ALTER.NATION #106
Beabadoobee, Quintron + Miss Pussycat, Jeremy Ivey, Matt Berninger, Helena Deland, Katie Melua, Holy Motors, Optic Sink, Deep Sea Diver, Open Mike Eagle, Woodkid, Autechre, Goldmund, Odessey & Oracle
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"Dye It Red"
Beabadoobee - Fake It Flowers / Dye It Red
...On the Loveworm and Space Cadet EPs, she enlisted a full band and producer Pete Robertson and looked back to the '90s, an era whose moods and sounds she digs deeper into on her debut album, Fake It Flowers. It's easy to understand why Beabadoobee finds that era so inspiring, even though it was over before she was born. Those years were a heyday for outspoken young women, whether they were musicians like Veruca Salt and Juliana Hatfield or fictional characters like My So-Called Life's Angela Chase (one of Fake It Flowers' finest moments, the swirling yet barbed "Dye It Red," sounds like it could be about her). Like many members of Generation Z, Beabadoobee doesn't just blur the boundaries between indie and mainstream, she erases them entirely...
The resulting vibe is some kinda tweaked-out Miami disco dipped into a Mississippi mudslide... Quintron & Miss Pussycat fans will get the unique charm and twisted take on dance music they have come to expect from our dynamic duo, but the added instrumentation and production from Mr. Cartwright push this album into some places that will surprise even longtime Q&P afficionados, especially Quintron's stinging one-handed stun slide guitar attack.
Canada's Sam Roberts Band offer more of their lyrical, rhythmically infectious rock on their seventh full-length, 2020's heartfelt All of Us. The album follows 2016's Juno Award-nominated Terraform and again finds the Montreal-based singer/songwriter exploring themes of rebirth and hope for the future. In some ways, Roberts' music is a bridge between the groove-oriented rock of bands like Primal Scream and the folky power pop-influenced style of fellow Canadians the New Pornographers....
Nashville singer/songwriter Jeremy Ivey had already enjoyed a long and comfortable career as a sideman and collaborator before making his solo debut with 2019's charming The Dream and the Dreamer. In a reversal of roles, Ivey's wife, country phenom Margo Price, stepped into the producer's chair and acted as de facto sidewoman to his twangy careworn missives, amiable introspections, and gently psychedelic romps. Having broken the frontman seal, Ivey made quick work of his follow-up, returning just one year later with Waiting Out the Storm, a sonic sibling to his debut that thematically sees him wading into the fray of politics and social concerns. On the surface, his low-key retro-leaning folk-rock seems an unlikely fit for a current-events record, but this incongruity works to his advantage as he sidesteps some of the more overt soapboxing of modern protest music, coming across instead like another weary bystander just trying to make sense of a world in chaos...
Matt Berninger - Serpentine Prison / Silver Springs feat. Gail Ann Dorsey
...The resulting, Jones-produced Serpentine Prison is an intimate, ruminative solo debut not out of line with the more downcast output of his band. Far from a single-handed effort, he's joined on the album by over a dozen guests, including National bassist Scott Devendorf, his El VY bandmate Brent Knopf, the Walkmen's Walter Martin, and Andrew Bird, the latter three of whom fill multiple roles on the recording. Famed Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey (also of I Am Easy to Find) is a featured vocalist on "Silver Springs," a song inspired by the waves of artists that leave home for the promise of the big city ("They'll never understand you anyway in Silver Springs"). It opens with a slinky, melodic guitar line, then skeletal rhythm guitar and hand drums before Berninger enters with a talk-singing plea. The track includes the line "Don't suck, don't die," which he lifted from Kristin Hersh's 2015 book about her friendship with the late Vic Chestnutt -- an example of a pact broken...
A Canadian musician who settled in Montreal to pursue recording as a singer/songwriter with a distinctly artful approach, Helena Deland drew the interest of Luminelle Recordings (Fat Possum/House Arrest) with her early EPs. Her full-length debut, Someone New, expands on the intimate, exploratory sounds of her earlier work... Opener "Someone New" introduces Deland's gentle, youthful voice and distracted demeanor, at first over a drone that eventually falls on- and off-pitch. Just before the one-minute mark, the song picks up keys, a rhythmic guitar pattern, and muffled drums to establish a tempo, while Deland's surrealistic ruminations continue ("If things go my way/I'll stay in this room/Where tonight I want to lay/Kissing someone new/With a familiar face/ I can't replace"). The song settles into something outright catchy, though the occasional unexpected chord progression and details like disappearing bass keep things off-kilter...
Britain's Katie Melua returns to her intimate pop sound with 2020's artfully textured Album No. 8. The album is Melua's first proper studio follow-up to 2013s Ketevan and arrives four years after her majestic holiday collaboration with the Gori Women's Choir, In Winter. While a return to her original alternative pop style, Album No. 8 is nonetheless a creative departure from her past work. Produced by Leo Abrahams, it finds Melua in a deeply introspective mood, crafting lightly experimental songs that evince the influence of '70s Krautrock and more-contemporary indie rock influences...
