ALTER.NATION #112
The Kills, Kamasi Washington, Guided by Voices, Xyla, The Kills, Osees, Thee Oh Sees, Doug Carn, Ali Saheed Mhuhammad, Adrian Younge, Lonnie Holley, Liturgy
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"Love Is A Deserter"
A good sign that a band is on a creative hot streak is the amount of music they release outside of their albums. As the B-sides and rarities collection Little Bastards shows, Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart were barely keeping up with their muse during their first decade as the Kills. Named for the Roland 880 sequencer/drum machine that gave the duo's early work its signature throb, Little Bastards is an apt description of these stray songs that deserve more love... While it's one of the collection's earliest recordings, it shows that Hince and Mosshart knew what they were doing from the start. Not only does Little Bastards get at everything that makes the Kills equally enduring and inventive, it's a lot of fun, too.
In scoring Becoming, director Nadia Hallgren's Michelle Obama documentary, saxophonist, composer, and arranger Kamasi Washington reveals a side of his musical universe we've not encountered on his own sprawling, spiritually inspired albums. He drew inspiration from Hallgren's counsel, her narrative frames, and Obama's life and musical tastes -- he listened to her playlists in preparation... "I Am Becoming" frames a resonant Hi Records-inspired soul melody with wordless backing vocals adding a gospel feel atop an emergent B-3, piano, keys, and strings. Washington leads the solos with a meaty, reedy tenor break followed by electric guitar and muted trombone...
...It's hard to imagine an artist better suited to capitalize on a year of enforced lockdown than Pollard, especially when his productivity was already through the roof. That the indie rock titans already had enough quality material in the tank after 2019's bounty to trot out two more full-lengths during a global pandemic was an impressive feat, and Styles We Paid For is no slouch of a record, especially given that it was completed in quarantine with the bandmembers trading files from their respective home studios. Originally envisioned as an entirely analog set called Before Computers, Pollard and bandmates Doug Gillard (guitar), Bobby Bare, Jr. (guitar), Mark Shue (bass), and Kevin March (drums) gamely readjusted their approach to suit the times and continued their hot streak with another reliably solid latter-day release.
When, toward the beginning of 2020, Xyla began crafting the tracks that would become her debut album, she was in what she has described as a “vulnerable” place. After six years in San Francisco, where she had moved from Houston to study French horn at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she had spent a few months in Berlin, soaking up the city’s electronic-music scene. It was a heady time: She clubbed by night and made music by day, gathering inspiration from the unfamiliar city around her. But upon her return to the Bay Area, her spirits came crashing down... The album reaches its emotional peak with the jazz-sampling “Narcissus.” Hi-hats tap like nervous fingers drumming on the kitchen table, and the way the beat stops and starts reinforces a curious mood that’s both ruminative and distracted. Her arrangement captures a curious heart-in-mouth feeling—not quite a fight-or-flight instinct, but a sense that something needs to change, if only the exit strategy would reveal itself. Then, after a few seconds of silence, it does just that: Her drum programming straightens out and plunges ahead, haloed by gentle chimes...
A good sign that a band is on a creative hot streak is the amount of music they release outside of their albums. As the B-sides and rarities collection Little Bastards shows, Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart were barely keeping up with their muse during their first decade as the Kills. Named for the Roland 880 sequencer/drum machine that gave the duo's early work its signature throb, Little Bastards is an apt description of these stray songs that deserve more love...
Hot on the heels of their late-2020 album Protean Threat, the ever-prolific Osees released a companion album of sorts made up of drastically remixed tracks, found sounds, manipulated field recordings, and general weirdness under the name Panther Rotate... It certainly doesn't rock as hard as an Osees album, but the mind-blowing nature of Dwyer's work remains intact and there's absolutely no reason anyone already under the band's spell shouldn't find Panther Rotate to be another vital and inspiring piece of the Oh Sees/Osees puzzle.
As a member of A Tribe Called Quest, Ali Shaheed Muhammad played a pivotal role in the evolution of rap music throughout the 1990s, factoring in the development of the jazz-rooted, sample-based production approach that epitomized Native Tongues...
Adrian Younge was known foremost as an entertainment law professor when he provided the score for the blaxploitation homage Black Dynamite (2009)...
Doug Carn is one of the finest Hammond B-3 organists alive. Also known as a fine pianist among jazz aficionados, he's spent the last six years leading the post-bop West Coast Organ Band. To producers/multi-instrumentalists Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Carn is a primary influence, the creative mind behind four seminal spiritual jazz-funk albums made for Black Jazz during the 1970s, including the oft-sampled Infant Eyes and Adam's Apple. He is a perfect subject for the fifth Jazz Is Dead project. Recorded on vintage gear at L.A.'s Linear Labs Studio, these analog recordings meld grooves from jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, Afro-Latin, and Brazilian styles in startling new ways... Carn plays organ exclusively on ten of these eleven collectively written cuts. Muhammad and Younge, in addition to co-composing and producing, play electric bass and Rhodes piano respectively. The house band also includes drummer Malachi Morehead, alto saxophonist Shai Golan, and trumpeter Zach Ramacier. "Dimensions" emerges with a glimmering, reverbed Rhodes and softly swelling B-3 in a circular, chromatic progression. The band responds with tight, butt-shaking, interlocking grooves. The scalar progression remains but is dominated by Morehead's slamming beats, Carn's meaty organ fills, and Muhammad's aggressive, rubbery bass line; combined, they provide the master key for the jazz-funk lock.
...The more ambitious "Like Hell Broke Away" can be described as dark psychedelic doo wop, as Holley pleads to a lover who wants to throw him out, surrounded by multi-tracked howls and moans as well as swirling, levitating guitar licks... He absolutely hammers the keys while wailing about the history of humanity from Biblical times to modern-day civil rights struggles, and it's one of the most inspired recordings he's ever made.
...Liturgy’s black metal core, built around Hunt-Hendrix’s time-stretching “burst beats,” remains intact, thanks to the return of the athletic quartet that debuted on H.A.Q.Q. But a gaggle of marquee New York improvisers—trumpeter Nate Wooley, flautist Eve Essex, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and so on—broaden Liturgy’s textures and techniques. Scraped violin strings chatter with tremolo guitars. Pounded piano figures complicate splenetic rhythms. At one point, during “The Fall of SIHEYMEN,” Liturgy sound like a symphony being led by John Zorn toward the Naked City...
The Kills, Kamasi Washington, Guided by Voices, Xyla, The Kills, Osees, Thee Oh Sees, Doug Carn, Ali Saheed Mhuhammad, Adrian Younge, Lonnie Holley, Liturgy
