musicOMH’s Top 50 Albums of 2017

Four years after Lorde illuminated suburban teendom with *Pure Heroine*, she captures the dizzying agony of adolescence on *Melodrama*. “Everyone has that first proper year of adulthood,” she told Beats 1. “I think I had that year.” She chronicles her experiences in these insightful odes to self-discovery that find her battling loneliness (“Sober”), conquering heartbreak (“Writer in the Dark”), embracing complexity (“Hard Feelings/Loveless”), and letting herself lose control. “Every night I live and die,” she sings on “Perfect Places,” an emotionally charged song about escaping reality. “I’m 19 and I\'m on fire.\"

Pushing past the GRAMMY®-winning art rock of 2014’s *St. Vincent*, *Masseduction* finds Annie Clark teaming up with Jack Antonoff (as well as Kendrick Lamar collaborator Sounwave) for a pop masterpiece that radiates and revels in paradox—vibrant yet melancholy, cunning yet honest, friendly yet confrontational, deeply personal yet strangely inscrutable. She moves from synthetic highs to towering power-ballad comedowns (“Pills”), from the East Coast (the unforgettable “New York”) to “Los Ageless,” where, amid a bramble of strings and woozy electronics, she admits, “I try to write you a love song/But it comes out a lament.”

Some bands take a few years to regroup for their next move; dream-pop pioneers Slowdive took 22, a return all the more bittersweet given how many bands their sound has influenced since. Combining the atmospherics of ambient music with rock ’n’ roll’s low center of gravity, *Slowdive* sounds as vital as anything the band recorded in the early ‘90s, whether it’s the foggy, countryish inflections of “No Longer Making Time” or the propulsive “Star Roving.”

“It felt like we were in a movie that had a totally implausible ending...” Slowdive’s second act as a live blockbuster has already been rapturously received around the world. Highlights thus far include a festival-conquering, sea-of-devotees Primavera Sound performance, of which Pitchfork noted: “The beauty of their crystalline sound is almost hard to believe, every note in its perfect place.” “It was just nice to realise that there was a decent amount of interest in it,” says principal songwriter Neil Halstead. The UK shoegaze pioneers have now channelled such seemingly impossible belief into a fourth studio opus which belies his characteristic modesty. Self-titled with quiet confidence, Slowdive’s stargazing alchemy is set to further entrance the faithful while beguiling a legion of fresh ears. Deftly swerving what co-vocalist/guitarist Rachel Goswell terms “a trip down memory lane”, these eight new tracks are simultaneously expansive and the sonic pathfinders’ most direct material to date. Birthed at the band’s talismanic Oxfordshire haunt The Courtyard – “It felt like home,” enthuses guitarist Christian Savill – their diamantine melodies were mixed to a suitably hypnotic sheen at Los Angeles’ famed Sunset Sound facility by Chris Coady (perhaps best known for his work with Beach House, one of countless contemporary acts to have followed in Slowdive’s wake). “It’s poppier than I thought it was going to be,” notes Halstead, who was the primary architect of 1995‘s previous full-length transmission Pygmalion. This time out the group dynamic was all-important. “When you’re in a band and you do three records, there’s a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record.” Drummer and loop conductor Simon Scott enhanced the likes of ‘Slomo’ and ‘Falling Ashes’ with abstract textures conjured via his laptop’s signal processing software. A fecund period of experimentation with “40-minute iPhone jams” allowed the unit to then amplify the core of their chemistry. “Neil is such a gifted songwriter, so the songs won. He has these sparks of melodies, like ‘Sugar For The Pill’ and ‘Star Roving’, which are really special. But the new record still has a toe in that Pygmalion sound. In the future, things could get very interesting indeed.” This open-channel approach to creativity is reflected by Slowdive’s impressively wide field of influence, from indie-rock avatars to ambient voyagers – see the tribute album of cover versions released by Berlin electronic label Morr Music. As befits such evocative visionaries, you can also hear Slowdive through the silver screen: New Queer Cinema trailblazer Gregg Araki has featured them on the soundtracks to no less than four of his films. “When I moved to America in 2008 I was working in an organic grocery store,” recalls Christian. “Kids started coming in and asking if it was true I had played in Slowdive. That’s when I started thinking, ‘OK, this is weird!’” Neil Halstead: “We were always ambitious. Not in terms of trying to sell records, but in terms of making interesting records. Maybe, if you try and make interesting records, they’re still interesting in a few years time. I don’t know where we’d have gone if we had carried straight on. Now we’ve picked up a different momentum. It’s intriguing to see where it goes next.” The world has finally caught up with Slowdive. This movie could run and run...

Nearly 20 years into the band\'s career, The National have reached a status attained only by the likes of Radiohead: a progressive, uncompromising band with genuinely broad appeal. Produced by multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner in his upstate New York studio (with co-production from guitarist Bryce Dessner and singer Matt Berninger), *Sleep Well Beast* captures the band at their moody, majestic best, from the propulsive “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness” to “Guilty Party,” where Berninger’s portraits of failing marriage come to a sad, gorgeous, and surprisingly subtle head.

