GeldBeyond The FloorStatic Shock / Iron Lung
Geld’s second album dials down the psych tropes of 2018 debut LP Perfect Texture, but its Scando-Japano HC abandon is every bit as deranged and dangerous. Written and recorded on “pills, meth, booze, weed [and] DMT,” so says the sales spiel: if this is the case, this Melbourne foursome are the opposite of sloppy drunks, cabbaged stoners or too-gone tweakers, rather a destructive forward line dosed on black market medicine by a shadowy team doctor. Fully sick in-the-red guitar tone, sinister-but-groovy basslines, foaming provoked-animal vox from Al Smith, maybe some bestial black metal influence in there but it’s such a barrage yer just guessing really, and the memorable lyric “Pubs open in my mind.”
DatblyguCwm GwagleAnkstmusik
Datblygu’s complete disinterest in refining their approach – disappearing for nearly 20 years and returning even more scabrous and clanking than before – is heroic, but these songs are not slapped together. ‘A i Z’ slashes fizzy noise through spaghetti western electro, a flirtation with danceability later made flesh through the glorious motorhearted synth pop of ‘Cymryd Y Cyfan’. ‘Y Purdeb Noeth’ has cold wave keys that envelop like a shroud and ‘Bwrlwm Bro’ is a tumbling dubby post-punk piece that, by Datblygu’s standards, is practically prog in its complexity. Other songs are little more than piano or hand drums or harmonium over which the pair beckon you into their bizarro world.
Susan AlcornPedernalRelative Pitch
Pedal steel guitar virtuoso Susan Alcorn has been making music of lyric extravagance and spectral moodiness for decades, translating the instrumental fundamentals she learned from country music into improvised music — as well as the compositions of Astor Piazzolla and Olivier Messiaen. Finally, at age 67, she dropped her first album as a bandleader and it packs a lifetime of ideas within meticulously pitched arrangements that make the most of a spectacular band with guitarist Mary Halvorson, violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Mike Formanek, and drummer Ryan Sawyer. Some themes are jaunty, some exploratory, and others solemn, yet all of them evoke the splendour of rural and urban landscapes with a humanity that’s nothing short of breathtaking.
Memnon SaWorld SerpentHoly Mountain
World Serpent, the fourth album by Memnon Sa – the London producer Misha Hering – portends disaster. Its doomy, droning soundscapes are ambient music for the daubing of large pentangles in red on chilly marble floors. It’s an initiation ritual to an event that I would not want to attend. Or the event that we’re all, right now, attending? I listened to this for the first time on a Sunday, on my state-approved walk, and it was the first time during lockdown that music has felt entirely congruent to the low-level but ever present dread of the streets.
ArcaKiCK iXL
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs PigsVisceralsRocket Recordings
For opener ‘Reducer’, the spotlight is on the cosmic lead guitar licks. ‘New Body’ grinds along antisocially like Swans or perhaps some kind of half-speed Jesus Lizard number. There’s a weird almost dubsteppy intermission with some spoken-word vocals involving an extended gastronomic metaphor. There’s maybe a thrash influence rearing its head elsewhere and some accessible growl-along choruses here and there. The crucial thing, however, is that the riffs are still heavier than Ray Winstone after a slap-up black pudding breakfast.
Dead MeatThe End Of Their World Is ComingSelf-released
Algiers’ There Is No Year (see elsewhere on this list) was an eerily prescient title for a record released in 2020, especially as their work has always engaged with the issues of racial and social injustice that have particularly come to the fore in the past months. Despite lockdown, the various members have been fiendishly busy with side-releases, of which this is a real highlight. Dead Meat is (mostly) Algiers’ Ryan Mahan, though bandmates Lee Tesche and Franklin James Fisher also feature. Released on a cassette that “chronicles a series of last rites rituals to the grotesque and decomposed corpse politic of the USA and its colonies,” this is a perfect blend of industrial marching songs, crazed sax skronk, and the martial turned to the cause of righteousness.
Harry PussySuperstarPalilalia
Spanning 15 songs on one 7″ by one of the greatest bands ever, these feral half-songs were recorded around 1993, and are all spikes and squalls and twangs – quick cuts between fury and space; groove and guts – totally life-affirming and completely fucking brilliant. Superstar includes a track called ‘Robert Ranks Reed (alphabetically)’, where Adris Hoyos screams and each Lou Reed album is given an A+ to C rating. The Blue Mask comes top. Essential.
Charli XCXhow i’m feeling nowAtlantic
Not only was how i’m feeling now produced and recorded entirely under quarantine by Charli XCX and her collaborators in just six weeks, she also let her fans in on every step of the process, live-streaming lyric-writing sessions, music video shoots and more. Having self-imposed a May 15 deadline for the album’s completion – which she only just made – in early April, she fleshed out the album night and day, barely giving herself any breaks. You might be forgiven for expecting how i’m feeling now to be a bit of a mess then, but instead it contains some of Charli’s finest bangers to date (‘anthems’, ‘pink diamond’), featuring the distinctive production of frequent collaborator A.G. Cook. Elsewhere, tracks like ‘forever’, ‘7 years’ and ‘enemy’ see Charli get to grips with her on-off relationship with her boyfriend that has been newly strengthened by the pair quarantining together.
Emma Ruth RundleMay Our Chambers Be FullSacred Bones
Lead single ‘Ancestral Recall’ delivers exactly what you’d expect from this pairing on paper. There are huge, emotive doom riffs complimented by Rundle’s soaring, majestic choruses and Thou vocalist Bryan Funck’s acerbic screech (which sounds notably more forceful and vitriolic here than it has recently). Tracks like ‘Out Of Existence’ combine the shimmering, earthy melodicism of Rundle’s old band Marriages with a much sludgier edge. That grungy flavour Thou explored on their Rhea Sylvia EP seems to run through a lot of the album and is a perfect fit for Rundle’s wounded, heartfelt hooks.
