Please note: prices do not include VAT/sales tax (where applicable). Erratics & Unconformities is the first album by Craven Faults. It follows three EPs: Netherfield Works, Springhead Works and Nunroyd Works. Real-time journeys across decades and continents, and swathes of post-industrial northern Britain. The journey on Erratics & Unconformities picks up where Netherfield Works left off. We take the canal towpath out of the city. We fork north shortly afterwards. Is this where it started? The terrain gradually becomes more rugged. Familiar. Wild. Evidence of human activity is less immediate in this glacial landscape. It’s there if you seek it. But easy to ignore. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the weight of the ice-sheet carving its way through the rock. Scepter Studios, Manhattan. September 1967. Vox amplifiers driven to within an inch of their lives. An insistent rhythm. Familiar. Wild. We head across the city to 30th Street Studios a year later. More refined. Capturing a moment four years after its inception. We call into Command Studios in London on an evening in March 1972 before the pace drops. A moment to take in our surroundings. Music born in New York that has travelled beyond our solar system. A sense of weightlessness. We go as far back as 1906. Central Park. Tone poems underappreciated at the time - a visionary. We pay a visit to the village of Wümme in northern Germany. Forward momentum. There’s a nod to the rhythm of the loom. The studio building echoes with its own history by way of an early 70s Elka drum machine. We come to Van Gelder Studio in 1962 by a process of addition and elimination. We stay for the next three years. We’re also put in mind of the time we spent at Dierks Studios in 1972. A treasured record bought at sixteen. It takes time to reveal itself completely. Perhaps it never does. It would be lost now. 8th January 2013 – 19:16 – Farfisa drone through diode filter and phaser – 26 mins 38 seconds Everything in its own time. The output from the old textile mill Craven Faults calls home is no longer as linear as it once was. There was no clear start point for the project, rather simply rediscovering the joy in experimentation with no material goals. Some of the recordings that make up Erratics & Unconformities go back almost seven years. Tracks have come and gone in that time. They don’t leave until they’ve undertaken a stringent quality control process. It started slowly, but has picked up momentum in the last eighteen months. Recorded and re-recorded to the correct level of imperfection, and then left to breathe. Mixed and re-mixed. Carefully compiled when the time was right. 3rd July 2019 – 12:34 – Mixdown The journey is just as important as the destination.
McDermott is releasing Roped In, a gorgeous, intimate, and often spare album that pulls back from the collaborative nature established on Going Steady for a collection of fragile drone pieces anchored by McDermott’s intricate but direct guitar playing and haunting pedal steel work from Portland, Oregon’s Barry Walker. Featuring contributions from William Tyler on guitar and Mary Lattimore on harp.
“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”
Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.
Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.
A Powys trio whose free-spirited invention and exuberant intensity flows through experimental pop: hypnotic, exhilarating and defiantly unique. The Welsh band Islet return with the release of their long-awaited new album. 'Eyelet' was recorded at home tucked away in the hills of rural Mid Wales. It took form the months following the birth of band members Emma and Mark Daman Thomas’ second child and the death of fellow band member Alex Williams’ mother. Alex came to live with Emma and Mark, and the band enlisted Rob Jones (Pictish Trail, Charles Watson) to produce. Winner of 2020 Neutron Prize www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/2020/09/30/news-islet-win-the-neutron-prize-2020/ Shortlisted for Welsh Music Prize 2020
The West Midlands-born and London-based electronic duo Delmer Darion (comprising Oliver Jack and Tom Lenton) announce their debut album ‘Morning Pageants’ will be released on the 16th October via Practise Music. Their debut album has been five years in the making: a sprawling, industrial ten-track account of the death of the devil, inspired by a line in the Wallace Stevens poem ‘Esthétique du Mal’: “The death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.” A vast aural landscape is covered from the opening melodies coded in the constructed language of Solresol. When sequenced together, ‘Morning Pageants’ is shrouded in the same intricate noise of self-sampling and tape degradation. De-centred rhythmic assemblies of analogue drum machines play through a series of guitar pedals, thunderous bass swells from a self oscillating filter feedback patch, and folk songs dissolve into thin air. The artwork for Morning Pageants was designed by Oliver, based from a series of 16th Century prints called “The Dance of Death” by Hans Holbein, depicting different people being led away by Death. Recreating one of the prints, he replaced the figure being led away with an original drawing of Satan. The final artwork is printed on Nepalese Lokta paper, a waxy yellow paper that has been used for lots of sacred texts. Even if you’re not following the descent of the devil step by step through their unspooling archives, you’ll have little chance not to be transfixed.
“It was just a big experiment, the process of making this album,” Tom Misch tells Apple Music. “There wasn\'t too much thought process behind it.” On this freewheeling passion project born of breakneck jam sessions, songwriter and producer Misch unites with virtuoso jazz drummer Yussef Dayes for a sound that fluidly combines elements of jazz, hip-hop, and electronica. Freddie Gibbs—the album\'s sole vocal feature—adds menace on “Nightrider,” “The Real” riffs on Dilla-era soul chops, and “Sensational” throws a nod to the swirling solos of percussive greats. This wickedly unrestrained vision has landed the Southeast London pair a maiden release on the pioneering jazz imprint Blue Note Records. “It\'s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be associated,” says Dayes, reeling off Blue Note luminaries including Coltrane, Hancock, and Blakey. “It makes you want to work harder, because those guys, they were on another level.” The process also prompted a bout of déjà vu for Misch. “I have this memory of seeing this guy on drums, like, 15 years ago in a talent show in this school, and thinking, ‘This guy\'s insane.’ When we were working on the album, I was like, \'Shit. Are you that dude who...\' So it was kind of a weird one,” he says. “I was always performing at school,” Dayes admits. “It\'s a way for me to express what I\'m feeling. A chance for me to connect with the people that are into the music and give them some energy and vice versa. But with us two collaborating, coming from two different fields, we have to meet in the middle. It\'s give and take from both of us.” Here, the pair run through the album track by track. **What Kinda Music** Tom Misch: “This was one of the first tracks we did. I had a session with Loyle Carner in summer 2018. We were recording and I called up Yussef to try some drums on this track I was producing. He came down and recorded the drums for what is now ‘Angel,’ on Loyle\'s \[*Not Waving, But Drowning*\] album. So, he left the studio, and then Yussef and I were there for the rest of the day. The origins of \'What Kinda Music,\' \'The Real,\' and \'Storm Before the Calm\' came from that day. It was just a crazy day.” Yussef Dayes: “From there, we realized it wasn\'t a one-track collaboration. We felt like it could be a tape or something. Sometimes you collaborate and it doesn’t quite click, but if from the get-go it\'s clicking and it\'s sounding good, you know there\'s something there. It\'s a unique sound this track; I felt like that was a fresh sound that neither me or Tom had explored completely, so I wanted to see us start with the off-kilter thing.” **Festival** TM: “This was a day with me, Yussef, and a bassist, Tom Dressler. We recorded a bunch of stuff over the three days. And the basis for this song was something we recorded there. I knew I liked the vibe, but I wanted to sing on it, and it took a while to execute the vocals. It\'s about when you\'re younger, you have this natural presence as in you\'re in the *now*, generally, when you\'re young. And then you kind of lose that as you grow older. It\'s saying how you still have that, that you\'re still able to be present. Yussef was like, ‘I want to call it \"Festival Tune.\"’ So I was like, \'Fair enough.\'” YD: “This is a big tune. It sounds like it could score a David Attenborough documentary, you know? On something about the planet, for the real earth people. It\'s just emphatic. I can imagine this being performed at Glastonbury; I can hear people singing along.” **Nightrider (feat. Freddie Gibbs)** TM: “The vibe of the instrumental felt kind of woozy, a bit hazy. And I remember going on the *Knight Rider* trailer on YouTube, playing it with the music, and it was just a perfect combination. We knew we wanted to get a rapper on the record, and I wrote down a list of people that we like. I\'m just going through the list and Yussef said, \'Let\'s do Freddie Gibbs.\' I\'m really chuffed about getting him because I\'m a big fan of Freddie. It really adds a different vibe to the record.” YD: “We recorded this with a good friend of mine, \[producer and engineer\] Miles James. We were just were rocking. We recorded the drums and bass down in Eastbourne and then we came back and produced it up. It\'s the same thing again. My job is...my drumbeat should be able to give everybody the music that they hear on top of it. I just was like, \'Yeah, we\'ve got to get Freddie on this, man.\' I\'d been in contact with him already, just sending him beats, and I just thought this needed that extra, that little touch, man.” **Tidal Wave** TM: “You can just hear the rawness of it, the moments where we\'re just shouting and stuff. Really low in the mix you can hear me shout out, \'All right, now it\'s like a chorus, so play drumming.\' Because at that point, even though we were just jamming, I knew it had potential to be a song.” YD: “This was me, Tom, and Rocco Palladino on bass. We set up, pressed record, and just jammed some ideas. We did that twice on this record, and this was the second time, just three hours worth of music. It was just one of those days, man, just light up the incense and catch a vibe, man. Not even thinking. I was just trying to do some different stuff on the drums, different cymbals that I hadn\'t used before, some wood blocks and stuff, and try to switch up a bit.” **Sensational** TM: “This represents a bit of the rawness on the record. It’s just a little cut from a day of jamming, a little insight, and I hit up Tobie Tripp, he’s an amazing strings player. I got him to lay some violin on it and double up the guitar part.” YD: “I wanted to make sure there\'s skits and interludes and off-cuts on the records, because all my favorite albums, when I listen to the Fugees or D\'Angelo, those albums play with skits in between that tie it together. I think \'Sensational\' is one of those things—it\'s like some country-western shit, sort of, like some Django shit. This is, I suppose, my bag, man. This kinda shit. I\'d love to get a rapper on this for a remix maybe.” **The Real** TM: “For me, this was kind of like me going back to being a beatmaker. The drums are from that day I was in the studio with Loyle, and then I went home and I started chopping some Aretha Franklin. That\'s what I like about this one. It\'s kind of me going back to what I used to do.” YD: “This is definitely one of my favorites. It\'s from the same day as \'Angel.\' This is one of the beats from that day, and I recorded the drums and then I forgot about this. Tom went away, he put the Aretha sample to it, processed the drums a bit, and came back later. I was like, \'Wow, what\'s this? I don\'t even remember this.\' I love that kind of stuff. I love gospel music. That\'s a big influence to me, man. That\'s a dream of mine, to record with a live choir at some point, and obviously Aretha Franklin, that\'s legendary.” **Lift Off (feat. Rocco Palladino)** TM: “I linked up with Rocco through Yussef. They have a proper sort of musical bromance. And it\'s cool to play with them, because they\'re very much in sync. It\'s been interesting finding my voice within that trio. It\'s brought out something different in me.” YD: “I\'ve known Rocco for about 10 years now. I think we\'ve started performing together the last three years now. He\'s crazy, man. You always can tell, because bass players—they\'re very specific, man. He\'s definitely the best at what he does, and obviously he comes from... \[Welsh musician and producer Pino Palladino\], his dad\'s an amazing bass player, too. He knows what he\'s doing, man. Let\'s put it that way.” **I Did It for You** TM: “We just clicked record and we were jamming for a whole day. And this is one of the joints that came up in the evening. We jammed something, then we\'d go up to the control room, we listen. I remember thinking, \'Shit, that sounded really nice.\' I knew I wanted to sing on that one. I was like, \'Yeah, this is a vibe.\'” YD: “We recorded this nearly two years ago, it was one of the first tracks. I\'d been to Brazil a few years back, years ago, and I remember Tom wanting to go. I think he did in the end, so that track was kind of inspired by some of those rhythms and that kind of energy. It\'s closer to Tom\'s sound, I think.” **Last 100** TM: “I was playing some piano, messing around, Yussef was up on the drum kit. It was after a session. We\'re just messing around before we go home, and then I start playing those chords. And I recorded it on my iPhone. I was like, \'This is nice.