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Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings
Matter of Time 3:22
Just Give Me Your Time 2:29
from Soul of a Woman 2017
Sharon Jones was 45 years old when she cut her first single with the retro-soul combo the Dap-Kings in 2001. She'd been trying to find a way into the music business for years before her partnership with the Dap-Kings unexpectedly made her a star, but it was obvious that once the right people heard her, they knew she one of the great R&B singers of her generation. Once the door opened for her, she didn't look back for a second. While Jones had beat cancer once, she wasn't as lucky when the disease reappeared in 2015, and through 2016 she played shows and recorded session in between rounds of treatment, with cancer finally claiming her life in November of that year. Some artists, knowing they have only so long to live, use their final recordings to sum up their lives and careers, but that was clearly not the case for Jones. Soul of a Woman, recorded during the last months of her life, is not an album about mortality; instead, this is the work of a woman who was determined to make the most of every moment allotted her. Soul of a Woman is a superb exercise in deep soul big-city style, and if Jones was ailing when she recorded her vocals, you would never guess to listen to the finished product...
Bahamas
Alone 3:24
Bad Boys Need Love Too 3:41
from Earthtones 2018
Afie Jurvanen's fourth Bahamas LP, Earthtones finds the guitarist/songwriter joined by the all-star rhythm section of Pino Palladino and James Gadson. With decades of legendary albums to their individual credit, the bassist and drummer happen to have played together on none other than D'Angelo's Black Messiah. It's not a trivial recording note, as Jurvanen sought them out due to that album and wrote much of Earthtones with these particular collaborators in mind. The result dials up the soul and slow-boiling funk while retaining Jurvanen's laid-back demeanor, all to steady, head-bobbing effect...
FIDLAR
Get Off My Rock 3:17
Almost Free 2:15
from Almost Free 2019
---Their spotty sophomore release, 2016's Too, wrestled with frontman Zac Carper's newfound sobriety in the face of the group's chosen lifestyle and typical subject matter; on Almost Free, they further complicate things by introducing some politics and social commentary into the mix. To their credit, FIDLAR have made legitimate attempts to get out of their creative comfort zone and go somewhere new. That said, Almost Free is somewhat of a mess. Recording at Hollywood's legendary Sunset Sound with Ricky Reed (Jessie J, Twenty One Pilots), FIDLAR strike out in a variety of different directions, landing some new tricks but slamming a lot more...
Courteeners
Heart Attack 3:14
More. Again. Forever. 5:25
from More. Again. Forever. 2020
Emerging from a dark and uncertain period following their 2016 effort, Mapping the Rendezvous, Manchester favorites Courteeners returned triumphant with their sleek, boundary-pushing sixth set, More. Again. Forever. Slicker and shinier than its rollicking predecessor, the album reveals another side to the long-running band, one that embraces dancefloor energy and groovy bass lines influenced by LCD Soundsystem. In a move similar to other late-era maturations by contemporaries like Kaiser Chiefs, Editors, and the Kooks, Courteeners -- frontman Liam Fray, guitarist Daniel Moores, drummer Michael Campbell, and bassist/producer Joe Cross -- nail the stylistic shift, injecting fresh ideas and new life without forgetting the jangly alt-indie spirit of the late 2000s when they broke onto the scene with St. Jude...
Cursive
I Am Goddamn 2:51
What’s Gotten Into You? 5:34
from Get Fixed 2020
It turns out that if you don't make an album for six years, you might end up with a lot of ideas for songs. That was certainly the case with Tim Kasher and his bandmates in Cursive. After 2012's I Am Gemini, Cursive didn't deliver any fresh music until Vitriola came out in 2018. By that time, they had written enough songs for a double album. But rather than send out a two-disc set, where they felt some of the material might get lost in the shuffle, they opted to split the bounty into two separate releases, and Get Fixed arrived 12 months after Vitriola. Vitriola and Get Fixed certainly work as separate entities, but it's not hard to tell that they have a shared ancestry, with Get Fixed possessing a sound and attitude that's much like its sibling. That said, Vitriola was a strong and well-crafted effort that reflected the anger and anxiety that's business as usual in America as the 2010s give way to the 2020s, and the same can be said of its follow-up...
Whyte Horses
Hard Times feat. John Grant 3:26
Bang Bang feat. Christa Bell 2:11
from Hard Times 2020
Over the course of two albums, Dom Thomas and his Whyte Horses collective made a name for themselves as master mixers of vintage sounds derived from swinging French ye-ye, swirling psychedelia, strutting big-city soul, snappy garage rock, and hooky kitchen sink pop. It's a little bit of theft, a little bit of borrowing too, but Thomas and his merry gang reassemble the pieces in ways that make clear they are adding great dollops of their own vision to the music... Listening to it back to back with one of their own albums, it's hard to see why Thomas decided he had to make Hard Times at all when their work already sounds like the "fantasy mixtape" they were aiming for here. It's far from a bad record, but it's a bit of a letdown for anyone who fell in love with the group's first two albums and looked forward to hearing them dig deep into their influences and come up with something special.
A Pace Far Different 3:53
Paper Bags 3:00
from Safe Sins 2020
Augusta Koch made her name in the middle part of the 2010s as the frontwoman for Cayetana, a raucous all-female punk trio from Philadelphia whose unfussy songs took cues from classic '90s riot grrrl and lo-fi indie while taking on stigmatic issues of mental health and self-image. Even before parting ways with her bandmates in 2019, she had begun to shift toward a more personal and varied approach, playing a series of solo acoustic shows and teaming up with multi-instrumentalist Matt Schimelfenig to record under the name Gladie. Now freed from her primary musical commitment, Koch turns her full creative attention to the project with the full-length Safe Sins...
