CowerCelestial DevestationHuman Worth
As well as the uncertain technological situation we find ourselves in, Celestial Devastation is also about growing older. As far as kitchen-sink accounts of existential dread go, ‘Hard-Coded In The Souls Of Men’ is one of the bleakest that’s ever been committed to tape. It haunts the psyche from first exposure, thanks to the vividly miserable descriptions in its verses, combined with an irresistibly infectious chorus.
Mach-Hommy#RICHAXXHAITIANSelf-Released
Mach-Hommy’s first solo album in almost three years is a triumphant, somewhat biographical affair that, as with past records, sees the Haitian-American shift at will between English and the Kreyòl he was surrounded by amid a childhood growing up in Port-au-Prince. Early highlight ‘POLITickle’ takes aim at the International Monetary Fund and the hold that US capitalism has on the political and social situation in Haiti, while also viciously touching on Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Elsewhere, he trades bars with contemporaries and underground legends alike in Roc Marciano, Black Thought and Tha God Fahim, among others, over expansive beats awash with exquisite pianos and sweeping string arrangements.
BIG|BRAVEA Chaos Of FlowersThrill Jockey
Quietness is a key part of A Chaos Of Flowers – the sparse ‘Chanson Pour Mon Ombre’ is the first time the band have employed acoustic guitar, and drums are more often scuttling brushes than big thumping stomps. As with their The Body collaboration, Robin Wattie’s vocals are clear and deliberate. There’s still plenty of loudness too, however. The songs swim among big dark waves of rumbling, lurching guitar. What’s ultimately changed is what BIG|BRAVE are doing with sonic extremes on A Chaos Of Flowers, rather than the existence of those extremes at all. The record’s most intense moments are often its quietest – the largely ambient ‘A Song For Marie Part III’, for instance, where a sparse melody sweeps wraith-like above deep bass, and which was actually recorded during the sessions for previous record Nature Morte. It’s a record that twists the listener’s expectations from high and low volume.
Laura CannellThe Rituals of Hildegard ReimaginedBrawl
Laura Cannell’s music shines a modern light on ancient melodies. The East Anglia-based composer draws on the tenets of early music to inform her works, capturing a spectrum of moods in the process. On The Rituals Of Hildegard Reimagined, Cannell looks to one of the beloved composers of medieval monophony, Hildegard von Bingen, for inspiration, crafting her own vignettes inspired by von Bingen’s spiritual melodies. Cannell’s tenth album builds on the composer’s prior work by continuing to showcase wafting music that feels like a refraction and reflection of the past.
Wendy EisenbergViewfinderAmerican Dreams
Whereas past Wendy Eisenberg releases have focused on their free improvising or their avant-pop sensibilities, Viewfinder finds them in group-leader mode, with the experience of navigating a newly opened-up world being portrayed through the winding contours of group improvisations. The album as a whole evokes a late-night drive, one in which the surrounding world reveals itself fleetingly in the headlights. The pieces are brought to life by a group consisting mostly of up-and-coming musicians in New York’s jazz scene, including Andrew Links on piano, Chris Williams on trumpet, Booker Stardrum on drums, and Zekereyya el-Magharbel, whose trombone playing colours the album’s offbeat vibe. Eisenberg gives the band space to fully breathe out their compositions, most notably on the instrumental 22-minute album centrepiece ‘Afterimage’. The piece builds continuously before fading into an atmospheric free improvisation, then re-emerges with more energy and intensity than ever before.
Erika AngellThe Obsession With Her VoiceConstellation
On The Obsession With Her Voice, Erika Angell creates her own universe out of her ever-changing voice. The Montréal-based artist cloaks her vocals in mystical haze, transforming them into alien reveries; she speaks poetry with scalding clarity; she sings melismatic songs that swirl around lush instrumentals. With this music, she seeks to create not just one world, but a constellation of planets and stars made of glimmering words, electronics and strings. No matter where the music goes, at the heart is Angell’s voice in all its different forms, in the process of being discovered and rediscovered as each phrase passes.
PersherSleep WellThrill Jockey
From soup to nuts, the debut album proper from Blawan and Pariah’s Persher project is a curdled morass of spoiled riffage. A fucked, cursed, post-whatever-the-hell heap of derangement. Straightaway, Sleep Well is flat-out unhinged. That’s recognisable within seconds. But the real news here is that ‘unhinged’ is simply Persher’s baseline, their bare minimum. As the record progresses, their commitment to pushing beyond that – to pursuing maniac mode as a persistent escalating musical state of being – reveals itself layer by layer, track by track. It’s a hoot.
