It is a delicious, terrifying, endless wave crashing over us. On the one hand there’s all this new music coming out all the time, on the other hand THERE’S ALL THIS NEW MUSIC COMING OUT ALL THE TIME. As Jeremy Allen lamented this week, the world is full of songs you will never hear as long as you live. Even if you reassure yourself that 90% of it is London Grammar remixes or Flemish power ballads, that’s still a lot of wonderful stuff. (And then you start thinking, Maybe I’d like to hear a Flemish power ballad.)
So, here is our list of albums we loved this month – some of them you may have missed, some of them we missed – plus some tracks that we think might make you happy.
Anna Wood
Temple ov BBV – Temple ov BBV
(Rocket)
Gnod’s Just Say No has already cast one of the longest musical shadows over 2017. A record much eulogised both here on tQ and elsewhere, and rightly so, somehow, it’s the most powerful of the group’s metamorphoses yet, by virtue of its compactness, the pinpoint targeting of its politicised assault.
Temple ov BBV, a collaboration between the group and Dutch psych-experimentalists Radar Men From The Moon, feels like a more twisted, parallel universe version of the same beast, the same sonic formula of terrifying, relentless pounding applied to a brilliantly bizarre tribute to Bart Huges, the scientist and psychedelic pioneer who drilled into his own skull in order to achieve enhanced mental power and a permanent high. Sonically, the record feels not dissimilar as an experience – a dentist’s drill of nausea, noise and utter brilliance, straight to the brain.
Patrick Clarke
Circle – Terminal
(Southern Lord)
It’s not that the preternaturally busy Finns, Circle haven’t released top shelf albums before. They’re responsible for several, with Pori and Hollywood being just two absolute must buys for fans of hypnotic, pulverising pysch rock and Kraut metal. But with a discography that includes somewhere in the region of 50 albums (including live recordings and limited edition cassettes) released in less than 25 years as Circle (and that’s not including LPs by side projects such as Circle (ex-Falcon), Falcon (ex-Circle) and Pharaoh Overlord) the feeling often remains that while they are always outstanding live, they sometimes fail to adequately communicate just how good their sound is on record. And the sound is an unlikely but bombastic, grin-inducing, 100% goofy mix of Judas Priest’s proto extreme metal/proto-NWOBHM Sin By Sin, the space rock Ur-artifact (Hawkwind’s Space Ritual and most flavours of Krautrock, especially Can, Amon Duul II, Neu! and Guru Guru. And importantly, Terminal feels like a perfect synthesis of all of these ingredients, finding the sweet spot that lies directly at the centre. The quality remains high all the way through but the title track is a particularly berserk highlight and will thrill your inner, Walkman-sporting, riffs loving, teenage homunculus.
John Doran
Nídia – Nídia é Má, Nídia é Fudida(Príncipe)
A shining light of the Lisbon-based Príncipe label since her first release in 2015, Nídia Minaj, now simply known as Nídia, returns to the label for her second solo release to date, and her debut album. Translating to English as ‘Nídia is bad, Nídia is fucked up’, the album offers a no-holds-barred distillation of the riotous energy that has punctuated all of her music and DJ sets over the last couple of years. Lead track ‘Sinistro’ is a smoky sub-100BPM collision of percussion, as adept at getting a dancefloor moving as any speedier Príncipe cut.
Many of the album’s track stand at less than three minutes in length, offering brief, but sharp shots of energy, the intensity rarely letting up. Opener ‘Mulher Profissional’ sounds like baile funk as reimagined by the Príncipe crew, acting as a fitting introduction to the dizzying heights that are to come. Those already primed on the label’s sound will find lots to enjoy in this record, while those not quite so in tune with Lisbon’s most vital current club sound will soon be brought up to speed as tracks like ‘Biotheke’ and ‘Underground’ roll through with the kind of drums so synonymous with Príncipe’s roster. The latter’s coda finds the producer bringing the label’s sound together with early ‘00s R&B, much in the same way as a number of grime experimenter did in the last decade to birth the r’n’g movement. I doubt there will be many more infectious club records than this released this year.
