ALTER.NATION #101
New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers, Grant-Lee Phillips, Annie Taylor,All Them Witches,Naked Roommate, Tricky,Throwing Muses,The Pineapple Thief, Hurts, Yelle, Josiah Johnson, Renegade Connection
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"Night Time"
New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers - New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers - Volume 1 / Night Time (feat. Jimbo Mathus)
In 2007, while rolling through the American night in a ramshackle retirement home vehicle badly disguised as a tour bus, blues legend Charlie Musselwhite and North Mississippi Allstars' guitarist Luther Dickinson engaged in conversation. The younger man related Alvin Youngblood Hart's philosophical desire to live as a "freedom rocker." The wily elder bluesman listened to his words, then looked out the window and knowingly pointed at the rising moon. He replied: "New Moon Freedom Rockers." Back in Mississippi at the Zebra Ranch studio, Musselwhite and Cody and Luther Dickinson joined forces with their dad, roots rock legend Jim Dickinson (who promptly added the words "Jelly Roll" to the band's name), Alvin Hart, and Jimbo Mathus, with NMA bassist Chris Chew and Paul Taylor as guests. They circled chairs, placed mikes, and hit "record." Afterwards, the session tapes were archived. They sat in the vault until Jim Dickinson passed in 2009, and they became apocryphal. Stony Plain's Holger Peterson contacted Luther and Cody about releasing them...
2018's Widdershins presented a Grant-Lee Phillips who was willing to mount a soapbox and speak his mind about life in Trump-era America. Two years later, on 2020's Lightning Show Us Your Stuff, Phillips is feeling a bit quieter and more introspective, still a man of principles but less inclined to speak so loudly about them. This music isn't the work of someone who has resigned himself to unfortunate changes in America; instead, he takes his time training a keen eye on the world around him, and has plenty to say about the larger issues of a culture in chaos as well as the stuff that complicates the heart and soul of nearly all of us...
Annie Taylor - Sweet Mortality / The Fool
Sweet Mortality is not a posthumous solo album from the first woman to survive a trip down Niagara Falls, but it is at times nearly as fun as freefalling inside a barrel. Taking their name from an unlikely early 20th century American adventuring legend, Annie Taylor are a rock band from Zurich, Switzerland with a pleasantly crunchy grunge-meets-psych-pop feel. Formed in 2017 by singer/guitarist Gini Jungi and bassist Michael Mutter, the group issued a pair of fuzzed-out singles before recruiting guitarist Tobias Arn and drummer Jan Winkler for their 2019 EP Not Yours! Now signed to Zurich indie Taxi Gauche Records, they offer up their first full-length album. Produced by David Langhard of fellow Swiss explorers Klaus Johann Grobe, Sweet Mortality is a still-wily though better-formed encapsulation of Annie Taylor's reigning grunge aesthetic with detours into dark pop, garage, and psychedelic textures...
Sweet Mortality is not a posthumous solo album from the first woman to survive a trip down Niagara Falls, but it is at times nearly as fun as freefalling inside a barrel. Taking their name from an unlikely early 20th century American adventuring legend, Annie Taylor are a rock band from Zurich, Switzerland with a pleasantly crunchy grunge-meets-psych-pop feel. Formed in 2017 by singer/guitarist Gini Jungi and bassist Michael Mutter, the group issued a pair of fuzzed-out singles before recruiting guitarist Tobias Arn and drummer Jan Winkler for their 2019 EP Not Yours! Now signed to Zurich indie Taxi Gauche Records, they offer up their first full-length album. Produced by David Langhard of fellow Swiss explorers Klaus Johann Grobe, Sweet Mortality is a still-wily though better-formed encapsulation of Annie Taylor's reigning grunge aesthetic with detours into dark pop, garage, and psychedelic textures...
The sixth studio effort from the mercurial Nashville psych-rockers, Nothing as the Ideal sees All Them Witches reunite with Dying Surfer Meets His Maker producer Mikey Allred for a bold and bracing collection of songs that plays to all of their strengths. Paired down to a trio after the departure of keyboard player Jonathan Draper, the band have crystallized their signature amalgam of improvisation and songcraft into an exclamation point where every soaring lead, snare crack, and mechanical whirr feels essential. Recorded at Abbey Road in London, the eight-track set makes good use of the legendary studio's analog infrastructure, peppering the proceedings with fragmented loops and rewinding reels, all the while maintaining a radiant classic rock core. It's also the group's heaviest outing to date...
Oakland musicians Amber Sermeńo and Andy Jordan were still mainly active with their funk-friendly post-punk band the World when they hatched the concept for Naked Roommate, a project that would reshape the organic, dancey energy of the World into something far more synthetic, cinematic, and shadowy. Naked Roommate had been in the works for a while when the World disbanded in January of 2020, making the time between that chapter closing and the arrival of Naked Roommate's full-length debut, Do the Duvet, a matter of months. Though the songs are fleshed out by contributions from bandmates Michael Zamora and Alejandra Alcala, much of Do the Duvet builds off the character of Sermeńo's disaffected vocals and Jordan's minimal electronic drum programming...
