ALTER.NATION #31
Field Medic, Cage the Elephant, Beck, Angélique Kidjo, Wand, Drugdealer, Gang of Four, Fat White Family, Elva, Sad Planets, Heather Woods Broderick, Kelsey Lu, Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble
weekly favtraX
21-04-2019
21-04-2019
FIELD MEDIC - hello moon from fade into the dawn
... Along with the lament of the touring musician leaning on alcohol to get through a rough night, Patrick's songs offer emotionally raw portrayals of self-acceptance, anxiety, and sweetly hopeful excitement. Up until this point, Field Medic's immense discography was made up of raw lo-fi recordings, with Patrick sometimes going so far as improvising entire EPs directly into a four-track recorder. Still coated in a warm sheen of fuzz, Fade into the Dawn is a relatively larger-scale production, being the first Field Medic material to include lead guitar overdubs and to implement live drums instead of minimal drum machine rhythms. It's by no means a slick production, though, with Patrick evoking some of the same shambling magic as Neutral Milk Hotel on bright songs...
Cage the Elephant feat. Beck - Night Running from Social Cues
Considering how Cage the Elephant brought home the Best Rock Album Grammy for Tell Me I'm Pretty in 2017, it's a bit startling that its successor, Social Cues, abandons the rough-and-tumble aesthetic producer Dan Auerbach brought to the band. Auerbach helped Cage the Elephant emphasize the bash-around garage elements lurking within their music, a sensibility that is absent on Social Cues. CTE work with producer John Hill, who previously helmed albums by Florence + the Machine, for this 2019 album, but a better touchstone for what they're attempting to achieve is Beck, who appears on the single "Night Running" and joined the group on a co-headlining tour in support of the album. Particularly on Colors, the 2017 LP that snagged him a Grammy for Best Alternative Album, Beck specialized in a bright, vivid pan-cultural pop, echoes of which can be heard on Social Cues....
Angélique Kidjo - La Vida Es Un Carnaval from Celia
Since she began releasing solo recordings in 1981, Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo has illustrated the reliance of Western popular musics on African traditions for inspiration. In 2018, the vocalist enlisted an all-star cast that included Nigerian drum master Tony Allen and some American indie rockers to display the coat of many colors that lies in the grooves of the Talking Heads' Remain in Light by revisioning the entire album through that lens. Kidjo is at it again with Celia, her album-length tribute to the queen of salsa, Cuban singer Celia Cruz. This time the connection is seamless. Kidjo began listening to Cruz's music in 1974, after seeing her perform in Benin as part of an African tour. Cruz readily acknowledged the African influence in her music and has sought to draw attention to it throughout her career -- especially after her exile from Cuba in 1959 -- by singing Yoruban songs exported during the slave trade some 400 years previously. Kidjo's affinity for the salsa pioneer grew deeper after being exiled herself from Benin when a Marxist/Leninist government took power during the '80s...
Wand - Thin Air from Laughing Matter
Beginning in 2013 as a gnarly psych band with garage tendencies, Los Angeles' Wand quickly made several albums of weird and suffocating music. They ran with the quickly evolving scene that included Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, and bandleader Cory Hanson's songs fell into similarly scuzzy territory. A shift began in Wand's sound around the release of 2017's Plum, the first album from the group to reflect a new lineup and a new democratic approach to songwriting. Plum and the subsequent 2018 EP Perfume set the tone for the drastic shift the band has been undergoing, and Laughing Matter cements these changes... Wand suddenly sound more indebted to Radiohead than ever before. Hanson's pained vocals draw closer to the style of Thom Yorke as the album stretches on, often gelling into bright harmonies with bandmate Sofia Arreguin...
Drugdealer - Fools from Raw Honey
The first Drugdealer album, The End of Comedy, was a bit of a stylistic shift for the band's main instigator, Michael Collins, that saw him moving away from trippy and weird psych towards something far more relaxed and Laurel Canyon-y. There were a few kinks to be ironed out, like meandering songs and a few too many cooks, but it was a promising and enjoyable record. The second Drugdealer album, Raw Honey, has zero kinks left to work out and fulfills all the promise of the debut and more. This time around, Collins and a wide range of collaborators absolutely nail the lush and lovely singer/songwriter sound of the mid-'70s, while adding some healthy bits of warm weirdness and subtle grandeur to the mix along the way. The album is a cool mix of shaggy-dog pastiche and real feeling moments of emotion, all wrapped up in an organic sound that's as familiar as a favorite old blanket...