\' We came back to it the next day and recorded the bassist. This is kind of like the love tune on the record. It\'s a summery, feel-good one.” YD: “You have the initial session and then obviously some of the tracks you need to produce up, so you spend a couple of weeks on them. Tom would write his vocals or add little synths to it, to get those sections there, but the drums are obviously the main thing you want to record and get that first. Then after that, it’s just adding the structure around it. ‘Last 100’ is definitely one of those ones we produced up and got the arrangement and added different instrumentation and backing vocals.” **Kyiv** TM: “So this one was actually recorded in London, but the live video was recorded in Kiev. That was a very, very cold day. It was about minus five degrees. And we were recording the live video for ‘Lift Off’ in this ex-community center in Kiev. It\'s an amazing old building. It looks like a Call of Duty zombie level. It was pretty cool. It was interesting to be in that part of Europe, the fashion and the architecture, ex-Soviet kind of architecture. And everyone in fur jackets and stuff. I want to go back.” YD: “It was in a mad building. It was like a freezer in there. They said we had one reel left, and we’d already wrapped up ‘Lift Off,’ then Rocco started playing these chords and we just recorded real quickly. It just came. What I like to do is still like to make it like it was a song. You play your part. The music is still the most important thing, even though you want to freestyle and you want to solo and all this stuff. You want to make a beat. You want to make something people will listen to as well. It’s just that know-how, how to, even if you are freestyling, just make it into the thing straight away, man.” **Julie Mangos** YD: “That’s our dads speaking on this one. It\'s a medley of little skits and stuff that we\'ve recorded. My dad’s talking about Deptford Market, where he used to sell Caribbean and West Indian food. He\'s describing what it was like in the market. About 20 years ago, he had a stall down there, and we used to have fruit imported and pick it up from the docks. This is just me and Tom trying to give a bit of context to where we\'re coming from. To get our dads on the record, and family involved—it\'s a touch, man.” TM: “Both our dads have been quite involved in coming down throughout making this record. Just coming and listening, giving their opinions on stuff. I called my dad, another day. Clicked record without him knowing, and I asked him what he thought of the record. So we put those on. I think my dad knew that this is something that I really wanted to do, making this record. Because I\'d tell him how excited I was about working with Yussef, and the way the tracks were sounding initially. There\'s a lot of excitement making this record. I think he sensed that.” **Storm Before the Calm (feat. Kaidi Akinnibi)** TM: “Kaidi is an amazing saxophone player. I met him when I was about 12 and he was seven or something. We met at a jazz youth club called Tomorrow’s Warriors. He was just insane at the sax at that time. Then fast-forward 10 years, I hit him up and we start jamming, and he featured on one of my tracks from \[2017 EP\] *5 Day Mischon*. And then we hit him up again, and he\'s been playing in my band, he\'s been touring with me. Thought we\'d try him on this track, and he just destroyed it.” YD: “He\'s 20 years old, and he\'s killing it already. It\'s one of the first ones we recorded as well. It\'s *that* same day, man. The same day, the \'Angel\' day, we recorded this one as well. This one’s got these dark synths, it\'s like a storm. It was always going to be the outro or the intro, but I think it just closes off with a different vibe before you check out. We were just trying to experiment with synths and the OP-1, which is this mad little synth I’ve got, and just span different sounds.”
Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”
If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”
“I just wanted people to see me broken down and to know that I’m not afraid to be broken down,” Angel Olsen tells Apple Music. “In fact, my whole life had broken down.” The singer is discussing why she chose to release *Whole New Mess*—a collection of raw, unvarnished tracks largely made up of demo-like recordings of the songs that would later become souped up and string-laden on 2019’s stunningly ambitious *All Mirrors*. “Originally, I wanted both to come out at the same time,” she explains. “But I wanted to make an honest account—untampered with by anybody. This was just me, the way that I would make demos.” Recorded at a church-turned-studio in Anacortes, Washington (“I couldn’t do it at home; I was still sitting in a lot of the feelings from the songs and I wanted to have a place to cook them”), *Whole New Mess* is a world away from the drama of *All Mirrors*, those galloping melodies and theatrical strings stripped away to leave a lone guitar, the occasional organ, and Olsen’s unmistakable vocals. *Whole New Mess* is, as the singer put it, “ragged,\" at times crackling as though it were an old vinyl LP. “It’s purposefully a mess,” she says, “because that’s how things are. A lot of the time, cleaning it up is the process. And I like to show where things start and how messy they are before they get to a point where they’re digestible for people when they come out.” Still, the record is as haunting as you’d expect, Olsen’s voice taking on an almost celestial quality on songs like “(Summer Song),” “Too Easy (Bigger Than Us),” or “Chance (Forever Love)” as it carries the full weight of the experiences and emotions that fueled these tracks. The dissolution of a relationship may have hit before they were written, but Olsen bristles at the idea that any of them document that alone. “I find it really infantilizing the way people just look at my work as heartbreak,” she says. “All I’m asking is for people to look a little further. That’s all.” Instead, this is an album “inspired by what I’ve been doing, by traveling constantly, by writing constantly for the last seven years and the things that I’ve learned,” she says. “It’s about the hardship that I’ve had to confront with people—not just romantically but just by accidentally \[building\] a business from the ground up and having to learn a lot of things along the way, the hard way.” By drawing the walls of her music in, she hopes people will see another side to her. “When I go out into the music world and I build my platform, I’m putting on wigs and glam dresses and putting on tons of makeup. Normally, when I get home, it’s a different story. It’s a different person. It’s a different life. I wanted to do something that was a little bit closer to who I actually am.” *Whole New Mess* is the first time the singer has delivered an album without a band since 2012’s *Half Way Home*. Doing it this way was, in part, a way of going back to her early songs and rediscovering how to, as she says, “feel strong in myself again outside of relying on so many band members or collaborators.” But it was also a necessary step to emancipate herself from these tracks, in order to let those same people back in to help her create the majesty of *All Mirrors*. And sitting in—and then letting go of—darker times to pave the way for something more beautiful chimes well with Olsen’s world view. “There’s a lot of hatred and anger and frustration happening in the world right now, and there’s a lot of destruction,” she says. “But all of that needs to happen before there can be progress. We really need to reexamine the way that we live, because we want to continue to live in this world and continue to be able to share the things that we enjoy. I really stand by ‘whole new mess’ as a phrase. I want to inspire people to think about what that means, whether it has to do with me personally and what I intended, or whether it inspires them to want to reexamine or look at those things in their own reality. I think there\'s a huge reckoning going on, and I\'ve been really inspired.”
No map is a match for Kate NV. On her third album, the Moscow electronic musician shreds conventional geographical boundaries, leaving border fences splintered in the rearview. Her music is, very roughly speaking, a mixture of Japanese city pop and the sort of avant-disco that used to soundtrack downtown New York spots like the Mudd Club. The synths and marimba are straight out of ’80s Tokyo; the sumptuous production and dubbed-out vocals suggest ZE Records artists like Cristina; the layered horns might as well be those of session players from Arthur Russell’s orbit. We haven’t even touched upon her singing, which flits between French, English, and Russian as she juggles experimental vocal techniques with the breathy sighs of dream pop. For all their idiosyncrasies, these songs have a way of sinking into your psyche. “Not Not Not” smooths its staccato phrasing into a form lilting and hypnotic; “Sayonara” smears slap bass, streaks of synth, and hiccupping sighs into a splotchy pointillism that’s both abstract and intuitive. On their own, any one of these tracks might be mistaken for an artifact from an alternate-universe ’80s; taken together, they amount to a triumph of world-building. Kate NV has said that she wrote these songs during an emotionally difficult period, but you’d never know it: Every one quivers with the thrill of unlimited possibility.
“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”
Field Music’s new release is “Making A New World”, a 19 track song cycle about the after-effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about war and it is not, in any traditional sense, an album about remembrance. There are songs here about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about Becontree Housing Estate and about sanitary towels. The songs grew from a project for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their sites in Salford and London in January 2019. The starting point was an image from a 1919 publication on munitions by the US War Department, made using “sound ranging”, a technique that utilised an array of transducers to capture the vibrations of gunfire at the front. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to pinpoint the location of enemy armaments. This particular image showed the minute leading up to 11am on 11th November 1918, and the minute immediately after. One minute of oppressive, juddering noise and one minute of near-silence. “We imagined the lines from that image continuing across the next hundred years,” says the band’s David Brewis, “and we looked for stories which tied back to specific events from the war or the immediate aftermath.” If the original intention might have been to create a mostly instrumental piece, this research forced and inspired a different approach. These were stories itching to be told. The songs are in a kind of chronological order, starting with the end of the war itself; the uncertainty of heading home in a profoundly altered world (“Coffee or Wine”). Later we hear a song about the work of Dr Harold Gillies (the shimmering ballad, “A Change of Heir”), whose pioneering work on skin grafts for injured servicemen led him, in the 1940s, to perform some of the very first gender reassignment surgeries. We see how the horrors of the war led to the Dada movement and how that artistic reaction was echoed in the extreme performance art of the 60s and 70s (the mathematical head-spin of “A Shot To The Arm”). And then in the funk stomp of Money Is A Memory, we picture an office worker in the German Treasury preparing documents for the final instalment on reparation debts - a payment made in 2010, 91 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed. A defining, blood-spattered element of 20th century history becomes a humdrum administrative task in a 21st century bureaucracy.
Squirrel Flower - the moniker of Ella O’Connor Williams - announces I Was Born Swimming, her debut album, out January 31st on Full Time Hobby (Polyvinyl in the US), and presents the lead single/video, ‘Red Shoulder’. The album’s title was inspired by Williams’ birth on August 11th 1996 - the hottest day of the year - born still inside a translucent caul sac membrane, surrounded by amniotic fluid. Throughout the 12 songs, landscapes change and relationships shift. The album’s lyrics feel like effortless expressions of exactly the way it feels to change — abstract, determined and hopeful. Squirrel Flower’s music is ethereal and warm, brimming over with emotional depth but with a steely eyed bite and confidence in it’s destination. The band on I Was Born Swimming plays with delicate intention, keeping the arrangements natural and light while Williams’ lead guitar is often fiercely untethered. The album was tracked live, with few overdubs, at The Rare Book Room Studio in New York City with producer Gabe Wax (Adrienne Lenker, Palehound, Cass McCombs). The musicians were selected by Wax and folded themselves into the songs effortlessly. At the heart of the album lives Williams’ haunting voice and melancholic, soulful guitar. The sounds expand and contract over diverse moods, cutting loose on the heavier riffs of ‘Red Shoulder’. “‘Red Shoulder’ is a song about destabilisation and dissociation,” explains Williams. “Something soft and tender becomes warped and sinister, turning into sensory overload and confusion. How can something so lovely turn painful and claustrophobic? The song ends with a heavy and visceral guitar solo, attempting to reground what went awry.” Williams comes from a deep-rooted musical family tree. Her grandparents were classical musicians who lived in the Gate Hill Co-op, an artistic cooperative from upstate New York that grew out of Black Mountain College. Ella’s father, Jesse Williams, spent most of his life as a touring jazz and blues performer and educator, and lends his bass playing to the album. Growing up in a family of hard working musicians fostered a love of music and started Williams down her own musical path. As a child, Williams adopted the alter ego of Squirrel Flower. A couple years later, she began singing with the Boston Children’s Chorus while studying music theory and teaching herself to play the guitar. As a teen, she discovered the Boston DIY and folk music scenes and began writing, recording, and performing her own songs, now returning to Squirrel Flower as her stage name. Sheer determination and belief quickly saw her make a name for herself in this newly discovered scene. Doing everything from making videos to the production of her music herself she recorded two EP’s and began touring, supporting the likes of Soccer Mommy and Adrienne Lenker (Big Thief). During this time the signature artful songcraft heard on I Was Born Swimming was formed.
