"Dance Till We Die" #122 ALTER.NATION.MiX - weekly favtraX 27-03-2021 (17trx 1h 06m)

 ALTER.NATION #122(17trx 1h 06m)

Lana Del Rey, Chad VanGaalen, Jon Batiste, American Culture, Triptides, New Bums, Michael Beach, Mint Julep, A.A. Williams

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"Dance Till We Die"

Vocalist who makes atmospheric orchestral pop showcasing her torchy image and sensuously husky singing style.

Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails over the Country Club / Dance Till We Die

...With seventh album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey shakes off the cocoon of her slick pop days completely, continuing the nuanced songwriting and hushed perspectives of NFR! and turning in her most atmospheric set of songs to date... This puts her layered self-harmonizing in the forefront of most songs, and also makes room for colorful smears of laid-back '70s-style lead guitar or delicate, jazz-informed touches. Del Rey again pairs with Jack Antonoff for production, and the duo map out every song with slowly evolving subtleties... It's on an entirely different page than the club-ready remixes of her earlier material, but with Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey shows her softest moments can be her most powerful.

Eccentric D.I.Y. indie rock singer, songwriter, and visual artist based in Calgary, Alberta. Since debuting in the front half of the 2000s, the multi-dimensional world of Canadian singer, songwriter, and visual artist Chad VanGaalen has developed as a panoply of experimental D.I.Y. indie rock, ethereal folk, and outright psychedelia all wrapped together into a distinctive audio/visual aesthetic.

Chad VanGaalen - World's Most Stressed Out Gardener / Flute Peace / Starlight

With a title to match its chaotic tone, World's Most Stressed Out Gardener is the seventh album from Chad VanGaalen, the Calgary-based singer, songwriter, and illustrator known for his eclectic kitchen-sink style and peculiar visual aesthetic... His previous album, 2017's Light Information, doubled down on underlying currents of anxiety and alienation, and while elements of this spill over into Gardener, the whole of the record is a far more sprawling and disconnected affair. Segueing from tranquil space folk to tumultuous quasi-orchestral indie rock, often within the same track, VanGaalen unloads his whims with an almost frantic gusto...

Louisiana-born pianist and singer known for his eclectic crossover music that juxtaposes jazz, soul, pop, gospel, and NOLA R&B.

Jon Batiste - We Are / I Need You

In May 2020, pianist and vocalist Jon Batiste released the song "We Are" in support of the Black Lives Matter protests. A year later, he expanded that song into the vibrantly cross-pollinated full-length album We Are. While jazz is always at the core of Batiste's work, on We Are he dips back into the genre-bending pop and R&B-influenced sound of his Stay Human ensemble... "I Need You," an electric amalgam of boogie-woogie blues and vintage hip-hop attitude -- like an impossible combination of Little Richard and OutKast. Batiste's genre-mashing reinforces the album's theme of intergenerational wisdom, and it's also wonderfully fun.

Scrappy Denver indie rock unit fronted by Chris Adolph honors the outsider culture of D.I.Y. music. Honoring the true outsider ethos of D.I.Y. music, Denver's American Culture plays an uncompromising amalgam of scuffed-up indie rock, classic college rock, and lo-fi punk, with bits of dub and Afrobeat thrown in for good measure.

American Culture - For My Animals / Silence / Drug Dealer's House

Colorado's American Culture return after a six-year gap to deliver For My Animals, a raw but comforting paean to the D.I.Y. underworld of basement shows, handmade merch, and the unbreakable community of outsiders who are the lifeblood of true independent music... American Culture's mix of harsh punk clatter, mellow jangle, dub, and observational mysticism makes for an intriguing tangle of mood and emotions. True to the umbrella spirit of their name, they represent a lot more than can be summed up by a single banal tag.

Los Angeles-based quartet employs a kaleidoscopic blend of breezy, retro-West Coast pop, knotty punk, and gritty, groove-laden psych-rock.

Triptides - Alter Echoes / Elemental Chemistry / She Doesn't Want To Know

Alter Echoes is the second album Triptides have made since moving to L.A. from Indiana, and their first in a fancy studio, one that boasts a pedigree ranging from the Standells to Pink Floyd. It's also their first for Alive Naturalsound Records, and after all that, it's not a shock that it is their sunniest, most polished, and hardest rocking album to date. The band's leader Glenn Brigman and the new lineup of bassist Stephen Burns and drummer Brendan Peleo-Lazar decided to strip away any remaining vestiges of the lo-fi, reverb-heavy group they once were to become something bright, clean, and super jangly.... "Elemental Chemistry" rolls along slowly like late-period Rain Parade jamming with early-'70s Pink Floyd... The best of the batch is the very Zombies-sounding "She Doesn't Want to Know," with Brigman doing his best Colin Blunstone as the group vamps jazzily behind him. These stretches out of their comfort zone work well for the band, giving the record more depth than previous efforts. They may be slightly less retro now -- very slightly -- but any disappointment this alteration might bring is balanced out by the reliably good songs and performances.

Dirgy folk duo formed by Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Skygreen Leopards member Donovan Quinn. A collaboration between two respected indie musicians, New Bums offer a spare, compelling sound rooted in folk, indie, and lo-fi traditions. New Bums' music often consists of just two voices and two acoustic guitars with the elements layered in a way to favor both their fluid melodic ideas and a gentle drift informed by psychedelia.

New Bums - Last Time I Saw Grace / Billy, God Damn / Wild Dogs

Back in slagtion, New Bums, that duo nobody thought to ask for – Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny and Skygreen Leopards' Donovan Quinn – are deeper in their nocturnal jungle where all the folly and failure in the world is like an elegant fever dream you want to have every night, and do. Dry humor and pathos pop in a collapsed acoustic vein!

