Geordie GreepThe New SoundRough Trade
One of the chief elements of black midi’s recorded material that Geordie Greep shuffles away from with his debut solo effort is the feeling of being unceremoniously plunged to the depths of hell (in the best possible way) in their unrelenting instrumentation. Here, more often than not, these 11 tracks actually invite you to dance and get swept-up in the romanticism of its lighter moments. Try to resist the ravishing guitar riff of ‘As If Waltz’ or the propulsive disco-tinge to the LP’s lead (and solitary) single ‘Holy, Holy’. In tone and temperament, The New Sound predominantly exists in a plush hotel bar adorned with gold sprayed features, waiters wearing white gloves, a sleepy pianist propped up in the corner accompanied by Greep delivering seedy songs about lounge lizards (“I want you to dress like a sophisticated tart with no make-up on, would that be alright”), acerbic slights at an impenetrable (and, unfortunately, all too recognisable) pseudo-intellectual poet who pens sonnets in the park, and a brash reminder to “check your balls for lumps”.
ThouUmbilicalSacred Bones
Umbilical is as aggressive as Thou have sounded. Gone are the melodious, grandiose ten-minute-plus songs that put them on the doom metal map with 2014’s Heathen. It’s like being trapped in a killing cage with the band. The songs are shorter, faster, sharper, full of straightforward, hard-charging riffs that still retain the layers of texture the band have developed with engineer James Whitten over the years. The (anti) philosophy of Umbilical is clear throughout its running time. Crush the chuckleheads by giving them the ferocity they want. Fight back through self-abuse. It’s an avowedly counter-intuitive solution, perfectly in line with Thou’s ironic, sometimes hard-to-fathom, attitude towards themselves.
Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald CleaverThe Blacksmiths, The FlowersReading Group
I have noticed a lot of excitement about this release on Reading Group, the second album by the trio of poet Fred Moten, bassist Brandon López, and jazz drummer Gerald Cleaver. Reader: that hype is wholly warranted. It’s poetry as music and music as poetry. Moten’s words lead, lyrically, timbrally, poetically – but the bass and percussion loosen the grammar. Associative inflections elevate the raw sound of each player, which at root – even if they were stripped of meaning or mood – runs each part in a constantly moving triangulated constellation of sound and meaning, evolving and repeating; stretching, infilling, and expanding. I want to say something profound, literary, articulate – but what I mean to say is: this is really exciting music and I love it to my bones.
Sleepytime Gorilla MuseumOf The Last Human BeingAvant Night
The first album in 17 years from performance art-inclined, experimental rock troupe Sleepytime Gorilla Museum comes as a pleasant surprise. The band turn in their most varied yet integrated work to date, a fully realised sonic tapestry that unspools like a movie for the mind’s eye, demanding to be played from start to finish with each listen. They still look like extras from Mad Max and their core sound (Art Bears-style RIO with metal, prog and industrial elements) is recognisably similar to past work, but what’s different this time around is how well all the pieces fit together, and the powerful emotional resonance these songs leave in their wake. Carla Kihlstedt’s beautiful vocals really come into their own, contrasting perfectly with Nils Frykdahl’s metallic growl. Chamber music miniatures evoking freak show carnivals rub shoulders with industrialised folk drones (‘Silverfish’). Propulsive Sturm und Drang pieces (‘The Gift’) exist alongside dream-like prog-inflected soundscapes (‘Hush Hush’), wild post-apocalyptic almost funk (‘Save It’) and a possessed sounding cover of This Heat’s ‘S.P.Q.R.’. Perhaps best of all is ‘Old Grey Heron’, sung by bassist Dan Rathbun, its opening lyric, “After years of service and distinction, The Old Grey Heron hobbles toward extinction”, evoking a stirring, emotional response not present in the band’s earlier material, for this listener at least.
Helado NegroPhasor4AD
An oscillation between control and disorientation continues throughout Phasor (the album’s title refers to a numerical vector for oscillation in physics and engineering). Hewing closer to the former is when the record is at its strongest, exploring the world of a character seeking connection but far from reach. “Quiet light / Pushing too far / It’s all gone”, he sings on ‘Best For You and Me’ as a pretty, bright piano line circles a light-footed beat. In ‘Colores del Mare’, filtered and agitated drums, toy-keyboard notes and claps bounce around the mix like a ball around a box, rattling the surfaces, threatening their integrity. It’s one of his best works for a decade.
Sahra HalganHiddo DhawrDanaya Music
You are now entering free Somaliland! Sahra Halgan’s life has been shaped by this east African republic and its efforts to gain full independence: warring factions forced her to France, where she honed her craft as singer of a band whose tangle of desert blues, garage and funk has reached a fabulous zenith on third album Hiddo Dhawr. She’s now back in Somaliland, running a venue which shares its name with this album.
