ALTER.NATiON
Ryley Walker, Anderson .Paak, Holly Golightly, The Good the Bad & the Queen, The Sufis, The Liminanas, Axis: Sova, Calexico, Josephine Foster, Tomorrows Tulips, Hen Ogledd, Public Memory
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17-11-2018
“I hate the idea you can’t like something because it’s popular. I’ve been accused of being a record nerd or snob, so I think this is kind of a rallying cry against that: sort of disarming that taboo of hating something because it’s not great. And I really think Dave Matthews is great. It comes out of a total place of love. It’s funny; I love all sorts of music, and I pride myself on having this vast library and knowledge in my head of music, but I haven’t been listening to a lot of music outside of Dave Matthews.”
...On Oxnard, Paak’s follow-up to his 2016 breakthrough Malibu, the rapping, singing, and drumming polymath approaches funk from a rap perspective. When Paak allows himself to be instinctive and loose, Oxnard blends these influences with a comforting ease. Cloaked in natty threads and a horndog ladies-man persona, he favors bubbling bass, silky textures, and sunset timbres, forever somewhere between Snoop Dogg’s “G’z Up, Hoes Down” and Bootsy Collins’ “I’d Rather Be With You.”...
HOLLY GOLIGHTLY IS BACK… With her first full band album since 2015’s Slowtown Now!
Do The Get Along features 12 songs performed by the perfect Holly Golightly band line-up of Bruce Brand (drums), Matt Radford (double bass), Ed Deegan (guitar) and Bradley Burgess (guitar)... It’s a template that she’s honed over the course of 12 solo albums, along the way impressing celebrity fans such as Jim Jarmusch (Holly’s track ‘Tell Me Now So I Know’ featured as the main title theme in his Broken Flowers movie), and most notably Jack White who duetted with Holly on ‘It’s True That We Love One Another’, the final track on the classic White Stripes album Elephant... Holly’s been busy over the last decade as half of blues/Americana duo Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs (The Brokeoffs being multi-instrumentalist Lawyer Dave). The pair have released nine well-received albums, and undertaken many tours on both sides of the Atlantic.
According to the official bumf accompanying the second album from Damon Albarn’s multigenerational supergroup, Merrie Land is “a beautiful and hopeful paean to the England of today”. Drummer Tony Allen told the Guardian last week that it’s an album people can dance to. Both sentiments might surprise those picking up the record: the cover features an image of a terrified Michael Redgrave in Dead of Night, a film in which he plays a ventriloquist taken over by his dummy, and the musical mood of much of the album is a dense, unsettled fug: slightly paranoid, rather unfocused...
After recording two really good albums of note-perfect garage psych (2012's Sufis and 2013's Inventions), Nashville duo the Sufis decided to retreat behind the scenes to produce and engineer acts like Paperhead and Universal Friend. After a move to Brooklyn, where they ended up studying with LaMonte Young, the duo (Calvin Laporte and Evan Smith) decided to chuck out the paisley, 12-string guitars, and fuzztone pedals in favor of a wider range of influences and sounds on their third album, 2018's After Hours. Instead of coming off like a modern-day take on the Monkees, this time out the band aims for something less colorful and more nocturnal. To that end, they de-emphasize guitars, bring in vintage synthesizers, and pitch the lead vocals down to a breathy whisper, while writing songs more suited to a long lie-down than a jangling dance party..
Following the release of their critically acclaimed album Shadow People (produced by Anton Newcombe) (BEC 5543242/BEC 5543243, 2018), French psych rock band The Limiñanas come back with I've Got Trouble In Mind Vol. 2: 7" And Rare Stuff 2015/2018, the second volume of their I've Got Trouble In Mind series. This new release, the first double vinyl released by the band, compiles 17 B-sides, rarities and other unheard tracks recorded from 2015 to 2018, including covers of "La Cavalerie" from French singer Julien Clerc, "Russian Roulette" from Lords Of The New Church, "Angels And Devils" from Echo And The Bunnymen, and (more surprisingly) the holiday song "Silent Night". 3-panel digisleeve with 12-page poster booklet.
The fourth album from Brett Sova's Axis: Sova project is the first to be recorded by a full-band lineup rounded out by guitarist Tim Kaiser and bassist Jeremy Freeze. Cut live to tape by the trio, the album is more focused and direct than past efforts, with a cleaner, scrubbed-up sound (the Stones-riffing title is no joke) and a greater presence of hooks... Uptempo tunes like "New Disguise" and "Crystal Predictor" approach power pop, but the guitars are wild and fuzzy enough to betray psych roots, particularly during solos.
Calexico spent the 2010s venturing from their Tucson home to make albums such as their New Orleans love letter Algiers and their ambitious trip to Mexico City, Edge of the Sun. For The Thread That Keeps Us, they decamped to the Northern California coast and recorded in a studio they nicknamed the Phantom Ship -- another change of scenery that allowed them to cast their sounds and songwriting wider than ever... and the restless percussion and squalling trumpets of "Another Space" make it one of the band's most rewarding experiments.
The umbrella term freak folk has been applied to many artists over the years with varying degrees of accuracy. In Josephine Foster's case, her music is certainly more esoteric than contemporaries like Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart. Her records have also seen her consistently pegged as an anachronistic artist, but in many respects, her music has never felt timelier.
Faithful Fairy Harmony feels like an antidote to an increasing detachment from each other and the world that has its origins in technology. Even when she's not directly focusing on the natural world, an obscure, bucolic veil hangs over these compositions... Elsewhere, the wayward melodies of "Lord of Love" tap into the psychedelic character of her music, and in addition, "All Pales Next to You" conjures a wooziness that the intoxicating nature of infatuation elicits.
Alex Knost, the leader of Tomorrows Tulips, sounds so sleepy when he works up the enthusiasm to lay down a vocal that he makes J Mascis seem like a cross between Peter Wolf and David Lee Roth. As a consequence, most of their recordings suggest the band is either stoned, bored, bummed out, or some combination thereof, but on their fourth album, 2018's Harnessed to Flesh, they manage to sound a bit more upbeat and engaged than usual, at least by their fatigued standards...
The band Hen Ogledd is named for the ancient Welsh term for northern England, which is where most of its four members are from. Originally rooted in northern folk music, Hen Ogledd has morphed into a weird art pop band that blends references to modern technology with imagery from older magic. Their next album will be called Mogic – a mix of magic and logic. The single is “Tiny Witch Hunter,” a pitch-shifted collage of apparently random scientific and tech terms that leads to a catchy, short chorus that consists solely of the song’s title phrase.
While Public Memory's Robert Toher doesn't quite tear everything down and start over on Demolition, he does make space for new forms of expression on the project's second album. On Wuthering Drum, Toher pared down the dense sonics of his former groups Apse and ERAAS with hypnotic, insular results. This time, his moody electronic collages reach outwards: "The Line"'s ever-expanding electronics introduce the vast scope of Demolition's songs. As on 2017's Veil of Counsel EP, the album's increased clarity gives Toher ample room to play with space and tempos. While Wuthering Drum's linear grooves had a lulling allure, there's no denying that the way "Red Rainbow" shifts from a serpentine crawl to a race through a cavernous nightscape adds excitement to Public Memory's sound...
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| Public Memory / Robert Toher |
Ryley Walker, Anderson .Paak, Holly Golightly, The Good the Bad & the Queen, The Sufis, The Liminanas, Axis: Sova, Calexico, Josephine Foster, Tomorrows Tulips, Hen Ogledd, Public Memory
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