GrouperShadeKranky
Shade is made up of songs spanning Liz Harris’ career, providing evidence that for as prolific as she has been — this is her twelfth album in 15 years — there was still something left in the vaults. The record stands in stark relief from recent Grouper output, first and foremost for its production qualities. Those familiar with older Grouper recordings will recognise the swampy reverb of ‘Followed The Ocean’ or ‘Disordered Minds’ that characterised her early work but have been absent in later years. There is an overall lo-fi aesthetic to all of the recordings which helps to tie the newer and older songs together cohesively. Nothing sounds out of place, nothing sounds too conspicuously clean.
ShackletonDeparting Like RiversWoe To The Septic Heart
There are elements of the many avenues that Shackleton has explored over the years on the seven pieces that make up Departing Like Rivers, his first solo album since 2012’s Music For The Quiet Hour. Within the first four minutes of 13-minute opening track ‘Something Tells Me / Pour Out Like Water’ alone, you’ll hear the thunderous bass pressure of those early Skull Disco releases on which the artist first built his name, rubbing up next to the live instrumentation and almost shamanic percussion and vocal play that has characterised much of his collaborative work in more recent years. Across a series of extended cuts, and a couple more quickfire ones too, Shackleton draws on that deeply psychedelic quality that has always tied together his work, and on Departing Like Rivers, it feels as though he’s found a breathtaking sweet spot between the last decade’s output and all of those groundbreaking early productions that made me fall in love with his work in the first place.
Skee MaskPoolIlian Tape
Considering the hundreds of press releases that end up in my mailbox daily, most of them blatantly hyping the next big thing, in the case of Pool, it was really refreshing to just get a totally unexpected new record. The absence of a press release, an industry standard that has unfortunately come to define how most people write about music, opened up a possibility for everyone to develop their own intimate relationship with the record. (I must add this has been the case with most Ilian Tape releases.) Be sure to take 100 minutes off for this one — it’s a beast of a record. You’ll know what I mean when you hear the ’80s hair metal solo in the track ‘Harrison Ford’.
Shirley CollinsCrowlinkDomino
On the surface, Shirley Collins has returned to her beginnings as a folk singer, something denied to her for much of her life, but she is now a very different singer from her younger incarnation. When she was travelling with Alan Lomax in the Appalachia and American South during 1959 collecting songs, she was the outsider bringing an anthropologist’s eye to other cultures. Now, she is the culture. She has become the singer she searched for in her youth, someone soaked in the song of the place they belong to. We rarely hear the singing voices of older people on professional recordings, and Collins’ voice is now reminiscent of field recordings made by early folk music collectors in pubs and farmhouses – people singing the songs they knew, the way they sang them.
Space AfrikaHonest LabourDais
Space Afrika’s debut for Dais Records is every bit as sprawling and captivating as 2020’s self-released Hybtwibt?, which proved to be a breakthrough release for the Manchester duo. Across 19 cuts – many of them brief interludes of around two minutes or less – the pair build on the ambient framework of past releases, delivering what they describe as “a homage to UK energy” that channels variously the most minimal, fractured elements of Actress, Burial at his most heartbreaking, and the murky trip-hop of ’90s Tricky.
Black Country, New RoadFor The First TimeNinja Tune
Just the six tracks in total, there is an air of familiarity to For The First Time. Rather than a collection of new music, Black Country, New Road have recorded the best songs from their live set into one cohesive and satisfying package. (With the notable exception of ‘Track X’, which has been part of Isaac Wood’s solo live set as The Guest occasionally for some time.) Indeed, for the indoctrinated, this debut is low in surprises, but the songs are very sharp and done a great justice by the production. It’s rare that a band this noisy, an album where chaos reigns, is recorded with this much clarity. There are so many different musical ideas, and none of them get lost along the way.
KzisTidibàbide / TurnTin Angel
The last time we heard from Mich Cota she had just released her debut album, Kijà / Care. Back in 2017, that record dealt with trauma, oppression – and also love. Now she has re-emerged as Kìzis. In her Algonquin language, Kìzis means ‘Sun’. This is a fitting name to perform under as her music is filled with light vocals that drift over bright melodies. Her latest album, Tidibàbide / Turn, is fearless and proud, featuring over 50 artists, including Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Mabe Fratti and Owen Pallet, spread over 36 tracks and three hours. Yes, this will be a long ride.
IoulusoddkinRhizome
Billed as both a mixtape and a debut album, ioulus’ oddkin hedges its bets. If you take it as a mixtape, you needn’t rationalise its quicksilver 16-minute running time and head-wrecking restlessness. See it as a fully realised set though, and it really has to be something special to justify its short stay. Still, that’s the most rewarding choice. Succumbing to oddkin as a complete album lets you marvel at how much can be crammed into such a small space, a trinket box of wounded feelings and musical invention.
