61.
For Xiu Xiu’s latest release, Jamie Stewart’s voice is bolstered by fifteen guest singers on a series of duets. Featuring indie-folk star Sharon Van Etten, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, punk legend Alice Bag and dark waver Drab Majesty, OH NO was instigated as a way to reflect on the redemptive power of human connection. Composed following “several incidents involving being thoroughly fucked over by a number of friends,” the album’s uplifting impetus is at odds with the music itself. Take ‘One Hundred Years’ with Chelsea Wolfe, where the pair sing about longing to escape from abusive parents, while the collaboration with composer Owen Pallett is punctuated by apocalyptic, unplaceable electronic fallout and contains the lyrics: “I dream of someone else entirely/ You said to me when I think of this family and who is in it/ How is that supposed to make me feel about myself?”Xiu XiuOH NOPolyvinyl
60.
Logue takes in rippling ambient/drone lushness from a well-travelled Kenyan, Joseph Kamaru, who is now resident in Berlin. Recorded between 2017 and 2019, it’s built equally of nu-new age synth melodies (with outbreaks of what seems to be live instrumentation) and field recordings which, inscrutable in their origins, transport KMRU’s music to somewhere more sinister than blissful.
KMRULogueInjazero
59.
Spending time with Rare Pleasure, Ringgo Ancheta’s first full-length release in five years, is akin to being carried aloft on candyfloss clouds. The world turns woozy. It isn’t always clear where you are going. You’ve never felt better. It’s a happy-go-lucky and free-floating album. But the project is aware of its roots and of the debts it owes. It carries the ecstatic ache of religious music – something with which Ancheta will have been intimately familiar, going back to the gospel songs he heard in church every Sunday through his childhood.MndsgnRare PleasureStones Throw
58.
There’s an idea in Japanese called ‘onkochishin’, roughly meaning to create new ideas from studying the past. It’s this that drives producer Jap Kasai, aka Daisuke Iijima, on his new album OWN ℃. Cutting up vocals sourced from traditional Ondo folk music, and combining them with juke and footwork instrumentals, it makes for an intriguing push and pull between different tempos and rhythms. It’s more than just two extremes clashed together, however. The vocal samples Iijima employs, which reverberate with deep soulfulness, are elevated, not dampened, by the skittering beats.Jap KasaiOWN ℃CHINABOT
57.
Fun Is Not A Straight Line certainly isn’t the first time Vladislav Delay has experimented with footwork having first launched the Ripatti project (named so after his real surname) in 2013 with a series of releases that certainly shared musical headspace with the Chicago-originated genre. Eight years on, he develops those ideas into a full album for Planet Mu, which is just as inspired by his lifelong love of hip hop and classic records such as Nas’ Illmatic as it is a desire to break with the simplicities of 4/4 house and techno. The result is a dizzying trip through chopped rap vocals, disembodied R&B warbling, head-scratching rhythms and all-out bass pressure.RipattiFun Is Not A Straight LinePlanet Mu
56.
Remember the days when Sunburned Hand Of The Man put out a new CDR every week and if you heard a noise coming from a shack in a forest and then crept in to see what was going on, you’d likely find this wacky free-rock collective in there, improvising some wild psych jamz into the early hours of the morn? I think that era was called the 2000s. Anyway, the freaky so-and-sos are back and in a slightly surprising way they’re sounding better than ever. The cuts here even seem to have a proper studio finish as opposed to having been recorded in, let’s say, a tiny loft space owned by a Scandinavian promoter wearing colourful-if-grubby yoga pants and smelling musty at best. I mean, the spacy ‘Flex’ sparkles almost as brightly as Trans Am. Vocalist Shannon Ketch brings a welcome earthy feel to a couple of numbers, making for a compelling Kosmische Beefheart vibe.Sunburned Hand Of The ManPick A Day To DieThree Lobed
55.
Five tracks into this new masterpiece by Tel Aviv-based singer/rapper/musician/producer Noga Erez, you will have stomped your living room to dust with more frenzy than you’ve felt since Missy dropped Under Construction. It’s that addictive, that essential, that demanding of immediate and endless rewind, and it’s definitive and emblematic of how rap – so long seen as a fad that pop could utilise – has now swallowed pop whole.Noga ErezKIDSCity Slang
54.
