LaibachAlso Sprach ZarathustraMute
Laibach seize every opportunity on Also Sprach Zarathustra to bring out the grandiose psychodrama and tension inherent in a founding tract of modern philosophy, rendering what could have been merely bombastic and brutal as spectacular and even sublime.
StormzyGang Signs & Prayer#Merky
Like Kano’s most recent record, Stormzy’s debut is a Trojan horse: you come for the chanted choruses and then, in the most life-affirming sense, you end up in church. All great albums are marked by their texture, their variety; and here Stormzy roams between rave MC and repentant sinner, between (to paraphrase Dave) gentleman and gangster.
LaraajiBring On The SunAll Saints
Now comes a brace of albums, Bring On The Sun and Sun Gong which are testimony to his unabated spirit, each track sounding like an excerpt from a music without beginning or end.
SoteSacred Horror In DesignOpal Tapes
Ata Ebtekar uses his digital chops to reflect and open a dialogue with the intricate playing from Arash Bolouri and Behrouz Pashaei, Persian polyrhythms and contemporary sonics. On ‘Plebeian’, for instance, the plucked and struck strings sit perfectly intertwined with high-tension digital pulses and fuzz. Indeed the strength of this intriguing album is the pervasive sense of mystery as to where the ancient ends and the modern begins.
Sleaford ModsEnglish TapasRough Trade
This is exactly what makes the duo the most vital act in British music right now: their music will continue to reflect the state of the nation for as long as it keeps defeating and demeaning itself. Why should they evolve when the Big Society remains as static and small-minded as ever? So long as nothing keeps on changing, Sleaford Mods will be there to document it.
Hey ColossusThe GuillotineRocket Recordings
I could go on about how fantastic this album sounds, about the glorious, soaring terror of ‘Experts Toll’, or the rich, mournful beauty of ‘Potions’, but what feels more important is what it means. The Guillotine, as Gnod have done on Just Say No…, sees Hey Colossus harnessing their chaos, honing it into the very essence of these terrifying times.
UUUUUUUUEditions Mego
Before a note crawls out of the speakers, it’s a mouth-watering prospect, a lineup that will have many fans of underground just-about-rock wondering why this combo hadn’t been thought of before. It’s actually rather ridiculous: two members of legendary post-punk giants Wire – founder and bassist Edvard Graham Lewis and ‘new’ guitarist Matt Simms – are joined by none other than former Coil and Spiritualized acolyte turned solo mystic music artist Thighpaulsandra and Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti from London art pop outfit Vanishing Twin. With such disparate backgrounds, the quartet could have produced a record that couldn’t tell its arse from its elbow. Instead, UUUU is a reminder of all of ‘rock’ music’s massive potential.
YossariansFabric Of TimeSelf-Released
“It’s intense, it’s hernia inducing, and that’s good. It would be semi-satisfying to see someone rushing off with an actual hernia. I just really want to make music that throbs, that people really grind their teeth to.”
Siavash AminiTARHallow Ground
With tinges of Pharmakon and Earth, Amini appears to take his cues this time from noise and drone rather than purely from the ambient world — manifest perhaps most acutely in the presence of static across the record: a hissing to which the ear is drawn, not by volume but by an omnipresence impossible to ignore. As a device it is simultaneously indicative of both something and nothing — residual cosmic radiation, impossible to decode, representative at once of the insatiable perpetual motion of contemporary life, its lasting impact on our environment, and the futility of all that sound and fury on a universal scale.
MxLxKicking Away At The Decrepit Walls Til The Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru The CracksKindarad!
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).
Lee GambleMnestic PressureHyperdub
Whether or not Gamble intended for Mnestic Pressure to be an exercise in confronting modern UK electronica’s fractured past and present, it certainly resonates as such – though it’s clearly a deeply personal work, with moments of stark introspection, so there could be more intimate layers at play. But as a work that gathers up so much of what’s going on in modern dance and electronic music in 2017 and finds ways to make them click together, Mnestic Pressure feels like a game-changer, or at the very least a defining moment. Time will tell.
