Kelly Lee Owens

Izzy Camina, Anna B Savage, Delmer Darion, Nick Zinner, Obongjayar, Stephen Malkmus, Katy J Pearson, Tara Clerkin Trio, Music Declares Emergency

issue 141

Kelly Lee Owens

True spirit

Let Us Face the Future

Sea Change Festival

YANN TIERSEN

MELT YOURSELF DOWN

FIELD MUSIC DRY CLEANING

VANISHING TWIN

PORRIDGE RADIO POZI

ALDOUS HARDING

ISLET

KEEL HER

SALENA GODDE N EMMA WARREN

DAVID KEENAN

JESSIC A MOOR

HASEEB IQBAL

CARL CATTERMOLE MICHELLE OLLEY

AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA

FOLLY GROUP

RICHARD NORRIS

DAISY CAMP BELL

4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE

LAURA BARTON

WILL BURNS

MATTHEW SHAW

JEN CALLEJA

ADAM CHETWOOD

TAPE NOTES

SIMON COSTIN

UK POSTER ASSOCIATION

JAMES ENDEACOTT

SCHOOL OF NOISE

JOE MUGGS

WILL HODGKINSON

SOPHIE DUTTON

BRIAN CATLING

CAROLINE

WENDY ERSKINE

MARTHA SPRACKLAND

MAX SYDNEY SMITH

DAVID BRAMWELL

SPACESHIP MARK

KATY J PEARSON

THE GOLDEN DREGS

COLD WAR STEVE RICHARD PHOENIX

WORKING MEN’S CLUB

AOIFE NESSA FRANCE S

DANIEL O’SULLIVAN

PENNY RIMBAUD

JONNY BANGER

SHIRLEY COLLINS

SQUID

HAILU MERGIA

H. HAWKLINE

SIMON FISHER TURNER

JEREMY DELLER

TIM BURGES S

JON TYE

INNERSTRINGS

SEA CHANGE RADIO

“The excellent Devon festival boasts a carefully curated blend of stimulating talks and under-the-radar bands” - The Guardian TICKETS, FULL LINE UP AND MORE:

www.seachangefestival.co.uk @driftseachange

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founder / Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Al Mills, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Groundwater, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Isabelle Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jemima Skala, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney. Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, Dave Kasnic, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter. With special thanks to Chris Cuff, Clarisse Quinn, Frankie Davidson, Keong Woo, Nisa Kelly, Lewis Jamieson, Patrick Johnson, Sinead Mills, Steve Philips.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 141

I’m not sure that I believe much in horoscopes, but when Kelly Lee Owens listed to me the traits that make her a typical Virgo, followed a week later by a long discussion about her journey to spiritual techno star via a schooling of White Heat indie, swapping horses in Wales and working the wing of a cancer ward, I had to admit that it all added up. Basically, Virgos get shit done. But more than that, they do so while obsessing over the details, which can be heard all over Kelly’s new album, Inner Song. Virgos are also modest and a laugh, like when Kelly told me about my own star sign and made it sound like Leos are massive bellends who always bring the conversation back round to them. That floored me. I’ve told all my friends about it. Stuart Stubbs

Izzy Camina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Delmer Darion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Anna B Savage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Katy J Pearson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Tara Clerkin Trio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Kelly Lee Owens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Nick Zinner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Obongjayar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Music Declares Emergency . . . . . . . . 62 03

Tribute

Andrew Weatherall: an atlas of wonder Andrew Weatherall changed people’s lives – for the better. Ever since the legendary DJ and producer’s death at the shockingly young age of 56 on February 17 there has been an endless stream of bittersweet stories and memories about how he did just that for so many. Here’s how Andrew Weatherall changed my life. Not in the back room of Shoom, but in my living room in North Devon on Saturday, January 13, 1990 while watching The Chart Show on ITV. Happy Mondays’ Madchester Rave On EP was number one in the Indie Chart and, for some reason, they played the remix of ‘Hallelujah’ rather than the original. Something about it – the loping rhythm, the insistent Italo house piano, the weirdly ethereal atmosphere – struck me and, when I went to the local record shop, Sound’N’Vision, in Barnstaple later that day I bought the 12”. It was my first ‘indie’ record and, despite the fact that the little info box on The Chart Show only named Paul Oakenfold as the remixer, the sleeve also mentioned a mysterious and misspelt person called ‘Wetherall’. Over the next few months I bought Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’ and ‘Come Together’, the remix 12” of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’, the Mix Of Two Halves of Saint Etienne’s ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and Bocca Juniors’ ‘Raise’, and I was more than aware that Weatherall’s name on a record – however it was spelt – was a stamp of authority and a badge of cool. Every obituary has focused on his production work on Screamadelica, and it’s impossible to underestimate that record’s importance – it was the gateway drug to so much music, all of which has shaped my life since. It came out September 23, 1991, which was my first day at university (I rushed to Volume Records in Sunderland to buy it), but it gave me more of an education than three years of Communication Studies ever did. Even the names of his remixes (the American Spring mix of ‘Higher Than The Sun’, the Nancy And Lee mix of One Dove’s ‘Fallen’) were like little revision notes. This was to remain his role – educator, rather than pied piper. He turned down adverts and remixing U2 and chose to remain on the outside looking in. He was one of those all too rare people who valued what truly matters, hence his refusal to – in his own words – “climb the greasy pole” and embrace the easy life he could so easily have had. But, despite his healthy cynicism, he was never jaded. He never lost that desire for discovery because he was a music fan, happy to share and eager to learn. His taste was impeccable and his knowledge was incredible – stretching way beyond music to literature, culture, history and fashion. Because of this, he remained relevant right to the end, via the Sabres Of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen to The Asphodells, and under his own name, with the dark and dubby ‘Unknown Plunderer’ appearing just days before he died. Then there was the production work with the likes of Fuck Buttons and The Twilight Sad, endless remixes, his NTS Radio show, the

words by nathaniel cramp. illustration by kate prior

annual Convenanza Festival in France and so much more. Three whole decades of not following a single career path actually led to an entire atlas of wonder. The sheer variety of the songs people were sharing in the aftermath of the news was testament to his magpie spirit as well as his genius. Andrew Weatherall had already changed my life when I met him in person at my first Sonic Cathedral night in 2004. I was in awe and a little bit frightened of him, but he was funny and friendly and even gave me his phone number offering his services for DJing duties. He kept that promise, not once but on numerous occasions and never asked for any money; I only ever paid him in brandy (no ice) and Coke (with ice). He also helped me achieve one of my ambitions when I released a 12” single with a Weatherall remix on it. In fact, he did two remixes of The Early Years’ ‘Hall Of Mirrors’ for the price of one (£0) as an apology after having to pull out of a DJ slot at the last minute. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke about him working his magic on a song from the debut album by bdrmm. I told him that, in his hands, this song could make me feel like the person I was when I first bought that Happy Mondays 12” all those years ago. “It is with a heavy heart that I have to inform you that I am unable to help you with the desire to feel 18 again,” he replied, “as I’m not doing any remixes for the foreseeable future.” Oh, little did we know. But in so many ways he will live on. A group of super-fans have made a Google Drive full of his DJ mixes from 1988 to 2020 – over 900 hours’ worth – called the Weatherdrive; his influence over the music and culture of the last 30 years is indelible; hell, he’s even on Google Maps walking up Kingsland Road. More importantly, if people could just learn from his approach and be more like him, then Andrew Weatherall will keep on changing people’s lives – forever.

Tech

I’ve accidentally made the Berghain of playlists Finding a song I enjoy is a pleasurable sort of accident, like tripping over in the street but realising the pavement has been replaced with a 12-tog duvet. I’m not an active seeker of new music, nor am I listener of platforms like 6 Music. It usually happens that I get invited along to a gig or festival and see an artist I’ve never heard of, or maybe I see a Tweet or hear some friends talking about a new album and I decide to listen. Feeling the need to impress people with good music taste is a characteristic as intrinsic to puberty as feeling self-conscious, perhaps they are even the same thing, but somehow I’ve never felt this pressure, which is weird because it meant I spent my teens trying to impress with traits that have inarguably less currency in a high school market – for instance, my handwriting. Who really gives a fuck about handwriting? Time spent caring about the wrong things made me a lazy music listener. I spent nights on MSN practicing my cursive, listening to the same Mandy Moore song on repeat. Fast forward a few years and I was doing the same thing at university, only this time it was Sophie Ellis-Bextor, and it wasn’t MSN, it was WhatsApp, and I wasn’t practicing my cursive, I was doing actual work. I wasn’t only a lazy listener; I was an obsessive listener; a song I liked could give me enough mileage to get through a month listening to nothing else. At some point I got Spotify, and ‘songs’ was born. It’s been causing my friends and family confusion ever since. But hear me out.

‘songs’ is the Berghain of playlists. It’s name, simply ‘songs’, veils the hyper-exclusivity of its existence, as there’s a strict 52 track limit (I’ve tried to think why the 52 is important here, whether it points to something transcendental of my own conscience, that it might subliminally appear in my life like Jim Carey and the number 23 in that film, The Number 23. “Is it a song for every week in the year?” I’ve been asked a few times. “Yes,” I’ve replied, because why not, it could be). Of course, I know more than 52 songs, and so I operate the playlist on a one-in-one-out basis, positioning myself as a mad-with-power bouncer imposing beauty contests on the likes of Celine Dion and Kurupt FM. I didn’t just build this playlist for a long car journey, or for a run, or for a specific mood – though it serves as a catch all for all of these things – I’ve begun to realise that this playlist has been built as the soundtrack to my life. Listening to an album in full has never appealed to me, the the Top 40 even less so, and the enormity of Spotify playlists available makes me nervous. I prefer the carefully selected lucky dip that is the shuffle function on ‘songs’: will it be Sugababes or The Blaze? Jennifer Lopez or Leon Bridges? Pour it all in my ears at once and clamp my eyelids open a la A Clockwork Orange as far as I’m concerned; the ideology behind ‘songs’ is that I will never tire of it. To make it as far as ‘songs’, a track has to sit firmly in the intersection of good, nostalgic and escapist. And obviously, I need to have obsessively listened to it for a month at least. To ask me what makes a good song is like asking a dog what makes a good pie. Instinctively I know what I enjoy but don’t ask me to articulate it, because I just can’t. What I do know is every song in ‘songs’ is a proper good song. As for nostalgic and escapist songs, they do what they say on the tin, and I’m not going to bore you with instances where a song has helped me get through a break up or has made me imagine myself as the heroine of a futuristic Stranger Things trailer wherein the noughties gets as much nostalgia as the eighties. ‘songs’ is not a performative playlist, and by this I mean that I would never offer to plug in my phone at a party. Sure, it’s the soundtrack to my life, but I’m the only person who’s been watching my life in full, in it’s many years and locations. No one will understand the days at my first job I spent weeping to ‘South Australia’ by Fisherman’s Friends, they won’t understand either that when I was twelve I choreographed a dance to ‘Do It Well’ by Jennifer Lopez, and now can’t listen to it without mentally performing the combo of kicks and step-ball-changes in my head. To play ‘songs’ at a party is an invitation for friends to ask for the aux cable. It’s not made to be understood or even heard by anyone else, which is why I gave it its vague and abstract name – just try searching ‘songs’ on Spotify. The first time I want anyone to hear ‘songs’ is at my funeral, when I’ll leave the instruction: just press shuffle.

words by emily harris. illustration by kate prior

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Ageing

Sweet 16: The path to Pavement included the druggy hardcore scene of central California

Stephen Malkmus: In 1982 central California, it was the golden age of hardcore – groups like Minor Threat and Black Flag and the Circle Jerks. Those bands had solidified their sound and message, and that was mixed with new wave, because the early ’80s was defining itself, like, ‘we’re not going to be like the ’70s’. Mixed with the continuation of hard rock from Rush and Van Halen, those were the three kinds of music that I liked, for better or worse. I was playing bass in a hardcore band in Stockton. We were called The Straw Dogs, after the Sam Peckinpah movie. There was a substitute teacher who kind of fancied us… not in a bad way – I think he was bored in the town, but the punk scene would encompass ages 15 to 24, because it wasn’t very big, so anyone who was into it, you would hang out with. He told us to call our band that, and we were like, ‘sure dude, that sounds tough and punk’. There was some talk of us going down to record with Spot, who was the producer of SST bands in Los Angeles, but it never happened – apathy and heroin. People started getting into heroin, unfortunately; in my town and in my band. There was one dude who was a brilliant chemist on a scholarship to the university. He was a punk guy who looked like Sid Vicious because he was so pale and always high. If you gave him Codeine pills he could convert them into something stronger that was almost heroin. So punks were doing that, and they were also just scoring heroin downtown, and it became the scourge and ruined the scene. Some people died, obviously. It got druggy. The first Straw Dogs show was in Sacramento opening for Toxic Reasons and T.O.S.L., who you might be familiar with because they had a song called ‘I Wanna Fuck The Dead’. They

were a pretty straight-on hardcore band and a well respected one. We did not go down well. Our best shows were when our singer got a mohawk. Then people went crazy. It was like, why do people like us now that our singer has a mohawk? Why does that inspire people to beat each other up into a pulp, which is what we considered a good gig, unfortunately. My other hobbies away from music were playing soccer and tennis, smoking weed and trying to meet chicks. I was a pretty good student, but the competition wasn’t very high. I’m noticing it now that my daughter is in public school that some people really don’t give a fuck. It felt like at my school there were only two nerds in the whole school. And this was the start of there being a computer room. I’d think, what are those nerds and losers doing going in there? And now I wish I had done it too. Not that I’m upset with my standing, but it’s funny to look back and know that something that’s had such a jaw-dropping influence in our world was starting back then. I then went to college in Virginia, where I met all of these guys who are the reason that you’re talking to me right now – David Berman and Bob who I formed Pavement with. Those bands from me being 16 were a good gateway to things that happened in college. I wouldn’t have been able to get into The Fall when I was 16. We started Pavement straight after college. I made the first record when I was back home visiting my parents. It’s hard to believe but we got our foot in the door from John Peel and other things like The Wedding Present covering our song as a B-side, and it all worked out. If you give a grifter an inch he’ll take a mile.

as told to stuart stubbs

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

CORNERSHOP ‘England Is A Garden’

2LP (Ltd 1000 One Green & One Blue Vinyl) / CD In the latest of a series of albums that have mirrored the exceptional story of the band itself, Cornershop return with a new album, It is an album that strides in an upbeat fashion, to deliver a full listening experience, bringing songs of experience, empire, protest and humour, steeped in the way only Tjinder Singh would come up with. **** MOJO **** Uncut

LA TAKEDOWN ‘Our Feeling Of Natural High’

Castle Face Records LP/CD Los Angeles-based cinematic instrumental band features a large cast and crew, their latest album features guest spots by Nedelle Torrisi and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yukihiro Takahashi. Forfans of Michael Rother, Top Gun, later Tangerine Dream, convertibles and long walks on the beach.

