Louder Than War's Albums of the Year 2018

In the wake of the EU Referendum, Damon Albarn decided to travel around Britain to get a sense of a nation plunged into dramatic change. After reconvening with his The Good, the Bad & the Queen bandmates—Paul Simonon, Tony Allen, and Simon Tong—those meditative journeys fed into their second album, *Merrie Land*. It’s an impressionistic portrait of a conflicted, confused land, with funfair organs, choirs, and tugging melodies folded into eerie but beautiful blends of folk, dub, and pop. Albarn talks Apple Music through his pilgrimage and the “strange emotions” that inform the album. **It’s hard not to feel real sadness listening to this record. Is that the point?** I think so, maybe, but I think it’s, if you could call something this, a beautiful sadness. I don’t know what that kind of means. **On the title track, you sing, “This is not rhetoric/It comes from my heart/I love this country.” This record is trying to not be angry or bitter or take sides, right?** No, no, no, I’m not trying to break the family up. I’m trying to be honest and deal with those strange emotions, like love of place. Even though I’ve traveled, it’s fair to say, around the whole world, I always come back home. What’s driven me as a creative person to explore other climes and cultures is what I grew up with in this country. That was what’s special about this country: the sense of openness. That’s what we’re missing with all this hastiness to get stuff done because we decided we had to get it done by this point. That’s all I feel. **You visited various parts of Britain to get a sense of the nation, going beyond the big cities to towns, including ones from British folk tales such as Banbury. Is this record your pilgrimage?** I’d never been to St. Albans or Luton or Banbury. I hadn’t even really been to Oxford. There were things I was very aware of—big cultural landmarks—that I’d never visited. So, in that sense, *pilgrimage* is a good description. I found ghosts everywhere. *Merrie Land* is a ghostly record. You just have to tune into the dissonance and the resonance in each place and work from there, especially if we’re going to try and give an impression. **The songs take us from train rides past World War I cemeteries in France to heavy nights in Blackpool pubs. You’ve packed a lot in here.** Yeah! I’ve never written so many lyrics, so that was a breakthrough for me. It’s something I’d like to explore—more words. I suppose it goes back to Jack Kerouac. Back to Betjeman on the train, it’s got a strong sense of kinship with that, and people like Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell. **Three weeks before the release of *Merrie Land* you were still on tour with Gorillaz. How easy is it to switch between bands?** I just love making music, so it’s not that difficult. I had a strange four days: I finished the massive, euphoric gig in Mexico City \[with Gorillaz\] and then came back to a little room \[in the UK\] to rehearse for eight hours and go on national television. The only thing I regret is that we didn’t have a “work in progress” sign hanging over the microphone stand. Or cones and tape round us. We should’ve been wearing hi-vis jackets: “We haven’t quite built this place yet, but we’re definitely working at it.”

The long awaited fourth album by London anachronistic punks The Men That Will Not be Blamed For Nothing.

For years now Wardruna founder Einar Selvik has done acoustic concerts and lectures, performing Wardruna songs on his own, as well as creations made for the TV-show “Vikings” in an acoustic format. Now parts of this material has finally been recorded “live in studio” in Solslottet Studio in Bergen (Norway), and is set for release through By Norse Music on November 23rd 2018. “Skald” takes the listener on a musical journey outside the massive soundscape that Wardruna is known for and into a simpler and more direct form, where voice, poetry and ancient instruments like Kravik-lyre, Taglharpa and Bukkehorn lead the way. Einar Selvik comments: “Skald” was recorded live in the studio with the intention of capturing the raw and uncompromising energy of a live performance rather than aiming for a flawless and polished expression. It sets out to give voice to the ancient craft that once lay at the heart of the Norse oral traditions, presented as it takes shape in the hands of a humble contemporary skald today. All formats of the album contains an extensive booklet with all lyrics translated as well as a solid introduction to the Skald and Old Norse poetry written by the acclaimed Icelandic author and Old Norse philologist Bergsveinn Birgisson. You can pre-order the physical formats here: - Wardruna EU store: wardruna.aisamerch.de - Wardruna NA store: wardruna.aisamerch.com - By Norse Music EU store: bynorse.aisamerch.de