Shopping return with their new album All Or Nothing – a record that speaks about commitment, leaps of faith and tests of courage. “A lot has happened in our personal lives since we last recorded and we knew this album was going to reflect that exciting and scary feeling that comes with change, heartbreak and personal evolution”, the band explains. Since their last record the band are now spread across the globe with Billy in LA and Andrew and Rachel in Glasgow, and the songs were written in a two week intensive period while they were all together. Taking a bold leap towards pop with their most vibrant & punchy production to date, mixed and produced by Nick Sylvester.
English songsmith Douglas Dare returns with his third and most stripped back studio album to date, Milkteeth, released on 21 February 2020 with Erased Tapes. Produced by Mike Lindsay — founding member of Tunng and one half of LUMP with Laura Marling — in his studio in Margate in just twelve days, Milkteeth sees Douglas become confident and comfortable enough with his own identity to reflect on both the joys and pains of youth. In doing so, he has established himself as a serious 21st century singer-songwriter with an enduring lyrical poise and elegant minimalist sound.
1. ሰሜን እና ደቡብ Semen Ena Debub North & South (Hailu Mergia) 2. የኔ ምርጫ Yene Mircha My Choice (Hailu Mergia) 3. ባይኔ ላይ ይሄዳል Bayine Lay Yihedal He Walks In My Vision (Asnakech Worku) 4. አቢቹ ነጋ ነጋ Abichu Nega Nega How Are You, Abichu (trad., arr. Hailu Mergia) 5. የኔ አበባ Yene Abeba My Flower (Hailu Mergia) 6. ሼመንደፈር Shemendefer Chemin de Fer Railway (Teddy Afro) It's been a long, winding road to Hailu Mergia's sixth decade of musical activity. From a young musician in the 60s starting out in Addis Ababa to the 70s golden age of dance bands to the new hope as an emigre in America to the drier period of the 90s and 2000s when he mainly played keyboard in his taxi while waiting in the airport queue or at home with friends. More recently, with the reissue of his classic works and a re-assessment of his role in Ethiopian music history, Mergia has played to audiences big and small in some of the most cherished venues around the world. With his 2018 critical breakthrough "Lala Belu" Mergia consolidated his legacy, producing the album on his own and connecting with listeners through his vision of modern Ethiopian music. Extensive touring after the record revealed an artist who is in no way stuck in the nostalgia for the “golden age” sound. The press agreed, including the New York Times, BBC and Pitchfork, calling his music “triumphantly in the present” in its Best 200 Albums of the 2010's list. Mergia's new album "Yene Mircha" ("My Choice" in Amharic) encapsulates many of the things that make the keyboardist, accordionist and composer-arranger remarkable—elements that have persisted to maintain his vitality all these years, through the ebb and flow of his career. The rock solid trio with whom he has toured the world most recently, DC-based Alemseged Kebede (bass) and Ken Joseph (drums), forms the nucleus around which an expanded band makes a potent response to the contemporary jazz future "Lala Belu" promised. "Yene Mircha" calcifies Mergia's prolific stream of creativity and his philosophy that there is a multitude of Ethiopian musical approaches, not just one sound. Enlisting the help of master mesenqo (traditional stringed instrument) player Setegn Atenaw, celebrated vocalist Tsehay Kassa and legendary saxophone player Moges Habte from his 70s outfit Walias Band, Mergia enhances his bright, electric band on this recording with an expanded line up on some songs. Mergia produced the album which features several of his original compositions along with songs by Asnakesh Worku and Teddy Afro. An artist still reinventing his sound every night on stage during his marathon live sets, this 74-year-old icon refuses to make the same album twice. His creative process in the studio—starting with the core band, then after listening extensively over weeks and months adding more sounds and instruments—is as urgent and risky as his concerts can be, pushing the band to the outer limits of group improvisation and back with chord extensions during his exploratory solos. "Yene Mircha" captures this live experience and fosters an expansive view of what else could be in store for this tireless practitioner of Ethiopian music.
Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini have different skill sets: The former’s a purveyor of heavy-hitting techno, while the latter specializes in shape-shifting modular-synth etudes (when he’s not playing with Nine Inch Nails). Their full-length debut together sounds more like Berliner Cortini than Londoner Avery: In place of four-to-the-floor rhythms and surging acid lines, there are floating pads, pensive arpeggios, and eerie ambient miniatures. But they also venture into spaces neither has explored before: “At First Sight” and “Enter Exit” are so flush with distortion that they verge on shoegaze, while the even more overdriven “Inside the Ruins” boasts the scorched-earth textures of doom metal. In addition to being formally inventive, *Illusion of Time* is emotionally exploratory, too, slipping between contrasting moods in a way that accentuates its immersive qualities—and makes its climactic payoff, with the blissed-out shimmer of “Water,” that much sweeter.
Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.
The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever wanted to get back in touch with the things that bring meaning to their lives after touring extensively in support of 2018’s full-length debut *Hope Downs*. The Melbourne five-piece has always approached their music with a keen sense of geography. On *Hope Downs*, singer/songwriter/guitarist Joe White and singer/songwriter/guitarists Fran Keaney and Tom Russo, who split songwriting duties, told stories about characters in distress in settings both familiar and remote—from the beautiful stretches of the Aeolian Islands in Sicily to the vast iron ore mines in Western Australia. On their second studio LP, *Sideways to New Italy*, they\'re also looking within themselves to connect with their feelings and emotions. “We went into the interior geography rather than writing about the outside,” says Russo. “It took us back to our formative places, and the places that we grew up and the places that we never guessed that we had idealized from a distance.” It also helped them recapture the excitement of being in a band together. “We wanted to carry through the positivity we always had when we started this band before we started touring,” says Keaney. “All together in the same room, not writing the songs until we\'ve actually had a chance to rip them apart and take them in different directions.” Here, Keaney, Russo, and White walk us through the album track by track. **The Second of the First** Fran Keaney: “That was one of the earlier ones that we wrote or started writing. And it informed the path that we would take for the rest of the album, which is that we found something that we were really excited about. I had a few chords for it and a rough idea for a song, and I brought it to the band, but then we ended up just taking it down a different path and left that song for dead. We had this jam that we were really excited about, but that\'s all it was. It was just two chords, and we just stuck on it, you know, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then just recorded it on an iPhone and then sat with it for a while and tried to work out what that new song might be.” Tom Russo: “We were going back to our roots of bringing in whoever is at hand to help do little bits and pieces on the album. And Joe\'s girlfriend, and one of our best friends, we got him to come in and do a spoken-word part. And that\'s not to our original spirit where we used to do that without first recording through it, just throwing the kitchen sink at it.” **Falling Thunder** Russo: “It’s about the constants of change, when you find yourself the next year in the same season. It’s written in that point where fall turns into winter. And I find that to be a really reflective time. Everyone else was on holiday in Europe, taking some time off. And I was just riding around in the tour van for a few days throughout Europe with our tour manager and our tech, which was a great experience, getting ferried around like that. I was in the van on my own, and I remember chewing the bones of this song, on my computer, in the back of a tour van watching Germany and the Midlands going by. When we eventually took it back to the band, we really pulled it apart and ended up surgically connecting two different songs.” Keaney: “Normally when we would do an operation like that, the body ends up rejecting the prosthetic, but this one was a complete success. We try to relate to our handsome monsters, our beautiful monsters. There’s a lot of—I know the metaphor is getting a bit weird—limbs on the cutting room floor. We can be brutal now. We\'re all very much open to collaborating, and while we do have a personal connection to ideas that we put in, everybody accepts that everything\'s up for grabs and everything\'s up to be moved around. So I think we\'ve got better at that over time. So yeah, there\'s a lot of carnage.” **She’s There** Joe White: “‘She\'s There\' was definitely one of those songs that just fell out of my hands really quickly on the guitar. I just knocked up a really quick demo on my computer at home. We went into pre-production with our producer Burke \[Reid\], who quickly informed us that whatever I created that day was a bit too confusing and a bit too odd. I think we were trying to push some boundaries of what\'s cool and what\'s normal and what\'s adventurous, so I guess an attitude we tried to take into this record was to not try to use the same verse-chorus-verse song structures that we\'ve used before. We hadn\'t really considered that idea of the listener, just going in it as this cool, weird pop song that can just jump around all different parts and do whatever it wants. Turns out maybe that isn\'t the case, but in the end, it informed what we have now. I feel like I used my brain more than I ever used it before, and I\'d go to sleep thinking about songs and then wake up in the morning with those songs in my head.” **Beautiful Steven** Russo: “I was thinking about the places that shaped me and shaped us. It\'s loosely set at the small, pretty tough Catholic boys\' school that Fran, Joe \[Russo, RBCF bassist\], and I went to. It would have been better to be in a co-ed school with boys and girls; there\'s something strange about getting a whole bunch of teenage boys together in like a concrete box. It\'s a bit of an unrequited love song from a teenage boy to their best friend.” **The Only One** White: “It started on my phone trying to make a synth-pop banger. I pulled the chords out of that and started playing it on the guitar. And then it turned into this kind of sad country song. So it was living in these two worlds. I think I went to bed one night while we were recording, watching *Stop Making Sense*, that live Talking Heads video-like concert. I liked the way that they introduced the elements, just one by one, and how they still managed to get so much groove, so much working for the song with so few elements. I had a little minor epiphany and thought, ‘Oh, all right. Maybe that is how we approach this song.’” Keaney: “I remember the very start and the very end of recording it. It was late at night and Marcel \[Tussie, RBCF drummer\] was probably pretty exhausted and he had his top off. So he was just walking around in his shorts, like he’s a man on a mission. He was losing his mind a bit. He was in his room, almost like he was boxed in a zoo, and Burke was playing around with all these drum sounds. I think he ended up using a plastic paint tub for one of the toms.” **Cars in Space** Keaney: “It\'s set at the time of the breakup between two people, and all that time before the breakup, when there are all the swirling thoughts and meandering words that happened at that time. When we were recording it, Burke said that he can see the rising and falling of the song, which is what happens in the verses. When it shifts between the chords and the hi-hats come up and the electric guitars move in and out, it\'s sort of the waves of \'Am I going to say it now? Is she going to say it now?\' For a long time, we tried to preserve the idea that it would be in two parts, that it would be \'Cars in Space\' and \'Cars in Space II.