ever more expansive realms, with an entrancing (for the most part) long form trio of cosmic-reflective and krautrock/kosmische imbued ethnographic journeys.
‘Star Birthmark’ sets things in motion with a near twenty-minute warm revolving Cluster-like peregrination. Roedelius and Florian Fricke sit at the piano as waves of flange guitar drones and fairground synth rotate around them. There are stopovers in North Africa (by the sounds of it) with vague echoes of scrappy-tinny Gnawa percussion (that will be the krakebs), some Egyptian flute or oboe, and spiritual paean of worldly voices. Half mirage, half prog-jazz suite, this side one spanning track builds towards a final squall of noise, haphazard piano and tumbled drums.
As a comedown, of a kind, the lengthy entitled ‘Supernatural Ears Hear The Call Of Faraway Mountains’ – half a haiku in its own right – floats off into the celestial. Spherical galactic rotations, serenading prog guitar and relaxed splashy and rattled drums drift around the outer reaches like a Tangerine Dream score.
The final track, ‘Ovine Wheel’, is all cathedral harmonia reverberated Popol Vuh, with spells of holy swoons, hints of a more traversing later Guru Guru and an ongoing, sometimes looped, analogue phone call between two European characters. Extra voices are added to the swell from what could be (again) Africa, but also Arabia and further afield.
Chase Ritual is an album to plug straight into; headphones on, ready to be immersed in globe-spanning and cosmic listening adventures.
Anton Barbeau ‘Stranger’
(Gare Du Nord) 9th December 2022
An omnivorous child of Ian Hunter, Lawrence Haywood, Kim Fowley and David Bowie, the both playful and broody artist Anton Barbeau is at it again with his myriad of influences, taking the familiar and bending it to his own ends.
Psychedelia, glam, new wave (that’s the German, American and Australian kinds), pop, scuzz rock and noughties indie gel together on a lamentable yet also romantically gestured catchy songbook; one that finds Barbeau “bumped” back to his wife’s farmstead in small town California from his Berlin sojourn. We have the pandemic to thank for that move, as Barbeau struggles to adjust to life back in the States, a “stranger” as it were to a culture and environment he left behind for Europe. As a Yellow Brick Elton once despondently sang, “I’m going back to my farm”. And it does seem there is a theme of shunning one life of endless pro-Covid tours and artistic pressures for a rustic idyll, isolated yet finding eventual content and purpose settling down with his wife Julia in domestic bliss.
Even his worldly band of contributors added their parts remotely; tuning in from Chesterfield, Lille, Detroit, Hastings and elsewhere. It doesn’t show for a minute, as everything seems to gel together so well.
Inner and outer turmoil, the turning over of thoughts and a sense of detachment are the main drivers on what most be Barbeau’s 30th, or something like that, album – so prolific that near enough everyone at the blog has had a go at reviewing one of his untold many albums, now coming full circle back to me. It starts with, I think, one of the album’s best tracks, a self-titled kind of gently brooding Heyme, Eno and Bowie-esque laced longing, searching plaint about being a stranger in a strange land. That disconnection bleeds over into the transatlantic version of Kraftwerk, via DAF, Der Plan and the new romantics, ‘Ant Lion’.
Barbeau’s musical allies are 2000s Bowie (Reality and Heathen especially), later 70s Roxy, the female harmony backed Kevin Ayers of Bananamour, Bolan, Ty Segall and Beck, but that extends, expands to so much more. At times I can hear (intentionally or not) an air of Neil Finn (admittedly arm-in-arm once more with Bowie) on the new wave-ish ‘Sugarcube City’ – a good line of which, as the song disappears into the ether, being, “You’re only as beautiful as your mirror.” And many of the album’s shorter, vignettes evoke all sorts of musical inspirations; from a drip reverbed, female cooed listing of ‘Favourite Items’ to the dreamy vapoured, soft dalek-like ‘Out Of Sight’.
To more romantic settings and the declaration of wedding vowels, the Stranger album pays a serious noted tribute to Barbeau’s wife, who may just have saved him from himself. Dedicated to his better half then, the Casio preset, nutritious-kissed ‘Farm Wife’ slips into the more Lennon-esque soppy “I owe you everything” sentiment of ‘Slight Chance’. It means all the insecurities and wantonness of many of the previous songs finds a balance and that sense of comfort, ending on a note of marital contentment. Barbeau bounces, trips and moodily sulks his way around a psychedelic ‘microdosed’ cannon of the fuzzed, serenaded, backbeat sprung and pop powered-up. The returning stranger may just have found his place for now, conjuring up a familiar sounding songbook of ideas and poignancy. As my colleague Mr. Domain has already written, when reviewing what is meant to be Stranger’s sister album, Power Pop!!! earlier this year, there’s nothing highly original here. Yet it is still a cracking album nonetheless, an idiosyncratic offering from a constantly evolving and changing artist.
Kinked And Señor Service ‘Reincanto/Real Bwoy’
(Artetetra)
From the bonkers symphony of experimental and playful electronic music label that last month brought us the insane sinfonetta that was Trans Zimmer & The DJs a split showcase of liquid, bubbled kooky arcade music and imaginative alien soundscaping. Sharing, in a most congruous fashion, the bill is the interchangeable Lapo Sorride/Don Sorride alter ego Kinked, and Umberto Pasinetti solo project Señor Service.
Sorride, whose music is described as a ‘leftfield-ritualism of vocal gestures and granular realities’, appears in various forms as a ‘visual and text researcher’ and ‘tenco-grime lyricist’ (whatever that is). In the Kinked guise we find Sorride running back and forth across a digital audio workstation, a Roland VT3 and Yamaha PSR E363 keyboard. Landing on everything but only holding onto any specific micro-sound for a few seconds, the action is constantly moving. Singular drum hits with some occasional rolls of a kind and even melodic, ambient waves emerge from out of a pneumatic soundtrack of power-ups, high-pitched frequencies, moistened effects, burbles and a strange version of computer game primitivism.
It’s as if µ-Ziq had created the early evolving forms of new life, a whole contained world; growing and learning to communicate with life outside a virtual biosphere. An improvisation with some very interesting, playful, on occasion, fun but also touching on quieter more serious tones, Reincanto, through chance, conjures up an alien and haphazard world of skittish soundscaping.
In a similar, if more realized and slightly more settled, mode, Señor Service sounds like Sakamoto’s floppy disks in the hands of the Aphex Twin. Quirks, looms and concertinaed MIDI-like sounds emanate from Pasinetti’s omnivorous feasting soundboard of quarks and cutesy dialogue samples.
At times this sounds like a marimba-twinkled score to some fantasy island level on a Japanese computer game of the nighties, at others, like the light flash patterned communications between the aliens of Close Encounters and the imagined inner worlds of a microchip. Cartoon arias and 64-bit scales combine with pleasing melodies, melodica-like waves and furry creatures on a synthesized, programmed collage of constantly evolving and progressive play. This is what happens when no one tells you to stop messing around in your bedroom with all those electronic music making devices. A free reign that magic’s up the goods.
It seems that to qualify for the Artetetra label nod of approval you need to be drinking from a whole other, fun and mad source than the rest of the electronic music fraternity. Always on a leftfield bent, and entertaining to boot, the Milan-based collective imprint once again delights as much as it does amuse in the pursuit of pushing at the fun buttons and outer limits of electronic and avant-garde music. A great split coupling of intriguing artists that demand further investigation.
Various ‘Perú Selvático – Sonic Expedition Into The Peruvian Amazon 1972 – 1986’
(Analog Africa) 16th December 2022
Sometimes as a critic you just want something fun and playful to listen to. To escape the lectures, the woes. And with Analog Africa’s latest visit to the cumbia mecca of Perú, you’re suddenly whisked away to the beach side parties and jungle shindigs of South America.
Released in conjunction with a rarefied collection of dance tunes from Sonido Verde de Moyobamba by the label’s Limited Dance Editions imprint, the Perú Selvático compilation draws together a survey of Amazon style cumbia movers and shakers from the early 1970s to the mid 80s. Sonido make a couple of appearances on this selection, so you can pretty much test whether you want to shell out for both albums in this two-pronged Perúvian showcase.
But before all that, just a little context and information is needed first. If you’re just a cursory listener or newcomer to the phenomenon of cumbia music then in short it can be described loosely as a Latin-wide style that swaps or picks up changes wherever it falls within the South and Central American regions. Originally starting off in Colombia as a merger of African, indigenous and European styles of music, cumbia spread like wildfire to most communities; adopted, adapted and again melded with even more sounds as it travelled. That underlying saunter cannot be mistaken however, nor the courtship for that matter.
The main European element, the accordion, would later be replaced by the electric guitar as electricity reached even the most densely covered areas of the Amazon; once more changing the sound in the process. Just to confuse matters, a sub-genre called “chichi” was to emerge specifically from inland Perú. This was a kind of Andean music that became popular in the country’s coastal cities, especially in Lima. Named after the favoured Inca corn-based liquor, chichi’s roots began in the oil boomtowns and interchanges of the Amazon. Speaking totally as a mere student of ethnography, I’m sure the music on this compilation is either part of it or at least a close relative. They both share the same penchant for surf guitar and rudimental synthesised sounds if this compilation is anything to go by. Add to that the party spirit – an itch to join a long conga line -, the use of Bill Justus-like raunchy licks, tropical hints of the Caribbean and a suffusion of bandy organ.
Behind the pin-up cover lies a less seedy, a bit sensual, collection of rare hits mostly confined, success wise, to the Amazon. Highly popular locally, it would take time to make it to the Lima airwaves. A smattering of producers took to the road, helping to spread that sound to cities like Tarapoto, Moyobamba and Pucallpa – only reachable by air or boat that last one. There’s a god showing of groups (I presume) from those mentioned regions, with The Ventures and Shadows twing-twang, scuffed percussion and playful spirit of the already mentioned Sonido Verde de Moyobamba, to the opening swimmingly wavy beachside Latin, low-volt amped guitar buzz of Pucallpa’s Los Royals, and the Meek-like echo-y reverb of Fresa Juvenil De Tarapoto. Talking of popularity, or just more prolific if you like, Los Zheros get three bites of the cherry. They saunter to congas and spindly percussion on ‘Selva Virgen’, stir up slightly more exotic sandy relaxed vibes on ‘Alibaba’ – some Arabian night fantasy perhaps -, and magic up seductive move on ‘La Uñita’. Likewise Los Cisnes get an equal three-way selection, with the Brazilian-flavoured ‘La Hamaca’, bendy and fuzz guitar surfing ‘Safari En La Selva’, and the held-organ, soft drum rolling ‘Rio Mar’.
Elsewhere there’s a balance of the laidback and racing, and a number of attempts to electrify cumbia with some synthesized technology; some zaps and wobbles and bobbed liquid bendy bits here and there, which mostly lean towards the lo fi and kitsch.
Intentional or not, some tracks veer over the borders, picking up sounds, grooves, rhythms from the East Coast of South America, Sun Records America and Mexico: or so it sounds. It’s a party whatever way you choose to look at it.
Analog Africa lift some sweet, cool tunes from out of obscurity, or at least highlight a cult sound to a wider audience. So give Christmas a more infectious Latin feel and joy this year, you won’t regret it.
