ALTER.NATION #70
Chromatics, Wolf Parade, David Bowie, Nicolas Godin, En Attendant Ana, Basic Plumbing, The Wood Brothers, Jeff Parker, The Sufis, Caspian, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Chromatics
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"from TOY to TOY"
Believe it or not, Chromatics released a new album last year, Closer To Grey. It wasn’t their long-anticipated (and missing in action) Dear Tommy, but it was very good, and the Los Angeles group is back with another very good new track today.
Their new single is called “Toy,” and it’s a characteristically cinematic and strobing song. “Tell me what I have to do/ ‘Cus I can’t stop thinking of you,” Ruth Radelet sings on it. “Tell me what I have to say/ ‘Cus I can’t go on living this way.” The band has also put out a stripped back “On Film” version of the track and an instrumental.
Wolf Parade - Thin Mind / Out of Control
It seems size does not matter for Wolf Parade. Multi-instrumentalist Dante DeCaro, who had been working with Wolf Parade since 2005, left the band in early 2019, leaving the original trio of Spencer Krug, Dan Boeckner, and Arlen Thompson to get along without him. But if anyone expected the group to scale back their sound as a three-piece, 2020's Thin Mind wastes no time in shutting down that thinking. Wolf Parade sound lively, passionate, and fully committed on these ten songs, with Krug's Bowie-esque glam-conscious vocals reaching to the third balcony and easily finding their target, as the arrangements suggest the great lost new wave album of the '80s...
David Bowie - Stay '97
“Stay,” of course, first appeared on Bowie’s 1976 album Station To Station. This new recorded was started during tour rehearsals at the Factory in the Dublin Docklands, and finished later for use as a potential B-side. Bowie wanted to update some of his older tracks so they’d sit alongside material from Outside and Earthling more comfortably live.
Nicolas Godin - Concrete and Glass / Concrete and Glass
Looking back on his career with and without Air, Nicolas Godin's beginnings as an architecture student become more and more apparent -- and not just because the first song he created, "Modulor Mix," was a tribute to Le Corbusier. A skilled use of structure and space is just as important to composing music as designing a building, and the weightless drift of his music is as much of a feat as a skyscraper that seems to defy gravity. Much like an architect, over the years Godin has built on his music's foundations while continuing to innovate. If Contrepoint's dazzling fusion of classical, jazz, Tropicalia, exotica, and left-field pop and the flawless '60s spy music homage of his Au Service de la France (A Very Secret Service) score felt like reactions to the iconic sound he crafted with Air, then Concrete and Glass is a welcome return to it. As its name suggests, Godin's second solo album is ultra-sleek and airy, in both senses of the word...
En Attendant Ana - Juillet / Enter My Body (Lilith)
En Attendant Ana are a Parisian indie quintet whose tightly focused melodies and energetic attack are fused with a curious blend of harmonic sophistication and wild abandon. They first appeared in 2016 with a rather rugged lo-fi EP, followed two years later by the more refined full-length Lost and Found, an exciting debut that revealed a young band with heaps of potential. Jump ahead to 2020, when their excellent sophomore LP, Juillet, makes good on that promise. Fronted by singer and chief songwriter Margaux Bouchaudon, En Attendant Ana are primarily a guitar band, though they make good use of multi-instrumentalist Camille Fréchou, whose lofty trumpet lines add a distinctive finesse to the group's energetic post-punk meets indie pop arrangements...
Basic Plumbing - Keeping Up Appearances / Too Slow
Basic Plumbing is Patrick Doyle's second solo project. Boys Forever was his first, and their one and only album showed that the longtime bandmember (Correcto, the Royal We, Veronica Falls) had what it took to lead a group. It was a shimmering and tough guitar pop album that was indebted to grunge, indie, and noise pop, while showing off Doyle's angelic voice and excitingly melancholy songwriting. Basic Plumbing is a stripped-down and scruffier version of that, and Keeping Up Appearances strips away any of the minimal gloss of Boys Forever in favor of a rough-and-ready approach. Doyle handles guitar, drums, and vocals, Helen Skinner adds bass lines, and the whole album was recorded quickly and with hardly any finesse from the producer's chair. The guitars jangle roughly, the cymbal crashes sizzle into the red, Doyle's fragile vocal harmonies drift through the mix like distant birds, and the bass holds it together in nicely melodic fashion...