TOMOVielle-ElectronicaKnotwilg
I first heard of TOMO early last year, when I saw him playing in a hurdy gurdy duo with Keiji Haino in a tiny venue called Fourth Floor in Tokyo. That was amazing, but this solo album, on the wonderful Knotwilg, is a beast. There are some comparisons to be made with Yann Gourdon, the way both lean into the raw and serrated density of sound it’s possible to generate with a hurdy gurdy, drawing in then distorting traditional forms as on ‘Awkward Bourrée’, (a Bourrée being a traditional French dance). ‘Wheel Of Life’ is more lyrical and sparse, sounding in passing moments like Henry Flynt’s ‘You Are My Everlovin”. Don’t sleep on this, it’s gone straight to the top of my (surprisingly large) experimental hurdy gurdy pile.
Alan SparhawkWhite Roses, My GodSub Pop
Made by Alan Sparhawk entirely on his own, White Roses, My God is the sound of someone searching for his voice, a new way to articulate the love he and his wife, Mimi Parker, who passed in 2022, shared, and all that is missed. Crucially, it’s a way to break through the numbness. “Can you feel something?” he asks on ‘Feel Something’ over squelching synths, his voice processed through a vocoder. The line repeats over and over. Suddenly as the song builds, he exhales “I think I feel something, yeah.” Surrounding himself with just a drum machine, a synth and a voice pitch effect, Sparhawk describes the process he went through as “stabbing into the unknown, trying to figure things out”. And that’s what it sounds like: the chaos of all his feelings shaped into something like clarity.
Skee MaskISS010Ilian Tape
ISS010 is an example of pure techno mastery. There’s been a lot of late 90s/early 00s-inspired techno music around in the past year or two, but nothing comes close to how Skee Mask takes the tropes forged by Jeff Mills, Basic Channel, Ben Sims and other forerunners and fulfils their further untapped potential in unexpected ways. The grooves, pads, chord progressions, even the claps sound familiar, but these tracks could hardly have been produced 25 years ago. It’s their depth and multilayered nature that give them away. Comparable older techno productions with more treble lack the impact and HD quality of Skee Mask’s productions. With intricately arranged, ever-evolving grooves backed by melancholic, dub-wise pads and shimmering sonic flourishes, these tracks are some of his best so far.
Rosso PolareCampo AmaroStudents Of Decay
For their fourth album, Rosso Polare took inspiration from fossi, that is, ditches surrounding fields across Italy. Sites which are, according to them, increasingly polluted but still teeming with life. Stemming from that came an immersion in Mondine chants and songs. Mondina were mostly female workers who weeded Italian rice fields. Their gruelling labour pushed them to political organisation. Protests and riots in the early twentieth century saw them win an eight-hour work-day. A rich musical heritage descended from their struggle, protest and resistance songs which ended up sticking around long after the Mondina’s battle had been won. With these influences and inspirations, Rosso Polare do something which parallels Jon Hassell’s ideas of the fourth world. But for them, the imagined space isn’t limited to the traditionally musical. Even more so than on previous albums, they create songs which double as unstable soundscapes. A sonic world where volatility breeds vibrancy. Concrete sounds blur into acoustic instruments, wildlife calls start to overlap with electronics.
Mdou MoctarFuneral For JusticeMatador
Active since the late 00s, it’s in the last few years that Nigerien rocker Mdou Moctar has really made a claim to be one of the iconic guitarists of his era. Funeral For Justice, his second album for Matador, teems with delicious riffs, ostentatious solos, sauna-hot tones, all done as the leader of a crack band plugged into his ‘assouf blues meets Billy Gibbons boogie’ vision. He also sings about meaningful things, such as how the French fucked his country up and should get out of it.
The Dengie Hundred With Gemma BlackshawWho Will You LoveTain
Who Will You Love is Owen Lawrence’s sixth release as The Dengie Hundred; all sound somewhat different, but – invariably – deeply spartan and shiverworthy. That sensibility has precedent in certain pockets of 90s slowcore and post-rock, 80s peculiarities like Deux Filles, and various musicians who carried the dub torch while not making dub music per se. With The Dengie Hundred, a name taken from a small quasi-coastal community in Essex, there is something like a psychogeographic element: Lammas Land, an album of two side-long tracks released only five months before Who Will You Love, is inspired by the Walthamstow Marshes near Lawrence’s house. An A4 insert with the LP features writing, also on the Marshes, by Gemma Blackshaw, an art history professor specialising in Vienna; Who Will You Love expands on this by enlisting Blackshaw as the album’s vocalist.