Hi, my name is Dominic Valvona and I’m the Founder of the music/culture blog monolithcocktail.com For the last ten years I’ve featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world that we think you’ll want to know about. No content on the site is paid for or sponsored and we only feature artists we have genuine respect for /love. If you enjoy our reviews (and we often write long, thoughtful ones), found a new artist you admire or if we have featured you or artists you represent and would like to buy us a coffee at https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail to say cheers for spreading the word, then that would be much appreciated.
Our Daily Bread 511: Anton Barbeau ‘Power Pop’
April 18, 2022
ALBUM REVIEW/Graham Domain
Anton Barbeau ‘Power Pop’
(Big Stir Records)
The new album by, Sacramento native, Anton Barbeau is called Power Pop. The irony is that it is not power pop! It is however Pop! More accurately, it is Pop with the sound of the early 1980’s, when bands like Vince Clarkes’ Depeche Mode and Howard Jones troubled the charts!
The new single ‘Rain, Rain’ is a case in point and comes across like the Eurythmics with male vocals! Complete with thunderstorm sound effects, the lyrics are standard Pop fare “rain on me, wash away my tears, set me free!”
Similarly, ‘The Never Crying Wolf Boy’ sounds like a cross between Yazoo and the Human League with its pulsing bass synth and daft lyrics… “The sound of silver tambourines spells out my name at Halloween.”
The short instrumental pieces between songs, such as ‘Slash Zed Zip’ and ‘Pompadour Toupee’ sound like off cuttings from The Art of Noise but don’t really add anything to the album!
The song ‘Power Pop’ meanwhile, begins like an alternative dance record before morphing into acoustic rock dourness, but still manages to have throwaway pop lyrics like “if this is war I’ve had enough, my mouth is full of power pop!” Sometimes, the songs stray into pure pastiche of the comedic type (like Neil Innes or The Rutles), for example, ‘The Drugs’. Elsewhere, the guitar pop of ‘Julian Cope’ reveals some terrible rhymes such as “Julian Cope, how do you cope?” and “I saw you Vibing, we beamed up Croyden Style-y, next thing it’s Bracknell and we’re backstage getting smiley!”
Overall it’s a fine pop album even if it’s a bit Retro in its sound and vision.
REVIEWS ROUNDUP
Words: Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea
Brian ‘Bordello’ Shea joined the Monolith Cocktail team in January 2019. The cult leader of the infamous lo fi gods, The Bordellos, has released countless recordings over the decades with his family band of hapless unfortunates, and is the owner of a most self-deprecating sound-off style blog. Each month we end him a deluge of new releases on his virtual desk to see what sticks.
Toxic Chicken ‘Uncomfortable Music’
21st July 2019
I don’t apologise for writing another review of Toxic Chicken, as this is his 3rd LP in as many months, and this like the other two is a work of pure maverick pop genius: and not just because there is a four second track called ‘Brian From The Bordellos’ on it!
This LP has everything that I love about the magic and joy of music. It has humour and a madness that at times reminds me of the great Syd Barrett and the wonderful White Noise Electrical Storm LP. It is eccentric pushed to the extreme. Songs with the subject matter of eating politicians and love songs for cats and for Mother Nature and what is bad about England, but that track only being under two minutes long does not quite manage to list everything.
Uncomfortable Music is certainly an enjoyable and rewarding listening experience, and at times, the subject matter does live up to its title. But this album is a pay-what-you-want to download, so is well worth a listen. Another great album from a great artist: And I mean artist. And the track ‘Little Snail’ is the best dance track I have heard all year.
Snapped Ankles ‘Stunning Luxury’
1st March 2019
The whirring and exciting sounds of post punk circa 2019 coming at you like a extravagant wholemeal piece of chiffon scarred alternative disco meat; the sound of Devo fucking the brains and beats out of the B52s whilst the horny ghost of Mark E Smith watches on making cutting asides whilst stomping on the hopes and dreams of the not yet born love child of David Byrne and Lena Lovich.
This LP is one big extravagance of dark dance and post punk joy, the sort of album to soundtrack your wildest night out ever: sordid clubs, cheap drinks, hanging out with girls and boys who really should know better, the best musical electro porn one could ever hope to gorge oneself on.
Stunning Luxury is dirty, it is funky, it is experimental, it is blistering rock ‘n’ roll. A luxury indeed. One that should be enjoyed by all.
Anton Barbeau ‘Berliner Grotesk’
(Beehive Records / Pink Hedgehog Records) 19th July 2019
There is a dark playful melancholy I love about this LP, not the weeping into your hanky kind, or, the “oh I feel so sorry for myself kind”, but the, “I am middle aged and looking back at my life through the good and bad the happy and bad” kind. There is hope in the future kind, the kind of melancholy that Martin Newell thrives at writing. Even the cover of the Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ is enriched with a sadness the original misses; this version overcomes the familiarity by transforming it into a slightly electro reggae beauty.
But not all is sadness and tears there is also fine pop of the power variety: the sort Jellyfish so excelled at releasing. The Bowie Mott and the Fabs influences of course shine bright bringing a lovely old time Englishness that is so often ignored in modern music of today. This LP is a finely crafted pop album, with enough quirks and twists to make it a very enjoyable listen.
Simon Waldram ‘Into The Blue’
27th July 2019
Simon Waldram made one of my favourite LPs from 2016, the wonderful self released Insolation, an LP that dipped and swayed, taking in JAMC one minute and the next, beautiful swathes of psych folk. This, his new album, Into The Blue, takes off where that album left off, but is a slightly more subdued affair: Songs of darkness, love, depression and hope merge into a quite beautiful collection.
In these days when the acoustic guitar has taken over the electric, sales wise, there is certainly a market for LPs of softly strummed melancholia, and Simon does it far better than most; bringing to mind at times, the beautiful slowcore shimmer of Low (especially on ‘Breaking Waves’), at other times, recalling the magic of the Go Betweens and The Smiths.
The highlight for me though is the beautiful psych folk instrumental ‘Sea Turtles’: a few moments of total bliss.
Into The Blue is a fine LP and with the right backing and a bit of luck could well fight its way to the top of the overcrowded melancholic brigade, and could find favor on many late night radio shows. An album of real beauty and sadness and hope.
Moody Mae ‘Throwing Rocks at John E. Road’
2nd July 2019
Indie pop from Sweden is on the whole a wonderful thing indeed, and this EP/mini LP from Moody Mae keeps within that wonderful remit. Beatles like ‘Martha My Dear’ piano, lovingly could not give a toss female vocals, ba ba bas and lofi psychedelia join forces to force music lovers to nod their heads and grin like grinning idiots. And to think that this was recorded in 2005 and has taken 14 years to see the light of day. I think it may be time for Moody Mae to reform and record a full length waxing. For when a band has the gift of pure pop wonderment it is a shame not to share that wonderment with the less fortunate. A treasure of a release.
Radio Europa ‘Community Is Revolution’
(Wormhole) 19th July 2019
It seems like a weekly event that Wormhole Records release a new underground LP of chilled out darkness. This weeks release is by Radio Europa and is an LP of chilled out darkness with the odd offering of a glimpse of light appearing through the cracks of the drawn heavy curtains called life: The beam of light showing the particles of dust exploding and hovering around the thoughts of insolvent tomorrows and the broken promises of yesterday.
Gentle soft spoken vocals lilt into the wave of dark synth and drum beats that blanket you in the warmth of the cold that whispers sweet nothings whilst grinding a worn down stiletto heel into your vacant soul.
Community Is Revolution is an album to soundtrack these uncertain times; an album to close your eyes and let the music sweep over you and take you to the dark recess of your mind where devils and angels juggle with the happy/sad of your life.
bigflower ‘Night And Day’
13th July 2019
Another week another fine free to download single from bigflower. An explosion of post punk guitars do battle with horns and a bass riff so mighty it would make Jean Jacques Burnel want to call it a day and to take up flower arranging. When oh when are this mighty band going to be picked up by some label. For this is far to a fine a track to slip under the radar yet again. Blogs, djs of the alternative variety should be ramming this down people’s throats instead of some acoustic guitar charlatan whining on about how twee their girlfriend’s vagina is [like they have saw their girlfriend’s vagina! They saw an egg box and let their imagination take hold]
Bigflower are one of the most exciting underground bands around at the moment and we at the Monolith Cocktail will keep ranting on about their majestic take on modern life until the less with-it blogs catch on. Blogs, djs, record labels for God sake get your fingers out.
Why Sun ‘Frugte’
14th June 2019
Softly strummed guitars and deeply crooned vocals kick start this beautiful five track EP of softly strummed guitars and deeply crooned vocals; songs that bring the joys of Galaxie 500 and the Wild Swans oozing into my mind, and lovers of those bands and the many bands of that ilk should enjoy this. So give it a listen especially if you are hung-over or on the verge of doing fuck all.
Albums of 2018: Part One: Idris Ackamoor to The Moonwalks
December 3, 2018
Selected by Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Gianluigi Marsibilio.
The decision making process:
Being the exhaustive and eclectic set of features our (choice) albums of the year are, we know you probably don’t need to or want to dally about reading a long-winded prognosis of our judgement process. But here it is anyway.
Continuing to shy away from fatuous rating systems and ‘best of lists’, the Monolith Cocktail endeavors to offer a more visceral and personal spread of worthy ‘choice’ picks, with no album dominating or holding any particular numbered position – unlike most of our contemporaries lists, stuck with the ridiculous task, for example, of explaining why one album is more deserving of their fatuous numbered spot than another.
With no hierarchical order, we’ve lined our album choices up alphabetically; split into two features – A (Idris Ackamoor) to M (The Moonwalks), andN (Thomas Nation) to (Thom Yorke) Z.
All of our favourite new and reissued albums and EPs from 2018 are of course considered to be the most interesting, vibrant and dynamic of the year’s releases. But the best? Granted, to make this list you have to have made some sort of impact, but we’d never suggest these entries were categorically the best albums of 2018: even if that might be true. Instead our list is an indicator of our amorphous tastes, rounding up another year in the life of the Monolith Cocktail, and we hope, introducing you to titles and artists/bands that may have dropped below the radar or got lost in the noise of more commercial better promoted releases.
All selections have been made by me (Dominic Valvona), Matt Oliver and Gianluigi Marisibilio.
A.
Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids ‘An Angel Fell’ (Strut Records)
Serving a worthy musical apprenticeship from and imbued by the masters Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Cecil Taylor, the polymath musician, activist, director of The Pyramids ensemble and torchbearer of spiritual and Afrofuturist jazz, Idris Ackamoor once more makes holy communion with the cradle of civilisation on the lamentable An Angel Fell. Imploring a unified message, a connectivity, a reminder that we can all trace our ancestry back to the same place, Ackamoor follows up on ‘We All Be Africans’ with an epic sweeping album of Afro-jazz 2-Step ‘Warrior Dances’ and plaintive primal jazz catharsis.
Walking through the Valley of The Kings; sailing aboard Sun Ra’s Arkestra; conducting the empyrean; evoking Kuti’s Lagos Afrobeat jive; Ackamoor and his troupe traverse the mismia of a broken, corrupt world, delivering cries of anguish and auguers aplenty. Whether penning requiems to the gunned-down black victims of the US Justice system (‘Soliloquy For Michael Brown’), or in radiant prayer (‘Sunset’), they effortlessly and wondrously summon forth the leading lights of each musical genre they inhabit. Afrobeat, gospel, spiritual, funk, blues, future-past-present all come together in one of the year’s most important, enlightening and defining opuses.
