Music. Life. Death. It doesn't matter. There will always be music churned out for the masses. Someone said to me this week, it's important to not leave your mark on the world as you pass through it. So, with this high summer selection of releases, the artists are working hard to meet that mantra.
SINGLES
BECK & PHOENIX - Odyssey (Fonograph Records)
by Ogglypoogly
There are adults in the world who’ve had time to be born, grow up, settle down and be approaching the oddly awkward age of Thirty in the span of decades for which I’ve been more than a little bit enraptured by Beck. Managing to have a distinctive sound whilst being something of a “genre spanner” is no mean feat. I’ve tried to have the conversation in which I list a Beck song I can’t enjoy or find some merit and found myself beset with some kind of mutism. This collaboration with Phoenix is another addition to the ‘song’s I’ve got immediately excited about and played over, and over, and over again’. This is upbeat Beck, a song of sunshine, wide smiles and dancing. I want to lay in a field of daisies and cry laughing into the summer. Maybe I’m blinded by my own appreciation, or the echo’s of eighties pop that dip into memories of a carefree time, but this song makes me feel lighter.
BABY QUEEN - Dream Girl (Polydor)
by Alan Rider
When this started I thought "here we go, another pudding faced college girl singing a poppy 'girl lusts after boy' song. Yawn!" but it quickly turns that perception on its head as the dream girl in question is the object of Baby Queen's lust, not some empty headed jock. That genuinely caught me out, so worth three hearts just for that. The video is pretty cool too, a proper little same sex teen drama film and worth a look by clicking on the Youtube link below. Go on then.
AMANDA SHIRES AND BOBBIE NELSON - Waltz Across Texas (ATO Records)
by Toon Traveller
HANIA RANI FT. PATRICK WATSON. - Dancing with Ghosts (Gondwana Records)
by Jay Lewis
Hania Rani is full of surprises. After releasing the quietly captivating 'On Giacometti' soundtrack earlier this year, a series of piano-led pieces, reminiscent of Nils Frahm's more introspective moments, her next single was the intoxicating 'Hello' an enticing pop song that ruminated on restlessness and repeated the one-word title over and over. It was intriguingly different.
'Dancing With Ghosts' is a return to more ambient textures. Rani and the Canadian singer/songwriter Patrick Watson share the hushed vocals over the fragile glow of echoey keyboards. A beguiling wooziness, the song (alongside 'Hello') a taster of her forthcoming 'Ghosts' album. The Paris-based video is suitably enthralling as a group of dancers moving unnoticed, ghost-like, through the city's busy streets and weave elegantly around each other. It's rather breathtaking.
OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW - Miles Away (ATO Records)
by Toon Traveller
THE CLIENTELE - Claire's Not Real (Youtube)
by Toon Traveller
BETTY DAVIS - Crashin' From The Passion (Light in the Attic)
by Toon Traveller
Light in the Attic on the label always leads to high expectations, and of course, this correlates. This new lost Betty Davies single comes from the forthcoming remastered collections from the label out on August 25th. I'd heard about Betty Davis, but never consciously heard or remembered her music, so this is a fresh as it gets. Immediately confronted with astonishing 70's street funk, there's a kicking band driving the song, and a sense of hi-energy before it became a club staple. The bass lines are amazing, fast, and furiously funky. A fuzzed wah-wah'd guitar flashes in and out. There are a lot of ideas, synths and hi-pitched vocals. Betty's rasping raw voice matches the music's hard, heavy, beats. This is a super slab of, beat you to the floor funk, with raw, hard as diamond spat out vocals, and just the funkiest horns, backing vocals, just the funkiest everything. “When I created the music, I just did it from my heart and from my soul. I didn’t really think about, ‘Well, who’s gonna like this, who isn’t gonna like it?’ I just created the music.” — Betty Davis
BAD HISTORY MONTH - Breakdown Lane (Julia's War)
by Ancient Champion
Love it. It has everything for me. From the True Delusion EP, due out on July 7th, Breakdown Lane, is as onomatopoetic as it suggests. It writhes with fury with no place to go until it descends over the hard shoulder into a swamp of feedback. I think the label is Julia's War. Find this record, you might not regret it.