Christian Eede
MXLX – Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The Cracks
It’s pretty hard to keep up with the output of Matt Loveridge, one of those rare artists who actually deserves the sobriquet ‘prolificic’. So many are his guises, collaborations and releases I’ve often found myself wondering what wonders might emerge were he to focus on just one one sonic identity. Well, this new album as MXLX might be the answer. Under its absolutely magnificent title Kicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The Cracks are eight tracks of psychic melodrama and unnerving noise, pompous electronic monsters and haunting melodic chants. ‘Your Bastard Mouth Is Open And Will Not Stop Howling’ sounds like Drums Not Dead-era Liars falling into a lava crevice, ‘I Just Want To Ride My Bike Into The Sky And Disappear’ sci-fi arpeggios clattering around the echoing, sooty wreckage of a space cruiser before the evolving noise of ‘The World Will Not Suck You Off’ (give the man a pound for the caustic track titles alone). ‘U Prick’ and ‘Pertida Di Sangue’ are glorious folk doom. Loveridge is one of the finest artists working in the criminally-undernourished but verdant British leftfield at the moment and this might well be his best work to date. Buy above, please.
Luke Turner
Umfang- Symbolic Use Of Light
(Technicolour)
How much can you do with not very much? As an artist and designer, Emma Olson made digital work in Preview instead of Photoshop, and now her first album as Umfang is made almost entirely on a Roland Boss DR-202. Not that it is somehow purer or always more disciplined to limit yourself in perhaps arbitrary ways – but it does give you a kind of freedom and it does encourage you to dig in hard. That’s what she’s done here, with doof-doof-doof-doof four-four beats as rigid as the 14 lines in a sonnet, and a sense of joy and playfulness that is beautiful melded with the stern bristles and snares, the tender ebbs and squelches. ‘Where Is She’ is propulsive, flawless techno; ‘Sweep’ is spooky, melancholy, an undecipherable message from someone lost in the deep; the title track is a growling, stuttering journey to nowhere. As Einstein (perhaps apocryphally) said, "Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler." This album is what he would have done with a DR-202. Read our interview here
Anna Wood
(Matador)
"Tinged with Suicide, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, sounds that hark back to their original meeting in Atlanta and which pay homage to their official formation in London, The Underside of Power is both the latest chapter in a long-running and universal story that seems to be nearing climax, and solid, sonic proof that Algiers are capable of not just acting with their hearts, but ripping them out and offering them up on record." – Karl Smith
Vince Staples – Big Fish Theory
(Def Jam)
"Hip hop is punk, it’s poetry, but also it’s party music – Big Fish Theory is an outstanding album that potently shows all of these exquisite possibilities. What’s more is, Staples makes it seem like the easiest thing in the world." – Tara Joshi
Broken English Club – The English Beach
(L.I.E.S.)
"Oliver Ho orchestrates a dubwise sense of dynamic space – each sparse part honed to savage efficiency – affording an elemental effect that perfectly matches the source matter: the alien, barren Dungeness." – Harry Sword
Endon – Through The Mirror
(Hydra Head)
"This is a monumental work that should be heard by anyone interested in the forging of new paths in extreme music, and if you want to invoke its closest comparison point, it pisses over the latest Full Of Hell album." – Noel Gardener
Laurel Halo – Dust
(Hyperdub)
"Her almost monomaniacal focus on the intricacies of sound since her earliest releases has clearly culminated with this record, one that is in constant flux between joyful abandon and grim introspection, pop-tinged electronica and avant-garde expressionism. It’s an album that abounds with details but feels perfectly homogenous, and one can only wonder where Laurel Halo goes from here. It could be very interesting indeed." – Joseph Burnett
Tracks Of The Month
kIRk – ‘Za ostatni grosz’
Zimpel/Ziołek – ‘Wrens’
Matthew and Me – ‘Every Day’ (Dean Honer Remix)
Greenspan and Taraval – ‘Follow The Moonlight’
Laksa – ‘Hallyah’
Nídia – ‘Sinistro’
The Charlatans – ‘Different Days’ (Chris & Cosey Remix)
Re-TROS – ‘At Mosp Here’
Housewives – ‘Excerpt 6’
Vessels ft. The Flaming Lips – ‘Deflect The Light’
