ALTER.NATION #33
Bleached, Hash Redactor, Hannah Cohen, Claude Fontaine, Big Thief, Empath, Pile, Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, Sebadoh, Cate Le Bon, Porridge Radio, Claude Fontaine
weekly favtraX
03-05-2019
03-05-2019
Bleached - Hard To Kill
...Don’t You Think You’ve Had Enough is the first album Bleached have recorded since getting sober. The title is a question Jennifer asked herself when she reached a turning point in that struggle. In a statement, she says today’s single “Hard To Kill” is about “staring down the road towards death and realizing I needed to wake up and get out of my selfish patterns of self destruction.” There’s a whistled hook, abundant cowbell, and a chorus that goes like so: “All the cities we burned down/ Turns out I’m very hard to kill.”...
Memphis-based band formed by members of Ex-Cult and NOTS with a dark, nihilistic energy and a caustic garage-meets-post-punk sound.
Though the caustic and sinewy Hash Redactor was formed by established members of the Memphis garage punk scene, their full-length debut, Drecksound, manages to elude all the trappings that can make side projects or would-be super groups fall flat. While the band shares the entire rhythm section of NOTS and an Ex-Cult member, Hash Redactor is decidedly its own thing. Drecksound bears some similarities to its creators' other projects -- hints of NOTS' jagged grooves that lean towards pop just to scoff at it with dissonance, a more humorous shade of the darkness that surrounds Ex-Cult -- but these songs are set apart by an anxious urgency that keeps the entire album on the brink of collapse. This is immediately evident on "Good Sense," an opening track that pushes a bass-driven post-punk riff to its breaking point, building intensity and volume ever upward until the song ends in a squall of feedback...
Hannah Cohen - Build Me Up from Welcome Home
Expanding on the soft acoustic and electronic textures of 2015's Pleasure Boy, singer and songwriter Hannah Cohen's third album, Welcome Home, is her first to be produced by partner and frequent collaborator Sam Owens, aka Sam Evian. Given the hazy, nostalgic quality shared by their solo output, what sounds like a promising professional partnership in theory proves to be an effective one in practice here...
Claude Fontaine - Strings of Your Guitar from Claude Fontaine
...These are no half-cooked stylistic dalliances or nonspecific nods to a reggae influence. Fontaine took her muse all the way, enlisting players like former Steel Pulse bassist Ronnie McQueen, onetime Astrud Gilberto drummer Airto Moreira, and Tony Chin, a reggae guitarist who worked on classic tracks with Dennis Brown, King Tubby, and Althea & Donna... The album splits into two distinct halves, with the first five songs looking to dub, rocksteady, and other Jamaican styles and the other five sending up bossa nova, mellow Tropicalia, and more Brazilian fare...
Big Thief - U.F.O.F.
...“UFOF,” the title track from their third album (and first for 4AD), is a fantasy that should be familiar to anyone who grew up somewhere small, dreaming of an outside force—a spaceship, a rock band—to touch down and make you feel different.
From the start, Big Thief have excelled at finding new lenses for familiar scenes, and “UFOF” extends their scope to science fiction. The sweep of fingerpicked acoustic guitars and airtight rhythm forms a new type of groove for the band—their version, maybe, of an arpeggiated synth and a drum loop. “I imagine you taking me out of here,” Adrianne Lenker sings, gazing heavenward as the music tumbles in anticipation. And when nothing comes to save her, she has no choice but to do it herself...
Empath - Roses That Cry
...After a brief, delicate synth intro, “Roses That Cry” launches into a kaleidoscopic squall. Catherine Elicson’s guitar sounds as if it is breaking into pieces, Garrett Koloski’s drums whip up a ferocious gale, and Em Shanahan and Randal Coon’s synths swirl and squawk in the undertow, bringing a generous levity. Elicson’s words echo the jumbled progression of this turmoil as she conjures fading memories. “Are you coming around/You’d like to, but you don’t know how,” Elicson nudges, her voice gently bending with compassion. “Remember when that tree fell on your car/Glass spilled all over the yard.” When the dust finally settles on “Roses That Cry,” Empath emerge unscathed.