\' The first had another chorus on it, but then once you got to II—which is now the outro of the song—it just didn\'t make sense. You\'re on this journey, and it feels like watching a Hollywood movie and then having another 45 minutes stuck on the end. That was sort of the idea why we couldn\'t really keep it as a song in two parts, so we ended up abandoning that idea.” **Cameo** Keaney: “The setting of the song was inspired by a place in the city of Darwin. We played at the Darwin Festival, and then there was this after-party at the park just next to it. It was a really cool scene. It sort of felt like we were in *Priscilla, Queen of the Desert*. There were all these different types of people, all congregated in Darwin. There\'s someone that I liked there, and then nothing happened. As I walked back home, I let my mind go down the alternative path of just being with that person, reaching through to eternity with that person. This is an absurd sort of an idea, a bit like letting your mind wander.” **Not Tonight** Keaney: “My auntie, a few years ago, was talking about how she hated the song ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones. Because it reminded her of when she was a kid. Her older brother, my uncle, would start to get ready to go out to parties or going out on a Saturday night rather than staying at home and watching TV and being in a warm house. He would be in the next room listening to ‘Miss You’ while he was putting on some cheap fragrance and putting on his cowboy shirt, getting ready to go out and drink booze and maybe get into a fight, that sort of thing. It always made her nervous and worried. And I could see that so vividly in my head. I thought that that would be a nice place to set a song.” Russo: “It started out as a country punk song. We tried to do surgery because it didn\'t quite sit right. There was a mix between both, and some parts which were almost like \'90s radio rock. And that didn\'t sound like us—it was too powerful. It had a bit of an identity crisis for a long time. Joe knocked the cowbell against it to give it that weird country disco swing. And that was the last thing, so we were all dancing around like, \'This is the end of the album,\' like a celebratory cowbell. It\'s my first cowbell recording experience, and possibly my last. I\'ve heard about this rule that you\'re only allowed to record a cowbell once in your life. So we\'ve used up that ticket already. I think it\'s the right song to use it on.” **Sunglasses at the Wedding** Keaney: “I did this thing that Mick Jones from The Clash does. Apparently, he writes the lyrics first, and then he just looks at the words and tries to find melody, tries to find the song in the words. There\'s all those really good soul songs about weddings and marriage. And I really like the tug of those, like \[*singing*\] \'Today I meet the boy I\'m going to marry\' and \'Going to the chapel, I\'m going to get married.\' I like those songs that are set at a wedding or near a wedding; it\'s such a momentous day. So I wanted to somehow try and carry that across. It\'s a bit dreamlike.” White: “The last thing we added to the song was that really sort of bubbly, nasally electric guitar that washes over the whole thing that, again, puts it back into that dream world. So it does make it feel like it\'s got a breath, a change of pace on the album, that also takes you into a different headspace.” **The Cool Change** Russo: “It\'s another one that\'s a bit of a mix of fact and fiction. It\'s someone remembering someone who comes in and out of their lives. In places like Australia, there\'s always someone whose ego kind of outgrows their town, and they go to other places to be bigger than they can be there. So they might go to LA or New York or London to be a star in one of the fields. It\'s about a person like that, but then they keep coming back to their old relationship and they\'re never going to love anyone else more than they love themselves. It\'s based on an amalgamation of a few people; I feel everyone knows someone like that. Musically, it was like a weird, folky little number. We didn\'t really know what to do with it; it was a bit countryish and it didn\'t really fit in our world. We looked at amping it up a bit, making it a bit faster, and then it suddenly turned into this sleazy LA country-rock number. But a good kind of sleazy, like riding a motorbike down the freeway.” White: “The backwards guitar helps fight that element. I just took my lead guitar track and chopped it up and reversed some of it and stuck it back in certain spots. That immediately just takes it to that *Sweetheart of the Rodeo* \[The Byrds’ 1968 album\] psych-folk kind of thing. But I\'ll also say that drumbeat is not bad at all. It lives between those worlds.”
On their second record, Sideways to New Italy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have turned their gaze inward, to their individual pasts and the places that inform them. From a town in regional Australia that serves as a living relic to how immigrants brought a sense of home to an alien place, to the familiar Mediterranean statues that dot the front lawns of the Melbourne suburbs where the band members live, the inspiration for the record came from the attempts people make at crafting utopia in their backyard (while knowing there is no such thing as a clean slate). In searching for something to hold onto in the turbulence, the guitar-pop five-piece has channelled their own sense of dislocation into an album that serves as a totem of home to take with them to stages all over the world.
After spending much of 2019 on the road touring their debut EP, *No. 1*, Montreal quintet Pottery returned home a profoundly changed band. For one, the garage-rock adrenaline of that first record had given way to a cowbell-clanging funk that owed as much to the call-and-response theatrics of James Brown and block-party atmosphere of War as it did to the polyrhythmic complexity of *Remain in Light*-era Talking Heads. But more importantly, the band had fully embraced the (sur)realities of life on the road: the mind-numbing drives, the dinners of raw supermarket hot dogs, the nights spent crammed into zero-star hotel rooms. Those bonding experiences form the basis for Pottery’s full-length debut, *Welcome to Bobby’s Motel*—a concept album that doesn’t so much immerse you in a storyline as a state of mind, with the titular character serving less as a traditional protagonist than a personification of the band’s driving philosophy. “We actually conceptualized the record after we\'d already made it,” guitarist Jacob Shepansky tells Apple Music. “It just ended up culminating into a pretty good portrait of our lives at that time. We were staying in all these shitty motels with five guys in a room with two queen-size beds and one guy sleeping on the floor. The whole idea came out of just trying to make the best out of these dismal situations and just enjoy the time with your friends.” But more than just successfully bottle up Pottery’s relentless onstage energy—with interlocking tracks that suggest the whole album was recorded in a single continuous live take—*Welcome to Bobby’s Motel* also charts the band’s spiritual maturation, as frontman Austin Boylan balances his absurdist proclamations with more sobering ruminations on family, labor, and addiction. Here, Shepansky checks us into *Bobby’s Motel* with this track-by-track guide to the album. **Welcome to Bobby’s Motel** “Back in April 2019, we were touring with Viagra Boys throughout the States, and we actually opened the show with this every night. That was exactly what we wanted to use this song for: a fast show opener that just grabs people\'s attention right away.” **Hot Heater** “We wrote this song a couple of years ago, and it kind of spearheaded a lot of the funkier, dancier stuff on this record. Something clicked, and it was very easy to understand where we wanted to take it from there. This song was sort of like a precursor to \'Bobby\'s Forecast\' and \'Under the Wires\'—it was the start of that trying-to-play-funky type of deal.” **Under the Wires** “This was actually inspired by the same Viagra Boys tour, and the same sort of circumstance that the whole Bobby character is surrounded by. We were staying in Weed, California, and we had a day off, so we had this great idea to rent out a cabin in the woods. We find this cabin on Airbnb, we get there…and it turns out the guy hasn\'t been there in, like, three months and the road isn\'t even plowed. So it\'s like 8 pm, we don\'t know what we\'re gonna do. All we\'ve got is a bunch of uncooked hot dogs and hot dog buns, because our plan was to have a fire and cook hot dogs. We ended up going to a Motel 6 and cramming into there, and we had no way to cook these hot dogs. So we just ended up hanging out by the highway behind this barbed-wire fence all night, and it was very special. It was kind of like that tipping point where you no longer care.” **Bobby’s Forecast** “Austin was ad-libbing for most of this. He was very inspired by James Brown at the time, so I think that definitely had an effect on his delivery. We wanted that line \[‘Power/It doesn’t take much work’\] to sound as ambiguous as possible, and for the listener to create whatever narrative they imagine. At the time we were writing the lyrics \[in June 2019\], we were thinking about our day jobs, and how there\'s always that boss that\'s going to look down on you just because he has the power to, and there\'s always going to be somebody that\'s abusing their power in some form, whether it\'s completely pedestrian or an actual human rights violation. So we wanted to keep it as open as possible for people to create their own narratives and understand it in their own way.” **Down in the Dumps** “We almost ad-libbed the lyrics for \'Down in the Dumps\' as well. We were just riffing off of a similar idea \[as \'Bobby\'s Forecast\'\] and talking about the powers that be. And we were also doing taxes at the time, and everybody was all stressed out about whether they did their returns correctly. There\'s that line ‘Taxman, come get me,’ which started from a joke. One of us was saying to Austin, \'Oh, you might want to double-check your return and make sure everything\'s okay,\' and his response was all confident and cocky, like, ‘Come get me!’” **Reflection** “Austin wrote this about his relationship with his mom, and it\'s very personal. His vocals and lyrics all came after we had actually done the whole song. We had been practicing it for a while and we just never really came up with any melodies. We were kind of getting close to finishing the record, and Austin was like, ‘You know, I just got to do this, I got to finish this.’ So he went home for a night, we came back to our drummer Paul \[Jacobs\]’s house the next day to work, and Austin had a full page of lyrics and a melody. We asked what it was about; he said, ‘My mom,’ and we were like, ‘Perfect!’ I\'m really happy with the way that one turned out. I think it\'s going to definitely affect future records. I think we\'re more conscious about writing personal stories now.” **Texas Drums Pt I & II** “We were in Texas last year for South by Southwest, and we were playing, like, four shows in one day, and there\'s drum kits for everybody to play at each venue. So Paul was kind of like rolling the dice all day. But at one of the gigs, there was this beautiful drum kit that he just fell in love with, and it turns out it was handmade by this guy in Texas. Paul just wouldn\'t stop thinking about it and became kind of obsessed with it. He had become so engulfed in this kit that when we got home, we were working on music and we had this song, and then, in the spur of the moment, he started shouting out, \'Texas drums!\' We all really liked it, and then we just went with it. It\'s a love letter to this drum kit in Austin that Paul played for 45 minutes.” **NY Inn** “\'NY Inn\' was actually written shortly after we finished recording our first record, *No. 1*, so it preceded the whole *Bobby\'s Motel* theme by at least three years. But it\'s kind of funny that it ended up being in such a similar realm. I had an old demo of the guitar line on an old four-track of mine, and then Austin came over and we just hashed it out. And then very quickly we played it with the band and adjusted the lyrics, and we were really happy with it. We\'ve been playing it live for like three years now.” **What’s in Fashion?** “This is definitely the most on-the-nose track on the record. It\'s a culmination of living in a very gentrified neighborhood in Montreal. It was mostly just a commentary on the people that we see on the street, where you\'re like, ‘Do you have a job?’ You see the same person walking around the street most days—they\'re just cruising around and they\'re always looking good, but you\'re like, ‘What the fuck do you do?’” **Take Your Time** “When I was living in Vancouver, my mom ran a mission—it was basically a free store for the homeless in the Downtown Eastside. I would go volunteer there on weekends in high school every once in a while, so it\'s always been something that I\'ve understood, and I\'ve been just really close to it. But then you come to Montreal, and you just see people gorging themselves and it\'s like this free-for-all. \'Take Your Time\' was about going from that point \[of witnessing rampant addiction in Vancouver\] to being a twentysomething in the bar having a great time, but what does it take to get to that other position? And how far do you have to be disillusioned with reality in order to get there? It\'s trying to understand what it takes for that sort of an addiction to spiral out of control.” **Hot Like Jungle** “Our first version of this was much more profane. It was me and Austin basically making this Austin Powers-esque cheesy love song. We sent it to Tim \[Putnam\], the head of Partisan Records, and he laughed…and then he was like, ‘Okay, you\'re going to change this, right?’ But we got somewhat attached to the song—not for the content, but just for the phrasing. And then when we were recording, \'Hot Like Jungle\' was on the back burner the whole time, because I was the only one really pushing to get it going, because I had this idea in my head of where we could take it. But we tried so many different iterations of that song when we were doing demos that everybody was just ready to check out. And then we really slowed it down, and then everybody was really happy about it. And Paul ended up just penning a couple of lines about him coming home from work—when me and him were working construction—and throwing down his keys and giving his girlfriend a hug. I don\'t know how he got in that headspace when we were recording, but c\'est la vie!”