THE OXYS - Mr. Horrible (Deadbeat Records)
ZERO s
by Tim London
The thing about punk was you never knew when it was about to fall apart. That’s what made it so thrilling. That and the skinny, unhealthy creatures who played it looked like they would never make it past midnight, let alone twenty-one. Everything that was good about it is missing on this abomination. See, this is what happens when you put sugar on bacon.
CAMP BEDFORD - Our America (CBRS)
by Tim London
Here’s a pledge, to do what’s necessary to change the United States of America, including burning the place down, which the climate probably doesn’t need help with. Strangely hopeful, probably communist, and sweetly sneaky. I can imagine this being sung in a small venue and persuading an extra ten percent of the punters to get up in the morning to go and stand somewhere shouting and hoping the cops have had their coffee. It’s a modern, classic political killer of a tune, all wrapped up in rainbow harmonies.
SMOKING POPES - Don't You Want Me (feat. Sincere Engineer) (smokingpopesmusic)
by Alan Rider
What is the point in these rocky cover versions? This "punchy'' (their words) version of the Human League mega hit only demonstrates that it is a classic song (but not by this band), and is one that we all know inside out anyway and is still being trotted out regularly at various heritage festivals by the Human League themselves if you really want to hear it again. They make a decent fist of it, but its all a pointless exercise in the end.
LOCAL NATIVES - Paradise (Loma Vista)
by Toon Traveller
TIBERIUS B - HHB (Zelig)
ZERO s
by Toon Traveller
THE CRITICALS - Belmont (Fantasy Recordings)
by Alan Rider
It's actually quite depressing just how many of these dull bands there are out there. This is an insipid rock that is so inoffensive it would knock quietly on the door rather than ring the bell and still be waiting politely outside at midnight for you to answer. I want music that pounds drunkenly on the doorbell at 3 am, screams obscenities through the letterbox, and then bungs a half brick through the window before running off.
BARENAKED LADIES - Lovin' Life (WMG)
ZERO s
by Tim London
It’s been a non-starter of a day but, finally, as a burglar alarm feebly grabs for attention three doors down I have a reason to respond to the act of breathing. I know you wondered if it was possible to blend the most brain-dead elements of Europop and that chugging ersatz rock that soundtracks American beer in all its forms. And it is! The lyrics and tune of Opus with all the energy and panache of a Wisconsin farmer suffering piles sat on a tractor planting beet. Thank you Red Necked Ladeez, you didn’t hold back. “...beautiful lyricism...” - Billboard
STORMZY - Longevity Flow (UMG)
by Tim London
Beats… are ten a penny, there are so many. So it’s the wordz that count, the amount of smart in the art and originality in the vicinity. Big up your mum’s rice, that’s a nice thing to do, but there’s too much ‘fuck you’ cos you made more Ps than the poor ordinaries and you boast about flying while the planet is dying and you don’t seem to care that you’re polluting the air. Look, you’re basically a decent chap but, truth, I hate this rap, it saps the good you do for the sake of a couple of crap rhymes. Move with the times.
SMILE - Bending Heretic (XL Recordings)
by Alan Rider
As some of you may well know, Smile are composed of Johnny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, both formerly of Radiohead, along with a drummer who hits things. So it basically sounds just like Radiohead. And I mean just like Radiohead. Not a lot more to say really. I liked Radiohead back in the day, but I've kind of gone off them a bit now as they have hit on a style and tend to stick to it, rather predictably. And this sticks to it, rather predictably.
AC SLATER & BADGER - SCREENSHOTS (FT. MURKAGE DAVE) - Screenshots (Nightbass)
by Tim London
Mr Murkage has a habit of dropping in on the top of a tune as if he’s been chatting to you already for a good five minutes, or picking up a conversation you started three years ago as if the years are seconds. It’s an excellent skill or instinct and it’s a good job he’s not trying to get your passcode cos he would probably be in there right now, sexting your mum and you’d still be blinking. Summer in east London caught like a Summer moth in a glass.
