15-07-2018 10:19 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX [from the recent past]

L i t h i c s

15-07-2018 10:19 alter:MiX # 33 alter tracks in PRSNT_PRFCT_MiX [from the recent past] # Lithics, Wand, Angel Olsen, The Heliocentrics, Gwenno Saunders, Jo Passed, L'Orange, Warmduscher, Walking Papers, Boss Hog, Esperanza Spalding, David Bowie

M U S I C

pres_perf_mix # The player always plays the latest playlist tracks. / A lejátszó mindig a legújabb playlist számait játssza. 

LISTEN THE PLAYLIST ON DEEZER.COM

Mating Surfaces is the second full length release, and first for Kill Rock Stars, as well as a couple of EPs from Portland, OR band Lithics. The band like to keep a little bit of a mystery to themselves as they have very little online presence outside of some local independent articles, and that carries over to the music as well.
Lithics
Excuse Generator 2:18
Boyce 5:02
from Mating Surfaces 2018
Mating Surfaces is the second full length release, and first for Kill Rock Stars, as well as a couple of EPs from Portland, OR band Lithics. The band like to keep a little bit of a mystery to themselves as they have very little online presence outside of some local independent articles, and that carries over to the music as well. There are many shifts and turns that can happen at the drop of a hat and every once in while vocalist/guitarist Aubrey Hornor’s usually detached vocals are sprinkled with emotions. There are some touches of some classic post-punk influencers like early Fall and Sonic Youth, but more-so in the sense of some fearless and wild abandonment in the name of experimentation...  Mating Surfaces is a record that is filled with tension and walks on the border of full on breakdown that it never really succumbs to until it’s fitting ending.

Los Angeles-based garage psych quartet championed by Ty Segall.  When the Los Angeles group Wand formed in 2013, they played a wickedly spooky brand of psychedelic garage rock tinged with heavy metal. Over the course of three albums recorded in a couple years, the band's leader Cory Hanson wielded full control over their claustrophobic sound. The band's lineup changed along the way and Hanson loosened his grip on their sonic boundaries, allowing the new bandmembers more say in their newly classic rock- and modern pop-influenced approach.
Wand
Perfume 7:29
Pure Romance 3:37
from Perfume 2018
After an album that saw Wand shifting from Cory Hanson's project where he called all the shots to a fully fledged band, consequently losing some of the claustrophobic brilliance of earlier work, the 2018 EP Perfume is another democratic effort that suffers the same fate. While the seven songs included aren't exactly bad, they just lack the attention to detail and spooky outsider psych feel of Wand when it was only Hanson pulling the strings...

St. Louis native whose intimate indie folk bridges classic country crooning and stylized garage rock.  Raised in St. Louis, Missouri and later relocating to Chicago, Illinois, indie folk singer/songwriter Angel Olsen began performing in St. Louis coffee shops in her teenage years, eventually branching out and tapping into a network of like-minded artists.
Angel Olsen
Fly on Your Wall (Angel Olsen) 3:38
Sweet Dreams (Angel Olsen) 3:11
Special (Angel Olsen) 7:21
from Phases 2017
Arriving a year after her Top 50 album My Woman, 2017's Phases compiles rarities spanning Angel Olsen's prior output, including early demos, stand-alone singles, and unreleased material from the My Woman recording sessions. Having made a gradual but marked shift in her sound during that time, it offers tracks representing the sparer, country-inflected lo-fi of her earliest work as well as the full-band retro rock present on My Woman... While likely of interest mostly to dedicated fans due to the eclectic nature of the recordings, it may also pique the curiosity of those less familiar with Olsen's growing, distinctive catalog.

Eclectic U.K.-based ensemble blending influences such as hip-hop, jazz, soundtracks, Ethiopian funk, outré electronics, and more.  Hailing from the United Kingdom, the youth-oriented ensemble the Heliocentrics are hard to pigeonhole, though some have dubbed them a contemporary acid jazz band. Led by drummer Malcolm Catto, the band straddles hip-hop, funk, modern creative jazz, soundtracks, library music, psychedelic electronica, and world musics.
The Heliocentrics
Visions of Himself 1:37
The Pit 5:26
Night and Day 4:02
from From the Deep 2016
On their 2016 release From the Deep, eclectic British rare groove enthusiasts the Heliocentrics take a dip through their archives, unearthing a multitude of tracks cut at their former recording home base, Quatermass Studios. As with most of their recordings, however, these outer-dimensional transmissions could have been beamed from seemingly any time in the past, present, or future. The band's heavy, spacy grooves resist easy categorization, laying down heavy, fluid drum patterns and filling them with cosmic synth squiggles, dubby echo, and the occasional squawking horns...

