Richard YoungsCXXIBlack Truffle
These two long pieces are a study in chance operations, but unlike a great many benchmark works in that field by John Cage and his ilk, Richard Youngs has set up limitations that make CXXI pleasing to the ear, if not wholly satisfying to the pattern-craving mind. In a sense, this makes the music more transgressive: like Brian Eno or Gavin Bryars before him, Youngs has a knack for taking challenging concepts and making them palatable to those who might not otherwise seek out being challenged by music. An invaluable skill, that, and one that’s undoubtedly pried open many a mind over these last few decades.
Hedvig MollestadTempest RevisitedRune Grammofon
Tempest Revisited is a beautiful and inspiring suite of music, by turns both lyrical and aggressive, evocative of the elements in their many different forms. Opener ‘Sun On A Dark Sky’ initiates the proceedings with a serene but eerie flute passage and some brief but ominous drums hinting at stormier weather to come later on. Early highlight ‘Winds Approaching’ kicks off with a flurry of handclaps and syncopated percussion, before the arrival of some propulsive blasts of resonant baritone sax and a subtle yet doomy guitar riff that returns at the end of the piece with renewed vigour. ‘Kittywakes In Gusts’ takes a jazzier approach, twin saxes swirling like seabirds riding eddies in the wind.
Snapped AnklesForest Of Your ProblemsLeaf
Forest Of Your Problems‘ spoken word third track, ‘Shifting Basslines Of The Cornucopians’, is a sturdy yet exhilarating journey – a common theme spread across this album. “It’s a great time to be alive,” bellows the band’s Paddy Austin and somehow these words exude both ‘where have you been for the past year’ vibes with just a glimpse of zeal, as we’re just days into ‘normality’. Forest Of Your Problems is a project of reassurance that we will dance again.
KorelessAgorYoung
After five years of trial and error with meticulous attention to every detail, Koreless is back with a simply breathtaking debut album that was absolutely worth the wait. If there’s one adjective worth applying here, it’s hyper-polished (in the best possible sense), meaning this is formidably palpable electronic music with an almost holographic quality, so much so it kinda locks you in and paralyses all your senses from the first to the last glassy tone. Everything’s so well-thought out on Agor — the tracklisting is immaculate, the sonic drama triangle is used to its full potential, and its production quality is almost without equal. Despite being so supernaturally artificial, made of something I could only describe as digital ice, this is some of the most emotional music I’ve heard all year — cyber-bliss guaranteed.
Leather RatsNo Live ‘Til Leather ’98Bokeh Versions
Leather Rats are like Hasil Adkins on tour with Suicide when Craig Leon was on the desk; they’re Lux Interior and Keith Hudson for On-U Sound. This is dub music for sewer dwelling punks. Think Escape From New York dystopia dancehall emanating from a subterranean basement club – damp and rotten, infested with low echo and sound seepage – only with a Wembley-sized audience green screened in. Apparently Leather Rats were a psychobilly punk act but Bokeh Versions is going for psychodubilly and I can dig the concept, big time, if not quite get behind the neologism. The story is they never made it into a studio – these live recordings are allegedly from Japan in the late ’90s where they also allegedly had a huge following… but make of that what you will. I can enjoy any fictional backstory if it comes with zombie licks like this.
Jorja ChalmersMidnight TrainItalians Do It Better
Bloody HeadThe Temple Pillars Dissolve Into The CloudsHominid Sounds
Punx, metalheads, metalpunx and general ne’erdowells develop (ugh!) their Nottingham-located project from a sludgy noiserock dirge with psychedelic leanings into… a psychedelic dirge with sludgy noiserock leanings. The result, Bloody Head’s second LP, sits pretty on the Hominid Sounds label alongside bands like Casual Nun and Melting Hand; the clouds of the title rain down acidic chaos and deceptively sharp riffs.
Ursula SereghyOK BoxGin&Platonic
Prague-based Ursula Sereghy’s OK Box seems to challenge the listener to a different mode of perception, undoubtedly following its own internal logic yet making perfect sense. Sereghy’s background is as a saxophone player in jazz bands, but OK Box sees her step into working solo, “experimenting with machines and sound design”, according to the liner notes. The pieces unfurl like a 1970s fibre-optic lamp, lines of ideas firing multi-directionally outwards from a centre but never totally unhinging themselves from the base. The whole tape seems to strive towards shedding hierarchies, pointing away from electronic music’s traditional unison and tight structures to something far more open ended and genuinely transcendent.