Sleep Well Beast was produced by member Aaron Dessner with co-production by Bryce Dessner and Matt Berninger. The album was mixed by Peter Katis and recorded at Aaron Dessner’s Hudson Valley, New York studio, Long Pond, with additional sessions having taken place in Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles.

Phoebe Bridgers wrote her first song at age 11, spent her adolescence at open mic nights, and busked through her teenage years at farmers markets in her native Los Angeles. By age 20, she'd caught the ear of Ryan Adams, who listened to her perform her song "Killer" in his L.A. studio, inviting her to come back and record it there the next day. The session blossomed into the three-song ‘Killer’ EP, released to much acclaim on Adams’s Pax-Am label in 2015. In the two short years since, Bridgers has toured or played with Conor Oberst, Julien Baker, City and Colour, Violent Femmes, Mitski, Television and Blake Babies among others. On September 22nd, Phoebe Bridgers will release her debut full-length, Stranger In The Alps. From the weeping strings and Twin Peaks twangs of opening track Smoke Signals, to the simple heartbreak of Funeral and melancholic crescendo of Scott Street, Stranger in the Alps is a swooningly beautiful record with a gothic heart.

On their second album, Wolf Alice continue to draw their cues from ’90s alt-rock. They do it with such adventure and panache that it never becomes simple mimicry, though. The melody and dissonance of shoegaze are fashioned into aching, beautiful tributes to passed friends and relatives (“Heavenward,” “St. Purple & Green”), “Yuk Foo” mauls misogyny with punk fury and wit, while the title track is an epic journey in stoner rock. Out front, singer/guitarist Ellie Rowsell is an increasingly assured presence, skillfully inhabiting the many moods of her rivetingly personal lyrics.

2014’s 'Too Bright' showcased Mike Hadreas stepping out saucily onto a bigger stage, expressing, with the production help of Portishead’s Adrian Utley, emotions arranged all along the slippery continuum from rage to irony to love. Here in 13 new ferocious and sophisticated tracks, Mike Hadreas and his collaborators blow through church music, makeout music, an array of the gothier radio popular formats, rhythm and blues, art pop, krautrock, queer soul, the RCA Studio B sound, and then also collect some of the sounds that only exist inside Freddy Krueger. Tremolo on the electric keys. Nightclubbing. Daywalking. Kate Bushing, Peter Greenawaying, Springsteening, Syreetaing. No Shape was produced by Blake Mills, the man behind Alabama Shakes’ Grammy Award winning album. He added precision and expansion. Some things are pretty and some are blasted beyond recognition. Records like this, records that make you feel like you’re 15 and just seeing the truth for the first time, are excessively rare. They’re here to remind you that you’re divine.

In the two years since *To Pimp a Butterfly*, we’ve hung on Kendrick Lamar\'s every word—whether he’s destroying rivals on a cameo, performing the #blacklivesmatter anthem *on top of a police car* at the BET Awards, or hanging out with Obama. So when *DAMN.* opens with a seemingly innocuous line—\"So I was taking a walk the other day…”—we\'re all ears. The gunshot that abruptly ends the track is a signal: *DAMN.* is a grab-you-by-the-throat declaration that’s as blunt, complex, and unflinching as the name suggests. If *Butterfly* was jazz-inflected, soul-funk vibrance, *DAMN.* is visceral, spare, and straight to the point, whether he’s boasting about \"royalty inside my DNA” on the trunk-rattling \"DNA.\" or lamenting an anonymous, violent death on the soul-infused “FEAR.” No topic is too big to tackle, and the songs are as bold as their all-caps names: “PRIDE.” “LOYALTY.” “LOVE.” \"LUST.” “GOD.” When he repeats the opening line to close the album, that simple walk has become a profound journey—further proof that no one commands the conversation like Kendrick Lamar.

After his breakthrough *Lost in The Dream*, Adam Granduciel takes things a step further. Marrying the weathered hope of Dylan, Springsteen, and Petty with a studio rat’s sense of detail, *A Deeper Understanding* feels like an album designed to get lost in, where lush textures meet plainspoken questions about life, loss, and hope, and where songs stretch out as though they\'re chasing answers. For as much as Granduciel says in words, it’s his music that speaks loudest, from the synth-strobing heartland rock of “Holding On” and “Nothing to Find” to ballads like “Clean Living” and “Knocked Down,” whose spaces are as expansive as any sound.

After a year of extensive touring in support of 2015’s The Agent Intellect, Protomartyr returned to their practice space in a former optician's office in Southwest Detroit. Inspired by The Raincoats' Odyshape, Mica Levi's orchestral compositions, and a recent collaboration with post-punk legends The Pop Group, for Rough Trade's 40th anniversary, the band began writing new music that artfully expanded on everything they’d recorded up until that point. The result is Relatives In Descent, Protomartyr's fourth full-length and Domino debut. Though not a concept album, it presents twelve variations on a theme: the unknowable nature of truth, and the existential dread that often accompanies that unknowing. This, at a moment when disinformation and garbled newspeak have become a daily reality.

The second full length record from Algiers.

