“I always get deep into a record, but now I’m 100% fully operational,” Kurt Vile tells Apple Music. “I got a fully armed battle station.” The Philly singer-songwriter is referring to Overnight KV, or OKV, the new home studio he finished building just before the pandemic hit in 2020. It’s afforded Vile a level of creative independence he’s not felt since he started recording in his bedroom years ago. “Why do I always have to go to some producer\'s studio?” he asks. “It\'s on their terms. I\'m grateful for it, we got a lot of stuff done. But you could say nothing\'s been 100% my personality since my early, more lo-fi records. I was 100% guard down, just doing my thing, man.” His ninth LP (and first for Verve, the legendary jazz imprint) combines the experimental purity of those early recordings with the sort of “completely high-fidelity” feel that he says his studio can provide, though he did, to be clear, collaborate again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) both at home and in LA. The result, Vile says, is “kind of like some American folk version of shoegaze music”—a set of sidewinding pop (see: “Flyin \[like a fast train\],” originally written for Kesha) and classic rock (“Fo Sho”) that includes contributions from Cate Le Bon and Chastity Belt, as well as drumming from Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip, Harry Styles). “It’s just lived in, really, the whole record,” he says. “There\'s multiple records that were left behind. But that\'s the way it should be. That\'s like somebody who\'s a carpenter or something, always working in their shop. I feel like you\'re not meant to put everything out. Just the way I live my life.” Here, Vile tells the story behind a number of songs on the album. **“Goin on a Plane Today”** “I got a piano at my house—it\'s very meditative and I can go to it every day. I remember I\'d be touring \[2018’s\] *Bottle It In*, and I\'d be thinking up these records that I was going to make from home, and then when I was home I\'d go over to the piano and be like, ‘Oh, I\'m so stoked, I\'m going to get a lot of music done while I\'m here.’ And then be rudely awakened to the fact that, no, I’ve got to leave in two weeks. I talk about opening for Neil Young in the song, because I wrote it around the time that we opened for Neil Young with Promise of the Real in Quebec, in 2018. That really happened.” **“Palace of OKV in Reverse”** “I love that there\'s more two-minute jams on this record—you could say that’s not been the case since my first album, \[2008\'s\] *Constant Hitmaker*, with ‘Freeway.’ But there\'s a lot of secrets about ‘OKV in Reverse.’ There\'s just a certain groove to it that triggered my mind, and then those lyrics came pretty quick. I didn\'t sing it until later when I was at Rob Schnapf\'s studio in LA, on the fly. He\'s good at capturing that thing.” **“Like Exploding Stones”** “‘Pain ricocheting in my brain like exploding stones.’ Some people attribute that line to migraines, and I do get migraines, so that\'s fine. But in the moment when I wrote it, it\'s more just stress, something weighing down hard on my head. I was pretty bummed out about something when I wrote that song, and then I recorded it right on my Zoom recorder—pretty much just live acoustics, drumming, and singing live. I imagined guitars feeding back, and the Moog synthesizer making noise, feedback massaging my cranium. I had all those things in the demo. Yeah, that\'s the beauty: You can just exorcise demons.” **“Hey Like a Child”** “It’s a love song. I’ve known my wife since we were pretty young, but you don\'t have to take it all so literally, because in the moment when I was writing it, obviously I\'ve got children of my own. It’s got the shoegaze-y bend, but a jangle to it as well. And I knew that song had super poppy potential. We did an early version of it in my basement studio, but then I took it over to Rob Schnapf\'s and I replayed all the parts, and again, Sarah Jones, she just killed it on drums on that song. That song was made really quick.” **“Chazzy Don’t Mind”** “Courtney Barnett turned me on to Chastity Belt—they toured together on \[2017’s\] *I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone*. I liked their music immediately, but it creeps up on you because they sing about everyday things. Julia \[Shapiro’s\] lyrics are really emotional, sometimes funny but pretty real, and they have this cyclical playing that really resonates with me. I knew I wanted them on this song. Lydia \[Lund\] and Julia play guitar on it, and Annie \[Truscott\] plays violin on it, and they all sing. Annie, she\'s such an amazing musician, she’s got perfect pitch on the vocal. They all have an equally important role in the band, but it\'s her bass underneath it all that really gets that melancholy thing.” **“Wages of Sin”** “That\'s been one of my favorite songs of Springsteen’s for a long time—it’s got that melancholy, dark hypnotic thing. I knew I could sing the hell out of it and make it mine, but also stay true to his. Nobody\'s done that lately, but in the country music world that\'s what I like: There\'s a song that speaks to you, and often it\'s a deep cut or somebody hears a song written fresh off the presses, like a demo, and they\'re like, ‘That\'s my song.’ Well, this is that except it\'s been my song since my mid-twenties, and now here I am at 42. We got it. We nailed it. And Springsteen, I don\'t know—it\'d be hard for him to ignore it. He\'d have to make a conscious decision to ignore it. Something tells me him and Obama are going to be enjoying it soon.” **“Stuffed Leopard”** “It’s funny because I felt like ‘Wages of Sin’ was a centerpiece, and I wanted it to fade out. But then ‘Stuffed Leopard’ just crept up on me, and I realized I didn\'t fingerpick throughout the whole record. Lyrically, you\'re just looking at stuff around the house, and you\'re just clarifying it’s a toy, not a taxidermy leopard. Yeah, it\'s just a fingerpicker, man. What can I tell you? Can\'t help it.”
Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was. The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside. All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.” The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence.
Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the same studio air. Expanding on the techniques used on Simian Angel (2019), we can never be entirely sure who is responsible for what we hear, as Ambarchi’s guitar is used to trigger everything from bass lines to driving piano riffs. Picking up from the staccato guitar patterns that ran through Hubris, Shebang’s single 35-minute track begins with a precisely interwoven lattice of chiming guitar figures, expanding Hubris’ monolithic pulse into a joyous, hyper-rhythmic melodicism that calls up points of reference as disparate as Albert Marcoeur, early Pat Metheny Group, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Building from isolated single notes into densely layered polyrhythms, the muted guitar tones are joined by subtle touches of shimmering Leslie cabinet tones and guitar synth. Simmering down and funnelling into a single note, the guitar stew is soon thickened by Joe Talia’s propulsive ride cymbal, which blossoms into a beautifully flowing yet rigorously snapped-to fusion funk, whose ever-shifting details skitter across the kit – think 70s heavyweights like Jack DeJohnette or Jon Christensen. An unexpected entry of guttural bass clarinet licks from Sam Dunscombe begins the series of instrumental features that pepper the remainder of the piece. Soon we hear from the legendary British pedal steel player B.J. Cole (hopefully known to some listeners from his outer-limits singer-songwriter masterpiece The New Hovering Dog or, failing that, ‘Tiny Dancer’), whose languorous yet uneasy lines float in and out of a shifting rhythmic foundation supported by a single note bass groove, cut through with aleatoric synth articulations Though single-mindedly occupying its rhythmic space throughout, Shebang’s dense ensemble sound is carefully composed while drawing on the free flow of improvisation, with individual voices momentarily coming to the fore and subtle changes in harmony and texture. Perhaps the most surprising of these shifts occurs around half-way through when the smoke of a buzzing synth crescendo from Jim O'Rourke clears to reveal something like a piano trio, with Ambarchi’s guitar-triggered piano patterns providing restless accompaniment to flowing melodic lines from Chris Abrahams of The Necks, while Johan Berthling’s double bass and Talia’s drums fill out the bottom end. Before long, things take another left turn as Julia Reidy’s rapidly picked 12-string guitar lines take centre stage, with O’Rourke’s monumental synth clouds hovering in the distance. The ensemble surges through a slow series of harmonic changes before the whole shebang dissolves into a delirious synthetic mirage. Bridging minimalism, contemporary electronics, and classic ECM stylings, and bringing together a cast of preternaturally talented contributors, Shebang is unmistakably the work of Oren Ambarchi: obsessively detailed, relentlessly rhythmic, unabashedly celebratory.
