THE MONTHLY DIGEST INCLUDES A CLUTCH OF ACCUMULATED NEW MUSIC REVIEWS; THE SOCIAL INTER-GENERATIONAL/ECLECTIC AND ANNIVERSARY ALBUMS CELEBRATING PLAYLIST; AND CHOICE PIECES FROM THE ARCHIVES.
(Photo by Todd Weaver)
___THE NEW___
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr ‘Drops’
(Sonic Transmissions) 22nd August 2025
Growing, developing and expanding the remit from what was meant to be a one-off commission, brought together especially for the Vossajazz Festival, the troupe is now on its third titanic fusion rich studio album proper. Set in motion by Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (who also runs the Sonic Transmissions label, home to the ensemble’s recordings) a number of years back, the (Exit) Knarr now acts as the ‘main creative vehicle’ for the Norwegian bassist going forward it seems.
Settling with a reasonable lineup on this third chapter but inviting in a number of guests on the album’s statement piece, a transformed vision of jazz deity Wayne Shorter’s ‘Deluge’ piece from the revered and influential 1965 album release JuJu, on this outing the sextet takes prompt or inspiration from a more visual source. In the sphere of the Russian maverick abstract visionary and Bauhaus professor Wassily Kandinsky and Swedish mystic and abstract progenitor – some would say the true and first ever abstract artist, beating her peers (Malevich and Mondrian) to pure abstraction by a few good years – Hilma af Klint, a number of graphic scores have been used to foster untethered freedoms and play from a group already in the freeform mode. In one way, addressing perhaps the lack of knowledge, the place in which she should stand, there’s an unsaid elevation of Klint, an early adopter of the very spiritualism, Theosophy, that first led the way for Mondrian and many of his circle to dare to strip away every last visage, reference of the world for abstraction. Arguably Klint can be said to preceded Kandinsky and the others to this goal. And her work is filled with the iconic circular shapes, the colurs that would go on to inspire Sonia Delaunay and many others.
As a visual methodology, these scores go some way to painting a reification of a partly live studio performance and the ‘tweaked’ effected and transmogrified aftermaths.
Bringing together Amalie Dahl on alto, Karl Hjalmar Nyberg on tenor and electronics, Marta Warelis on piano and also on electronics, Jonathan F. Horne on guitar, Olaf Olsen on drums and of course IHF on what sounds like both electric and double bass, the album divides two longer form performances with a couple of shorter pieces. Speaking the experimental language of Anthony Braxton with garbled, hysterical and squeezed abandon, and inspired by the equally freeform pioneering Mats Gustafasson and his No Ensemble, the ensemble open with an already mentioned version of Shorter’s ‘Deluge’; taking the original’s more controlled bluesy swing style of simmering and serenaded and crooned sax for a tumultuous ride on the open seas of both discord and crested freefalls. It starts with twisted guitar wire grabbing and neck sliding and incipient tethered drums but soon develops into a recognisable, familiar feel before numerous swells and peaks resemble a fusion of the Henry Grimes Trio (cicra ‘Fish Story’ if we’re being specific), Rashied Ali, the Anthony Braxton Quartet, Keith Jarratt and Darius Jones. Wild in places, with the guitar going on to sound like a sci-fi dialect of tabbed beeps and switches, and the horns squeezed until the pips fall out, the action is shared out equally between all participants without losing a single instrument.: and that’s when you consider there’s also the guests, Mette Rasmussen on a second alto and a second drummer, Veslemøy Narvesen added to that untamed tidal wave experiment.
The album title is next. A change of a kind in tempo and thought this shorter composition articulates those droplets in various ways on a performance that sounds more open air than studio recorded. The sound of a dragon fly’s wings in rapid hovered form hangs around in a chamber-esque atmosphere of musing and pondering. Part JAF Trio, part ECM and part classical-minded jazz of a certain vintage, the gentle cascade of drips and drops fall very nicely and mysteriously on this Scandinavian ice float.
A second centrepiece if you like, ‘Kanon’ is dedicated to the renowned Norwegian drummer, composer and free jazz improvisor of note Paal Nilssen-Love. From his parents famous Stavanger jazz club located incubator to the capital and onto wide world recognition, Paal played with such notable company as Mats Gustafasson and Peter Brotzmann’s Chicago Tentet, before going on to set up his own All Ears festival. As an inspiration to a generation of Norwegians, Paal’s influence is huge. And in this mode, at this time, the sextet conjures up a semblance of his artform and free experimentation. But first, it all starts with some speaking panning of a curled up rattling drum roll, the quivers and quavers of the piano and what could be the attempt to match the sound of a buzzing bee. But it all soon develops into a wilder proposition of Masayuki Takayanagi, Eric Dolphy (I’m thinking specifically here of Out To Lunch!), Roscoe Mitchell, Andy Haas, Bill Dixon and Last Exit. It keeps changing; whether that’s in the action, dynamics between players, the tampering down parts that then peak into hysterical cries of squeezed, rasped and the burbled. A surprising passage of play even takes on a Lalo Schifrin vibe nearer the end.
The finale is left down to a performance that’s manipulated (or ‘tweaked’ as it’s written here), stretched out and elongated into a sci-fi hallucination. As if being treated and remodelled in real time, it sounds like the band is being pulled via a prism into the mirror backwards. It reminded me of the We Jazz label and their own retreated, remixed projects over the years. But stands as a more electronically led production that offers up a slightly off-kilter and magically alien version of their sound.
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s (Exit) Knarr colour new directions with an extended palette of ideas and sounds; heading towards breaking point before returning back to a recognition of the free form jazz movement that we can recognise. Source it out.
Andy Haas & Brian g Skol ‘The Honeybee Twist’
1st August 2025
Striking up an online and postal friendship since first writing about the highly experimental saxophonist, trick noise maker and effects manipulator when touring as a band member with Meg Remy’s Plastic Ono Band-esque U.S. Girls a few years before Covid, the former Muffin, NYC side man to the city’s attracted maverick luminaries of the avant-garde and freeform jazz, and prolific collaborator with Toronto’s most explorative and interesting artists, has sent me regular bulletins (and physical copies) of his various projects. Some have been in the solo mode, others with friends, foils and collectives.
Running off just a smattering of those releases (a majority of which have been with the highly obscure Resonantmusic imprint) from the last decade or so, and you have three extraordinary albums with the stringed-instrumentalist Don Fiorino (American Nocturne, Don’t Have Mercy and Accidentals), various appearances on records by Matt ‘Doc’ Dunn’s The Cosmic Range, the warped and discombobulating For The Time, Being solo act, and the avant-garde improvised performative triumvirate of SCRT with regular collaborator David Grollman and Sabrina Salamone.
Andy Haas now partners up with fellow Toronto native Brian g Skol for an unusual duet of saxophone and drums. Although it was recorded back in that city in 2024, the finished concentration and spatial experiment is now seeing the light with an official release via Haas’s own Bandcamp profile. I’m glad it hasn’t disappeared into obscurity, as it is one of the best, most radical but surprisingly rhythmic and pumped, worldly sounding album’s he’s made; much of this is down to the visual artist and percussionist/drummer Skol’s expressive and grasp/ear for international influences of rhythm, from both the Latin and Afro-South American to North Africa and the influence of Jaki Liebezeit.
The Honeybee Twist is a strange union between two instruments seldom pitted against each other; certainly not in this setting, with Haas once more wildly controlling the panning of his serialism style and both atonal and shrilling, bristled circular breathing sax and Skol combining hand drums, various percussive elements and drum kit breaks to provide a beat, a groove or more sporadic passages of the tactile, textures and tumultuous.
From nothing, reifications of the fire thief Prometheus, compounds, a vertical axis used in a 3-D space to show depth and elevation, self-assembly and play of words take some form of shape across an album of mystery, extemporization, and musing. Whilst stirring up these evocations, these reference points, both players traverse and kick around Arabian landscapes, Jon Hassell’e fourth world, the extremes of Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Sonny Simmons, Andrew Cyrille and Evan Parker, and the factory. The opening mythologically entitled ‘The Eagle And Prometheus’, sounds like a sax and drums transmogrification of Battles; leaping straight in with beating drums, splashes of cymbal and that signature circular breathing technique. This is where I believe you can hear an echo of Saw Delight era CAN relocated to Egypt or the Arabian souk: Haas’s sax starts to sound more like a shrilling vibrating mizmar or even a zurna, and Skol’s drums could be mistaken for the daf and riz on occasion.
Against the near constantly moving, feeling and exploring drums and percussion, Haas’s effected sax goes from blues to freeform jazz, to reflections and colloquy and soliloquy. There’s a harshness and roughness at times to that instrument as it goes through various warbles, buzzes, rasps and drones.
Despite the title of ‘Maybe I’m A Machine’, there is no mistaking that this is a very human interaction between two highly experienced experimental artists circumnavigating any kind of easy label, demarcation. The notes of an abstract nature bristle, vibrate and trill to a near amorphous global rhythm on a most experimentally original collaboration. Please seek it out.
Maria Elena Silva ‘Wise Men Never Try Vol. II’
1st August 2025
As promised last month, the second volume in the Wise Men Never Try series from the near evanescent and relaxed but deeply effecting singer and musician Maria Elena Silva.
After previous releases, some of which featured such notable company as Jeff Parker and Marc Ribot, and after stripping back Bob Dylan’s courtly enigmatic dames to their most essential essences with interpretations of both ‘Queen Jane’ and a summoned bell rung ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’, the Chicago homed Maria has turned to readapting, revaluating and transposing various themed songbooks from America’s past. Volume I, reviewed in the July Digest, turned to the pages of the Great American Songbook with familiar standards made anew and enigmatic through the emotively ethereal, connective, almost otherworldly and with a real sense of depth and something approaching the tactile – especially instrument wise.
Under that same ‘umbrella title’ the second volume travels further back in time to the America Civil War period of rousing, rallying, sorrow, tragedy and hope sheet music; much of the material used to bolster a flagging campaign by the Union during the early and mid-years of that horrifying, destructive and divisive war – arguably never really settled, with suspicion still between the North and South of the country culturally, politically and economically. In fact, recalling songs from nigh on 160 years ago has never seemed more prescient; chiming true with the age we find ourselves in right now. A balance is struck, history revisited, propaganda resized, and the sentimental repurposed. But arguably, the emphasis in this case is on the music of the eventual winners in this five-year conflict; although a number of the songs and rallying calls for the Union were also adopted and adapted by the Confederacy after they’d seen the effect it had on boosting morale and symbolising the cause.