The long-running English indie-pop trio Saint Etienne have always had a healthy dollop of nostalgia—and with their ninth album, they\'ve crafted a sonic love letter to the UK suburbs where they grew up. Though the album centers around a longing to return to the simplicity of childhood (such as on the orchestral Northern Soul of \"Something New\"), there are plenty of lively and upbeat moments too, such as the deep disco of \"Dive\" and the New Wave bounce of \"Magpie Eyes.\"

The long-running English indie-pop trio Saint Etienne have always had a healthy dollop of nostalgia—and with their ninth album, they've crafted a sonic love letter to the UK suburbs where they grew up. Though the album centers around a longing to return to the simplicity of childhood (such as on the orchestral Northern Soul of "Something New"), there are plenty of lively and upbeat moments too, such as the deep disco of "Dive" and the New Wave bounce of "Magpie Eyes."

While evolving from the feral roar of 2007 debut *Strange House* toward the saucer-eyed dance rock of 2014’s *Luminous*, The Horrors have often sculpted sharp pop tunes. Their fifth album fully embraces those melodic instincts while exploring the possibilities offered by mixing psychedelia, rock, and synth-pop with their gothic otherness. The results are disparate and gripping, from “Machine”’s grinding urgency to the woozy swagger of “Press Enter to Exit.” Finale “Something to Remember Me By” is the towering peak of their most assured album to date, evoking Balearic-period New Order with its yearning fusion of house and synth-pop.

You don’t need to hear Taylor Swift declare her old self dead—as she does on the incendiary “Look What You Made Me Do”—to know that *reputation* is both a warning shot to her detractors and a full-scale artistic transformation. There\'s a newfound complexity to all these songs: They\'re dark and meaningful, catchy and lived-in, pointed and provocative. She\'s braggadocious on “End Game,” a languid hip-hop cut with Ed Sheeran and Future, and then sassy and sensual on “…Ready for It?” and “I Did Something Bad.” But songs like “Call It What You Want” and “Delicate” bring Taylor\'s many emotional layers together and confront the dynamic between her celebrity and personal life: “My reputation’s never been worse/So, you must like me for me,” she offers. It all makes for a boundlessly energetic, soul-baring pop masterpiece—and her boldest statement yet.

After a six-year break during which frontman Robin Pecknold vanished to the Washington woods then reappeared as a college student in New York, Fleet Foxes return with a fresh sense of purpose. Expanding on the harmony-driven sound of their first two albums, *Crack-Up* boasts both pretty, straightforward folk tunes (“Naiads, Cassadies,” “Fool’s Errand”) and sprawling, suite-like explorations (“Third of May / Odaigahara,” “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar”) that are at once comforting and quietly avant-garde. It’s a balance that allows the band’s natural sweetness—and wild ambition—to shine.

Crack-Up, Fleet Foxes' long-awaited and highly anticipated third album, comes six years after the release of Helplessness Blues and nearly a decade since the band's self-titled debut. "Rewarding, involving, and meticulous," says the AP, "Crack-Up has been well worth the wait." "Likely to be the most remarkable album you will hear this year," exclaims the Times (UK). "The return of one of the most original bands of this century." Pitchfork calls it "their most complex and compelling album to date."

Over the 30 years of Oxbow’s operations, no one has come comfortably close to classifying the Bay Area group. This could arguably be the result of Oxbow’s ongoing evolution, but accurately describing any particular phase of the groups’ seven-album career is no easier than describing the broader metamorphic arc of their creative path. This is especially true with their seventh album Thin Black Duke, where Oxbow’s elusive brand of harmonic unrest has absorbed the ornate and ostentatious palate of baroque pop into their sound, pushing their polarized dynamics into a scope that spans between sublime and completely unnerving. This is new musical territory for all parties involved. As throughout their history, Oxbow grapples with channeling man’s most primal urges through a framework of meticulous, cultured, and cerebral instrumentation. But the unadulterated electric roar and percussive barbarism of their past work wasn’t as wholly satisfactory as it had been in the past. Other flavors were deemed necessary and called into play, both to slake unnamed thirsts and to suitably fit the Thin Black Duke’s lyrical themes, but also to explore the further reaches of Oxbow’s studied approach to tension and release, structure and dissonance, and melody and abstraction. “Certainly we all became increasingly aware that none of us are getting younger,” says guitarist Niko Wenner. Recognizing one’s own mortality can render one’s art to the ranks of ephemera, but Oxbow lashed out at such notions. “For this record I wanted to go even further in the way we always make recordings, as music that hangs together over an entire album, 'large scale coherence' if you will,” Wenner says of his compositional strategy. “I was inspired by pieces like Bach's Goldberg Variations and the formal technique in classical music where a small idea, a kernel, is reiterated, morphed, expanded and truncated, to make a piece of music permeated with the potent perfume of that small element.” Consequently, the attentive ear will notice recurring musical phrases and motifs throughout Thin Black Duke. Noticing such details isn’t necessary to absorb and appreciate the album, but as Wenner suggests, “I think I'm not the only one that finds a visceral satisfaction when you can look into something you like deeper, and deeper, and find more and more there.”