Once a member of the girl group-loving Pipettes, the Welsh singer/musician embarked on a career as an electronic pop artist after leaving the group.  
Gwenno
Chwyldro (Gwenno Saunders) 5:18
Sisial Y Môr (Gwenno Saunders) 5:41
from Y Dydd Olaf 2015
Gwenno Saunders used to be best known as one of the Pipettes, and if she had vanished after they broke up, she would still have something really cool on her CV. With the release of her first solo album, Y Dydd Olaf, Gwenno (as she's now known) makes a name for herself outside of the group in a big way. The record was inspired by the 1976 sci-fi novel House of the Twilight, is sung entirely in Welsh except for one song sung in Cornish, and hits a sweet spot between the exotic electronic pulse of Broadcast, the candy-sweet pop hooks of Stereolab, and the experimentalism of classic electronic pioneers like Delia Derbyshire...

Dreamy but aggressive guitar-based indie pop from Vancouver, led by guitarist and songwriter Jo Hirabayashi.
Jo Passed
In 4:28
Lego my Ego 4:27
from Out 2016
The nicest thing anyone has ever – ever – said to Jo Hirabayashi, frontman of Jo Passed, is that his band’s debut album sounds like “fucked-up Beatles”. Titled Their Prime, the LP does sound like fucked-up Beatles. It sounds like, somewhere across an ‘80s universe, Lennon and McCartney discovered Can and Neu!, and maybe a little Sonic Youth and XTC along the way. Opening with “Left,” it demonstrates that timeless knack for dreamy melodies – chord progressions that sound like they were created in a land far far away. Lyrically, however, it’s imbued with a philosophical longing for answers to questions that have resurfaced for the first time since the explosion of counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (SubPop)

Eccentric beatmaker whose nostalgic productions heavily sample early jazz records and vintage radio broadcasts. 
L'Orange
Third Person 2:20
Suspension 2:44
Broken Wand Ceremony 2:37
from The Ordinary Man 2017
On his 2017 full-length The Ordinary Man, anonymous Nashville-based beatmaker L'Orange plays up his image as a man of mystery by making an album about magic itself. As with the majority of his work, he builds choppy beat collages out of samples from dusty old records and vintage radio broadcasts, with a fondness for classic jazz, soul, and blues. This time out, there's more of an emphasis on eerie pianos and audio hocus-pocus, particularly in the way L'Orange chops up vocals, which constantly seem to be falling through trap doors...

London-based rock & roll band featuring members of Fat White Family, Insecure Men, and Paranoid London. 
Warmduscher
Bright Lights (Dan Carey / Craig Higgins) 1:10
Big Wilma (Saul Adamczewski / Jack Everett / Craig Higgins / Ben Romans-Hopcraft / Quinn Whalley) 2:05
The Sweet Smell of Florida (Saul Adamczewski / Jack Everett / Craig Higgins / Ben Romans-Hopcraft / Quinn Whalley) 4:15
from Whale City 2018
There's a lot about Warmduscher's music that qualifies it as good-time rock & roll (albeit of a distinctly deviant variety), but there's a whole lot more going on in Whale City. Their weirdly wild 2015 debut, Khaki Tears, set them apart from any standardized classification, and with the follow-up, they certainly continue to plow a furrow as outliers...

Seattle-based hard rockers featuring members of the Missionary Position and Duff McKagan. Seattle-based quartet Walking Papers make no-nonsense, guitar-heavy rock & roll. 
Walking Papers
My Luck Pushed Back (Jeff Angel / Walking Papers) 3:54
Red & White (Jeff Angel / Walking Papers) 5:46
This Is How It Ends (Jeff Angel / Walking Papers) 6:29
from WP2 2018
Packed with enough dirty guitar riffs to fill a smoky roadside bar, Walking Papers' second album, WP2, is another dose of no-nonsense rock & roll from the Seattle-based group. Recorded in early 2015 -- shortly after wrapping up touring behind their self-titled debut -- WP2 arrived three years later in 2018, due to bassist Duff McKagan's obligations with his other band, Guns N' Roses. Improving upon their first with polished production and a livelier vigor, WP2 is blues-drenched rock that fans of Queens of the Stone Age and Screaming Trees should enjoy. Frontman Jeff Angell's voice carries the project, his gritty delivery reminiscent of Bono filtered through the murk of Mark Lanegan...