The Wood Brothers - Kingdom in My Mind / Alabaster
"Alabaster" kicks off Kingdom in My Mind, the Wood Brothers' eighth studio album, with a slow, thick groove, its swampiness a reflection of how the album originated from a series of studio jams. The band didn't enter the studio with the intent of recording a new album, but they were taken with the results of their recording, so brothers Chris and Oliver Wood shaped the improvisations into songs. Starting with a collection of funky rustic recordings wound up being a boon to the Wood Brothers, letting Kingdom in My Mind establish a vibe that's cozy, homespun, and just slightly slick. Chalk the polish up to how the group are veterans with a good sense of space and feel, a knack that they're pushing on Kingdom in My Mind over tasteful songcraft...
Jeff Parker - Suite for Max Brown / Go Away
Guitarist and composer Jeff Parker made a name for himself first with Tortoise during the '90s, and then as an integral member of the experimental music scene in Chicago. He's made a career of jumping the dimensions between rock, soul, funk, and jazz. Unknown to all but his contemporaries and musician friends, he also pursued his intense love of hip-hop without recording any of it; that is, until he released The New Breed from his adopted home in Los Angeles in 2016... While that recording revealed his respect and gratitude for his departed father, Suite for Max Brown is titled for and dedicated to his very-much-alive mother. Produced by the artist and engineered by Paul Bryan, it is a continuation of the sounds explored on New Breed. It includes most of the same sidemen, though it's more a solo date than a band date, and its tunes meander and stroll through thoughtful, creative, loose-sounding compositions...
The Sufis - Double Exposure / Outta My MInd
The Sufis' fourth album, Double Exposure, follows in the same lo-fi, weird, and woolly bedroom psych footsteps as their previous album did. Only this time the duo have a much more focused and animated approach to the writing and recording process and punch their performances up just a touch. The sound might be oddly smooth and bathed in cheapo synths, warbly vocals, and drums that sound like they have an inch of water sloshing around inside them, but the songs are shiny and sharp as diamonds...
Caspian - On Circles / Division Blues
It's been five years since Massachusetts post-rock six-piece Caspian delivered the rightfully acclaimed Dust and Disquiet in 2015. On it, they reinvented post-rock's static modernism through composed and richly textured layers of instrumentation and sonic effects designed to enable spacious rhythmic and timbral experiments... Produced and engineered by Will Yip, the eight-song On Circles was cut in a Pennsylvania studio during the month of May in 2019. Yip intuitively illustrates Caspian's intent to find the invisible intersection between self-generated propulsive rock energy, seduction, and a trance-like penchant for reverie... "Division Blues" adds cellos and violins as ballast for the wafting, bell-like guitars in a processional waltz time, swelling and shrinking bar by bar until the entire enterprise becomes a gorgeous squalling rock monolith...
Bohren & der Club of Gore - Patchouli Blue / Verwirrung am Strand
In the nearly six years since German dark jazz outfit Bohren & Der Club of Gore released 2014's Piano Nights, drummer Thorsten Benning left the group. Rather than replace him, they downsized and became a trio. The remaining members, Christoph Clöser (compositions, tenor saxophone, vibes, Fender Rhodes), Morten Gass (piano, organ, engineer, producer), and Robin Rodenburg (double bass) perform Patchouli Blue as if Benning never left; the sparse, funereal percussion is handled by a synth and all three members. The more things change the more things stay the same in the Club of Gore's musical universe. Their tunes remain as sad as a burned-out house and as lonesome as a broke and crying drunk under a dim street lamp after closing time... Yet, as evidenced by tracks such as the single "Verwirrung am Strand," there is a nearly tender melodic sensibility wired into the music. This is not to say they’ve given up their trademark senses of dread or impending doom, but they've been de-emphasized in favor of a less foreboding state of stasis...
Chromatics - Toy
Believe it or not, Chromatics released a new album last year, Closer To Grey. It wasn’t their long-anticipated (and missing in action) Dear Tommy, but it was very good, and the Los Angeles group is back with another very good new track today.
Their new single is called “Toy,” and it’s a characteristically cinematic and strobing song. “Tell me what I have to do/ ‘Cus I can’t stop thinking of you,” Ruth Radelet sings on it. “Tell me what I have to say/ ‘Cus I can’t go on living this way.” The band has also put out a stripped back “On Film” version of the track and an instrumental.
The band also recently released a 47-track (!) deluxe edition of Closer To Grey that included some alternate takes of tracks, remixes, and instrumentals of all the songs on the album.
Chromatics, Wolf Parade, David Bowie, Nicolas Godin, En Attendant Ana, Basic Plumbing, The Wood Brothers, Jeff Parker, The Sufis, Caspian, Bohren & der Club of Gore, Chromatics
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