001 ALTER.NATiON: weekly favtraX / 21-10-2018 (54')

ALTER.NATiON #001
Donny McCaslin, John Grant, Kikagaku Moyo, Kristin Hersh, Kurt Vile, Mythic Sunship, St. Vincent, Sundays & Cybele, The Mountain Movers, Young Jesus, Hop Along, Frankie Cosmos

KRISTIN HERSH

weekly favtraX
21-10-2018

"Breath In"

ALTER.NATiON #001 on DEEZER

Influential US female rock singer, most famously with her band Throwing Muses. 
KRISTIN HERSH - Breathe In (Kristin Hersh) 3:20
Kristin Hersh has so many sounds and words flowing through her that she has three musical projects and a thriving career as an author to try to contain them all. While several of the projects she released before Possible Dust Clouds, such as Throwing Muses' 2013 release Purgatory/Paradise and her own 2016 effort Wyatt at the Coyote Palace, were elaborate double-album and book affairs, she opts for economy on her tenth solo album...

Melodic Connecticut-based indie rock outfit led by Daniel Greene with experimental and psych-pop elements.
THE MOUNTAIN MOVERS - My Eyes Are Always Heavy 4:09
The Mountain Movers' second album for Trouble in Mind, Pink Skies, sees the Connecticut quartet taking their already heavy psychedelic sound into a new realm that's more formless, free, and intense...

Chicago-bred L.A. transplants evolved from their emo origins to improvisational post-rock. 
YOUNG JESUS -  Deterritory (Young Jesus) 5:58
The Chicago-bred L.A. transplants return just a year after the release of S/T -- a record that signaled the rebirth of the band. Before S/T, Young Jesus were found perfecting a Hold Steady-esque line of indie rock on 2015's Grow/Decompose, then a marked spike in their evolution took place...

An immensely talented jazz saxophonist and flautist with limitless expertise and expressive improvising technique.
DONNY McCASLIN - Exactlyfourminutesofimprovisedmusic (Zach Danziger / Jason Lindner / Jonathan Maron / Donny McCaslin) 4:00
With Blow., Donny McCaslin transitions from world-class jazz saxophonist to indie/art rock provocateur. The musician gained mainstream recognition from the rock world when his quartet collaborated on David Bowie's final album, Blackstar...

Former Czars frontman who embarked on a literate yet heartfelt solo career in the 2010s.
JOHN GRANT - Is He Strange (John Grant) 5:17
On Love Is Magic, John Grant lets the electronics that have lurked around the edges of his music since 2013's Pale Green Ghosts finally take center stage. To make his fourth solo album, he recruited Ben "Benge" Edwards, with whom he worked on Mr. Dynamite, the debut from his dark electro-pop side project Creep Show...

A musical polymath whose St. Vincent project gained praise for emotionally intricate songwriting and its blend of rock, jazz, electronic, and classical touches. 
St. VINCENT -  Masseduction 3:40
Even as her albums and concerts become more ambitious, St. Vincent's Annie Clark wouldn't be anywhere without the fundamentals she reminds listeners of with MassEducation. Recorded over a couple of evenings during MASSEDUCTION's mixing sessions, on the album Clark and pianist Thomas Bartlett strip down the album's songs to reveal new layers of closeness and distance, sincerity and artifice...

Heavy instrumental band from Copenhagen taking notes from the limitlessness of free jazz and the volume of '70s psych.
MYTHIC SUNSHIP - Way Ahead 7:05
Mythic Sunship’s sound has been described as “the ethos of free jazz in a doom setting”. On this 2xLP set, recorded and mixed in the studio of Causa Sui’s Jonas Munk’s, the band goes even further and let’s saxophone burn into the mix...

Japanese psychedelic rock collective who incorporate Krautrock, dub, and folk-rock influences; founded by Kazuo Tsubouchi in 2004.
SUNDAYS & CYBELE - Unbalanced 5:21
Following 2017's folky, Krautrocky Chaos & Systems, Japanese psych group Sundays & Cybele set the controls for The Dark Side of the Moon on their 2018 release. On the Grass is an overt homage to Pink Floyd's monolithic masterpiece from 1973, even nicking its title from the lyrics to the song Brain Damage...