No listener to Dawson’s earlier music has ever discerned a lack of artistic ambition. Whether they got on at the last stop - the 4 track Tyneside-Trout-Mask-through a-Vic and Bob-filter of Nothing Important - or earlier in the journey, with The Glass Trunk’s visceral song cycle or The Magic Bridge’s sombre revels, devotees of his earlier recordings will be at once intrigued by and slightly fearful of the prospect of a record that could make those three landmark releases look like formative work. Peasant is that album. From its first beguilingly muted fanfare to its spectacular climax exploring a Dark Ages masseuse’s dangerous fascination with a mysterious artefact called the Pin of Quib, Peasant will grab newcomers to Richard Dawson’s work by the scruff of the neck and refuse to let them go until they have signed a pledge of life-long allegiance.

Special Request returns to Houndstooth with the monolithic Belief System. Comprising 23 tracks (4xLP / 2xCD / digital) recorded over the last 3 years and utilising source material from Paul Woolford’s tape archives going back to 1993 - Belief System augments the DNA of the project with a new visceral production aesthetic. Vast layers of atmospherics, unhinged modular work, contact microphone recordings of icebergs cracking, microtonal elements, and the introduction of stark soundtrack pieces borne out of Woolford's work in sound design combine with the trademark heavyweight production style of Special Request to deliver a formidable new body of work.

Sylvan Esso’s sophomore album, What Now, is the sound of a band truly fulfilling the potential and promise of their debut. Everything has evolved - the production is bolder, the vocals are more intense, the melodies are more infectious, and the songs shine that much brighter. However, it is also a record that was made in 2016 - which means it is inherently grappling with the chaos of a country seething inward on itself, the voices of two people nestled in studios around the country who were bemused by what they looked out and saw. It’s an album that is both political and personal, and blurs the line between the two – What Now describes the inevitable low that comes after every high, fulfillment tempered by the knowledge that there is no clearly defined conclusion. What Now asks where we go as a culture when standing at what feels like a precipice. It’s a record about falling in love and learning that it won’t save you; about the oversharing of information and the fine line between self-awareness and narcissism; about meeting one’s own personal successes but feeling the fizzling embers of the afterglow rather than the roar of achievement; about the crushing realization that no progress can ever feel permanent. It is an album that finds its strength in its own duality. But at its core, What Now is an album of the finest songs this band has ever written- produced masterfully, sang fearlessly- to articulate our collective undercurrents of anxiety and joy.

31 AUGUST 1997 was one of the hottest nights in Paris that year. Just after midnight a black Mercedes Benz rushes through the dark streets with a horde of ravenous paparazzi on tow. In the Pont de l’Alma tunnel the car swerves into a roof-supporting pillar and in the echo of the metallic roar dies Diana, the Princess of Wales. The world has lost one of its greatest icons and the morbidity of popular culture hits a new high. The story is strangely resonant with the myth of the Greek goddess Artemis (Roman: Diana) and the hunter Actaeon, who, after having seen the goddess bathing naked, is turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hunting hounds. This picture opens Ulver’s 13th album, The Assassination of Julius Caesar. Such historical quantum leaps often occur in Ulver’s musical universe, which has never been bound by any physical law. And the band’s unruly play with myth, history and popular culture has never been more manifest than now. From the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on one day in May 1981, to the queer, black house with the address 6114 California Street, San Francisco, better known as the headquarters of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan – Ulver moves seamlessly through time and space, and manages, in their own strange ways, to create a coherent tableau with a deeply personal backdrop. “I want to tell you something / about the grace of faded things,” as it goes in the song “Southern Gothic”. Those familiar with this stubborn pack of wolves from Oslo will not be surprised that they also this time round are shifting shape. Never afraid of challenging or redefining current musical conventions, Ulver has now enacted what they are calling “their pop album”. You don’t have to worry about vexing radio humdrum or pastel ear candy though – Talk Talk and Music Machine are pop music as good as any in the universe of Ulver. A universe where “pop” is more a mark of distinction, denoting immediacy and possible body movement. Factory Records and Welcome to the Pleasuredome. The Assassination of Julius Caesar is an album the band has been longing to do for many years, to delve into the music of their childhood, along with the now fading memories and drifting clouds of romance. After the (to them) surprising success of last year’s hybrid ATGCLVLSSCAP, released on the recently established House of Mythology, the way was eventually cleared for a full status studio album from Ulver. Not since Shadows of the Sun, now ten years of age, has the band worked under such clearly defined criteria, staying true to an aesthetics. Such music is never easily conceived, but Ulver’s unyielding ethos of following their instincts has again showed them the way. Fear of repetition and standstill is just as instinctive in the mind of this group as hunger is for their counterparts in nature. The core crew behind this album is Kristoffer Rygg, Jørn H. Sværen and Tore Ylwizaker, in company with Ole Alexander Halstensgård, who has also been an important contributor to earlier albums. As usual, there are prominent guests, the renowned experimental guitarist Stian Westerhus puts his personal signature on several tracks, the same goes for associated members Anders Møller and Daniel O’Sullivan. Legendary Hawkwind shaman Nik Turner adds his sax to “Rolling Stone”. The Assassination of Julius Caesar is mixed by Martin “Youth” Glover, known from bands such as Killing Joke and The Fireman (with Paul McCartney), plus producer of The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony” and many other major players. The result is epic and wide-scoped as a historical drama, without ever mollycoddling the listener. “What have I done to leave you here,” asks vocalist and primus motor Kristoffer Rygg on the last track, “Coming Home”. Since Ulver was formed a quarter of a century ago, their musical odyssey has taken them round the world in many shapes. This year will see them perform in select places with a new spectacular live production. And even if Ulver might have brought home the game with their most ambitious and majestic work thus far, rest assured that the wolves will keep on following you through the night. – Ando Woltmann

Intended as an examination of 21st-century femininity and masculinity, Laura Marling’s sixth album drills into her friendships and relationships with absorbing intimacy. Musically, it’s one of her finest records too. She consistently finds a captivating balance between immediacy, nuance, and adventure—whether she’s plucking cascading acoustic melodies on “Nouel” or creating a suspenseful union of hushed electronic beats, filmic strings and snaking electric guitar on “Don’t Pass Me By.”