Once more in an intimate setting with just the accompaniment of Erez Dessel on piano, Tyler Wagner on double-bass, and Maria on guitar, the Civil War period is amorphously twisted into minimalist meanders and dreamily untethered shapes of the tactile, the avant-garde, and descriptive. At the heart of it all, Maria’s voice is relaxed and diaphanous; pitched somewhere between folk, the Celtic, the traditional and the jazzy. The tragically played out ‘Booth Killed Lincoln’ sounds a little like Joan Baez in parts. It certainly, in all its traditionalist lament, has an air of Dylan about it and the Laurel Canyon circle of female troubadours. Like a play in itself, the acts, steps that lead to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on that fateful day, at that fateful performance at the Ford Theatre, Washington D.C., could be lifted off the sensational pages of that time’s broadsheets. Lincoln’s last breath, rather ironically to the last, is very much Dylan: “Of all the actors in this town, I loved John Wilkes Booth the best.” Musically, there’s but an essence of accompaniment, with the double-bass strings sounding more like a wooden set of spokes and a sort of dampened drum. The odd harmonic is twinged.
However, the album strikes a jarring chord of dissonance, a heavily pressed and free form piano opening gambit of Keith Jarrett and Thomas Schultz. Interpreting the American composer of romance and patriotism George Frederick Root’s most popular rallying call, ‘Battle Cry Of Freedom’, Maria seems to counterbalance Dessel’s passing storms, shades of forbode, salon bar upright tones, uncertainty, the abstract and discordant with disconsolate beauty. A second Root interpretation, the succour giving ‘Tramp Tramp Tramp’ (aka ‘The Prisoner’s Hope’, written in the later stages of the war) is sympathetic to the original, but more melodiously jazzy.
Some of the material leans towards country: albeit a version that exists in a fog of the Appalachians and Woodstock. There’s even a moment on ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ where either the double-bass or guitar resembles a banjo. And the album’s most unusual break from the formula (though to use that word is doing Maria and her foils a disservice), the finale ‘My Old Horse Died’, features a far more rustic, loosely and buzzier more carelessly strummed guitar and the sound of what could be some kind of replicated plucking/picking tines. I do love this song; it sounds like Dylan writing a filmic Western song to feature in Little Big Man or McCabe & Mrs. Miller. As far as I can hear, there isn’t much in the way of horses, but some ironic metaphor for loss, wistful financial and property woes: “Swallowed the place where my home stood. Mortgage guy came round, claimed the hole in the ground where my home once stood.” It almost sounds drunken this slice of Western music from the counterculture.
Remembrance, tragedy, the call to arms, and above all, the encouraging original lyrics of the abolitionist (one of the key themes, subjects of many of these songs) ring like wispy or beautified and pining poetry from the battle fields of America. Only, that same divisive rage, the splits, the distrustfulness and hunger for independence rages still to this day; a constant cry wolf of civil war is voiced whenever the political class weaponizes its losses, or failure to win an election. Handled with subtly, and a classy skill that stretches out the meaning, the lyricism, the mood and intention further, a new spotlight has been drawn upon these historical songs; taken into an avant-garde territory without losing sight of a melody, a form or shape, Maria and her foils create a rather unique and incredible atmosphere; bringing dusted off Civil War pamphlets, sheet music and the like to a new audience. Every bit as encapsulating and dreamy as Volume I. It will be interesting to see what Volume III offers, and where Maria goes next. An excellent, spellbinding series so far.
Saul Williams, Carlos Niño & Friends ‘Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople’ (International Anthem) 28th August 2025
An enviable collaborative union of talent from both the East and West coasts of an America on the eve (or thereabouts) of Trump’s inauguration, under the TreePeople canopy of righteous indignation at the state of a nation, gathered the totemic voiced poetic polymath Saul Williams, the divine styler, multi-instrumentalist, percussionist and producer of afflatus and new age conscious jazz and its many strands, Carlos Niño, and a host of congruous musical friends from a scene of ever-expanding inter-connections. You can’t get any more symbolic than this; setting up for an experimental – perhaps extemporized in part – performance beneath the black oak and walnut trees in Coldwater Canyon Park, L.A. Recorded at the time and now seeing the light (so to speak) eight months later into the new Presidency, this ensemble piece’s headlined foils and longtime friends since the 1990s, combine forces across an archaeological dig of free associations.
But before peeling back the layers of this psychogeography, a little about the artists involved in this part explorative, part free expressive, part oratory and part theatre. Not that Niño would boast, but the highly prolific producer, ‘expansive percussionist’, experimental composer, connector and communicator, has made albums as and with such notable luminaries as Ammoncontact, Build An Ark, The Life Force Trio, and others. And also overseen the Alice Coltrane protégé – the keyboardist, composer and actor – Surya Botofasina’s2022 devotional Everyone’s Children. All the while, leading or instigating his own loose ensemble of multidisciplinary artists and the & Friends banner. This time around, those friends include recurring foil Nate Mercereau (the solo artist in his own right’s skills include the guitar, composing, songwriting, live sampling and improvising), Aaron Shaw (the horn player has worked with such notable icons and names as Elijah Blake, Anderson Paak., Dave Chappelle, Herbie Hancock, and made music for TV and film), Andres Renteria (the L.A. percussionist/drummer and DJ has worked with an impressive host of artists over the year: Jose Gonzalez, Father John Misty, Flying Lotus and Nick Waterhouse), Maria The Artiste (hot-housed in the AACM of Chicago, the woodwind player, vocalist, vibraphonist, bandleader and composer is also a member of the late Horace Tapscott initiated, and now six decade running, Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra), Francesca Heart (the partial alias of Italian artist, researcher and electronic artist with a skill at playing the conch shell Francesca Mariano, who makes new age music of a kind on computers), Kamasi Washington (the saxophonist who’s profile has possibly been highest over the last twenty years, after ushering in a revival of a sort on spiritual, odyssey jazz, has picked up a number of awards and plaudits for his work and collaborations) and Aja Monet (the lauded and awarded contemporary poet, writer, lyricist and activist can be heard joining Williams with a forewarned and haunting poetic vision on ‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’).
Needing no introduction, but getting one anyway, American rapper, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and actor Saul Stacy Williams first came to attention during the late 1980s on the New York café poetry scene. The burgeoning innovator, mixing beat/poetics/slam and hip-hop, soon stood out. A big break came as the lead in the awarding winning Marc Levin directed movie SLAM in the 90s; the phenomenon of slam poetry, its reach via competitive performance outside academia, set free from the stiff studied branches of the elite institutions. The list of peers that Williams has performed with is incredible; from blast master KRS-One to illmatic Nas, The Fugees, beat poet Allen Ginsberg and Black arts movement luminary Sonia Sanchez. Williams has also been a driving force behind the Brooklyn Afro-punk movement, written a libretto for Ted Hearne’s LA Philharmonic produced oratorio PLACE and two symphonies by the late Swiss composer, Thomas Kessler, based on two books of Saul’s poetry, Said the shotgun to the head and The Dead Emcee Scrolls. The scope and range are wide indeed, with both Williams film roles and a stint on Broadway as the lead in the first hip-hop musical, Holler If You Hear Me – based upon the lyrics of Tupac Shakur – to consider. And on top of that a sextet of studio albums and quartet of poetry books, all translated into multiple languages. The self-titled album debut of which was produced by Rick Rubin. There’s so much more of course; a whole Wikipedia page in fact to delve into.
But what’s important is that the experience, creative richness and innovativeness of all participants in this movement of change is in no doubt. And when all brought together like this, the results have a real depth and breadth, weaving together so many connective threads of outrage and riled injustice and indignation. This is meta, an alternative, sometimes more felt than real, history toiled over until exposing the roots.
To distil this performance down to jazz would be an injustice in itself, as the ensemble and their two leads accentuate, ring and punctuate, and, without rhythm in most cases, build a spiritual, conscious and traumatic atmosphere around and bedded beneath the either peppered, prophesied, near uninterrupted flow of racial injury, of hurt, of rage and recourse. The musical and sound elements certainly recall some of the signatures of jazz; of artists such as Coleman, the Pharoah, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, of Don Cherry, The John Betsch Society, of Brother Ah and Idris Ackamoor. But nothing quite frames this performance, demarcated into four parts with an after show of appreciation and emotional final word sit-down with the audience. For amongst the collage of the atavistic and primal, as prehistoric beasts lift their heads disturbed by the stirring hands of the dig, and Edan’s wildlife emerges from the grasslands, and the sax sings a parched reedy song, the percussion mirrors the sounds of dry bones and beads, and the vibraphone’s bulb-like notes float like particles in the style of Jamal, Williams delivers omens and a associative thread of technological, economic, political, social ills. Williams sounds one part Quelle Chris, another part Amiri Baraka on that opening “land map”: that cradle of uncivilised repeal. Later on, as the poetics seem to be less interrupted or stretched, the style is more Watts Prophets; especially on ‘We are calling out in this moment’, which links together the origins of Manhattan and its stock exchange with the original Lenape peoples that once farmed it, cultivated it and called it home before the arrival of the Dutch and then the English. Origin stories connect with the occupy movement, Black Lives Matter in a flurry of redress; the financial epicentres slave trading roots almost matter-of-factly and shockingly mapped out.
Later on, Williams is joined by Aja Monet for the new age balm turn African wilderness haunting ‘‘The Water is Rising/as we surpass the firing squad’, who’s contribution amongst the vibraphone tinkles and dreamy serenaded saxophone wafts and lingers and pines, and the “insect gossip”, recalls Tenesha The Wordsmith passing the mic to the Last Poets, once Williams takes up his post in front of the said allegorical “firing squad”.
Sitting down with the audience at the very end of this astonishing performance – bordering on both the theatre, the counterculture, and the activist -, and after the stats, the re-purposed jargon, the rebalance of history as it was and is, a time of emotional pleading and reminder that there is still work to be done. But that message is one of community and the need to build and maintain networks of support in the tough times; not to wallow or give in. But as one stage in the fight this album marks a new enterprise and platform for greater harmony and a safe place for experimentation. International Anthem can do no wrong, as they continue to facilitate such creative sparks of inventive free play and poetry.
___/The Monolith Cocktail Social Playlist Vol. 100___
For the 100th time, the Social Playlist is an accumulation of music I love and want to share; with tracks from my various DJ sets and residencies over the years and both selected cuts from those artists and luminaries we’ve lost on the way and from those albums celebrating anniversaries each month.
Running for nearly 12 years now, Volume 100 is the latest eclectic and generational spanning playlist come radio show from me – the perfect radio show in fact: devoid of chatter, interruptions and inane self-promotion.