(Dominic Valvona)
Ammar 808 ‘Maghreb United’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Throwing the traditional unwieldy Maghreb, before it was demarcated and split into colonial spheres of influence, back together again in the name of progress and unity, Sofyann Ben Youssef fuses the atavistic and contemporary. With past form as one half of the Bargou 08 partnership that gave a modern electric jolt to the isolated, capitulating Targ dialect ritual of the Bargou Valley on the northwestern Tunisia and Algeria border, Youssef under the moniker of Ammar 808 once again propels the region’s diverse etymology of languages, rhythms and ceremony into the present, or even future: hopefully a more optimistic one.
Jon Hassell’s ‘possible musics’ meets Major Lazer, the traversing adaptations from the Gnawa, Targ and Rai traditions and ritual are amorphously swirled or bounced around in a gauze of both identifiable and mystically unidentifiable landscapes. Mixing modern R&B, dub, electro effects with the dusky reedy sound of the evocative gasba and bagpipe like zorka, and a range of earthy venerable and yearning vocals from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria artists, Youssef distorts, amps up or intensifies a resonating aura of transformative geography and time.
Nothing short of visionary. Full review…
(DV)
Angels Die Hard ‘Sundowner’ (Jezus Factory Records)
Admittedly taking some time to grow on me, the Angels Die Hard combo’s Monsterism Island meets Les Baxter ethnographic phantasm of a remote Southeast Asian archipelago instrumental concept album, Sundowner, has finely unfurled its full magic: just in time to be included in the annual albums of the year features.
Imbued with a legacy of progressive, alt-rock, psych, exotica and post-punk influences plus Julian Cope’s Krautrock compendium, the Angels transduce and channel a cornucopia of styles once more as they soundscape the tropical island of Andaman. An environmental clarion call as much as a progressive rocking exotica, Sundowner is dedicated, at least partially, to the environmental tragedy of the plastic-strewn oceans.
Beachcombing a radioactive luminous landscape of musical opportunity, from bummer downers to mind-expanding space rock jams, these Angels expand their horizons (literally), on the band’s best album to date. Some ideas work better than others of course, but when they do get it right they produce some fantastic opuses of amorphous abandon. Full review…
(DV)
Any Other ‘Two, Geography’ (42 Records)
The story of Adele Nigro (Any Other) is made of beautiful songs originating from a desire to subvert a rather conservative musical culture, just like the Italian one.
2018 has given us many beautiful pieces, of the most varied atmospheres, but to find a compact and complete album in each of its parts, touch refuge in Two, Geography (42 Records).
The numerous collaborations that Any Other has collected, as a musician, in recent years, have been invaluable to develop, refine and embellish her poetics.
The sonorities of the album are very distinct, and at the same time loquaciously soaked by all the experiences brought on stage (or in the studio) during the year that is inexorably past.
With Two, Geography, however, there is more, Adele coming out with her head held high, they are not only beautiful pieces that stand out for their immediacy and vitality, but also the international character of the project.
Any Other’s work was immediately presented as something else, for depth and acuity, starting from that ‘Roger Roger, Commander’ or from the same singles who announced Two, Geography.
The simplicity in intertwining linear arpeggios, bright rhythmic lines and a voice, both delicate and particular, makes us immediately think of the disc in a different way, we immediately understand that such a sound must be appreciated with attention and in its various nuances.
Since the first bars of ‘Silently. Quietly. Going Away’ (the first work of Any Other) you could see her skill in shaping a song form as a real opportunity for musical and textual speculation.
The song ‘Capricorn No’ is a monument of modernity that comes on, not only for its immediate and deep style, but because it plays with the atmosphere that you can hardly expect from an Italian artist.
The work as a whole is a challenge, a part of a musical resistance, a progressive push in the sea magnum of ideas that too often settle down, even in brilliant artists.
Any Other is the 2018, the beautiful and fundamental face to make us remember that, all in all, this year went well.
(Gianluigi Marsibilio)
B.
Anton Barbeau ‘Natural Causes’ (Beehive/Gare du Nord)
Ian Hunter via Robyn Hitchcock via Luke Haines via Julian Cope, wrapped inside an enigma, the Sacramento born, Berlin-based, Anton Barbeau changes his style of delivery repeatedly yet always maintains an idiosyncratic ingenuity in whatever he does. The results of an aborted project under the Applewax banner, made in the run up to the 2016 US elections, Natural Causes is the reflective, more open antithesis to what would have been a far darker and mournful proposition. Richly melodious and halcyon, this most brilliant new collection finds Barbeau both transforming some of the back catalogue (for the better) and penning new glorious sounding maverick pop songs: The quality of which are cerebral, memorable, melodic but also adventurous and inventive.
Barbeau and a congruous cast of guests lend a touching caress to a songbook of contemporary surreal lyrical musings and love songs. Unrushed, even breezy in places but hardly lacking intensity, there’s an air of nostalgia in homages to the radio stations and DJs that first sparked interest in the young Barbeau on the Hunter fronts Tom Petty band finale Down Around The Radio. And with a nod to one of the music cannons greatest ever records, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper kaleidoscope, a stab at a popsike hit (a missing link from one of Strange Days magazines 80s halcyon compilations) is made with a song that was originally written to be recorded at the venerated Fab Fours’ inner sanctum of Abbey Road, with the quirky Disambiguation.
Fans of Barbeau will be once again charmed by his unique songwriting abilities, and those still unfamiliar with the inimitable generation X artist of renown will find much to love about his psychedelic pop genius. Full review…
(DV)
MC Paul Barman ‘Echo Chamber’ (Mello Music Group)
“Potent politics, funky lounge lizard off-the-tops and bizarre hypotheses, burrowing its way through the toughest of leather bound volumes to have you picking the bones out for weeks on end” RnV May 18
In many ways this is the consummate Paul Barman album, but it bears repeating straight off the bat, while trying super hard to not sound incredulous, that ‘Echo Chamber’ features production from ?uestlove, DOOM and Prince Paul (funky/sidekick status, from stoop to playground), with additional contributions from Mark Ronson (upping the ludicrousness with a tweak of The Ronettes’ ‘Sleigh Ride’), Masta Ace and Open Mike Eagle. That’s some serious string pulling from an explicitly cult concern only reinforcing his standards in lewdness and a smart Aleck riot act both downplaying and toadying a racing IQ (his relocation to Mello Music Group keeps him in his own lane as well). Ridiculous as ever with the dictionary and remaining a brilliant observer – see ‘Youngman Speaks on Race’, and ‘Commandments’ going one better by taking the Decalogue to Sesame Street and Biggie’s Bed-Stuy – Barman carries on making the longest of long shots with battle raps that’ll bamboozle and WTF one-liners that Jackanory or congress will sadly never benefit from. Bigger, better and geekier than ever.
Bixiga 70 ‘Quebra Cabeça’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Translating as the ‘puzzle’, Bixiga 70‘s latest album is a full 360-degree panoramic evocation (both joyful and lamentable) of their homeland’s African roots. Translating those roots, an ancestry that runs through many of the band members (some individuals descended from the Africa-Caribbean religion of ‘candomble’ for instance), Bixiga are also inspired on this journey by some of the highly talented artists they’ve shared various stages with over the years. Artists such as the Ghanaian highlife singer Pat Thomas, the Nigerian sublime traversing saxophonist legend Orlando Julius and Brazilian octogenarian star João Donato. Incorporating the lot they merge their brass-y signature carnival funk and shaking Afrobeat sass with cosmic voodoo, Afro-jazz and sloping funk.
The quality as always shines through on every track, with the visions and evocations of both Africa and Bixiga’s city home of Sao Paulo articulated by an energetic but also ruminating soundtrack of the tribal, funky, cosmic, tropical, gospel and ritual. The slave portal of Benin, further outlying deserts of the sub-Sahara and busy rhythmic bustles of Nigeria are channeled via the melting pot hubs of Brazil on the group’s most epic, ancestral and geographical straddling album. It only remains to see just how great it will sound live on stage. Full review…
(DV)
The Bordellos ‘Debt Sounds’
Brian Bordello ‘The Death Of Brian Bordello’ (Metal Postcard Records)
In a parallel universe the Jesus And Mary Chain never left East Kilbride; Julian Cope never formed the Teardrop Explodes; and Brian Wilson was in fact born in St. Helens in the late 1960s, and recorded all his opusus on a Tascam four-track, inspired by Mark E Smith. This alternative world is one the dysfunctional family circle The Bordellos inhabit. Probably the best lo fi rock’n’roll-meets-post-punk-meets-the-Spaceman 3 hapless band you’ve never heard of, the prolific group, headed by the patriarchal masthead Brian Bordello, have been luridly, sinisterly, laughably and pessimistically knocking-out their brand of disgruntled alternative yearnings for a decade or more with little attention from anyone other than us loyal fans – who probably need our heads examined in all honesty. You either get them or you don’t. And you could find some of their more confrontational dark humour (songs about the BBC killing John Peel, still loving the musical cannon of Gary Glitter, and on this album, Debt Sounds, some sinister predatory sexual allured shclock about Rolf Harris) too unsettling, even perverse.
Debts Sounds, in the manner of a Half Man Half Biscuit play-on-words, is The Bordellos low cost Pet Sounds. That may not be initially obvious. But stay with me on this one. Fashioned and realised by Brian from the band members and even affiliates, girlfriends and whatnots various outpourings and late night sessions into a most epic song book of unrequited love, sick love, obsessed love, compromised love, salacious love, and even some tender love – they excel themselves on the laid bare and touching ‘Spirograph’ and quasi-Beatles ‘My Life’ meets the hardened north romanticism of ‘I May Be Reborn’ (Take this for a line: “Every smoking chimney my Statue of Liberty”), Debt Sounds is full of great maverick performances and songwriting, made in a period of crisis, anxiety and manic depression. Ok…so more Don Van Vliet than Brian Wilson, but still a valid comparison.
Whereas will you hear odes, homages and eulogies to Jimmy Campbell and Faron’s Flamingos to a back track featuring vague indifferent shades of Thom Yorke, Cope, Velvet Underground, Red Crayola, Joy Division and the The Seeds? Nowhere that’s where. Brian Bordello’s Track-by-track breakdown…
Knocking out records on a whim, it seems inconceivable that the leader of the Bordellos has never actually released a solo effort until this year (and only a few weeks from the end of 2018). Paring down, enverated, Brian Bordello steps outside the family unit on his debut solo, The Death Of... Not expecting many flowers on that graveside elegy of a album title, Brian takes a sort of reflective pause and looks back on a litany of tropes that have come to encapsulate his resigned fatalism. With only a clipped, rough and unguarded acoustic guitar and his trusted Tascam for company, Brian pays tribute to rock’n’roll icons Eddie Cochran (again) and Mark E Smith (who Brain thinks should be canonised as a saint); wears his heart on his sleeve cooing songs about lingering memories of bunk-ups, unrequited wooing gone wrong and lost kitchen sink romances; and languishly but candidly weary sonnets on depression.