Raw and raucous blues-punk ensemble fronted by the husband-and-wife team of Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez.  All-star N.Y.C. blues-punk combo Boss Hog was helmed by the husband-and-wife team of singer Cristina Martinez and singer/guitarist Jon Spencer, who'd previously teamed up in the legendary cult band Pussy Galore.
Boss Hog
Billy (Boss Hog) 3:47
Signal (Boss Hog) 2:54
Sunday Routine (Boss Hog) 3:49
from Brood X 2017
Boss Hog have always been a band content to work on a time-line that would puzzle most bands, perfectly willing to go five years between releases as they attended to their other projects. But 2017's Brood X arrives over 16 years after their last proper album, 2000's Whiteout, as Cristina Martinez sets aside her duties as a working mom and Jon Spencer takes some downtime from his Blues Explosion. If Boss Hog sound a bit different than they did at the dawn of the 21st century, that's to be expected, but Brood X (and the 2016 companion EP Brood Star) reveals that they've changed very little conceptually; their dirty mixture of punkified blues, raw funk, and stoned but committed show band swagger is a bit less swampy, but it will still make you feel good and greasy after a few spins...

Singer and instrumentalist Esperanza Spalding established herself as a wildly flourishing talent in the '00s.  Hailed as a prodigy on the acoustic double bass within months of first touching the instrument as a 15-year-old, Esperanza Spalding has emerged as a fine jazz bassist, but has also distinguished herself playing blues, funk, hip-hop, pop fusion, and Brazilian and Afro-Cuban styles as well.
Esperanza Spalding
Good Lava (Esperanza Spalding) 3:37
Judas (Esperanza Spalding) 4:09
Funk the Fear (Esperanza Spalding) 5:04
from Emily's D+Evolution 2016
On previous albums, Grammy-winning bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding dived into jazz standards, Brazilian rhythms, and sophisticated, harmonically nuanced R&B. But with her 2016 album, Emily's D+Evolution, she takes an entirely different approach. A concept album revolving around a central character named Emily (Spalding's middle name), Emily's D+Evolution is not a jazz album -- though jazz does inform much of the music here. Instead, Spalding -- who also co-produced the album alongside legendary producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie) -- builds the release largely around angular, electric guitar-rich prog rock, kinetic, rhythmically rich jazz fusion, and lyrically poetic pop. Of course, Spalding's version of pop is never predictable, always harmonically inventive, and frequently imbued with as many improvisational moments as possible within the boundaries of a given song. But relative to her previous releases, this is still a significant shift. Helping to bring Emily's D+Evolution to life is a band Spalding put together specifically for this project, including guitarist Matthew Stevens, drummer Karriem Riggins, keyboardist Corey King, and others. Conceptually, the character of Emily represents Spalding as a young girl, and works as a conduit through which she explores and unpacks complex ideas about life, love, sex, race, education, and the creative process. While it would be reductive to call Emily's D+Evolution a retro album, Spalding's harmonic and melodic content and production aesthetics definitely have a '70s quality...

The mercurial music icon widely considered the original pop chameleon and figurehead for countless musical movements.  The cliché about David Bowie is that he was a musical chameleon, adapting himself according to fashion and trends. 
David Bowie
Blackstar (David Bowie) 9:57
Lazarus (David Bowie) 6:22
Sue (Or in a Season of Crime) (Paul Bateman / Bob Bharma / David Bowie / Maria Schneider) 4:40
Girl Loves Me (David Bowie) 4:51
from Blackstar 2016
It's difficult to separate 2016's Blackstar from The Next Day, the album David Bowie released with little warning in 2013. Arriving after a ten-year drought, The Next Day pulsated with the shock of the new -- as Bowie's first album of new material in a decade, how could it not? -- but ultimately it was grounded in history, something its cover made plain in its remix of Heroes artwork....  To that end, Bowie recruited saxophonist Donny McCaslin and several of his New York cohorts to provide the instrumentation (and drafted disciple James Murphy to contribute percussion on a pair of cuts), a cast that suggests Blackstar goes a bit farther out than it actually does. Cannily front-loaded with its complicated cuts (songs that were not coincidentally also released as teaser singles), Blackstar starts at the fringe and works its way back toward familiar ground, ending with a trio of pop songs dressed in fancy electronics. These don't erase the heaviness of the opening quartet but such a sequencing suggests Blackstar is difficult when the main pleasure of the record is how utterly at ease it all feels: Bowie's joy in emphasizing the art in art-pop is palpable and its elegant, unhurried march resonates deeply.