A year and a half after the death of his daughter Mazy, English electronic pioneer Tricky delivered his appropriately dark and dirgeful 14th album, Fall to Pieces. The first full-length since 2017's ununiform, the set closely followed the first stage of Tricky's sonic catharsis, the 20,20 EP, continuing the mourning process across a taut 11 tracks that brim with angst and sadness. As the digitized production drones, anxiety and melancholy build to uncomfortable levels like the most unnerving and depressed Portishead or Massive Attack tracks...
Tricky and Marta Złakowska
...Of course, her music is a force of nature no matter which project she's working with, and Sun Racket shows that the Muses still have plenty of noisy catharsis to offer as well. Where Purgatory/Paradise was huge in size, consisting of a sprawling mosaic of songs and a book, the band's first album in seven years is huge in sound, with a rolling, crashing heft that owes more than a little to Hersh's work with 50 Foot Wave. It may be named Sun Racket, but water imagery abounds in its ebb and flow of surging rockers and ballads that draw in listeners like an undertow, and in how it channels the sudden ways life can change (it's probably not a coincidence that Hersh's 25-year marriage was ending as she made this album). The standout "Dark Blue" opens the album's floodgates with a reminder of how Hersh, Bernard Georges, and David Narcizo can submerge their listeners in big sonics and bigger emotions...
With a catalog of excellent recordings dating back to 1999's Abducting the Unicorn, Pineapple Thief began realizing their almost peerless musical potential after 2008's Tightly Unwound. Since then, their music found an exploratory space between the expansive pop of Radiohead and Elbow, and 21st century prog. When King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison joined the ranks on 2016's Your Wilderness, frontman/songwriter/guitarist Bruce Soord welcomed his rich, polyrhythmic approach; it added considerable drama to the band's older songs. The drummer settled in more on 2018's Dissolution, contributing intuitive charts to Soord's poignant lyrics and melodies. Harrison is fully integrated on Versions of the Truth. He serves in his established role as well as being a songwriting partner for Soord, who began writing the album at his home studio in Glastonbury, deeply troubled by global politicians who no longer bothered disguising their lies. Not content to write a political album, Soord sought to explore this phenomenon in interpersonal relationships. He requisitioned Harrison to provide insight, charts, new rhythms, textures, and structured harmonies that communicated the duality in his lyrics.... "Break It All" emerges with heavy, riff-laden swagger. The hard rock vamp and reverbed vocals are accentuated by punchy snare and kick drums, Soord's distorted open-tuned chords, and a knotty synth run...
The fifth studio album by British duo Hurts, 2020's Faith is a dusky, slow-burn album that finds singer Theo Hutchcraft and instrumentalist Adam Anderson in a sanguine mood, taking their time to craft measured anthems, rife with an early-'90-inspired goth and industrial production. Having started their career evoking the monochrome intensity of groups like Depeche Mode and New Order, Hurts quickly expanded their approach, embracing an ever more pop-oriented sound, dipping into contemporary R&B, '70s-style disco, and dance music. Produced by Hurts along with Martin Forslund and Joe Janiak, Faith is less upbeat than 2017's Desire and feels closer to their 2010 debut, albeit with a more organic, less claustrophobic aesthetic...
After jumping headfirst into the pop mainstream with the Dr. Luke-produced album Complètement Fou in 2014, the French duo Yelle survived the plunge mostly unscathed. They didn't manage to break through to the masses, but a string of singles subsequently released between 2016 and 2018 showed that their grasp of bubbly dance pop remained strong and the songs benefited from the gentle scrubbing away of some of the shinier upgrades the pop machine affixed to their sound. L'Ère du Verseau completes the process and then some, with the result being the most streamlined, deepest-sounding, and most powerful album they've made yet...
Just prior to the release of their Warner Bros. debut, the Head and the Heart co-founder Josiah Johnson took a leave of absence from his longtime band. Struggling with addiction and fighting to face his demons, the singer/songwriter watched from the sidelines as Signs of Light hit number five on the pop charts and his bandmates toured the world without him. Johnson did eventually get sober, though he did not resume his role in the Head and the Heart, opting instead to document his soul journey with Every Feeling on a Loop, his first solo album. As any songwriter well knows, periods of tumult and personal upheaval lead to reflection that when nurtured begets material of a particularly authentic nature. Working with Lucius member Peter Lalish, who brought his own stable of musicians into the project, Johnson turned his reflections into a dramatic 12-song set that shares some of the indie folk exuberance of his previous band, but chases new muses as well...
Renegade Connection is the collaborative duo of Renegade Soundwave's Gary Asquith and electronic producer Lee Curtis, who released records throughout the '90s as Lee Curtis Connection. Their earliest track, 2014's "I'll Surrender," was built on a backbone of traditional roots reggae that almost sounded like early-'60s ska, with Asquith's detached vocals floating over understated synth flourishes and electronic additions via Curtis. Politicians, Protesters & Thieves is Renegade Connection's first work since that nascent single, and finds Asquith and Curtis exploring moody minimal dub and dark trip-hop production across its brief seven tracks...
New Moon Jelly Roll Freedom Rockers, Grant-Lee Phillips, Annie Taylor,All Them Witches,Naked Roommate, Tricky,Throwing Muses,The Pineapple Thief, Hurts, Yelle, Josiah Johnson, Renegade Connection
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