ALTER.NATION #94
Bad Moves, Dream Wife, Holy Wave, bdrmm, Mint Field, Thurston Moore, Pure X, Keleketla!, Sault, Benjamin Biolay, A.A. Williams, Greg Foat
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"Local Radio"
ALTER.NATION #94 on deezer
Bad Moves - Untenable / Local Radio
Conventional wisdom says pop punk is the province of teenagers, that folks are supposed to give up on catchy hooks and speedy tempos once they're into their mid-twenties. Bad Moves are here to prove that isn't true. Their second album, 2020's Untenable, is a truly glorious exercise in amped-up pogo punk, full of tunes that will have nearly anyone bouncing around the room by the time the opening track, "Local Radio," hits the chorus for the first time...
Dream Wife - So When You Gonna... / So When You Gonna...
"Put your money where your mouth is!" Dream Wife shout on So When You Gonna…, and that's exactly what they do on their second album. Known for their support of female and non-binary artists, the band worked with a creative team consisting entirely of women, including producer Marta Salogni and mastering engineer Heba Kadry (who is almost as well-known as her clients). With the help of these women, Dream Wife deliver a more polished, more eclectic version of their music that lives up to the promise of their self-titled 2018 debut album in unexpected ways... On much of So When You Gonna…, the pop instincts Dream Wife wrapped in barbed wire riffs and snarling vocals are allowed to ring out clearly and sweetly... Though it's very different from Dream Wife, So When You Gonna… is just as genuine, and the duality in Dream Wife's music only makes them a more interesting, and more relevant, band.
Holy Wave - Interloper / Buddhist Pete
On the four albums leading up to 2020's Interloper, the Texas quartet Holy Wave quietly established themselves as reliable practitioners of top-notch psychedelic sounds. The band fill their psychedelic beakers with typical ingredients like echoing guitars, spacey melodies, and hazy atmospheres, while also adding potent strains of washed-out shoegaze textures, hypnotic motorik rhythms, and reverb-heavy garage rock... "Buddhist Pete" have plenty of rollicking energy and guitar firepower...
bdrmm - Bedroom / Happy
English quintet bdrmm pull from several schools of dreamy, driving, hypnotic rock on their debut full-length, which spells out the pronunciation of the band's name. The group seem well-versed in dream pop and post-punk, with a hazy but clean guitar sound and steady, propulsive drumming that nods to Krautrock and space rock... A few tunes are more upbeat, combining surf-influenced guitars and shivering post-punk rhythms. "Happy" delivers the refrain "I'm happy if you're happy" with mixed emotions...
Mint Field - Contingencia
Formed in Tijuana and currently based in Mexico City, Mint Field specialize in sweltering, languorous psychedelic rock. Led by singer-guitarist named Estrella del Sol (which translates to Star of the Sun), they make hallucinatory mood music for oppressive heat, a soundtrack for days when a bleary melancholy spreads out over everything and even sundown doesn’t offer a respite from the sweaty humidity. In other words, they are a perfect band for one of the hottest and most depressing summers in recent memory, one where hallmarks of seasonal fun have become dangers to public health.
Thurston Moore - HASHISH
By The Fire features My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe on bass and backing vocals, Negativland’s Jon Leidecker (aka Wobbly) on electronics, James Sedwardson on guitar, and Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley alternating on drums with Jem Doulton. And today, you can preview it with its first single, a blissed-out guitar tangle called “Hashish.”
According to a press release, the song is “an ode to the narcotic of love in our shared responsibility to each other during isolation...”
Austin band Pure X went through several shifts as their sound evolved, moving from humid, atmospheric ambient rock on their earliest material into more refined songwriting on their 2014 album Angel. After six years of semi-dormancy, Pure X offer up the most straightforward reading of their drifty, dreamlike sound on their self-titled fourth album. Even presenting their most direct and tuneful material, Pure X's main talent is still creating a slow-moving, album-length mood that hangs suspended somewhere between bliss and regret.