For their first album as Gilla Band, (formerly Girl Band) the foursome has redrawn their own paradigm. Most Normal is like little you’ve heard before, a kaleidoscopic spectrum of noise put in service of broken pop songs, FX-strafed Avant-punk rollercoaster rides and passages of futurist dancefloor nihilism. Covid lockdown robbed Gilla Band of any opportunity to try the new material out live, but the pandemic also incinerated any idea of a deadline for the new album. They were free to tinker at leisure, to rewrite and restructure and reinvent tracks they’d cut – to, as drummer Adam Faulkner puts it, “pull things apart and be like, ‘Let’s try this. We could try out every wild idea.” The group also fell under the spell of modern hip-hop, “where there’s really heavy-handed production and they’re messing with the track the whole time,” says Fox. “That felt like a fun route to go down, it was a definite influence.” Most Normal opens with an absolute industrial-noise banger that sounds like a manic house-party throbbing through the walls of the next room as a downed jetliner brings death from above. What follows is unpredictable, leading the listener through a sonic house of mirrors, where the unexpected awaits around every corner. The common thread holding Most Normal’s ambitious Avant-pop shapes together is frontman Dara Kiely. Throughout, he’s an antic, antagonistic presence, barking wild, hilarious, unsettling spiels, babbling about smearing fish with lubricant or dressing up in bin-liners or having to wear hand-me-down boot-cut jeans (“It was a big, shameful thing, growing up, not being able to afford the look I wanted and having to wear all my brother’s old clothes”, says Kiely). Most Normal, then, is a triumph, the bold work of a group who’ve taken the time to evolve their ideas, to deconstruct and reconstruct their music and rebuild it into something new, something challenging and infinitely rewarding. It’s a headphone masterpiece. It’s a majestic exploration of the infinite possibilities of noise. It’s a bold riposte to your parochial beliefs on whatever a pop song can or should be. It’s the best work these musicians have put to (mangled) tape.
*Read a personal, detailed guide to Björk’s 10th LP—written by Björk herself.* *Fossora* is an album I recorded in Iceland. I was unusually here for a long time during the pandemic and really enjoyed it, probably the longest I’d been here since I was 16. I really enjoyed shooting down roots and really getting closer with friends and family and loved ones, forming some close connections with my closest network of people. I guess it was in some ways a reaction to the album before, *Utopia*, which I called a “sci-fi island in the clouds” album—basically because it was sort of out of air with all the flutes and sort of fantasy-themed subject matters. It was very much also about the ideal and what you would like your world to be, whereas *Fossora* is sort of what it is, so it’s more like landing into reality, the day-to-day, and therefore a lot of grounding and earth connection. And that’s why I ended up calling *Fossora* “the mushroom album.” It is in a way a visual shortcut to that, it’s all six bass clarinets and a lot of deep sort of murky, bottom-end sound world, and this is the shortcut I used with my engineers, mixing engineers and musicians to describe that—not sitting in the clouds but it’s a nest on the ground. “Fossora” is a word that I made up from Latin, the female of *fossor*, which basically means the digger, the one who digs into the ground. The word fossil comes from this, and it’s kind of again, you know, just to exaggerate this feeling of digging oneself into the ground, both in the cozy way with friends and loved ones, but also saying goodbye to ancestors and funerals and that kind of sort of digging. It is both happy digging and also the sort of morbid, severe digging that unfortunately all of us have to do to say goodbye to parents in our lifetimes. **“Atopos” (feat. Kasimyn)** “Atopos” is the first single because it is almost like the passport or the ID card (of the album), it has six bass