GUIDED BY VOICES ‘Surrender Your Poppy Field’

SHIT AND SHINE ‘Scenic Farm’

Rock Is Hell Records LP only 150 copies on clear vinyl for the UK too!! Spread over two heaving discs, the main man Craig Clouse has once again proved how up there he is right now as a producer, slaying all in his path and showing how far you can really take this shit. DEEP CUTS!!! MAXIMUM BEATAGE FOR YOUR PSYCHE!!

GBV Inc LP/CD Surrender Your Poppy Field, is a headspinning tour de force: a bit of everything... plus more! And hands down the most adventurous GBV album ever. There are lo-fi four-track tape recordings, there are songs recorded with a single microphone in a basement, there are big studio fully produced hook-laden pop songs, and there is a lot in between.

REVBJEDLE ‘Hooha Hubbub’

Buried Treasure LP and CD package! The 2nd album by protean, noise-folk collective Revbjelde, recorded in Berkshire, England between Aug 2017 & Nov 2019 "whilst enveloped in a post-referendum smog". Blending motorik rock, twisted glam, post-punk jazz improvisation, industrial soundscapes & acid folk.

LAVENDER FLU ‘Barbarian Dust ’

In The Red Records LP/DL In contrast to their prior mobile-unit hole-ups and hometaped fryers, Barbarian Dust, their third album, marks the band’s first raid of a proper studio. Extending the formalities further, the conceptual impetus for the sessions stem from a collective meditation on cosmic biker rock. Inhale the dust!

CUCINA POVERA ‘Tyyni’

Nightschool Records LP/DL Tyyni is the third album by Finnish-born sound artist and musician Cucina Povera aka Maria Rossi. A Finnish word referring to still, serene weather, the title belies a new note of turmoil in Cucina Povera’s soundworld. Tyyni represents a more detailed focus on the sculpting of sounds that curl around Rossi’s hymnal vocal performances.

WASTED SHIRT ‘Fungus II’

Famous Class Records LP/CD Wasted Shirt is Brian Chippendale and Ty Segall. We’re quoting Henry Rollins here… “the album is exploding euphoria from start to finish. The more you play it, the better it kabongs you upside your head. Hectic doesn't even begin to describe it. Brian and Ty, two mere particles in the grand scheme, collide at high speed, the technicians dive for cover, the reaction is recorded. Mutation is achieved. This is Freedom Rock. Turn up the volume. Hasten your emancipation. Sonic joy awaits.”

OH SEES UK 2020

15/5

BIRMINGHAM –- The Crossing

16/5

MANCHESTER - Albert Hall

17/5

GLASGOW - Barrowlands

18 & 19/5

DUBLIN - Button Factory 21/5

22 & 23/5

BRISTOL - SWX

LONDON - Electric Ballroom

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Interview

Izzy Camina

Kill your local indie softboy, by Joe Goggins Photography by Emily Malan. Styling by Tatiana Isshac 10

Interview

Last year, Izzy Camina posted a cover of Frank Ocean’s ‘Ivy’ to Soundcloud. It’s one of the deeper cuts from Blonde but, beyond the fact that she might have picked ‘Thinking Bout You’ or ‘Nikes’ instead, it’s a choice that makes sense; her own sound is heavily indebted to Ocean, a thickly atmospheric blend of dark RnB and gauzy dream-pop. She’s insisting, though, that she takes her cues from a far broader cast of characters. “I mean, I’ve recorded a Bauhaus cover, too, but my manager told me not to post it,” she complains. “I did ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, but apparently that’s not pop enough, so it’s not out there.” Still, it’s every bit as indicative of her range of influences as Ocean is. “I like a lot of things. EBM, I love that,” she says, and clarifies that she means electronic body music, the heady blend of industrial, synth-punk and dance popular in Germany in the ’80s “that makes you feel like you’re exploding from the inside”, before reeling off a list of her favourite artists – Gesaffelstein and Boy Harsher both get shoutouts. She is evidently keen to avoid pigeonholing before her career makes it off the ground, and she isn’t afraid to say so. Funnily enough, it’s this sheer force of personality that sets her apart from her peers on her second EP, Nihilist in the Club, which is scored through with wry, knowing wit. You can practically hear her rolling her eyes as she wearily slaps down nice-guy beta males on ‘Kill Your Local Indie Softboy’. ‘Up n Down’ is a searingly self-aware treatise on millennial angst. She took delight in naming the title track, convinced it would rile philosophy and psychology majors. “It’s super jokey, it’s super tongue-in-cheek, it’s me being a really emo bitch,” she laughs, before suddenly snapping to attention. “Obviously, I’m not actually a nihilist. I understand that it’s a corrosive foundation for one’s worldview.” She does this repeatedly over the course of a forty-fiveminute conversation – laces her affable, laidback demeanour with a piercing piece of insight, like when she plays down her love of Ocean’s music but then goes off on a tangent about “how brilliantly he’s navigated our capitalist America as a feeling artist, and I use ‘feeling’ as a verb.” In that respect, she talks like she writes, both within her songs (‘Up n Down’’s deceptively simple chorus conceals the blistering references in the verses to drugs and violence) and within the wider context of her work: a scroll through her Soundcloud sees her tracks broken up by poems,

with titles like ‘Fentanyl’ and ‘Digital Lust’. It is not an unusual contradiction for those in their twenties; one minute cloudy, the next clear-eyed, mired in a purgatory halfway between insecurity and self-assurance. — I did not become a star — In Camina’s case, if her obvious talent would justify the latter, her experiences in the industry so far might explain the former. It already feels like she’s taken the long way around: having been raised in small-town New Jersey, she arrived at her current Los Angeles base via a stint in East London, where she never quite got off the ground musically. “When I first set up my Soundcloud, all of the early interest I got was from people in the UK,” she says, explaining her move. “Which I think was purely because my profile picture was taken at Brighton Pier. Everybody who saw my page assumed I went to BIMM, or whatever the fuck that school’s called.” The photo had, in fact, been taken on one of many family holidays; Camina’s dad hailed from Bow, and the relative luxuries afforded to her by the resultant dual citizenship meant she had few qualms about accepting the invitations that came her way – “fuck yeah, sick, let me just drop out of college.” She spent three years in London, a period that bore fruit in the shape of her debut Battle Royale EP, but that also involved frustration, isolation, and the kind of day-job monotony that would inspire ‘Up n Down’. “I did not become a superstar,” she notes drily, “but it was a positive learning experience. It’s a good place to be as a young artist; there’s a big difference between the way music is consumed in the US and in the UK. There seems to be way more hunger for new music in the UK, and there’s a tendency to take the side of the underdog more. You’ve got scouts absolutely ravaging the internet for talent. You’ve maybe got more of a shot there.” Which begs the question as to how she ended up not just back in the States, but about as far as it’s possible to be from her hometown and still be on the U.S. mainland. “Through the miracle of the internet, I was discovered by somebody over here who is really well-connected,” she explains, declining to name him but helpfully providing us with a postage-stamp-sized list by describing him as “a major music industry guy, but not a complete asshole.”

Interview As much as LA will serve as the launchpad for Nihilist in the Club, the groundwork was mostly laid in London. ‘Kill Your Local Indie Softboy’ was penned for a very specific type of Hackney inhabitant; Camina was in for a shock on crossing the pond, finding herself encountering a very different kind of man from those back in New Jersey, who “like to vape, go to car meets, watch Joe Rogan and drink at sports bars.” Like most of her writing, it’s brilliantly cutting. “I’m banging my head against a wall about that, though,” she groans, swatting away reassurances that indie softboys have by no means become an endangered species in East London since her departure. “I feel like that trope is over now. I should have put that out two years ago. Not everything is timeless. Sometimes we want things to be fresh and poignant, and have teeth and bite and relevance. And, you know, again – you shouldn’t take it too seriously. I wrote it as a joke, really.” — Everybody’s broke — Camina exclusively self-produces her music, another aspect of it that began to flourish in London. She began teaching herself how to use Ableton whilst still in college in the U.S., “just because I couldn’t play any instruments, and I knew nothing about music theory.” In the UK, though, making her own beats became a case of needs must, when she was paired with producers who didn’t suit her, as she recalls in her own inimitable way. “I was like, ‘fuck this, this shit sucks, these people suck, I hate this corny shit. Let me figure out how to do this myself.’ From YouTube tutorials and just picking away at it, I’ve been getting better. It’s a good skill to have, especially when you realise how hard it is to find a collaborator you click with. The stars have to align in a way that I think is actually pretty rare.” She wrote ‘Up n Down’ in London, too, something she’s been thinking about recently as she compares how similar Los

Angeles’ negatives are to the ones she experienced here. “Everybody’s exhausted from working super hard, and everybody’s broke,” she says. “A lot of restaurants, in London especially, do illegal shit where the hours are totally fucked, and you get locked into this cycle of working the closing shift and then having to open up the next day. It’s a long way from being a little shithead in New Jersey and running around with no responsibilities. You experience these intense lows, and then you’re looking in the mirror and telling yourself, ‘grow up. Deal with it.’ I know what a huge privilege having dual citizenship is. It’s a weird routine, of misery and then positivity.” As with so many artists of her generation, there’s something necessarily political about Camina’s writing, something innately tied to the state of the wider world when the emotions she’s processing are ones created by the material realities of her day-to-day. “Everything I write is halfway between obvious and abstract. My lyrics are subversively political. You can probably tell that I’m generally pretty disturbed by the world we live in. I think I’ve always had the mindset of wanting to stay detached and observe the madness from that standpoint, which is just a self-preservation mechanism.” She hesitates, then presses on. “There’s a line in ‘Nihilist in the Club’: ‘Thinking about the day I die / tell me why the fuck I should even try?’. About a year after I moved to London, my dad died. Heart attack. Healthy guy, totally random. It wasn’t necessarily a beautiful relationship – it was quite toxic – but like it or not, he was kind of my world. There was unfinished business there, and I was left with a lot of trauma to sift through on my own. I really detached, and never really mourned, and I’ve kind of been that way since – a little bit out-of-body. So that’s in these songs, because that’s where my head’s been at.” She lights up again. “So, you know, expect some more sad girl shit to come, dude. You’re gonna be like, ‘damn! She’s feeling it!’”

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Interview

Delmer Darion Satan finally pivots from metal to IDM and ambient, by Alex Francis. Photography by Jody Evans

If you were setting out to find the Devil’s birthplace, the first place you should go is an air-conditioned room in Stockholm. This is the National Library of Sweden, where the vast illuminated manuscript Codex Gigas is kept. If you were to somehow get past the reinforced glass and turn the musty pages, darkened with centuries of light exposure, you could get to page 290 recto – a vast image of Satan, horns dripping with blood and twin tongues writhing around his neat white teeth. This is where the Devil begins, if you ask Tom Lenton of electronic duo Delmer Darion. “While the Devil dates back a lot further than that, from my research [the 14th through 17th centuries] is the period where the average person had the most acute sense of the devil as a physical agent who could intervene in daily lives. That was always the most interesting place to start, I think. It partly speaks to why the page 290 recto in the Codex is so interesting, because it feels like a symbolic starting point in the history of the devil.” The duo’s debut album, after five years spent recording, is due to be formally announced in the next couple of months. It traces the history of Satan, filtering medieval dread and 1980s paranoia into a beguiling mixture of IDM, shoegaze and ambient music. Their newly released track ‘Wildering’ shows off the IDM and ambient influences to great effect, all shattered vocals and hypnotic guitar building to a terrifying noise climax. The record as a whole, though, feels closer to the more out-there explorations of Boards of Canada, especially the shoegaze and psych selected for last year’s Societas X Tape. It makes similar stylistic leaps between genres and styles, but – like Boards of Canada – Delmer Darion never lose their own identity to the concept or to the genres they choose to work in. — Early evils — The birthplace of this duo isn’t quite as beautiful as the Bohemian monastery where the Codex Gigas was first written and illuminated. The Benn Hall is a sturdy chunk of 1960s municipal concrete just off a roundabout on the A426, squatting awkwardly between the Rugby Borough Council offices and