APHEX TWIN - Blackbox Life Recorder 21f (Warp Records)
by Jay Lewis
When my children were much, much younger I used to beckon them with the deep growl of ‘Come to daddy, come to daddy’ when I wanted to get their attention. This was, of course, my poor and comic impersonation of the booming voice on Aphex Twin’s frantically unnerving track of the same name. I have only just played them the actual record and, worst still, showed them the still rather terrifying video by Chris Cunningham. They’re still horrified by it all and probably think much less of me as a result. Maybe I should have introduced them to the music of Aphex Twin with this, skittering drum patterns (why, of course!) over a tender synth soundtrack (think labelmates' Boards of Canada for reference). Midway the track seems to succumb to the cacophonous percussion, but then it eases towards a glorious ambient coda. Enchanting! After a five-year absence, it's great to have Aphex Twin back.
THE HOLY FAMILY - Go Zero Suite Pt II (Rocket Recordings)
by Alan Rider
Now this is more like it. A slowly uncurling and ever so slightly ominous conger eel of a track, improvised for sure, but full of details and interest that keep you hooked in. They describe themselves as "underground-rock-and-beyond shapeshifters" and this Proggy nonsense (in a good way) bears that out. Their previous single 'Bad Travelling' got a well deserved four hearts from me back in May and this one merits the same. This gives a good name to improvised noodling. The album 'Go Zero' is heading this way and I'm dusting off the landing pad for that as we speak.
BEHIND THE FRIDGE - Soup of the Day (Demo)
by Ancient Champion
I can't share this because it comes in an unshareable format, a cassette in a crisp packet set on top of the waiting to be emptied recycling bin. This tells me at least Behind the Fridge are nearby and they know there is an industrial dispute on. If fetching and carrying recycling is industrial. It is. The music. Oh I like this band they are an acoustic riot. Like, imagine if Stewart Lee held a guitar while joking. A little like that.
LPs
CELINE GILLAIN - Mind is Mud (Cortizona)
by Alan Rider
Another boundary-pushing release from Belgian experimental label Cortizone, Mind Is Mud reminds me of an off-the-wall Patti Smith, intoning free association lyrics over a pulsing and ever-morphing electronic backdrop, 'Never Easy' being a standout track here. Celine claims to "Use the voice as a vehicle for ideas. I investigate its percussive and polyphonic potentialities, the possibility to have more than one voice/mouth" and in doing so has come up with something akin to aural sculpture here. This type of material is always challenging, as it pushes against our limited definitions of music as bland entertainment, but Mind Is Mud rises to that challenge and grabs it firmly around the neck, but is surprisingly catchy at the same time.
THE SAXOPHONES - To Be a Cloud (Full Time Hobby)
by Katherine Pargeter
My first encounter with The Saxophones came in 2018 when they recorded their version of 'Just You,' a song that had originally soundtracked a particularly odd moment in David Lynch's extraordinary TV series 'Twin Peaks.' In many ways, it was the perfect introduction to them.
Five years and three albums on, The Saxophones (husband and wife duo of Alexi Erenkov and Alison Alderdice ), continue to fascinate me. There is something unusual, disorientating, something strange about them . Firstly there's the faux-retro sleeve ( golden script on a brown background, like a lost Carpenters' album...but then they're pictured wid swimming together - so maybe not, and is Alison just glaring at us). Beyond the mellow late-night jazz club/lounge bar feel, Alexi will observe 'I wanna make you love me/I wanna be obscene' ('The Mist'.) 'You beg for mercy in my fantasy' ('Hunter'), and the most perplexing 'Freedom never looked so good/So many ways to die, it's hard to choose). It's just, y'know, a little peculiar.
Throughout the album, Alexi maintains his Lee Hazlewood (via Bill Callahan with a dash of Scott Walker) like croon, so it's no shock when the marvelous closer 'Desert Flower' has a very 'Nancy and Lee' feel. And then there's the brilliantly stilted video, like a lost piece of old home video footage. Oh, it's just so 'Twin Peaks' again. I'm certain David Lynch would approve.
Other Materials
L7 - Fast and Frightening and other kick ass stuff (Sub Pop)
by Alan Rider
Are L7 still going? Apparently, they never stopped and have just announced a new US tour kicking off in Sept (or 'Fall' if you are a Yank). L7 may be throwbacks to the days when a female rock band was a novelty, but much though I'd like to make a sarky know-it-all dismissal along those lines, these are great. That's my artistic credibility shot.
Essential Information
Main image L7