The debut album from Pottery, Welcome to Bobby's Motel, arrives June 26. Produced by Jonathan Schenke. Who is “Bobby,” you ask? Enter Pottery. Enter Paul Jacobs, Jacob Shepansky, Austin Boylan, Tom Gould, and Peter Baylis. Enter the smells, the cigarettes, the noise, their van Mary, their friend Luke, toilet drawings, Northern California, Beatles accents, Taco Bell, the Great Plains, and hot dogs. Enter love and hate, angst and happiness, and everything in between. Beginning as an inside joke between the band members, Bobby and his “motel” have grown into so much more. They’ve become the all-encompassing alt-reality that the band built themselves, for everyone else. So, in essence, Bobby is Pottery and his motel is wherever they are. But really, Bobby is a pilot, a lumberjack, a stay at home dad, and a disco dancer that never rips his pants. He's a punching bag filled with comic relief. He laughs in the face of day-to-day ambiguity, as worrying isn’t worth it to Bobby. There’s a piece of him in everyone, there to remind us that things are probably going to work out, maybe. He’s you. He’s him. He’s her. He’s them. Bobby is always there, painted in the corner, urging you to relax and forget about your useless worries. And his motel? Well, the motel is life. It might not be clean, and the curtains might not shut all the way. The air conditioner might be broken, and the floors might be stained. But that’s okay, because you don’t go to Bobby’s Motel for the glamour and a good night’s sleep, the minibar, or the full-service sauna. You go to Bobby’s Motel to feel, to escape, to remember, to distract. You go for the late nights and early mornings, good times and the bad. You might spend your entire life looking for Bobby’s Motel and just when you think you will never find it, you realize you’ve been there all along. It’s filthy and amazing and you dance, and you love it. The 11 songs on ‘Welcome to Bobby’s Motel’ don’t just invite you to move your body; they command you to. Fusing reckless, manic energy with painstaking precision, the record is part post-punk, part art-pop, and part dance floor acid trip, hinting at everything from Devo to Gang of Four as it boldly careens through genres and decades. The music is driven by explosive drums and off-kilter guitar riffs that drill themselves into your brain, accented with deep, funky grooves and rousing gang vocals. The production is similarly raw and wild, suggesting an air of anarchy that belies the music’s careful architecture and meticulous construction. The result is an album full of ambitious, complex performances that exude joy and mayhem in equal measure, a collection that’s alternately virtuosic, chaotic, and pure fun.
Seven years after the death of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. leader Jason Molina, *Eight Gates* collects nine unreleased songs recorded in 2008 while he was living in London. Molina had learned a wealth of trivial factoids about the city and its history during his stint—often twisting the facts as he’d come up with poetic flights of fancy (the album title refers to the seven gates of London, imagining a new gate for himself). Otherwise, his oblique prose runs deep through these spare, doleful recordings, filled with existential frustration (“Old Worry”) and pithy dirges (“Be Told the Truth”) set alongside funereal organs and acoustic slow burns, respectively. Molina, a lifelong Midwesterner, lets the guitar notes hang on \"Whisper Away,\" evoking the picturesque landscape of his hometown in all its vastness. The mood feels ominous, but also peaceful, as Molina added the soothing natural sound of birds throughout—which he recorded on his four-track in the garden outside of his Brick Lane house. These moments offer flickers of respite, like on \"Thistle Blue,\" where he accentuates the calm and the chaos within himself: \"Blackbird and thistle blue/Whose wilderness has my heartbreak wandered through.\"
Sometime in 2006 or 2007, Jason Molina moved from the midwest to London. Separated from his bandmates and friends and never one for idleness, Molina explored his new home with fervor. Sometimes he’d head out on foot, often with no destination in mind. Other times, he’d pick a random tube stop and find his way back home. He’d pick up on arcane trivia about London’s rich history, and if the historical factoids weren’t available — or weren’t quite to his liking — Molina was quite comfortable conjuring his own history. His adoration of The Great American Tall Tales like John Henry and Paul Bunyan’s blue ox Babe stretched across the Atlantic, where he created his own personal Tall Tales. And when he learned of the London Wall’s seven gates (itself a misconception), Molina went ahead and called it eight, carving out a gate just for himself. The eighth gate was Molina’s way into London, a gate only passable in the mind. Fast forward to 2008, Molina set off on an experimental solo tour through Europe. While in Northern Italy, Molina claimed to have been bitten by a rare, poisonous spider. A debilitating bout of illness ensued. "I was in the hospital here in London,” Molina wrote in a letter. “Saw six doctors and a Dr. House-type guy. They are all mystified by it, but I am allowed to be at home, where I am taking a dozen scary Hantavirus type pills a day that are all to supposedly help — but they make me feel like shit.” There is no record of a single doctor visit, not any prescription record for these medications. It is entirely plausible there was no spider and that whatever was keeping him indoors during this time was entirely self-induced. While at home, he of course wrote songs. Molina also claimed that during this time, he fed several bright green parrots that would gather in his yard. While often associated with a greyscale sensibility, Molina was oft-clad in a Hawaiian shirt and had, at least in part, selected the name Songs: Ohia for his first project as a nod to Hawaii’s ‘Ohi’a lehua flower. Which is all to say, the tropical element the parakeets brought to those sick days delighted Molina. He made short, crude field recordings of them with his trusty four-track. Only once Molina was officially on the mend and re-exploring the streets of London would he learn that those parrots had their own fabled tale. Back in the 60s, Jimi Hendrix — in a moment of psychedelic clarity — released his pair of lime green ring-necked parakeets from their cage, setting them free into the London sky. Now, their decendents are spotted regularly around certain parts of the city. Or so we’re told. Eight Gates is the last collection of solo studio recordings Molina made before he passed from complications related to alcoholism in 2013. Recorded in London around the time of the supposed spider bite and Jimi's supposed parakeets, some of the songs (“Whispered Away,” “Thistle Blue”) are fully-realized — dark, moody textures that call to mind his earlier work on The Lioness. Knowing what we know about those parakeets and their peppered presence on the recordings, one can’t help but think of that colorful tree of birds on Talk Talk’s classic Laughing Stock, certainly a spiritual guide for much of the set. Other songs (“She Says,” “The Crossroads and The Emptiness”) lay in a more unfinished states, acoustic takes that call to mind Molina’s Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, and still tethered to Molina’s humorous studio banter. You remember how young Molina was, and how weighty this art was for such a young man. On the closer, “The Crossroads and The Emptiness,” Molina snaps at the engineer before tearing into a song in which he sings of his birthday (December 30), a palm reading and the great emptiness with which he always wrestled. It is a perfect closer and, in many ways, the eighth gate incarnate: mythical, passable only in the mind, built for himself and partway imaginary but shared, thankfully, with us.
This one’s for the procrastinators and the slow learners. This one’s for the bungled and the botched, for the fumbled and humbled. This one’s for the late bloomers, and ultimately, Snapshot of a Beginner is proof that sometimes, the late bloomers bloom brightest. Eight years and four albums into it, the artistic arc of Nap Eyes finds itself tracing a line alongside frontman Nigel Chapman’s daily tai chi practice. Those first years and albums are the cold mornings in the park: the measured movements, the joint aches, the self-doubt. With each new release, an incremental and invigorating step forward. And with the end of each album and tour, a return to the beginner's practice. And now, Snapshot of a Beginner, Nap Eyes's boldest, most concentrated and most hi-fi album to date, a study of that repeated return and all that it can teach you. “The fact that you’ll never reach some idealized goal of self-mastery is exciting and a very good thing,” said Chapman of both his musical and meditative endeavors. “It’s necessary to be patient and to accept whatever’s happening now. Whatever you understand today, there will always be much more to learn, and so there’s not much cause for either self-congratulation or self-negation. This is part of Suzuki’s idea of the ‘beginner’s mind’ [see: Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, 1970], that even after years of practice, a person should maintain an open-minded willingness to learn. For a true rank beginner, this attitude also serves as a potent inoculation against overly harsh self-judgment.” There’s an immediately noticeable leap in arrangement and muscle on Snapshot..., one that still holds the raw, nervous energy and the earnest, self-deprecating poetry that make Nap Eyes an enduring cult favorite. The music still brings to mind the bucolic ennui of the Silver Jews and Daniel Johnston’s jittery naïveté. But the new sheen and maturity also now brings to mind the wide-angle appeal of The Jayhawks and the addictive brightness of Green Day’s Kerplunk!. Almost all the songs of Nap Eyes are whittled into their final form from Chapman’s unspooling, 20-minute voice-and-guitar free-writing sessions. Each member — drummer Seamus Dalton; bassist Josh Salter or guitarist Brad Loughead — then plays a crucial role in song development, composing around the idiosyncratic structures and directing the overall sound and feel of the songs. Until now, that final song construction and recording has been mostly done live in a room. But for Snapshot of a Beginner, the band went to The National’s neuvo-legendary upstate NY Long Pond Studio, working with producers Jonathan Low (Big Red Machine, The National) and James Elkington (Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley), the latter of whom also did pre-production arrangement work with the band. And my friends, this last, new piece of the puzzle has made all the damn difference. Never has Nap Eyes sounded more ferocious. There’s an enormous, pummeling guitar moment in the back half of “Primordial Soup” that feels like the tide is about to sweep Chapman’s pondering philosopher out into the deep. But then, there's the patient, new wave of “Mystery Calling,” which may well be the thesis statement of the album, if not one of Nap Eyes' most nuanced, entrancing compositions. And then there’s “Mark Zuckerberg,” a hi-fi jangle-pop earworm that, at its outset, sounds like it could be the theme song from Party of Five. Less a takedown of any one specific, capitalist tech fascist than it is a poem about the confounding and beautiful swirl of modern life, it is their thoughtful, incisive Hit for The People. One minute you’re watching Facebook’s founder, pallid and grotesque, testify before Congress over your morning coffee; the next, you’ve fallen into some conspiracy theory rabbit hole, clicking and liking away. Maybe your day wraps on a long walk through the city park, watching teens bliss out with a jazz apple. And you see the matrix of all the meaning and meaninglessness in this Dance of Life. “Transcendence is all around us,” Chapman repeats, a freeing incantation and a gift to us all as the coda slows and expands. It took Nap Eyes a long time and a long practice to reach this artistic zen, but one gets the feeling throughout Snapshot of a Beginner that this balance is going to hold.