As lo fi as it can get, Brian’s most intimate, personal performances yet strip away all the caustic dissonance and fuzz to reveal his most brilliant songwriting. The Death Of is an often beautifully morose songbook that lays bare the talents of a true uncompromising outsider.
(DV)
Brace! Brace! ‘S/T’ (Howlin Banana)
Producing gorgeous hues of softened psychedelia, new wave, Britpop and slacker indie rock, this young but sophisticated band effortlessly melt the woozy and dreamy with more punchier dynamic urgency on their brilliant debut album.
Squirreled away in self-imposed seclusion, recording in the Jura Mountains, the isolation and concentration has proved more than fruitful. Offering a Sebastian Teller fronts Simian like twist on a cornucopia of North American and British influences, Brace! Brace! glorious debut features pastel shades of Blur, Gene, Dinosaur Jnr., Siouxsie And The Banshees (check the “I wrecked your childhood” refrain post-punk throb and phaser effect symmetry guitar of ‘Club Dorothée’ for proof) and the C86 generation. More contemporary wafts of Metronomy, Mew, Jacco Gardner, the Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Deerhunter (especially) permeate the band’s hazy filtered melodies and thoughtful prose too.
A near-perfect debut album, an introduction to one of the most exciting new fuzzy indie-pop bands of the moment. Full review…
(DV)
Apollo Brown & Joell Ortiz ‘Mona Lisa’ (Mello Music Group)
“Rugged but always smooth, reflective with a forked tongue…there’s a lot of comfort to be taken from the union of two opposing authority figures exercising supreme quality control” – RnV Nov 18
This duo’s mutual will to only work with the elite – Joell Ortiz as a member of Slaughterhouse, Apollo Brown extending his collaborative run after shared albums with Skyzoo, Ghostface Killah, Ras Kass, Planet Asia – is head start number one. Yes these are extremely experienced experts in their field who shouldn’t drop the ball, but 12 tracks, one emcee and one producer, two guests maximum, and everything absolutely finely tuned is still the best advantage to press home. A steadiness to both performances has BPMs instantly finding their sweet point so instrumental richness can build, settle, simmer and seduce, and vocals slip straight into the pocket housing an imperceptible line between recognition and vengeance. The introspection of ‘Mona Lisa’ pays respects with a feeling that it doesn’t pay to dwell, that while everything may be upbeat and secure – visuals of sauntering down a street and coloured in something like a high definition sepia – slippery slopes, with ‘Cocaine Fingertips’ the album’s most rotten apple and situations like the bittersweet resonance of ‘That Place’, are always around the corner. Another win for the seemingly indefatigable Mello Music Group as well.
(Matt Oliver)
C.
The Cold Spells ‘S/T’ (Gare du Nord)
Esoterically gentle and wistful, The Cold Spells debut long player is a gauze-y organic and ambiguous (to a point) affair of undulating ‘moss covered’ circuitry, folk, quintessential English psych, paisley patterned hallucinogens and Kosmische.
Communing with the ether, connecting with the psychogeography of their chosen environment – from the soft Wiccan with forebode travail of Thomswood Hill to the alluded-to abandoned mental hospital waste ground near Hainault -, a host of spirits tune in and out of the continuous, though (as we’re told) not in a linear order, flowing suite of laudanum imbued Victoriana lyricism and Beatles-esque melody.
A surprise package, quietly unassuming, the trio’s encapsulation of an age of ghostly memories – the ancestors inhabit the band’s present to address the here and now concerns of a troubled, unstable world – is magical and gently lamentable; a perfect evocation of aicd folk and pastoral esotericism, as beautifully plaintive as it is ominous. Full review…
(DV)
D.
Die Wilde Jagd ‘Uhrwald Orange’ (Bureau B)
Fashioning a mysterious ‘Clockwood Orange’ world of Gothic and ominous dreamscapes, inspired by and named, in part, after the studio it was produced in, and by both the 17th century menagerie paintings of the Flemish artist Frans Snyder and the collected devotional Medieval period songs of the Llibre Vermell De Montserrat artifact, Die Wilde Jagd’s Sebastian Lee Philipp takes us on an eerie, cosmic and slinking travail through a throbbing sophisticated earthy electronic soundtrack. His musical partner on the group’s adroit debut self-titled experiment, producer Ralf Beck, is excused from the follow-up but lends out his extensive racks of vintage analogue synthesizers to Philipp, who transforms and obscures their banks of sounds into ghostly permutations, shadowy creatures and lurking, dancing and honking sonorous cries from a murky wilderness.
Uhrwald Orange is a classy imagined score, balancing cool, gleaming and aloof German electronica with menacing, nocturnal earthiness, yet also reaching for the celestial. One minute imbued with hints of Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Eno, Cluster, and Faust, the next slinking on to the Tresor club or Basic Channel dancefloor. In short: a most impressive album. Full review…
(DV)
Dur-Dur Band ‘Dur Dur Of Somalia: Volume 1, Volume 2 And Previously Unreleased Tracks’(Analog Africa)
A highlight in a catalogue of outstanding reissues from the Analog Africa label, intrepid crate digger Samy Ben Redjeb reprises the first two volumes of Somali fusion funk music from the legendary 1980s outfit, the Dur-Dur Band. Embodying a period in the decade when Mogadishu could boast of its cosmopolitan reputation – notably the European chic Via Roma stretch in the Hamar-Weyne district, a colonnade for café culture, cinema and of course music – the hybrid Dur-Dur Band moped up the polygenesis fever of their native city with effortless aplomb during their short heyday.
Saved from ‘tape-hiss’ and ‘wobbles’, remastered to sound the best they’ve ever sounded, these curious but above all loose-limbed nuggets successfully merged a myriad of Somalia traditions with a liberal smattering of disco, reggae (via the northern part of the country’s ‘Daantho’ rhythm style; an uncanny surrogate for Jamaica’s number one export), soul and funk. Mirroring a similar fusion thousands of miles away in New York, the Dur-Dur languidly produced an electrified no wave-new wave melting pot.
Split up across a triple LP and double CD formats the Dur-Dur Band’s first two albums proper, Volumes 1 and 2, and a couple of unreleased tunes feature on this, the first in a promised series of re-issues. Released originally in 1986, the first of these and the band’s debut album, Volume 1, has a rawer unpolished but snazzy sound that saunters, skips and grooves along with aloof coolness to sweltering laidback funk; opening with the wah-wah chops and a fuzzy organ stunner, ‘Ohiyee’ , which lays down a sophisticated but explosive spiritual dance floor thriller. Volume 2 by contrast seems a little brighter and tropical; beginning as it does with the dub echoed, Trenchtown pirate radio broadcast ‘Introduction’.
Going further than most to bring the sounds of Africa to a wider audience, the Dur-Dur Band release proved to be one of the label’s most difficult, as Redjeb tackled the geopolitical fall-out of a country devastated by civil war to bring us a most unique sounding and essential collection. Full review…
(DV)
E.
Elefant ‘Konark Und Bonark’ (9000 Records)
Emerging from the Belgium underground scene, with members from a myriad of bands, each one more obscure than the next, the Elefant in this room is a twisted agit-post-punk, boiler come forensic team suited troop of noise peddlers. Lurking around basement venues for a while now, the sludge metal and gallows Krautrock merchants have released a slurry of EPs but never a fully realized album until now.
For an album that grapples with Marilyn Manson, Swans, Killing Joke, Muse, industrial contortions and Germanic experimentation, Konark Und Bonark is a very considered, purposeful statement. Though things get very heavy, implosive and gloomy and the auger like ghosts in the vocals can sound deranged, there is a semblance of melody, a tune and hint of breaking through the confusing, often pummeling, miasma of artificial intelligence armageddon.
A seething rage is tightly controlled throughout, the sporadic flits and Math Rock entangled rhythms threatening to engulf but never quite reaching an overload, or for that matter, becoming a mess. Elefant’s prowling and throbbing sound of creeping menace and visions of an artificial intelligent domineering dystopia is an epic one. Arguably the band have produced their most ambitious slog yet and marked themselves out as one of Belgium’s most important exports of 2018. Full review…
(DV)
Bernard Estardy ‘Space Oddities: 1970-82’ (Born Bad)
‘Fragmented D’une Empreinte Magnétique: Rares 1966-2006’ (Gonzai Records)
Because sometimes you just can’t decide, I’ve chucked in two reappraisal celebrating compilations of the odd, curious, thrilling and kitsch flights of fantasy musical fragments/sketches/soundtracks/compositions from the late and most gifted venerated French composer Bernard Estardy. I can’t even claim that these are great collections, let alone the best albums of the year, but they’ve kept me smiling all year.
Nicknamed ‘The Baron’, the founder of the CBE recording studio (which he set up in 1966) collaborated with a host of famous French icons in his time (arranging, producing or sound engineering for Johnny Hallyday, Francoise Hardy, Nino Ferrer, Michel Sardou and Jean Guidoni amongst others), but found an unleashed creative freedom as the master of consoles on his own excursions and dream flights of curiosity. Enjoying a resurrection of a sort in 2018, in part down to his daughter Julie Estardy‘s biography ‘The Giant’, Bernard’s eclectic back catalogue, from the realised to cutting room floor, is being reissued or rediscovered by a new generation through a number of different labels, both in France and internationally.
Two such compilations swept me up in their bombast; the first an album that couldn’t be described any better than the title it comes with, Space Oddities, and the second, Fragmented D’une Empreinte Magnétique, a Gauloises hotbed of weepy venerated organ romanticism and salacious sleek soundtracks. The first takes library music to the stars and beyond on a sassy opulent voyage of esoteric cosmic discovery. Jazz meets deep space on a drum-heavy collection of mysterious thrillers, phantasms and exotic awe. Tracks such as the more romantic, flute-y glide in space blues ‘Slow Very Slow’ sound like they could have made it to the ears of Goldfrapp or Greg Foat. The second of the pairing frequents more Earthy realms, pitching gospel with Bacharach yearnings, sentimental laments (the torn love soliloquy ‘It’s A Lovely Day To Die’ sums it up perfectly) and the strangest of deep-chested sung French cowboy soundtracks (A very Parisian journey to buy your ciggies, ‘La Route Au Tabac’, is rerouted through a lonesome pine trail). Both are as brilliant as they are audacious; a refreshing escapism and proof of a unique talent.
(DV)
Evidence ‘Weather or Not’ (Rhymesayers)
“From the moment he draws first breath on ‘Weather or Not’, Evidence embarks on a masterclass” – RnV Feb 18
A meteorological masterpiece showing that it’s rarely sunny in LA, whenever it rains it pours, and that Evidence is always bringing the weather with him. Ever laconic but whose economy of words is always wisely directed and word association seems slight but cuts deep, Ev walks the streets with collar up and hands dug into pockets, seemingly always in search of a contentment whose elusiveness he’s fine with. This prolongs a character pairing the enigmatic with a spokesman calling it straight down the line (“things I never thought about, trying to be elusive in the process, get forgot about”), a wallowing wanderer with whiplash in the tale and forever in control of his destiny (feel the tempered triumph of the concluding ‘By My Side Too’). A spread of AM band forecasts, a splash of psychedelic epiphanies and head nodders that buck like a bronco from Premier, Nottz and Babu, plus some Step Brothers espionage from Alchemist, allow the Dilated Peoples man to find you: because ‘Weather or Not’, you can’t run, you can’t hide.