Jerskin FendrixWinterreiseUntitled Recs Ltd
The risk with an album this multi-faceted is that it could easily just descend into a muddle as its components clash into one another – like mixing too many colours of paint to get a sludgy brown. However, Jerskin Fendrix’s main success is how that doesn’t happen, how its pace is too blistering and his creativity too electric to ever get bogged down. He expresses himself in so many ways, in such a short space of time, but succeeds in more or less every single one. His beat-making is unique, his instrumentation prolific, and his lyric-writing witty and rich. For all of this, however, you’re still left wondering who, at the core, Jerskin Fendrix really is.
Mariam RezaeiSKEENFractal Meat Cuts
Entirely arranged on two turntables – Mariam Rezaei’s instrument of choice – SKEEN generates a visceral collage, recomposing varied sound sources, most of them contributed by friends and fellow travellers from the UK experimental scene. Such an approach is typical of her multifaceted output, grounded in a feeling for community and collaboration, whether as an improviser, as musical director of LBGT+ choir Northern Proud Voices or for her Noisestra project, which mobilised a collective of young turntablists from the local area, performing shows with prominent new music ensemble Apartment House.
NdiaNão Fales Nela Que A MentesPríncipe
Nídia is an artist whose name has come to be synonymous with Lisbon label Príncipe’s brand of kuduro and tarraxo club music, following her first release with them in 2015. Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes, her second album for the label, sees her push her sound further into the more experimental territory first explored on her 2017 debut LP, Nídia É Má, Nídia É Fudida. ‘Popo’ is an outstanding combination of laidback Atlanta trap and Afro-Portuguese sounds while ‘Raps’ features an earworm of a lead melody and knockout drums. Perhaps the highlight though is ‘Capacidades’ with its hollering vocal samples, accordion-aided lead melody and syncopated drums.
DeerhoofFuture Teenage Cave ArtistsJoyful Noise
An album imagining post-apocalyptic humans balefully trying to recall the world they once knew, recorded remotely with the band’s members in four different cities before the coronavirus pandemic was even a known threat, it’s fair to say the fifteenth Deerhoof record is somewhat prophetic. It’s also one of their best records to date, a fractured and strange LP that thrives on a sense of fragmentation, veering one way and another in terms of both melody and fidelity as the four members piece together their respective home recordings.
Antonina NowackaLamunanMondoj
Antonina Nowacka is one half of Polish duo WIDT. Lamunan is a solo vocal album, of recordings made in the geological outboard of a cave near a Javanese volcano, which she later assembled in a Polish fortress. It is wordless, echoing, ancient music, something brand new and impossibly old. Its simplicity makes it sing – the uncomplicated appeal of hearing one’s own voice echoed by the pre-human shapes of the earth.
Lorenzo SenniScacco MattoWarp
Maybe it’s a generational thing. But I had a proper old-man moment with this record on first listen. I’d downloaded the album onto the laptop that’s hooked into the big sound system in the living room. And in the time between pushing play and when the music began (about a nanosecond) I had forgotten all about pushing play on anything at all. The staccato attack of sharp sonics scared the absolute shit out of me. I jumped out of my skin, wondering where the hell this intense noise was coming from.
Closed CircuitsReturnerSelf-Released
Closed Circuits has been around for over a decade now, and has (this is the solo project of Portugal-based Chris Page) been reviewed on these pages before. Quite how I lost touch with such a wonderful artist is beyond me, but I’m now forever grateful that I saw a tweet by Dale Cornish recommending this record. A click to one of Closed Circuits’ tweets that said, “Want to hear some really niche music that sounds like #LeonardCohen being bothered by #Coil? Step right this way,” and another to Bandcamp, and I was sold. A week or so spent drifting through the back catalogue suggests that the end of my ignorance of his music was timely – this is Closed Circuits’ best record yet, all thoughtfully sombre, gothic electronic soul.
ClippingVisions Of Bodies Being BurnedSub Pop
Visions Of Bodies Being Burned‘s highpoint is ‘Looking Like Meat’. Jesus Christ it’s good. There are ticker tape hi hats pasted over fractured percussion, all hissing high-end and metallic timbres. The track, featuring Ho99o9, is dominated by a squashed, muscular, distorted bass synth that booms and jerks and twitches in all its pitch-shifted magnificence. The best aggressive electronic music transcends its digital form to become something sounding hyper-natural or even primeval, like it’s been unearthed from the subsoil; ‘Looking like Meat’ is no different.
Sufjan StevensThe AscensionAsthmatic Kitty
The Ascension feels like an attempt at rebalancing our perceptions of the Christian movement – if only in a small way – at a time when the fundamentalist right threatens to lead us towards armageddon driven by zeal, insanity and their own certainty. For all the synthetic otherworldliness, this record is unflinchingly honest in its assessment of the United States as well as a very personal and raw portrait of Stevens’ own humanity and fallibility. There’s no dogma, only equivocation. To hear free-thinking and self-awareness from an American follower of Christ is a blessed relief and offers reassurances that not everybody has lost their minds.
Yves TumorHeaven To A Tortured MindWarp
One of the abiding motifs of an Yves Tumor record is intense, almost spiritual transformation. The track ‘Medicine Burn’ leads us out of the sultry vocals and decadent horns of album opener ‘Gospel For A New Century’ and launches the listener into a visceral, charged battle between guitar and drums, each fighting for supremacy, with Tumor’s lyrics barely rising above it all. The words are almost spat out, gasping and exasperated: “Carry me away into your spirit.” Heaven To A Tortured Mind is not hesitant about the fact that it wants your body.