As the 2020 lockdown commenced in Britain, Tim Burgess found an effective way to entertain a nation in isolation. Every night, Twitter gathered at #TimsTwitterListeningParty to play appointed albums while the artists and collaborators shared anecdotes from making those records. Apart from generating calls for the Charlatans frontman to be knighted for services to keeping spirits up, the virtual gatherings spotlighted his bottomless enthusiasm and curiosity for music. Also emerging during the COVID-19 outbreak, his fifth solo album is another vivid reflection of that personality: exuberant, adventurous pop that, even in its darkest corners, is warm-souled and melodic. Largely written by Burgess in pre-lockdown solitude in Norfolk, the album freewheels through chamber pop, drone rock, piano balladry, and psych, finding lyrical inspiration everywhere from America’s West Coast (“Lucky Creatures”) to an escalator in a London drugstore (“The Mall”). On the self-searching “Timothy,” it’s that faith in words and melody that shines through again: “When the music starts it fills my heart/Oh, those songs/Make us strong.” *I Love the New Sky* is just one more exhibit in the case for Burgess being crowned a national treasure.
*GENE* comes five years after *Inji*, Sam Dust’s debut under the moniker LA Priest, found a home amongst psych-pop enthusiasts. Some fragments of the album were made as early as 2014, composed on a homemade drum machine also named GENE. “I wanted to drop the record in 2018, but I was coaxed into letting it build up,” he tells Apple Music. “I\'m more of a \'drop it while it\'s hot\' kind of guy.” Label forces felt a later release date would add to anticipation, but Dust is happy to go with the flow. Two years later, the album feels lived in and analog, in keeping with Dust\'s aesthetic (he claims to not have a phone). Here, Dust tells the stories behind each of *GENE*\'s songs. **Beginning** “When I was writing the song, I had these three syllables—dah, dah, dah—stuck in my head. I actually tried about 50 different words in the refrain, but ‘be-gin-ning’ was the thing that fit the song, and it felt right. When you come into an album and you\'ve got a song called \'Beginning\' in it, it has to start the album. You can put it somewhere else, but it feels a bit too quirky or something.” **Rubber Sky** “I actually recorded the first version of this song while I was driving. I had my laptop, so I stopped, and I put the laptop on the dashboard and set it up. I\'ve never done this before or since, and I just started recording and laid down the melody and all the harmonies on it. I had those ideas sitting around for maybe three or four years. It was the last song I added to this record. You don\'t want to forget. If you don\'t recall all your ideas, you could lose albums\' worth of material.” **What Moves** “‘What Moves’ was another very late addition to the album. There’s a similarity between the first few tracks, specifically the first three. They share this common sound that the rest of the album kind of goes away from into something else. It\'s the first time I\'ve ever modeled a song on another one of my songs. If you look back at my previous stuff, each song is fairly unrelated. This was an attempt—a very loose attempt, but an attempt nonetheless—to have some sort of connection and flow. \'What Moves\' started as an early Dictaphone recording, but I never considered it a very good idea until I was like, \'I\'ve got to just make a single for the album.\' It sounds kind of cynical and formulaic, but I tried to do it with a lot of soul, and I just took this one melody and tried to give it as much depth as I could.” **Peace Lily** “I played the melody on the keyboard when I was out in the Sierra Nevada mountains. That\'s where I started the record. I only had what I could carry in a suitcase when I went over to America from the UK. I had my first prototype of the GENE drum machine and a little white Yamaha keyboard. \'Peace Lily\' was probably the simplest song on the whole record. It was just me playing the keyboard, kind of badly, because it\'s one of those mini-keys keyboards, so you can\'t really get your fingers to hit the right notes. I think it turned out all right.” **Open My Eyes** “Beginning with ‘Open My Eyes,’ I was trying to create a light and dark, two sides of the record. I arranged the record in terms of light to dark. I wrote this around the same time as ‘Beginning,’ so it was one of the early recordings. It didn’t have that certain darkness to it when I first wrote to it. But it required a lot of lyrical content, and as I put the lyrics down, I realized that because the chorus came very early on, it was about seeing both the good and bad. I\'m looking at everything in that song, I suppose. It has a bigger-picture feel to it.” **Sudden Thing** “I wrote this song when there were difficult things happening in my life, people around me were going through difficult times. This was late 2017, early 2018. There were a few emotional times happening around me. This song was my way of dealing with it. There is a sadness, a realization that things come to an end, that time passes on and things are not going to remain the way they were. I just needed an outlet for that. Luckily, if you are an artist, you have a real opportunity to get it all out and in the open, and move forward. This song was my way of looking back and taking weight off my shoulders.” **Monochrome** “When I wrote this, I wanted to pay tribute to heavy metal, rock, and those genres. Obviously, I\'ve never really been strictly a guitar player, or considered myself really adept as a guitar player, so when I think about metal, it\'s like death metal anyway. I never dive into genres deep enough to know what they truly are, so this is my interpretation of metal. It\'s just the way I hear the genre. One of the references for this song was Radiohead\'s song \'Myxomatosis,\' which is a really clever way of making a heavy song. The lead sound is just a crappy synth sound in a way, but it sounds great.” **What Do You See** “I wrote ‘What Do You See’ on the same day or the day after ‘Peace Lily,’ but it didn\'t really turn into a song. I was just noodling on a keyboard. I found this glitch on the keyboard that I took with me, that mini keyboard, where you could record a loop. If you held the keys down, they would just mash together into this impossible keyboard line. That just sparked it off, because you could hear all these melodies in this garbled mess of notes. I just put the vocal line down over those melodies in the next day or two. That was one that was sitting around, not being used until the last week of recording as well. That and \'Rubber Sky\' came along really quickly. It would have been a very different record if it wasn\'t for the last week of recording.” **Kissing of the Weeds** “I think these recordings might be from 2014. They\'re from a night when I was drunk with some friends and I was just playing the acoustic guitar in a kitchen. You can hear people talking and singing along and things. We were on a ferry once, and the wake-up sound on the ferry is of Celtic origin. The wake-up sound made us all laugh, because it was so sincere. The guitar line is based on that Celtic wake-up call. It’s this kind of slightly haunting and medieval-sounding thing.” **Black Smoke** “I consider ‘Black Smoke’ to be a sonic experimentation in the form of a ballad. I wrote it while I was just trying to push the drum machine to its limits and see what textures I could get out of it. Most of it is just layers of that. It wasn\'t very easy to make it into a song, and I didn\'t want to push it to be a traditional verse-chorus-verse thing, so I really just left it alone and just let it be. I wanted it to be a journey into the unknown. The end is from when I discovered that my place in the States had a cellar. The first thing I did was get my drums out of storage. They\'d been in storage for years, and I finally set up my drum kit down there. At the end of \'Black Smoke,\' you can hear me just going crazy. That\'s what I did for exercise as well at that time. I didn\'t go out much. I just went and played the drums.” **Ain’t No Love Affair** “This was the first recording of the drum machine that the whole album is built on. It\'s from when it was just in this form of a bundle of wires, it wasn\'t even in a box at that point. And I didn\'t know what I was doing. I just hit record and everything else in the song came later. It\'s weird for me, I suppose, to explain that the songs are just essentially drums, because not many people think of songs in that way. In the last two songs, and especially in the last song, I\'m just trying to find out what’s possible over the backbeat provided. Over such an unconventional backbeat, I\'m just trying to find out how you can actually deal with a song atop it. That\'s the merit of those things. They\'re not going to ever be radio-friendly tunes, or even party-friendly necessarily, but there\'s just a potential for future reflection and learning within these experiments.”
Arriving four years after the iconoclast variously known as Sam Dust, LA PRIEST and L.A. Priest thrilled the world with the cosmic pop of his debut album Inji, GENE is named after a brand new modular drum machine Sam dreamt up and built alone. Working in isolation for more than two years, soldering iron in hand, Sam designed GENE using 150 electrical circuits he made up himself.
Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien was 51 by the time he’d readied this, his first solo album. Even though he’d been writing his own material since the making of *OK Computer* almost a quarter of a century earlier, a couple of things slowed his path towards turning his ideas into songs. One was confidence. “I didn’t know how to write,” he tells Apple Music. “I had lots of little musical motifs, but, kind of ridiculously, I don’t know why I didn’t ever sit down with Thom \[Yorke\] and say, ‘How do you do it?’ And anything that I started writing, it was like, ‘Well, it’s not as good as “Street Spirit.”’” The other was family—which wasn’t an obstacle as much as an involving step in O’Brien becoming a songwriter. “I *wanted* to be a dad,” he says. “Most people in our game, it’s like the art comes first: ‘I am a fucking artist and that rides roughshod over everything.’ I say this to people all the time: Don’t be scared of being a parent, and don’t be scared that whilst your children are young your creative output isn’t as great as it was. Because I believe that in the long run, you feed that humanity back into your music. For me, it was like a mirror on all my weaknesses. And I had to sort my shit out—it wasn’t easy, but you have to do it. Being an artist, that humanity is really important. It feeds your art and it nourishes you in a way that gives you longevity.” It’s no surprise then that *Earth* pulses with life’s many moods and tones, beginning with the percolating rhythms and guitar growls of “Shangri-La” before eventually falling to a gentle, hushed close with the Laura Marling-assisted “Cloak of the Night.” In between, O’Brien is seething at the 2007-8 financial crisis (“Banksters”), but the prevailing mood is positivity as he considers solidarity, hope, and mortality. He may have taken his time to get here, but O’Brien’s restless sense of musical adventure ensures *Earth* never sounds wearied—“Brasil” alone travels from pastoral folk to dance-tent euphoria in little more than eight minutes. And the spiky agitation of “Banksters” might even have Thom Yorke wondering why his bandmate didn’t break out those little motifs a bit sooner.