If "Nothing Valley" were a real place, it’d be mossy, verdant, and a little bit strange. Melkbelly, formed by vets of Chicago’s experimental and DIY scene champions, organized noise and thoughtful freneticism on its debut full-length, "Nothing Valley," fusing dreamy vocal lines and cantankerous guitar racket. Its songs clang and bang in stripped-down production that highlights the band’s sharp edges; multi-faceted slabs of sound serve harmonious, immediate songs. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the band members’ tastes run obscure--The Hecks, Lightning Bolt, and jazz drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and, as they tell us, “bands and musicians that draw on a sense of adventure." The quartet’s membership overlaps with several Chicago noise and experimental bands and art collectives. An efficient one-day recording session resulted in Melkbelly’s first EP, 2014's "Pennsylvania," which opened the door to touring and opening slots for Speedy Ortiz, Magik Markers and Built to Spill, and led to The Chicago Reader calling Melkbelly “one of the most exciting new sounds out of Chicago.” Next, Melkbelly got back to writing and working, recording a pair of 7-inches with Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Public House where it had made its first recordings ever for Public House’s Digital Singles Series and a Public House compilation tape. The sessions gave the band a chance to deepen its collaboration with Vettraino. Miranda writes most of Melkbelly’s tunes on guitar and brings them to the band who puts them through the ringer, where they morph into a Melkbelly arrangement. Often, however, the band will take a guitar riff or two from an open jam recorded at practice and spin it into a song. "Nothing Valley" was recorded in early 2016 in Vettraino’s basement studio to 8-track analog tape. Fresh off a West Coast tour, the band let the hours on the road and missed art tourism opportunities at Spiral Jetty shape the songs as well as the recording process itself, writing half the album material in the studio. "Nothing Valley" breezes gust fresh and forcefully.

Meaning all things magick and supernatural, the root of the word occult is that which is hidden, concealed, beyond the limits of our minds. If this is occult, then the Occult Architecture of Moon Duo’s fourth album - a psychedelic opus in two separate volumes released in 2017 - is an intricately woven hymn to the invisible structures found in the cycle of seasons and the journey of day into night, dark into light.  Offering a cosmic glimpse into the hidden patterning embedded in everything, Occult Architecture reflects the harmonious duality of these light and dark energies through the Chinese theory of Yin and Yang. In Chinese, Yin means “the shady side of the hill” and is associated with the feminine, darkness, night, earth. Following this logic, Vol. 1 embraces and embodies Moon Duo’s darker qualities — released appropriately on February 3, in the heart of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. According to guitarist Ripley Johnson, “the concept of the dark/light, two-part album came as we were recording and mixing the songs, beginning in the dead of winter and continuing into the rebirth and blossoming of the spring. There’s something really powerful about the changing of the seasons in the Northwest, the physical and psychic impact it has on you, especially after we spent so many years in the seasonal void of California. I became interested in gnostic and hermetic literature around that time, especially the relationship between music and occult qualities and that fed into the whole vibe.”    Adds keyboardist Sanae Yamada, “the two parts are also intended to represent inverted components of a singular entity, like two faces on the same head which stare always in opposite directions but are inextricably driven by the same brain.”  Vol. 1 was mixed in Berlin by the band’s longtime collaborator Jonas Verwijnen.

Oh, Sealand is the band’s sixth release and first full album of new material since 2014’s The Water Between Us. It is a disquieting album full of love and frustration for England, peppered with literary references, old roads, lost films, fishermen and drowned villages. As well as the full musical line-up, the album feature the voice of comic book writer Alan Moore, a sea shanty choir and an unofficial anthem for the independent principality of Sealand, which lies 6 miles off the coast of England. Preorder it - and more, here: www.microcultures.fr/fr/project/view/oh-sealand

Rocket is Philadelphia-based artist Alex G’s eighth full-length release—an assured statement that follows a slate of humble masterpieces, many of them self-recorded and self-released, stretching from 2010’s RACE to his 2015 Domino debut, Beach Music. Amid the Rocket recording process, Alex made headlines for catching the attention of Frank Ocean, who asked him to play guitar on his two 2016 albums, Endless and Blonde. More than any stylistic cues, what Alex took from the experience was a newfound confidence in collaboration. Rocket wears this collaborative spirit proudly, and in its numerous contributors presents a restless sense of musical experimentation - effortlessly jumping from distorted sound collage to dreamy folk music to bouncing Americana. Rocket illustrates a cohesive vision of contemporary American experience; the cast of characters that Alex G inhabits have fun, fall in love, develop obsessions, get in trouble, and—much like rockets themselves—ultimately they burn out. Alex, though, in a collection of songs that’s both his tightest and most adventurous, is poised only for the ascent.

