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
weekly favtraX
2 7 - 0 3 - 2 0 2 1
"Dance Till We Die"
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 - 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...
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.
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
