28/11/2021
21/11/2021
20/11/2021
Yasmin Williams – Urban Driftwood (2021 album)- Sunshowers l Yasmin Williams
On her second album, the 24-year-old Virginia guitarist brings kalimba, kora and djembe into her effervescent finger-picked style, her dexterity illuminating a tapestry of moods. Sunshowers cascades beautifully, as intricate as a curtain of wisteria; the overtones on the spry Dragonfly cast a transfixing spell; on Jarabi, Williams’ nuanced playing blurs into a gorgeous stream. In contrast, Swift Breeze takes on a darker, racing hue, uncannily evoking Albini-era PJ Harvey. A thoughtful, tradition-defying joy. LS
Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness(2021 album) - The Rain
Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness 2021
An understated, overlooked delight, Will Stratton’s sixth album is beautifully written, beautifully played, and beautifully arranged, its gorgeous, cosseting sound – deft fingerpicked guitar bearing the influence of Nick Drake – masking a series of deeply uneasy songs in which even the most personal moments feel tainted by paranoia brought on by global events. AP
Fiver – Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition(2021 album)- Yeah But Uhhh Hey
Fiver – Fiver with the Atlantic School of Spontaneous Composition 2021
Fiver is one of many projects from Toronto’s Simone Schmidt, joined on this beautiful, spacious record exploring the frontier between country and improv by players who recently backed Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Schmidt’s voice is deep, impasto-textured and enveloping, singing of human solidarity during precarious times; the brushed drums are brisk and amiable, the pedal steel twinkling, a tense, overdriven mid-section foray soothingly resolved. LS
Divide and Dissolve - We Are Really Worried About You 2021
Divide and Dissolve – Gas Lit, 2021
You might compare this sludgy Australian duo to Sleep or Earth for their shared deep-fried undertow, but Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill – respectively of Black Cherokee and Māori heritage – prefer to see their supreme heaviness as the legacy of their Indigenous ancestors. Reed plays sax and guitar, which seethe and rear throughout their third album (produced by Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson), while Nehill’s drums and effects summon stately hauteur and roiling fury. It’s face-toasting stuff, evocative of standing that bit too close to a bonfire to marvel at its fiery dynamics. LS
Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt - of Sleep 2021
Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt – Made Out of Sound
A triumph of Covid-era remote working, with Orcutt improvising guitar lines over drum recordings that Corsano emailed to him. Their previous in-person collaborations have been combustibly high-energy – here the mood softens and cools, but still has their impetuous jazz and blues rhythms, and the air-saturating climaxes are astoundingly beautiful. BBT
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Shattered Ground (Lyric Video)
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – Carnage 2021
A triumph of impossibly rich songwriting that ranks close to its career-best predecessor Ghosteen, Carnage finds Cave ruminating on his youth and the upheavals of 2020 – “when everything is ordinary until it’s not” – while Ellis provides a dense, shifting, vividly alive musical backdrop of loops, electronics and strings. AP
Erika de Casier - Insult Me
2021..........Y2K style is unavoidably resurgent, and while you might prefer that low-rise jeans, flip-phone fetishism and pop-punk remained in the past, Portuguese-born, Denmark-raised producer Erika de Casier’s affinity for the era’s Timbaland/Darkchild nexus of R&B is a welcome throwback. Her second album (and first for 4AD) echoes its uncanny glimmer of sophistication, a fitting contrast to the trash men she excoriates with poise and sly humour. LS
The Body - "A Pain of Knowing" (Official Music Video)
2021.......There’s a truly apocalyptic mood on the latest LP by the Rhode Island duo, their heavily distorted tracks evoking the sound of falling masonry or the sudden arrival of a locomotive through your front window. By screaming at a distance from the mic, Chip King’s vocals are carried off in the melee – resonating like a siren deep inside one’s adrenal glands, notes of pure animal fear. BBT
Black Country, New Road - 'Track X' (Official Video)
2021. best album Part of the current fecund strain of British art-prog alongside Black Midi and Squid, BCNR married klezmer, garage rock and Tortoise-y jazz in a highly original melange. But it’s the lyricism, and its delivery by Isaac Wood,
Arooj Aftab - Mohabbat
2021.........Following her 2015 debut Bird Under Water, Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab intended to make a more danceable second album. Then came the unexpected death of her brother, bringing new meaning to the Vulture Prince concept she had taken as her working title. Here, she reimagines Urdu ghazals over shuddering violin and tense harp, the production sombre, patient and heavily affecting – especially as a space for grief after a year of unfathomable loss.