Newbold Road Car Park. It was here where Delmer Darion first met, at a preteen Battle of the Bands. “We were in Year 6,” says Oliver Jack, grinning at Lenton, who has his head in his hands. “Tom was playing in the Battle of the Bands, and I was a viewer, so obviously he’s the rock god doing Enter Shikari covers.” The pair got to know each other better at secondary school and their early experiments in Ableton began. “We’d hang out for an afternoon and make something,” says Jack. “And it was never a complete song, some of them are so bad.” It surely couldn’t be that bad, I say. It’s now his turn to be embarrassed. “I… this, this is on me,” he says. “I did a Fatboy Slimstyle remix of Adele so it’s got these big Fatboy Slim drums and this little synth line that’s like doo doot de doot doot. That’s the worst, by far.” Years of late school nights making beats and mucking around in Ableton followed. “It’s now been nearly 15 years of most weeks sending each other something.” says Jack. Eventually things became more serious for the pair, with a smattering of Bandcamp releases surfacing in their late teens and university years. The duo also cultivated an interest with film, taking their name from a surreal death in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. This eventually surfaced as a recurring fascination with weaving concept and story into their music: “Even when we were like 14 or 15 I remember having visions of putting together an album with quite a heavy sense of concept and some sense of narrative and really dedicating time to it.” says Lenton. “Obviously it’s quite difficult though, so we didn’t.” Eventually, those teenage fantasies came to fruition. Lenton’s long fascination with literature and the occult merged with Jack’s interests in obscure hardware and a self-confessed need for a project on the go to start the five-year process of creating a concept record about Satan. “The place that the idea came from originally was a Wallace Stevens poem, where he writes about the death of Satan as a tragedy for the imagination.” says Lenton. “Part of what [Stevens] is getting at is that for most of human history we’ve had grand, overarching narratives which help us to understand the world and our place in it – what kind of narratives does humanity need now that religion is dying? While

Interview

Satan is scary, he also provides something useful. He gives you an understanding of the world.” The album’s long gestation is rooted in the band’s extreme attention to detail. There are hidden messages throughout, written in a long-forgotten French musical language called Solresol: “It’s fragments from the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer,” says Lenton. “And one thing that a lot of people found persuasive during the Satanic Panic in the 1980s was that a lot of the ‘evidence’ was lent power by being recorded onto tape, like it couldn’t be faked. So all the Solresol parts are very heavily tape-saturated.” Jack chimes in: “Right now we’re listening very closely to the album over and over to get the final mix right, and we’re like, ‘do you remember how many hours and hours we spent on that one tiny little detail? Will anyone know? Will anyone care? Probably not.’” — Sympathy for the The Devil — That sort of self-deprecating humour finds its own expressions on the record. After the first half of the album plunges the listener into early-modern dread of the Devil, the second half traces a lineage of possession incidents and so-called Satanic interventions across the world. The second side travels from the 16th-century investigation of Martha Brossier’s possession in France through to suburban parent’s associations in the 1980s accusing the cartoon He-Man of using occult symbolism to turn children against God. “The hope is that these things

seem increasingly ridiculous until we end up in the ‘80s, we end up at the Satanic Panic and we’re looking at He-Man.” says Lenton. “The image at that point is supposed to be: this is what he’s become. The Devil is now so pathetic that he’s sat behind a TV screen manipulating children with He-Man.” The album’s fascination with the death of the Devil, and Delmer Darion’s intense dedication to minor details, is right there on the album art. It’s based on a series of postage stampsized woodblock prints from the 15th century depicting Death leading away figures from all levels of society; but in the band’s version, a skeletal figure is taking Satan himself by the arm and leading him off. Oliver Jack cut the print himself on lino: “It took so long. Literally weeks. It’s one of those things – if you fuck up, it’s gone. If you slip and cut through it all… It’s not just a lot of work, it’s a lot of high-intensity, high-stakes, sweaty work.” After that, it’s thirty prints on thirty kinds of paper – and of course, they chose lokta paper because of its traditional use in sacred texts. The duo recount this with an odd glee, like they’re daring listeners to find all the hidden meanings. After the formal interview ends, I end up chatting with the band over a quiet drink. Lenton says something offhandedly which sounds, more than anything else, like a challenge: “I was saying earlier, I always value making something interesting, and what I mean by that is that I love the idea of us making things that reward close listening and active listening. [I want people to] delve into the details, look up the lyrics, work out ‘what’s this referring to’. Just try and unpick all of the allusions.”

Interview

Anna B Savage Most people’s New Year’s resolutions are humdrum: night-time pottery classes, travelling to more countries beginning with M, that sort of thing. For Anna B Savage, it has been to wank more. Not your average objective for the year ahead, I say, sipping tea in the (extremely quiet) Queen Elizabeth Hall cafe on London’s Southbank, worried our booth neighbours are listening. “Basically I wanted to wank more!” laughs Anna, suddenly not caring who can hear us. “I was sad that I had never thought to learn; I thought I could be in charge of that. I got to a point where I was reading all this feminist literature which made me realise I am not in control here; I am not getting off in a lot of the scenarios that I am having with heterosexual men so I need to take this into my own hands. Also, I love making lists and that

was right at the top. Second on the list was to learn to whistle with my fingers in my mouth, which I also did!” In basic terms, it turns out wanking was the creative catalyst Anna needed, the result being a new album set for release this spring that deals head-on with female sexuality and discovery. It’s the next step from Anna’s breakthrough EP, that came out in 2015 followed by an abrupt silence. “Yeah I kind of disappeared,” she says. “I wasn’t having the best time in my own brain – that was the first thing that happened. People were nice about my first EP and I just wasn’t expecting it. I just thought I am never going to be able to write anything as good as that ever again. It’s quite funny as I released a single yesterday and people have been saying this is so great but my brain is already saying,

Interview

A voyage of self-discovery and wanking, by Ian Roebuck Photography by Sophie Barloc

‘you’re never going to write anything as good as that again’, so I am like, ‘oh no not you again, shut up!’. I am better at batting my brain away today – that’s the difference between now and then.” — Losing my virginity — Back in 2015, Anna’s fragility echoed throughout her frank and honest debut; listening back now, it’s a startling collection of songs that earned her tour slots with the likes of Father John Misty and Jenny Hval before cataclysmic life changes halted her progress. “After the EP I broke up with someone and moved back to London. How can I put this, I was small and timid and just so uncomfortable in my own skin so

I had to build everything back up. There were building blocks put in place right from the bottom, I had loads of different jobs and I was just following things that I love. I was always desperately trying to write music, but I was thinking everything I am writing is shit, it felt like pulling teeth, it was so painful. I was just thinking, why can’t I do this anymore?” It turns out wanking was the cure, along with her decision to make a film about virginity with the ex-boyfriend from that break up. Anna can’t help but laugh at herself. “Yes, I’m so weird aren’t I? Female sexuality, that’s a very strong theme throughout both the album and this film. It’s a portrayal of me losing my virginity. I’ve been working on it for 3-and-a-half years; it’s morphed from a music documentary into

Interview

“It goes back to the female pleasure thing: I don’t cum, I don’t get anywhere near cumming, and it lasts for about 25 seconds”

Interview a film about memory, fallibility of memory, perceptions and, of course, sex. The film and the album are companion pieces that stand alone. There are songs on the album about him and there are songs on the album that are about the filming process.” It must have been an emotional journey – a raw exploration into something so private as one’s own virginity. “That’s right. It’s been tough. In the film we re-live losing our virginities, having the actors work out what we remember, where does your left hand go at this point, where does your right hand go? How many thrusts are there? We hadn’t spoken for several years since we broke up, so we did loads of interviews separately with a third person, a close friend to both of us, so we wouldn’t infiltrate each other’s memories, the two versions of the virginity play out next to each other. It’s very stark and our memories are quite different. It goes back to the female pleasure thing: I don’t cum, I don’t get anywhere near cumming, and it lasts for about 25 seconds, just all the stuff that isn’t normally shared.” I point out that she’s about to share that information twice, in both an audio and visual format. “It’s so bizarre! I don’t think I would encourage anyone else to do it as it’s been quite difficult, but it’s worked for me and for us, I think. It’s strange trying to remember why you loved someone and why you were with someone, drudging those feelings up from out of the dirt. I leak a lot anyway but there has been a lot of crying. It’s been a real learning curve and seeing the difference in him has been incredible too.” — Tim Curry in lingerie — As if Anna’s new single, ‘Chelsea Hotel #3’, wasn’t shocking enough in its scream for female autonomy and pleasure, it ends with a glorious lyric about Tim Curry in lingerie. Anna smiles in recognition. “I think it was the first time that I ever felt something downstairs and thought, ooooh what is going on? I was watching Rocky Horror Show for a first time when I was 10 or 11 and I remember that being the moment where I thought what is happening down there!” Anna gleefully namechecks influences like these throughout every song she’s written, almost as if she can’t help it. “These are the things peppered through my album – there is Spice by the Spice Girls, Funeral by Arcade Fire, films like Y Tu Mama Tambien; I literally namecheck all of them. I don’t know if I do it on purpose so much, but I know that it’s very important to me that there are streams and rivers and to know what stuff is flowing in from where. I spent so long when I couldn’t write, and when I was finding it so hard to create anything I was struggling with the idea of people plucking this amazing stuff from out of thin air and they were just able to do it, wake up one day and just do it.” It’s clear Anna takes pride in her body of work – the first EP in 2015 was a solo labour of love; for the album she enlisted the help of William Doyle, an artist in his own right who was looking to develop his production skills. “It was a dream,” she

says. “I had spent nearly 3 years up until he got involved, where I had tried different things but ran out of money, but he put out a thing on social media saying I am looking to produce things and if anyone is interested please get in touch. Within twenty seconds I was typing away to him. I knew the kind of audio world that I wanted it to be in – really intricate and with tiny metallic audio things going on – I didn’t know how to do it. He understood the world that I was trying to create – it was perfect.” I ask what it was like to suddenly find yourself in a room with another headstrong musician. “William is such a joy,” says Anna. “I tend to go off on red herrings – oh shiny things. He is very good at not doing that, saying, you know, maybe we should do a bit more work now. Just spending 2 or 3 days with him for over 6 months was great. I was embarrassed though, not knowing all the terms. I would say I want it to be earth and mud with sparkles, so he was very patient.” The pair finished the album before sending it to City Slang, a much-admired label who quickly signed Anna to their roster. After years of toil it was a moment to cherish. “Yes, it’s totally cemented the hard work, but having done the album before I was signed, with just Will and then presenting the album, that was where the pride comes from. I have spent years honing this. So, City Slang saying yes was also very nice.” You’re not going to disappear again, are you, I ask as we step out onto a wind-swept Southbank. “Last time I read everything. I think that was part of my demise. But it’s hard as it just gets filtered into my eyes and I can’t avoid it. It’s hard to know what I am going to do. Don’t worry, I am not going to vanish for another five years, that’s far too sad. I promise I won’t read reviews or listen to anyone, I’ll just do my own thing.”

Interview

Katy J Pearson The West Country girl turned 1970s Texas mom, by Tristan Gatward Photography by Tom Porter

“The only thing I want to be able to do in 2020 is to safely ride a bike,” says Katy J Pearson, resolutely but with a smile, sitting in a quiet booth in the corner of London pub The Lexington. She’s one of these people who speaks so warmly and excitedly that she barely takes a breath between her sentences; words just come flying out. “I want to do another cycling proficiency” (apparently that didn’t go so well first time around). “I’m a bit dangerous on a bike,” she admits, “and I don’t drive. My lefts and my rights are just not a vibe. And, I mean, I live in Bristol where literally everyone cycles. All my flatmates cycle, but if my parents hear that I’m even about to get on a bike, they’re like ‘no.’ I’m almost 24.” She continues to tell me about a recent trip she took to Amsterdam where she cycled everywhere, and was fine. “I didn’t get run over at all!” she says - a veritable badge of honour. All it took was a lot of research about the cycle paths of the city, where parks come with wide walkways and gliding along the canals is as commonplace as breakfast. She reflects further, letting go of the sadness that held back her cycling career, taking her head out of her hands and laughing a little. “Yeah, I don’t do many of these new year resolutions. My only goal is to start the year not feeling so hungover that I’m severely unhappy.” Is March too late to be telling you about the dawn of the new decade? Almost definitely. — After the major label — Katy’s been based in Bristol for almost three years, but there’s still an element of Big City Living, having grown up in semi-rural Gloucestershire. The space between Cirencester and Stroud is one where everyone knows everyone with a kind of Midsomer Murders familiarity. She exclaims as she realises we share a friend in Stroud, bounding through stories about him, the small-town black markets that pop up around Glastonbury, and those rare times when something happens. “I can’t live in London,” she asserts, seguing into the conscious decision you have to take as a musician to draw

yourself away from the capital. “It’s a great city, I just think it doesn’t do anything good for me. I don’t feel at all inspired, just creatively overwhelmed. It feels so full that there’s no breathing space. With my old band, I was here a lot but never found my cup of tea here. I think I was too sensitive for it.” Before penning the dream deal with indie heartthrobs Heavenly Records, Katy was in a hype band with her brother called Ardyn. A major label deal and three EP releases down, they were dropped before putting out a debut album. It was the kind of situation where parameters for success had to become recalibrated – 14 million streams just don’t cut it. “When we were dropped, my brother and I moved back home, and he had glandular fever and so I just went into the studio every day by myself, using Logic and started writing. It was hard work, once you’ve been on such a busy journey. As soon as it stops you hit the rock bottom… or at least, a very low point. Maybe that was how I was able to write these very personal songs. I was writing to make myself feel better rather than writing to do something for my career. It definitely gives you a bit of a kick, too. When it’s only you, you realise that you’ve got to do all the work or literally nothing happens. “When I was signed to a bigger label and had more of a monthly income, I found it so detrimental because I wasn’t doing anything but sitting there and trying to write. When you’re busy, it’s so much better for your head, being able to live and let the creativity hit you. Being able to take time over it is so important. And I enjoy working, it gives me balance.” Bristol has been an essential part of nurturing this new creative world around her. “It’s such a lovely music scene, and there’s a bit more space to grow,” she says. “Everyone’s doing entirely different things – Scalping are doing heavy rock, techno, massive vibes, and then there’s Grandma’s House who are my really good friends – they do this surfy post-punk thing. Then there’s Fenne Lily doing folk. I dunno, there’s not really anyone doing exactly the same thing, which feels special. You don’t think about Bristol and easily categorise it.”