“All This I Do For Glory” is a reasoning and exploration of the machinations of ambition and legacy, an examination of the concepts of afterlife, and the first half of a doomed love story in the model of the greek tragedies. As a narrative, it exists temporally somewhere between 2015’s “Never were the way she was” (with Sarah Neufeld) and the first volume of the NHW Trilogy. With this, his first solo outing since 2013’s “To See More Light”, Colin Stetson ventures into territory both familiar and strange. Here still, is the dogmatically stripped down approach to performance and capture (all songs recorded live with no overdubs or loops) but there is an immediacy to the album that belies a more invasive and thorough miking of the various instruments being utilized and a seeming influence drawn from the early nineties electronica of artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre, evident in the more pointed role played by the instruments' many percussive elements. There are ancestries, motivic and timbral, woven through these six songs that plainly anchor them within the shared universe of his Trilogy, though the overall experience is one of extreme intimacy, the sounds and imagery more tangible and immersive than previous offerings. The brief and brutal “In the clinches” recalls (or presages) echoes of songs like “Judges”, though now feeling like one has fallen down the bell of Stetson’s ancient bass saxophone itself. “Spindrift”, crystalline and serene, calls to mind the ambient works of Aphex Twin, while “Between Water and Wind” with it’s “Immigrant Song” swagger, relentlessly carves it’s way into the bedrock here, paving the way with an increasing focus on the minute and the minimal, with a deepened sense of patience shared by most of the album’s six tracks. Engineered and mixed by Stetson himself, this album represents a decidedly independent approach across the entire creative process and finds him at the top of his game, both as a composer and instrumentalist as well as a producer.

The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir chronicles the 50 years of songwriter Stephin Merritt's life with one song per year. Merritt sings vocals on all 50 songs and plays more than 100 instruments, from ukulele to piano to drum machine to abacus. Unlike his previous work, the lyrics are nonfiction—a mix of autobiography (bedbugs, Buddhism, buggery) and documentary (hippies, Hollywood, hyperacusis).

A moment that fell down in the life of Haley Fohr on January 22, 2016 - now in album form! Redefining and realizing the goals that were set to allow Haley become Circuit des Yeux and Circuit des Yeux to become Haley.

Josh Tillman’s third album as Father John Misty is a wry and passionate complaint against nearly everything under the sun: Politics, religion, entertainment, war—even Father John Misty can’t escape Father John Misty’s gimlet eye. But even the wordiest, most cynically self-aware songs here (“Leaving L.A.,” “When the God of Love Returns There’ll Be Hell to Pay”) are executed with angelic beauty, a contrast that puts Tillman in a league with spiritual predecessors like Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson. A performer as savvy as Tillman knows you can’t sell the apocalypse without making it sound pretty.

'Pure Comedy', Father John Misty’s third album, is a complex, often-sardonic, and, equally often, touching meditation on the confounding folly of modern humanity. Father John Misty is the brainchild of singer-songwriter Josh Tillman. Tillman has released two widely acclaimed albums – 'Fear Fun' (2012) and 'I Love You, Honeybear' (2015) – and the recent “Real Love Baby” single as Father John Misty, and recently contributed to songs by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Kid Cudi. While we could say a lot about 'Pure Comedy' – including that it is a bold, important album in the tradition of American songwriting greats like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, and Leonard Cohen – we think it’s best to let its creator describe it himself. Take it away, Mr. Tillman: 'Pure Comedy' is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence. Something like that. 'Pure Comedy' was recorded in 2016 at the legendary United Studios (Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Beck) in Hollywood, CA. It was produced by Father John Misty and Jonathan Wilson, with engineering by Misty’s longtime sound-person Trevor Spencer and orchestral arrangements by renowned composer/double-bassist Gavin Bryars (known for extensive solo work, and work with Brian Eno, Tom Waits, Derek Bailey).

“I feel weird,” repeats Stephen Bruner on “Captain Stupido”. That’s encouraging because the leftfield moments have always lent his jazz/funk/soft-rock fusions singular charm—even here when he meows through “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II)”. By those standards, the melancholy “Walk On By”, with its pensive verse from Kendrick Lamar, and “Show You the Way”—co-starring soft-rock icons Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins—feel irresistibly straightforward, but their velvet melodies are as beguiling as Bruner’s falsetto harmonies.