Here’s to the hundredth edition, which features a homage or two to Terry Reid and Howie Tee, who we both lost recently. Self-coining his own nickname, Reid’s voice was lionised as “superlungs” for his incredible vocal prowess. But as an all-round package, voice, guitarist and rock artist of universal repute – in any article or description, Reid is anointed as the ‘artists’ artist’ -, Reid could shake the foundations of blue-eyed soul and maximum R&B, blues rock and heavy rock. His name was touted around the 1960s, courted to front or join countless luminaries, from Led Zep and Deep Purple (he turned them both down). There’s many eclectic steps on the way, including a penchant for the Latin rhythms of Brazil (falling into his orbit during 1969, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, recently exiled by the military dictatorship of Brazil, were helped by Reid’s attorney to come to London; they would go on to flank Reid at the seminal Isle of Wight Pop Festival almost a year later in 1970), a direction into introspective jazz, desert mountain commune living and session work for Don Henley, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt – this came after Reid more or less decided to retire from his solo career. A rich life lived. So, in my selection I’ve gone for a smattering spread of tracks from the cannon, starting back at the beginning with the title track from the 1968 LP bang bang you’re Terry Reid plus ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’, ‘Rich Kid Blues’, ‘Live Life’ and ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’.
From a whole other sphere of the musical landscape, Howie Tee, the hip-hop and new jack swing hit maker of repute during the 80s and 90s. Born in the UK, but raised up in Flat Bush, Brooklyn, Tee’s (or the name his folks would recognise, Howard Anthony Thompson) musical protectory took flight with a break in the early electro crew CDIII. Already familiarising himself with the mixing desk and production tools, Tee quickly jumped ship to producing, his first success being in conjunction with U.T.F.O.’s Kangol Kid, with the commercially hot hip-hop group Whistle. At the same time Tee also put together the equally successful Real Roxanne collaboration, scoring with ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’ – which as the name suggests, rides on the go-go phenomenon. There would also be production credits for records by Cash Crew, Seeborn & Puma, E.S.P. and Izzy Ice. Tee then became the in-house producer for the New Jersey-based independent label Select Records, producing relative hits for Special Ed and Chubb Rock. But it wasn’t all hip-hop orientated, for in 1991 he mixed and co-produced Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’: a Billboard number one. And he also made remixes for such diverse acts as Madonna and Maxi Priest. I’ve chosen both Special Ed and the Real Roxanne, plus Chubb’s bromance cut, ‘DJ Innovator’.
In a celebratory mood, I’ve also kept up the monthly inclusion of anniversary album tracks, with 60th nods to The Beatles Help, Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited (I’ve gone for, what I hope, is two not so common of known cover versions from both) and Miles Davis E.S.P. There’s also 50th glass raisers to Cortex’s cult favourite, Troupeau Bleu, Don Cherry’s pioneering Brown Rice, and Eno’s Another Green World.
Every month I like to collect up some of the more newish or recent tracks that didn’t make the Monthly playlist selection – either for lack of space or I just forgot to include at the time. In that category there’s Elaine Howley’s diaphanous, translucent ‘Hold Me In A New Way’, Mike Cooper’s vague South Seas, Pacific exotic mirage ‘Eternal Equinox’, U.S. Girls’ Jane (Doe) Country and Plastic Ono Band funk ‘No Fruit’, the collaborative PAUER/Wolfgang Perez/Der Wandler/Magic Island union’s yearning ‘Falling Over You’, and Pons hi-energy 80s work-it no wave dance diatribe ‘Fast Money Music’. There’s also a track from the recently released, and featured, Woody at Home Vols 1 and 2 – Guthrie hanging round like Banquo’s ghost over Dylan, who’s Highway is revisited this month.
The rest of the playlist is made up of cross-generational from across the ages by Jaz-O, Baby Washington, Isan Slete, Vincent Over The Sink, Phantom Payn Days, Lynn Castle, Mad Walls, Massacre and more…
TRACK LISTING:
The Real Roxanne FT. Howie Tee ‘Bang Zoom (Let’s Go-Go)’
Pons ‘Fast Money Music’
Themselves ‘Roman is as Roman Does’
Waylon Jennings ‘You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away’ Mariangela Celeste & Vangelis ‘Honolulu Baby’
Woody Guthrie ‘One Little Thing An Atom Can’t Do’
Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons ‘Queen Jane Approximately’
Terry Reid ‘The Hand Don’t Fit The Glove’
Baby Washington ‘The Ballad Of Bobby Dawn’
Terry Reid ‘Rich Kid Blues’
U.S. Girls ‘No Fruit’
Lynn Castle ‘You Are the One’
John Baldry ‘It Ain’t Easy’
Isan Slete ‘Lam Phloen’
Terry Reid ‘Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’
Miles Davis ‘R.J.’
Jaz-O ‘Put The Squeeze On ‘Em’
Special Ed ‘I Got It Made’
Cortex ‘Automne – Colchiques’
Brian Eno ‘Sky Saw’
Furniture ‘My Own Devices’
Mad Walls ‘Lily’
Massacre ‘Bones’
Terry Reid ‘Live Life’
Mint Tattoo ‘Wrong Way Girl’
Terry Reid ‘Ooh Baby (Make Me Feel So Young)’
Chubb Rock Ft. Howie Tee ‘DJ Innovator’
Don Cherry ‘Degi-Degi’
Elaine Howley ‘Hold Me In A New Way’
Mike Cooper ‘ETERNAL EQUINOX’
Xul Solar ‘Sigh’
Vincent Over the Sink ‘Number Theory’
Phantom Payn Days ‘primitive chamber music phone call blues’
Woody Guthrie ‘I’m A Child Ta Fight’
Willis Earl Beal ‘Like A Box’
Marcos Resende & Index ‘Nina Nenem’
___/Archives___
From the exhaustive Archives each month, a piece that’s either worth re-sharing in my estimates, or a piece that is either current or tied into one of our anniversary-celebrating albums. From the former category, my original review of Willis Earl Beal’s nite flights soul harrowed and ached Noctunes album, released a decade ago this month.
Willis Earl Beal ‘Noctunes’
(Tender Loving Empire) Released 28th August 2015
Whether stretched beyond the realms of fact and fiction or not, the many travails of Willis Earl Beal fit the outsider artist profile perfectly. With more deaths/rebirths than the Dali Lama’s had reincarnations, Beal’s self-made and put-upon myth status as the Zorro masked articulate esoteric blues and soul poet, only reinforces the mystery that surrounds him. Hardly the result of an easy life – one that’s seen him grow up in a sort of odd isolation, plagued by both physical and mental health; a consequence in no small part of his injuries sustained when trying out for the army.
His musical epiphany arrived whilst down-and-out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The untrained, and at one time homeless, but naturally gifted songwriter recorded the rawest of lo fi tracks, leaving them with his hand drawn cover art at various coffee shops around town, alongside flyers seeking a girlfriend with his phone number written on them. These unassuming offerings eventually made their way onto the cover of Found Magazine in America and from there, fell into the hands of XL Recordings Jamie-James Medina. Originally signing to the labels Bronx-based offshoot Hot Charity, releasing two well-received albums – his debut Acousmatic Sorcery in 2012 and Nobody Knows follow up in 2013 – Beal succumbed to either ennui, despondency or the pressures of suddenly being foisted into the music business and quit. Beal slopped off into a self-imposed exile in the backwoods of Olympia, Washington, and became the Noctunes crooner.
As the title suggests – a riff on nocturnes – these twelve nocturnal lullabies, paeans and plaintive ballads evoke the romantic nighttime meditations. Stripped to the barest of accompaniments, yearningly swooning with the occasional burst of a drawn-out primal scream, high notes and pained wallowing, Beal creates a haunted soundtrack. Part southern river ambient journey, part soul-baring soliloquy.
Once again dodging definition, he takes the mournful strings and suffused hymn like aspects of his previous recordings and ditches the bounce and R&B elements for minimalism. Still channelling Otis Redding with a side order of Bill Withers and echoing traces of TV On The Radio’s most dilatory maladies, Noctunes is, when prescribed in small doses, a visceral stirring experience. Choosing to say more with a lot less, lyrics, which if uttered by many other artists would sound like mere platitudes, are given a gut-wrenching and despondent leverage when leaving Beal’s lips.
Often draining, and at times laying it on a bit too thick, the album’s impact can be enervated when digested in one session. Lingering manifestations rather than epiphanies, it feels like our protagonist is unburdening his heart. A tough call on paper, yet the bare faint undertones of funeral parlour organ, stuttering jazz style drums, murmuring hums and synths lift the songs gently above morose and indulgence.
We need your help. If you’ve enjoyed this selection, the writing, or been led down a rabbit hole into new musical terrains of aural pleasure, and if you able, then you can now show your appreciation by keeping the Monolith Cocktail afloat by donating via Ko-Fi.
For the last 15 years both me and the MC team have featured and supported music, musicians and labels we love across genres from around the world: ones 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 or interest in. 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 say thanks or show support, than you can now buy us a coffee or donate via https://ko-fi.com/monolithcocktail
Our Daily Bread 365: U.S. Girls ‘Heavy Light’
February 27, 2020
LP REVIEW
Dominic Valvona
U.S. Girls ‘Heavy Light’
(4AD) LP/6th March 2020
Marking a decade in a recording career that extends just beyond that, Meg Remy as the ambiguous U.S. Girls has progressed from bedroom diy-style 60s bleeding hearts girl group tape-loops to ever more sophisticated femme fatale politicized boogie, disco and funk. From performing as a, more or less, solitary figure from 2008 until she signed on in 2015 to 4AD, Meg has not only expanded her musical horizons and production techniques but also cast of collaborators: the last two albums for the much-mythologized indie label have included a full-on contorting live band, made up of Meg’s oft musical foil and partner the maverick guitar-slinging Maximilian Turnball (under his nom de plume of Slim Twig) and a host of Toronto talent; many of whom perform together as the multi-limbed collective Cosmic Range.
In (re)cycle mode Meg’s latest thematic cerebral pop opus, Heavy Light, is full of reflections and retrospection, not just on duality but hindsight. The seventh LP proper even features a trio of reworked recordings from the back catalogue; songs that chime with and make a connection to those very same themes, as Meg turns away (to a point) from her previous, almost, removed character sketches to gaze inward and take stock: going back even to recollections of childhood experiences. The first of this trio and a recent single ’Overtime’ first appeared on the 2013 Free Advice Column EP. Missing its lo fi Ronettes chimes, replaced with a more up-tempo gyrating workout of withering, cheated heart sassy funk, the refreshed Overtime now features a cameo pined saxophone requiem solo from Bruce Springsteen’s current E Street Band member Jake Clemons: his wane and whining contortions in parallel with the Linda Sharrock like pained wails. An annoyed song of deceit, the title an allusion to a partner drinking away his extra pay in overtime, is pretty much a universal and timeless theme given an uncomfortable twist: the protagonist laying six feet deep in the soil.