Interview “When I recorded the first single, I was like, ‘what the fuck, this is quite country’” The venues are consistently brilliant, too. You’ve got Thekla, a former circus boat and Banksy canvas, moored in the Mud Dock of Bristol’s Floating Harbour, The Fleece and Louisiana with iconic tour posters stacked on top of each one another like a proud grandparent’s memory-hoarding living room. Hey, The White Stripes once played to 10 people too. “I remember going in there when I was 15 seeing Summer Camp after school and just looking at the walls. Like, ‘woah, Kings of Leon!’. When I played there I had to really take a moment. Amy Winehouse played here too. It’s just crazy – it’s really nice, growing up in the West Country and being in a city with so much musical history.” — Those alluring Rhinestones — The self-described West Country girl turned 1970s Texas mom gives away the latter part of that personality in the music video for recent single ‘Tonight’, which shows Katy double-

green-denim’d and line dancing around Dartmoor. “I’ve been wearing double denim since I was 15,” she laughs. “I started working at this vintage shop and suddenly I found myself being drawn toward Rhinestones all the time. I dunno, when I recorded the first single, I was like, ‘what the fuck, this is quite country’. I had no idea, but yeah, my friends always took the piss out of me. I feel like it’s just a progression – I really relate to it now. Shit, that’s me.” She talks about the actualities of the video as if it were revision for an unimportant school test that still makes you nervous on the day. “We literally had 10 days to do this music video and I told them I was going to line dance. The guys assumed that I’d got all these lessons booked and I was like, no. I looked at one video on YouTube on the day. We got to Dartmoor and everyone just looked at me like, ‘right, go on then’. And I was just thinking ‘fuuuck’. And I just had to go for it, and everyone was cracking up. I was so nervous. I mean, you could definitely tell it wasn’t my professional… thing. I was very much winging it. If I did really do it, it wouldn’t have been me. “It’s been really nice being able to be so in control of these videos. I’ve been going to Dartmoor since I was a baby, and my parents met down in Salcombe – that’s where we did the end scene at Bolt Head. We were down in South Sands Beach which is really close to the end scene and bumped into some family friends who had a house just there. Like, ‘Hello Nigel, how’s it going?’. And he was like, ‘Ah, do you want to film on the balcony?’. So that first scene where I turn around was filmed there; it was just all so weird. It kind of settles in sometimes that I’m really being able to make this world around what I’m doing now.” We talk about her influences a little, and namely where these hedonistic folk icons have disappeared to. Lewis Capaldi’s just not going to cut it, is he? It’s Crosby, Stills and Nash, it’s Roy Orbison and Dolly Parton. But above all, it’s The Beatles. “One thing I found really interesting actually was that documentary with Leonard Cohen and Marianne [Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love]. I was just crying the whole way through because it was so beautiful. And so interesting! Like, I had no idea he was a big old womaniser and micro-dosing on MDMA all the time. You have this really wholesome image of someone, but of course they’re people. Like, of course Joni Mitchell was addicted to coke. “To have an honest icon is a difficult thing,” she says. “It’s easy to be adored when there’s a mystery to you, and people only know as much of you as is in your songs. You didn’t get to see right into their lives. It’s not like Joni Mitchell was there on Instagram Live Stream being like, ‘hey guys, it’s me here in California, by my roads,’ or whatever.” There’s no alternative to the downbeat romance of ‘Heart of Gold’ if you don’t see the awkward shots of Neil Young eating a ham sandwich.

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Interview An experimental band who sound bigger as they shrink, by Dominic Haley. Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

Tara Clerkin Trio An icy wind is howling through the streets of South Tottenham today. Inside, Bagel, New River Studios’ resident house cat, is curled up amongst the sofa cushions and doing his level best to sleep. Unfortunately, four humans have recently invaded his sanctum and appear dead set on ruining it for him, with their clinking bottles and constant coos of adoration. He opens up an eye and tries to get them to shut up by fluttering his ears. It doesn’t work – it’s time for the nuclear option. Standing up, he arches is back, stretching every muscle before flopping off the couch to strut off across the bar, looking for somewhere with less annoying people. “Come back!” Tara Clerkin calls after him, feigning outrage. “We’re almost done.” The bus that has brought her and her bandmates – brothers Sunny-Joe Paradiso and Patrick Benjamin – might have left Bristol early this morning, but none look all that worse for wear for it. The trio is warming up after their photoshoot by sinking beers and chatting excitedly. For some reason, our conversation has spontaneously focussed on ways to fill the long hours of hanging about while waiting for gigs to start. “Honestly, I don’t mind this bit,” says Clerkin when I ask how they deal with the waiting periods. “It’s the hour before that I really don’t like; that’s when I start to get nervous.” Although the bar is quiet right now, in a few hours’ time New River Studios will be buzzing. There is a lot of excitement swirling around the Tara Clerkin Trio right now. With echoes of acid jazz, off-kilter psych-pop and ethereal electronica, the group’s sound sits nicely alongside experimental bands like Jockstrap. They are a product of Bristol – specifically, Bristol circa 2010, and the weird and wonderful experimental scene that grew up around cassette/record label/live promoters Howling Owl, which began when Joe Hatt and Adrian Dutt (both of noise band Spectres) moved to the city in an attempt to find somewhere in the South West where their band wouldn’t be booed off the stage. Alongside record shop Stolen Recordings, this live music collective became a lightning rod for Bristol’s DIY noise musicians, creating a ready-made community of collaborators and fellow travellers.

Interview “It was a really tight scene – everyone always went to everyone else’s gig,” explains Benjamin. Even though he was at uni down the road in Bath, he often travelled to Bristol, and together with his brother found himself right in the middle of things. “It was a whole bunch of people doing experimental stuff gathered together under one banner really. Coming from where we came from, we were only really exposed to dubstep, house and disco, so Howling Owl really opened us to whole range of different things.” It was in this melting pot where Paradiso, Benjamin and Clerkin got started in music. In the decade since first meeting, the three have dabbled in a range of musical projects. Looking over it, the only thing that rivals the number of bands the three has been involved in is the variety of musical styles they’ve passed through. Here’s an extremely truncated run down of what the various projects the members have been in: Benjamin and Paradiso both play in a punk band called Luxury Dad; Paradiso plays Oh Sees-inspired space rock in a group called Taos Humm; Benjamin releases his electronica compositions on Bulb Records; and Clerkin has put out an album’s worth of Julia Holter-style folk, simply called Hello. It’s the Tara Clerkin Band that is probably the most pertinent to our story, though. This eight-member psych-folk troupe was the first time the three worked on Clerkin’s own compositions, and it’s the act that most readily sowed the seeds for what would become the Tara Clerkin Trio. “You could say the Tara Clerkin Trio started mainly because everyone else un-joined the Tara Clerkin Band,” shrugs Clerkin while piecing together the transition from the big group to the small one. “A lot of the other members went travelling or had babies, so we’re basically the leftovers.” — Down the rabbit hole — For a lot of acts, a reduction in band members usually leads to a stripping down in sound, but in the case of the Tara Clerkin Trio, this new project has allowed the group to go exploring with a whole new territory of soundscapes and influences. Their debut seven-track LP, recently released on Laura Lies In, finds naturalistic psych-rock replaced with coolly executed electronics and evocative soundscapes. This new direction could loosely be defined as jazz, but it actually manages to cover a wide range of sonic touchpoints; from soulful acid jazz and blissful pop. That’s without mentioning the more avant-garde explorations, recalling the classic works of Steve Reich and Arthur Russell. For Clerkin, the shift is style is simply the result of the band trying to make a break with old habits. “I wanted to get away from writing songs on the guitar,” she says. “The problem is that I can’t play the clarinet very well, hence why we started using the loop pedal. While we like acid jazz and things like that, we definitely stumbled into that genre. I was much more interested in doing something more minimal.” “If you don’t start off with a guitar, you’re going to make a song that sounds a lot different to the Oh Sees or whatever,” adds Paradiso. “Also, it draws on a lot of things we’d been around

but hadn’t really explored. There’s always been a lot of noise and free improv stuff in Bristol, but until recently it was always really underground. That coalesced with what we’re doing, as well as what we were discovering on the internet. There was a short period a few years ago where it felt like every song was going down its own little rabbit hole.” The ingenuity of this way of writing really jumps out when you listen to the lead single ‘I Know He Will’. Introduced by warm-sounding synths and airy piano loops, as the song builds, it’s as if it has been co-written with the city of Bristol itself, with Clerkin’s breathless vocals and breezy clarinet floating over the sounds of a busy building site. “It was completely accidental,” Paradiso tells me when I ask where the idea came from. “While we were demoing the song, we’d left the window open without realising that there were scaffolders working outside. When we went to loop the clarinet, we realised we had their clangs on the track, so the idea grew from there.” “I should add that it’s not the actual recording that you can hear on the record,” says Clerkin, jumping in to clarify. “Unfortunately, that sounded absolutely shit, but I did manage to find a library track of scaffolders working, which is the one we used on the song.” The track captures the strange psychogeography that the Tara Clerkin Trio manage to weave into their music. Listening through the LP sometimes feels like cracking a window and listening to the sounds of the street. For me at least, it’s the type of record that conjures up those, weird, surreal experiences you sometimes get when you live in a big city. Tracks like ‘Hellinca’ and ‘Any of These’, which have a lazy, disjointed energy, effortlessly evoke the feeling of aimlessly walking the streets, passively observing the strange rituals of your fellow citizens as they get on with their daily lives. When I put this to the band, Clerkin nods approvingly. “We didn’t set out to make a concept record or anything like that, but I love the way that a certain tone of clatter can put you in a place,” she says. “I really wanted to play with that concept. I wanted to do less storytelling and try and take snapshots of those little moments. “For me, this record is more about this time in our lives than a place or feeling. I know this is coming across as pretentious, but this is more of an honest reflection of where we are right now. Before, I think we were slightly guilty of forcing things. We tended to make music that we were slightly embarrassed about; it always felt weird when you had to stand by it. It’s nice to be upfront and let what comes out speak for itself, which is totally influenced by the context.” Out of nowhere, a man sidles up to our table and sheepishly waves at us to get our attention. As it turns out, he’s the sound guy, and it’s time to get the show on the road. As the band collect up their things, there’s just time for one last question. I ask if this is just the start for the Tara Clerkin Trio, or as before will the group be moving on to explore new sonic pastures. “Oh, we’ll be doing some more stuff,” laughs Paradiso, glancing at his bandmates. “For one thing, Tara’s mum says she needs to sing more, and we definitely don’t want to let her down.”

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Reviews Albums

Albums

The Strokes — The New Abnormal (columbia) In 2005, in the lead up to the release of First Impressions of Earth, and perhaps fearing the worst, Albert Hammond Jr told NME how The Strokes had banked enough credibility to “last us a lifetime”. It didn’t seem like a bold claim at the time, but not even Hammond could have expected it to be as true as it remains today. It’s now 2020 and The Strokes endure on a wave of goodwill, nostalgia and a sense of what we owe them. First Impressions of Earth came out and gave us a beefier, bloated Strokes who shredded enough on ‘Heart in a Cage’ and ‘Juicebox’ for us to go with it, outrageously flirting with Barry Manilow on ‘Razorblade’ before the album fell off a cliff. The following Angles (2011) and Comedown Machine (2013) sold 3 copies between them but still we loved The Strokes. When a band member releases a solo project, we wish it was a new Strokes album instead. When The Voidz tour, we buy tickets in the hope that Julian will perform the demo version of ‘You Only Live Once’. Even when he doesn’t you still get to see Julian Casablancas from The Strokes. That’s how much credibility the first two Strokes albums banked – it’s both impressive and depressing. The obvious question is why hasn’t another band meant as much to people in the last 20 years. But what’s more apparent as a new album comes over the horizon once again, is how we’ve frozen the band in one time and they’ve frozen themselves in another. Despite the sound of Angles and Comedown Machine (and 2016’s 3-track Future Present Past EP), most of us still have The Strokes down as the band that only strum downwards; ’70s New York revivalists; Converse and jeans and perhaps even a tie, from a time when boys were boys and bands were

bands. But they’ve been leaning into ’80s new wave – from The Police to Blondie to A-ha – for much longer than they ever spent aping Modern Lovers; Casablancas their Marty McFly longer than their Joey Ramone. And that’s where they still are with The New Abnormal – an album that features a Basquiat painting as its cover: a stamp of cultural significance and modern retro cool if there ever was one in 2020. What Albert Hammond Jr meant in that NME interview was that The Strokes were going to do whatever the fuck they like from now on, which, in part, translated to them playing slower and longer. The New Abnormal certainly adheres to that, with a few exceptions, including opening red herring ‘The Adults Are Talking’ – a close relative to Comedown Machine’s ode to ‘Take On Me’: ‘One Way Trigger’. This is what “the Strokes sound” is now – a wafer-thin drum machine fizzing at a skittish pace, with Casablancas properly singing over it and an endless guitar line that sounds like it’s coming from a keyboard. It’s as strong as the best parts of Comedown Machine (and there were some best parts), but then it’s gone again, slowly fading not quite to nothing but some on-mic studio chatter where Casablanca appears to say, “So let’s go back to the old key, old tempo, everything.” That old tempo, it turns out, is half the speed. The following ‘Selfless’ is largely forgettable, even if it does feature Casablancas reaching new heights in his falsetto singing. He sings way up there on ‘Eternal Summer’ too – a strange, plodding number of U2 stadium rock drums and a chorus that has Casablancas fully shouting, “I can’t believe it / Life is such a funny journey / Psychedelic / This is the eleventh hour,” like a drunk yelling at the wind. It’s the flabbiest the band have ever been, who, by the way, have also retired their full-stop endings and now opt for a mix of slow fades and clips of unidentified new Strokes tunes, as if they’ve been recording over old demo tapes. ‘Eternal Summer’ is not Casablancas’ finest hour as a lyricist, but as a writer who’s always built with abstraction in order to deliver a moment of clarity that can feel profound, the drum-less ‘At The

