ALTER.NATiON
Radiohead, Old Sea Brigade, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Ultramarine feat. Anna Domino, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Noname, Ibibio Sound Machine, Sharon Van Etten, Priests, Bill MacKay, Tørsö, Cherry Glazerr
Radiohead, Old Sea Brigade, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Ultramarine feat. Anna Domino, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Noname, Ibibio Sound Machine, Sharon Van Etten, Priests, Bill MacKay, Tørsö, Cherry Glazerr
weekly favtraX
13-01-2019
Radiohead Rarity “Ill Wind” Is Now Streaming / The Moon Shaped Pool B-side is finally available
Radiohead have finally made “Ill Wind” available on streaming services. A B-side from A Moon Shaped Pool, the track originally appeared on a CD with the vinyl edition, alongside their would-be Bond theme “Spectre.”
Old Sea Brigade will release his debut full-length album, Ode To A Friend, on January 4, 2019. With this news, the Nashville-based, Atlanta-born singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist shares a new album track, “Feel You,” with an accompanying music video.
Produced by Jeremy Griffith, the 11 tracks on Ode To A Friend blur and break barriers. While the songs remain rooted in Americana, indie, rock, and ambient soundscapes, they also toss and turn between analog cinematic flourishes and provocative lyricism.
After recording three murkily psychedelic albums heavily influenced by living in the swirl of Mexico City, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete's sound changed when the duo moved out of the bustling metropolis to the more relaxed locale of Ensenada in Baja, California. Their music became more expansive on 2016's Balance, and shifted again when they built their own studio and had more time to experiment. When recording 2018's De Facto, they were joined by members of their live band -- synthesizer wiz José Orozco, drummer Andrea Davi, and bassist Fernando Nuti -- and the five musicians recorded much of the album together in one room, constructing songs from loops and fragments before masterfully patching them together.... "Unificado" is a desert-baked psych ballad that turns into a fuzzfest halfway through, with Obsolete wringing all sorts of nasty noise out of his guitar with the rest of the band locking into a sturdy late-'60s groove...
Nearly 30 years after Folk, their debut long-player, Essex duo Ultramarine return to Les Disques du Crépuscule for Signals Into Space, their seventh album... Signals Into Space is what you'd expect from Ultramarine: it's airy, spacy, and pillowy, and its textures frame unassuming loops colored with synthetic and organic rhythms, carefully arranged reeds, winds, stacked keyboards, and samplers. The American singer/songwriter Anna Domino -- whose recordings on Les Disques du Crepuscule and Factory inspired the lads early on -- co-wrote and sings on four tunes... Domino and Ballamy come together on "Arithmetic," where dubby club jazz, angular Prince-esque pop, and spindly Anglo funk collide with psychedelic effects, trippy echoes, and multivalently layered percussion, with organs and electronic pianos exchanging pulses amid the loops and beats in the foreground. That dubwise quotient meets Ballamy's improvising as tenor sax and jagged synth chords introduce Domino, who relates a nearly perverse tale of technology and intimacy. Sampled handclaps, bass loops, and chunky guitars expand the striated cadence into a nocturnal drift of sonic inquiry.
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| Anna Domino |
Serge Gainsbourg had an old trick that he loved to pull, using his lascivious baritone to intone dark, fucked-up things over gorgeous, frothing pop music. On “Bombs Away,” Serge’s daughter and “Lemon Incest” duet partner does a sort of updated version. The track — from Charlotte’s Rest collaborator SebastiAn — is slick, itchy club music, its needling synth-pop arpeggios offset by lush lounge-singer piano. In her lithe whisper, Charlotte lays out apocalyptic scenarios: “The city’s quiet and awaiting the Blitz/ A candle’s lit where old Victoria sits/ Babylon’s burning, and a dynasty ends/ Enemies, enemies will never be friends.”