Japanese psychedelic rock band combining elements of Krautrock, Indian ragas, and acid folk.
KIKAGAKU MOYO - Orange Peel (Go Kurosawa) 4:27
After building a solid backlog of unpredictable records that flowed through jazz, psych, prog, and space rock territory like cosmic drifters, Japanese combo Kikagaku Moyo settle down a little bit on 2018's Masana Temples, and come up with their most unified and cohesive record yet...

Philadelphia band whose punk-injected, literate indie rock is led by idiosyncratic vocalist/songwriter Frances Quinlan.
Hop Along - How Simple 3:48
...On first listen, “How Simple” might seem like a straight-ahead breakup song; Quinlan’s refrain of “Don’t worry, we will both find out, just not together” outlines a recent rift, while girl group-style backing vocals sound like her crew rallying around her for support. But, at other moments, that familiar approach disappears behind a slew of other worries...

The remarkably prolific Greta Kline taps into the D.I.Y. ethos of K Records and the early-2000s N.Y.C. anti-folk scene.
Frankie Cosmos - Being Alive 2:22
...“Being Alive” is a song about being pathetically in love—the kind of all-consuming love that massacres you, that puts you on edge at all times. The track hinges on intense swerves in tempo that mirror the speed of infatuation: slow during melancholic daydreams and quick while flustered and giddy. The most exhilarating part is a breakneck drum interlude smack in the middle, and the most soul-stirring is when Kline’s bandmates chime in around a misty bassline and agree that, yes, this whole living thing is wild. ...

From lo-fi roots and compulsive recording, this fuzzy Philly songwriter grew a huge body of strong and constantly evolving solo work.
KURT VILE - Cold Was The Wind (Kurt Vile) 4:51
Following the dusky wandering of 2015's B'lieve I'm Goin Down... and the sometimes cloying 2017 Courtney Barnett collaboration Lotta Sea Lice, restless workingman Kurt Vile looked to his time in transit for his seventh album, Bottle It In. The songs here were recorded over the course of two years in various studios and locations across the U.S., and Vile assembled them between tours and road-trip vacations with his family...

Donny McCaslin, John Grant, Kikagaku Moyo, Kristin Hersh, Kurt Vile, Mythic Sunship, St. Vincent, Sundays & Cybele, The Mountain Movers, Young Jesus, Hop Along, Frankie Cosmos

22 first tracks from the best albums of the year 2015 (44-63) PnM.MiX

Florence and the Machine

Titus Andronicus – No Future, Pt. 4: No Future Triumphant 4:53
If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus...

Viet Cong - Newspaper Spoons 3:02
Starting a band is easy; an actual career in indie rock is a much tougher proposition these days. Financial success seems harder and harder to come by and saying something new within the context of guitar based music might be even more difficult...

Florence and the Machine – Ship to Wreck 3:55
Florence Welch has built her career on the premise that she feels things more painfully and powerfully than anybody else...

Miguel - A Beautiful Exit 3:04
As perhaps the last vestige of grown-folks carnality in mainstream music, modern R&B trades in the archetypes of masculinity; sweaty abs and dirty talk pushed by loverboys (Usher) and bad boys (Jodeci)...

Slaves - The Hunter 3:02
Kentish punks lose their edge on record
Slaves are extraordinary fun live: a duo with a singing stand-up drummer and a guitarist prone to playing while being passed across the heads of the audience, and blessed with the underrated gift of being amusing between songs...

Young Fathers - Still Running 3:08
Edinburgh hip-hop trio Young Fathers continue to evolve on their sophomore release, so much so that White Men Are Black Men Too could threaten a jump out of the "rap" section of any given record store if it weren't for all the electronic musical mashing and the album's aggressive, provocative title...