Door’ delivers when he growls, “Have to fight what I can’t see / Not trying to build a legacy.” It’s a highlight, even if it takes forever to end, as does every song here. Better still is ‘Bad Decisions’, because it sounds like a Cure song from a John Hughes film, thanks almost entirely to Nick Valensi’s string-hopping guitar riff. And while ‘Not The Same Anymore’ falls fowl to a chugging chorus, its verses almost have something of Nina Simone about them… briefly. If it sounds like I’m clutching at straws here perhaps it’s because I’m trying to swerve ‘Why Are Sundays So Depressing’ on account of its title alone – coming to an Alan Partridge phone-in near you. Unfortunately, the song itself is somehow completely horrible and a total non-event, plagued by a distracting electronic whipping sound and the laziest of back and forths between Valensi and Hammond Jr. The most confusing moment on The New Abnormal though is ‘Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus’ – a ludicrous disco track that is initially appalling until you realise it’s the best thing The Strokes have done in a long time. The name’s not a good start, and what they do with it is worse, reaching for a level of meta that Robbie Williams hit when he sang, “And that’s a good line to take it to the bridge,” on ‘Strong’. The Strokes do pretty much the same thing, with Casablancas saying “break” in one brief silence, and, “Can we switch to the chorus right now,” just before they do. It’s probably not want you want from The Strokes, but in case you didn’t get it before Casablancas starts crowing, “I want new friends but they don’t want me,” they’re clearly having a laugh here, and it feels like a relief. Finally, The Strokes stopped being too cool do what they really want, which is this case was to build a song as ridiculous and as fun as this around a two-finger synth hook and the odd Pet Shop Boys blast. The New Abnormal is still a way from being The Strokes’ Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, but at moments its getting there. It’s certainly self-indulgent enough, and admirably pig-headed too. For an album that’s only 9 tracks long, it

Albums goes on forever, and I’ve not even passed comment on the closing ‘Ode to The Mets’. But we’ll be back here. The New Abnormal will become your fifth favourite Strokes album (there really is little going on on Angles). We’ll forget that the band haven’t sounded like ‘The Modern Age’ since ‘The Modern Age’. We’ll find something to love in what they do next. For a lifetime. 5/10 Stuart Stubbs

Half Waif — The Caretaker (anti-) Running has long been a useful symbol for songwriters who want to provoke a direct physical response as they describe abstract emotions. We can run in circles, run away with our lover, run up that hill to make a deal with god. Or, we can just run, towards nothing in particular. That’s the kind of running Half Waif – aka Nandi Rose – writes about on The Caretaker. “Going nowhere fast,” she belts out in its opening moments, sounding as if she’s in pain, digging deep for resilience as the synths around her threaten to swallow her up. Rose is an impeccable writer, and on her follow-up to 2017’s Lavender she pulls power and introspection out of quotidian moments, like going for that run you really don’t feel you can face. Let’s get this out of the way early: The Caretaker is fantastic. It’s a ballsy pop record that often uses restraint and delayed payoff to create a deeper connection. Rose is good at writing choruses, but her songs keep their distance more often than not, like she’s meeting us on her own terms. The album employs the same distancing technique – keeping those close to us at arm’s length to better ourselves, and letting friends in when the timing is right. “Don’t you worry about me, I won’t worry about you,” she sings on single ‘Ordinary Talk’ – “I’ve got places

in my mind that I’ll never find if you’re holding my hand like you always do.” The song blossoms with layered vocals, slinking keys and drums that you could sink into. It’s a gorgeous slow burn at the core of the album’s balance between opening up and closing off as a person. Her melodies and production are both taut and winding, dodging easy categorisation. Drum machines and sour keyboards meet piano, flute, and clarinet as these individual songs grow. It’s a clever reflection of the way her lyrics grow in potency. Her words initially read as cold across the album, until their subtleties shine through, revealing deep empathy and introspection. On ‘My Best Self ’, she reframes our generation’s obsession with identity from self-obsession to a selfaware embrace of interconnectivity. By the end of The Caretaker you might better understand where you fit in to the world, and how the world should fit to suit you. 8/10 Stephen Butchard

C.A.R. — Crossing Prior Street (ransom note) At 16 years old, Chloé Raunet fled her native Vancouver for London, trying to escape her difficult childhood. With her third album under the moniker C.A.R., Raunet uses 42 minutes of sophisticated, electronic pop to tell her story and make amends with her past and – perhaps – her present. Crossing Prior Street, whose title is an homage to the London street that was the first place the Franco-Canadian producer has ever called home, is a ten-track journey through a healing process; an experiment in leftfield pop that explores the scarcity and loneliness of life in a metropolis. Linked by a drum machine that sets her narrative’s heartbeat (the main recurring element here), Raunet’s vocals tell her story among

metallic filtered voices and pop singing, helped by new wave/post-punk inspired synths. The dark, gothic atmosphere of tracks like ‘Pressure Drop’ is counterbalanced by tribal pieces like ‘Steals the Dance’. It’s the sound of the street, with sirens, drills, steps, and disturbed transmissions, that permeates through the tracks. This is a record on which the rhythm of a big city enters the personal story of a teenager looking for herself, and becomes a part of her. 6/10 Guia Cortessa

Hamilton Leithauser — The Loves of Your Life (glassnote) You can’t help but feel that people like Hamilton Leithauser attract good stories. I’m not talking about the wrung-out nostalgia highs and back-chat from the good days, before his old band The Walkmen announced a playfully “extreme” hiatus (that’s lasted eight years to date). His third solo record, The Loves of Your Life, is packed with tales about real people, from rock’n’roll singers who can’t hit the notes to strangers who hide from their flatmates in old cinemas, and friends whose parents still pay their rent. It’s a further breakaway from the great, dirty city sounds he helped revive in the early ’00s, but it lounges around the same subjects with a renewed and lighthearted sense of reverie. The Leonard Cohen-style triplet guitar has been trashed and replaced by the bare bones of Freakbeat, the occasional doo-wop backing harmonies (‘Isabella’) and island-bounce blues (‘Wack Jack’) of Dylan’s Infidels. There’s less of the melodic ’50s crooner he perfected with Rostam Batmanglij on 2016’s I Had A Dream, but it returns to the same sweet spots. The fantastical creation narrative plays out like

Albums surrealist folklore; magical accounts of humanity are tenderly cast with an even more guttural, well-travelled sing-shout. A couple of quieter moments are so emotively strung that Leithauser cuts a beat, as if so engrossed in watching his own stories unfold that he forgets it’s his job to fill in the lines. The one moment of Leithauser’s own self-reflection seeps into the final track – a piano ballad backed by his own kids – where his own gorgeously weathered vocal mediates on forgiveness. But even the most earnest of subjects are humorous, poetic and engaging – he’s writing with one eye on the couple watching the waves crash against the beach, and the other firmly fixed on the seagull that might be about to ruin their fish and chips. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Porridge Radio — Every Bad (secretly canadian) The key line on Porridge Radio’s debut album arrives on ‘Lilac’. “I don’t want to get bitter / I want us to get better,” wrestles the Brighton quartet’s Dana Margolin over slacker indie instrumentation. It encapsulates the record’s drive towards self-understanding, which frequently sees her repeating phrases until she either believes in them or they can no longer harm her. These mantras teeter towards the confessional but pull back by dint of her delivery, which rages with the power of conviction and a lack of self-pity. The lo-fi grunge of ‘Sweet’, for instance, centres on a conversation between mother and daughter. “And are you still so depressed?” one asks the other futilely but firmly, having exchanged gifts. It’s an attention to detail that extends to the music, despite it being superficially punky in approach. The long, cool synth lines on ‘(Something)’ form a

bed for a roboticised vocal that reflects the depersonalising effect of a toxic relationship. The guitars on ‘Nephews’, on which she dreams of being with her relatives “under the sea”, simulate the wash of water. The project was birthed from the open mic nights Margolin used to play, and there’s a clear sense that she’s the ringleader as she revels in the noisy energy of her bandmates. The dual vocals on the jittery goth pop of ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’ are a case in point. If it’s taken a long time to release their first ‘proper’ album then it was worth the wait, despite Margolin’s warning shot on ‘Homecoming Song’ that, “there’s nothing inside.” 7/10 Susan Darlington

The Chats — High Risk Behaviour (bargain bin) At the end of 2017, a grainy YouTube video of a track by The Chats song ‘Smoko’ went viral. Three lads, three chords, one very striking mullet. Like the mullet in question, bad taste is central to the debut album by the Australian punk rock trio: a lot of the focus is on getting wrecked, and there’s no problem too large that a trip to the clap clinic can’t sort. But of course, it takes a hell of a lot of intelligence to make music this dumb. As hook writers and storytellers, The Chats are masters of economy – frontman Eamon Sandwith may be singing about the full fat pleasures of life, but the medium is as sparse as you like. With no funny business, sixteen songs manage to collectively limbo under the half an hour backdrop. Sonically, they’re painting in the scuzzy power-pop colours of Buzzcocks, The Hives, even Sham 69. And taken in that spirit, High Risk Behaviour is a huge amount of fun and does exactly what it sets out to.

They celebrate the best of times (having a really nice pub meal with plenty of ketchup in ‘Pub Feed’) and commiserate the worst of times (‘Identity Theft’ bemoans when your bank details are stolen buying drugs on the dark net). Stick it on at 5pm on a Friday. I dare you. 8/10 Fergal Kinney

Yves Tumor — Heaven to a Tortured Mind (warp) After this fourth album and second for Warp, we are still none the wiser about exactly who or what Yves Tumor is. Opening track ‘Gospel For a New Century’ comes in on a bed of scratchy horns, rolling drums and stoned vocals, but with a clear sense of forward momentum. It is a single, a standalone tune, a bastion of focus and thrust that has not been typical of Tumor’s previous work. Could this be, we ask ourselves, a sign of a more straightforward RnB record? Our questions are answered within seconds of following track ‘Medicine Burn’, with its squalling, compressed guitar tone and nonsensical, pain-ridden lyrics. We are firmly back in the deregulated zone where confusion is king. This is the pattern of Heaven to a Tortured Mind; a give and take between challenge and payoff. The payoffs don’t come bigger than on ‘Kerosene!’; a five-minute slick, seductive two-way between Tumor and an unnamed female singer that launches into ecstatic, skyscraping, Prince-esque electric guitar solos at multiple points. It is an irresistible track, the biggest moment of his career to date and proof that he could be a major overground star one day if the notion were ever to interest him. But evidently, as of now, that is not the plan. There are too many simultaneous ideas, too much comfort in saturating the sound palette throughout Heaven to a Tortured Mind for it to have mass appeal,

Albums and yet it is that very freewheeling experimentation that makes it such an intoxicating listen. A little like the moodboard records of recent years by Thundercat, King Krule or Gonjasufi, the power here comes from the constant ambush of new ingredients, all unified by the connective tissue of its auteur’s musical personality. Genre identification is redundant in the face of this level of artistic freedom. Together with 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love, this album represents the imperial phase of Yves Tumor’s career, him out at the vanguard of the world that he himself created. Only he can know what happens next. 8/10 Max Pilley

Dana Gavanski — Yesterday Is Gone (full time hobby) Heartbreak is a well-trodden topic in songwriting, but Canadian singer-songwriter Dana Gavanski manages to make it her own on a confident and compelling debut LP, Yesterday Is Gone. Born in Vancouver to a Serbian family, Gavinski began to write music in Montreal during her final year of college, when she picked up a guitar left behind by her ex-partner. Yesterday Is Gone is more than a title – it’s an imploration that sustains throughout the record. “I’m learning how to say goodbye,” sings Gavinski on the title track, “to let you go and face the tide / To wrap my feelings in a song.” Produced alongside Sam Gleason and Mike Lindsay of LUMP, the record explores the muddiness that comes with breaking up; Gavanski’s attempt to discover and understand herself outside of the relationship, and ultimately, to move on from it. Her vocals have a sweet soulfulness reminiscent of Julia Jacklin, tinged with occasional touches of dissonance that bring to mind Cate Le Bon. Working through a plethora of

emotions, the record is at times defiant, at others tender, but always imbued with an understated kind of strength. The sparse, solemn closer ‘Memories of Winter’ breaks the spell somewhat; a reminder of the inevitable emptiness left behind after a relationship is over. 7/10 Katie Cutforth

Sports Team — Deep Down Happy (island) 2019 was a hell of a year for Sports Team. Labelled ‘everyone’s new favourite band’, they set about delivering on that tag with a trail of feverish live shows where everyone was literally invited. And so, from bussing fans to Margate and headlining stages at festivals, to impromptu gigs at their local, that scattergun exuberance hits with the same velocity here on their debut. Everything is packaged into tight 3-minute bursts as you hurtle through The Maccabees-esque ‘Here’s the Thing’, pick up a few Brexit tropes on ‘The Races’ and unpack “I just wanted to be your Demi Moore” on ‘Kutcher’. Opener ‘Lander’ also punches straight in as vocalist Alex Rice instantly establishes his part-Mick Jagger/part-Eddie Argos persona—and he proves to be the lightning rod throughout, shouting, straining, strutting his way through tracks, snapping sardonic lyrics like, “This avant garde / Is still the same / Go to Goldsmiths and die their fringes to know they’ve made it only / When they’ve signed their rights to Sony”. Ironically, it’s the kind of quintessentially British indie pop that Transgressive might have signed up in their seat-of-the-pants genesis, and it’s that sense of loose ties and loose limbs that gives Deep Down Happy its endearing nostalgia of spilling into the streets for sunshine pints before ending up in a club, a stranger’s front room… or another bus

to Margate. A debut as wry, energetic and charismatic as their inexhaustible live presence has always promised. 7/10 Reef Younis

Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini — Illusion of Time (phantasy) Ever since he ditched his Stopmakingme name at the start of the last decade, Daniel Avery has been on the move stylistically, and his latest release marks his biggest deviation yet. The shift from big-room techno towards textural abstraction that he hinted at with his last solo album goes full-blown for this collaborative album with Nine Inch Nails keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, in which neither a kick-drum thud nor snare clap is encountered across its 45 minutes and yet still the signifying aesthetics of club music – nocturnal yet bright, solitary yet communal, with interplay of tension and release – linger. Added to that beatless atmosphere is a laudable embrace of sonic grit and grain alongside the sort of wistfully poignant grandeur more often deployed in stadium rock. The result is a record that suggests Godspeed You! Black Emperor in drone mode, reimagining Music For Airports as if the runways were covered in gravel and air traffic control was on strike. Most of the time, this works a treat. Opener ‘Sun’, with its overpowering tape hiss and decayed brushstrokes of distant synth tones, sets a widescreen cinematic scene that, despite only containing two chords for its entire duration, retains enough tactility to avoid boredom. Similarly, the fetishisation of surface noise and analogue crackle on ‘CC Pad’ generates an atmosphere that complements the gently undulating synth, and the neon oscillations of ‘Enter Exit’ provide a perfect foundation for the piece’s climactic feedback section.