Keleketla! - Keleketla! / Future Toyi Toyi
feat. Soundz of the South, DJ Mabheko, Tony Allen, Tenderlonious, Afla Sackey, Afla Sackey & Afrik Bawantu
The international, pan-generational project Keleketla! started when Rangoato Hlasane and Malose Malahlela, founders of Johannesburg's Keletetla! Library, were approached by Ruth Daniels of the charity In Place of War and asked which producers they would most like to work with in a collaboration with South African musicians. They expressed interest in several Ninja Tune artists, particularly label founders Coldcut, and so the duo of Jonathan More and Matt Black flew to Johannesburg and recorded sessions with several musicians, singers, and rappers, including Sibusile Xaba, Yugen Blakrok, and members of the collective Soundz of the South. Back in England, they shaped the material with additional contributions from legendary drummer Tony Allen, visionary saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, rap godfathers the Watts Prophets, and several others.
Keleketla! packs a wide array of styles, tempos, and moods into an hour, with the album's central themes including hope for the future, celebration, and unity through music. Considering how much is going on at any given time, the songs never feel overstuffed, and every voice and instrument is allowed to shine. Opening tune "Future Toyi Toyi" is basically a gqom track arranged for a full ensemble, with a full chorus rhythmically chanting over dark, droning synths and heavy polyrhythms played by Tony Allen. (Allen passed away months before the album's release, and without being a conscious tribute to him, the release is certainly a testament to the widespread influence of the Afro-beat sound he helped build with Fela Kuti back in the 1960s and '70s.)
We don’t know too much about the mysterious UK group SAULT, but their music speaks for itself. On Juneteenth, they put out a powerful new album called UNTITLED (Black Is), their third release that has dropped out of nowhere in just over a year. “Hard Life” is an early highlight. It starts off sinewy and locked-in, a pulsing bass backing a chant: “It’s a hard life, fight against the weak/ It’s a hard life, threatened by our freedom/ Be on your way, things are gonna change.” The song breaks through to something like catharsis around three minutes in, an explosion of gospel and soul and glorious voices that sweeps the listener up in it. “Finally we’ve reached the end,” everyone sings, expressing hope at a time when it’s hard to have hope. It’s a gorgeous breakthrough, one that sounds like it makes all the hard work worth it.
France's Benjamin Biolay left behind his provocative Buenos Aires cycle after two acclaimed albums, Palermo Hollywood in 2016 and the platinum-certified Volver in 2017). Grand Prix is nostalgic and unquestionably autobiographical. Its title references Formula 1 racing's excitement, drama, heroes, and tragedies. "Grand Prize" artfully contrasts racing with his own life experiences and the sacrifices he's made in pursuit of art... For "Papillon Noir," with Demoustier, he channels New Order's dancefloor rock beautifully. Again, despite the joy in the mix, his lyrics are resigned to always being in a temporary place when it comes to love: "I am an evening visitor, I am the vestiges of the dark sun/I am the night watchman, I am the bizarre boy...who has nothing to do/I am your only alibi, your temporary libido…."
Few artists have had a career trajectory quite like A.A. Williams. She put out her debut EP in early 2019, before she had even staged a live gig, and by the end of the year, she was the new darling of the independent music press... While the notion of a classical musician and secret metalhead becoming an overnight underground sensation makes for a good story, Williams' success has come for a good reason -- she's a prodigiously talented musician with a strong creative vision, and her first LP, 2020's Forever Blue, is a remarkable piece of work... Your friends who wear black all the time may be the target audience, but A.A. Williams' ambitious blend of post-rock, folk, goth, metal, and classical ingredients deserves as wide a hearing as it gets, and Forever Blue is a uniquely effective debut album.
Foat has become a versatile mainstay in UK jazz through an acclaimed series of albums on Jazzman and Athens Of The North, moving from soul-jazz workouts to library music to cinematic, haunting compositions and pastoral acid folk. ‘Symphonie Pacifique’ goes expansive and widescreen, building a lush soundscape using choral textures, harp and tubular bells. “It has been a hallmark of my previous albums to use choral voices and tubular bells to sound more like chordal instruments,” explains Foat. “I used pedal steel for the first time on these tracks.” All are showcased on the atmospheric ‘After The Storm’. “This piece was completely improvised during our last day of studio time,” continues Foat. “The assistant engineer had set up an arpeggio on the synthesizer as a metronome; the harp and guitar created an ostinato, myself and others soloed over it and we later added choir and strings. Eventually, we took the arpeggio off to leave a calm, serene piece of music..."
Bad Moves, Dream Wife, Holy Wave, bdrmm, Mint Field, Thurston Moore, Pure X, Keleketla!, Sault, Benjamin Biolay, A.A. Williams, Greg Foat
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