clarinets and a very fast gabba beat. I spent a lot of time on the clarinet arrangements, and I really wanted this kind of feeling of being inside the soil—very busy, happy, a lot of mushrooms growing really fast like a mycelium orchestra. **“Sorrowful Soil” and “Ancestress” (feat. Sindri Eldon)** Two songs about my mother. “Sorrowful Soil” was written just before she passed away, it\'s probably capturing more the sadness when you discover that maybe the last chapter of someone\'s life has started. I wanted to capture this emotion with what I think is the best choir in Iceland, The Hamrahlid Choir. I arranged for nine voices, which is a lot—usually choirs are four voices like soprano, alto, or bass. It took them like a whole summer to rehearse this, so I\'m really proud of this achievement to capture this beautiful recording. “Ancestress” deals with after my mother passing away, and it\'s more about the celebration of her life or like a funeral song. It is in chronological order, the verses sort of start with my childhood and sort of follow through her life until the end of it, and it\'s kind of me learning how to say goodbye to her. **“Fungal City” (feat. serpentwithfeet)** When I was arranging for the six bass clarinets I wanted to capture on the album all different flavors. “Atopos” is the most kind of aggressive fast, “Victimhood” is where it’s most melancholic and sort of Nordic jazz, I guess. And then “Fungal City” is maybe where it\'s most sort of happy and celebrational. I even decided to also record a string orchestra to back up with this kind of happy celebration and feeling and then ended up asking serpentwithfeet to sing with me the vocals on this song. It is sort of about the capacity to love and this, again, meditation on our capacity to love. **“Mycelia”** “Mycelia” is a good example of how I started writing music for this album. I would sample my own voice making several sounds, several octaves. I really wanted to break out of the normal sort of chord structures that I get stuck in, and this was like the first song, like a celebration, to break out of that. I was sitting in the beautiful mountain area in Iceland overlooking a lake in the summer. It was a beautiful day and I think it captured this kind of high energy, high optimism you get in Iceland’s highlands. **“Ovule”** “Ovule” is almost like the feminine twin to “Atopos.” Lyrically it\'s sort of about being ready for love and removing all luggage and becoming really fresh—almost like a philosophical anthem to collect all your brain cells and heart cells and soul cells in one point and really like a meditation about love. It imagines three glass eggs, one with ideal love, one with the shadows of love, and one with day-to-day mundane love, and this song is sort of about these three worlds finding equilibrium between these three glass eggs, getting them to coexist.
Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.
It’s not easy to dance with one’s tongue buried deeply in cheek. But Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul effortlessly combine lean, punchy electro-pop with an unapologetically sarcastic sense of humor. On the Belgian duo’s debut album, *Topical Dancer*, the two musicians draw on their multicultural backgrounds to take sly potshots at racism, sexism, and self-doubt. On “Esperanto,” Adigéry riffs on microaggressions over plunging electric bass, and on “Blenda,” she marries a crisp, funky groove with a surprisingly vulnerable chorus: “Go back to your country where you belong/Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” Co-produced by their longtime collaborators Soulwax, the album slices neatly across the overlap between punky disco, indie dance, and underground house; ’80s avant-pop influences (Art of Noise, Talking Heads) brush up against the sing-speaking wit of contemporaries like Marie Davidson and Dry Cleaning. Some of the album’s most powerful moments transcend language entirely: On “Haha,” Adigéry’s laughter is chopped up and dribbled over an EBM-inspired beat, making for a slow-motion floor-filler that’s as surreal as it is captivating.