Rochelle JordanPlay With The ChangesYoung Art
Play With The Changes signals a slight departure from the forward-leaning fusion R&B of the singles ‘How U Want It’ (2017) and ‘Fill Me In’ (2019), towards gleaming dancefloor anthems that celebrate life and reflect both the rich history of UK club genres and R&B mutations brought about by artists like Kelela and FKA twigs. The album, produced by KLSH, Jimmy Edgar and Machinedrum, who’s been working with Rochelle Jordan since 2015, stylistically transmutates from track to track in a flawless manner. Shifting between liquid D&B, UK garage-infused R&B, shuffling breakbeats, inspired feel-good house, bedroom trap, subdued lovers rock, and so on, here you’ll find some of the finest pop tunes of the year, light-years ahead of many other artists’ current hackneyed disco nostalgia. Jordan’s feathery but round voice makes her part of a long lineage of R&B divas, but instead of retracing the same old paths, she bets on a fully contemporary sound.
Part Chimp‘Drool’Wrong Speed
This might be blasphemy, but when I hear an MBV or Dinosaur Jr. track, I don’t think, “This has got to be the loudest live band in the world.” I’m not sure they need to be. It’s arguably an ancillary thing. The opposite is true of Part Chimp, easily one of the world’s heaviest guitar squads. Pop on Drool and it’s altogether likely that you’ll immediately reckon something along the lines of, “I bet the sheer, unholy thunder of these knuckleheads playing in a cramped bar could explode an unlucky dove just like a 2001 Randy Johnson fastball in a spring training game against the Giants.” Well, maybe you wouldn’t think that, exactly, but the point is it comes through on record. It is immediately evident. You don’t even need to imagine it, to suss out how their gigs might go. You just know it to be true. Would it even work otherwise?
HARD FEELINGSHARD FEELINGSDomino
There is an element present in club music that goes beyond knowing and becomes about sensing, which though intuitive, appears to be interlinked with experience. HARD FEELINGS’ move sure-footedly towards a philosophy of overlapping senses, which, as best articulated by Michel Serres, hinges on the mixing and mingling of bodies. “Absent, ubiquitous, omnipresent sound envelops bodies,” writes Serres in his book The Five Senses. “Practically all matter, particularly flesh, vibrates and conducts sound.” HARD FEELINGS’ Joe Goddard and Amy Douglas here prove super-conductors channelling sound deep into the body.
The Transcendence Orchestra All Skies Have SoundedEditions Mego
Anthony Child and Dan Bean’s well-named The Transcendence Orchestra returns with All Skies Have Sounded, which from the first track, ‘Having My Head Is Felt’, on exudes a sort of trippy, oozy warmth. Indeed, that title sums up the record rather well. Apparently inspired by, or a channeling of, “Gonzen, uminari or retumbos” – mysterious sounds that come from the heavens – the record recalls Coil, Tangerine Dream and, weirdly, Brian Eno, but the interludes on the ’70s ‘pop’ records rather than his ambient moments. There are even Stephen O’Malley-esque guitar lurges, weird subsurface watery gloops and beautiful drones. It’s highly recommended for long mountain valley drives, or a summer wander with a pot of honey imbued with the magical bounty of Dartmoor’s close-cropped sheep pasture for company.
Little SimzSometimes I Might Be IntrovertAge 101
Now four albums deep, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert sees Little Simz invite fans deeper still into her backstory. As she serves up some of her most confessional songwriting to date, frequent collaborator Inflo’s production sets the rapper’s acute lyricism against grand, orchestral strings and horns on singles such as ‘Introvert’ and ‘I Love You, I Hate You’. Elsewhere, she subtly looks to Afrobeats on the Obongjayar-featuring ‘Point And Kill’, sets her sights on the dancefloor with ‘Protect My Energy’, and nods to trap-inflected grime on ‘Rollin Stone’, all with excellent results.
Joy Orbisonstill slipping vol. 1XL
still slipping vol. 1, Joy Orbison’s debut full-length effort, bounces effortlessly from one style to another, from the intricate 2-step of ‘swag w/ kav’ to the melancholic house of ‘better’. There’s a nod to ’80s post-punk on ‘playground’, and gloriously throaty verses from James Massiah and Goya Gumbani on ‘swag w/ kav’ and ‘playground’ respectively. Rather than a bold new direction, the mixtape feels like a peek behind the curtain, turning the dancefloor monolith into somebody we can all relate to, with Mum calling up to be sweet about something she doesn’t quite understand. “Yeah, yeah. there’s something in it that you can latch onto,” she says about his new single. “It’s got, well… it’s not a melody… but it’s got something you can almost hum to. No, no, I really liked it.”
