062 ALTER.NATION weekly favtraX 03-11-2019

ALTER.NATION #62

Olivia Colman, Alcest, Cigarettes After Sex, Sudan Archives, Little Scream, The Bad Plus, Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, Anna Calvi, Simon Joyner, Omni, Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon, CUP, Nels Cline, Yuka C. Honda, Itasca

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"G l or y   B o x"

ALTER.NATION #62 on DEEZER

Sarah Caroline Olivia Sinclair, CBE, better known as Olivia Colman, is an English actress. Deemed a "national treasure", Colman is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, four BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Independent Film Awards, the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and a BFI Fellowship.
Olivia Colman - Glory Box / Portishead from BBC Children In Need: Got It Covered
In an exclusive collaboration for BBC Children in Need, a whole host of stars have got together to record an entire album to raise money for this year’s appeal...
Each star has handpicked a song significant to them for the album.  Recorded at the legendary Rak and Abbey Road Studios in London, they each received expert guidance from Brit and Mercury award-winning record producers and songwriters, Guy Chambers and Jonathan Quarmby.

Alcest are a metal duo from Bagnols-sur-Cèze, France comprised of Neige (guitars, keyboards, vocals) and Winterhalter (drums). Their music has gradually shifted from black metal to shoegaze to post-metal, and finally to the integrated sound known as blackgaze. Intense melody, lush, swirling electronic textures, and sometimes screamed-sometimes cleanly sung vocals entwine in their mixes. 
Alcest - Les Jardins de Minuit from Spiritual Instinct 
When Alcest released Kodama in 2016, it stood apart from their previous catalog in exploring the "blackgaze" metal subgenre they'd created. It was darker, more aggressive, and had more pointed edges.... Spiritual Instinct, the band's debut for Nuclear Blast, builds on Kodama even as it reaches further outside the emotions expressed on it in order to transcend them. It explores dichotomies -- the divine and the primal, the raw and the refined, the hideous and the beautiful -- in a quest to reveal complexities at the heart of what humanity actually means. Opener "Les Jardins de Minuit" borrows a radically Gothic bassline from Joy Division before a single-string melody line, followed by doubled vocals, pave the way for blastbeats and powerful, strummed open chords. It's a swirl of gray and smoke that gallops along.

Ambient pop collective started as a recording experiment in an echoey hallway. Ambient pop collective Cigarettes After Sex grew out of an experimental sound project by songwriter Greg Gonzalez. 
Cigarettes After Sex - You're the Only Good Thing In My Life from Cry
...The project of Texas native Greg Gonzalez, Cigarettes After Sex's noir-ish imagery and languid odes to romantic obsession made them seem like unlikely candidates for such contemporary pop culture peaks, but the song and subsequent 2017 debut album nonetheless found a very receptive audience... With the gently hissing surf-and-sun-baked limestone cliffs as their backdrop, he and bandmates Randall Miller (bass), Phillip Tubbs (keyboards), and Jacob Tomsky (drums) recorded nine gentle, often improvised pieces of music to which Gonzalez added lyrics at a later date. Cry is nothing if not cinematic and, as its creator has indicated, is indelibly linked to its place of origin. Listening to the opioid strains of "Don't Let Me Go" or "You're the Only Good Thing in My Life," it's easy to picture the lovelorn indie playboy gazing wistfully from a marbled balcony out into the sea's infinite expanse...

Violinist, singer, songwriter, and producer who combines R&B, hip-hop, folk, and experimental electronic music for the Stones Throw label.
Sudan Archives - Pelicans In The Summer from Athena
Nothing about Sudan Archives and Sink, Brittney Parks' self-written and self-produced Stones Throw EPs, sounded underdeveloped or uncertain. That they were filled with tunes akin to repeated epigrams and transportive moodscapes -- instead of traditionally-structured songs -- seemed like a deliberate artistic choice, not a deficiency. It's only after being weighed against the LP follow-up Athena that they come across as unripe. The previously solitary Parks opted here to work with a crew including James R. McCall IV, Will Archer, Rodaidh McDonald, Paul White, and Catherine Parks (her sister) among the dozen or so fellow producers and songwriters... and "Pelicans in the Summer," a pulsing/snaking song of deep affection...

Delivering her own brand of ambitious, grand-scale indie pop, Little Scream is the stage name of vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Laurel Sprengelmeyer. Her music is at once lush and intimate, with a subdued approach informed by folk but with melodies that are drawn from indie pop and flashes of rock dynamics.
Little Scream - Switchblade from Speed Queen
Sometimes you have to spend some time away from home in order to see it as it really is. Laurel Sprengelmeyer, aka Little Scream, was born and raised in the United States before she settled in Canada and made a name for himself in the local indie music community... What she saw has become the foundation of the third Little Scream album, 2019's Speed Queen, a moody but beautifully crafted set of intelligent indie pop melodies matched to vocals that are graceful on first glance but speak of lives teetering on the brink if you're willing to take a closer look. The LP's title track speaks of the anxieties and desperation of a woman whose greatest wish is to have the means and stability to own her own washer and dryer, a simple dream that is painfully far from her reach...

Progressive jazz scientists who found a way to put a modern rock-oriented spin on jazz while still honoring its forward-thinking traditions.
The Bad Plus - Undersea Reflection from Activate Infinity
When the Bad Plus released Never Stop II in 2018, new pianist Orrin Evans had been in the group for less than a year. He's since logged thousands of miles with them, playing concert halls and bandstands across the globe. That makes Activate Infinity, their second album together, a much more integrated affair. Evans' decades of experience as a bandleader and inventive hard bop-inspired pianist lend immeasurably to the quirk and instinct of this trio...  Anderson's fluid soloing adds heft and imagination that Evans and King follow down an intricately constructed rabbit hole. Activate Infinity is a canny, wildly creative expression of the Bad Plus' collective persona; it's inspired, sophisticated, fresh, and a joy to encounter, time and again.

