ALTER.NATION #74
Grimes, Agnes Obel, Lanterns on the Lake, Lee Ranaldo / Raül Refree, King Krule, Six Organs of Admittance, Sonny Landreth, Pat Metheny, Courtney Barnett, Greg Dulli, Guided by Voices, Cerrone
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"My Name is Dark"
Grimes - Miss Anthropocene / My Name is Dark (Art Mix)
Grimes' music has frequently sounded like pop music for the end of the world, so it makes sense that she leans into that mood on Miss Anthropocene. On her fifth album, she taps into mythology's power to make vast forces easier to comprehend by envisioning climate change as a demon-goddess pop star (as hinted at by the title's clever blend of "misanthrope" and "Anthropocene"). Humanizing the harm humans have caused to the environment by evoking deities of destruction and the singles chart is an intriguing concept that Grimes commits to completely. She trades the surreal, hi-def brightness of Art Angels for a murky mix of ethereal, nu-metal, and industrial-inspired sounds that call to mind a thoroughly polluted world: The tempos are sluggish, the atmosphere is thick, and guitar riffs struggle to emerge from processed sludge... "My Name Is Dark" builds from bleak hedonism into a pop song worthy of a dance number that becomes a fight scene -- a Grimes specialty, as Art Angels' "Kill V Maim" proved...
Agnes Obel - Myopia / Myopia
The follow-up to 2017's acclaimed Citizen of Glass, Myopia is the Danish singer/songwriter's fourth full-length effort and the second collection of songs self-produced in her Berlin home studio. Built on the competing themes of trust and doubt, the aptly named Myopia is Agnes Obel's most insular work to date, continuing in the vein of its predecessor with dramatic pitch-tuned vocals and Gothic chamber pop melodies. Obel has been refining her spectral nocturnes for a decade now, and Myopia, with its fever dream vistas and melancholy abyss, doesn't disappoint...
Lanterns on the Lake - Spook the Herd / Baddies
Based in Newcastle, England since their formation, Lanterns on the Lake have historically kept their recording practices in-house, opting to track songs in their homes and other improvised studio spaces, even after signing with a label that would provide funds to do otherwise. For their fourth album, Spook the Herd, they finally did venture outside of their comfort zone to work with engineer Joss Worthington (the Membranes, Pete Coe) at a studio in Yorkshire. The band still oversaw production. Fine-tuning their sound instead of marking a significant change in presentation, they emerge with another solid set of songs distinguished by rich, dreamy, acoustic-electronic textures and singer Hazel Wilde's brooding lyricism...
Lee Ranaldo / Raül Refree - Names of North End Women / The Art of Losing
Ranaldo and Refree worked together Ranaldo’s last solo album, Electric Trim (Mute, 2017), and soon after the pair returned to the studio to record the follow up they realised that Names of North End Women would become what Ranaldo describes as “the beginning of a new partnership, a new configuration’”.
For one of the greatest guitarists, ranked by both Rolling Stone and Spin, of his generation (Ranaldo co-founded Sonic Youth in 1981) and an artist reinventing traditional flamenco guitar (Refree’s album with Rosalía continues to grow internationally), this is an album that features tracks with little or no guitar. Instead the duo composed using marimba and vibraphone, using samplers, a vintage 2-inch Studer tape recorder and a modified cassette machine Ranaldo had previously used in performances 25 years earlier...
King Krule - Man Alive! / Cellular
... Marshall duly stuffs his concise follow-up to The Ooz with the terror and negative liquid references, both literal and metaphorical, for which he is known. They even girdle it, starting with a numbed post-punk creeper in which Marshall drones about glancing at his phone to watch a girl cry, and signing off with a lashing, hollowed-out appeal of disconnectedness and dejection that contains the lyrics, "We don't have long 'til this earth is drowned." The Krule gaze is certainly more outward than before, though the most trenchant observations are mumbled. At times, Marshall sounds like he's recording a memo in the middle of a sleepless night...
Six Organs of Admittance - Companion Rises / Mark Yourself
Three years after 2017's relatively low-key and largely organic Burning the Threshold, Ben Chasny nudges Six Organs of Admittance back toward the brink on the exploratory Companion Rises. Over the two previous decades, the California native's prolific project has shifted back and forth from a collaborative full-band experience to a deeply focused solo endeavor espousing its creator's current philosophies or passions. Composed, performed, recorded, and mixed entirely by Chasny, Companion Rises falls squarely in the latter camp, though it's certainly not without a sense of spontaneity and chance. Offsetting nimble acoustic guitar patterns with synths and rhythm-generating algorithmic programs, the arrangements ripple with wild energy, coating the more earthbound elements in swathes of hyper-digital space dust...