“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”
Jarvis Cocker’s band Pulp might have been one of the defining groups of the mid-’90s Britpop era, but there was something distinctly different about them. In a sea of bands fixated on the past, Pulp’s landmark 1995 album *Different Class* was, musically and lyrically, a step forward. They weren’t the only band taking a critical look at British society, but Cocker was constantly turning his gaze inward. In his songwriting, relationships were messy, memories weren’t always to be trusted, the drugs often had the opposite of their intended effect, and even the losers got lucky—more than just sometimes. On two albums to follow, the Sheffield group would cut further left—and Cocker would go on to explore many more avenues of expression. Two solo albums in 2006 and 2009 (as well as writing most of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s beautiful *5:55*) only further showcased his range—and that’s before he occupied himself as a book editor, a BBC radio host, and, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a housebound orator of great literary works. (Google “Jarvis Cocker’s Bedtime Stories” to hear his soothing baritone recite Brautigan and Salinger.) On the heels of his collaborative project with Chilly Gonzales, 2017’s *Room 29*, Cocker was invited by Sigur Rós to perform at a festival in Reykjavík. He quickly assembled an entirely new London-based group of musicians to work through song sketches he’d developed over the last few years, which became the band-in-progress JARV IS…—emphasis on those three trailing dots. “Usually you put that into a sentence when you are implying that something isn\'t quite finished,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “The whole point of this band was to finish off these ideas for songs that I\'d had for quite a long time but wasn\'t able to bring to fruition on my own.” At a trim seven songs, *Beyond the Pale* still manages to explore a range of themes, most of which revolve around the modern human condition—from aging to FOMO and self-doubt to living in the wake of a bygone era. Evolution plays a big part, too—not just in the subject matter, but in how the music took shape: “Because we were doing this experiment of trying to finish off a record by playing it to people, it seemed logical that we should record the shows so we could see how we were getting on,” he says of what would become “Must I Evolve?”, which was recorded live in an actual cave in Castleton, Derbyshire. “A light bulb went off in my head then, because that\'s every artist\'s dream, really—to make a record without even realizing it. To not go through that self-conscious phase where you go into a studio and start questioning things and the song gets away from you.” Here, Cocker tells us how the rest of the songs came together. **Save the Whale** \"You\'re not the first person to say there\'s a similarity to Leonard Cohen, which I take as a massive compliment, because he\'s really been an artistic touchstone for me, all through my career. There are some artists that show you different ideas of what a song can be, and open up your perceptions of what a song can be. Especially for someone like me, who was basically brought up on pop radio, which lyrically isn\'t very adventurous. So what Leonard Cohen did with words in songs was something that really had an effect on me. But what\'s exciting for me was all the time that I was in Pulp, I was the only person in the band who sang. And in this band, basically everybody sings, especially Serafina \[Steer, harpist\] and Emma \[Smith, violinist/guitarist\]. Rather than it being a monologue, I can tie in other viewpoints with what they say. And sometimes it will reinforce it, sometimes it will undercut it, sometimes it will just comment on it. And it\'s a lot of fun writing that way, because suddenly you\'re writing a dialogue or conversation rather than just me, me, me all the time.\" **Must I Evolve?** \"The starting point for it was me thinking about the development of a relationship, from meeting someone to moving in with them and stuff like that. You could draw a parallel with evolution itself, of two cells splitting and then those cells divide more and then you start to get organisms and eventually you\'ve got some fish and then the fish grows legs and somehow comes out... I guess I was just remembering biology textbooks from school. The idea of the ascendant man, stuff like that. The Big Bang. That was a bit of a joke I had with myself, with the meanings of \'bang.\' Banging, like \'Who\'ve been banging lately,\' and the Big Bang that started the whole of human creation off. Two of the longest songs on the record are questions: \'Must I Evolve?\' and \'Am I Missing Something?\' I guess I\'m at an age where I ask myself those kind of questions, and the songs were some type of attempt on my part to answer those questions. But this really was the key song because it was the first one that we finished and released, and also the call-and-response theme came from this song, because I\'d already written the \'Must I evolve? Must I change? Must I develop?\' But there was no answer to that. We were just rehearsing and I think it was Serafina started going, \'Yes, yes, yes,\' I think as a bit of a joke. And then I thought, \'That\'s such a great idea, let\'s just do that.\' That totally added a new dimension to the song.\" **Am I Missing Something?** \"It\'s in that tradition, I suppose, of those long songs where it very directly addresses the listener. This is the oldest song on the record; the lyrics were written pretty much eight years ago. I wanted to try a bit of a different approach, and so the lyrics aren\'t so much a through narrative; it\'s not just one story. It jumps around a bit. And that seemed appropriate because it\'s about this idea of \'Am I missing something?\' It could mean there\'s something really interesting going on but I don\'t know about it, which is like a modern disease: Too many entertainment and information options to choose from. It can also be like, \'Do I lack something? Is there something missing in me? Do I need to fill some gaping psychological hole within myself or whatever?\' Or actually, ‘Am I overlooking something, am I not getting something?’ That\'s a really important part of a song, that you have to leave some space in it for the person listening to do what they want with it.” **House Music All Night Long** \"People have said, ‘Yes, it\'s a COVID anthem,’ but it wasn\'t conceived in that way at all. For a start, it was written two years ago before anybody was really thinking about any pandemic. It was really just one weekend where I was stuck in London. It was a very hot weekend and everyone I knew had left town. I was in this house on my own and some friends had gone to a house music festival in Wales and I was jealous of that. I was having—people call it FOMO, don\'t they? I just thought to myself, \'Don\'t just sit here feeling sorry for yourself, do something to get yourself out of this trough you\'ve found yourself in.\' So I remembered that there was a secondhand keyboard that I\'d bought from a street market just a few weeks before and it was down in the basement of this house. So I went and found it, brought it up, plugged it in, put it through an amp, and just started trying to write bits of music. I came up with the chord pattern that the song starts off with, and because this keyboard—it\'s an old string machine, so it\'s got a quite naive sound to it, which reminded me of some of those early house records where they would use big, almost symphonic-sounding things but on really crap keyboards. The first chord change really reminded me of something like \'Promised Land\' by Joe Smooth or something like that. So maybe it was because I was thinking about my friends who were having a good time at a rave. Again, once I\'ve got that idea of the two meanings of \'house\'—like, house music and then \'house\' as in a building that you live in. I was stuck in a house feeling sorry for myself whilst my friends were out dancing to house, probably having a great time, as far as I was imagining. And so then the song had already half written itself once I got those basic ideas down.\" **Sometimes I Am Pharaoh** \"I developed a fascination with these street entertainers—human statues. You tend to get them outside famous buildings or in tourist hotspots. So you either get somebody dressed up as Charlie Chaplin—that\'s why it\'s \'Sometimes I\'m Pharaoh/Sometimes I\'m Chaplin.\' And they stand still and then a crowd gathers and eventually they move and everybody screams and hopefully gives them some money. It died out a little bit in more recent years. They’ve been superseded slightly by those levitating guys—have you seen those ones? Where it\'s like Yoda floating, and he\'s holding a stick but obviously the stick—there\'s some kind of platform under him. And I feel sorry for the statue guys, because the levitating Yoda, it\'s just like, anybody could do that. You just go and buy the weird frame—which has obviously got some kind of really heavy base so that it doesn\'t topple over—and you\'re in business. Whereas to actually stand still for hours on end must be really difficult. I was just showing some respect and love to the people that were doing that.\" **Swanky Modes** \"My son \[who lives in France\] goes to this once-a-week rock school. It\'s run by a guy from Brooklyn who moved over to Paris. I\'ve become friendly with him, and he asked me if I would come to the class and help the kids write a song in the space of an hour or something. So we met to talk about how that could work, and then we\'re jamming around and he was playing the piano and I was messing around on the bass and then we started playing what became \'Swanky Modes,\' which is really not a kids\' song at all. The piano that you hear on the record is him, Jason Domnarski. And the first half of the song has got my bass playing on it. So it\'s almost like a field recording. This is probably the most narrative-driven song on the record. Somehow all these events that happened to me at very specific periods of time, which was when I was living in Camden in London, just towards the end of my time at Saint Martins art college, so we\'re talking about 1991. I was only living there for maybe eight months, and all these images from my time of living there suddenly came into my mind really, really clearly. The title of the song, \'Swanky Modes,\' it\'s the name of the shop. It was a women\'s clothes shop that was near where I was living at the time. Again, that\'s one of the mysteries of songwriting—why suddenly, almost 30 years later, these words would come to me that summed up a fairly minor chapter in my life. But it came back in really minute detail and I\'m really glad it did, because now I\'ll never forget that period on my life, because I\'ve got a souvenir of it.\" **Children of the Echo** \"A few years ago I was asked to write a review of a book called *The John Lennon Letters*. I\'m a Beatles fan, and particularly of John Lennon, so I thought if John Lennon wrote lots of letters, I\'d really like to see them. So I was sent an advance copy of the book, and it was just weird. They weren\'t letters. Some of them were just \'Tell Dave to get lasagna from supermarket. Walk dog.\' They were just to-do notes, like a Post-it note that you would put on your refrigerator to remind you to do something. They weren\'t letters. So I was really, really disappointed with this book, so I tried to express this in the review. And this phrase \'children of the echo\' came into my mind, which in the context of the article was talking about how someone in my position—I can\'t really remember The Beatles, because I was a kid. I was born in 1963, when they first broke through, and then they broke up in 1970 when I was seven. They were there, but I couldn\'t really be actively a fan or anything like that. But they left such a mark and they made such an impact that the ripples obviously were coming out and affected everybody a lot. And this made me think of this idea of an echo, of a sound which would be like The Beatles, this amazing sound that changed everything. And then I consider myself to be a child of the echo because I was brought up in the aftermath of that. And I was thinking, \'Well, we\'ve got to get beyond that,\' because that was the problem with that thing that got called Britpop in the UK—that it was so in thrall to the \'60s and The Beatles in particular that it killed it. It stopped it from being what could\'ve been a really forward-thinking and exciting and innovative thing into a retro thing. And you can\'t make another period of history happen again, it\'s just impossible. It seemed like it was exciting, and \'here we come, here\'s the revolution, the world\'s going to change.\' And then it just went into this horrible nostalgic morass of nothing. That\'s when I jumped ship. I think now it\'s so long ago that there is a chance now to do something new, because we have to transcend the echo now, we have to make another thing happen. We can\'t keep living on this echo that gets fainter and fainter and fainter and fainter. Because there\'s nothing to live on anymore.\"
Hailing from Melbourne, but with a sound stretching from 60s and 70s afrobeat and exotica to Fela Kuti-esque repetition, the proto-garage rhythmic fury of The Monks and the grooves of Os Mutantes, there’s an enticing lost world exoticism to the music of Bananagun. It’s the sort of stuff that could’ve come from a dusty record crate of hidden gems; yet as the punchy, colourfully vibrant pair of singles Do Yeah and Out of Reach have proven over the past 12 months, the band are no revivalists. On debut album The True Story of Bananagun, they make a giant leap forward with their outward-looking blend of global tropicalia. The True Story of Bananagun marks Bananagun’s first full foray into writing and recording as a complete band, having originally germinated in the bedroom ideas and demos of guitarist, vocalist and flautist Nick van Bakel. The multi-instrumentalist grew up on skate videos, absorbing the hip-hop beats that soundtracked them - taking on touchstones like Self Core label founder Mr. Dibbs and other early 90’s turntablists. That love of the groove underpins Bananagun - even if the rhythms now traverse far beyond those fledgling influences. "We didn't want to do what everyone else was doing,” the band’s founder says. “We wanted it to be vibrant, colourful and have depth like the jungle. Like an ode to nature." Van Bakel was joined first by cousin Jimi Gregg on drums – the pair’s shared love of the Jungle Book apparently made him a natural fit – and the rest of the group are friends first and foremost, put together as a band because of a shared emphasis on keeping things fun. Jack Crook (guitar/vocals), Charlotte Tobin (djembe/percussion) and Josh Dans (bass) complete the five-piece and between them there’s a freshness and playful spontaneity to The True Story of Bananagun, borne out of late night practice jams and hangs at producer John Lee’s Phaedra Studios. “We were playing a lot leading up to recording so we’re all over it live”, van Bakel fondly recalls of the sessions that became more like a communal hang out, with Zoe Fox and Miles Bedford there too to add extra vocals and saxophone. “It was a good time, meeting there every night, using proper gear [rather than my bedroom setups.] It felt like everyone had a bit of a buzz going on.” Tracks like The Master and People Talk Too Much bounce around atop hybrid percussion that fuses West African high life with Brazilian tropicalia; the likes of She Now hark to a more westernised early rhythm ‘n’ blues beat, remoulded and refreshed in the group’s own inimitable summery style. Freak Machine is perhaps the closest to those early 90’s beats, but even then the group add layers and layers of bright guitars, harmonic flower-pop vocals and other sounds to transmute the source material to an entirely new plain. Elsewhere there’s a 90 second track called Bird Up! that cut and pastes kookaburra and parrot calls as an homage to the wildlife surrounding van Bakel’s home 80 kilometres from Melbourne. Oh, and there are hooks galore too – try and stop yourself from humming along to Out of Reach’s swooping vocal melody. Bananagun are first and foremost a band enthused with the joy of living and The True Story of Bananagun is a ebullient listen; van Bakel - as the main songwriter - is keen not to let any lyrical themes overpower that. There’s more to this record than blissed out grooves and tripped out fuzz though: The Master is about learning to be your own master and resisting the urge to compare yourself to others; She Now addresses gender identity and extolls the importance of people being able to identify how they feel. Then there’s closing track Taking The Present For Granted, which perhaps sums up the band’s ethos on life, trying to take in the world around you and appreciating the here and now. A keen meditator, van Bakel says of the track: “so often people are having a shit time stuck in their own existential crisis, but if you get outside you head and participate in life and appreciate how beautiful it all is you can have a better time.” Even the band’s seemingly innocuous name has an underlying message of connectivity that matches the universality of the music. “It’s like non-violent combat! Or the guy who does a stick up, but it’s just a banana, not a gun, and he tells the authorities not to take themselves too seriously.” The True Story of Bananagun then is perhaps a tale of finding beauty in even these most turbulent of times.
