Your latest round-up of the very best in new music is as diverse as they come, with tQ’s staffers picking out everything from chest-rattling dub to elegant minimal folk, from shimmering pop to expulsions of gothic gloom.
Everything you’ll find below, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking artists, regular deep-dive essays, a monthly podcast, specially-curated ‘Organic Intelligence’ guides to under-the-radar international sub-genres, and more.
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Patrick Clarke
ALBUMS
Tristwch y FenywodTristwch y FenywodNight School
On my way to All Tomorrow’s Parties Festival 2016 in Prestatyn, I remember looking at Welsh names on the train platforms as if they were from Tolkien tales. It fascinated me, but I couldn’t read it and didn’t even try because it would break my tongue. But when I first heard Tristwch Y Fenywod (featuring the members of Guttersnipe, Hawthonn, and Slaylor Moon) crossing language and aesthetic barriers, I dived into their music immediately. On the one hand, they sing exclusively in Welsh, but they leave the oral and instrumental tradition behind and do not play a piece of folk music. It sounds ancient sometimes but is modern; the point is not studio-advanced production but its simplicity. Its sticking point is language – it makes the story come alive.
SmoteA Grand StreamRocket Recordings
The six, thickly layered longform jams that make up A Grand Stream often dwell in that grey area between having begun to fall and having fallen. Which is to say, though the music is obviously durational – or perhaps intended to be endured – it never quite feels like a succession of seconds, one after another, amounting to minutes. At times, it can feel like that infinitesimally brief moment I mentioned above – neither a start nor an end – stretched forever, poised mid-air, until overlaid upon itself again and again like temporal ribbon candy. But inevitably, that permanence is illusory, reality kicks in, and down you go. Still, there’s a weird ecstasy in that. In the knowing and in the collision with the ground itself. Openers ‘Sitting Stone Pt.1’ and ‘Sitting Stone Pt. 2’ are like this, functioning in much the same way as doom metal. Certainly, they’re equally acquainted with low end – Smote just has more fiddles and flutes. Anyhow, here, as in doom, the riff is the thing. You can sense it coming. The riff is the floor, and it’s just a matter of when it hits you in the face. Then, it hits you again and again and again. You never quite get to the point where you’re lying prone on deep shag.
Ghost DubsDamagedPressure
Early in the twentieth century, the Italian Futurists envisioned music that mimicked the sounds of war. Early Industrial peddlers Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire reflected the cacophony of assembly lines and machinery onto braying audiences. With manufacturing and industry a vanishing prospect in the Western world, the emptied, oxidising warehouses and steel carcasses stand as lonely monuments to decaying ideas. In their midst, Ghost Dubs utilises the low-end workouts of King Tubby, Raime’s spatiotemporal acumen, and the industrial tinkering of Missing Brazilians to haunting effect.
Various ArtistsSoundsystems At Notting Hill Carnival, 1984-1988Death Is Not The End
Nearly an hour of decently preserved recordings of the decade’s premier UK sounds – also including Saxon, Java Nuclear Power and Volcano Express – it captures a fertile, transitional time in the culture where digital dancehall and hip-hop were exerting their influence on this music (and Notting Hill Carnival more broadly). Indeed, we hear a sizeable excerpt of Java Nuclear from 1986 which is basically a bunch of rappers with occasional recourse to toasting; on the other hand, they got Cutty Ranks as a special guest the following year, one of a new wave of hypeworthy deejays bubbling up. Carnival and other such blowouts are good arenas to remind your audience of the real you, away from records with a little too much mid-80s polish: compare Tippa Irie’s vocal on this tape, as he piles through ‘Football Hooligan’, to the album version. It also doesn’t have the bit where he blames the Bradford City stadium fire of 1985 on soccer violence, so that’s a bonus.
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, The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined builds on the composer’s prior work by continuing to showcase wafting music that feels like a refraction and reflection of the past.