DJ Anderson do ParaísoQueridãoNyege Nyege Tapes
Often characterised by eardrum-punishing levels of distortion and rowdy vocal delivery, Brazilian funk has been gaining a wider, more global audience in recent years. Sitting at the more underground, less bass-boosted end of the sound is producer DJ Anderson do Paraíso, who hails from Belo Horizonte. Queridão, his first album, is a mind-bending trip through dissonant, macabre melodies and minimalist beats, its use of silence and space just as effective as everything that is actually present. With the help of a wide cast of guest MCs and vocalists, the producer builds a bonkers sound world that is part-haunted house, part-classical concert hall, with its employment of choirs, strings, bells and atonal pianos through the record. Queridão, its title a reference to his local status as the “dearest”, is a compelling, menacing listen unlike much else you’ll hear this year.
Schoolboy QBlue LipsTop Dawg Entertainment
Having opted to step away from the rat race of chasing Spotify streams and hype via an endless cycle of mixtape and album drops – this is Schoolboy Q’s first studio album in five years – Blue Lips is well worth the wait. The US rapper sounds more mature and self-assured than ever before as he reminds us of the promise that earned him so many fans when first breaking out over a decade ago, while also boldly pushing new boundaries. There’s a deeply psychedelic, serene quality to much of the production (see cuts like opener ‘Funny Guy’, ‘Blueslides’ and the jungle-referencing ‘Foux’), tracks often flowing seamlessly from one to the other as Q flits between exploring the peaks and troughs of rap stardom, and the expectations that come with it, with frequently dizzying honesty.
Kim GordonThe CollectiveMatador
In addition to its provocations and Kim Gordon’s drive to disrupt, The Collective is an intelligently produced record that manages to summarise a very specific sense of overwhelming, arguably inescapable in our everyday lives. Listeners might be surprised by Gordon’s turn towards hip hop, especially at this point in her career. But in truth, we shouldn’t be – Gordon, forever the definition of cool, has always been one to flip the script, combining genres and ideas in a way that isn’t ever limiting or conventional. The Collective feels like a true portrayal of that chaos, in its content and also in Gordon’s refusal to be boxed-in by what she should or should not be doing. It also perfectly scores those moments in between, when the anxiety rumbles, threatening to unmask our bleak realities.
Quatuor BozziniJürg Frey: String Quartet No. 4Collection QB
In Jürg Frey’s world, stillness is motion. Throughout the Swiss composer’s String Quartet No. 4, Quatuor Bozzini pull their bows so gradually that it feels as if each note is stopped in time. Yet they aren’t: with each reiteration, these tones gradually expand, taking up every inch of the quartet’s wooden instruments. Each slight change feels faint, but they accumulate; it’s like the shifting of a glacier over many years. This is the world Frey has come to embody across his career, and his fourth string quartet continues to explore the engulfing atmospheres he crafts out of thin air.
British Murder BoysActive Agents & House BoysDownwards
The recordings on British Murder Boys’ debut album hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist. The battery of drums that comprise ‘It’s What You Hide’ gyrate like a wheel coming off its axis, and the rasp of blistered synthesis and chest-rattling bass beats on ‘It’s In The Heart’ are a joyous ode to military grade knob-twiddling. Their palette has changed a little though. ‘Killer I Said’ is a dubby affair that continues the conversation with Northampton’s Reducer. The viscous, gangster-limped cadence hauls itself into a space cleared by the snare’s reverberating “Kah” but it’s the hit of the low end that cements its place in your memory. High-pass filters are swung left and right, as if Surgeon has taken Adrian Sherwood’s mixing desk out onto the high seas.
Fievel Is GlauqueRong WeicknesFat Possum
Flute plays a dominant role on Rong Weicknes, mostly setting a playful tone and occasionally bringing drama with its cascades of sound. On ‘As Above So Below’, it’s the flute that brings a quirky, romantic energy that could easily soundtrack an early 70s sitcom, while a glitchy keyboard balances the song in modernity and unsticks it from pastiche. Fievel Is Glauque have a strong sense of this balance, with keyboards and sitar adding unexpected counterpoints on songs like ‘Transparent’ and ‘Haut Contre Bas’ to the airiness of the album. What is most interesting about the sitar is that it is used for its vibrating delay and the dimension it adds to the songs rather than as a heavy-handed display of Eastern influence.
Harry Górski-BrownDurt Dronemaker After DreamboatsGLARC
Harry Górski-Brown plays several instruments on his debut tape, but leaves the songwriting to others: its first seven tracks are from the Scottish Gaelic folksong canon and the eighth and last is a live cover of ‘I Wanna Fight Your Father’ by Irish viral rap duo The Rubberbandits. In this, and by sprinkling moments of text-to-speech voice offering metacommentary on the album as it progresses, the Glasgow-based musician seems intent on having the ancient and the modern confront each other, with buoyant and bibulous results.
Saagara3Tak:til
In a globalised world, the word exotic has become increasingly loaded. What’s exotic to you may not be remotely exotic to someone on the other side of the world, and the whiff of orientalism and even primitivism is never far away. Nevertheless, 3 is exotic in its fusion of disparate elements: the occidental electronica of Polish musician Wacław Zimpel and the Carnatic musical tradition of his four southern Indian collaborators. On their third album together – as it was with the previous two – the ancient and divine sit with the relatively modern and broadly secular. It makes for a wonderfully alien patchwork of sounds where the rich colours bleed into each other to create something vivid and unique.