SZACtrlTop Dawg
Sonically and tonally, in some ways New Jersey artist SZA’s debut album picks up where Frank Ocean’s Blonde left off: it might not be subverting the game in quite the same way, but Ctrl has got those dreamy, indie-style guitar melodies, and that same sense of vulnerability in both delivery style and lyrical content. Indeed, while Ocean’s open queerness became the talking point surrounding that album, SZA’s open insight into modern-day femininity ought to be the conversation surrounding this. Ctrl offers up a candid, confident airing of insecurities; be that via the prism of relationships – flings, affairs as the other woman, and longer-term romances – or the prism of her own self-esteem.
Ryuichi SakamotoasyncCommons
async weaves together intangible synthetic panes with the more earthly, percussive tones of the piano on tracks like ‘zure’, and on ‘walker’, natural noises – the call of cicadas and what might be either the sound of footsteps on gravel or heavily frosted grass – are juxtaposed in call and response with gentle swells and vibrations. It is these contradictions, appearing track after track, and which after all are only contradictions on paper, that make clearest the album’s concern with duality.
UnsaneSterilizeSouthern Lord
Despite the fact that listening to one of their albums in full feels like a 40-minute bludgeoning, there’s something oddly heart-warming at play here. Unsane are not chameleons or shapeshifters but rather stoic veterans unashamed to continue honing a sound many would argue they perfected decades ago. The cacophony that once seemed so petrifying is now the personalised ringtone you might set for an old friend, and that’s absolutely fine. In these uncertain times of potential nuclear annihilation it’s deeply comforting to know that the band most capable of soundtracking it are still with us and ready to rage at the push of that big red button.
J HusCommon SenseBlack Butter
“Did you see what I done? / Came in a black Benz, left in a white one.” I could write essays on that couplet. In fact, I almost did. About the freewheeling bravado tinged with insecurity. The interplay of racialised inferiority and accidental lurch into purity. The panicked realisation of success, dancing on that ambivalent, ubiquitous metonym for success; the Mercedes Benz.
ColleenA Flame, My Love, A FrequencyThrill Jockey
A flame my love, a frequency is a modest, introspective album. It focuses on the small, the minute, turning inwards in the face of questions too large to grasp. Contained in her live recordings and with minimal tools, A flame my love, a frequency is fleeting. Within a cultural climate of over-production and hyper-attention to gear, it evidences a vulnerability often absent in music today, surprising in more ways than one.
Rainforest Spiritual EnslavementAmbient Black MagicHospital Productions
Dominick Fernow delivers the most impressive outing yet from his Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement alias, summoning the dubby ambience of prime Chain Reaction and enlisting Silent Servant for co-production duties on the album’s two opening tracks. Skip to ‘Praying Mantis Black Arts’ for your fix of rib-rattling sub bass.
Electric WizardWizard Bloody WizardSpinefarm
Long live the new Wizard, much like the old one in so many ways but with a renewed sense of purpose. Wizard Bloody Wizard still rocks hard enough to justify the occasional rebellious upward glance from the existential trudge down the long spiral into nothingness that they evoke so bleakly, and so well.
Total LeatheretteFor The Climax Of The NightMïlk
The album is built on rising anxiety, driving belligerently onwards towards the darkest dancefloor you never dreamed of, climaxing with throbbing machine music. Reverberating, irregular beats from the drum machine are layered with creeping vocals that you can’t quite catch but paranoiacally understand. This is dark disco, mutated EBM, queer industrial music that deserves its face wrapped in latex.
Davy KehoeShort Passing GameWah Wah Wino
Davy Kehoe steps up for his debut on Wah Wah Wino and what follows is a storming exploration of new wave, techno and downtempo jams packed into six tracks, Kehoe’s drum machine put to heavy, exceptional use throughout. It’s hard to pick a highlight, from the opening title track’s nine-minute post-punk freak-out to ‘Going Machine”s gorgeous, organ-led balladry and ‘Storm Desmond”s sprawling, mournful collision of drums, clarinet, guitar, mbira, harmonica and more. Seek out this record immediately.