Melt-Banana3+5A-ZAP
After hanging their shoes up for almost ten years, Melt-Banana are finally back, this time with an album that’s definitive of their bizarre, yet charasmatic ideas. Throughout the tracklist, the band filter through various genres – more than we’ve seen them experiment with before as each track keeps you guessing. 3+5 see’s the duo present listeners with a fresh take on heavy music as they double down on experimental sounds and pay a nod to their Japanese culture through the subcultures of anime and gaming. A project with little boundaries, 3+5 stands on its own two feet as a concoction of hyperactive releases weaving in disco, electronica, cyberpunk, metal and more.
M.HaiuxSummer Nights And Still WaterSelf-Released
They say familiarity breeds contempt, but I don’t think that’s true, really. Especially when it comes to folk music. Folk music needs to be conversant with its ancestors, chatty even. The sprightly buoyancy of ‘The Wild Reality’ had me practically running to the basement to dig out our Fahey, then rushing back upstairs to put on ‘Sligo River Blues’. Not out of any overt similarity necessarily, but because these recordings needed to speak to one another – were speaking to one another. Now, I’m not saying ‘The Wild Reality’ has the staying power of ‘Sligo River Blues’ – only time will tell on that front – but what I am saying is that it converses with its forebear beautifully, fluently. Similarly, there’s a moment right near the end of ‘River Ribble’ that calls out to Richard Dawson so loudly that it can’t be anything but intentional. Here, though, the implicit threat of violence that permeates so much of Dawson’s work is gone. In its place is a joyful ease, a full-bloom kindness, a gentleness that characterises the bulk of Summer Nights And Still Waters. There is, at times, a sort of bittersweetness, and a certain kind of drama, but it possesses the soft magic of the quotidian, like pulling creeping Charlie and bindweed from the garden.
Hamish HawkA Firmer HandSO Recordings
This is a record that rips into masculinity in a way that’s been curiously absent from male artists of late. Hawk’s songwriting, sometimes arch and frequently ribald, reminds me of Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming from the dearly lamented Wild Beasts – there’s a similar pleasure in the double-entendre, the aside, a delight in the waspish mess of love and lust. Whether a heterosexual songwriter could write like this in the current climate is an argument for another time, but Hawk’s determination to go into the thorny side of ourselves here feels thrilling. As he put it in a recent interview with Loverboy magazine, A Firmer Hand is the sound of him exploring an “erotic heart, a lustful side, a desiring side, which by its very nature can be more animalistic, can be uglier, not violent exactly, but it’s not pure and smiley.”
TRACKS
The Bug‘Buried (Your Life Is Short’ / ‘Bodied (Send For The Hearse)’Relapse
These two twin cuts from The Bug’s new album Machine find Kevin Richard Martin firing on every cylinder. Both are tar-thick and osmium-heavy, ‘Buried (Your Life Is Short)’ unspooling slowly and deliberately, while ‘Bodied (Send For The Hearse)’ plunges into depths most producers could only dream of.
Liv.e‘Mashed Feelings / $$$$ $’Self-Released
Texan singer-songwriter-producer Liv.e is back with a deeply woozy banger that sounds like your neighbours are having quite the party and you’re not invited. I’m reminded of Slava Tsukerman, Clive Smith and Brenda I. Hutchinson’s music for Liquid Sky, only angrier and lairier.
Frankie Archer‘Barbara Allen’Self-Released
Frankie Archer stands apart in the current swathe of young folk musicians for the extent to which she dives headfirst into the capabilities of innovative instrumentation. After a sublimely gothic rendition of ‘Lovely Joan’ earlier this year comes a new electronic take on ‘Barbara Allen’ – understated and moody, and yet utterly hypnotic.
Shovel Dance Collective‘The Merry Golden Tree’American Dreams
The first taste of Shovel Dance Collective’s long-awaited debut studio LP (although it follows a slew of releases based on field recordings, offcuts and standalone tracks) will be familiar to those who have seen the band’s extraordinary live performances. For those that haven’t, ‘The Merry Golden Tree’ shimmers with just as much beauty on record as it does on stage.
