ALTER.NATiON
Sharon Van Etten, Deerhunter, Juliana Hatfield, Steve Gunn, M. Ward, Israel Nash, Joe Jackson, Night Beats, Liz Brasher, Buke and Gase, Lost Under Heaven, Dolphin Midwives
Sharon Van Etten, Deerhunter, Juliana Hatfield, Steve Gunn, M. Ward, Israel Nash, Joe Jackson, Night Beats, Liz Brasher, Buke and Gase, Lost Under Heaven, Dolphin Midwives
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20-01-2019
...From her 2009 debut Because I Was in Love through 2014's Are We There, she mined the tension generated by murmuring instrumentation clashing with her passionate delivery, a balance that proved quietly compelling. Van Etten maintains that sense of drama on Remind Me Tomorrow, her fifth full-length album, but she's radically shifted her presentation. Working with producer John Congleton, she's expanded her sonic palette, incorporating vintage synthesizers and drum loops while occasionally cranking up her amplifiers. Some of the sounds are conscious throwbacks, but they don't play like retro nostalgia, not in the context of Remind Me Tomorrow, which juxtaposes fearless aural adventure with keenly observed observations of easing into a satisfied life...
...On Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?, Cox looks at the world around him with the same intensity that he used to examine his own life on earlier albums. Though this shift in perspective was brought on by the political climate of the late 2010s, Deerhunter's version of resistance isn't to rail against only the injustices of that era, but against a seemingly endless history of inhumanity and death with songs that sound deceptively life-affirming...
...Appropriately, some echoes of AM pop linger on Weird -- it's there in the occasional wash of analog synth and the insistent hooks, and it's there in exuberant closer "Do It to Music," a love letter to the complex joys of pop -- but the album is barbed by design, a return to the ornery personal pop that's been Hatfield's métier in the 21st century. The album title alone hints at what Weird is about: the feeling of not quite fitting in with the world at large...
Annabel Mehran's black-and-white cover photo for Steve Gunn's The Unseen Inbetween is a portrait of the guitarist and songwriter seemingly on the move. It evokes those found on early- to mid-'60s recordings by Bob Dylan, Koerner, Ray & Glover, Jackson C. Frank, Bert Jansch, and others. Gunn has shifted his focus considerably. Rather than simply showcase his dazzling guitar playing, he delivers carefully crafted, uncharacteristically tight and well-written songs with guitars, keyboards, strings, reeds -- and percussion -- translating them without artifice or instrumental disguise...
Equal parts rock memoir and cautionary tale, M. Ward's ninth outing, What a Wonderful Industry, arrived out of the blue as a surprise release in June 2018. Forgoing his long-held roster position at Merge Records, the Portland-based songwriter issued the album himself, pairing his affinity for arcane American roots traditions with colorful stories from his two decades operating in various branches of the music industry. Ward's laconic delivery and retro-minded Americana have always been presented with a twinkle of dry wit, but not unlike its unannounced delivery, a self-released concept album calling out what he refers to as the "heroes and villains in equal measure" encountered during his career comes as a bit of a surprise...
Israel Nash takes his retro references seriously. While his vocals bring frequent comparisons to Neil Young in full helpless mode, his new album, the suitably titled Lifted, occasionally echoes the Beach Boys with a symphonic sound. It’s hardly surprising considering the fact that Nash has continued to expand on his folkadelic sound since starting his career a decade or so ago. He even dropped his proper surname Gripka in the process, a further step, one would guess, along the path to reinvention...
“When it looked like I'd be recording in late July and mixing around my birthday, in August, it struck me that the only other occasion that had happened was while making my first album. It still took a while for it to sink in: this would be 40 years on… The road to this album is littered with the wrecks of songs and half-songs that didn't make the grade. There are eight survivors, which I think is enough. How significant the resurgence of vinyl is, I'm not sure, but I did think of this as an album, with two complementary sides of about 20 minutes each…
I never have an overall theme in mind when I start trying to write songs for an album, but sometimes one will develop. In this case it's Comedy and Tragedy, and the way they're intertwined in all our lives. The songs are about fear and anger and alienation and loss, but also about the things that still make life worth living: friendship, laughter, and music, or art, itself. I couldn't have done this in 1979. I just hadn't lived enough.”
It's easy to sound tough when you're part of a gang, but it's a good bit different when you're traveling all by yourself. With his band Night Beats, Danny Lee Blackwell kicked up a lot of dust with the 2013 album Sonic Bloom and 2016's Who Sold My Generation, playing fuzzy garage-accented rock with a bluesy undertow. But with his band at least temporarily out of commission, Blackwell was forced by circumstance to do things a bit differently, and he's doubled down on that thinking on 2019's Myth of a Man. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys signed on to produce Myth of a Man, and instead of assembling a new edition of Night Beats, they headed to Nashville and recruited some veteran first-call session musicians to accompany Blackwell on his latest batch of songs...
Singer/guitarist Liz Brasher first tried her hand at songwriting as a young adult after studying up on a variety of 20th century American masters, including Stephen Foster, Lead Belly, and Bob Dylan. She found particular inspiration in the sounds of the Delta blues and Southern soul. On her full-length debut, Painted Image, those influences shine through an eclectic retro-soul. With stops in Chicago and Atlanta along the way, the North Carolina native was drawn to Memphis, Tennessee to write and record the album, which was tracked at the historic Ardent, Royal, and Electraphonic Recording studios..
If you remember Buke and Gase as that experimental duo who play the instruments they built themselves, you might want to adjust your expectations before listening to 2019's Scholars, their first full-length album after a five-year recording layoff. In their previous work, Aron Sanchez and Arone Dyer constructed their music around two instruments of their own creation, the buke, a large, six-string relative of the ukulele played by Dyer, and the Gass, a fusion of the guitar and the bass used by Sanchez. However, while both instruments are part of the mix on Scholars, this time around the duo have pared back on organic instrumentation and jumped deep into electronics...
Lost Under Heaven's debut, 2016's Songs for Spiritual Lovers to Sing, was the sound of Manchester-bred singer/songwriter Ellery James Roberts and Dutch singer/songwriter/visual artist Ebony Hoorn having fallen in love and willfully drowned themselves in artful sonic euphoria. With their sophomore album, 2019's cathartic Love Hates What You Become, the couple rise to the crashing reality of living in the wake of that love and the realization that simply finding your soulmate doesn't fix your life, your emotional health, or the world around you. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton and Swans drummer Thor Harris, Love Hates What You Become is a devastatingly affecting album, built deftly around the duo's yin and yang vocals with Roberts' tortured, throaty yawp coolly contrasted by Hoorn's flat, Marlene Dietrich-in-Doc Martens delivery. The songs are hugely anthemic in the punk tradition of Patti Smith and Nick Cave...
The first vinyl release from Dolphin Midwives, the solo project of Portland-based artist Sage Fisher, is a delicate yet splintered album of sparkling, multi-tracked harps and ethereal vocals. Fisher states that the album is "about finding beauty and acceptance in the fractured, broken and vulnerable places," and her usage of electronic effects seems very hands-on, as she's constantly twisting and warping the sounds of her voice and instruments. It's much busier and glitchier than something by Mary Lattimore, to name another harpist who augments her playing with looping pedals and other effects...
Sharon Van Etten, Deerhunter, Juliana Hatfield, Steve Gunn, M. Ward, Israel Nash, Joe Jackson, Night Beats, Liz Brasher, Buke and Gase, Lost Under Heaven, Dolphin Midwives
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