Riderless Horse is my first solo record, and it’s the first record my former partner, Kennan Gudjonsson, didn’t produce. I haven’t made an album since 2010. I decided to stop pursuing music several years after my sixth record, Outlaster, because of unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan. Creating music had always been a positive outlet during difficult times, but eventually it became a source of absolute misery. Kennan, a cat and I lived in a studio apartment in NYC for 25 years, finding ways to survive while making records and going on tours. Our apartment was the place where people would come stay, eat, drink, play music, and use our tub. It was quite a home we had created, but it was decaying steadily from the moment we moved in, and in the end, it was as if black mold was growing beneath the surface, undetected, and the two of us were dying and getting too weak to ever leave. We loved each other. We were each other’s family, but there was ongoing abuse, control and manipulation. We hid. We didn’t want anyone to see how ugly things could get, so we increasingly isolated from our friends and family. We were lost. On January 26, 2020, I made the decision to separate and live apart, and on January 27, Kennan died by suicide. What a thing, suicide. I can only feel sadness and guilt about it. Maybe I’ll have other reactions to it later on. Riderless Horse documents the grief, but it also marks moments of empowerment and a real happiness in discovering my own capability. Steve Albini produced this record with me, and Greg Norman assisted. The three of us are old friends, and we did a field recording in a guesthouse built like a lighthouse that two very dear friends of mine have in Esopus, NY. It was exactly the right environment to work on this record. We all had meals together, cried, laughed, and told stories. It was perfect. It made me realize how much I love writing, playing and recording music. Terrible things happen. These were some terrible things. So, what to do – learn something valuable, connect with people, move the fuck out of that apartment, remember the humor, find the humor, tell the truth, and make a record. I made a record.
There’s a light but pervasive melancholy that surrounds *FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE*, Brian Eno’s 22nd solo album—a sense of weightlessness that feels both blissful and a little threatening. Are we cruising safely through the clouds or are our wings about to burn (“Icarus or Blériot”)? Are our lives too busy to consider the microscopic worms in the ground beneath our feet, especially when they don’t participate in capitalism (“Who Gives a Thought”)? How long will the world go on without us (“Garden of Stars”)? As much as these songs are elegies for a vanishing future, they’re also beautiful meditations on the fragility of the present—a mode Eno has been working in comfortably since the mid-’70s. The sound design is as beautiful and expansive as you’d expect, and Eno’s voice—an underrated instrument—is both common and quietly transcendent, the sound of a boy wandering an empty earth. He’s always interesting. But this is one of the first times in years he’s sounded so vital.
When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”
Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.
Kurt Wagner’s Lambchop project was once the standard-bearer for fusions of country and indie rock, but over the years, it has become more unpredictable: By 2016’s *Flotus*, the Nashville musician was submerging his voice in watery vocoder, and on 2019’s *This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)* he spread on a thick layer of synths and drum machines. After the quasi-ambient diversions of 2021’s *Showtunes*, *The Bible* ventures even further afield. In its opening song, you’ll find ruminative piano, horns, strings, a sudden detour into classical music, digital glitches, and Wagner’s voice freshly stripped of artifice, all in the service of a pensive portrait of his aging father—some of the most moving songwriting in Lambchop’s catalog. Produced by Minneapolis’ Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson, frequent Bon Iver collaborators, *The Bible* offers new surprises at every turn, like the disco-house groove and trance synths of “Little Black Boxes,” or the jazzy drum ’n’ bass of “Whatever, Mortal,” or the Lil Jon-styled “hey!” that goes tearing through the placid waters of “Daisy,” a sound so out of place you wonder if you’ve imagined it. Along the way, he considers the George Floyd riots on “Police Dog Blues” and mourns the late rapper The Gift of Gab on “A Major Minor Drag.” The closing “That’s Music” even features quotes from Tommie Smith, an Olympic runner who raised the Black Power fist from the winners’ podium in 1968. Much like Wagner’s patchwork of styles, the cumulative effect of all these images is cryptic yet powerful: a picture of life in America through the eyes of one of the nation’s most idiosyncratic songwriters.
The notion of The Black Keys as some kind of neo-primitive blues machine risen from the swamp to bring you what rock was supposed to be has always been a little overstated: Like The White Stripes, they’ve always been highly style-conscious, not to mention more occupied with simplicity in concept than in practice—they work at it. *Dropout Boogie* feels of a piece with 2019’s *“Let’s Rock”*: catchy, concise, stripped down but polished, with references to glam (“Wild Child”), psychedelia (“How Long”), and post-Stones blues (the Billy Gibbons co-write “Good Love”). With 20 years as a band behind them, they have their story and they’re sticking to it. And the more sophisticated they get, the easier they make it sound.
Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.
Coming off the back of 2019’s excellent *The Book of Traps and Lessons* and the critically acclaimed play *Paradise* at London’s National Theatre in 2021, MC and poet Kae Tempest’s fourth album is their most ambitious, personal, and open to date. Made with longtime collaborator and producer Dan Carey, the record moves in a series of bold musical and thematic suites that take in collaborators including Lianne La Havas, South London rapper Confucius MC, Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, and BROCKHAMPTON’s Kevin Abstract. *The Line Is a Curve* is about letting go of the anxieties and fears that hold you back and embracing life’s cyclical nature. “This record is meant to symbolize a journey through different pressures,” says Tempest, “whether it’s the pressures of a relationship, or trying to survive and build the name for yourself, or just trying to get through the day. It will mean something different to everybody, but that’s the beauty of language.” Here, they talk us through *The Line Is a Curve*, track by track. **“Priority Boredom”** “It’s an evocation of a feeling that I imagine we all are familiar with, which is the relentless pressure of existence and the forces competing for our attention. It’s meant to plunge you directly into the experience of the dull numbness and the claustrophobia of life in the present moment. What it’s saying is this race to death that we call progress or happiness or the pursuit of normal activity, happy families, or whatever the value system is that we’ve swallowed up and are trying to recreate is actually extremely taxing for the individual and also for the community. It’s quite sarcastic in its own way. It’s meant to be knowing rather than an actual description of our lives.” **“I Saw Light” (feat. Grian Chatten)** “I’ve wanted to work with Grian ever since I met him. My desire was to have Grian’s voice contributing a poem because I feel him in that way, as a poet. When you put somebody else’s words alongside yours, you create this friction between the verses that creates new meaning. It gives the words a new energy, a new dimension. Grian putting his words down transformed and affected the verse that I had already written. It’s beautiful.” **“Nothing to Prove”** “It’s a statement song. It’s powerful in its musicality. I love the beat. The first and the second verses are absolutely phonetically matched. There is communication going on between the transformations in the lyric as it begins in one way, and then as it transforms in the other way, so you have this kind of call-and-response between two verses. For me as a writer, a rhymer, and a lyricist, to be doing that on a record is an embodiment of having nothing to prove. It’s like, ‘Here, look what this song is doing.’ It’s like this chorus, musicality, lyricism, flow that are all saying the same thing. There’s nothing to prove—it’s all to play for.” **“No Prizes” (feat. Lianne La Havas)** “It’s close-up portraits of three characters and Lianne’s voice is the overarching theme or the undercurrent of what is common with all of them. The same thing that is occurring for them all, and all of us, in this world where we’ve set the album—where the dominant mythology says, ‘I’ve just got to keep climbing, and I don’t know why.’ I’ve known Lianne for a long time, and I love her voice passionately. There’s mutual respect and friendship there, and it just felt like the right time to try and bring some of that energy through into the record.” **“Salt Coast”** “It’s a love letter to Britain. Within my imagination, this island was embodied as this kid, this young girl. I suppose I was thinking about my childhood. I was thinking about the people I knew and loved as a kid, the people that made the most profound impact on me, and also the particular Britishness of that time. It’s acknowledging all of the complexities of loving home. It’s a complex place to love but, for me, it’s no less beautiful than any other. It’s home. I’ve gone deeply into why this soil feels the way it feels to me. I really want it to be the unofficial England World Cup anthem. Imagine that on the terraces.” **“Don’t You Ever”** “Kwake Bass plays the drums. We’ve been friends since childhood. He’s one of the greatest drummers of our generation, I think. The guitar part is by this guy Luke \[Eastop\]. We were all in a band together when we were about 19 years old, and the music on this, not the lyrics, was something that we used to play together when we were doing all of these hippie festivals. I just thought to myself on this record, ‘I want to get everybody together again. I want us to play together, and I want to do a kind of grown-up version of that song.’ Because it’s a fucking brilliant song.” **“These Are the Days”** “This is one that me and Dan wrote together in this weird studio lockdown situation. It’s this big, epic production, but we were writing it on a very minimized kit. We knew we wanted to do it live, so when the band came in to do ‘Don’t You Ever,’ we also did ‘These Are the Days’ with all of the horns and the same crew playing the bass and the drums. That had a huge impact on it. It’s us saying, ‘Yeah, these are the days, this is the time, let’s fucking play this song!’” **“Smoking” (feat. Confucius MC)** “When I started rapping—and I’m talking about 15, 16 years old—Confucius was instrumental in guiding me. His lyricism was profound for me. We were in a crew together, and he was an important person in my creative life. If it wasn’t for those people, I would not be here, so I wanted to bring my community into my creativity. It sounds the way it does because I recorded it backstage at a festival and sent it to Dan as a voice note, which I often do.” **“Water in the Rain” (feat. Assia)** “It’s kind of setting myself free from some stuff that I’ve been suffering from with poor mental health. I think sometimes singing about it, just describing it and going into the experience of it, can take some of the fear out of what you experience when you’re experiencing it in isolation. It’s a profound moment on the album for me.” **“Move”** “I think of the album as a series of suites. You start with ‘Smoking’ and all of the themes that come up in that and then you move into ‘Water in the Rain,’ which is this unleashing of deep emotion, which then opens up the space for us to get to ‘Move.’ ‘Move’ is a response to what’s come before. I’ve connected with the tenderness, so now I can really dig deep and find my strength. This is the time to get up off the floor and stand up for yourself. The idea of ‘Move’ is that you earn that strength by being that vulnerable. It’s a fight song. I might be losing right now, but I’m not going to give up.” **“More Pressure” (feat. Kevin Abstract)** “*The Line Is a Curve* builds its momentum. It’s like a wave: You build up all of this galvanizing spirit of fight, and that’s what enables you to reframe the narrative of the pressures that you’re under. Now you can say, ‘Right, I get it. I’m under all this pressure, but I’m going to use all this pressure, and I’m going to use this energy to make change and cultivate greater acceptance.’ It’s all part of this swell that begins at the start of the record. Rick Rubin suggested that I give Kevin a shout. It’s not quite as close to home as the other collaborations, which are very much based in South London, but it opens the record up a bit more and, hopefully, allows more people in.” **“Grace”** “It’s like a prayer. It’s this repeated refrain that comes back to me. When I’m in need, I go back to those words: ‘Let me be loved. Let me be loving.’ I would say those words to myself before going out onstage to do a performance of *The Book of Traps and Lessons*. It’s become something to keep me grounded. It feels really fitting that this song came out of the sessions making this album, but then it’s something that had its place in other works that I’ve done. Dan is playing the synth line to ‘Priority Boredom’ on the guitar, so it leads you back around in a circle. It’s such a gentle, tender way of finishing the album.”
Welsh producer/vocalist Kelly Lee Owens released her ultra-personal second album, *Inner Song*, in August 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. With any plans to tour the record scuttled, that winter she managed to decamp from her London home to Oslo—just before borders were closing again—for some uninterrupted studio time. Much like *Inner Song*’s rather short 35-day gestation, after a month of work with Norwegian avant-garde/noise producer Lasse Marhaug, Owens emerged with *LP.8*, her most experimental, liberating record yet. On her previous full-lengths—this is actually her third, not her eighth—Owens alternated between deep, plodding techno tracks and moody synth compositions, over which her lithe vocals floated effortlessly. But on *LP.8*, the contrasts—between the earthly and the ethereal—are felt more deeply. The opener, “Release,” plays like a lost Chris & Cosey cut, its crunchy precision finding that sweet spot between industrial and early techno. On the New Age-y “Anadlu,” “S.O (2),”and “Olga,” hints of Enya’s influence shine through, but the songs’ gauzy atmospheres are often counterweighted by brooding undertones. “Nana Piano” is a melancholy solo piano sketch, unfettered except for some gentle birdsong in the background. But the closing “Sonic 8” is Owens at her most direct and visceral: She channels all sorts of frustrations while intoning, “This is a wake-up call/This is an emergency” over a beat so skeletal and abrasive that it sounds like a frayed wire swinging dangerously close to the bathtub.