The second song to be lifted from its original time, ‘State House (It’s A Man’s World)’, first featured on the 2011 LP U.S. Girls On KRAAK. Given a little pep, crisper production too, the 2020 version keeps the backbeat but adds a choral quality of descending voices – on what sounds like a protest sway rather than march – and one of the album’s most featured backing instruments, the marimba. The lilted undulating sparkle and trickling marimba is interesting, as Meg has decided to record this latest album a little differently to the last; using a live band but with less augmenting beats and synthesized effects, to give it a different feel entirely to In A Poem Unlimited. And so it has a more natural less post-produced sound: “un-automated”, as the PR spill calls it. Though many of the same musicians from that previous LP remain, and Meg has brought in dance producer and remixing luminary Rick Morel (Pet Shop Boys, Cyndi Lauper, Yoko Ono), the instrumentation is more classical, chamber and symphonic – timpani, strings, double bass, balladry melodramatic piano, hand drums and percussion.
Album closer, ‘Red Ford Radio’, is the final track of the three revisions; having first appeared on Meg’s second LP, 2010’s grainy and discordant Go Grey. The lumbered slow-steamed haunting clang of the original remains, if slightly cleaner, and the revolving repetitive vocal loop of “I can’t breathe in this red ford anymore, I’d do anything to get out, get out” is intact, but lifted from the swampy mono gauze so that you can now hear the increasingly panicked mantra and the menacing bounced beats of an oil drum that allude to something far darker.
Heavy Light is as much about the vocals as the instrumentation and production, as Meg works with a host of singers to create a jubilation of gospel, soulful and theatre production chorus voices. Meg’s host of harmonious singers, conducted by the multi-talented Toronto stalwart and motivator Kitty Uranowski, sound like Bowie’s Philly-inspired plastic soul troupe on the weaponised Plastic Ono Band go disco swirled boogie, with Anita Baker in tow, ‘4 American Dollars’, and impassionedly sorrowful on the Mick Ronson tickles the ivories stage-y ballad to the complex notions of consent, ‘IOU’. This chorus not only sings with aria like ascendance but also lends it to the sound-art like collages that break-up the album’s collection of songs. Overlapping individual voices recollect their own unique anecdotes in a number of thematic vignettes, the question being posed through the track titles (‘Advice To Teenage Self’, ‘The Most Hurtful Thing’, ‘The Color Of Your Childhood Room’), with answers both cathartic and bland.
Taking its title cue from the Franz Kafka aphorism “A faith like an axe. As heavy as light”, this album takes both a wry and revisionist look at the past. The contrast of experiences themed ‘Woodstock ‘99’ – itself, a perhaps ill-advised festival cashing in on it’s own mythologized past; generation X attempting in some way to own a piece of the boomers history – even lifts lines from Jimmy Webbs classical pop breakup song, ‘MacArthur Park’: “Someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can take it, ‘Cause it took so long to bake it. And I’ll never have that recipe again.” Written – I’m assured – about Webb’s breakup with Susan Ronstadt, turned down initially by The Association, it was Richard Harris who first made it a hit, but its Donna Summers version which seems to have inspired this vague transmogrification – that and a piece of Springsteen, The Boomtown Rats and Bowie’s piano moments on Hunky Dory. Almost with one eye winking, Meg’s impassioned sadness denotes a slight melodramatic indulgence on a song that has some really good lines about revising expectations and relationships with divided loyalties. ‘The Quiver To The Bomb’ goes much further back: four billion years in fact, to the dawn of womankind on a withering repetitive LCD Soundsystem piano drama.
Talking of borrowing, the brushed jazzy stagey, timpani rolled ‘Born To Lose’ has echoes of the sort of glass-y marimba and vibraphone chimes you’d hear on a Modern Jazz Quartet record. Those effective vibes, given a Latin makeover, can be heard again on the tropical, even Tango-esque, sauntering South American Spanish pop song ‘And Yet it Moves/Y Se Mueve’.
Personally though, it’s the beautifully conveyed and dreamy lulled ‘Denise, Don’t Wait’ and the already mentioned liquid funk soulful ‘4 American Dollars’ that I’m most endeared to. The former has that hanging on the end of a call that never comes, the expectant longing of a 60s girl-group heart breaker feel, skewered and reset in the now as a minor symphonic ballad. The latter shows off those over layered harmonies on a resigned polemic rile against the money men and the systematic failure of neoliberalism’s skewered capitalism- though I’d argue that a new elite of tech evangelists is a major driver of the inequality gap; those tech giants so-called altruistic virtues don’t wash as they hold onto ever greater reservoirs of capital and cash, usually offshore, instead of investing and spending in the economy at large: the drip down effect always an unsafe claim of multiple governments, even less effective when the rich don’t offer up even the most measly of crumbs.
Meg Remy remains one of the most consistent, (re)inventive and important pop artists and voices of the last decade. This, now, trio of 4AD records marks an unbroken run of assured quality; her finest work so far. No one quite politicizes disco, boogie and pop like it. No one sounds quite like her at the moment: not even close. There’s a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, and a lot of revising on Heavy Light as Meg holds up a mirror to both our conscious and unconscious biases, willing to root about in the grey areas and contradictions. Yet there is a sign of hope, a celebration of diversity –not in the achingly virtuous sense –, through the inclusion of eclectic voices and collaborators. U.S. Girls is not an expanded solo project but a hub, an all-welcoming activist umbrella that happens to produce some of the grooviest and most brilliant pop. I really do hope that I’m going to be marking Meg’s next decade in 2030!
Related posts from the Archives:
Half Free LP Review
In A Poem Unlimited Review
U.S. Girls Live Report
The Monolith Cocktail Is Now On Ko-Fi
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.
Albums of 2018: Part Two: Thomas Nation to Thom Yorke
December 6, 2018
Albums Selected By Dominic Valvona and Matt Oliver.
Welcome to Part Two of our alphabetically ordered best/choice/favourite albums of 2018 feature. You can find Part One here…
The decision making process:
Being the exhaustive and eclectic set of features our 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 in short, 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 numbered spot than another.
With no hierarchical order, we’ve lined our album choices up alphabetically; split into two features – Part One: A (Idris Ackamoor) to M (Moonwalks); Part Two:N (Thomas Nation) to Z (Thom Yorke).
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 in PART TWO from me (Dominic Valvona) and Matt Oliver.
N.
Thomas Nation ‘Battle Of The Grumbles’ (Faith & Industry)
Fixed intently on the anguishes of identity in a post-Brexit voted England, yet bleaching his 1960s bucolic and 1970s lounge (erring towards yacht rock almost) imbued songbook with nostalgia, the lyrics themselves read as augurs yet embedded on parchment, Blue House front-man James Howard weaves a diaphanous if plaintively foreboding chronicle of the past and present.
Creating a whole new persona as Thomas Nation, his commitment to a hazy timeless sound, both rustic and ambitious, goes as far as using only his rough mono mixes; undeveloped and left in their most honest, purest form. You won’t be surprised to learn that Howard has also released his Nation moniker debut, Battle Of The Grumbles, on cassette tape.
Littered with references to this Island’s past (both at home and overseas), from the illustrated album cover scene of the 16th century ‘Battle of the Spurs’ (when the Holy Roman Empire teamed up with Henry VIII’s England) to more ambiguous stirrings and despondent yearnings that feature musical echoes from across that ages, Battle Of The Grumbles stands metaphorically at the precipice of the white cliffs of Dover awaiting Britain’s fate.
A gentle spirit, James Howard creates a pastoral nostalgic journey filled with augurs, despair and disillusion but always diaphanous. The first of what Howard hopes will be an annual ‘pilgrimage’, the Thomas Nation incarnation is a cerebral wonder through the essence of Englishness, questioning and probing the psyche as it meanders through the psychogeography and heart of the countryside. Full review…
(Dominic Valvona)
Tony Njoku ‘H.P.A.C’ (Silent Kid Records)
Bringing a very different perspective and life experience to the London avant-garde art and electronic music scene, the British-Nigerian producer with the earthy falsetto, Tony Njoku, articulates a most unique form of magical soul music on his stunning new album. Though undulated with an ethereal to malady suffused backing of sophisticated synthesized travails, Njoku’s vocals always seem to bobble and float above the choppy breaks and ebbing tides.
Adrift in so many ways, through his life experiences, transferring as he did at the age of fourteen to London from a life spent hiding his true personality in the toxic macho boarding schools of Lagos, the sensitive Njoku found at least one kind of solace; able to show a vulnerability and pursue the music career he really wanted having previously recorded a number of hip-hop albums (the first when he was only twelve) that proved entirely counterintuitive, but were completely in tune with Nigerian environment he grew up in. Yet in the arts community he joined in his new home of London, he found few Afrocentric voices or people he could identify with or relate to. From that isolation comes an album inspired by the ‘high art sonic’ forms of Arca and Anhoni, and by the metamorphosis nature of Bjork; Njoku’s own compositions feature a beautiful synthetic shuffle of Afrofuturism soul and more searing discordant synth waves that clash and distort on arrival but gradually sync and become part of the motion. From beauty to pain and release, and often back again, each track (and not in a bad way) seems open-ended; a constant flowing cycle of emotions, which can be healed during that moment, in that space and time, but will inevitably return: A calm followed by turbulence and hopefully the light.
Eloquently in a hymn like fashion between pained malady and the venerable, heavenly but also melancholic and turbulent, H.P.A.C is a futuristic soul album of delicate intellect. Full review…
(DV)
P.
Micall Parknsun & Mr Thing ‘Finish What We Started’ (Village Live)
“Mainstays trusted with hip-hop restoration…with all the answers for those exaggerating hip-hop’s downfall” – RnV July 18
Featuring “beats to make your eyebrow dip” and the flow of one of the UK’s most reliably disdainful when it comes to holding your own, Micall Parknsun and Mr Thing made the very good decision to turn 2017’s one-off ‘The Raw’ into a 40 minute non-apology for playing the game properly. With hip-hop mumbling its way to the dogs, this pair have fire in the belly for the unfashionable return to beats and rhymes designed to stick around and give a damn. Measured run-ups streaked with bluesy, soulful headspace occupancy (with drums front and centre each and every time), a crux of blockbusters and pure boom bap battery, all land like a two-footed tackle, Thing researching and sculpting ‘the real’ without making it a puff piece on nostalgia or announcing they’re here to save the world. Park-E does his utmost to remain an upstanding citizen, pushed to his limits by both Thing’s heavyweight kicks and snares and general scene lethargy. The emcee’s systematic, it’s on when I say so-flow, perfectly lands the elbow once the producer has left you staggering backwards.
(Matt Oliver)
Josh T. Pearson ‘The Straight Hits’ (Mute)
Changing his tune (literally) Josh T. Pearson, the lonesome blues Texan with a wagonload of baggage, heads out onto the range with a swag bag of more joyful, unencumbered ‘golden hits’ with his latest album for Mute Records.
Leaving behind the more apocalyptic gospel concepts of his work with the short-lived but acclaimed Lift To Experience, Pearson sets himself new parameters; adhering to a five-point rules system for transforming a “batch of tunes” he’d been working on for a decade. Earmarked originally for the ‘unrecorded’ Bird Songs album, the nine original songs on The Straight Hits are a lighter and as the title suggests ‘straighter’ attempt to change the mood.