Albums More interesting still are the moments in which Avery and Cortini prefer slow builds to simple repetition: ‘Inside The Ruins’ mines the aggression of industrial techno, but, with the music stripped of any movement, the emphasis becomes one of pure, relentless pressure. Equally, ‘Water’’s exercise in disintegration evokes a come-down for the club itself, as if the echoes of a once-euphoric space are being slowly unravelled layer by layer. Much of Illusion of Time feels simultaneously improvisatory and studied, which perhaps betrays Avery and Cortini’s working process: the record was built via email over several years, and then put to bed in a single three-hour session while the duo were on tour together with NIN. Indeed, that depth is one of the album’s great strengths: even when the pair edge into the more unabashed heartstringtugging realm of soppy shimmering guitars, there is enough three-dimensionality and conceptual heft to guard against potential mush, leaving a record of pleasing contradictions: brittle but dense, machined but organic, constantly mutating and pleasingly still. 8/10 Sam Walton

Thundercat — It is What it Is (brainfeeder) Since his break-out collaboration with Kendrick Lamar on his 2015 masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly, which built upon the considerable reputation he’d garnered through his work with Flying Lotus, Suicidal Tendencies and others, Thundercat has swiftly graduated from a musician’s musician to a listener’s musician, culminating in the success of his last album, 2017’s Drunk. Drunk elevated Thundercat from the pre-eminent session musician sought for his ferocious 6-string bass virtuosity and funkadelic groove to his own singular and commercial force. However, despite

the jovial verve of Drunk, Thundercat cut a sullen and paranoid figure on the record when listening closely. This pervasive gloom is a hangover from his first two albums, The Golden Age of Apocalypse (2011) and Apocalypse (2013), both of which were introspective affairs soaked with moments of disquiet. Thundercat being Thundercat, there was fun to be had on both records, such as the intoxicating ‘Oh Sheit It’s X’ and the Boys Noize bounce of ‘Jamboree’, but these tracks were mostly diluted by surrounding waves of consternation. If his first two albums were crepuscular ruminations, then Drunk was the other side of the coin – the subsequent, pain-numbing blow-out. It saw Thundercat trade in meditative jams for truncated spats of energy and drowned the pensive with deluges of sanguinity and irreverence. However, like a sicklysweet cocktail, while the first sips were rich with the taste of funk and California sunshine, by the end of the album you encountered where all the bitterness was congealed and Drunk finished with a nuanced capitulation; a hallucinatory and fragmented solace that hit as hard as any of his earlier albums. Thundercat seeks to cement this dexterity further in his new album, coming hot off a successful collaboration with Brainfeeder labelmate/owner Flying Lotus on the latter’s 2019 album Flamagra. However, the results on It is What it Is are frustratingly uneven as mature craftsmanship and heartfelt attempts at transcendence are continually herniated by misplaced Drunk-era interludes that downplay the emotional weight of the record and occasionally border on the obnoxious. Following a short solipsistic cosmic intro, the album starts auspiciously with the orchestral gloss of ‘Innerstellar Love’. It’s a track packed with a full-bodied and erratic drum that tears through the doting bass before submitting to the fashionably-late sax that envelopes the sound of the track and conjures a swirling Sun-Ra tainted black hole. The celestial strings at the start of the punk-driven roar of ‘I Love Louis

Cole’ quietly melt to a profane charge of drums that are punctuated by hi-hats, all the while Thundercat channels tales of hedonistic nights until the song buckles into a drowsy introspective sound. It’s a rare instance where Thundercat is able to alchemise euphoria and stupor within one track and it is a raging success. Drunk’s extroverted funkiness surfaces in ‘Black Qualls’ where Thundercat pays homage to his musical influences, featuring funk legend Steve Arrington alongside Childish Gambino and Steve Lacy. Lyrically, Thundercat shines here as he intersperses potent truths of upwards mobility as a young black man in-between all the infectious bass. After a polished start, Thundercat then abruptly up-ends the record by going on a tear of uninspiring and flimsy tracks consisting of ‘Miguel’s Happy Dance’, ‘How Sway’, ‘Funny Thing’, and ‘Overseas’. Each feels blotchy and incomplete, and doesn’t manage to achieve the connection you feel Thundercat’s desperate to make. Worse yet, it stalls all momentum and irrevocably upsets the spiritual equilibrium of the record. The album is briefly able to recalibrate sonically during ‘Dragonball Durag’, with a deep sumptuous bounce before stalling again with pretty but ultimately dull ‘How I Feel’, before winding into the didactic and innocuous Beatleesque oddity of ‘King of the Hill’. It’s only when Thundercat drops the zaniness that the album connects again with the vulnerable soul of Unrequited Love; lacing the yearnings of a remorseful Thundercat with a cutting violin sailing above it. The reflective ‘Fair Chance’ is undoubtedly the highlight of the album, combining an aching sincerity with a sonic contrast from the rest of the album thanks to appearances from Ty Dollar $ign and Lil B. Narrating over a sombre atmosphere, Thundercat is at pains to explain how he tries to “get over it, to get under it” – “it” being the death of close friend Mac Miller. The interplay between the three vocalists strikes a spiritual chord that soars above the rest of the album. However, despite this resuscitation, it’s too little too late to entirely save

Albums the record, and album closer ‘It is What It Is’ bows out in confused fashion. The majority of the album’s minutes are filled with gorgeous musicianship and compelling lyrics, but the album never recovers from its lacklustre middle section. It is what it is. 6/10 Robert Davidson

Baxter Dury — The Night Chancers (heavenly) Stanley Kubrick once said that a film is – or should be – more like music than fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. He also believed that observation is a dying art. The parallels between Baxter Dury – whose music is synonymous with selfdisclosure and character scrutiny – and Kubrick are more visible than you’d think. The Night Chancers’ conscious progression is a nod to Kubrick’s psychological journey through the maze scene in The Shining. Atypically for Dury, not every song here is confessional. Instead, they’re more of a feeling projected into a filmic narrative. On some of the tracks, different characters appear, and we know that because Dury adopts different voices and accents to fit the situation. The casual darkness of Dury’s lyrics and the upbeat music is a contrast that becomes almost comical, echoing Kubrick’s introduction of bleak irony to the sublime and absurd. On this record, Dury remains disarmingly, brazenly British. It’s the insular safety of middle-class London that permeates The Night Chancers: from the title track’s thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation to the absurd bloggers of ‘Sleep People’. There are stories about the futility of clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set via soiled real life (‘Slum Lord’), social media-enabled stalkers (‘I’m Not Your Dog’), and sleepdeprived optimism (‘Daylight’). The

record’s finely-drawn vignettes are all informed by the corners of the world Dury has visited, but its overarching theme is that of being caught out in your attempt at being free. There is a political undercurrent to Dury’s music, but it’s the intimate details of everyday domestic life that get him going. The title track is a case in point: an Anglo-aggro ode to the aspects of British life that no one talks about, recalling Mark E. Smith’s ability to make the ordinary sound extraordinary. Indeed, Dury is a bit of a wordsmith, but in a way that doesn’t alienate anyone. It’s matterof-fact, anti-intellectual even. Above anything else, Dury shows us that a little bit of melody and a lot of honesty can go a long way. 8/10 Hayley Scott

Jackie Lynn — Jacqueline (drag city) Let it never be said that Haley Fohr doesn’t know her way around an engaging alter ego. Following up her debut release under the Jackie Lynn moniker back in 2016 – and a wildly successful second foray into what-used-to-be-called freak folk as Circuit des Yeux – Fohr defies the notion that either project should pin her down with Jacqueline, ostensibly a concept which follows the daily life of our titular picaro, a femme long-haul truck driver, from casino to Odessan bar, with an incongruous debt to electric disco as audacious backdrop; filling station Americana as high camp, a few hundred yards apart from her previous work. This is all to say, as conceptually robust as Jacqueline might be – from the Moroder-worship of ‘Casino Queen’ to luscious comedown ‘Traveler’s Code of Conduct’ – following the vague narrative won’t come close to the sheer joy of the sound. Fohr may be one of the sole artists capable of undergoing genre exercises with

the same pro appeal as her more ‘serious’ output. ‘Shugar Water’ is one of her most pop-minded numbers to date (think Nico fronting Talking Heads twisting their way through an ABBA deep cut), but far from cheapened by Fohr’s enduring weirdness. That’s Jacqueline; one of today’s most outlandish artists attempting a wider connection, ironically projected through a sparkling face mask. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Sabina Sciubbia — Force Majeure (goldkind) There aren’t a huge number of comparisons you can instantly drag out of your brain’s musical hyperspace when an album begins with a glistening chamber-pop groove and Sabina Sciubbia’s thick, Nico-infused atonal vocal singing “I’m dancing with the clouds / romancing with the clouds”. Best known for her role fronting Grammy Award-winning Brazilian Girls, her own solo rebirth (Force Majeure being the first full-length under her own name in six years) sounds fresh and exploratory, excellently sidestepping being a retrogressive throwaway whilst still paying homage to the scenes that birthed it. Sciubbia’s explorations sprint over a remarkable ground, but never risk nearing saturation point: twelve tracks ease through chamber pop, baroque, italo-disco, N.Y. East Village bossa nova, electro and punk, flicking between French, Italian, German and Englishlanguage when one dictionary’s parentheses fail to translate her intent. The first four foot-tappers nod to the free-form pop of Sciubbia’s time at the Nublu Club with the Wax Poetic and Nublu Orchestra. ‘You Broke My Art’ reaches further still to the highlights of Stereolab’s art-rock bossa nova, whereas ‘Stars’ sounds like an off-kilter ode to Robyn’s ‘Honey’ (it’s literally about stars

Albums falling from the sky and lovers setting them on fire). Even the transition from a more leftfield Can-plays-The-Normal bleep to a Marlene Dietrich-esque, tender musical chanson doesn’t sound forced as it climaxes with fears about over-sharing an identity (‘I Know You Too Well’). And as soon as the theory gets heavy, there are still enough lyrics on the album to be written on a passive aggressive tote bag. It’s serious, often numinous soul-searching, sure, but you can still enjoy it: “All I want, all I need is love, and coffee too.” 9/10 Tristan Gatward

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — Viscerals (rocket recordings) Despite their frankly excessive band name, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs know not to overstay their welcome when it comes to albums. While two songs on 2017’s Feed the Rats were over fifteen minutes long, you can get away with that when your record only has three tracks on it. Likewise their 2018 breakthrough King of Cowards, which capped proceedings at six songs. Now their third album proper, Viscerals, comes in at eight tracks – one of which, unusually for them, doesn’t even hit the two minute mark. Pigs x 7 aren’t messing about here. Viscerals is a much tighter record than the band’s previous efforts. It can be difficult to avoid sacrificing depth in the pursuit of a leaner sound, but nothing is lost here. Lead single ‘Reducer’, for example, is an absolute onslaught of riffs and blistering vocals, while the one-anda-half-minute long ‘Blood and Butter’ momentarily breaks up the pace with a deeply unsettling spoken-word account of the ‘social pressure cooker’. Meanwhile, the thrashing ‘World Crust’ and ‘Crazy In Blood’ ensure that Viscerals lives up to its name.