19/11/2021
17/11/2021
LAUREL HALO - Like an L
Laurel Halo – Dust (2017)
Some of Dust sounds like imitations of pop songs. Some of Dust sounds like imitations of IDM songs. Some of Dust sounds like imitations of nu-jazz songs. Taken as a whole, Dust sounds like nothing else
Paragons - Hope For Tomorrow 2021
over the course of a dozen-plus albums, the Ben Jones-led collective Constant Smiles have navigated ambient/shoegaze experiments with 2020’s Control, droney chamber pop with 2019’s John Waters, and cold-wave atmospherics a la Black Marble and Drab Majesty with 2018’s Lost.
Having self-released many of their projects, the band now offer Paragons under the auspices of Brooklyn-based Sacred Bones
14/11/2021
13/11/2021
Jandek - Upon the Grandeur
"I was 17 when somebody called me 'the ambient late '00s Jandek', based solely on the absurd volume of dissonant, broken-sounding amateur soundscapes I was trying to create out of bedroom software that only 2009 home recording technology could offer. Ever since that day, and the subsequent download of Chair Beside a Window that came with it, I've eaten up whatever I can of this stunner's output. Inherently broken sounding, both wildly articulate while linguistically vague, join this man as he strums his guitar and vocalizes whatever might be on his mind. Any listener lucky enough to discover this outsider is in for the rawest musical experience of their life."
Discussions of Jandek rarely begin with the man's music, as unique as that is. The enigma, the riddle, the mystery, is what normally comes first. Very few artists have created such a catalogue of music, over 40 albums so far, whilst revealing so little about themselves.
The few known facts about Jandek are as follows: His albums contain no information within the packaging. The cover picture is normally of the man himself, or of a street or house, even occasionally giving us a glimpse of the inside of the house. No artist or album title ever appears on the front. The back cover will have the title, tracklist and track times, plus an address for the PO box of the record label Corwood Industries. It is presumed the man behind Jandek is Sterling R. Smith, because that is the name written on the back of cheques which are returned with your order from that PO Box. He will not do interviews or discuss his music in any way; the only journalists to have spoken with Jandek are "Outsider Music" compiler Irwin Chusid, Byron Coley of Spin magazine, and Katy Vine, who tracked him down to his house, only to be refused any discussion of his music. Until very recently, he never, ever played live.
The music itself is what's important though, and that all began in 1978, with the release of the dark and foreboding Ready for the House. Originally released under the name The Units, it was the work of one man. A strange, desolate acoustic blues album, guitar tuning and chords were seemingly thrown out of the window, this was the sound of one man strumming and clanging almost randomly at his instrument, whilst mournfully croaking out abstract stream-of-consciousness tales. His next album, Six and Six was released a full three years later.
One would say that nothing was heard from him for three years, but in reality, few would hear of him at all for many years to come, despite his seemingly unending stream of releases from then on. In the sleeve notes to Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, Irwin Chusid likened Jandek's (then) 28 albums to the sound of 28 trees falling in the forest. There was no-one to hear them, he wasn't interested in publicising them, but still they kept on coming. Changes in style came about: there have been electric albums, albums heavily featuring piano, even three spoken word albums. Some albums feature uncredited other musicians, "Eddie" on guitar, "John" on drums, "Nancy" on vocals, all only mentioned either in track titles, or within the track themselves. Rarely have conventional chords, singing, or even tunings been used on any of his releases.
The world kept on turning, Jandek kept on releasing new albums, all seemed normal. Until 2004, when Jandek performed live for the very first time, 26 years after his debut release. The 2004 Instal festival at Glasgow featured a performance by Jandek (announcing himself as "a representative from Corwood Industries"), backed by Richard Youngs on bass, and Alex Neilson on drums. Although on that occasion he played only on the grounds that he wasn't on the bill, and was unannounced, he seems to have developed a taste for the live arena, playing live twice more in the North of England in 2005. Perhaps, as Jandek enters his later years, he will finally shrug off his recluse tag, and become available to his public.
07/11/2021
06/11/2021
DEAN BLUNT -BLOW
Dean Blunt turns art pop on its head on this release. Whereas most art pop is maximalist, uses strange instrument sounds/textures, is heavily reliant on composition, and has "higher" lyrical material, Dean does all the opposite on this release. There's lots of minimalism in the art direction of this album, Dean uses much more traditional instrument sounds than on much of his other music, many of the songs are based heavily on samples and others lean more heavily on repetitive grooves and drum machines, and he writes some urban, melancholic, yet accessible lyrics that aren't very abstract. The album goes through a few different sounds and yet it all feels cohesive. One of Dean's finer albums.
01/11/2021
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