ALTER.NATiON #27 
weekly favtraX
27-03-2019
| Ibibio Sound Machine, American Football, Andrew Bird, Luther Dickinson, Sisters of the Strawberry Moon, Strand Of Oaks, Bill MacKay, These New Puritans, Apparat, Ritual Howls, Spiral Stairs, Cate Le Bon, Sky Ferreira |
27-03-2019
Ibibio Sound Machine - Wanna Come Down from Doko Mien
Ibibio Sound Machine's sophomore album for Merge and third overall finds them building on the more production-savvy post-punk and electro soundclash tenets of 2017's Uyai and combining them with the militant Afrobeat grooves of their 2015 self-titled Soundway debut. Doko Mien reveals Ibibio Sound Machine as a restless outfit. Here, articulating their version of Nigerian-saturated roots Afrobeat, they assimilate and recombine crisp, synthetic, and organic beats, zigzagging Kraftwerk-ian synths, fuzzed-out psych guitars, whomping rubbery basslines, and a driving, punched-up brass and horn section that recalls the Tower of Power Horns as much as it does Fela Kuti's... muscular horns. "Wanna Come Down" is sung by Williams in her mother's and grandmother's native Ibibio language.
American Football - Every Wave to Ever Rise (feat. Elizabeth Powell) from American Football (LP3) 5:54
After releasing their reunion album in 2016, the members of American Football started trading song ideas and demos back and forth and realized their sound had evolved. LP2 came across like a continuation of what they had begun so beautifully on LP1 15 years earlier; LP3 takes that sparse, intricate, and emotional sound and expands it in new and interesting ways. The quartet stretch the songs out, adding long instrumental passages. They add a wider range of instruments to the arrangements -- including vibraphone, bells, keyboards, and vocal choirs on one track -- all of which give the songs a new richly burnished feel. For the first time, they bring in outside vocalists to sing with Mike Kinsella. Land of Talk's Elizabeth Powell adds lovely French backing on the languid "Every Wave to Ever Rise,"...
Andrew Bird - Sisyphus from My Finest Work Yet
Andrew Bird’s My Finest Work Yet is as much a culmination of his musical storytelling as it is a high mark of his 20-plus year career—you can walk away with a different favorite song with each listen. The album, Bird’s 12th solo outing, is replete with superlatives, containing some of his most exquisite melodies and finest wordplay, as well as his lushest, warmest sound yet. The latter is a pinnacle achieved through live vocals, mainly from Bird and Madison Cunningham, and recording sessions sans headphones or separations...
A son of Memphis royalty, a talented guitarist with an eclectic range of influences, and one of the North Mississippi All-Stars. / All-star roots collective formed by Luther Dickinson with vocalists Amy Helm, the Como Mamas, Amy Lavere, Sharde Thomas, and Allison Russell.
Luther Dickinson, Sisters of the Strawberry Moon - Sing to Me
Aside from co-leading the North Mississippi Allstars with his brother Cody, Luther Dickinson has spearheaded a number of solo projects drenched in American roots music since 2009. Solstice is a kind of companion to 2012's Go On Now, You Can't Stay Here by the Wandering -- Dickinson's first project with female vocalists... Rev. Charles Hodges' organ is the prime accompanist on Helm's "Sing to Me." It flows through her sweet take on rural soul, while clarinet and slide guitar add jazz and blues for good measure...
Strand of Oaks - Forever Chords from Eraserland
"The scene isn't my scene anymore" croons Tim Showalter on Eraserland's inaugural track and lead single "Weird Ways." It's a sentiment that anybody with a rearview mirror can relate to, and as inward-looking as his Strand of Oaks project has been over the last decade, Showalter has rarely sounded as self-referential as he does on the band's seventh full-length effort... The nearly ten-minute, atmosphere-drenched penultimate cut "Forever Chords" -- the wordless, ambient, and even longer closer feels a tad excessive -- sums things up most succinctly: "If you believe you can be loved/You'll outlive your past/And you hope it never ends.
Bill MacKay - Dragon Country from Fountain Fire
Fountain Fire is the true follow-up to 2017's fine Esker, Bill MacKay's debut long-player for Drag City. "True" in that the guitarist and producer cut and released SpiderBeetleBee -- his second effort with guitarist Ryley Walker -- that same year. Like Esker, Fountain Fire was recorded completely solo with MacKay playing guitars, piano, organ, bass, percussion, and requinto, and singing on a pair of cuts. Musically, this eight-song set travels in a variety of directions simultaneously. Opening single "Pre-California" is an overdubbed exercise in layered solo guitar(s) work with distorted, warm electric strumming, gently reverbed single-string picking -- in a modal scale that resembles surf music if it originated in North Africa -- and multivalent slides adorning its margins... It all culminates in "Dragon Country," the set's longest and most odyssey-like track. Sharded, rhythmically strummed acoustic guitars are played in a folk style that recalls Davy Graham's fluctuating minor-chord improvisations and are woven into a seemingly liquid brew of Dick Dale-esque electric fingerpicking, dreamy slide, Eastern modalities, and stacked, staggered overdubs. Though it's over six minutes in length, it feels like it flits by in an instant...