In many ways Insecure Men - the band led by the fiercely talented songwriter and musician Saul Adamczewski and his schoolmate and stabilising influence, Ben Romans-Hopcraft - are the polar opposite of the Fat White Family. Whereas sleaze-mired, country-influenced, drug-crazed garage punks the Fat Whites are a “celebration of everything that is wrong in life”, Insecure Men, who blend together exotica, easy listening, lounge and timeless pop music, are, by comparison at least, the last word in wholesomeness.

Dirtmusic return for their fifth album, a full-scale collaboration with Turkish-psych visionary Murat Ertel from Baba Zula. Recorded in Istanbul, the album navigates hypnotic rhythms, cinematic atmospheres and dark political realities. ‘We need music like this to stay sane’ – Murat Ertel The striking figure of Murat Ertel is standing at the door of his home studio, a converted mechanic’s garage in a suburb of Istanbul. The Turkish capital is a tense and conflicted place these days, but Baba Zula’s leader and saz man is on fine form. Before him stand those current and former musical nomads, Chris Eckman and Hugo Race, guitars in hand. Dirtmusic are about to take on their latest, and perhaps most thrilling, form. But let’s rewind a little, for Dirtmusic’s story is worth your time (although it perhaps makes more sense to talk about Dirtmusics plural). Originally a straight-talking, mainly acoustic trio mining blues and country for 21st century gold, the band’s first happy accident was to stumble upon Tamikrest at the fabled Festival au Désert in Timbuktu in 2008. A musical love story began, running through that joyous first collaboration with Tamikrest in BKO (2010), followed by Troubles (2013) and Lion City (2014), which expanded the roster to include Ben Zabo, Samba Touré and a host of other superb Malian musicians. In the meantime, however, the Islamist takeover of Northern Mali in 2012 had darkened the sound and the songwriting, giving them a tone that continues to resonate through the new record. Back to that garage. True to form, Eckman and Race look to improvise, for that line to the Bamako years is still strong. They’ve come with a couple of beats and loops – and they’re not even sure whether they will attach any words to this year’s Dirtmusic. But Ertel knows they need to tell a story. The time and the place demand it. This is being recorded in Istanbul after all, and Eckman has flown there from Slovenia, a country that has secured its southern border with razor wire – and Race from Australia, where sea-borne refugees are detained indefinitely on remote islands. And so it goes, a tale of borders and walls, of cold fronts and cold hearts. The opening track, ‘Bi De Sen Söyle’, is a statement of intent, musically and lyrically: shared vocals that mass in urgent call-and-response, the psychedelic grip of Ertel’s saz, which barely leaves the record for a second, and percussion from Ümit Adakale that tells us that this is music for clubs and parties as much as for private spaces. It shares this with ‘The Border Crossing’, the prime slice of Pop Group-inflected postpunk-funk that follows it, with its voice of hard truth, perhaps even of cynicism, but also of ambiguity. Both tracks ask you to consider who is speaking. The world is indeed ‘getting smaller’, but for whom? Is it the privileged traveller who’s in trouble here, or the refugee? Everyone has a story to tell, even if we can only catch glimpses of it. The shadow of the new despots hangs over them, but the refusal to preach, that insistent ambiguity again, asks just as many questions of the liberal challenge. It’s a questing, restless record for the head, but perhaps more so for the body. It broods throughout, as post-punk, Turkish psych, funk, rock and electronics stalk the grooves with widescreen intent – listen to ‘Safety in Numbers’, for example, an instant classic that sees Race in imperious form, or ‘Love is a Foreign Country’, which features a startling appearance by Gaye Su Akyol, a treat for those who loved her Hologram İmparatorluğu, one of the most striking Glitterbeat releases of 2016. Fans of Baba Zula, Turkey’s premier psychedelicists, will also have more than enough to chew on, particularly in the remarkable title track that closes the album. ‘We need a story,’ said Murat. This year’s Dirtmusic summit has given us another one to think about and, as importantly, to dance to. The desert tent has been swapped for the garage in Northern Istanbul, for now, but the concerns remain the same: to tear down borders, real and imagined, as quickly as they can be thrown up. Ten years in, this singular band with a plural soul have made their finest record yet. ‘Recording like this is truly in the moment, there are no preconceptions to satisfy and the music and words are improvised. We drew inspiration from the atmosphere of Istanbul, the general disaffection with the state media and the uncertainty of the immediate future’ – Hugo Race ‘[Murat’s] studio is really a warm and relaxed place to work. I think if we had tried the same thing at a slick studio, with the clock running, it wouldn't have come together so easily. By the end of the first day the friendships were already forming and we were having a hell of a good time’ – Chris Eckman