MicrocorpsXMITALTER
Alexander Tucker has innovated a novel way of processing signal on XMIT, cutting and splicing segments of speech into time-stretched non-sequiturs, a disquieting technique used to effect, for example, on Simon Fisher Turner’s outing, entitled ‘OCT’. ‘ABII’, with Astrud Steehouder, elasticises the album’s most classical vocal elements, whilst orphan electrics are set to gurgle and bray in the background. Nik Void’s contribution, ‘ILN’, is the record’s most straight-ahead knees-up, an analogue, heavyweight raga built for the world’s abandoned dancefloors. At its best, XMIT nods adroitly to Radiohead’s woofer endangering ‘Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors’, and adeptly advances the wild forward/backward vocal simultaneity of ‘Everything In Its Right Place’.
Ben LaMar GayOpen Arms To Open UsInternational Anthem
As an improviser, Ben LaMar Gay possesses a keen sense of freedom in music. But like The Art Ensemble Of Chicago of old, he understands this freedom not as a license to skronk and overindulge in excessive techniques – when heard, his cornet is subdued – but as a lightweight abandon in using whichever element he sees fit. Case in point, ‘Bang Melodically Bang’ flows along like a fusion of hip hop and jazz, before coalescing into an emphatic chant. ‘Aunt Lola And The Quail’ wobbles through a swarm of elastic sounds chased by a brass texture and frolicking flutes. Meanwhile, ‘I Be Loving Me Some Of You’ assembles a bricolage of Ethio-jazz from synth jitters and wonky beats.
AudiobooksAstro ToughHeavenly
The second album by Evangeline Ling and David Wrench’s audiobooks is decidedly more focussed than its predecessor, 2018’s barmy and freewheeling Now! (in a minute), but that doesn’t mean it’s any less thrilling. The interplay between Ling’s shapeshifting vocals – sometimes tender, sometimes terrifying – and Wrench’s dynamic wonky-pop instrumentals that makes them so great has only got tighter; whereas before their music was based around the sparks that emerged when their two styles clashed against each other, Astro Tough sees everything burst in unison into flames. Throughout the record, they’re still firing in a thousand different directions – grizzly dub on ‘The English Manipulator’, blasting melancholy synth-pop on ‘First Move’, gorgeously tender on ‘Farmer’, manic on ‘Lalala It’s The Good Life’ – but always attacking in tandem. Each song is a vastly different part of an extremely satisfying whole, and further proof that they’re two of the most forward-thinking pop artists of their generation.
Eris DrewQuivering In TimeT4T LUV NRG
It’s in lucid shifts between genres – dissolving, looping, spiralling between BPMs and octaves – that Quivering In Time reaches its peak. Powerful, swerving transitions have long been a fixture of Eris Drew’s sets, a style that she’s spent many years perfecting. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, while working a corporate job and training to become a lawyer, she cultivated a taste for breaks, garage and bassline, going against the mainstream penchant for tacky house and the hegemony of smooth mixing. Quivering In Time is a testament to these pivotal years, fuelled by precious memories and past experiences. Yet the album as a whole is far from nostalgic.
Eimear Reidy Natalia BeylisWhose Woods These AreSelf-Released
The day after I got my jab I felt a bit washed out; nothing serious, but enough to make me shrink from any, well, serious listening. This album was a salve, it got me out of bed into clothes and out of the house for a walk. Natalia Beylis picks out simple piano and organ lines, an easy fluency that caresses the resonant warmth of Eimear Reidy’s cello running breathy and low. These three tracks are about trees, prompted by Robert Frost’s ‘Whose Woods These Are’, which moved into the public domain this year. Beylis and Reidy imagine a utopia where the trees go public domain (imagining the disintegration of land ownership by proxy). There is much space to breathe here and those who crave more might be similarly settled by hearing the seasons unfurl in the monthly sessions Laura Cannell and cellist Kate Ellis are recording and releasing throughout this year.
Black MidiCavalcadeRough Trade
David Lynch likened creative ideas to fishing – you wait and when they start biting, it’s showtime. Keep in the shallow waters and you’ll catch the small ones. But “down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” Creatively sincere, their instincts radically open, black midi pack a bucketful of pretty big catches on Cavalcade. The concept revolves around a series of third person narratives where each tells their oddly allegorical story in a procession. Each track is a universe of its own, doing what art should do: using its own virtual space as an experimental testing ground to try those limits of taboo and impossibility that remain limited IRL.