There’s a sketch-like quality to a softer focus. It could almost be a diary. Moments recall Henry Collins and Robin Foster’s sound practice dubbed ‘rummaging’, in which miscellaneous objects in a container or drawer are shuffled and manually intermixed, allowing the sounds of their scrapes and collisions “to improvise with others of their own accord.” Talking to composer Simon Fisher Turner a while back, he told me of his disdain for the term ‘field recording’, preferring instead ‘life recording’. The term feels apt here, too. On the second track, ‘Discrete (The Market)’, we accompany Rousay on a trip to her local farmer’s market. Elsewhere, we hear the putter of idling car engines, the crack and pop of distant fireworks, ice tinkling against the side of a glass.Claire Rousaya softer focusAmerican Dreams
53.
…And Again Into The Light is a return to form and then some. It also sounds fucking enormous – after the absolutely beautiful title track kicks things off with Austin Lunn’s signature bluegrass bathed in celestial ambience, ‘Dead Loons’ is surprisingly doomy, with big, dense chords left to ring out on booming eight string guitars. When it explodes in a flurry of metallic riffing and Lunn’s characteristically intense drumming, it’s backed by stirring, powerful strings, creating a really rich, emotive wall of sound. In fact, And Again is perhaps the most elaborately orchestrated Panopticon album yet.Panopticon…And Again Into The LightBindrune
52.
On Second Line, Dawn Richard continues to tap into the dance music that has dominated much of her work since 2015’s Blackheart. Fusing house, techno, electro and all manner of other club sounds with the R&B on which she first emerged as a member of US group Danity Kane and then as part of the Diddy Dirty Money trio, Richard intersperses some of her most assured, soulful work yet with clips of herself interviewing her mother, lending the album a deeply autobiographical slant. Above all, Second Line’s irresistible grooves and hooks see Richard continue to chart a path all her own within the modern R&B landscape.Dawn RichardSecond Line: An Electro RevivalMerge
51.
When Valentina Magaletti’s oblong tank drum cycles emerge from the dark to form a tuneful skeleton for ‘Idioma’, the opening cut of Tomaga’s final release, it’s a sound at once known and unknowable, evolved from 2016’s The Shape Of The Dance, yet embedded with a deeper meaning in light of Tom Relleen’s passing. On Intimate Immensity, the breathless reverberations of his Buchla synthesiser are just that bit more incisive than before as they saturate the sound space and grow emotional branches around echoing polyrhythms. Bass textures bubble up and wash over lurking, shy noises with newly discovered weight. An electronic pulse whistles for the first and last time.TomagaIntimate ImmensityHands In The Dark
50.
Valentino Mora takes his ambient techno sound to its deepest depths on his debut album. Ranging from abyssal, pulsating drones (‘Hadal Zone’) to stunningly hypnotic, arpeggiated synth cuts (‘Morphosa’, ‘Membrane’), Underwater sees the French producer find a perfect home on Donato Dozzy and Neel’s Spazio Disponibile label as he crafts a psychedelic, deep sea world to get fully lost in.Valentino MoraUnderwaterSpazio Disponibile
49.
After a year of lockdown records, it’s time to welcome into our lives the new genre of ‘post-pandemic’ album. One such example is Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee. Celebratory and suffused in optimism, it chimes with the sense of a long dark night finally drawing to a close. This isn’t by coincidence. Michelle Zauner – the Korean-American native of Eugene, Oregon, who has used Japanese Breakfast as a stage name since 2016’s Psychopomp – could write the book about coming out of the shadows and facing towards the dawn. Following an extended and disorientating lockdown of the soul, she’s ready for change. Jubilee finds her figuratively cracking open the shutters and engaging once again with the outside world.Japanese BreakfastJubileeDead Oceans
48.
This might be blasphemy, but when I hear an MBV or Dinosaur Jr. track, I don’t think, “This has got to be the loudest live band in the world.” I’m not sure they need to be. It’s arguably an ancillary thing. The opposite is true of Part Chimp, easily one of the world’s heaviest guitar squads. Pop on Drool and it’s altogether likely that you’ll immediately reckon something along the lines of, “I bet the sheer, unholy thunder of these knuckleheads playing in a cramped bar could explode an unlucky dove just like a 2001 Randy Johnson fastball in a spring training game against the Giants.” Well, maybe you wouldn’t think that, exactly, but the point is it comes through on record. It is immediately evident. You don’t even need to imagine it, to suss out how their gigs might go. You just know it to be true. Would it even work otherwise?Part Chimp‘Drool’Wrong Speed
47.