These New Puritans - Infinity Vibraphones from Inside the Rose
Since debuting with the distressed post-punk of 2008's Beat Pyramid, These New Puritans have made a tradition out of reinvention, approaching composition from surprising new angles and channeling their innate sense of drama into each new evolution. The project of twin brothers Jack and George Barnett, the group were still in their teens when they began releasing music, yet they effused ambition and taste well beyond their years. That ambition remains in play on Inside the Rose, the band's fourth full-length release. As with its predecessor, 2013's symphonic Field of Reeds, Inside the Rose is high on grandeur, contains no guitars, and barely resembles a rock album in any traditional sense. While that album was based in a largely organic neoclassical world of chamber ensembles, voices, pianos, and percussion, the nine tracks featured here fuse an array of synthetic tones and treatments to their acoustic brethren, coming off like an intriguing hybrid of late-period Scott Walker and the Blue Nile...
Apparat - Brandenburg from LP5
After Moderat announced their indefinite hiatus in 2017, Sascha Ring went back to his solo career as Apparat. LP5 is the follow-up to 2011's The Devil's Walk, Ring's most song-oriented solo work, rather than the last album to bear Apparat's name, 2013's more challenging Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre). The title of LP5 ostensibly nods to Autechre's 1998 full-length, which it doesn't resemble in the slightest. Ring has stated that his experience with Moderat, which ended up touring major venues, inspired him to think big with his own music, but here he refrains from writing quirky, crowd-pleasing electro-pop tunes like Moderat's "Bad Kingdom." Like all of Apparat's albums since 2003's Duplex, LP5 is filled with live instrumentation as well as Ring's fragile, yearning vocals, which are refreshingly not over-emotive...
Ritual Howls - Alone Together from Rendered Armor
As their album titles suggest, textures are vitally important to Ritual Howls' music. Turkish Leather telegraphed the rough sensuality and dusty drama of its songs, while Into the Water hinted at the cold depths of their third album. Rendered Armor's title is just as evocative of the streamlined, hard-edged sound of the trio's fourth full-length... "Alone Together" begins the album by paring their music down to the bare essentials of a spiky drum pattern and a twangy guitar riff...
Spiral Stairs - Swampland from We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized
We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized, the third album Scott Kannberg has released under the name Spiral Stairs, opens with a big, bouncy beat that practically invites the appearance of a horn section. The surprise arrives when Spiral Stairs actually adds those horns, the first of many bold detours on We Wanna Be Hyp-No-Tized. Keep in mind those detours are contextual. An Ameri-Indie stalwart since he co-anchored Pavement, Spiral Stairs usually deals with the barbed, brittle sounds of classic underground rock, but he abandons that aesthetic here, trafficking in grand gestures and bold colors... Perhaps Kannberg can be a little on the nose, writing verses about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on "Swampland," but that only adds to the charm of the album: after years of championing obscurity, there's something bracing and endearing about hearing Spiral Stairs aim squarely for the gut.
Cate Le Bon - Daylight Matters
Cate Le Bon writes songs in the absurdist tradition, as both as an escape and a mirror to the world. Her music is elliptical and sparse, using familiar sounds—chiming electric guitar, saxophone—to create her own alien landscape. “Daylight Matters,” the swooning first single from her new album Reward, isn’t so much a reinvention as it is a grand unveiling. It’s more Young Americans than Low, all glowing and swaggering and lovesick. While her recent music, solo and as part of the post-punk duo DRINKS, has seemed cloaked in mystery, she’s now more direct as an arranger and writer, breaking down in the bridge and layering her voice into a pleading choir of “c’mon”s. “A day in the life, arranging the chairs,” she sings coolly, as if gesturing toward her handiwork. “And I’m never gonna live it again.” She’s spent so long building her own world; it looks even stranger and more beautiful with the sun shining in.
Sky Ferreira - Downhill Lullaby
After six years, Sky Ferreira is back with new music. She’s shared “Downhill Lullaby,” her first single since Night Time, My Time. The track is slated to appear on that album’s follow-up, Masochism. In Pitchfork’s new digital cover story, Ferreira told writer Camille Dodero that she co-produced the track with “Twin Peaks” music supervisor Dean Hurley. It features strings by Danish violinist Nils Gröndahl.
Ibibio Sound Machine, American Football, Andrew Bird, Luther Dickinson, Sisters of the Strawberry Moon, Strand Of Oaks, Bill MacKay, These New Puritans, Apparat, Ritual Howls, Spiral Stairs, Cate Le Bon, Sky Ferreira
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