GnodLa Mort Du SensRocket Recordings
This album may be GNOD at their most direct, but GNOD are still GNOD. They cover a lot of territory in just over 30 minutes, while still taking time to get more than a little weird. ‘Pink Champagne Blues’ thrashes unrelentingly. ‘Town’ stomps and groans. ‘The Whip And The Tongue’ goes full-on S&M sleaze skronk. On the album’s longest track, ‘Giro Day’, GNOD ratchet up the intensity of their scorched-earth noise over 12 bracing minutes. By the end, it’s like getting sandblasted – but in a positive way.
At the GatesThe Nightmare Of BeingCentury Media
Easily the most adventurous, daring and surprising album that At The Gates have released since reforming, The Nightmare Of Being feels like a whole new chapter for the band, expanding their trademark melodic riffage into more progressive and psychedelic pastures. The opening combo of ‘Spectre Of Extinction’ (featuring a scorching Andy LaRocque guest solo) and ‘The Paradox’ is great but only hints at the album’s overall scope, continuing the dark but stirring sound of To Drink, but with a slightly more melancholic vibe. After this though, the record really broadens out, with the unexpectedly gorgeous ‘Garden Of Cyrus’ playing out like a late ’70s King Crimson vista, even boasting a beautiful saxophone solo.
Vapour TheoriesCelestial ScuzzFire
If you are one of the Bardo Believers, here’s the latest recording from the band’s sibling guitar-and-effects maestros, John and Michael Gibbons, under their Vapour Theories alias. You probably know what to expect by now. You’ll be right, and you will not be disappointed. Beautifully thick, intertwining guitar tones, yanked down from heaven itself and presented to you on a golden turntable. ‘High Treason’ has an acoustic hippie-folk vibe to mix things up a bit but it’s the surrounding heavier and denser numbers that really fool your brain into thinking you’ve died and are now floating in lysergic limbo. There’s something about the wonkily melodic guitar line that bobs around below the fatly distorted surface of ‘The Big Ship’ that really brings a tear to my (third?) eye.
Jeff ParkerForfolksInternational Anthem
On Forfolks, Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker uses efficient looping to create mesmerising environments, humid and warm, and unleash his masterful improvisations, revisiting pieces that he wrote decades ago like ‘La Jetée’, giving them a new context that allows the listener to appreciate its brilliance in a new light. On the other hand, his straight-ahead reading of the standard ‘My Ideal’ is so tonally sumptuous and tunefully generous that it provides a potent reminder of what a great jazz soloist he is. His music often works like a balm – something still much needed – so maybe that’s why I’ve embraced this album so fervently, but regardless of the context, Parker has been one of my favourite musicians for decades. This matches anything he’s produced during his career so far.
Jane WeaverFlockFire
Flock is the 1990s as taped-from-the-TV versions of Naked and KLF vanity projects, the ticking beats of Trans-Europe and Trans-American compilations, Suede’s electric grimoire, Beta bandaids, the Family Of God LP and the collective psyched-out idiocy on Ochre Records, Giant Steps from various switched on Scouse and Wool bands, Superfurry animism, Broadcast’s divinations into the underground currents of Eurofilm, Stereolab laying down their subliminal grooves akin to an amped-up Philip Sidney gig, and a Krautrock-sampling Cope acting as underground cheerleader. Interesting, offbeat people doing their thing, in other words. And Jane Weaver is one of them.
Rien VirguleLa Consolation Des ViolettesMurailles Music
Rien Virgule’s third album is their first following the death of member Jean-Marc Reilla, who contributed electroacoustic noise to the group’s dense, claustrophobic sound. Carrying on under the circumstances can’t have been easy, but on La Consolation Des Violettes the remaining trio of Anne Careil (voice and synths), Mathias Pontevia (drums and samples) and Manuel Duval (synths and samples) have succeeded in fashioning something both terror-stricken and cathartic. Awe and unease are conveyed by Careil’s pallid, processed vocals – sometimes virtually liquified, or sucked backwards like Carole Anne calling out through the TV in Poltergeist – and these gradually unfolding pieces with their scraped, clattered rhythms. There’s a thrilling sauvagerie to the galloping rhythm and eastern melodies of ‘Le Cri Du Typograph’, ‘Toque De Clous’ has a heightened, carnivalesque quality, like a Danny Elfman score recorded in a dank medieval crypt and ‘L’Ogresse Amoureuse’ is traversed by creepy incidental noises as it ascends inexorably to a gothic peak. Brace yourself.