The new Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs album is a visceral experience. The record is all guts and glory, tauter than before and all the better for it. It’s relentless; an all-out-assault of riffs and rumblings that pushes Pigs x 7 to new heights. 8/10 Liam Konemann

Hinds — The Prettiest Curse (mom + pop music) Hinds’ third album is not only the band’s most candid and unapologetic to date, but its revolutionary spirit speaks to their departure from the lo-fi, fluffy indie-pop of their 2016 debut, Leave Me Alone. While admittedly there is still a good amount of fluff here (the album is littered with upbeat tracks that could elicit the desire to dance in more or less anyone) The Prettiest Curse is an evolution. It is striking, complex, uncompromising indie-pop. More than that, it makes a bold statement: it canonises Spanish indie-rock, bringing the Spanish language, in which the band embrace singing for the first time, into the Anglophone mainstream of the genre. The Prettiest Curse is a celebration of women – of Spanish women (the album artwork was designed by legendary photographer Ouka Leele) – and is, at its heart, about the intricacies of women’s emotional experiences. Musically, Hinds layer dizzying samples with trippy distortion and candy floss vocals. Lead single ‘Riding Solo’ sees the four-piece channelling MIA’s intoxicatingly visceral playground pop in a bittersweet ode to isolation and loneliness. ‘Boy’, on the other hand, transitions seamlessly between English and Spanish to create an anthemic, crescendo-laden track that screams intense desire. Elsewhere on the album, classical guitars provide the backdrop for sultry vocals, while in later tracks statement drum

beats and slicing guitar lines cut to the bone. Hinds’ music will always be charming in its juvenility. It is, to an extent, an indie expression of a teenager in turmoil. Yet on The Prettiest Curse, the band have honed their craft: here their characteristic puerility slashes like a knife, and is wielded as a weapon in the pursuit of inclusive, jubilant, defiant indie-pop. 9/10 Rosie Ramsden

Ultraísta — Sister (partisan) Ultraísta are a supergroup of sorts, made up of Beck and REM’s live drummer Joey Waronker, wispy electro-pop singer Laura Bettinson, best known for her work as Femme and Dimbleby & Capper, and long-standing Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, who has guided Thom Yorke and co through every album of theirs since OK Computer. Of those three, it’s Godrich’s fingerprints that appear to press heaviest on Ultraísta’s second album: the skittering beats are sliced and diced with the sort of beautifully uncanny human–android push–pull last heard on In Rainbows, and pleasingly textural and three-dimensional synth tones create an engrossing soundworld of electronic fuzz over which Bettinson can layer her glacial coo. What’s missing, unfortunately, is anything resembling a memorable melody: vocal lines are treated more like looped samples than songs, and the result is a series of almost identically (although evidently painstakingly) constructed edits of studio jams that are impeccably tasteful, immaculately crisp, and disappointingly sanitised. Flickers of life are audible in ‘Water In My Veins’, ‘Bumblebees’ and ‘The Moon and Mercury’, where Bettinson is allowed a degree of looseness in performance, stretching out the arrangements

Albums to create some much-needed space, but otherwise Sister is too often hamstrung by its cold, audiophile perfectionism. On the one hand, this is dazzling to encounter – the entire album gleams sonically, every edit feeling super gourmet with nary a hair out of place –but on the other, such airtight cleanliness leaves Sister frustratingly gutless; a masterclass in studio production technique in desperate need of songwriting calibre to match. 6/10 Sam Walton

FACS — Void Moments (trouble in mind) On the third album from the Chicago post-rock trio – formed from the ashes of Disappears in 2017 – singer Brian Case is almost disappearing into their hypnotic wall of industrial sound. Minimalism has always been central to the FACS project, but here Case is almost actively removing his voice from the equation – there are snatches of cut-up vocals in the early part of tracks, and then nothing for quite some time until the next one. It’s highly effective, suggesting that he wants us to know that what he’s saying isn’t at all the most important thing going on here. Except, well, when it suddenly is. ‘Casual Indifference’ sees this technique deployed to detonate a political message: “Different sexes,” spits Case, staccato, “Playing around with... Who can say?”. In its elusiveness and its repetition, it becomes a remarkably effective bit of messaging. Case explained that the track “is definitely the most explicit lyrically in terms of its message... love is love, and anyone who disagrees is wrong.” Right on. In their hypnotic, repetitive moodiness, the band’s closest analogue is probably Salford’s GNOD, or even Thurston Moore on his last two records. The drumming is worth mentioning

too: check the percussion on tracks like ‘Version’ and ‘Boy’, swelling like a militia until they’re very front and centre, the last noise on the battlefield. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

Zebra Katz — LESS IS MOOR (zfk) It takes LESS IS MOOR, rapper Zebra Katz’ long-anticipated debut album, about ten minutes before it becomes distressingly twisted. Early tracks ‘INTRO TO LESS’, ‘ISH’ and ‘LOUSY’ serve as potent warnings: taut with an unstable, macabre energy and cavernous beats which regularly explode with a disorientating fuzziness. All the while Katz’s composed flow proclaims his intention to keep the dance floor jumping. By fourth track ‘BLUSH’, Katz’s lurid grooves are decidedly off the rails, emitting an ominous intensity like a chthonic Faithless. From hereon in, the album goads you into dancing like moribund Saint Vitus victims with the infectious up-tempo swing of ‘IN IN IN’, the eviscerating drum ‘n’ bass ferocity of ‘ZAD DRUMS’, the brooding, HEALTH-like ‘MONITOR’ and the industrial-driven ‘MOOR’ on which Katz’s flow briefly disintegrates as the nocturnal chaos consumes him in carnality and comedown paranoia. The fabric of this middle section is unsettlingly versatile, as Katz contorts it with an occult majesty. His lyrics expertly oscillate between fleeting hedonic fervour and pointed societal rage to fuel an insidious, isolating sound. ‘NECKLACE’, an acoustic cut, comes as a much-needed reprieve that showcases Katz’s tenderness, momentarily liftinh the pervasive darkness before entering what feels like a satisfying closing stretch: the pulsating drive of

‘SLEEPN’, the sonic avalanche of ‘NO 1 ELSE’, and the cathartic ‘UPP’. Unfortunately, the record hangs around a couple of tracks too long, with the incongruently ebullient ‘LICK IT N SPLIT’ and gratuitous ‘EXIT 2 VOID’. This marginally nullifies the record’s impact, but it’s otherwise an accomplished, confident, and virile work. 7/10 Robert Davidson

TOKiMONSTA — Oasis Nocturno (young art records) In 2015, TOKiMONSTA lost the ability to hear music. After two sets of brain surgery to treat Moyamoya, a life-threatening brain disease, music lost all melodic meaning for the LA producer, also known as Jennifer Lee. Despite the trauma of this incident, her recovery was swift and successful: she played Coachella just four months after her surgeries and became the first Asian American producer to receive a Grammy nomination for the best dance/electronic album in 2017. Oasis Nocturno follows 2017’s Lune Rouge, an album entirely composed of songs that Lee wrote while recovering her musical sensibilities. This new record is similarly moving and can be understood as Lune Rouge’s second act, another step along her journey of recovery and reclaiming her narrative. Echoes of the last few years’ events ricochet throughout this album. These can be traced through ‘Up and Out’, a track that takes its time, to the tender and sensual ‘Phases’, to the album’s closer ‘For My Eternal Love Dream, My Treasure’. The latter transmits a feeling of relief – of having said your piece, even if no one will ever hear it. The album’s features are lengthy, and certainly have their extraordinary moments; EarthGang’s rap on ‘Fried For

Albums The Night’ is a highlight of the album. Elsewhere though, they feel like they compromise Lee’s true production abilities, squashing the instrumental to make room for the vocal feature. Oasis Nocturno is an emotive spin on nu-hip hop, cementing TOKiMONSTA’s auteur-like relationship with the mainstream. 8/10 Jemima Skala

Cloud, but the real masterstroke was recruiting Detroit group Bonny Doon as her backing band – they bring such nuanced lightness of touch to the tracks. The tumult and churn of Out in the Storm must now feel worth it: this stunningly pretty ode to recovery is Crutchfield’s finest work, and possibly her masterpiece. 9/10 Joe Goggins

Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud (merge) Anybody familiar with Katie Crutchfield’s last record could have predicted that she’d have some serious healing to do on the follow-up. Out in the Storm was a noisy, aggressive exposed-nerve of an album, one wrought with trauma, and the typically relentless touring schedule that followed served as an extended process of bloodletting. At the end of it, in the summer of 2018, Crutchfield embraced sobriety. It was a decision that set her up for a series of homecomings on Saint Cloud, her fifth record as Waxahatchee. With drink and drugs eschewed, she’s returned to the clear-eyed outlook of her teens, and to the musical landscape that defined her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama. The influence of country giants like Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt hangs heavy over the album, but Lucinda Williams is the most significant reference point; not just in terms of the bright and breezy Americana of the tracks, but in the way she evokes Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by painting such vivid portraits of her travels across America. There’s late-night drives across the Midwest on ‘Fire’, reckonings with their past in her hometown on ‘Arkadelphia’ and a nod to her father’s Florida heritage on the title track. Producer Brad Cook was Crutchfield’s primary collaborator on Saint

Sorry — 925 (domino) While Sorry may not be oversharers in interviews, over the past three years the opposite has been true with their music. School friends Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen, the duo at the nucleus of the project, began making music in 2014. From 2017 onwards – now christened Sorry after going under the name FISH for a bit – they have dispensed a steady trickle of demos, singles and audio/visual mixtapes that has rarely paused. However, 925, their debut album proper, presents an opportunity for the north London outfit – important to distinguish that since they’re often grouped with the ‘south London’ scene spearheaded by Goat Girl and Shame – to take stock. But that’s not what they’ve done. Or, at least, that’s not what it feels like they’ve done. The pair have spoken in the past about how while superficially they’re considered to possess all the normative tickboxes of a guitar band but that their approach is more akin to a spontaneous bedroom producer: write it, cut it, share it. Above anything, 925 retains that instinctive feel; maybe that’s because they shunned a grand studio and made it at home. Consequently nothing here is overly ponderous. Songs are moments. Scenes. Sometimes they’re about dreamtup characters like the opener ‘Right

Around The Clock’, Louis singing “she’s all dolled up like a movie star”. Other times it’s tongue-in-cheek comments on clichéd excess: “I want drugs and drugs and drugs” on ‘More’. Musically it all feels distinctively, and refreshingly, out of step with the current proliferation of politico-postpunk. The sound has more in common with the mechanical thrust of Garbage’s ‘Version 2.0’ or The Cure’s Japanese Whispers than anything off, say, Schlagenheim. These are songs built around sizable melodic choruses, but still manage to be idiosyncratic – like Asha’s vomiting “yuck” utterance on ‘Starstruck’, the unexpected, bass-powered swerve ‘Wolf ’ takes or the joyful theft from Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’ that distinguishes ‘As The Sun Sets’. Sorry also deliberately invite listeners’ projections onto their songs: “genderless” is how Asha recently described her creations. A sad pretty love song like ‘Heather’ perhaps captures that best, Asha and Louis trading lines: “what’s a boy to do / what’s a girl to do?”. Same goes for ‘Snakes’: “I never thought about you in your underwear,” sings Asha. “Because I never really cared what was under there.” And while a debut album represents a significant chapter in any band’s book – and this is a really good one – you get the sense that Sorry are comfortable with the notion of change: that tomorrow they might be something different. 8/10 Greg Cochrane

Flat Worms — Antarctica (god?) Though the term ‘supergroup’ can sometimes carry with it some degree of misplaced expectation, L.A. trio Flat Worms have always felt exempt from such a predetermined fate. Not only has

Albums their Petri dish of psychedelia-saturated post-punk been devastatingly potent in recent years, the band’s cohesive framework has proven them to be far more than some throwaway side project. Scooped right from the barrel of John Dwyer’s fabled Castle Face Records, Flat Worms’ personnel partly make up the ranks of Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall Band and Dream Boys. With all three members’ playing careers easily linked by connectable dots, Flatworms’ output feels distinctly unforced and organic. The band’s third full-length effort, Antarctica is a chaotic vision of the mundane; one that makes no attempt to stifle the sarcasm of its commentary. Recorded in just six days inside Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio, Antarctica trades washed-out production for the sort of steely-faced surfaces in which you can see your bloody-nosed reflection as it batters you to a mangled pulp. Laying each apathetically recounted decade to landfill, ‘The Aughts’ is an exhausting sprint to the finish line. Chugging basslines and razor-sharp guitar riffs lacerate lead single, ‘Market Forces’, whilst the title track clings to the sort of dryly-spoken nihilism of any sure-fire satire. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

Lewsberg — In This House (cargo) As a word of warning, the opening track on Lewsberg’s new record is not enjoyable. Arie van Vliet’s intermittent vocals are buried deep in the mix on ‘Left Turn’, crowded out by harsh, standoffish guitar chords as the singer only half tells an incoherent story. “Keep on listening – or don’t” seems to be the message from the Rotterdam-based band. Thankfully, though, In This House – the second album from this art rock, lo-fi nihilist outfit – does eventually open

its door to the listener. Complete with a persuasively smooth riff, ‘Cold Light of Day’ comes as a counter to the album’s cold start. Arie van Vliet then channels the dry wit of Bill Callahan on ‘At Lunch’ – an unrushed ode to day-drinking – before the lolloping ‘Trained Eye’ builds a hypnotic mood. The Velvet Underground’s influence can be felt through the whole album, but this wiry song is particularly indebted to the school of Lou Reed. The pace quickens again on ‘From Never to Once’, another track on which the guitar riffs sound pretty crass until they’re repeated enough. The band are unflinching in the album’s most hectic moments, revelling in the trainlike rhythms of ‘Through the Garden’; equally, Shalita Dietrich’s subtle bass create a sense of calm on ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, before album closer ‘Standard Procedures’ disintegrates. Lewsberg’s iconoclastic approach to their music is in keeping with their Sonic Youth and VU role models but also holds them back on In This House: an intriguing record which impresses with its repetitive, unpredictable nature while still feeling slightly unfinished. 5/10 Jamie Haworth

James Righton — The Performer (deewee) The title track of ‘The Performer’ finds James Righton mulling over the conflict between creative and family life. “That’s not me standing there, in the light / Put [the artistic persona] on for the night,” he croons over a piano line that sounds suspiciously like Foreigner’s ‘Cold As Ice’. It’s a theme that permeates his first solo album, which sees him settling a little uncomfortably into his mid-30s after a youth spent at the forefront of the