Holy Motors couldn't have picked an album title that better represents how artfully they distill their influences than Horse. While their debut Slow Sundown hinted at just how far West they could take their music, this time the Estonian band lean into their dreamy brand of twang. They wrote much of Horse while on the road in America, and the feeling of traveling through wide-open spaces reverberates on tracks such as "Matador," which sounds like tooling down a long highway in the dead of night... echoes the Velvet Underground, Cowboy Junkies, and of course, Mazzy Star...
Natalie Hoffmann, guitarist and singer of the Memphis-based garage-punk group NOTS, started Optic Sink as a solo home-recording diversion in 2018, while her main band was taking a break from touring in order to work on their third album. NOTS had incorporated spooky organs and shadowy effects into their jittery post-punk tunes, but with Optic Sink, Hoffmann plunges fully into the analog electronic realm, constructing dystopian minimal synth gems that are every bit as urgent and visceral as her guitar-driven work. With collaborator Ben Bauermeister providing additional percussion, Hoffmann blots out the light with thick layers of hazy synths, while buzzing, apprehensive bass lines and racing drum machine rhythms make her monotonic intonations sound all the more paranoid...
With their third full-length outing, Impossible Weight, Seattle-based indie rock band Deep Sea Diver delve deeper into pain and emotional turmoil. Fronted by singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter Jessica Dobson, the quartet build upon the promise of 2016's Secrets, tightening the songcraft with satisfying results. Although she's faithfully backed by drummer Peter Mansen, bassist Garret Gue, and second guitarist Elliot Jackson, this is clearly the Dobson show. Facing depression, conflict, bad relationships, and much more, she gives an urgent and passionate performance, pushing her vocals and searing guitar work to new heights... Additional highlights include the churning rock blast "Lights Out" -- which sounds like a collision between Radiohead and Silversun Pickups...
Open Mike Eagle wrote the songs on Anime, Trauma and Divorce in order to help process his feelings during a particularly turbulent time in his personal life, which was made even more complicated when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. He alludes to a broken marriage and music business troubles, but doesn't go too deep into specifics -- instead, the album is primarily focused on his reactions to everything that's going on, as well as how he considers coping with it all and making efforts to improve his life... the dusky house thump of "Bucciarati" (featuring Kari Faux) smoothes over the song's sentiments of trying to emerge from feeling broken...
Though nearly a decade separates Woodkid's The Golden Age and S16, it's almost impossible to tell at first. Arriving seven years after his 2013 debut album, Yoann Lemoine's second full-length is very much of a piece with his previous work; his songs still have so much musical and emotional richness that they feel like miniature symphonies. S16's opening track, "Goliath," is pure Woodkid: its bone-rattling beats and heroic strings evoke the giant's menace and David's bravery as well as Lemoine's own epic battle between toughness and vulnerability....
Autechre tended toward the excessive throughout the 2010s -- an incomplete list of their output during the decade includes the two-hour Exai, the five-part Elseq, and the eight-hour NTS Sessions, in addition to dozens of live releases. The daunting yet highly rewarding NTS Sessions particularly houses some of the duo's most extreme material, from 20-minute algorithmic splatter-funk jam sessions to an hour-long postapocalyptic drone. 2020's SIGN seems to be a deliberate step back from all of this, being a standard-length album that leans closer to their ambient side... A steady 4/4 kick drum underpins the melancholy wash of "psin AM," giving space to breathe and reflect...
...Eighth album The Time It Takes finds Kenniff in a nostalgic frame of mind, presenting 15 ambient pieces that stretch the project in new directions and build on the musical vocabulary established with earlier albums. Goldmund's sound has always been rooted in restraint and minimalism... The gorgeous "Rivulet" smears piano and distant strings through layers of delay that sound captured on a warped, decades-old cassette...
For their third album, Odessey & Oracle focused more exclusively on their vintage synth element, using only synthesizers and keyboards from the '60s and '70s. Released in early 2020, Crocorama continued to expand the band's approach and sound.
All keyboards and synthesizers used on this record are from the 60’s to the 80’s : Hohner Pianets N & T, Minimoog model D, Korg Lambda, Oberheim SEM, Prophet 600, Crumar Bit99 & Brassman, Logan String Melody II, Roland SH-09, Korg MS-20 & Stage Echo…
Beabadoobee, Quintron + Miss Pussycat, Jeremy Ivey, Matt Berninger, Helena Deland, Katie Melua, Holy Motors, Optic Sink, Deep Sea Diver, Open Mike Eagle, Woodkid, Autechre, Goldmund, Odessey & Oracle
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