Born out of a series of studio sessions, LP.8 was created with no preconceptions or expectations: an unbridled exploration into the creative subconscious. After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway. Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with esteemed avant-noise artist Lasse Marhaug. Together, they envisioned making music somewhere in between Throbbing Gristle and Enya, artists who have had an enduring impact on Kelly’s creative being. In doing so, they paired tough, industrial sounds with ethereal Celtic mysticism, creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release. One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her ‘eighth album’. Lasse Marhaug is known for hundreds of avant-noise releases, previously working with the likes of Merzbow, Sunn O))) and Jenny Hval, for whom he produced her acclaimed albums Apocalypse, Girl, Blood Bitch and The Practice Of Love. A label mate of Kelly’s, Marhaug has recorded for Smalltown Supersound since 1997. Welsh electronic artist Kelly Lee Owens released her eponymous debut album in 2017 and followed this up with 2020’s Inner Song. She has collaborated with Björk, St. Vincent and John Cale. In April, she returns with LP.8.
After releasing the standalone stunner “What You Gonna Do?” in late 2021, Elizabeth King is set to release a new collection of sacred soul recordings, each more fiery than the last, entitled I Got a Love out June 24, 2022 on Bible & Tire Recording Co. (an imprint of Fat Possum). The album was produced by Bible & Tire founder Bruce Watson and backed by his Sacred Soul Sound Section led by guitar aficionado, Will Sexton. Most of the material on the album was drawn from pioneering 70s gospel DJ/producer Juan D. Shipp’s D-Vine Spirituals Records catalog. Elizabeth was the flagship artist on the label and her early recordings are part of Bible & Tire's ongoing D-Vine Spirituals reissue series including their latest compilations Sacred Soul: The D-Vine Spirituals Records Story Volume 1 and 2. Shipp, an 83 year old producer, DJ and longtime manager of Elizabeth, didn’t miss the chance to be back in the studio with Elizabeth, egging her on. This 60 year old relationship has flourished as the recordings indicate. Once the album was thought to have been completed, Watson had one more trick up his sleeve. He enlisted Mississippi rhythm & blues shaman Jimbo Mathus (Squirrel Nut Zippers, Buddy Guy, Andrew Bird) to produce one more cut for the record. He wanted a Mathus original. Something outside the box. What came was the title track “I Got a Love.” Like a haunting stroll through the dark Memphis streets with a desperate cry of love and affection. Elizabeth cries out “I got a love, people. That comes from Heaven above.” The song would not be complete without the Memphis-style horn arrangement from Art Edmaiston and background vocals from Mathus and his protege Schaefer Llana. I Got A Love shows a different side of King. A more raw and vibrant side. The songs have more energy, more stamina and drive harder than her previous release without compromising the integrity of King’s glorious voice and personality. It’s as if Elizabeth was just getting warmed up with her 2021 album Living In the Last Days and now the stage is set with this new offering. The true concept of sacred soul can be found in earnest on tracks like “I Need The Lord” and “My Robe,” which find King and company weaving that historic Memphis Soul Sound within the gospel framework, always keen on delivering the sacred message. The real gem however, can be found within the two and a half minute acapella performance of “Give Me Wings.” King, accompanied by her daughters in the round sing the words “As I go from door to door, loved ones gone, I won’t see ‘em down here no more. That makes me feel like flying away, to be at rest.” Elizabeth’s delivery is personal. Not only does she sing for the love and loss of her late husband years ago, but for all of the many who that have gone on before her. I Got a Love is a testament to the many years Elizabeth has spent honing her craft and patiently waiting for her moment.