Michael Beach is a San Francisco-based musician. The formative years of his musical career were spent in Melbourne, Australia where he released several EPs with Electric Jellyfish (Ecstatic Yod, Twin Lakes) as well as his debut LP, Blood Courses (2008).

Michael Beach - Dream Violence / Irregardless / De Facto Blues

Dislocation and anxiety course through Michael Beach’s fourth solo album, endowing both his woolly guitar rockers and thoughtful piano ballads with an undercurrent of dread. While that’s a relatively familiar feeling in light of the past year, those doomy vibes lend thematic heft to the Melbourne-based songwriter’s cathartic approach. Right from the opening ‘Irregardless’, which announces its clanging tunefulness for nearly two and a half minutes before Beach finally begins to sing, he seems to be circling the idea of our hopes being unceremoniously dashed. He sings about “dreaming of an imaginary past” and “oblivion calling you by your name”, while advising the subject to “walk with the pride of the dispossessed”... “We’ve got the modern existentialism / Lying on the factory floor,” sings Beach on the capitalism-skewering ‘De Facto Blues’. He singles out the phrase “Roma Invicta” (“unconquered Rome”) as a rallying cry for those propping up ailing imperialism, while the song charges on with an impassioned forward thrust...

The explorative alternative dance music of married duo Hollie and Keith Kenniff (Helios, Goldmund) balances dreamy and polished textures.

Mint Julep - In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep / Mirage / In The Ocean

For their fifth album, Mint Julep -- the married duo of Keith (aka Goldmund and Helios) and Hollie Kenniff -- embrace denser, hazier textures explored but not sustained on its more dance-oriented predecessors. That's not to say that it's not still dance- and sway-friendly, rather that the descriptively titled In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep is more suggestive of a drugged-out, somnambulant state than a set of pop songs... Much like the album's title, songs such as the shimmery "Mirage" and more percussive "In the Ocean" are as sonically descriptive as they are evocative with overlapping textures, including Hollie Kenniff's breathy voice subtly trading emphasis in the mix without ever fading into something perceived as a background. .. The collective result is often exquisite, and In a Deep and Dreamless Sleep's subtle changes in tempo, rhythm, and sophisticated timbres provide enough movement to soothe rather than bore.

Dark, artful vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs fuse folk, metal, post-rock, and classical influences. Describing her music (with tongue in cheek) as "death gospel," A.A. Williams writes and performs dark and deeply atmospheric songs with a textured voice, matched by her instrumental abilities on guitar, piano, and cello.

A.A. Williams - Songs From Isolation / Creep / Into My Arms / Nights In White Satin 

A.A. Williams adds her dark, gothic sheen to stripped-back covers on Songs From Isolation… In some ways, it was almost perfect timing that A.A. Williams’ Forever Blue debut landed just as the world realised that COVID wasn’t going to be a short-run thing. The intimate, close melancholy of the London singer-songwriter was already something beautiful to which one could escape the noise of the world. As perspectives and lives changed and loneliness became much more of a feature of daily life, the mood of her frail, shadowy songs became the perfect reflection of those moods, a hug of sound... 

Lana Del Rey, Chad VanGaalen, Jon Batiste, American Culture, Triptides, New Bums, Michael Beach, Mint Julep, A.A. Williams

094 ALTER.NATION.MiX weekly favtraX 08-07-2020 (51')

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

Washington, D.C. band who fuse edgy punk rock with engaging power pop melodies and clean harmonies. Grafting power pop melodies onto the speedy and minimal frameworks of punk rock, Bad Moves deliver rock & roll that's both fun and thoughtful.
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...

Arty, all-female British trio influenced by '90s indie rock, punk, and ambient pop. With their brashly catchy mix of punk and pop and proudly feminist viewpoint, Dream Wife continue the empowering lineage of the Slits, Debbie Harry, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Le Tigre. 
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.

Texas-based garage-psych combo whose music is one part Nuggets-style fuzz mixed with two parts lysergic echo and drone.
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...

Hull, U.K.-based quintet Bdrmm walk the line between dream pop and shoegaze, switching between ethereal melancholy and driving delay with ease.
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...

Mexican duo producing ethereal dream pop with nods to Krautrock and ambient, utilizing fuzzy guitars and heavenly vocals.
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's work with Sonic Youth rearranged the parameters of indie rock to an almost incalculable degree, merging experimental art rock tendencies with unconventional guitar tunings for a sound that would influence generations to come.
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...”

Pure X - Pure X / Angels of Love
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.

The collective Keleketla! is a musical collaborative project between Coldcut and a menagerie of South African musicians, as well as several international guests. Encompassing a variety of jazz, hip-hop, and club sounds, their genre-bending eponymous album arrived in 2020.
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.)

Anonymously presented collective mixing psychedelic soul, post-punk funk, and alternative R&B, produced by Inflo.

SAULT - Hard Life

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.

French pop singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer who is the only loigical successor in chanson to Serge Gainshbourg.

Benjamin Biolay - Grand Prix / Papillon Noir

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…." 

Dark, artful vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose songs fuse folk, metal, post-rock, and classical influences.

A.A. Williams - Forever Blue / All I Asked For (Was To End It All)

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.

London-based keyboardist, composer, bandleader, and DJ, Greg Foat is a musician completely of his time and somehow beyond it. His highly original "non-contemporary jazz" utilizes conventional instruments and an exotic array of unorthodox ones, including harpsichord, tubular bells, and a 15-piece choir.

Greg Foat - Symphonie Pacifique / Symphonie Pacifique

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