“Song 31″ is a victory lap. Noname released it as a celebration for selling out three end-of-year shows in her Chicago hometown, all on the heels of her excellent Room 25, which solidified her as a critical darling. It’s also, at least partially, a rebuff against those who say that maybe Noname is a little too much vibe, and too few bars. Noname jumps all over “Song 31,” her silky voice shadowboxing with a gorgeous beat that’s part-and-parcel with the stuff that was on Room 25. On it, Noname grapples with the idea of “pain for profit,” using her art as both a tool for personal transformation and capitalist gain. “Everything is for everything, rhymin’ with casualty, ain’t no labels that’s backing me but my tickets be sellin’ out,” she raps...
We all know the longstanding, well-earned pop-music cliché about stiff and mannered white boys, from Paul Simon to James Murphy, looking to Africa for some hint of funky liberation. And so it feels especially liberating when an African woman comes along and swipes the stiff and mannered funk back from them.
On “Tell Me (Doko Mien),” Eno Williams, born in Nigeria and based in London, leads her band Ibibio Sound Machine toward nervous, jittery ecstasy. Williams’ voice is graceful and liquid when she’s singing in English and euphorically disruptive when she’s singing in Ibibio. In both languages, she expertly surfs over her band’s brittle synths and burbling bass, a disco-techno-funk hybrid that spans decades.
Pop music and youthfulness are always bound up in each other: a new artist cataloguing the travails of their teens or early 20s in real time, or the songs a young person chooses to soundtrack formative life experiences, or an older artist looking back on the time lost, the time spent, the paths taken or not, the summers gone. Aging, obviously, is universal — so you can find countless songs through pop history that try to reckon with the passage of the years, the old haunts disappearing, the person you become looking back on the person you were. In “Seventeen,” Sharon Van Etten is as meditative as ever, but sings over a song that’s more surging and hook-driven than her past work... I’ve heard a couple people compare “Seventeen” to Bruce Springsteen, one of the main influences Van Etten has cited for Remind Me Tomorrow and a patron saint for a Jersey-raised songwriter like herself...
...It’s striking how they mold their political vigor into a glossier finish. The band’s lyrics have long been fixated on an old-school Americana mythology that’s fallen out of favor for glitzy skyscrapers, a “drawn-out parody of what a country thought it used to be.” “The Seduction Of Kansas”‘s sonic framework writhes in that disconnect. It takes the geographical and purported ideological center of the country and presents to it a devil’s bargain of recognition. Katie Alice Greer’s sneering chorus echoes the litany of politicians and corporations that pander to middle America voters, turning them away from progressive values to embrace bad actors who don’t have their best intentions at heart...
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| Priests |
Chicago composer Bill MacKay has announced a new album, Fountain Fire, that will be out in March. It’s his first solo work since 2017’s Esker... "Pre-California is a brief meditation on transitioning states. Lines are introduced as a catalyst for biological action and movement is improvised through a telescoping of perspectives. In the window we see california before California, before Califerne or Calida Fornax, the hot furnace in which matter and thought are free to unravel."
...After some insane bass and drums combustion and a ceremonial pick slide, Tørsö are off to the D-beat races, violently flailing at dangerous velocity as vocalist Mae howls about futility and self-loathing: “I don’t need more time to self-reflect/ All I do is lose self-respect/ And in the end, it’s all the fucking same/ I fight myself every single day.” Halfway through the two-minute runtime, the band switches to a more primitive chug — proving they’re as adept at heavy lifting as cardio — while Mae instructs us to bury her alive. It’s hard to follow through on her command, though, when you’re being whipped around so savagely.
The new Cherry Glazerr album, Stuffed & Ready, is incredible. Clementine Creevy has mastered the art of writing gleaming, glamorous alt-rock songs with ugliness at their core...
In a press release, Creevy explains: “Wasted Nun” is about a woman trying to come to grips with her life. She’s a tragic woman. She hates herself and is trying to move through the world but gets deflated by extreme self-loathing. She wants to harness the power of the universe but instead she turns to self-destruction. The song is aggressive and intense because I’m letting out my anger, I’m enraged. People want girls to be strong, I want to be strong, but I just feel angry, and those are two very different things. There’s a stubbornness there, I know."
Radiohead, Old Sea Brigade, Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Ultramarine feat. Anna Domino, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Noname, Ibibio Sound Machine, Sharon Van Etten, Priests, Bill MacKay, Tørsö, Cherry Glazerr