Think of all your favourite songs by Scritti Politti, Grace Jones, Mylène Farmer, Adele Bertei, Wham. Now imagine that none of the people who wrote those songs really wrote those songs. Imagine they all ripped them off – the melodies, the rhythms, the sound, the feel, the lot. Imagine it was all stolen from some other artist, some obscure studio-bound hermit without the looks and the money and the record label pull. Imagine some baroque conspiracy to have the music of that original artist suppressed. Every copy of their work deleted and pulped. Just one third gen copy remaining, buried in a ditch for decades, then finally dug up, a little warped, a little grimy. Do you ever hear a record and feel like it’s been made just for you?AmorAMOR/LEMURNight School
45.
Composed in the apartment where Pauline Anna Strom lived for years, Angel Tears In Sunlight narrates a non-visual encounter with an alternate, sci-fi inspired reality. Opening track ‘Tropical Convergence’ is like an auditory experience of an Ursula K. Le Guin novel. Nature and magic are entangled – shimmering, glockenspiel beats are raindrops landing on the forest canopy. The jungle theme returns with ‘Tropical Rainforest’, which is punctuated with watery sounds, calling to mind Strom’s recollection of her early sound experiments. During the 1980s – alone while her husband was at work – for hours, she would manipulate a bowl of water with one hand and hold a microphone in the other, attempting to weave the splashes into a melody. It’s from these small, clandestine details that dense, psychedelic worlds emerge.Pauline Anna StromAngel Tears In SunlightRVNG Intl.
44.
Self-released, self-produced and home-recorded, Nebula Rasa was apparently worked on almost non-stop for six months before Matt Loveridge’s laptop was stolen from his Bristol flat, then somehow retrieved a few days later. Thoughts: being able to fit this much sound inside a clunky tea tray blows yer mind, don’t it? Being able to back it up on cloud storage is even wilder! And we nearly missed out on a pretty phenom suite of music here. Every given song is formed of multiple segments, with most of those segments suggestive of a few stylistically different things, so rather than trying to liveblog the 44 minutes it might be better to note (some of) what one might hear on Nebula Rasa. Slimelight industrial pop, synthesised folk-metal like Goblin doing Korpiklaani.MxLxNebula RasaKindarad!
43.
Emotions are not something serpentwithfeet’s Josiah Wise does by halves. The artist who described his grief in such rich and sometimes agonising detail is just as present when he describes his happiness. The details on DEACON are rooted in the mundane rather than escapism: chance meetings, watching Christmas films in July, corny clothes and jokes, the man who calls everyone’s mother ‘Mama’. This new focus is reflected throughout the tenor of the album. Wise’s vocals – reaching sky-high falsettos and weaving in the gospel traditions he was raised with – are a calling card for his work. The emphasis for DEACON, however, is more on dexterity than drama. The effect is often collage-like, with calls and responses, wordless flourishes (at their most playful as a trumpet on ‘Same Size Shoe’) or as a show of mutual strength as, like when they are layered on the outro of ‘Fellowship’.SerpentwithfeetDEACONSecretly Canadian
42.
WINK is Chai’s first record working with external producers, and tellingly pushes the group to a wider sonic scope than ever. It pulses with an excellent hip-hop and R&B polish, blending waves of sheen with their proclivity for brash pop and the cascading dance-y punk energy of a group like Le Tigre. Take ‘It’s Vitamin C’, which shimmies with the echoes of the dancefloor while also playing with breezy jazz hip-hop inflections.ChaiWINKSub Pop
41.
This eerie small-album suite of pieces by Francesca Ter-Berg has a sense of levitating above and around the material world. These pieces are perhaps best triangulated by other recent (excellent) strings-based records: by the story-telling of Silvia Tarozzi in the links to song, the places that are present in cellist Leila Bordreuil’s work, and the rich dynamics Lori Goldston pulls from her solo playing. The cover perhaps makes it look a bit ambient (I spit), but what’s on here never approaches that genre’s wallpaper-ish tendencies, drawing tunings and songs from Ter-Berg’s studies of Klezmer music, including traditional Yiddish song ‘Oi Ihr Narishe Tsionistn’ and short Sinti song ‘Me Sunowa’.