Sonny Landreth - Blacktop Run / Groovy Goddess
Louisiana guitar slinger Sonny Landreth returns to the studio with his quartet two years after 2017's Grammy-nominated Recorded Live in Lafayette. Blacktop Run is more than just a new studio outing, however. Landreth reunites with producer R.S. Field for the first time since 2005's Grant Street. Field produced Landreth's three breakout sets for Zoo as well as several later albums. He is a studio empath and extends artists full faith and credit. Landreth possesses a distinct sound to be sure, direct, resonant, and simple, but he's restless when it comes to experimenting with styles... Cajun stomper complete with button accordion; zydeco and Delta blues melt together on a honky tonk dancefloor. "Groovy Goddess" is a spiky instrumental showcasing Landreth's electric slide-playing swing.
Pat Metheny - From This Place / Wide and Far
During the late 2010s, guitarist and composer Pat Metheny toured a new quartet featuring British piano prodigy Gwilym Simcock, Malaysian-Australian bassist Linda May Han Oh, and veteran Mexican-American drummer Antonio Sanchez. This group learned the guitarist's catalog and toured it globally, gelling and maturing before entering the studio for From This Place, the first new studio material from Metheny since 2014... "Wide and Far" is a bluesy groover that nods to Metheny's first great jazz influence, Wes Montgomery, while Simcock melds Horace Silver's funky hard bop to nearly pastoral expressionism. The tune's orchestration recalls Don Sebesky's on The Rape of El Morro, one of the CTI dates that remains important to Metheny. "...
Courtney Barnett - MTV Unplugged: Live in Melbourne / Sunday Roast
Recorded in October of 2019, nearly a year-and-a-half after the May 2018 release of her second album Tell Me How You Really Feel, MTV Unplugged: Live in Melbourne finds Courtney Barnett choosing collaboration over intimacy... she's supported by her regular band of bassist Bones Sloane and drummer Dave Mudie, along with cellist Lucy Waldron, and she invites many peers and idols to share the stage. Paul Kelly, Evelyn Ida Morris, and Marlon Williams, musicians all better-known in Australia than America...
Greg Dulli - Random Desire / A Ghost
...By the end, the Afghan Whigs were Dulli and whoever else he chose to bring along, and presumably tired of the ruse, he's chosen to cut out the middlemen and issued his first solo album, 2020's Random Desire, which does a better job of fleshing out his musical and thematic tropes than he managed on Do To The Beast and In Spades. Random Desire doesn't rock like prime Whigs, but the rhythmic patterns and melodic shifts have Dulli written all over them...
Guided by Voices - Surrender Your Poppy Field / Cat Beats a Drum
Anyone who was shedding a tear at the Electrifying Conclusion of Guided by Voices in late 2004 would probably be taken aback if you had told them that the group would not only be back in action in the year 2020, but also in the midst of one of the most consistent hot streaks in their recording career. But after Robert Pollard assembled a new and improved edition of GbV in 2016, the band released six albums that range from quite good (2019's Warp and Woof) to genuinely great (2017's How Do You Spell Heaven and 2019's Zeppelin Over China). 2020's Surrender Your Poppy Field puts the count up to seven, and it stands out stylistically from its immediate predecessors. Since Pollard debuted this GbV lineup -- Pollard on vocals, Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare Jr. on guitars, Mark Shue on bass, and Kevin March on drums -- their songwriting and production has favored their leader's latter-day embrace of the twists and turns of prog rock rather than the lo-fi dense-pack pop hooks of their '90s breakthrough works...
Cerrone - DNA / I've Got a Rocket
As of 2020, disco pioneer Marc Cerrone has been professionally making and performing music for nearly 50 years. His vast discography, spanning dozens of albums, has included Afro-beat-influenced funk, suspenseful soundtracks, adult contemporary pop, and French house... The sensation of cruising through space is elevated by "I've Got a Rocket," which seems like a more interstellar variation on Cerrone's 1978 track "Rocket in the Pocket," with a sprinkling of Man-Machine-era Kraftwerk...
Grimes, Agnes Obel, Lanterns on the Lake, Lee Ranaldo / Raül Refree, King Krule, Six Organs of Admittance, Sonny Landreth, Pat Metheny, Courtney Barnett, Greg Dulli, Guided by Voices, Cerrone
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