(MO)
F.
Flora Fishbach ‘À Ta Merci’ (Blue Wrasse)
The French music press we’re told have fallen hook, line and synth for the alluring contralto voice of Flora Fishbach, who’s 80s revisionist pop twist on chanson oozes with such sophistication that its difficult not to embrace. Fishbach picked up the album révélation award at the Le Prix des Indés for best independent debut LP, winning high praise and plaudits galore ever since. Looking to make a similar impact across the Channel, the ‘bohemian darling’ has just released a deluxe edition of her electro pop requiem À Ta Merci. That decision is more or less echoed in the album’s title, which translates as, “at your mercy”.
Featuring the original running order and a bonus septet of gorgeous live recordings, this aloofly chic, yet theatrical, and especially when performing, animated album recasts Françoise Hardy as a disco pop and electro swooned crooner. Effortlessly channeling the vaporous dreamy pining of Kazu Makino on the moon dust sprinkled fantasy title-track and ambient textured, synthesizer bass bubbling yearned lament ‘Un beau langage’, and a Gallic Alison Goldfrapp on the opening ice-y cool malady ‘Ma voie lactée’, Fishbach adds a French nuance and sensibility to the synthesized pop ascetic: a signature you could say that despite the revivalist backing of electronic drum pads, post-punk sass, Moroder arpeggiator, Rococo harpsichord and hi-energy is unmistakably contemporary and French.
With the momentum already building in France and with the recent runaway success of music press darling Christine And The Queens (who I personally find utterly dull) I’m sure the UK will embrace this sophisticated chanteuse. This is overwhelmingly a better, more fun record than Christine’s (or the name she’s now adopted, Chris). Fishbach has certainly impressed me enough – what’s not impressive about referencing the philosophical aloof quandary that is Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” (“I am another”) on a tropical slinking crystalline pop song, Un Autre Que Moi (“Another Me”) – to recommend her as one to watch in 2019. Full review…
(DV)
Fliptrix ‘Inexhale’ (High Focus)
“‘Inexhale’ masters the art of knocking you down with a feather: the pugilistic psychoanalysis is untouchable” – RnV Sept 18
It’s a little disingenuous to say Fliptrix became the High Focus main man this year, given he’s the driving force behind the label and already has a back catalogue of textbook pen and pad amplification. What with the label’s ever bubbling pool of talent seeing Ocean Wisdom blazing all and sundry, Jam Baxter expanding his cult appeal and two late night smokers from Coops, ‘Inexhale’ could’ve played the holding role and sat in the pack. But with breath control putting a copyright on the title and not a single word wasted, it’s an album that will leave you levitating. Be that from his street level strain of spirituality – letting the sharp end of something herbal work him over, or thoroughly aware of the rights and wrongs of his surroundings – or from the velocity of what’s spat (‘Inside the Ride’ doesn’t and won’t ever flop). Then flipping what the surroundings suggest, and never getting lost in the haze even with eyes at the reddest, Fliptrix finds the perfect medium between headphone moments and smacks to the head.
(MO)
Fofoulah ‘Daega Rek’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Bustling onto the transglobal London and Bristol scenes in 2014 with their earthy and urban bombastic fusion of Wolof African culture and dub electronica rich debut LP, the Fofoulah ensemble laid down the template for the a unique adventurous sound. Though taking its time to materialize, four years on, the follow-up album hasn’t just moved on but supersonically zoomed into the experimental void; even an esoteric, spiritual one at times.
Daega Rek, ‘the truth’ when translated from the Wolof language of coastal West Africa, sees Fofoulah’s saxophonist, keyboardist and producer Tom Challenger transmogrify the original Gambian talking drum of the group’s shamanistic rapping lead Kaw Secka and the accompanying percussion and propulsive drumming rhythms of his band members. (All of which were laid down at the Real World studios). Secka would then reappear in post-production to record his half spoken/half-rapped protestations and observations; the results all re-shaped into a ricocheting lunar-tropical bounding dub cosmology.
Skipping and skittish in motion; pushing the envelope as they pay tribute to lost brothers (‘Kaddy’ pays 2-Step rhythmic eulogy to the late photographer Khadija Saye who died in the Grenfell Tower disaster), the visceral taste of home (‘Chebou Jaine’ dedicated to Secka’s cousin, who cooked the best national Gambian dish) and search for the truth, Fofoulah lunge into the electrified dub ether of sonic adventure. Full review…
(DV)
G.
Goatman ‘Rhythms’ (Rocket Recordings)
An amorphous exploration of world ‘rhythms’ as transduced by one the mysterious Scandinavian GOAT band members through a an arsenal of filters, modulators and oscillations, the debut Goatman suite blends its polygenesis inspirations perfectly.
Offering up magical and scintillating rhythms galore, from Kuti’s compound Afrobeat to a tremolo and laser bouncing variant of RAM’s Haiti vibe, you can expect to hear the venerable tones of gospel, jazz, reggae, psych and pure ethereal acoustic Kosmische on this sonic flight of fantasy. Earthy yet light enough to soar, this impressive experiment side-project channels its influences perfectly to conjure up new musical ideas. Echoes of GOAT are never far away of course, yet this imaginative take feels more natural, more organic, and above all, more soulful. A fantastic debut.
(DV)
H.
Jack Hayter ‘Abbey Wood’ (Gare du Nord)
Bringing light, or at least opening up a psycho-geographical narrative dedicated to the very edges of a largely ignored London postcode – so far out on the South Eastern outskirts as to be part of Kent –, an earnest Jack Hayter composes a yearning lament to Abbey Wood on what is his first solo album in fifteen years.
Hayter’s deftly played, with twangs of bucolic and Baroque folk, blues, synthesized atmospherics, Americana and reverent chamber music, multilayered songbook connects with the psychogeography of his chosen location. From songs about the Abbey Wood diaspora and its position as a gateway to the world to laying cooing elegiac wreaths to those unfortunate victims of the WWII Arandora Star passenger ship tragedy, Hayter produces a lived-in musical novel, rich with references, landmarks and peopled by those who left an indelible, if at times fleeting, mark upon this much forgotten or passed over postcode: their ghosts, no matter how small the part they played in its story, never inconsequential; remembered and written about with a certain gravitas by the erstwhile troubadour, who performs the most accomplished and brilliant of testaments. Full review…
(DV)
Homeboy Sandman & Edan ‘Humble Pi’ (Stones Throw)
“A banquet of slaps that will become one of your five a day, and ultimately year” – RnV Oct 18
If seven or so tracks are good enough for Pusha T, Kanye etc, then they’re an ample fit for this elite underground swashbuckler of a showdown brought to us by the matchmaking Gods. Having flitted around the periphery for what seems forever, Edan returns with some of his best, ear-piercing archaeology to date as he shifts the B-boy-psych continuum once more; and Homeboy Sandman, both revelling in getting in the thick of it and firing off missives as he’s swept along for the ride, gets off the wall (“see me looking photogenic in the Book of Genesis, waving off medicines”), yet reels off some of the realest in recent times (it’s still, and shall remain, all about ‘Never Use the Internet Again’, which stylistically is actually a bit of a left-turn). The feeling pervades that the pair are proudly gladiatorial, indulging in friendly, unspoken competition as much as fighting the good fight as anointed hip-hop saviours. Let’s hope the sub 30-minute running time means the door is open for a second bout some time soon.
(MO)
J.
Juga-Naut & Sonnyjim ‘The Purple Door’ (Eat Good Records)
“Their usual, indomitable personas on the mic never skimp on Michelin-starred quality, and they still aren’t the ones to test if you think they’re pushing their luck” – RnV Aug 18
It’s an album largely based on elitist boasts, expensive trinkets and accessories and some pretty outlandish claims, but hey, these boys done good. Larger than life and living the playboy lifestyle making the ludicrous seem obtainable – you too can be a ‘Purple Door’ gold card holder – Juga-Naut and Sonnyjim transform the Midlands into St Tropez with a load of gala funk to make a red carpet entrance to, with just a hint of a twinkle in its eye like a felonious exile that has everyone’s backing. That said, you can’t live the life of a Rat Packer if you ain’t got the gab, and these two are no novices: the great suitability of their top table rhyme personas – Juga-Naut will have you believing every word he spits, Sonnyjim coming in dry and stonefaced yet smelling (and producing) like a million bucks – shares a love of all things gastronomic on the likes of ‘Duck Season’ that comes sweeping down a spiral staircase, while ‘Look Around’ takes a moment to act more tactfully, pledging family honour like a good fella. It might not be dining etiquette, but these two are pulling chairs from under the competition.
(MO)
Park Jiha ‘Communion’ (Glitterbeat Records)
Circumnavigating the globe to bring much-needed exposure to new sounds, Glitterbeat Records imprint tak:til gives a second wind to a suite of acuity serialism from Southeast Asia. Released originally in South Korea in 2016, the neo-classical musician/composer Park Jiha’s debut solo album Communion is given an international release by the label.
Inspiring what we’re told is a burgeoning Korean music scene (well, an alternative to the K-Pop craze), a chief progenitor of the movement Jiha alongside collaborative partner Jungmin Seo originally melded the country’s musical heritage with an eclectic range of contemporary sounds as the 숨[suːm] duo in 2007. Releasing the highly influential regional albums Rhythmic Space: A Pause For Breath (2010) and 2nd (2014), Park and Seo crossed the time zones to perform at both WOMAD and SXSW. Congruously putting the duo on hold to explore a more ‘personal’ and minimalistic ‘musical vocabulary’ as a solo artist, Jiha dexterously balances the air-y abstract breathes of the ‘piri’ double reed bamboo flute, the searing twang of the ‘saenghwang’ mouth organ and the softly paddled patter of the ‘yanggeum’ hammered dulcimer in what is a dialogue between a dulcet calm, the meditative and an entangled dissonance.
Transforming Korean traditions into a more experimental language that evokes the avant-garde, neo-classical and jazz yet something quite different, Park Jiha’s tranquil to entangled discourse evocations reach beyond their Southeast Asian borders both musically and metaphysically into something approaching the unique and amorphous. Full review…
(DV)
John Johanna ‘I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes’ (Faith And Industry)
More a mini-album, even 12″ to be contrary, the beautifully cooed, warbled and ached venerable I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes is nothing less than an afflatus anointed paean to a higher purpose. Informed by the mystical cosmology of the Eastern Orthodox Church, John Johanna‘s spiritual blues-y and gospel rock’n’rock hymns are both diaphanous and mesmerizing, even hypnotic; recalling visages of Morricone, Fleetwood Mac, Terakaft, Dirtmusic and Wovenhand as it wanders a picturesque but troubled soundscape.
On the devotional pilgrimage, the troubadour of the most evocative, stirring country burr, switches between aching falsetto yearning to lovelorn cowboy on the Andes romanticised cooing, and from the ethereal to fraught, as he makes communion.
No two songs are quite the same, as the wooing rustic sits next to (what can only be described as) the holy desert rock fusion of Native Indian and Afro-beat title track, and Bossa shuffle meets Yonatan Gat raindance. It all congruously comes together in one most divine service. A minor masterpiece.