Aging Land TranceEmbassy NocturnesTombed Visions
You can hear both Land Trance and Aging on their collaborative record, the former’s hypnotic lattices of texture, and the latter’s deep, resonant atmospheres. What you hear most, though, is the old building in which they worked. Named Embassy Nocturnes in tribute, the album’s eerie echoes are like reverberations from a dark and cavernous hallway, its hypnotic gloomy beauty like the dilapidated glamour of a forgotten ballroom, its distorted chimes like the tolling of a haunted grandfather clock. Listening to the album, it is as if the building’s spirit itself has somehow been made audible; you can sense the presence of all those hidden histories and secret compartments around every corner, little fragments of something too big and too old to consume in one go.
ClairoSlingFader
Clairo writes music that finds you in places – geographical and mental – and takes you out of them for a few minutes. They are songs that follow you around, that play on the radio as you’re driving on the motorway, or in a warm flat amongst a gathering of friends, something that sweetly permeates your stream of normalcy. I first found Clairo on a train to Manchester. Despite listening to post-punk consistently for a month at that point, somehow my Spotify Daily Mix brought me to her, and I saved ‘Pretty Girl’ because I liked how airily intimate it felt. I later realised that this is what Clairo creates when she reflects and warps her life into art: organic, fragile gems.
HelmAxisDais
His commitment to the scuzzy and undernourished established, it still seems fair to say that Axis is definitely Luke Younger’s heaviest album under the Helm moniker. At points crushingly airless and under-lit, the record has a glower that’s slightly at odds with previous Helm records; a crackling dark energy perfectly summed up by the solar eclipse on its cover.
Claire Rousaya softer focusAmerican Dreams
A snowdrift of long, languorous organ notes. Whistling tones, like swallows arcing through the sky. A rustle of foley. There’s crackling, crinkling – it’s hard to tell exactly what is going on, but there’s a sense of activity, things happening – real things, somewhere in a real place. A flicker of light. Then the whole edifice collapses suddenly, like the air has been sucked out. There’s a breath, the music takes a beat. Then into the clearing – and I mean that literally: picture a forest clearing, or like clearing a desk, just sweep all that clutter out the way – a voice rises up. “I’m trying not to miss you.” It’s Claire Rousay’s ‘own’ voice – but rendered alien, synthesised into virtual life with the familiar stepped trill of autotune software spinning gothic melismas from that third syllable: “not.” A cyborg, rococo refusal.
Manic Street PreachersThe Ultra Vivid LamentSony
Just when you’re counting Manic Street Preachers out, they have repeatedly proven themselves capable of bouncing back fully recharged and within touching distance of the peak of their abilities. Exactly where The Ultra Vivid Lament, the band’s 14th album, ranks in their oeuvre will only really become clear when the dust has settled. With the first few listens, the initial sense is that if it’s not in their top five, then it’s arguably top half. Its pleasures are not obvious, slap-you-in-the-face ones. If it has a close relative in the band’s back catalogue, it is 2004’s underestimated, under-loved Lifeblood. It moves in subtle shades, pastels rather than primaries, building its moods more delicately than the Route One surges and crescendos of Resistance Is Futile.
Sylvie Courvoisier Mary HalvorsonSearching For The Disappeared HourPyroclastic
As with the best improvised music, it’s often hard to tell what’s composed and what’s spontaneous, a quality that’s heightened by the intense interactivity on display across Searching For The Disappeared Hour, with line upon intricately woven line emitting tangy harmony and charged melodic counterpoint. I might ordinarily flinch when an opening track references ‘Moonlight Sonata’, which Sylvie Courvoisier injects on Mary Halvorson’s ‘Golden Proportion’, but it creeps up so naturally, as every give-and-take gesture does here, that it feels inexorably spot-on. There are a few improvisations among the album’s dozen tracks, but they benefit from the duo’s astonishing rapport, which transmits a chamber-like precision even in the most seat-of-the-pants exchanges. It’s a detail-rich knockout, from start to finish.
