Tunng – Tunng Presents … Dead Club
A unique and beautifully intimate and poignant seventh LP by the British pioneers of folktronica, bursting with intellect, restrained energy, gentleness, and their oft characteristic, seamlessly interwoven vocals, and including a sequence that spells out the chords D, E, A and D again. One particular recurring musical aspect is gentle piano, a perfect sympathetic accompaniment, and to the fore, as part of the parallel podcast project, interviews of course about 2020's most enduring subject – death. Extracts of several of those voices intersperse within the songs, including Max Porter reading from his novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, illusionist Derren Brown, Tinariwen’s founder Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, and forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black. The tone varies from moving tributes such as The Last Day, or the upbeat A Million Colours, to some particularly dark, but also humorous moments on the songs Man, and also Woman, the highly practical, but poetic SDC (Swedish Death Cleaning) full of forensic decluttering detail of objects belonging to an elderly relative that need to be discarded – "The old toys in the shed have to go." And then there's the succinctly witty and fatalistic Death Is the New Sex, because “Death is coming to fuck us all.” Filled with lyrical and musical gems – sampled gentle breaths, unpredictable phrasing, many clever musical ideas and melodies, from all six band members, all blend into one of their best yet. Long may it live. Out on Full Time Hobby.
Tunng – A Million Colours
Ólafur Arnalds - Some Kind of Peace
The Icelandic multi-instrumentalist and producer returns with one of his most personal, rather than conceptual or thematic albums after 2019's Re:member, which featured his musical system called Stratus of two self-playing and semi-generative pianos. Now he returns to a barer, more exposed and vulnerable method, the focus about the difficulty of creativity, and with some improvisation, openly confessing his fear and struggles with being a self-confessed perfectionist grappling with the messier realities of everyday life. Guests are Bonobo on Loom, which has a interwoven electronica sound, as also with JFDR on Back To The Sky, and Josin on the more classical The Bottom Line. The exquisite Woven Song features a ghostly folk voice, strings and piano, sounding like a gossamer thin spider's web in the cold sunlight. Delicate, beautiful and like his homeland landscape, indeed very peaceful. Out on Mercury KX.
Ólafur Arnalds, JFDR - Back To The Sky
Quakers – II - The Next Wave
The title doesn't lie - this is a follow-up to the original 2012 Quakers album and something of a hip hop extravaganza - a supergroup featuring more than 25 MCs and 30 tracks. The core production is Supa K (fka Katalyst), 7STU7, and Fuzzface, aka Portishead and Beak drummer Geoff Barrow, and it's full of experimental sounds, rhythms and voices, including include Sampa The Great (on Approach With Caution), as well as Koreatown Oddity (on Double Jointed), Radioactivists (Radiola) and Jonwayne, Guilty Simpson, Grandmilly, Jeremiah Jae among many more, but is separate to the 2020's other album, Quakers - Supa K: Heavy Tremors album mix. Out on 13th November on Stones Throw Records.
Quakers – Approach With Caution (with Sampa The Great)
Kylie Minogue – Disco
Certainly far more her natural territory than the country-style 2018 album Golden, the mini pop princess returns with something to lighten these dark times with songs that do what it says on the tin - drawing heavily on 70s and 80s disco, staccato strings, and high quality production, and elements of gospel backed on songs such as Say Something, featuring the House Gospel Choir. It's a fluffy, feelgood album, and doesn't really say anything as such, but a decent one for the limits it sets up - just to dance, even if that's something we currently have to do on our own in our living rooms "a millon miles apart". Classic tinny tinsel Kylie is on Magic, while Real Groove, while slow to start, gets going in a funky 70s style eventually. Get out your gold lamé and let it all go on the imaginary dance floor. Out on BMG
Kylie Minogue – Say Something
Tiña - Positive Mental Health Music
A welcome debut at last for southeast London band, produced by the pioneer of innovative new acts, Dan Carey. Tiña are led by main singer and songwriter Josh Loftin, with a line in slow, deliberate confidence and droll humour, and with psych-pop keys, drums and guitars and a slight country leaning with echoes of Silver Jews or Clem Snide. Loftin has stated that he used the songs to “work through a mental breakdown”, and that for him “writing is like solving a mystery”, and that certainly comes to the fore on Golden Rope. Dip is also a standout track, alongside I Feel Fine and Rosalina. Out on Speedy Wunderground.
Tiña – Dip
Holy Motors – Horse
Americana and slow rockabilly with.difference in a return album, after 2018's acclaimed Slow Sundown, by the band from Tallinn, Estonia who give their brand of such music a dark twang and old-school flavour of reverb, as well as some crossover with more recent artists Mazzy Star, Orville Peck, Duke Spirit and Sunflower Bean. Meanwhile Midnight Cowboy sounds like a Buddy Holly 45 played at 33 rpm, a classic rhythm and blues guitar on Country Church, the acoustic duet of Road Stars, the melancholy Trouble, and Life Valley (So Many Miles Away) all carry a similar, won't-be-hurried pace filled with quality sustain, and something that might come out of a road movie. Out on Wharf Cat.
Holy Motors – Country Church
Planet Battagon – Trans-Neptunia
Exuberant, mind-bendingly experimental cosmic jazz-electronica with wonky, twisting sonics and rhythm by London’s Nathan Curran-Tugg is a cavalcade of musical wit, infinite jest and rhythmically roguish energy, with some echoes of early 70s Miles Davis. With a mixture of live drums, synth bass, drum synths & FX, on the album Tugg also improvises with associates, Martin Slattery (bass clarinet, alto sax and FX), Oli Savill (percussion), Mickey Ball (trumpet) and Jack Baker (acoustic drums). Standout tracks include, as mentioned on Song of the Day, Wezlee's Disco Inferno, as well as Eris in Formation, Race to Weynot, Styx, Orcus Ice, and Escape from Sedna. Released by On The Corner.
Planet Battagon – ERIS in Formation
Adulkt Life – Book of Curses
A debut album of angry, explosive new punk by Chris Rowley from the cult Brighton band who split in the 1990s Huggy Bear, now back in the noise game with deliberately strange spelling alongside John Webb and Kev from Male Bonding and Sonny Barrett, and mastered by Total Control‘s Mikey Young. The snarling delivery nad lyrical style is short and punchy like the songs – grappling with and uncoiling around today's reality like a snake in a basket, all the way from opener Country Pride to closer New Curfew. Other standouts include Taking Hits and Whistle Country. Out on What's Your Rupture? Records.
Adulkt Life – Taking Hits
The Growth Eternal – Bass Tone Paintings
A highly unusual album by the Los Angeles artist also known as Byron Crenshaw is a collection of 17 one-minute pieces prefixed by random roman numerals, and of fascinating experimentalism around his bass guitar, strings, and vocal effects box, from opener , XIII. crowns & creases, which has an outer-body, otherworldly quality, to the intricate My Storm At Sea, the ritualistic, wobbly XII. Pyre by Wildfire, and space-out offbeat funk of Weak, and perhaps oddest and beautifully best, III. Rain Song for Five Bass Guitars. Out on the Leaving Music label, it's also available as a download on Bandcamp or, of course, on cassette.
The Growth Eternal - III. Rain Song for Five Bass Guitars
This week's selection is by The Landlord.
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