(DV)
M.
Marlowe (L’Orange & Solemn Brigham) ‘Marlowe’ (Mello Music Group)
“Both excel in never revealing what’s steaming around the next corner, even when you’ve grabbed your toothcomb for the umpteenth time” – RnV July 18
Another yearly round up, another L’Orange inclusion. North Carolina stands up as latest collaborator Solemn Brigham rhymes his ass off: weirdly, without necessarily feeding off what the producer is trawling, and helping create something of an odd couple match made in heaven. L’Orange sets the scene, usually a funky hoedown, a sample-heavy brouhaha anticipating a stand-off or a psychedelic neck-snap. As is his wont, there’s a narrative to be spun, or some simple time-travelling to be done where no two bops are the same. Brigham on the other hand, blurbed as “summoning the holy spirit of Big L” without getting sucked into the danger zone, just jumps in with a garrulous B-boy stance and goes for it. Without L’Orange surrounding him in a world of imagination, give Brigham a park bench and a ghettoblaster and the results would be the same. What he does guarantee is that you’ll be going back to what he has to say, and whatever the variables, the energy and entertainment (grounded surrealism?) never dips. L’Orange may have found himself an emcee to keep on retainer.
(MO)
Hugh Masekela ’66-‘76’ (Wrasse Records)
A most poignant and timely reminder of one of the true greats, the mammoth 66-’76 collection shows a multifaceted Hugh Masekela: The exile. The trumpet maestro. The bandleader. The activist. The colonial revisionist. The angry young man. But also the conciliatory. These are just some of the many faces of the South African titan of jazz and African musical fusions that can be found inside the latest essential collection of the late great polymaths’ back durable catalogue.
Put together especially by Masekela and his good friend, producer and collaborator on a number of projects together, Stewart Levine, just before he passed away at the beginning of this year, the three disc spanning collection features key tracks from many of his most iconic and experimental albums (two of which are included in their entirety). But what makes this especially appealing to collectors and fans alike, is that many of these albums were never officially released in the UK and Europe before. Progressing in the chronological order they were recorded, we follow Masekela’s journey not just musically but politically across his most formative decade and his partnership with Levine and collaborations with such legendary ensembles as the Hedzoleh Soundz combo. From the combined jazz and Township fusions of The Emancipation Of Hugh Masekela all the way to criss-crossing the transatlantic slave routes on Colonial Man, this collection is a sheer joy. Full review…
(DV)
(MO)
Brona McVittie ‘We Are The Wildlife’
With the lightest, most deft of touches, Irish songstress and harpist Brona McVittie embarks on a voyage of ‘psycho-geographic’ inspired encapsulations of a mysterious, magical landscape and history on her debut album, We Are The Wildlife.
Tracing the sonic contours of London’s urban fringes and the rural landscapes of Mourne, McVittie pitches her fluttery diaphanous harp-led songbook somewhere between post-folk and the cinematic – helped along in part by the drifting trumpet evocations of film composer Hutch Demouilpied, who’s contributions sound at times like Miles Davis Dingo transported to an Irish peat bog.
Her ephemeral harp melodies and phrases often feel like a breath or just the merest hazy lingering presence of the instrument, which might in some ways be down to McVittie’s technique of playing them all on the guitar first before transcribing over. It certainly offers a different perspective and technique. And it certainly takes this heavenly traditional instrument into even more mystical, accentuate abstract realms, helped of course by an accompaniment of meadow flute (Keiron Phelan), sad bowed delicate strings (Richard Curran), searching fleeting slide-guitar and shuffling to full-on breakbeat drums (Myles Cochran). All of which amorphously pushes the often-ancient feelings and geography towards John Martyn and Bert Jansch one minute, towards the Incredible String Band or trip-hop the next.
Played with the lightest of touches, McVittie’s wildlife and Celtic inspired filmscape subtly crafts tradition into a cerebral suite of neo-classical and ambient folk. We Are The Wildlife is the most inviting and unique of debuts. Full review…
(DV)
Minyeshu ‘Daa Dee’ (ARC Music)
From the tentative first steps of childhood to the sagacious reflections of middle age, the sublime Ethiopian songstress Minyeshu Kifle Tedla soothingly, yearningly and diaphanously articulates the intergenerational longings and needs of belonging on her epic LP, Daa Dee.
Minyeshu left her native Ethiopia in 1996, but not before discovering and then learning from such acolytes as the doyen of the country’s famous Ethio-Jazz scene, Mulatu Astatke, and the choreographer Tadesse Worku and singers Mahmoud Ahmed, Tilahun Gessesse and Bizunesh Bekele. First moving to Belgium and then later to the Netherlands, the burgeoning star of the Ethiopian People To People music and dance production has after decades of coming to terms with her departure finally found a home: a self-realization that home wasn’t a geographical location after all but wherever she felt most comfortable and belonged:“Home is me!”
Evoking that sense of belonging and the theme of roots, but also paying a tribute and lament to the sisterhood, Minyeshu conveys with a sauntering but sorrowful jazzy blues vibe not only the burden and grind of daily life for many of her compatriots back home in the tumultuous climate of a fragmented and often chaotic Ethiopia, but also the joy of song and togetherness.
Not only merging geography but musical styles too, the Daa Dee LP effortlessly weaves jazz (both Western and Ethiopian) R&B, pop, dub, the theatrical, and on the cantering to lolloping skippy ‘Anteneh (It Is You?)’, reggae. Piano, strings and brass mix with the Ethiopian wooden washint flute and masenqo bowed lute to create an exotic but familiar pan-global sound. Minyeshu produces a masterful heartwarming, sometimes giddy, swirling testament that is exciting, diverse and above all else, dynamic. Her voice is flawless, channeling various journeys and travails but always placing a special connection to and emphasis on those special roots. Full review…
(DV)
Moonwalks ‘In Light (The Scales In The Frame)’ (Stolen Body Records)
At least geographically close to the spirit of the Motor City, if generations apart, Detroit’s Moonwalks brood in the shadows of the counterculture doyens that made it such an infamous breeding ground for snarling attitude garage, psych and acid rock in the 60s and early 70s.
Transitioning, so we’re told, from ad hoc abandon warehouse performances as a diy glam psych rock troupe to experimental space rock stoners, spiraling in a vaporous gauzy vortex of 80s British Gothic and acid shoegaze influences, the Moonwalks make a certain dynamic progression on their second full length album, In Light.
Sometimes they sound like a black magic rites Byrds and at others like a doomed The Glass Family on a bum ride. Their curtain call, The Joy Of Geraniums, is the most odd song of all; taking the Moonwalks into a whistling led peyote-induced trip to the Mojave Desert.
Vocally malaise the voices waft between Siouxsie Sioux, Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy and Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell. Of course it fits the nebulous cosmic doom and dreamy psych style of the group perfectly; ambiguously drifting through magical rites and sulky pretensions aplenty. Full review…
(DV)
Quarterly Playlist Revue of 2018: Part Two: Ammar 808, Warmduscher, Dr Octagon, Grimm Grimm and more…
June 12, 2018
Quarterly Playlist 2018: Part Two: Choice tracks from the last three months.
Welcome to part two of the Monolith Cocktail’s carefully selected and put-together quarterly playlist revue of 2018. Featuring an eclectic mix of ‘choice’ new music, re-releases and recently dug-out nuggets, all released in the last three months of the year, the blog’s staff (well me, Dominic Valvona, and our resident hip-hop fanatic Matt Oliver) have, as usual, produced a lively, sometimes meditative, at times distressed and harrowing, playlist.
Twisted dark arts sit next to cosmic sounds from the Maghreb; peregrinations flow into more steely razor sharp post-punk; and key hip-hop pontifications go hand-in-hand with shoegaze and the psychedelic. But as always, the musical flow will take you to all the most interesting locations, and hopefully introduce you to something you’ve never heard before.
Tracklist in full:
London Plane ‘New York Howl’ Review
Josh T. Pearson ‘Straight To The Top!’ Review
The Seven Ups ‘Stampede’
Homeboy Sandman & Edan ‘#NeverUseTheInternetAgain’ Review
Lee Scott & Jazz T ‘What If Lee Was A Super Dope Rapper In 1988?’ Review
The Nonce ‘Chocolate Cake’ Review
Warmduscher ‘Standing On The Corner’
Samba Toure ‘Yefara’ Review
The Turbans ‘Zawi’ Review
David Dor ‘Sapri Tama’
Hany Mehanna ‘Mouna’
Bernard Estardy ‘La Route Au Tabac’
The Magic City Trio ‘Black Dog Following Me’ Review
Grimm Grimm ‘Still Smiling’ Review
Black Light white Light ‘Forward Backwards’ Review
Matt Finucane ‘Damn Storyteller’ Review
Canshaker Pi ‘Pressure From Above’
Ammar 808 ‘Bognga & Sandia’ Review
Shimshon Miel ‘Amsterdam Experience’
The Mauskovic Dance Band ‘The Opposite’
Black Thought ‘9th vs. Thought’ Review
Pan Amsterdam ‘The Lotion Song’ Review
Del The Funky Homosapien ‘Humble Pie’ Review
Brownout ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’
Dr. Octagon ‘Operation Zero’ Review
Sad Man ‘Parrot’ Review
Yonatan Gat ‘Projections’ Review
Die Wilde Jagd ‘2000 Elefanten’ Review
Elefant ‘Norsun Muisti’ Review
Lucy Leave ‘Look//Listen’ Review
Bas Jan ‘Argument’
Sudan Archives ‘Pay Attention’
Georgia Greene ‘Lonely For You’
Evil Bone ‘In Vain’ Review
The Bordellos ‘Fading Honey’ Feat
Anton Barbeau ‘Secretion Of The Wafer’ Review
Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ Review
Thomas Nation ‘Hold My World’ Review
The Lancashire Hustlers ‘Consider Me’ Review
Alex Stolze ‘Way Out’ Review
Crayola Lectern ‘Rescue Mission’
Tanzania Albinism Collective ‘Albino’
Spiritualized ‘A Perfect Miracle’
Tickling Our Fancy 062: The Turbans, Sonido Gallo Negro, Anton Barbeau, Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita, Nonpareils…
March 27, 2018
Dominic Valvona’s new music reviews roundup.
Interesting releases from across the world and music spectrums; Tickling Our Fancy is the most eclectic of reviews roundups. With no themes, demarcations of any kind, or reasoning other than providing a balanced platform for the intriguing, the great and at times, most odd releases, I bring you this month’s latest selection.
I have a truly international spread of releases for you all, even more than usual with one band in particular, the backpacker collective The Turbans, featuring band members from the UK, Eastern Europe, Levant, Africa, Balkans and beyond. I take a look at their borderless debut album for Six Degrees Records. From Mexico way, there’s the b-movie space mambo and cumbia occult of Sonido Gallo Negro: newly signed to Glitterbeat Records and releasing their third album Mambo Cósmico. Uniting for the second time together on a recording, Welsh harpist maestro Catrin Finch and Senegal kora star Seckou Kieta reunite for diaphanous and reflective celebration of the two instruments and their respected native homeland’s heritage on SOAR. Closer to home there’s the latest inimitable psychedelic pop album, Natural Causes, by Anton Barbeau; an EP of blossoming, Kaleidoscopic dance pop from the Leeds duo Lost Colours; the first solo album project to see light after the break-up of The Liars, with Aaron Hemphill’s Nonpareils solo debut Scented Pictures; Sebastian Reynolds’ Mahajanaka odyssey, now finally getting a soundtrack release; and the tortured industrial noise and biblical raging of the Boston duo Water Fragment.