Pile - Lord of Calendars from Green and Gray
Midway through Pile’s new album comes one of the best and most unusual protest songs of the Trump era... It’s as close to an anthem as Pile has written, though it remains staunchly unhummable. Even this band’s protest tunes are circuitous tangles of aggression and flailing limbs. Pile, the noise-rock darlings of the Boston DIY scene, achieved their cult-like measure of indie fame by touring mercilessly and doing nothing the easy way: The band has never written fist-pumping platitudes, never optioned a song for a major television show, never covered Toto... And, perhaps to match the stench of sociopolitical revulsion, Maguire summons some utterly sickening riffs: “Lord of Calendars”... ferocious.
Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi - Ten Thousand Voices from there is no Other
Folk music shouldn’t have stars, but Rhiannon Giddens’ illuminating charge is hard to ignore. This February, she led the brilliant Our Native Daughters project, collaborating with US musicians Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla to recover and reinstate some of the African American histories buried in folk music. Three months later comes another album of far-reaching curiosity with a solid purpose: exploring how sounds and rhythms from Africa and the Arabic world connect with the traditional music of Europe and America. Francesco Turrisi is Giddens’ collaborator this time, a Dublin-based Italian multi-instrumentalist usually working in jazz, improvisation and early music... What There Is No Other resembles is a 21st-century version of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, the landmark 60s folk-rock record that showed how unusual musical connections on paper could sound utterly natural in the service of song. Giddens’ instruments are the minstrel banjo, octave violin, viola and her wide-open, rangy, contralto voice...
Sebadoh - Sunshine
Sebadoh are nearing the release of their first album in six years, Act Surprised. The indie greats have been promoting it with a run of singles... a fourth preview in the form of “Sunshine”... According to Lou Barlow, the song is “about going inside. Giving up, for the moment, on finding answers in nature or social rituals. Going inside, where I feel safe, and finding strength in intimacy.”...
Cate Le Bon - The Light
Is Cate Le Bon at the top of her game right now? I think Cate Le Bon is at the top of her game. Every single we’ve gotten from her upcoming new album, Reward, has been absolute perfection — a masterful blending of the Welsh musician’s avant-weirdness and pop precision... It’s a spinning sigh of a track that finds Le Bon dropping cutting lines like “Holding the door to my own tragedy/ Take blame for the hurt but the hurt belongs to me” with heartbreaking casualness. The song is an elastic band of horns and ricocheting piano keys.
Porridge Radio - Don’t Ask Me Twice
“Don’t Ask Me Twice” is completely off-the-wall bonkers, and it’s great. The UK band clanks and clangs together, blasting and bursting at the seams with a psychedelic twist. Dana Margolin embraces the unknowability of life with a raucous joy, a constant refrain of “I don’t know”s that sounds like being ripped apart.
Here’s Margolin’s quote about it: For me, ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’ is a song about suddenly noticing where you are and being surprised to find yourself in your own body in that place. When we play it live it feels like it’s all going to fall apart at any moment, but then it kind of pulls back and falls into place again, and then suddenly the chaos comes back and everything feels so intense...
Claude Fontaine - Play by Play from Claude Fontaine
As the story goes, Los Angeles-based singer Claude Fontaine had never listened to reggae when she stumbled into a London record shop and was flooded with inspiration from the sounds of '60s rocksteady that the staff was spinning. Caught up in a storm of what felt like an instant personal connection with the music, Fontaine spun her fixation into an obsession and turned that into the driving force behind her self-titled album, penning songs in the style of classic Jamaican music. These are no half-cooked stylistic dalliances or nonspecific nods to a reggae influence...
Bleached, Hash Redactor, Hannah Cohen, Claude Fontaine, Big Thief, Empath, Pile, Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, Sebadoh, Cate Le Bon, Porridge Radio, Claude Fontaine
Nincsenek megjegyzések:
Megjegyzés küldése