Tobias Jesso Jr. – Can't Stop Thinking About You 3:53
At some point it became clear that one of the themes for the first quarter of 2015 would be The Return of the Male Piano Balladeer. Upcoming records from Father John Misty, Matthew E. White, and new kid/not-kid Tobias Jesso Jr. (he’s 29)...

The Weeknd - Real Life 3:43
"My cousin said I made it big and it's unusual/ She tried to take a selfie at my Grandma's funeral," Abel Tesfaye sings on "Tell Your Friends", a revealing highlight from his second major label album...

Low - Gentle 5:06
Low will always be considered the quintessential slowcore band, but their real mastery, and the secret to their decades-long vitality, lies in something more intangible than tempo...

FFS – Johnny Delusional  3:11
Franz Ferdinand and Sparks initially floated the idea of working together in 2004, following the release of the former band's first album, which went platinum, and the latter band's 19th, which didn't chart...

Jazmine Sullivan - Dumb 3.33
The Philadelphia singer Jazmine Sullivan is such a singular artist there's an easy temptation to contrast her latest album, Reality Show, with everything else—to define her work by its negatives, by the paths it avoids rather than those it follows...

US Girls - Sororal Feelings 2:57
Three tracks into the new U.S. Girls album, Meghan Remy is awoken by a phone call from a girlfriend. She tells her about the bad dream she just had, in which her father emailed her a digital folder containing nude images of Remy taken when she was a child...

Jlin – Black Ballet 3:39
Menace is a sensation endemic to footwork, the Chicago-borne genre of heart-racing house music that is predicated on going harder and better than anyone else on the floor...

Richard Thompson - She Never Could Resist a Winding Road 4:28
Decades into his career, Richard Thompson remains a perennial critical favorite, favorite of other musicians, and cult hero; his guitar work (hybrid picking, bizarre tuning, and soloing that never feels too self-indulgent) is unparalleled and his songwriting taut, brainy, dry and dark...

Songhoy Blues - Soubour 3:32
Songhoy Blues are a young and exuberant Malian band who already have a remarkable history behind them. They fled from their homes in the north when radical Islamists overran the region, and on reaching the safety of Bamako, decided to form a band – at which point their fortunes dramatically changed...

FKA Twigs - M3LL155X EP 3:03
In "Papi Pacify", the video that introduced FKA twigs to the wider world, the British pop star stares into the camera as a man (a lover, it should be said) pries his fingers into her gaping mouth...

Ryley Walker - Primrose Green 4:06
If you thought that the last word in folky period detail was offered by the Coen brothers in their movie Inside Llewyn Davis, then you’ll be fascinated by Chicago’s Ryley Walker...

John Grant - Grey Tickles, Black Pressure 5:30
...Possessed of a smooth but aching baritone, this Colorado-raised, Iceland-based expat evokes the lushest masters of Seventies rock while delivering sociological commentary and self-deprecating wit offset by dreamlike symphonic-synthetic splendor...

Drenge – Running Wild 3:45
When their self-titled debut clattered out of the Derbyshire village of Castleton in August 2013, it was clear that Drenge were troublemakers of the very best kind. Stroppy, pale-faced brothers Eoin and Rory Loveless looked committed to near-vampirical levels of sun avoidance...

Bill Ryder-Jones - Tell Me You Don't Love Me Watching 2:26
...As with 2013's 'A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart', much of 'West Kirby County Primary' was written and recorded in the 32-year-old's childhood home, and the album sounds appropriately haunted by his memories of people and places...

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba - Siran Fen 5:48
Two years ago, the world’s greatest n’goni player released the magnificent Jama Ko, an album that matched furious songs about the chaos then threatening Mali with exhilarating solos on the ancient African lute, transformed with electric pick-ups and effects pedal...

Wolf Alice - Turn To Dust 3:07
What a relief it is that the next big British indie sensation isn't a bunch of anointed lads with stadium-sized savior complexes. Wolf Alice's debut album is one of 2015's most anticipated homegrown debuts, thanks not to them running their mouths or having the right management, but three years of hard touring punctuated by just four EPs...