Nonpareils ‘Scented Pictures’ Mute, 6th April 2018
With the Liars now, more or less, the sole concern of Angus Andrew, the first fruits of the schism that split the original band up is now unveiled in the shape of Aaron Hemphill’s solo nom de plume Nonpareils: chosen because it’s a “name that didn’t evoke a single person or a producer name, but hopefully something that sounded more like a group or a band…something plural.”
Moving to Berlin in 2015, a year before he left the Liars, Hemphill has had a good two years break from his former band mate, but instead of reflection or acrimonious scorn he’s decided to deliver a cyclonic churning and confusing barrage of sonic displacement; a window in on the woozy state of Hemphill’s mind, all those ideas, snippets and memories channeled through a abstract and broken staccato and heavy reverb obstruction that’s still capable of throwing out some pretty good hooks and tunes.
‘Metaphysically reconstructed pop’ as Hemphill himself calls it, the druggy feel and lingering traces on his inaugural solo debut, Scented Pictures, was all recorded in Berlin using the most haphazard and off-kilter of processes. Recording ‘stacks’ of acoustic instruments whilst ‘doing the silliest’ of experiments upon them, Hemphill also encouraged the engineer on these sessions to distract and hinder him as he bashed away on the drums (without a click-track), and set up the microphones, when on the piano, to deliberately “fall away from the body of the instrument.” And so there is a strange disconnection and time-lapse, in which everything sounds like it’s running away from its main source or languidly slurring, that runs throughout this album. It ties in to the theme of “time-accelerating” and Hemphill’s premise of a “sensory experience of memory”, which encourages the brain to fill-in the gaps of what is a constantly trudging, stuttering soundtrack of disorientated peculiarities. None more so than The Timeless Now, which sounds like a churned and slurred breakdown of time itself, set to eternal damnation and spinning like a centrifugal space sequence.
Amongst the reversed effects, stumbled drums, tetchy loop oscillations there’s hints of Mogadon induced Atlas Sound (on the surprisingly Spector trippy dream pop plaint Makes Me Miss The Misery Girls), a Coil/John Cale hybrid (Cherry Cola), vaporous synth (ala the Eno-esque Press Play), Alan Vega (more specifically the title track, which also includes a subtle trace of Neukölln Bowie, but his ghostly presence can be heard on many tracks) and R. Stevie Moore.
Often resembling a scratched CD having a fit of the jitters; often obscured under a veil of languorous multilayering; often sounding distant; Hemphill still retains an ear for melody, combining the abstract with post-punk, rock’n’roll and techno to produce something dreamy. His ideas are distilled into a seething disorientation of time and memories; tapping in to the anxious and confusion of our times. Not so distant from the Liars sound, yet different enough to be challenging, Scented Pictures is an enigma waiting to be unraveled.
Sonido Gallo Negro ‘Mambo Cósmico’ Glitterbeat Records, 6th April 2018
Serving up a mystical occult of a third album, the sauntering Sonido Gallo Negro take a trip aboard one of Erich Von Däniken’s ancient astronaut controlled UFO to draw in a wealth of cosmic affected South American styles and exotica.
Slinking all the way the nine-piece outfit reach out beyond the Mexican borderlands to embrace the multicultural dance rhythms brought to the Americas via Africa and the Middle East and of course the centuries ingrained influence of the Hispaniola.
Already interpreting and reframing the popular cumbia – what was originally the folkloric rhythmic dance practiced by the Africans who were en mass displaced and brought to work in Columbia – and mambo on previous records, the group now include a hybrid mix of ‘cha cha’, the Mexican ceremonial dance known as ‘danzón’, and the Sinú River sprung brass orchestra come Caribbean region of Colombia ballroom style ‘porro’.
Oscillating over the Nazca Lines or creeping through the Theremin quivering sorcery mists of Catemaco, every song has an exotic but kitsch like charm; no more so than with the world famous cover of the Mexican bandleader Pablo Beltrán Ruiz’s mambo turn crooner swaying Quién Será?, covered and transformed into an almost comic dash, with Farfisa organ prods and Dick Dale tremolo.
Encompassing Santo vs. the creatures from Mars b-movie cosmic effects (Mambo Cósmico, but also throughout), deity worshipping ritual frazzling (Cumbia Ishtar), bird-like trilled exhales from the cha cha hot-stepping carnival (La Foca Cha Cha Cha), sultry ballroom with Spanish flair (Danzún Fayuquero) and Surf twanged otherworldliness (Danza del Mar), Sonido Gallo Negro perform everything with a lively flair; both busy but controlled.
Like a Mexican Head Hunters celebrating the rich musical diversity and occultist symbolism – from the mysterious allure of Mesoamerican pyramid building societies to magic shamanism – of the Americas, Sonido Gallo Negro meld all their influences together in one big bubbling melting pot of fun.
The Turbans ‘The Turbans’ Six Degrees Records, 6th April 2018
Collecting band members as they busked together in such exotic locations as Kathmandu, the two instigators, and fellow ‘half-Iranian/half-British nomads’, behind the international backpackers The Turbans, (the self-confessed ‘seventh best guitar player in the band’) Oshan Mahony and violinist Darius Luke Thompson, have amalgamated countless styles and cultures towards a largely upbeat celebration of borderless solidarity.
The term for this cross-pollination of the Levant, Balkans, India and Africa, coined by the group’s Kurdish percussionist Cabber Baba, is ‘music from manywheres’, though their base and center for at least half the time when not on tour is Hackney in London – the other half spent in Goa. They sing of this attachment to Hackney, celebrating its multicultural allure and spirit to a loose backing of electrified souk rock and jostled hand drums on the paean tribute song of the same name.
It would take an age to document each of this globe-stretching group’s credentials and heritage, let alone mention all the additional guests that make this, The Turbans, debut album so richly amorphous, traversing as it does so many cultural and national references. Songs such as the folkloric wandering Sinko Moy, written by the group’s former Bulgarian pop star and Django Ze front man, Miroslav Morski, for instance features the lulling atmospheric choral backing of The London Bulgarian Choir, who project us the diaspora and view from the Carpathians, but then other elements of musicality and tone hint at Cairo, Timbuktu and even Ireland. This shifting sense of location is The Turbans signature; one minute gazing from atop of a camel, searching over sand dune landscapes, the next, regaling a romantic atavistic paean to Flamenco accompaniment in Moorish Spain.
Featuring a rambunctious mix of characters, from Belarus oud player Maxim Shchedrovitzki to guembri maestro Simo Lagnawi, the group throw Tuareg blues, gypsy music, Moroccan pop covers, colonial Tunisian lounge music and Greek folk into one gumbo pot of both harried japes and more serene contemplation.
Political by being so diverse in a climate of hostile nationalism and closed borders, The Turbans don’t so much push an agenda as reference the various travails by which many of its members had to overcome to reach these shores. And so this album is more a celebration of universal collaboration.
Recorded, of all places, in a previously abandoned 500 year old property on the borders of Scotland and England, in the Northumberland farmhouse turned community arts centre where the group’s co-founder Mahony grew up, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more international sound right now.
Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita ‘SOAR’ bendigedig, 27th April 2018
Only two releases in and the bendigedig label – an independent partnership between Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan, Wales and ARC Music – is already proving to have erudite tastes for the finer examples of beautifully-crafted folk and traditional music from the versants of Wales and beyond. Following on from the recent Gwyneth Glyn album Tro, the internationally renowned harpist Catrin Finch once more draws parallels musically and culturally between her native Wales and the West African homeland of musical partner Seckou Keita, on the working duo’s second album together, SOAR.
In a similar vein to her fellow compatriot, Glyn, who just as effortlessly blended her Welsh lilted tones with those of the Indian ghazal singer Tauseef Akhtar on the Ghazalaw LP collaboration and has also supported Keita on tour, Finch merges the angelic elegance of the harp with the equally elegant, spindly diaphanous sound of the harp-like Kora, as played by the maestro from Senegal,
Combining the two distinct, but as you’ll hear highly congruous, instruments together and bringing both experts extensive knowledge and talents to the fore (and the bios of these two practitioners is highly impressive and wide), the duo weave an intricate melodious album that celebrates both their diversity and shared goals.
Originally coming together for the award-winning Clychau Dibon LP in 2013, the harp partnership continue with that album’s avian theme, using it as a springboard for another articulated series of paeans and serious reflections. Though it might not be the most obvious of geographical connections, both artists seamlessly tie their respective backgrounds and heritage together, starting with the divine ‘soar’ and flutter of the Dyfi Osprey on the opening bird of prey homage, Clarach. Immortalizing the first Osprey in modern times to be born in Wales after an absence of 300 years (persecuted to extinction by the end of the 17th century), its survival and 3,000 mile migration to West Africa is celebrated by mirroring its travail between the two continents; this majestic creature’s freedom finds solace and respect through the duo’s charming melodies and interplay. It’s a forced migration, and the theme of colonization, that’s given a more jazzy-blues harp voice on the trembled-held poignant 1677. Tilted after the year that Vice-Admiral Jean Il d’Estrees stormed the Dutch fort on the island of Gorèe off the coast of Keita’s birthplace of Senegal, captured in the name of his master King Louis XIV, it marks the point in history where rule in the region passed to France. Gorèe would become a notorious slave trading port over the next century. Capturing the motion of rocking boats in the interaction between the two instruments, the duo mimic a murky back and forth pattern in plaintive remembrance to those who have left the West African coast behind for a better life, and for those who weren’t so lucky.
Staying close to Keita’s heart, they also perform a reinterpretation of the lovely tribute to Yama Ba; written by Keita’s uncle and fellow kora maestro Solo Cissokho as a paean to the woman who believed in him when times were tough, and was willing to invest in his future, buying him the equipment he needed to amplify his instrument. From the semi-nomadic Fulani people who live all over West Africa, Yama Ba is given a peaceable, softly accentuated homage, with Finch replacing and transforming the original melody played by Cissokho’s bassist Kevin Willoughby. There’s also an inviting gesture of effortless warmth on the Senegal split-language entitled Tèranga Bah: A nod to the country’s version of ‘great hospitality’, Tèranga translates as ‘hospitality’ in the Wolof dialect, Bah as ‘great’ in Senegal’s other most common tongue Mandinka. And one of the oldest tunes in the Senegambia kora repertoire, the difficult (only played we’re told by experienced practitioners) Baisso is twinned with an excerpt from Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the surprisingly seamless and classical reverent turn joyfully serene Bach To Baisso hybrid.
Back to the valleys of Wales, and one of the album’s most serious tunes, Finch commemorates an event, a catalyst for an insurgence in Welsh nationalism that led to a groundswell of protest and even sabotage. Cofiwch Dryweryn is a gorgeous lament to the flooding in 1965 of the Tryweryn valley in north Wales; flooded to create the Llyn Celyn reservoir that supplied water to the city of Liverpool. Those unfortunate enough to have lived or worked its land were forced to leave; an action that led to much resentment and went towards a revival in self-determination – though it would of course take a further forty years for Wales to get a devolved powers from Westminster. Here, lost almost in the flow of the watery gushes and drama, Finch’s whispery tones echo the feelings, “remember Tryweryn”, as Keita lends a yearning vocal and kora pinning accompaniment.