Far from set in stone – the unwritten rock’n’roll law that all rules are written to be broken is invoked on the tender yearning A Love Song (Set Me Straight) – each song must at least try to follow Pearson’s self-imposed requirements: Number one, all songs must have a verse, a chorus and a bridge; two, the lyrics must run sixteen lines or less; three, they must have the word ‘straight’ in the title; four, that title must be four words or less; and five, they must submit to song above all else i.e. “You do as she tells you, whatever the song tells you”, “You bend to her, and not her to you.”
The Straight Hits is a most rallying rodeo that gives the Americana soundtrack a much-needed kick-in-the-pants; the themes of love, whether it’s the analogical kind, ‘take me right now’ kind, or lamentable kind, enacted across a varied but blistering songbook. Rejecting the stimulants and his demons, Pearson choses the good ol’ fashioned power and redemptive spirit of gospel ye-ye and country rock’n’roll. And don’t it sound just mighty fine and swell! Full review…
(DV)
Q.
Qujaku ‘Qujaku’ (So I Buried Records)
Occupying both the spiritual and cosmic planes, emerging from the gloom and holy sanctuaries of the dead, the brooding Hamamatsu-based Japanese band Qujaku wowed with their second album of operatic Gothic and psychedelic doom-mongering. Beginning as they mean to go on, the opening ‘Shoko No Hakumei’ suite, more an overture, is itself a full on Ring cycle (as conducted by Boris) that is dramatic and sprawling: running almost the entire length of a full side of a traditional vinyl album.
On a very large foreboding canvas, Qujaku build-up an impressive tumult across the album’s nine-tracks of prowling esotericism and galloping drum barrage immensity. Between crescendo-bursting three-part acts and shorter volatile slabs of heavy caustic drone rock, the group often evokes an Oriental Jesus And Mary Chain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Spacemen 3, or Nine Inch Nails when at their most enraged. Psychedelic in the mode of The Black Angels, but also straying at their most languid and navel-gazing towards Shoegaze, Qujaku’s dark spanning cacophony of throbs and trembles bear many subtle nuances and becalmed breaks amongst the masses and maelstroms.
On an epic scale, dreaming big and intensely, Qujaku perform the most dramatic of daemonic theatre. Full review…
(DV)
R.
RAM ‘August 1791’
Considering the tumultuous bloody revolution from which an independent Haiti was born, RAM leader Richard A Morse‘s “Our existence is a political statement” mantra is unsurprising. Named after the initials of their road well travailed founder, RAM perform an entrancing spectacle of the ritualistic. Morse, originally born in Puerto Rico but brought up in Connecticut, spent the 80s rubbing shoulders with the polygenesis New York art and music scene’s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol’s factory. His interest piqued by the new wave’s adoption of Afro-diaspora rhythms and world music, Morse decided to travel to his native homeland to study the Haitian sound.
The son of Haiti folk legend Emerante de Pradine, Morse was already well aware of his ancestral roots, but had yet to indulge in or absorb the rich history of the island fully. After an initial short trip, Morse found himself it seems so seduced and inspired by Haiti’s culture that he decided to stay for good. Marrying local dancer and singer Lunise, he kick started the frenzied, rambunctious troupe, channeling the ideas he picked up on in New York and merging them with the signature instrumentation and sounds of the local Vodou belief, mizik-rasin and the drifting currents of the Caribbean and Africa.
This year’s odyssey, guided by the spirits and with dedications to the marternel and those that have helped (including the pivotal film director Jonathan Demme, who prominently featured one of their tracks in his or award-winning Philadelphia movie in 1994) shaped the band over the years, springs from Haiti’s enslaved population’s struggle for independence from its European masters. August 1791, the year and month of revolution (inspired by their colonial masters own revolution), frames this tropical fusion of tragedy and sauntering joy. Returning to the legends that sparked this fight, such as the ill-fated former slave turned leader of revolt, Toussaint Louverture (driving out the Spanish and British but captured and imprisoned under Napoleon’s regime; languishing in a cell at Fort de Joux until he died in 1803), and first Emperor of Haiti, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (assassinated by disgruntled members of the burgeoning administration), RAM evoke the spark that set in motion the first free republic of African heritage people in the Western hemisphere. Their seventh album not only pays tribute but features a musical accompaniment from that era; with a sound more or less, when stripped to its essence, that would be familiar to the Creole and African communities of the late 18th century.
Uniting in a busy percussive fusion the Americas with the roots of Africa, RAM bustle and hustle traditions to produce a paean to the Island they call home.
(DV)
Soho Rezanejad ‘Six Archetypes’
Impressive in all its striking celestial and throbbing distressed staccato shimmer the experimental Danish artist Soho Rezanejad’s ethereal but equally futurist dystopian ambitious new LP, Six Archetypes, is a bold exploration of identity politics.
Interplaying six of the major character symbols (The Guardian, The Orphan, The Seeker, The Russian, The Idealist, The Prostitute) from the Tarot with Carl Jung’s Psychological writings on the collective and structured reality, Rezanejad weaves the complex contemporary themes of gender liquidity and self-discovery into an amorphous mix of electronica, darkwave and Gothic pop suites.
Though not always audible, Rezanejad’s untethered vocals – vaporous and often ghostly undulating in an aria style – whisper, coo, lull, pant, wrench and shout throughout the shard majestic and multilayered intricate backing of synthesized, programmed, modeled sounds. It’s a striking voice too. At times, such as the beautiful but serious stellar flight of the navigator, Bjork meets Chino Amobi, rotary opener Pilot The Guardian, she sounds like Nico. And at other times, such as the lush Bowie/Sylvian synchronicity, Soon, her vocals sound like a mixture of Jesus Zola and Lykke Li.
Returning to the soil, so to speak, Rezanejad saves her most heartfelt yearn until the end; lovingly but starkly impassioned, singing in her ancestral tongue of Farsi – Rezanejad is the daughter of first generation Iranian immigrants – the National Council Of Resistance Of Iran’s alternative national song in protest against the state’s heavy-handed ideology.
An ambitious debut opus of dark beauty and ominous despair, Six Archetypes is a highly impressive cosmology of gender, roots and futurism politics and narratives. Full review…
(DV)
S.
Sad Man ‘ROM-COM’
Haphazardly prolific, Andrew Spackman, under his most recent of alter egos, the Sad Man, has released an album/collection of giddy, erratic, in a state of conceptual agitation electronica every few months since the beginning of 2017.
The latest and possibly most restive of all his (if you can call it that) albums is the spasmodic computer love transmogrification ROM-COM. An almost seamless record, each track bleeding into, or mind melding with the next, the constantly changing if less ennui jumpy compositions are smoother and mindful this time around. This doesn’t mean it’s any less kooky, leaping from one effect to the next, or, suddenly scrabbling off in different directions following various nodes and interplays, leaving the original source and prompts behind. But I detect a more even, and daresay, sophisticated method to the usual skittish hyperactivity.
Almost uniquely in his own little orbit of maverick bastardize electronic experimentation, Spackman, who builds many of his own bizarre contraptions and instruments, strangulates, pushes and deconstructs Techno, the Kosmische, Trip-Hop and various other branches of the genre to build back up a conceptually strange and bewildering unique sonic shake-up of the electronic music landscape. Full review…
(DV)
Otis Sandsjö ‘Y-OTIS’ (We Jazz Records)
Imbued as much by the complex language of North American and European modernist jazz as those who use it to riff on in the hip-hop and electronic music genres, the adroit Gothenburg saxophonist and composer Otis Sandsjö transmogrifies his own jazz performances so they transcend, or at least amorphously (like liquid) expand into polygenesis soundscapes.
Y-OTIS reimagines a musical union between Flying Lotus and Donny McCaslin, or better still, Madlib reconstructing the work of 3TM; the flow, if you can call it that, sounding like a remix deconstruction in progress as the rapid and dragging fills and staggered rolls of his group’s drummer Tilo Webber are stretched out, inverted and reversed into a staccato to dynamic bursting set of breakbeats and loops. Mirroring all the various cut-and-paste techniques of the turntablist maestros, Sandsjö and his dexterous troupe of keyboardist Elias Stemeseder, bassist Petter Eidh and Webber sound like a group being remixed in real time, live: And it sounds brilliant, as you’re never quite sure where each of these compositions is going to end up.
Sandsjö’s debut album, released via the Helsinki festival and label platform We Jazz Records, is a multilayered serialism suite of ideas and experimental visions. All of which, despite that complexity and blending of sophisticated avant-garde jazz, hip-hop, R&B, trip-hop and dance music, keep an ear out for the melody. If the ACT label, or ECM, ever converges with Leaf and Anticon, Y-OTIS might well be the result. Full review…
(DV)
Scran Cartel ‘Blue Plaque Candidates’ (Scran Cartel)
“A great, belt-loosening spread grilling you with much more than just a bunch of culinary one-liners” – RnV Aug 18
Brit grafters MNSR Frites (Granville Sessions) and Benny Diction (Corners) read you the specials for twelve fascinating tracks, packing foot-related rhetoric from the moment the dinner bell sounds. It’s quite an accomplishment to master such a particular angle without it being a gimmick, and easy to forget that ‘Blue Plaque Candidates’ is not specifically a concept album, just an expression of culinary love. These two really know their cookbooks and have a shopping list that you can’t check out quick enough, from cordon bleu menu toppers to bread and butter basics and young at heart sweetshop favourites, the Estuary English plating your three squares a day with the same near-apathy as they do exotic, forbidden fruit. The jazzy, funky beats are garnish to the duo cookery schooling everyone, indulging in one sub-grime moment on the E-numbered ‘Dundee’, and a cultural knowhow showing that greed isn’t always good, adds weight to their sprattish statement of “we write and record rap songs about food”. A chef fingers’ kiss for this one.
(MO)
Skyzoo ‘In Celebration of Us’ (First Generation Rich)
“Some of the smoothest psychology and concrete consciousness you’ll hear this year. One to be toasted over and over” – RnV Feb 18
Giving ‘In Celebration of Us’ the grown man rap label is a bit of a giveaway given Skyzoo’s opening skit of confiding in a pal about giving up the streets for the sake of his newborn. The Brooklynite and new father speaks a lot of sense, a flow that will express disappointment rather than anger and keep the titular celebrations modest, and attracts a captive audience when aiming at your head twofold, comprehensively ensuring the wateriness of neo-soul doesn’t just ebb away, or the dustiness of Detroit-style beats fugs your judgement. Picture a sometimes reluctant lecturer, as everyman as the tales you’ll familiarise yourself with, but giving you the full education once the mic in his hand. Not clinging to verse, hook, verse structure, Skyzoo doesn’t ramble, rather makes certain that he’s examined everything from top to bottom, very much schooled in knowing that if something’s worth doing, do it properly. Enough to make you feel warm and fuzzy – there are some undeniably slick, R&B moves crossing over as well – and rather more pensive when presented with the cold light of day.