Holy Tongue Meets ShackletonThe Tumbling Psychic Joy Of NowAD 93
Holy Tongue’s collaborative record with Shackleton is an essential meeting of minds that was born from the two acts sharing a festival bill in Sweden, where a mutual respect for each other’s work was soon established. Holy Tongue ultimately set out recording a wave of new raw material and gave Shackleton free rein to do what he wanted with it. Lead track ‘The Merciful Lake’ is a dubbed-out trip through haunting bass, skipping drums, cosmic guitar, and the kind of bonkers stretched-out vocals so characteristic of Shackleton’s work, while early highlight ‘Blessed And Bewildered’ meshes feral horns, an addictive polyrhythmic bassline and vibraphone courtesy of Holy Tongue’s Valentina Magaletti. A deeply immersive and hallucinatory listen, The Tumbling Psychic Joy Of Now stands as one of the best things both acts involved in its making have filed away in their already impressive respective discographies.
Kendrick LamarGNXpgLang / Interscope
Coming more than two years after the unwieldy and, at times, considerably flawed Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Kendrick Lamar’s sixth studio album – surprise released to cap off a year that saw him confirmed as February’s Super Bowl halftime show headliner and become embroiled in that increasingly grim and asinine beef – is loaded with self-contradictions and some distance away from his best work, but then he has set the bar fairly high. What you do get in GNX, though, is a deeply entertaining, braggadocio-laden meshing of the kind of club hits that fuelled his early popularity (the G-funk-powered synths of ‘Squabble Up’, the bass-boosted, DJ “MUSTAAAAARD!”-produced ‘TV Off’) and the more plaintive arc of much of the material that followed it – the SZA-aided ‘Gloria’, which initially presents itself as a tribute to a mistress but ultimately turns out to be addressed to his own pen, is a gorgeous closer, while ‘Reincarnated’ flips 2Pac’s 1997 classic ‘Made N***az’ and sees Lamar channel the likes of John Lee Hooker and Billie Holiday.
In opener ‘Wacced Out Murals’, the record explodes into life as the rapper sets his stool out early and takes aim at various hip hop figures (Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne are among those who get it in the neck) while making the first of several references across the album to his feud with Drake. Proceedings only get more vengeful from there as he embarks on a victory lap of sorts, while flying the flag for the LA rap scene that raised him. It’s impossible not to hear – a pastiche of, some might say – the flow of the late Drakeo The Ruler, for example, on the likes of ‘Peekaboo’ and ‘Hey Now’. The latter sees him go back and forth with relative up-and-comer Dody6, while the jittery title track features contributions from fellow Comptonite Hitta J3, and two more comparative LA upstarts in Peysoh and YoungThreat. Incisive and loaded with sharp wordplay, but also enormously goofy and fun, GNX is less overburdened by the grand, earnest concepts of its predecessor, and all the better for it.
Hamish HawkA Firmer HandSO Recordings
A Firmer Hand is such a thrilling listen because it eschews the platitudes of empowerment for something far more gritty, tough, self-critical – yet it’s also unafraid to dish it out. It’s possibly not just Mr. Hawk’s parents who might be advised to avoid this record, but from the sounds of the wonderfully waspish lyricism throughout, so might also music industry contacts, ex-lovers, friends and the sort of sexual acquaintances whose closing of the front door might be met with both a chuckle and a sigh of regret.
Guðmundur Steinn GunarssonStífluhringurinnCarrier
Each of the two movements on Stífluhringurinn, named after a hydroelectric dam in Reykjavík, has a four-part structure that gives each sound a moment of dominance, and the second movement reverses the order of the first because we should consider it to be walking down the other side of our initial ascent of the titular dam. The piece was written for the Caput Ensemble, a group operating at a very flexible size between maybe two and 20 players since 1987. Here, I think there are about a dozen musicians working with Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s graphic, screen-based, animated scores. Premiering in 2019, plans to record the work were frustrated by COVID-19 and a later, more granular and editorial version has emerged which has also allowed producer/engineer The Norman Conquest a little freedom to add some further finesse to proceedings too. The ensemble largely comprises strings (bowed and plucked instruments), brass, recorders and harpsichord, with some percussive sounds working around and within.
Mary HalvorsonCloudwardNonesuch
Cloudward probably won’t jump out to familiar listeners of Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson’s previous albums as being particularly unusual in her catalogue. However, it’s probably the first where she sounds fully immersed in her band Amaryllis, which she originally composed music for in 2020 during the pandemic. Now, she finds herself still writing for the band, and the results are rich and increasingly organic-sounding. With the album a means to articulate the process of her band re-emerging after the pandemic, the cadence of the record seems to replicate the sound of the city’s life gradually blossoming out into the streets.