BòscBòscLa Crue / La Grande Folie
When I first heard ‘L’Èrba d’Amor’ as part of Bòsc’s set for the Printemps du bal, it made me feel like I was levitating. OK, so I was coming down with something and starting to feel feverish, but its power undoubtedly translates to the recorded version on the group’s self-titled debut: the mesmerising vocals in Occitan, the wavering drones, the heart-stopping first chord change at 4’48”, the feeling of wanting it to last for an eternity. I don’t think they’d appreciate me focusing on just the one song, though, and with good reason – Bòsc is an all-round beauty.
CaveiraFicar VivoShhpuma
There are moments on Ficar Vivo which sound like pure electricity, buzzing through wires. It’s just electric guitar, bass, drums and sax, but it feels like you’re being sucked in, past the microphones and the instruments and their pick-ups, deep into the cables and the circuitry, as if the current itself ran straight into your auditory nerve. Rattling around with the capacitors and the diodes, these tiny little components, somehow this impossibly vast soundstage opens up. It’s like Ant-Man in the Quantum Realm. The tiniest spark becomes a forest fire, raging across the landscape, the earth left scorched and ruined in its wake. Time and space lose all meaning here.
Blood IncantationAbsolute ElsewhereCentury Media
Absolute Elsewhere feels like the cosmic leap into the unknown that Denver quartet Blood Incantation have been teetering on the edge of for the last couple of years. Whilst some were disappointed that 2022’s Timewave Zero was a fully fledged ambient record rather than a fusion with their usual death metal maelstrom, last year’s standalone ‘Luminescent Bridge’ single proved these two aspects of the band’s sonic identity could co-inhabit harmoniously after all. If ‘Luminescent Bridge’ felt like the band plotting out a star map, then Absolute Elsewhere is the rocket ship that finally propels them deep into the cosmos. Boasting a similarly rich, luscious and organic sound (this time captured at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios), the album finds Blood Incantation returning to their death metal roots with renewed psychedelic vigour, eager to tear apart familiar metallic ideas and reshape them into vibrant new forms.
UnderworldStrawberry HotelVirgin Music / Smith Hyde Productions
Underworld, like Kraftwerk, have a not so secret past. Where the Germans unleashed a campaign of selective repackaging and denialism about the dominance of the flute in the early years, Underworld’s mediocre shot at pop stardom is there for all to see and hear on streaming, even if most tend to give it a swerve. Underworld’s modus operandi ever since could be interpreted as a kind of reactive ongoing deconstructionism, though Strawberry Hill – perhaps more than any album before it – embraces melody and channels it in a more mature and idiosyncratic way. They’ve not exactly gone back to their roots, but they can at least turn and face themselves in a way that would have been unthinkable in the mid-1990s.
Martha Skye MurphyUMAD 93
Um was not created in a vacuum and Martha Skye Murphy does not project the callowness of a debutante or arrive half-formed exhibiting potential. It’s a record made by someone who sounds like she’s been making records for years and, in a roundabout kind of a way, she has (and not just with any ragtag and bobtail, either). Moreover, her remarkable, fragile soprano, offset with bursts of operatic ululations, is tempered by the extraordinary production on the album: a combination of herself, Ethan P. Flynn, and the mixing nous of Marta Salogni. The sonic evolution of ‘Kind’, which toys with abstraction before bursting into a chime-garnered ball of combustion, best exemplifies the talent on offer.
The CureSongs Of A Lost WorldPolydor
Though Songs Of A Lost World has a mood, it’s not monochromatic. ‘Alone’ opens with sweeping majesty and space; ‘A Fragile Thing’ has a brisker rising punch; ‘Drone:Nodrone’ is shuddering cyclical intensity; ‘All I Ever Am’ leans the closest to a kind of pop quirk, but only in the most oblique sense. Throughout, both Robert Smith’s and Roger O’Donnell’s keyboards, whether synths or piano or whatever else they choose to employ, have a presence here that seems more distinct than those elements have been in a long time for them, a way to make moments like the steady introduction of a song like ‘And Nothing Is Forever’ seem very not-rock-as-such, yet utterly necessary in context.
UniformAmerican StandardSacred Bones
American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps Uniform’s most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. As outlined in a recent essay for The Quietus, it focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa. Like the band’s four previous albums and sundry collaborations, these experiences are examined under a harsh, bright, unforgiving light in a manner that’s deeply unflattering but also cuttingly incisive.
MIKE & Tony SeltzerPinball10k
Arriving off the back of a majestic, prolific run in recent years that has taken in, among other releases, 2023 standouts Burning Desire and Wiki and The Alchemist collaboration Faith Is A Rock, MIKE is at his breezy best on this link-up with Brooklyn beat-maker Tony Seltzer. It helps that the producer serves up a set of brilliantly buoyant, almost psychedelic trap beats for MIKE to let loose on, but there’s a palpable sense of fun packed right through the record’s nimble 21-minute runtime as the rapper runs through bars that are equal parts reflective and self-aggrandising, while also welcoming the likes of Earl Sweatshirt and Jay Critch into the fold.