ORDER A PHYSICAL COPY HERE: www.pwelverumandsun.com P.W. ELVERUM & SUN box 1561 Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A. 98221 WRITTEN AND RECORDED August 31st to Dec. 6th, 2016 in the same room where Geneviève died, using mostly her instruments, her guitar, her bass, her pick, her amp, her old family accordion, writing the words on her paper, looking out the same window. Why share this much? Why open up like this? Why tell you, stranger, about these personal moments, the devastation and the hanging love? Our little family bubble was so sacred for so long. We carefully held it behind a curtain of privacy when we’d go out and do our art and music selves, too special to share, especially in our hyper-shared imbalanced times. Then we had a baby and this barrier felt even more important. (I still don’t want to tell you our daughter’s name.) Then in May 2015 they told us Geneviève had a surprise bad cancer, advanced pancreatic, and the ground opened up. What matters now? we thought. Then on July 9th 2016 she died at home and I belonged to nobody anymore. My internal moments felt like public property. The idea that I could have a self or personal preferences or songs eroded down into an absurd old idea leftover from a more self-indulgent time before I was a hospital-driver, a caregiver, a child-raiser, a griever. I am open now, and these songs poured out quickly in the fall, watching the days grey over and watching the neighbors across the alley tear down and rebuild their house. I make these songs and put them out into the world just to multiply my voice saying that I love her. I want it known. "Death Is Real" could be the name of this album. These cold mechanics of sickness and loss are real and inescapable, and can bring an alienating, detached sharpness. But it is not the thing I want to remember. A crow did look at me. There is an echo of Geneviève that still rings, a reminder of the love and infinity beneath all of this obliteration. That’s why. - Phil Elverum Dec. 11th, 2016 Anacortes

"Epic kraut-pop opera teeming with motorik rhythms and analogue synths.” NPR “A mind-expanding delight, devoid of retro posturing.” Guardian “Sparkling strangeness from one-woman genre-buster..superb.” Uncut “Intoxicating space-rock.” MOJO Modern Kosmology sees Jane Weaver's melodic-protagonist channeling new depths of creative cosmic energy within. After the huge critical acclaim of 2012's “Fallen By Watchbird”, followed by 2015's exploratory "Silver Globe" LP winning her unanimous "record of the year accolades" and hefty measures of radio play-listing Jane Weaver's conceptual trajectory has sent her neo-kosmische penchants to the point of no-return. Jane Weaver's unwaning yearning for psychoactive pop energy has just reached a new level of magnetism. As snowclones go, Modern Kosmology is the new Silver. Another Spectrum to add to the tension. Jane Weaver also announces a short run of album launch shows in the UK this May, ahead of more extensive UK and European touring to be announced later in the year.

Deep-thinking South London rapper Loyle Carner bares his soul on his confessional, jazz-infused hip-hop debut, *Yesterday’s Gone*. On dramatic opener “The Isle of Arran,” he samples a rapturous choir and some funky guitar licks, using his soft-spoken flow to ponder the meaning of death. Elsewhere, “Ain’t Nothing Changed” finds the MC languidly reciting rhymes as if perched on a bar stool in a basement jazz club, chewing over the realities of financial debt while accompanied by bluesy saxophone and a boom-bap beat.

It's amazing how the floodgates open when you shut out all the internal and external noise, stop pandering to stereotype, cease listening to your anxieties, and disregard the compartment society has built for you. I'm Not Your Man, the Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Rae Morris)-produced second album from Marika Hackman, begins with an impromptu hearty laugh. It's not the sound of silliness; it's the sound of liberation, spontaneity, and joy. 24-year-old Hackman is feeling more herself than ever. Life isn't necessarily funnier or happier, but when there's cause for a joke or a big ballsy statement, she's not holding back any more. The album took almost 18 months to complete, during which time Hackman switched to a new manager and a new label, transitions that yielded new avenues for exploration, a lot of time, and a lot of distance – mainly, she insists, from self-imposed boundaries. “I used to be very self-conscious,” explains Hackman. “If something sounded a bit too pop or like I'd heard it before I'd mold it into something different. This time around I thought, ‘fuck it, I'll just let it flow.’” The results of this semi-anarchic approach are evident in the grungier, catchier sonics of I'm Not Your Man, and the lyrics, which reveal an unhinged and shamelessly free Hackman. There's an open-ended nature to the lyrics, which delve into femininity, sex and sexual identity, millennial ennui, the pressures of living in a social media bubble, and the perils of being young in a fast-paced industry. “The record's all about female relationships, romance and breakdowns, but there's also a dim worldview going on. ‘I'm Not Your Man’ can either mean ‘I'm not your man, I'm your woman,’ or it can mean 'I'm not a part of this.’” Hackman cranked up the knobs in the studio, turning away from the quieter sounds of her past to realize her teenage fantasy of fronting a raucous band. “I wanted to let rip and lose control. When I was younger I wasn't looking at Joni Mitchell. I was looking at Nirvana thinking, 'I wanna be like that!'” To channel this feral female energy, Hackman recruited London quartet The Big Moon as her backing band. The results are a dynamic, multi-genre album tied together by razor-sharp wit. The sounds span from Cate Le Bon weirdness to Warpaint dirge jams to straight-up Britpop choruses. “People were saying it was a mash-up between Radiohead, Blondie and The Cure,” laughs Hackman, self-mockingly. “I can't wait to see the reaction,” she says. “That's the thrill of reinventing yourself. I might piss off a lot of die-hard folky fans but this is still my brain, it's still my world, and I'm gonna create it how I want.”

“I just want to listen to people’s stories, hear what they have to say,” trills Gothenburg-born singer-songwriter Jens Lekman on “To Know Your Mission”, his fourth album’s euphoric curtain-raiser. That’s no understatement. Across 10 exultant modern vignettes, Lekman skips nimbly from skittering odes to rebellion (“Hotwire the Ferris Wheel” with Tracey Thorn) to glorious disco workouts (“How We Met, The Long Version”), and cements his place as one of indie-pop’s most affecting—and unconventional—bards.