(MO)
The Last Skeptik ‘Under the Patio’ (Thanks for Trying)
“An album simmering down the summer’s sticky restlessness: dusky beats that never fade to black, understated in their genre reach” – RnV July 18
Intense from The Last Skeptik, extremely well connected and arguably more well rounded since after a spell of paying extra-curricular dues. Surrounding himself with a boiling pot of hungry emcees gets a maximum return from teeth gritted, rapid fire, pound the road, witty unpredictables, all of whom casually playing down their iron mic grip. Synth-wired, at times spindly beats either host the back-to-mine session or storm the stage, perfect for its roll call – Bonkaz, Kojey Radical, Doc Brown, Scrufizzer but four headliners to pick from – to move through and dominate while playing the back, with motive or just willing daylight away. While originally noted for soundtracking summer humidity, ‘Under the Patio’ is decidedly not an album for office hours. Dabbling in shades of the exotic and skilfully soulful throughout for an album of rough edges, it’s the careful contrasts – the haunting ‘Hide & Seek’ featuring Matt Wills, the inexplicable but permissible ‘Calm Down’ inviting The Manor round for a knees up (there’s the versatility for you) – and Skeptik’s own version of ‘Deep Cover’ on posse cut ‘Oxymoron’ – that triumph in their cohesion to give TLS a massive W.
(MO)
Stella Sommer ’13 Kinds Of Happiness’ (Affairs Of The Heart)
In the vogue of an age-old central European malady, the dour romanticism that permeates the stunning solo debut album from the German singer/songwriter Stella Sommer is wrapped in a most beautiful gauze of melodious uplift and elegiac heartache.
Artistically, as the results prove, making the best decision of her career, Sommer steps out for a sojourn from her role in the German band Die Heiterkeit. Far from an extension of that group (though band mates Hanitra Wagner and Phillip Wolf both join her on this album), there are of course concomitant traces of it. Sommer however makes louder but also accentuates these traces and lingering relationships; her lived-in, far-beyond-her-years vocal more sonorous and commanding than before.
Possibly as perfect as an album can get, 13 Kinds Of Happiness is an ambitious, slowly unveiling album of diaphanous morose. Pastoral folk songs and hymn-like love trysts are transduced by a Gothic and Lutheran choral liturgy rich backing that reimagines Nico fronting Joy Division, or Marianne Faithfull writhing over a Scary Monsters And Super Creeps era Bowie soundtrack (especially on the galloping Northern European renaissance period evoking thunderous drumming ‘Dark Princess, Dark Prince’; just one of the album’s many highlights). I don’t use that Nico reference lightly: Sommer channeling the fatalistic heroine’s best qualities atmospherically speaking.
A curious Teutonic travail of venerable lovelorn despair and modesty, Sommer’s debut LP will take time to work its magic. But work its magic it will. A tremendous talent lyrically and vocally, serious and astute yet melodically enriching and lilted, her sagacious deep tones are starkly dramatic, but above all, rewarding. Here’s to a solo indulgence that I hope long continues. Full review…
(DV)
Station 17 ‘Blick’ (Bureau B)
With near enough thirty years of experience behind them and a changeable lineup of both musicians with and without various disabilities, the Station 17 collective once more shift their focus and sound; moving away from the all-out pop of the last album Alles Für Alle for a more improvised travail through the Krautrock, Kosmische and experimental electronica cannon.
Free of predetermined structures, lyrics and ideas they enjoyed an improvised freedom; inviting a host of German musical royalty to take part in what is a collaborative recording experience – something they’ve done in the past, having worked with icons such as Michael Rothar and the late Holger Czukay. And so each of the album’s tracks feature the signatures sounds and quirks of its guests: The writhing prehistoric Krautrock-jazzy Le Coeur Léger, Le Sentiment D’un Travail Bien Fait for example features the guiding avant-garde, ‘musique concrète’ presence of drum and bass partnership of Jean-Hervé Péron (the French title track I dare say his idea) and Zappi Diermaier; key founders of the reverent agent provocateurs Faust, who in recent decades have broken away to form their own iteration of the group under the faUSt banner. And, though only as part of its most modern regeneration, Tangerine Dream’s Ulrich Schnauss appears to gaze through a progressive Kosmische tinged explored ‘astronomical telescope’ on the album’s heaven’s gate opening finale.
From another generation, Dirk Dresselhaus, aka Schneider TM, appears both as an engineer, capturing these sessions and crafting them into a coherent album, and as a collaborator on the kooky bossa nova preset Die Uhr Spricht. Andreas Spechtl of Ja, Panik! infamy appears alongside Station 17 singer Siyavash Gharibi on the poppier, Der Plan-esque Dinge, and another Andreas, Andreas Dorau, joins the same upbeat, marimba like candour on what we’re told is an “enduring appraisal of post-capitalist perversion”, Schaust Du, whilst Datashock travel through the primordial soup into another dimension on the Acid Mothers-hitch-a-ride-aboard-the-Cosmic Jokers-spaceship Zauberpudding.
Turning the dial on an imaginary radio station, attuned to all the highlights from Germany’s most experimental if rhythmic decades, Blick confidently absorbs the influences and inspirations of its multitude of guests to produce social commentary and reflect on the here and now. Full review…
(DV)
T.
Rodrigo Tavares ‘Congo’ (Hive Mind Records)
The amorphous traversing post-rock and jazz travelogue from Brazilian guitarist/composer Rodrigo Tavares is filled with a sense of contemplation and meditation, and a yearn for the spiritual. The spiritual is represented in Congo’s genesis; the catalyst for Tavares soundtrack inspired, in part at least, by a visit to the controversial ‘spiritual healer’ John of God – a medium, psychic surgeon of dubious repute -, who lives in the remote central Brazilian town of Abadiânia. The meditative, in this case, runs throughout the suggestive instrumental passages and vignettes that ponderously drift, cascade and ebb across a real and imagined borderless global soundtrack.
Suffused throughout this album you’ll find lingering traces of the ACT jazz label, minimalism, Tortoise post-rock, Brazilian legends Joâo Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi and Tom Jobim, and removed by quite a few degrees, a hint of the free-form untethered to any easy classification, evolving guitar experimentation of the Sun City Girls – as it happens a show in a remote former gay bar in Brazil by the same band was one of the stopovers on Tavares ‘transformative road trip’; the fruits of which and experience laying down the creative foundations for Congo.
Truly transglobal, Tavares helps take Brazilian music – like his fellow compatriot Sentidor – into often trance-y, unburdened and unlabored directions. With few rough edges, this congruous soundtrack makes for a ruminating, thoughtful smooth journey. Full review…
(DV)
Samba Touré ‘Wande’ (Glitterbeat Records)
In a country abundant with guitar virtuosos, the highly genial Samba Touré still stands out as one of Mali’s most celebrated and accomplished; transducing the travails, heartache but also joy of his homeland through his signature articulate nimble-fingered style of playing.
His third album for Glitterbeat Records – the first, Albala, was the label’s inaugural release in 2013 – Wande is billed as a warmer homely songbook: previous releases were produced during the Islamist insurgency that swept aside and hijacked the Northeastern Tuareg communities’ battle for autonomy in the north eastern regions of Mali. Far from a complete break, the sadness endures on Wande; though Touré sadness is a most beautiful, cantering and lingering one. Especially when paying tribute to his friend and collaborator, sokou fiddle maestro Zoumana Tereta, on the spoken word with wavering drifty, almost dub-like echo-y effects tracks of the same name, which features the late musician’s spindly evocations from beyond the ether.
Recorded in under two weeks, allowing weekends for band members to scratch a living playing at weddings, sessions for the album were relaxed, performances captured on their first take with few overdubs. The lo fi production feel of the rocking blues ‘Yerfara/We Are Tired’ could be a lost inspiration for 80s period Rolling Stones with its almost transmogrified Start Me Up like Richards riff. ‘Goy Boyro/The Good Work (Well Done)’ even begins with a Taj Mahal, BB King reminiscent introduction hook, before dipping over the horizon. But whatever you do, don’t call this is a desert blues album, or even an African one; Touré correctly insistent that this is contemporary ‘universal’ rock music.
Not quite such a leap of faith or different to previous albums, an unpolished and laidback methodology has produced a slightly more sagacious, free-floating quality and another essential Touré masterpiece. Full review…
(DV)
Ty ‘A Work of Heart’ (Jazz Re:Freshed)
“Almost feels like a magic carpet ride over the capital’s skyline; come and spread your arms if you really need a hug” – RnV Mar 18
Soft focus viewed with the wisest of eyes cutting through life’s smokescreen: the eminent UK statesman preserves the essence of never getting too high or too low. Ty has long had that trustworthy delivery of a life coach who can pep you up – inspirational with quiet authority – and tell you to man up without raising his voice, any hints at vulnerability given the very British keep calm and carry on treatment (“when you smile with me publicly I’m wearing a mask, gritting my teeth, a wolf in a bundle of sheep”). The liltingly clean production is what might turn a few ears belonging to those thinking hip-hop’s not for them – right from the off it’s of a Ty-tracked, toasted cinnamon bun snugness, a concrete jungle paved with a yellow brick road heading towards promised lands, but with the plain sailing carrying some turbulence. ‘A Work of Heart’ sounds as good as when Jack Frost comes knocking, as much as when the summer’s hose pipes were forbidden fruit. And like the first blooms of spring. AND the first leaves of autumn falling too.
(MO)
U.
U.S. Girls ‘In A Poem Unlimited’ (4AD)
Featuring most of the Toronto cast of collaborators that propelled the first U.S. Girls release for 4AD records, Half Free, forward, but stretched and lushly flexed into space boogie and other equally eclectic grooves by the city’s multi-limbed collective The Cosmic Range, Meg Remy’s latest cerebral pop revision tones down some of the vibrancy for acerbic, sax-wailing pouted-lips resignation and introversion.
Moving across the border from the USA with her husband and musical collaborator Maximilian Turnbull, aka guitar-slinging maverick Slim Twig, long before Trump reached The White House, Remy has broadened her postmodernist transmogrification of bleeding hearts 60s girl group meets tape-loops signature to accommodate femme fatale disco and funk since making a new home for herself in Canada.