Chaos Wonderland is the seventh full-length album by Colorama, depending on who you believe (it’s the ninth if you include the ‘mini’ albums). Why Chaos Wonderland? Colorama frontman Carwyn Ellis explains, “well.. I’ve travelled a lot these last few years and I’ve seen a lot of places in total flux, upheaval and yes - chaos. Nowhere more so than at home. But at the same time, I’ve seen much to make me cheerful, not least in the beautiful sights I’ve witnessed, along with the warmth and inherent goodness of the vast majority of people I’ve encountered”. It was recorded at Shawn Lee’s ‘Shop’ Studio in early 2018, during the gaps in between Ellis’ stints touring around the world with the Pretenders. Shawn Lee has had an incredibly productive (30-odd solo albums to date) career, featuring collaborations with a myriad of different artists including Clutchy Hopkins, Tony Joe White, Darondo, Money Mark, Tommy Guerrero, Psapp, Little Barrie and Saint Etienne, with whom he worked on the ‘Home Counties’ album, which is where he and Carwyn Ellis first worked together, on their 2017 single, ‘Dive’. With both musicians being prodigiously talented multi-instrumentalists, the album was recorded surprisingly quickly, and with very little added help, although Lay Low, the brilliant Icelandic singer, added her vocal magic to the funky paean to love, ‘Me & She’. Other highlights include ‘Dusty Road’, about an outcast on the run, the cosmic tiki-flavoured ‘Black Hole’, boombastic opener ‘And’ and the smoothly soulful ‘Reconciliation’, which takes on a whole new meaning in the current environment we’ve found ourselves in. The album was recorded, then Carwyn got inundated with other projects, and time flew by... Fast forward to 2020. In March, everything ground to a halt for most of us in the UK, including Carwyn. This busiest of musicians now found he had time on his hands and... music to release! So, finally, we have Chaos Wonderland, the ‘new’ album by Colorama.
Alright, let’s just get this part out of the way: Muzz is a new band comprised of three gentlemen you probably know from other bands. Paul Banks is the singer in Interpol, has a project with The RZA called Banks + Steelz, and has released records as a solo artist. Matt Barrick played drums for Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Walkmen, and you’ve likely seen him on tour with Fleet Foxes. Josh Kaufman is a third of the folk group Bonny Light Horseman and has his producer mitts all over esteemed recordings by The National, Bob Weir, The Hold Steady, The War on Drugs, and many more. Paul + Matt + Josh = Muzz. OK, phew. So how did we get here? Why, casually, of course. Banks and Kaufman have been friends since their formative teen years, having attended high school together overseas before separately moving to New York City for further study. There, they independently crossed paths with Barrick while running in similar music circles and shapeshifting scenes. Some years on, they each remained in touch: Barrick drummed in Banks + Steelz and on some of Kaufman’s production sessions; Kaufman helped on Banks’s early Julian Plenti solo endeavor; various demos were collaborated on; a studio in Philadelphia was co-bought; “what if”s and “we should”s were tossed about. By some accounts, Muzz recordings date back to 2015; cosmically speaking, though, the seeds were planted long ago. Either way, when the opportunity to make music as a trio presented itself, the gentlemen pounced. “We found a spot that represents what the three of us love, so it was a collaborative production,” Kaufman says. “Finding a place where we met aesthetically was really cool, especially at this point in our lives. I’m not surprised that Paul and I are in a band together after all these years; what I am surprised by is that my favorite drummer is the guy who brought us back together to make music. He’s this rare rock drummer who came out of the D.C. hardcore/ska scene and swings like a jazz drummer. Matt was the magnet.” Banks elaborates: “I love The Walkmen and every band Matt’s been a part of; he does things on the drums that are so subtle and tasteful it gives me the warm fuzzies. And since we were kids, Josh has been a real inspiration to me, a talent on some other plane. As a producer he creates an environment where other musicians can shine. There’s a creative overlap we share that revolves around Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, The Stones, and Dylan that I haven’t really had an outlet for all these years, so this is us exploring that.” “Josh has more training as a theory musician while Paul comes from a different perspective,” Barrick says. “You never know how Paul’s gonna approach a song, lyrically and melodically, so it’s always unusual and exciting. Everyone is open to everyone else’s ideas. I think three is a great number of people for a band. We all had a big hand in everything.” With that level of creative chemistry in the lab, the only foreseen hold-up would be one of timing. Due to the sheer weight of the trio’s independent obligations, the Muzz project took shape at a simmer. Multiple sessions were held over the years at various practice spaces and studios like Barrick and Banks’ Silent Partner in Philadelphia and Kaufman’s preferred Isokon in Woodstock, New York, with his regular engineer Dan Goodwin filling in as co-producer on the album. A typical session incorporated demos that Banks or Kaufman brought to the table with room in place for any member to build upon an idea as he felt, or with a new skeleton composed during a jam in the live room. Barrick and Kaufman tended to work on music in the early parts of the days, and Banks would join them to add lyrics and melodies on top or in tandem. In a first for Banks, the lyrics were not entirely his domain, as Barrick and especially Kaufman contributed words to certain songs and helped shape things vocally. The band always recorded as they rehearsed, lending a freshness to the material that also benefitted the patchwork schedule. “It’s genuinely collaborative, a three-headed monster,” Banks says. “We generate music together, and songs come from all directions. No one person is calling the shots, it’s equal-everything.” Sonically, the band aimed for a timeless tone, one that would make the music hard to place when viewed from some distance. In fact, the band’s name holds a meaning that serves to describe that very feeling. “We didn’t want the record’s era to be overly identifiable, so we used traditional recording methods with a live, analog feeling,” Banks says. “It’s a little more naked and open at times. Josh uses the word ‘muzz’ to describe a texture of sound he likes in certain older recordings, so it’s his attempt to put a term to a subtle analog quality. It became very married to our sound.” “The music has this weird, super removed vibe but is also personal and emotional at the same time,” Kaufman says. “Whether it’s Paul speaking in character or it’s the backdrop to a movie that’s not really there, that’s something we were going for. If something felt natural in a simple way, we left it. I’d never heard Paul’s voice framed like that—a string section, horns, guitars—we know none of that is visionary but it felt classic and kind of classy.” The resulting songs are dark and gorgeous, expansive and sparse, like Cormac McCarthy prose stretched across a cowboy painting of a sunset. “Bad Feeling” chimes and slinks with a touch of Bryan Ferry panache as Barrick’s kick drum pushes the tune along and Kaufman’s Rhodes fills the space. “Evergreen” features Banks’s vocal doubling down on Kaufman’s gorgeous slide guitar melody, and “Patchouli” and “Summer Love” burrow and twinkle psychedelically. There are upstart rockers like “Red Western Sky” and “Knuckleduster” and jazz-beat drum showcases like “How Many Days” and “All Is Dead To Me,” but no matter the sonic direction Muzz go, they go there as if effortlessly and with maximum emotional, cosmic charge. “I don’t ever write with the intention of giving records an overarching theme, as that feels very limiting,” Banks says. “But looking back, I think the through line for me is meditations on mental health, and the quest for happiness and the way in which the mind can play tricks on us. But, ultimately, the music speaks for itself. We have a genuine, organic artistic chemistry together. It’s partly a shared musical taste from youth, as with me and Josh, but then it’s also the souls of my friends that resonate with me when expressed through music. I think it’s cosmic.”
Wajatta — the musical duo of Reggie Watts and John Tejada — return with their second album, “Don’t Let Get You Down”, to be released by Brainfeeder on 28 February 2020. Coming from different worlds, but sharing a passion for the rich history of electronic music, beat-boxer/comedian/musician Watts and electronic music artist/DJ/producer Tejada bring out the best in each other’s formidable skill sets. Where the duo’s debut album “Casual High Technology” hinted at the broad stylistic possibilities inherent in the marriage of Watts’ elastic, soul-stirring vocals and Tejada’s layered, melodically inventive productions, “Don’t Let Get You Down” makes good on that promise. The first single from new 11-song LP, released today, is the infectious title track. With its brightly pulsing synths and whistling hook, ‘Don’t Let Get You Down’ is, in the words of Reggie Watts, “the poppiest song we’ve ever done.” Wajatta (pronounced wa-HA-ta) is a mash-up of the artists’ last names. Having grown up with similar musical influences, Austrian-born Tejada and German-born Watts draw from their love of electronic music. Exploring the intersection between influences and innovation, the two describe Wajatta's music as “electronic dance music with its roots in Detroit techno, Chicago house, '70s funk and New York hip hop.” It’s a sound that is both familiar and wholly original — and, like all great dance music, ultimately life-affirming, as Watts vocalizes, sometimes without words, the joyful energy of his and Tejada’s funky, shape-shifting productions. “That’s the great thing about working with John,” Watts says with an infectious grin. “He’s so steeped in the history of this music. I just pick up on that and run with it.” Wajatta builds most tracks from scratch, bouncing ideas off one another from initial spark to finished product. It’s all done face-to-face: “We never just share files,” Tejada notes. They also try to keep their sessions as spontaneous as possible, in a never-ending quest to, as Watts puts it, “capture the freshness.” As a result, the 11 tracks on “Don’t Let Get You Down” crackle with the energy of fresh ideas captured at the moment of inspiration. It’s electronic music made organically, from two masters at the top of their respective games. Their organic approach extends to their live shows, at which Tejada rebuilds the duo’s tracks on his samplers and synths, while the multi-octave Watts conjures vocal symphonies out of little more than a loop station and a delay pedal. They’ve performed at Movement in Detroit, MUTEK in Montreal, CRSSD Festival in San Diego, two Dirtybird shows (BBQ in 2018 and Campout in 2019), in addition to a live studio session for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic. The duo’s live energy is captured on the final track of the album ‘All I Need Is You’, a fully improvised song that was part of a spontaneously created 90-minute performance for Club Something at The Sweat Spot, an L.A. dance studio run by choreographer Ryan Heffington. It’s a six-minute snapshot of the improvisational brilliance that lies at the heart of everything Wajatta does — an approach summed up in Watts’ off-the-cuff one-liner near the track’s end: “We’re making everything here for you from scratch — just to ensure maximum freshness.”