It’s often difficult to hear when one instrument begins and another ends, the kora and Welsh harp in such synchronicity. The earthy spindled kora and plucked ebb and flow of the serene harp both prove the most complimentary of companions. The two heritages and ancestral combine for a united front on the plight of not just a migratory bird but people and ideas too. The exchange articulated with beauty and élan.
Sebastian Reynolds ‘Mahajanaka EP’ Nonostar, 20th April 2018
Finally releasing the soundtrack part of his beautifully transcendental Mahajanaka odyssey style dance and music collaboration, the Oxford musician/composer/promoter and member of the Flights Of Helios collective Sebastian Reynolds launches an EP’s worth of variations to promote the upcoming live performance of the Mahajanaka Dance Drama at the Wiltshire Music Centre 2nd April 2018. The beautifully softly malleted and chiming peregrination original is transformed subtly and serenely over the course of a live performance – performed with his Solo Collective triumvirate band mates Alex Stolze, Anne Müller and Mike Bannard – and two remixes.
A keen enthusiast of eastern and oriental cultures, especially Buddhism, Reynolds travelled to Thailand a while back as part of a British Council/Arts Council England funded trip. During that visit he laid down the groundwork for the Mahajanaka project, a collaboration fusion of both traditional Thai forms and Western contemporary dance and music, which reinterprets the ancient stories of Buddha on his multiple incarnations journey of perfection towards becoming fully enlightened.
Partners on this reimagining project include Neon Dance and the acclaimed dancer/choreographer Pichet Klunchun, and on the score itself, features both long-term collaborator Jody Prewett (keyboard) and the Thai pop group The Krajidrid Band under the direction of composer/producer Pradit Saengkrai. Recorded playing the classical Thai “piphat” ensemble music, The Krajidrid Band’s evocative sacred finger cymbal chimes and peaceable soft mallet accompaniment is sampled and looped by Reynolds to produce a gently overlapping and mysterious ambient flight of fantasy. It certainly creates the right mood, successfully merging the source material with the atavistic, transformed by Reynolds’ signature process of reinvention.
Featuring his chamber electronic partners from the already mentioned and most brilliant Solo Collective project, there is a trembled bow and gentle stirring strings version, included alongside the original. Performed at the Roter Salon, Berlin on the 6th February 2017, this live recording adds a gently lilting undulation of European cello and violin, courtesy of Müller and Stolze, to the ceremonial Thai drones and lush divine resonance. Taking it in another direction, albeit subtly, the Emseatee remix adds a ice-y vapour and tight enervated clattery beats, ala Bonobo, to the Southeast Asian suite, whilst the Atlasov remix subtly wafts this soundscape towards a gauze-y The Orb and Artificial Intelligence era Warp label direction. Though nothing quite matches the original Jon Hassell like venerable peregrination, a most beautiful evocation of the Buddha enlightenment transported to another realm.
Anton Barbeau ‘Natural Causes’ Beehive/Gare du Nord, 13th April 2018
Ian Hunter via Robyn Hitchcock via Luke Haines, wrapped inside an enigma, the Sacramento born, Berlin-based, Anton Barbeau changes his style of delivery repeatedly yet always maintains an idiosyncratic ingenuity in whatever he does. Posing in a not too dissimilar fashion to Julian Cope on the cover of his latest (and 23rd) album Natural Causes, he looks to all intents and purposes, standing amongst the long stones, like nature’s son on a Ley Lines trip. You can hear a hint of the arch druid of heads own, more, digestible and melodious brand of psychedelic pop running through Natural Causes, but not exclusively, as he opens up to the 12-string élan of the decade he was born in to: the 60s.
Not so much softening up as choosing a more personal, peaceable approach to ‘glorious sounding’ maverick pop, Barbeau has produced something quite stunning and timely (Barbeau fast approaching his 50th birthday): a cerebral album both instantly memorable, melodic and yet adventurous and inventive.
The results of an aborted project under the Applewax banner, made in the run up to the 2016 US elections, Natural Causes is the reflective, more open antithesis to what would have been a far darker and mournful proposition. In part a request from Barbeau’s French label Beehive (released in conjunction with Monolith Cocktail favourites, Gare du Nord), the album that would eventually grow out of the abandoned Applewax would include remakes of past classics alongside new material.
Having another bite at old faithful, Magazine Street, he amps up the jangle factor and production on this country-rock Byrds meets Green Pajamas classic. There’s also reinforced crisp breezy versions of Creep Tray – this time featuring the lush undulated backing vocals of Karla Kane, who guests on a quintet of songs, adding everything from harmonies to “OMs” – and the fuzzed-out vortex, Just Passing By.
In between the all too fleeting to be effective as anything other than paused intermission style vignettes, Barbeau and a congruous cast of guests lend a touching caress to a songbook of contemporary surreal lyrical musings and love songs. Unrushed, even breezy in places but hardly lacking intensity, there’s an air of nostalgia in homages to the radio stations and DJs that sparked interest in the young Barbeau, on the Hunter fronts Tom Petty band finale Down Around The Radio. And with a nod to one of the music cannons greatest ever records, The Beatles Sgt. Pepper kaleidoscope, a stab at a popsike hit (a missing link from one of Strange Days magazines 80s halcyon compilations) is made with a song that was originally written to be recorded at the venerated Fab Fours’ inner sanctum of Abbey Road, with the quirky Disambiguation, which evidently does have a tenuous link to the Beatles, featuring as it does McCartney (and Pretenders) wingman Robbie McIntosh on 12-string guitar. Meanwhile, the discombobulating time-signature Coffee That Makes The Man Go Round is humbly declared to feature the “second greatest riff ever”, and is in part inspired by one of the 60s most underrated bands, Family.
Perhaps one of the most touching declarations and attempts at a lilting anthem, Summer Of Gold, which features Nick Saloman and Ade Shaw of Bevis Frond fame, and Michael Urbano who works with Neil Finn, sounds like Crowded House backed by a Mellotron accentuated rich Amon Duul II. Adopting an entirely different sound, Barbeau covers a strange space in which Sparks collaborated with Squeeze on Secretion Of The Wafer, and channels George Harrison (yes another Beatles link) on the Krishna referencing peaceful Mumble Something.
Fans of Barbeau will be once again charmed by his unique songwriting abilities, and those still unfamiliar with the inimitable generation X artist of renown will find much to love about his psychedelic pop genius.
Lost Colours ‘A Different Life EP’ 61seconds, 14th March 2018
Featured last month, Lost Colours’ life-affirming cosmos pop single One Space Left sits at the center of their new follow-up extended EP, A Different Life. That debut song, a visceral explosion of colour encapsulating the Leeds-based duo’s optimistic abandon in producing psychedelic pop, with a lilt of globe-travelling trance, to put a smile on your face.
Featured either side of it is a trio of similar universal voyages and a number of various remixes, starting with the slow boat to Goa via the South China Seas caressed and lingering Organic Adventures. Building a relaxed soundtrack into a stronger, more rallying trip-hop explosion, the scale of this adventure expands to include waves of indie rock guitar, strings and crashing drum breaks. On a more jazzy soul trip, part Chemical Brothers, part Acid-jazz, the title track and Technicolor High both feature the earthy indie soulful vocals of Sam Thornton. The first of these is a horns, flute accented cyclonic propelled thrust through “the cosmos”, the second, an indie-dance Coldplay traverse.
A Different Light receives two remix treatments, both of which stretch, chop up or strip the original; the Abstract Orchestra transformation slinky but sharp and optimizing the jazz elements; the Night Stories, amping up the swirls and adding velocity drum’n’bass to the mix. Technicolor High is given the LC Nightshades Euro club treatment, with bongos, vapour trails and ambient pauses.
The Lost Colours duo, already lively for the past few years on the remix scene themselves, have been biding their time, steadily building up material for their move over into producing their own original blossoming, Kaleidoscopic material. They sound to be on the right path, their debut and new EP an unashamed joyful and lifting experience of psychedelic and exotic trance dance music.
Waterman Fragment ‘Waterman Fragment’ Available now on Bandcamp
Though something of an unknown entity, I do know for certain that the often brutal and discordant Waterman Fragment convincingly grind through the miasma, shock and stresses of our unstable, conflict-beckoning world on there recently released self-titled LP. Started by two self-confessed “music survivors” of the 90s New England noise/skronk scene, the Waterman Fragment duo have moved on to summon forth a caustic barrage of demons with this incarnation of metal pummeling, warped and tortuous flagellation.
Quite vivid and fired-up, when you can hear them, the mostly spoken (or barracked through a megaphone) lyrics have a real depth and poetic menace. Layers of meaning and references strike at the bowels of hell; the aftermath of an aerial bombing raid that hits a zoo becomes a quasi prose style menagerie version of Guernica, on the hypnotic quagmire dissection of death from above, A King And A Smak In A Calm. Warning it’s strong stuff, but here’s an example of that distressing vivid lyricism: “Beneath deep rubble reptiles squirm. The aquarium explodes. Monkeys and gorillas flee, hair singeing as they run. Shattered glass aviaries empty themselves. Trapped in their temple, elephants die. Rats work the huge rib cages and mounds of entrails to make a golem, filling its head with flies, as the city shines red through a gate knocked off its hinges in the background.”
The finale, which almost bounces and shimmer along by comparison to the rest of the album, moving along to a double-time mix of the Moon Duo, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Suicide and The Normal, is an elegiac unflinching discourse on the Crystal Meth epidemic sweeping America (but the rust belt in particular): “A lumber saw took his leg, lost all his teeth to crystal meth.”
Harrow be thy name and all that, there’s plenty of Biblical quotation or allusion to it anyway to be found; extracts of Psalm 51 can be found on the fork-tongued exorcism at the foot of the Babel Tower, The Hyssop – a reference to the brightly coloured shrub found in Southern Europe and The Middle East, mentioned in the bible, known for its medicinal properties as an antiseptic. The Swans argue with 4AD era Scott Walker soundtrack certainly sounds like a brooding combat between the esoteric bible and dark forces. There’s plenty of rage, a lot of the daemonic, and plenty of the Old Testament prophecy amongst the blood and guts and tearing flesh.
A theme of breaking free, shouted over the white noise, and the need to breathe; shedding the old skin, escaping the augurs of destruction; and escaping the Skynet possible future of automation and our robot overlords on the repeated steel ring fence kicking and foot pedal throbbing industrial Function: “Come meet the robot god, your soul’s entrusted to take off his metal mask. I’m staring back at you. I am the function of pure self destruction, anti-reproduction, and pro-automation.”
Sawed, drilled, stamped, teared, hammered and bashed, you really will feel like you’ve been savaged and beaten by the time you reach the end. A challenge certainly; the paranormal, biblical, esoteric no match for the realities of human nature and its darkest misdeeds, distilled through the harsh Gothic and industrial noise soundtrack of the uncompromising Waterman Fragment duo. For those who embrace the gloom and mire consider this a most heavy serious recommendation from me.
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