Producer, occasional vocalist, and DJ Nina Kraviz hails from Irkutsk, Siberia -- not exactly a dance music hot spot. Kraviz fell under the spell of house music during the mid-'90s through radio. A few years later, she moved to Moscow for the sake of studying dentistry, and was briefly part of a trio called MySpaceRocket.
St. Vincent, Nina Kraviz
Hang On Me (Batu Remix) 5:41
Pills (Population One Remix) 6:30
Masseduction (Midland's Mass Seduction Remix)
from Nina Kraviz Presents MASSEDUCTION Rewired 2019
If Masseduction Rewired didn’t exist there would be no great clamor to invent it. St. Vincent’s Masseduction, on which this remix album is based, has already been remade once in acoustic form, and there is no obvious crossover between St. Vincent’s warmly inventive indie pop and the arctic techno freeze of Rewired curator Nina Kraviz. More worryingly, remix albums generally run the gamut from damp squib to outright embarrassment.
Against the odds, though, Masseduction Rewired is actually rather intriguing. No one—bar a rabid and possibly theoretical St. Vincent/Kraviz crossover fan—will enjoy everything here; the 22 tracks frequently stretch the patience, but most people will find something to love. Rewired also provides food for thought: Its catholic approach to remix styles encourages the listener to consider the tangled art of the remake and the question of authorial identity...
Jacco Gardner
Levania 2:44
Somnium 2:15
from Somnium 2018
After a couple albums of relaxed chamber pop built around baroque instrumentation and gently psychedelic songcraft, Jacco Gardner did some drastic renovations on his third album, Somnium. In the three years between records, Gardner relocated to Lisbon and found himself enmeshed in reading old science fiction novels and pondering the cosmos as he wandered around his new city of residence. These cerebral pursuits led him to some musical exploration. Inspired by old-school synth boffins like Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno, the record is completely instrumental and vintage electronics take a larger role, playing the main melodies and providing texture...
The Heliocentrics
Human Zoo 4:49
A World of Masks 7:45
The Wake 2:29
from A World of Masks 2017
After 2016's From the Deep, an excellent summation of all their previous musical directions, the Heliocentrics go -- as the banner on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters bus proclaimed -- "Further." While the Malcolm Catto-led outfit has been digging through many varieties of jazz, psych-funk, hip-hop, library grooves, and international sounds (having worked with Mulatu Astatke and Lloyd Miller) for over a decade, A World of Masks presents an intergalactic take on many of the above.
Added to the band's personnel on this date is Slovakian vocalist Barbora Patkova, who has been working with the outfit live since 2013. Like her fellow Heliocentrics, she is an explorer. While June Tyson is a reference point, Patkova is so versatile that other comparisons are equally apt: Urzula Dudziak, Julie Tippetts, Jeanne Lee, and Patty Waters also come to mind...
Ron Gallo
Really Nice Guys 2:08
YouTubular 3:31
from Really Nice Guys 2018
After releasing two albums and doing his share of touring, Ron Gallo has clearly learned a few things about the music business, and some of them are pretty funny. Gallo and his band (also known as Ron Gallo) have chosen to share some of these valuable lessons, and 2018's Really Nice Guys is a biting and witty eight-song EP about some of the pitfalls of the musician's life. In the title track, Gallo confronts the dilemma faced by nearly everyone who has been in a band -- what are you supposed to do about your musician friends who are fine people but woefully untalented?...
Sunwatchers
New Dad Blues 6:16
Psychic Driving 4:59
from Illegal Moves 2019
New York quartet Sunwatchers make instrumental music that exists where the spiritual reach of free jazz and the screaming chaos of psychedelia intersect. Bandleader Jim McHugh was a founding member of the late-2000s freaked sounds collective Dark Meat, and he carried on their deep-fried blend of structure and skronk when he uprooted from Athens, Georgia, to New York City in 2010 and began working towards what would become Sunwatchers. Wildly prolific, the band quickly established their untethered sound over the course of multiple releases captured both in the studio and in live performances. Illegal Moves is their third studio album, and its seven selections capture the group at their tightest and most electric state of sonic and psychic connectivity yet...
Wire
Be Like Them 3:52
Primed and Ready 2:43
from Mind Hive 2020
One of the great joys of Wire's music in the 2010s and beyond is how brilliantly they reinvent their enduring strengths in equally timeless and timely ways. On Mind Hive, the band's legendary skill at writing concise songs filled with layers of meaning comes to the fore. Even its title is compact yet complex, flipping a statement of shared knowledge -- and perhaps conformity -- into one of restless intelligence. Wire don't waste any of the album's terse 35 minutes; instead of the ruminative approach they took on Silver/Lead, they immediately spring into action... The issues Wire grapple with are evergreen, and as they persevere in the face of stupidity and apathy, Mind Hive's unflinching, poetic songs prove maturity is a weapon they wield just as deftly as outrage.
Down the Hill 4:43
When It Burns 3:20
from Juillet 2020
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...
Shadow Show
Charades 3:45
Green Stone 3:47
Shadow Box 4:10
from Silhouettes 2020
After a few seconds of mysterious noise that sounds like distant waves crashing, Silhouettes, the debut album from Detroit trio Shadow Show, begins with a bassline a few notes removed from "Taxman" and a kaleidoscopic explosion of tremolo guitars and mod pop vocal harmonies. It's a strong start to an album that channels several different generations of both British pop and Detroit rock without ever directly mimicking any specific influences. Vocalist/guitarists Ava East's haunted guitar tones on songs like "The Machine" find the middle ground between pensive, late-night loner jams from Fred Smith's Sonic's Rendezvous Band and the sinister energy of Primal Scream...
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