The momentum of this album fluctuates throughout, and compared to Half Free, takes a lot to bed in and flow – and I’m still not sold on the two skits -, starting as it does with the aching ponderous slow burner Velvet 4 Sale – perhaps Remy’s most dark fantasy yet, imaging (just imagining mind) a role reversal of power, as she implores a girl friend to buy a gun for protection, impressing that the only way to change men is for women to use violence. An unsettling twist played out to a dragging soul fuzz backing track, the song’s central tenant imagines a world where women take up arms against men, though Remy ‘deplores violence’ of course. It’s followed by an equally sensually nuzzling sax and yearned vocal performance, and take on the Plastic Ono Band, Rage Of Plastic, before picking up with the album’s most bouncy weaponized boogie, M.A.H. – a chic Ronnie Spector fronting Blondie style diatribe broadside aimed at the democrats venerated saviour Obama, who Remy condemns for the charismatic charm seduction that pulled-the-wool over many supporters eyes, hiding the fact that he presided over a covert number of unsavory drone strikes.
Hardly disarming then, In A Poem Unlimited deplores the present hierarchy with a seething checked rage, set to a challenging but melodious soundtrack of yearning no wave, scintillating chic disco, Plastic Ono Band soul, vaporous 80s pop and even jazz. The patriarch comes in for some scathing poetic justice; played out to some of the year’s best tunes and performances. Full review…
(DV)
V.
Vukovar ‘Infinitum’ (Le Recours Forêts Production)
Vukovar/Michael Cashmore ‘Monument’
Among the most prolific of bands, Vukovar have released two of their most stunning albums in just the last quarter of 2018 alone. Keeping to the signature three-syllable grandly entitled Gothic statements of malcontent, melodrama, aggrandizement and melconholy, both Infintum and Monument romantically encircle the void better and with more sagacious quality than previous records. Though only in existence for barely three years, and perhaps already splitting up, Vukovar are improving on every release. Both are included because…well, I can’t make my mind up about which of these recent opuses of despair and hermetic exploration I prefer. Hell….they’re both great. And here’s why:
The fifth LP in the malcontent’s cannon, Infinitum, pulls at the mortal coil of human misery in a murky quagmire. An endless backing track of reverberating delayed snare strikes, a rolling timpani bounding bass drum, esoteric stately sounding waltzes, unwieldy bestial guitar, resigned new romantic synth and escaped melodies muddily, and often amorphously, swim and oscillate around a combination of longing, if worn down and depressed, swooning vocals and Rimbaud-meets-Crowley-meets-Kant-on-the-edge-of-an-abyss poetic despairing narration, on what is a bleak if at times gloriously dark beauty of an album.
Bound-up in their own self-imposed limitations, these anarchistic dreamers go one further than the Hebrew code of law commandments by adhering to 13 of their own; each one a rule or restriction in the recording process that couldn’t be broken, at any cost. So strict were these conditions that even if the band were close to finishing the album, any infringement no matter how minor, would result in the entire sessions being abandoned. Mercifully they made it through to the end; releasing a troubled, bleak lo fi ritualistic romance of an grand opus.
Cut from the same cloth, but collaborating with an undoubted influence, the group’s sixth LP, Monument, traverses the void with Current 93 stalwart and producer/composer Michael Cashmore (appearing under the guises of his Nature And Organization nom de plume). A congruous in what is a melancholy harrowing romantic partnership with the morbidly curious Vukovar, Cashmore leads with a vaporous, industrial and often godly (whichever God/Gods they be) brutalist swathe of sagacious moodiness. Arguably inheritors of Current 93 and, even more so, Coil’s gnostic-theological mysticism and brooding venerable communions, Cashmore seems the obvious foil. Current’s The Innermost Light and Coil’s (and John Balance’s swan song as it were) The Ape Of Naples both permeate this conceptual opus.
From haunting melodrama to harrowing decay, unrequited love to radiant escape, the loss of innocence and youth to sagacious death rattles, Vukovar prove ideal torchbearers of the cerebral Gothic sound and melancholic romanticism. A meeting of cross-generational minds with both partners on this esoteric immersive experience fulfilling their commitments, Monument shows a real progression for Vukovar, and proves a perfect vehicle for Cashmore’s uncompromising but afflatus ideas to flourish in new settings, whilst confirming his reputation and status.
Whatever happens next, this ambitious work will prove a most fruitful and lasting highlight in the Vukovar cannon; one that’s growing rapidly, six albums in with a seventh already recorded; another ‘momentous’ statement that affirms the band’s reputation as one of the UK’s most important new bands. Full reviews…
(DV)
Y.
‘Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs Of World War II’ (Six Degrees)
In light of the recent Tree Of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh, the increasingly uncomfortable language and hostility from the far Left, and the rising tide of European wide anti-semitism, this most tragic songbook of WWII Soviet Union laments from the Jewish community that joined Stalinist Russia’s defence against the Nazis, is a timely reminder of persecution from the graveyard of history. 400,000 men and women signed up to fight Hitler’s forces in one of the most bloody and apocalyptic campaigns in military history. If gratitude was ever warranted, the fate that awaited many of the survivors was anything but; mistrust and resentment instead led to swathes of the Soviet Union’s Jews being imprisoned, tortured and murdered by Stalin’s regime, their sacrifice for the mother nation all but airbrushed out of existence – almost.
Thought lost in the annals of time; suppressed, if not destroyed, the tragic but poetic WWII testaments, made lyrical prose, of just a small cross-section of Russia’s Jews is given the richly evocative and adroit production showcase it deserves by a collective of professors, producers and musicians. Originally unified in an anthology by an ethnomusicologist from the Kiev Cabinet For Jewish Culture, Moisei Beregovsky, alongside colleague Rovim Lerner, hundreds of Yiddish songs written by Red Army soldiers, victims and survivors of the Nazi’s massacres were gathered in the hope of being eventually published and performed. Unfortunately at the very height of the Communist Party’s purges in the decades that followed the end of WWII, both these well-intentioned preservationists were arrested. Subsequently the project was never finished, the work sealed up and hidden away. But as it would later transpire, not destroyed.
Transcribing these laments and firsthand accounts of endurance (many of which included testament evidence to various Nazi atrocities) would take patience, skill but above all respect. The results of this this most tragic desideratum are underscored by the musical director and violinist Sergei Erdenko‘s conducted stirring accompaniment ensemble of classically trained instrumentalists and singers; all of whom were brought together by the producer, and overseer (one amongst a whole group of people that have perserved, shared and made this project possible over the decades) Dan Rosenberg.
Songs of heroism, stoic belief, and even more violently encouraging prompts to machine gun as many Nazis as possible, are brought back to life. But despite the materials obvious harrowing and tragic heart-wrenching nature, the music throughout is a dizzying, waltzing mix of Yiddish, Roma, Klezmer, folk and even jazzy cabaret that’s often upbeat. The band does a sterling job in giving voice to those suppressed individuals and the songs that were believed lost forever, destroyed by a regime that would treat its loyal Jewish community, many of which made the ultimate sacrifice and wholeheartedly believed in the socialist doctrine, little better than the Nazis they so valiantly overcame. Yiddish Glory is not just a reminder however, or even just a revelation, but a beautifully produced and evocative performance. Full review…
(DV)
Thom Yorke ‘Suspiria (Music For The Luca Guadagnino Film) (XL Recordings)
I’ve no idea of the inimitable Thom Yorke‘s methodology and process – whether he composed directly to a cut of Luca Guadagnino‘s remake, or, went away on the premise that…well, it’s Suspiria, and this iconic Gallo trip knows exactly what sort of a soundtrack it thirsts for, so I’ll just make it up in me head -, but whatever it is, his evocative harrowing soundtrack technique works; providing an eerie balance of spine-chilling tension and beautiful dreamy waltzes.
Elevating further the progressive and ritualistic treatment of the original 1977 Suspiria movie soundtrack by Italy’s revered Goblin, Yorke’s mirror-y hypnotised lingered vignettes and bestial guttural scares are treated with earnest seriousness.
If a film could be even more stylised than its original forbearers, this post-millennial disturbed take by Gundagino is an artistically knowing, conceptually aloof indulgence for the senses that receives the most stunning, richly esoteric of soundtracks. Compelling, alluring and plaintive; using many of the arty macabre’s signature tricks, atmospheric mood stirrers and prompts – from heightened Gothic choral aches to Carpenter meets Oldfield piano note and tubular chiming nerve tinklers – Yorke sets out his soundtrack somewhere between the perimeters of Kubrick, magic realism, psychological drama, Dario Argento, Francois de Roubaix and his very own solo work.
The proof is in the candle-lit shadowy mood induced eating of course, and sitting as I was in the daylight of the early afternoon, I couldn’t help but feel unnerved enough to check behind the curtains for murderous witchery dance troupe teachers, who’s intent was to embed a sacrificial knife into my skull. Yes I was spooked.
A frightful but often ethereal magical score, Yorke matches his Radiohead foil, Jonny Greenwood in the field of soundtracks: an artform all in itself. I’ve no doubt it will become a cult album; equal to the sacred Goblin score, if not, dare I suggest, an improvement.
(DV)
Live Review: Words: Dominic Valvona
U.S. Girls Live At Stereo, Glasgow, May 19th 2018
Swapping the tape collage and loops (to a point) for the full-on experience of a live band on tour, Meg Remy seduces the Glasgow audience tonight with the most sophisticatedly sexy, often louche, of pop dynamics.
Remy is able to captivate with bittersweet pouting malady the most traumatic, darkest nature of patriarchal sexual control and seamiest aspects of capitalism whilst slinking to a cerebral mix of glitterball disco, raunchy pop fantasy and on as demonstrated on the finale from her most recent album, In A Poem Unlimited, and tonight’s curtain dropper, ‘Time’, no wave meets contorted jazzy break beats.
Embracing then, the seductive forces of pop music, Remy’s unsavory but vital exposés and therapeutic exercises in acknowledging trauma and abuse are made more palatable by this shift; and in turn reaches an increasingly wider audience. Channeling femme fatales and maverick artists such as Ronnie Spector and Gloria Ann Taylor and more modern alluring pop stars, Remy slips these dark themes under a sonic soundtrack of glorious disco, boogie and avant-garde experimentalism.
Showcasing a looser funky sound, backed by the Toronto hothouse supergroup The Cosmic Range (a collective that at any one time traverses Afrobeat, Krautrock, boogie and free-jazz), the central force of nature at the heart of what was initially a solo project, since expanded with a full cast of writers, producers and collaborators all willing her on, Remy yet again performs in character. Previously taking the brilliant (and one of our albums of 2015) Half Free out on the road with just the backing vocalist Amanda Grist (of Ice Cream fame) to keep her company, dressed like a leotard wearing Olivia Newton John, sporting a chic cropped hairdo, Remy returns with longer sporty locks, wearing a laced backed crop top, flanked by a duo of energetic male and female vocal sparring partners.
Performing more or less the entirety of this year’s album (her second for 4AD), with subtle transformed versions of Half Free tracks ‘Window Shades’ and ‘Sororal Feelings’ (made far more limbering, elastic and, again, sexy), this flexing multi-limbed incarnation of the U.S. Girls powers through, what seems, a short but explosive set.