But the difference with Jeff Goldblum, who is releasing I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This one year after his debut and following a celebrated Glastonbury set this summer, might be that music came before the acting. Goldblum learnt piano growing up in Pittsburgh, and has played lounge gigs with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra throughout his career. And musicianship courses through these classily rendered jazz standards.
Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra feat. Anna Calvi - Four On Six/Broken English  from I Shouldn't Be Telling You This
...Anna Calvi lends her lowest-register vibrato to the mash-up of Wes Montgomery’s “Four on Six” and Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English”, which injects a rebellious splash of electric guitar. Sultry sweetness...

Prolific figure of the Great Plains' lo-fi D.I.Y. scene, and a heavy influence on Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst. Cited as a key influence by Conor Oberst (of Bright Eyes) and Beck, Omaha, Nebraska native and singer/songwriter Simon Joyner has been putting out delicate, intimate, mournful songs since the early '90s.
Simon Joyner - You Never Know from Pocket Moon
favorite musician's favorite musician. Consistently active and firmly independent since the early '90s, Joyner's influence is apparent in much more recognizable names like Bright Eyes, Kevin Morby, Angel Olsen, and other top-shelf artists occupying the space between Americana and lyrically focused songwriting. Pocket Moon continues Joyner's reshaping and refining of the elements that have given his work such impact since he began... The arrangements are simple, centered around vocals high in the mix. Throughout his discography, Joyner has consistently evoked Leonard Cohen's grim narratives, Dylan's flirtations with the surreal, and Townes Van Zandt's blue-collar storytelling. Combined with his own intricate lyrical perspectives, these influences are sharper on Pocket Moon... "You Never Know" runs through a series of everyday scenes that hold deeper emotional weight, stretching out with the same protracted lyrical rumination as Blonde on Blonde-era Dylan...

Energetic blend of Postcard pop, angular post-punk, and scrappy D.I.Y. punk by ex-members of Deerhunter and Carnivores.
Omni - Present Tense from Networker
After a jump to Sub Pop, Omni return with their most precise, most melodic, and best-sounding album yet. Like their first two, Networker was recorded in rural Georgia with Nathaniel Higgins and the sound is very similar. Frankie Broyles' guitar is a slashing, twisted ball of nerves, his drumming is spare and punchy, Philip Frobos' basslines are jabbing and melodic, and his vocals are cheerfully monotone and just barely poke their head out of the mix. What's different this time is everything is a little more jagged, the guitars have more restraint, and there are hints of avant-garde jazz and Television throughout...

Welsh songwriter Cate Le Bon's distinctive voice and smart arrangements manifested as a dark, looming take on psychedelic pop over the course of multiple critically acclaimed solo albums, side projects, and production for others.
Bradford James Cox is an American singer-songwriter and musician, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the indie rock band Deerhunter. He also pursues a solo career under the moniker Atlas Sound.
Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon - Canto! from Myths 004
Cate Le Bon's role as producer on Deerhunter's 2019 album Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? can be heard in both the album's experimental tendencies and organic yet distant arrangements. Le Bon's own 2019 strike Reward had the same balance of strong songwriting and production that blurred curiosity and confusion. The creative friendship between Le Bon and Deerhunter's Bradford Cox takes new shapes on their collaborative EP Myths 004. At its most straightforward, the seven-song project sounds like what could be outtakes from either artist's 2019 album. Opening track "Canto!" features Cox in a dramatic double-tracked vocal melody in an arrangement decorated with strums of autoharp, dissonant guitar soloing, and heavy tandem drum kits...

CUP is an experimental art-pop project from creative and marital partners Nels Cline (Wilco) and Yuka C. Honda (Cibo Matto). An intriguing blend of electronic, folk, rock, and improvisations, the New York duo made their debut with the 2019 album, Spinning Creature.
CUP -  Spinning Creature from Spinning Creature
A project from musical and marital partners Nels Cline and Yuka C. Honda, CUP is a delightfully strange affair that merges exploratory improvisations for guitar, percussion, electronics, and voice with more structured art-pop songwriting... The two come together most soundly on the album's title cut, an artful gem of circular folktronic pop with a curiously inviting melody sung in unison. Pleasantly weird without being pretentious, CUP defy easy categorization and their debut pops like the collision of two beloved nonconformists.

The wispy vocals and guitar-picking style of Kayla Cohen evoke the gentler branch of the singer/songwriter era as well as centuries past.
Itasca - Only a Traveler from Spring
Following Open to Chance, her first album to feature a backing band, by three years, Spring is the fourth overall effort from Itasca, the alias of indie folk balladeer Kayla Cohen. Collaborative or not, all four records are populated by the songwriter's gentle, fingerpicked tunes and evocative lyrics, inspired here by her temporary relocating from L.A. to rural New Mexico to write. Specifically influenced by the region's diverse landscapes, highway apparitions, and the isolation she experienced, the resulting songs were recorded to tape with members of Gun Outfit and Sun Araw. On an album where everything is soft and bucolic, notable behind-the-scenes collaborators include James Elkington, who provided atmospheric string arrangements, and singer/songwriter Chris Cohen, who mixed the record...

Olivia Colman, Alcest, Cigarettes After Sex, Sudan Archives, Little Scream, The Bad Plus, Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, Anna Calvi, Simon Joyner, Omni, Bradford Cox / Cate Le Bon, CUP, Nels Cline, Yuka C. Honda, Itasca