HEAD OVER TO WWW [DOT ]RASHDECISION.BIGCARTEL [DOT] COM TO ORDER THE VINYL. It saves us from bandcamp fees :) You can get the digital download here as pay-what-you-want from here if you would like to donate something for a digital download, please use friends and family option on paypal to [email protected] (please state the donation Is for a download) so we can avoid paypal fees...otherwise your generous donations tend to go straight to bandcamp :( ALBUM RELEASED on 19th MAY 2018.

WHERE ARE THE LYRICS? You can find them in the physical copies of our album (vinyl & CD). We also included them in a college-level workbook we wrote, based on the lyrics and themes of Capture the Flag. For a suggested donation of $5-$20, a digital version will be e-mailed to you. If you use this in your coursework, please tag the band and let us know! Includes the full lyrics, unlimited streaming of Capture The Flag via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Buy it here: bridge9.bandcamp.com/album/capture-the-flag ----------------------------------- ORDER OUR RECORDS: www.b9store.com/waronwomen INTERACT WITH US: twitter.com/WarOnWomxn LOOK AT PICTURES: instagram.com/waronwomen BUY OUR 10": www.exoticfever.com/artists.php?id=115 BUY OUR MERCH: shirtkiller.com/collections/waronwomen

RECITAL is a record consisting of 7 songs by TEAM PICTURE rec. winter 2017/18 released via BIG DUMB MUSIC

Interrobang‽ are Dunstan Bruce and Harry Hamer from anarcho-pop-cabaret troupe Chumbawamba and Griffin - former enfant terrible in the London louts, Regular Fries. They formed in 2012 with a vision to create something that speaks to the generation who grew up in the shadow of punk, with hopes and dreams, full of rebellion. How do they express their anger now? They reject the idea of nostalgia, they refuse to live in the past, no looking back; this is all forward, forward motion. Interrobang‽ create an agit-punk-funkstorm. It’s angular, taut urgent, pulsating and intense. And it’s tight, terse and to the point. They are totally wired, can't you see? This baring of souls is played out via their battered and bruised uneasy listening. It can be awkward and resolute; but it can shake you, rattle your aging bones and send you helter-skeltering onto the dancefloor. It’s a frantic, skewed quirky, punchy, staccato pop that’s buzzing like a fridge. Lyrically inspired by the idea of hitting the age of 50 and what this all means whilst creating a crass punk blues sound; it’s all about the cliché of the mid life man-crisis and it’s sometimes slightly shirty, occasionally curmudgeonly, but always, always brutally honest.

After two concept albums and a string of roles in Hollywood blockbusters, one of music’s fiercest visionaries sheds her alter egos and steps out as herself. Buckle up: Human Monáe wields twice the power of any sci-fi character. In this confessional, far-reaching triumph, she dreams of a world in which love wins (“Pynk\") and women of color have agency (“Django Jane”). Featuring guest appearances from Brian Wilson, Grimes, and Pharrell—and bearing the clear influence of Prince, Monae’s late mentor—*Dirty Computer* is as uncompromising and mighty as it is graceful and fun. “I’m the venom and the antidote,” she wails in “I Like That,” a song about embracing these very contradictions. “Take a different type of girl to keep the whole world afloat.”