Jens Lekman describes his new record playfully, but also honestly, as “a thirties-crisis disco album; it’s an existentialist record, about seeing the consequences of your choices”. Across three studio albums, the Swedish singer/songwriter and musician has proven not only his flair for telling very personal stories with a sharp self-awareness, but also his skill for balancing depth of emotional expression with droll and often self-deprecating detail. It’s a winning pop combination. His fourth, Life Will See You Now is a typical Lekman album in several ways: sly humour is key to its heartfelt nature; it inverts pop’s writing norm by making songs with sad concerns sound happy and songs with a happy subject sound sad; and it plays with notions of identity and the self. Life Will See You Now is expansive, the upbeat sound of a revitalised Lekman, who is just one of many characters in his new stories about the magic and messiness of different kinds of relationships. It’s also the result of deliberate steps he took to create this fresh sound. Although Lekman is present in all of the songs on Life Will See You Now, it’s sometimes as a listener or spectator, rather than solely as the central active figure. Male characters get more of the spotlight than before. Lekman’s previous records have been female-centric, “I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote about men. It was inspiring at first, but writing about masculinity went down a very dark path. And there was a sadness that was very real; I had trouble finding stories that weren’t horribly depressing” he admits. “How Can I Tell Him” is one of a few songs saved from that shelved plan, a touching ode to male friendship that addresses the behavioural boundaries drawn around expressions of intimacy for generations of men. Another big choice was a decision to experiment with different kinds of rhythms – disco, calypso, samba and bossa nova all get a bespoke twirl in the spotlight – and so he called on producer Ewan Pearson (M83, The Chemical Brothers, Goldfrapp) to help realise his new songs. “I was looking for something more rhythmical. That was just what was intriguing me at the time – how you structure rhythms and build changes and time signatures. For me, not being trained in music, to learn a few of the tricks was very fascinating.” The alluringly offbeat lilt of “Our First Fight” is a perfect example of this subtle shift. More obviously upbeat are “What’s That Perfume That You Wear?”, which features a steel pans sample from Ralph MacDonald’s “The Path” of 1978 – “one of my favourite records ever,” enthuses Lekman – “To Know Your Mission”, whose jaunty, sing-along chorus belies its serious subject (self-doubt and indecision versus self-belief and faith) and the irresistibly buoyant “How We Met, The Long Version”, a disco-pop cracker with strings and piano that samples Jackie Stoudemire’s 1983 track, “Don’t Stop Dancin’”. The writing of Life Will See You Now was somewhat of an attempt to overcome periods of self-doubt, a process helped by Lekman’s two interim projects – Postcards, in which he committed himself to writing and releasing one song every single week in 2015 and Ghostwriting, where he asked other people for their stories and wrote songs around them, rather than his own experiences. “There was a part of me that was really sick of this Jens Lekman character,” he confesses, “and I wanted to write myself out of my songs. “ Jens laughs: “After I did the Ghostwriting project I was able to let that go, and also realized how important it is to be in your own songs to be able to communicate an emotion.” It may be very much inspired by stories told to him by friends and random acquaintances, but for Lekman, Life Will See You Now is still “a very personal record”. In “To Know Your Mission”, the perky Euro-pop number set in August of 1997 that pictures him – or at least, a character called Jens – as a teenager contemplating his future, one line that’s particularly pertinent to his ideas about this singer/songwriter business stands out. “In a world of mouths, I want to be an ear,” croons Lekman, sweetly. “If there’s a purpose to this, then that’s why God put me here.” It’s not a statement of religious belief, just a simple recognition of what he was in some way called to do. Life Will See You Now proves how right he was to listen.

**** MOJO **** The Arts Desk **** Evening Standard **** Record Collector **** Loud and Quiet A 7-movement odyssey composed for analogue synths and a full 29-piece colliery brass band Recorded live in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK, with Tubular Brass by the Real World Studios team Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia’, explores one person's journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself With artwork by Grammy award winning designer Jonathan Barnbrook (David Bowie collaborator on albums ‘Blackstar’ and ‘The Next Day’ ) and the complete brass band and rhythm section recorded live on location in The Barnsley Civic Theatre with Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio team, this exclusive album combines Peel’s detailed, analogue synth layered production and her expressive flair for performance with ‘Tubular Brass’, featuring the top UK championship brass band players. It’s a wholly unique, collaborative sound and seemingly, a first of it’s kind both live and on record. At the close of the album’s final song ‘The Planet of Passed Souls’, tutti brass jostle with the hiss and crackle of a 78rpm record. An emotionally charged, scratchy sample taken from a 1928 recording of Peel’s own choirboy grandfather in Manchester Cathedral leaves the listener questioning the reality of Mary’s connection with the stars… Did she ever make it to Cassiopeia? Is this all a daydream as she sits in a back garden shed tinkering with electronics and her telescope? Or maybe this is her final breath as her mind and body pass into another realm of life? Is this science or fantasy? And how much is there really a division between the two?