Far too many band members to name, let alone all chronicle their ever entangling nuances and connections, Remy’s Cosmic Range troupe notably features husband and native Canadian Maximilian Turnbull, aka the space boogie guitar maverick Slim Twig, on doodling and noodling guitar duties, but also, playing his lungs out, some guy whose name I didn’t catch sucking and blowing on the tiniest of saxophones a wailing but also accentuate contortion of the Plastic Ono Band and a strung-out soul imbued Bowie.
Arriving late and already half-cut (blame the Cup Final, Royal Wedding and a surprisingly summery day in Glasgow; celebrated with liberally poured cheap Champagne from Aldi) we missed ShitKid, who I’m sure was a perfectly congruous support act. But apologies aside the vocals tonight could have been clearer, obfuscated at times by the sonic overload of the Cosmic Range, bouncing off the venues walls and the unfortunately placed concrete column that cuts the room in two. We could have also done with an encore; the band pretty quickly exiting without a word, disappearing off stage with no announcement (in fact there wasn’t any dialogue with the audience at all) at barely 9:30pm (possibly the earliest finishing gig I’ve ever been to). But despite this and though the words and subjects may get lost, the cadence, mood and anger translates into the most hypnotizing of agonies and troubling ecstasy.
Still, the Obama berating cooed disco thumper ‘M.A.H’ sounded lusher and hypnotizingly powerful live, and the twisted gospel Catholic gilted ‘Pearly Gates’ (originally featuring the soulful tones of James Bayley) was positively withering with venerated parody and a sweating chemistry between Remy and her vocal partners. The all too soon last song of the evening, ‘Time’, was a wig out of taut jamming and increasingly distressed, almost primal, screaming: A sonic funk attack.
Remy once again held the audience in her gaze and proved beyond doubt that she is one of the most exciting, dynamic and interesting artists of the last five years. Me and my entourage, and by the look of it that night, the entire Glasgow audience was enthralled anyway.
Quarterly Revue Playlist 2018 Part One:
March 15, 2018
The Quarterly Playlist chosen by Dominic Valvona, Matt Oliver and Ayfer Simms
A reasonable assessment of the last three months, the Quarterly Playlist features an eclectic selection of ‘choice’ tracks from the Monolith Cocktail team. From across the musical spectrum, songs from the far east sit alongside glittering pop; traversing meditations share room with hip-hop and the Kosmische.
The inaugural revue playlist of 2018 features Plastic Ono Band sultry protest pop from U.S. Girls, fragmented reeling breakbeats from Cut Chemist and friends, Motorik mooning from Station 17, electrified dance jazz from Hailu Mergia, mystical cosmic cumbia from Sonido Gallo Negro, a cappella paean to Nelson Mandela by the Afrika Mamas, direge-y garage rock from the Moonwalks and 38 other equally interesting and varied tracks from across the globe.
Tracks in full:
‘Incidental Boogie’ U.S. Girls (review)
‘Look At Your Hands’ Tune-Yards (review)
‘Well Who Am I’ Band Of Gold
‘Die Cut (Theme)’ Cut Chemist feat. Deantoni Parks (review)
‘(((leapfrog)))’ MC Paul Barman (review)
‘Addis Nat’ Hailu Mergia
‘Ein Knall’ Station 17 feat. Harald Grosskopf and Eberhard Kranemann (review)
‘The Timeless Now’ Nonpareils
‘1001 Nights’ Ouzo Bazooka (review)
‘Fresh Product’ Awate
‘Anything Goes’ Andy Cooper feat. Abdominal (review)
‘Efrati’ Fadaei
‘Black Sambo’ Skyzoo (review)
‘Kingz & Bosses’ Slim Thug feat. Big K.R.I.T. (review)
‘That Jazz’ Coops (review)
‘Cumbia Ishtar’ Sonido Gallo Negro
‘A Casa De Anita’ Camarao
‘All That We Are’ Brickwork Lizards (review)
‘Hlala Nami’ Hot Soul Singers
‘Le Château’ Fishbach (review)
‘Into Space’ Sailing Stones
‘Illogical Lullaby’ Hatis Noit (review)
‘Also’ Astrid Sonne (review)
‘Reptile’ Soho Rezanejad (review)
‘Remain Calm’ Tony Njoku
‘Air Rage’ Lukas Creswell-Rost (review)
‘Embers’ Flights Of Helios (review)
‘And The Glamour Fell On Her’ Brona McVittie feat. Myles Cochran and Richard Curran (review)
‘Same Old, Same Old’ The Cold Spells (review)
‘Winter Bound’ Hampshire & Foat (review)
‘Vidsel-Sthlm, Enkel’ Bättre Lyss (review)
‘Akokas’ Tal National
‘The Border Crossing’ Dirtmusic (review)
‘I’ll Be Ready When The Great Day Comes’ John Johanna
‘Diego Says Hello’ Modulus III (review)
‘Communion’ Park Jiha (review)
‘De Roda’ Rodrigo Tavares (review)
‘You Get Brighter’ John Howard (review)
‘Tata Madiba’ Afrika Mamas (review)
‘In Between Stars’ Eleanor Friedberger
‘No Place Like Home’ Life Pass Filter’ (review)
‘I Don’t Wanna Dance (with My Baby)’ Insecure Man
‘Israel Is Real’ Moonwalks (review)
‘Men Of The Women’ Peter Kernel (review)
‘We Have Always Lived In The Palace’ Sunflowers (review)
Our Daily Bread 265: U.S. Girls ‘In A Poem Unlimited’
January 23, 2018
ALBUM REVIEW
WORDS: DOMINIC VALVONA
U.S. Girls ‘In A Poem Unlimited’
4AD, 16th February 2018
Featuring most of the Toronto cast of collaborators that propelled the first U.S. Girls release for 4AD records, Half Free, forward, but stretched and lushly flexed into space boogie and other equally eclectic grooves by the city’s multi-limbed collective The Cosmic Range, Meg Remy’s latest cerebral pop revision tones down some of the vibrancy for acerbic, sax-wailing pouted-lips resignation and introversion.
Moving across the border from the USA with her husband and musical collaborator Maximilian Turnbull, aka guitar-slinging maverick Slim Twig, long before Trump reached The White House, Remy has broadened her postmodernist transmogrification of bleeding hearts 60s girl group meets tape-loops signature to accommodate femme fatale disco and funk since making a new home for herself in Canada.
With the emphasis on the dark machismo and chauvinist undercurrents and pains of womanhood that lie beneath the surface of the records created by such groups as The Ronettes and disco artists such as Gloria Ann Taylor – her relatively obscure but sublime plaintive Love Is A Hurting Thing transformed into her own seductive lamentable Window Shades by Remy on her last album -, Remy makes acidic, sometimes bitter ironical commentary on contemporary issues; from personable anecdotal evidence to cross-societal issues: an end to the war machine; an end to the patriarch; an end to the nascent forces of disunity.
Thematically In A Poem Unlimited’s dark meditations and character studies reflect, as Remy puts it, ‘the changed atmospheres that directly precede and follow acts of violence and the desperate strategies used to mitigate its infliction’. Remy however also, and as a consequence, turns on political and spiritual leaders and the lies that they, as much as all of us, tell each other to survive. Though Trump can’t help but draw a miasma over proceedings, its surprisingly the charismatic, lauded over by the left, Obama who meets the ire of a disappointed, expectant but crushed, Remy on the album’s most bouncy weaponized boogie, M.A.H. Suddenly picking up after a somewhat labored start, the third track on this eleven track album, Mad As Hell, reevaluates those two-terms in office with a chic Ronnie Spector fronting Blondie style diatribe. Obviously an original supporter, now pulling apart the enigmatic myth, she lands some solid blows on a number of policies and actions – including an increase in drone strikes – that undermine Obama’s celebrated status (almost considered saintly). A real swell disco preening pop hit with substance, it’s one of the album’s most effective highlights and one of 2018’s best tracks.
Continuing that musical sensibility, the album’s other most vibrant pop standout, the seductively Catholic laced, anecdotal Pearly Gates, reimagines a controversial prime 80s Madonna in a venerated heavenly pout against the dubious and dangerous sexual practice of “pulling out” at the moment of release – another story as told to Remy by a friend, but an all too twisted practice of unprotected sex, the male protagonist boasts: “I’m really good at pulling out.” Twisting religious icons (St. Peter) and the liturgy into a tale of sexual pressure, Remy is joined by fellow Toronto artist James Bayley, who adds a real nice swooning soulful gospel harmony to the metaphorical “pearly gates” hip-hop, disco and pop crossover.
In the pop mood still, Incidental Boogie is a bruising (“to be brutalized means you don’t have to think”) tumult set to a contorting tropical limbering Chewing Gum Annie meets The Cosmic Range glitterball swank, whilst the, often egalitarian but fanciful sentiments utopia, arpeggiator electro glide in neon Poem sounds like a vaporous Moroder era Sparks fronted by Kylie Minogue channeling Olivia Newton John.
The influence of the Toronto Cosmic Range collective – an interstellar shindig facilitated by Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn, which features both Meg and Turnbull and a host of other musicians from the area, with a sound that stretches from Ash Ra to Sun Ra – can be heard on the album’s more quack-boogie and contorting jazz pumped workouts. The final thrashed out jamming group effort Time grows and grows from funk chop bordering on Broken English style vivid broody 80s disco-pop to no wave.
The momentum of this album fluctuates throughout, and compared to Half Free, takes a lot to bed in and flow – and I’m still not sold on the two skits -, starting as it does with the aching ponderous slow burner Velvet 4 Sale – perhaps Remy’s most dark fantasy yet, imaging (just imagining mind) a role reversal of power, as she implores a girl friend to buy a gun for protection, impressing that the only way to change men is for women to use violence. An unsettling twist played out to a dragging soul fuzz backing track, the song’s central tenant imagines a world where women take up arms against men, though Remy ‘deplores violence’ of course. It’s followed by an equally sensually nuzzling sax and yearned vocal performance, and take on the Plastic Ono Band, Rage Of Plastic, before picking up with the already mentioned M.A.H.
Still an impressive album by an obvious great talent who dares to be provocative where it counts, adding danger and darkness to the mostly bland in comparison pop scene, Remy’s U.S. Girls vehicle – a collaborative effort, though Remy leads and carries it as a solo project – continues to revise past musical influences to produce an objectionable expression of feminist anger and grief. Hardly disarming, In A Poem Unlimited deplores the present hierarchy with a seething checked rage, set to a challenging but melodious soundtrack of yearning no wave, scintillating chic disco, Plastic Ono Band soul, vaporous 80s pop and even jazz. The patriarch comes in for some scathing poetic justice; played out to some great tunes.
Monolith Cocktail Blog 