Gang of Four - Alpha Male from Happy Now
The notion that the election of Donald Trump and the reality of Brexit was going to inspire a lot of great punk rock, as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did in the '80s, hasn't worked out quite the way some people hoped. But it has encouraged a few veteran artists to tighten their thematic focus, and that seems to be the case with Gang of Four. 2015's What Happens Next -- which debuted the "Gang of One" lineup with guitarist Andy Gill as the only member left from the band's glory days of the '80s -- was a relatively refined and toothless work that dealt with the personal more than the political. But that's certainly not the case with 2019's Happy Now; this music is more deeply rooted in electronics than Gang of Four's best work, but here the surfaces are rougher and cut noticeably deeper, with the grooves suitable for dancing but jagged in their execution. Gill's guitar work is very much in his classic style, full of sharp shards of sound and dense clouds of feedback, and it gives Happy Now an aggressive and muscular punch... But Trump's voice gets sampled in "Alpha Male," which clearly concerns itself with some of his myriad scandals...
Fat White Family - Feet from Serfs Up!
With two polarizing albums of rickety misanthropic lo-fi shenanigans under their belt, Britain's Fat White Family add a dash of pop grandeur to their still-difficult third outing. More often than not, the Peckham-bred combo have inspired a love-them-or-loathe-them reaction, pitting provocative humor and biting satire against an underachieving backdrop of tinny Casio synths and harsh, wonky psych guitars... Without sacrificing their edge, frontman Lias Saoudi and his crew turn in a handful of genuine highlights, particularly in the opener, "Feet," a dark-hued disco-style banger with smart arrangements that is equal parts sleekness and heft...
Elva - Ghost Writer from Winter Sun
Winter Sun is the debut of Elva, an indie pop group based in Norway that's co-led by Elizabeth Morris, formerly of Allo Darlin', and Ola Innset of like-minded Making Marks. (Elva means "the river" in Norwegian.) Fans of Allo Darlin' will be especially pleased to learn that not only does Morris retain her tuneful, bittersweet pop sensibilities here, but the album was produced by former bandmate Michael Collins and features string arrangements and violin by longtime collaborator Dan Mayfield...
Sad Planets - Bad Cells from Akron, Ohio
Ohio's status as the secret center of the rock & roll has been well established, and this often becomes evident in unexpected ways. As drummer with the Black Keys, Patrick Carney has been half of one of the most popular acts to emerge from the Buckeye State in the 21st century with their blues-based excursions into indie rock. John Petkovic has never enjoyed a payday on a par with Carney, but as the founding member of Death of Samantha and Cobra Verde (and a brief stint with Guided by Voices), he's got cred to spare as one of Ohio's underground heroes...
Heather Woods Broderick - These Green Valleys from Invitation
A touring and studio musician who has been a longtime member of Sharon Van Etten's band among her other indie folk-minded collaborations, Heather Woods Broderick stepped out on her own in 2009 with the acoustic album From the Ground. She went on to expand her sound with atmospheric electronics on 2015's Glider and continues to fortify textures on her third solo LP, Invitation. It takes its title from a Thomas Moore quote about being open to experiences and change. That type of literary inspiration is apt for a meditative set of songs that look to nature, childhood summers spent along the Oregon coast, and reflection itself for subject matter.
Kelsey Lu - I'm Not In Love (10cc cover) from Blood
Intricate and sculptural, North Carolina singer-songwriter-producer Kelsey Lu deals in music where the unifying genre is, essentially, beauty. Having previously collaborated with the likes of Sampha, Solange and Florence Welch, the Los Angeles-based artist’s sublime debut album arrives, delving between everything from absorbing dream-pop, twangy blues, left-field electronics, serene ambient and even delicate classical (Lu is a trained cellist). Blood is meditative, surreal and deeply imaginative – be that in the lush, cryptic cover of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love,..
“Come on, join us,” a voice beckons toward the end of “The Colors That You Bring,” the first single from the new project by Chicago’s improvisational scene mainstay Damon Locks. It’s a fitting welcome to what began as a solo effort but then developed into the 15-strong Black Monument Ensemble. Taken from the upcoming album Where Future Unfolds, which documents their live debut at the city’s Garfield Park Conservatory, “The Colors That You Bring” draws from dusty hip-hop, astral jazz, and full-throated gospel, for an eclectic stew that’s like the Celestial Choir’s “Stand on the Word” if performed live by the Sun Ra Arkestra. But there’s a crucial activist ingredient, too. Locks has said the work was inspired by his time teaching art to maximum-security prisoners, as well as by police killings of unarmed black men. The song feels its most free, and freeing, after a spoken-word sample of singer, activist, and Civil Rights Movement heroine Lena Horne declaring, “I’m not gonna stop.” That’s when all the instruments drop out except for percussion, and we’re invited to rejoice with the ensemble as it belts out an exultant, collective statement of faith: “I still believe in us.”
Field Medic, Cage the Elephant, Beck, Angélique Kidjo, Wand, Drugdealer, Gang of Four, Fat White Family, Elva, Sad Planets, Heather Woods Broderick, Kelsey Lu, Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble
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