New Rave movement with Klaxons and short-lived project Shock Machine. There are traces of his past work on the album – notably the woozy Tame Impala-isms of ‘Devil Is Loose’. For the most part, though, he guides his introspection firmly through ’70s influenced singer-songwriter territory. ‘See The Monster’ borrows from the psychedelic atmosphere of Lee Hazelwood’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’, the ode to his daughter ‘Edie’ finds him slipping into a lounge suit to play piano, and the instrumental saxophone interlude ‘Lessons In Dreamland Pt. 1’ tests the water in a smoky nightclub. Part recorded in Bryan Ferry’s studio, Righton seems to be styling his post-band career on the former Roxy Music frontman. This results in a sophisticated album that nonetheless lacks the visceral thrill of a true performer. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Mentrix — My Enemy, My Love (house of strength) Having been born in Iran and lived in Berlin, France, and the UK, Samar Rad’s life experience makes her something of a poster woman for these warmongering modern times. After moving to France as an 8-year-old to escape war in Iran, she moved back at 14, relearning Farsi practically from scratch and switching from studying Latin and French literature to Arabic and the Qu’ran. These “existential wanderings” (as Rad calls them) have ultimately shaped her polyglot sound alongside Persian poetry, traditional instruments and the inward-looking contemplation of Sufism. It gives ‘My Enemy, My Love’ a spiritual existentialism that enables a track like ‘Longing’ to take a Mooyeh mourning chant from Iran and spin it

Albums into all-engulfing Fever Ray darkness or allows you to imagine the opening of ‘Nature’ getting dropped into The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ as the easterninspired interlude. They might be slow-burning, patient tracks but Rad’s use of rhythm and mysticism maintain that beguiling presence. It’s a combination that comes to life on title track, ‘My Enemy, My Love’ as Rad uses a daf (a large hand drum with metal ringlets) to crash out a tempo that’s propulsive, industrial and ancestral all at the same time; elsewhere, ‘Loyalty’ takes a similarly percussive approach, but refines it to a simpler marching drum mantra. That introspection and worldview paired with dark electronica and traditional Iranian melodies make for a fascinating, if complex, listen that pushes beyond convention. And it’s that melting pot strength that makes this one worth digging deeper, wherever you’re from. 6/10 Reef Younis

Pottery — Welcome to Bobby’s Motel (partisan) Welcome to Bobby’s Motel is one of those debut records that wears its influences proudly. Every few seconds, something in it will give a little tickle to your mental music archive; it could be a vocal intonation or a lyric, a bass strut or a production flourish. For the subsequent few moments, the track unfurling before you is vying for your attention with your innate desire to identify exactly which Talking Heads or Devo track it rhymes with. Whether that experience sounds like a fun game or some kind of torture will likely dictate your reaction to this album. The track ‘Bobby’s Forecast’ alone runs a gauntlet of historical trends, from the ESG/DFA cowbell rhythms that set it in motion to the deep, funk-rock

groove that forms the song’s backbone to the James Brown “c’mon, break the drummer’s arms” exaltations of vocalist Austin Boylan as it breaks down. The sludgy psych of the title track, the Bryan Ferry sophisti-pop of ‘Reflection’, the Nick Cave drama of ‘NY Inn’, it’s an entire day’s BBC 6 Music running order in less than 40 minutes. Deeper subject matter is rarely easy to discern, save perhaps for the climate change-conscious ‘Hot Heater’, but in truth, Welcome to Bobby’s Motel is an endlessly re-listenable album, and fans of post-punk and new wave will find many joys in its contents. If there truly is nothing new under the sun, is it really such a crime to create such a loving facsimile of a model that works so well? 7/10 Max Pilley

Wilma Archer — A Western Circular (weird world) Having released material as Slime between 2010 and 2017, composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Will Archer has taken on a new pen name, Wilma Archer. A Western Circular is his debut LP under this new alias, representing a shift in his career. Inspired by the books of John Fante, the record aims high, exploring aspects of duality in the human condition: the ideas of life and death; peaks and troughs of emotion; finding beauty in pain. The record moves dramatically between genres without feeling mismatched, emphasising Archer’s remarkable musicality and diversity as a composer. Two instrumental tracks open the record – the title track populated by sallow strings, and the smooth jazz of ‘Scarecrow’ – before MF DOOM comes in to speak the record’s first words. Archer expertly plays with tempo and layering, building a sonic world that induces

everything from sorrow to nostalgia, anxiety to joy. A Western Circular plays host to an impressive line-up of guests, featuring vocal contributions from Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands, Sudan Archives and Laura Groves. These collaborations have formed and developed over a number of years, the end result being a project which is as ambitious and far-reaching as the soundscapes Archer creates. 8/10 Katie Cutforth

NNAMDÏ — Brat (sooper records) That Nnamdï Ogbonnaya has chosen to shorten his stage name for the release of this latest record should not be mistaken as emblematic of a streamlining process more generally. Those familiar with the modern-day renaissance man, and specifically his 2017 LP Drool, can attest to the fact that he has a thrilling disdain for genre boundaries and does not set self-limiting parameters; accordingly, Brat, his first album as simply NNAMDÏ, takes in everything from hip-hop to low-key synthpop, via the occasional jazz freakout. This is an album more indebted to his native Chicago than Drool, which took its cues from West African stylings in places, and the sense of greater musical cohesion that lends to proceedings is matched by a more singular thematic throughline than previously. Brat is an introspective collection, with opener ‘Flowers to My Demons’ – on which Ogbonnaya makes a pledge of self-care – setting the tone. There’s still room for eccentricity, not least on the avant garde-meetsindustrial throwdown of ‘Perfect in My Mind’ or the nervy minimalism of ‘Really Don’t’, but the palette is largely one more clearly defined than on Drool. Woozy, late-night R&B reminiscent of Frank

Albums Ocean or Sampha provides the backbone, in a manner that runs from the playful (‘Semantics’) to the profound (see ‘Glass Casket’, which provides the emotional axis for the rest of the record to revolve around). Like all of Ogbonnaya’s output, there’s a frantic energy to Brat that might prove a bit much for some, but there’s also evidence of a control to the chaos that makes this his most compelling solo release yet. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Hilary Woods — Birthmarks (sacred bones) For all the hard work Dublinbased composer Hilary Woods has done over the last few years, she’s yet to produce an album that ably straddles her twin sensibilities – as a mood-driven producer of tone poems, and a tantalisingly elliptical storyteller. Birthmarks, an LP two years in the making and a meditation on future uncertainty and childbirth, comes close to essential – but, recalling a black metal version of Cocteau Twins’ verdant collaboration with Harold Budd on The Moon and the Melodies, it also flexes the skill of its producer-collaborator, frequent dabbler in noise music and extreme metal, Lasse Marhaug. Where 2018’s Colt aped a little too much of Julee Cruise and Grouper’s obscured detachment – with songs like vague shapes suspended in moorland fog – Birthmarks not only denotes a figurative step forward but an almost literal one. The shape was a feral beast all along, and it’s sizing up the listener, every last blood-mottled hair now hyperreal, every yellow tooth sharp and hungry – see pseudo-instrumentals ‘Lay Bare’ or ‘Mud and Stones’, seamlessly folding into the resplendent folk-industrial stop of ‘The Mouth’, or the genuinely terrifying squall of ‘Cleansing Ritual’; the cellos and

horns across Birthmarks don’t coo or lull. They drool. They snarl. But with all the exorcism comes a sort of ghostly release with the austere closer ‘There Is No Moon’, a fitting demonstration of Woods’ keen sense of pacing. “My dreams, they try and read between these lines,” she mutters, and all the tumult of the preceding seven tracks are granted a disquieting, if ultimately satisfying, ending. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Minor Science — Second Language (whities) A release from Minor Science, aka Berlin-based producer and writer Angus Finlayson, has long been a highlight of the Whities schedule. On debut album Second Language, he greets us wide-eyed and wonderstruck. Both sonically and in terms of the record’s arrangement, there is a counterintuitive sense of precision to the chaos frequently on show here, many of the ideas having been crash-tested on previous EPs. This is one of the more intriguing facets of modern electronic music: the intricacy gifted from both evolutions in computer music and the melding of sound design and musicianship. While this release dabbles within those parameters, the music here is bright and vacuum-sealed at times reminiscent of the digital gloss of Rustie or SOPHIE. But where those artists aim towards the truly synthetic, the music here feels like the soundtrack to a video game representing an organic world. On the other hand, ‘Blue Deal’ seems to be mimicking the familiar act of sampling from funk, but this reverse-engineered production style makes it sound joyfully cartoonish and uncanny. This combination of skill and playfulness is present in tracks like ‘For Want of Gelt’, the extended drum fills toward the end of the track sounding simultane-

ously like he’s fallen asleep on his MIDI keyboard, and stayed up ‘til 6AM perfecting each snare hit. So much excitement comes from this anarchic approach to sound selection and song arrangement; throughout, we’re left guessing what’s waiting around the corner. More often than not, it’s something wonderful. 7/10 Oskar Jeff

MXLX — Serpent (kindarad) Matt Loveridge takes no prisoners on his latest record. The Bristol-based producer, songwriter and sound artist operates within the thick of the city’s burgeoning experimental and electronic music scene, having been a founding member of Beak> alongside Geoff Barrow and working with rising acts like Giant Swan and Scalping. Serpent is a record that testifies to the calibre of the creative company Loveridge keeps. Like his previous LP as MXLX, the superbly-titled Kicking Away at the Decrepit Walls til the Beautiful Sunshine Blisters Thru the Cracks, this is a monster of a record, all leaden feet, oppressive weight and destructive power. Droning synths course through the body of each track, Loveridge’s half-spoken, halfchanted vocals contouring the otherwise amorphous instrumentation into something that feels surprisingly focused once you’ve adjusted to the gloom. There’s nothing here that quite measures up to the face-melting grunt of the previous record’s opener, ‘Your Bastard Mouth Is Open and Will Not Stop Howling’ – another absolute winner of a name – but the cumulative effect of Serpent packs just as much of a punch as that of its predecessor. The Bristol underground scene is among the UK’s most exciting at the moment, and this album is yet another reason why. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Albums Live Baxter Dury White Rock Theatre, Hastings 21 February 2020

JPEGMAFIA Earth, London 27 February 2020

“I came here to do some nasty shit,” cautions Barrington Hendricks, hastily unzipping his orange hi-vis jacket. Though appearing twenty minutes late, he wastes little time to reassure us that no one’s getting short-changed this evening. It’s a genuine disclaimer, and judging by the ensuing frenzy, it’s not one anyone’s about to take lightly. Tonight will be the first of two sold out London shows one week apart for Baltimore’s JPEGMAFIA, and it’s shaping up to be a defining, no-holds-barred assault. Eyeing up the onlookers, he stalks the stage perimeter. No one is truly safe – journalists, politicians, celebrities, misogynists, feminists, rock ‘n’ roll heroes, the alt-right, overly sensitive white people and even Peggy himself all stand defenceless and exposed. The polished keys and course bassline on opening the track ‘Jesus Forgive Me, I Am A Thot’ is momentarily stifled by chants of “fuck you, Peggy”. It all feels dangerous and strangely masochistic, and Peggy feeds off this deprecative ovation. Much like on his previous two records, on stage JPEGMAFIA is erratic

and unpredictable. A rasping, ablebodied vocalist, he spits from the guttural depths of his throat, each round cocked and ceaselessly reloaded. Geiger-counter style atmospherics on ‘Thug Tears’ scrape the air, all the while Peggy writhing through each delirious verse. He briefly detaches himself from his own apocalyptic production, sometimes fluctuating between naked a capella and his music’s hellish reality, all of which are illustrated through bars of brilliant, darkhumoured absurdity. On his latest album, All My Heroes Are Cornballs, Peggy explores his feminine side, and as he returns to the stage following a blown-out rendition of ‘Thot Tactics’, this is played out. “Your make-up is incredible!” he compliments an audience member. Igniting anarchy with abrasive Veteran favourite ‘Baby I’m Bleeding’, he eventually surrenders his tired limbs to ‘Free To Frail’. A melody-driven introspection of his own fame and achievement, it’s the first time he looks truly vulnerable. Spoken with uncensored conviction, he says, “this last song is dedicated to my least favourite musician”. The appropriately-titled finale, ‘I Cannot F*****g Wait Til Morrissey Dies’ feels enough to blast Moz into utter oblivion. Ollie Rankine

Full of down-at-heel artists, down-trodden bohemians and down-from-London bearded types, the population of Hastings can be identified in many a Baxter Dury lyric, so there couldn’t be a more fitting place for him to begin his tour for new album The Night Chancers. Tonight, we’re in the White Rock Theatre as the aforementioned rag tag descend on a venue more accustomed to panto than pop satirists. Pints are downed in front of Jason Donovan posters as the wind crashes in from the coast just outside, the atmosphere an intoxicating mix of jollity and impending chaos. These are Baxter’s people and a warm reception awaits his entrance as he eases into an all-encompassing, careerbest set. The watching crowd might not know ‘I’m Not Your Dog’ and ‘Slumlord’ from the imminent release but the songs are met with gleeful faces – it’s hard not to love Baxter’s wonderfully eccentric presence. While the fresh material continues to plough similar ground to previous works there’s a certain edge to tracks like ‘Carla’s Got a Boyfriend’, perhaps brought on by the cold reality of romantic failure that lifts their onstage delivery. Dury is clearly relishing playing these songs to an audience for a first time, but much of the onlookers’ pleasure comes with old favourites. It’s not until a mid-set rendition of ‘Oi’ that we see some real movement in the crowd, and when ‘Miami’ arrives later on there’s welcome electricity in the theatre. Much of the fun in Dury’s music lies in his clever wordplay and character sketches, and on first listen The Night Chancers delivers this in droves. The title track digs deep into seedy 4am territories, and ‘Sleep People’ depicts the kinds of vagrants with which the Hastings crowd would be all too familiar. Despite the darkness, there’s vivid humour in these sordid tales. The performance is littered with a few unwelcome sound problems which

photography by andrew mangum

Albums Live seem frankly irrelevant to both Dury and his fans, both old and new. Shoulders are shrugged and jokes are shared. “What’s the matter,” he screams, “sea salt in your ears?”. As the band launch into an encore of ‘Cocaine Man’, ‘Prince of Tears’ and epic new album finale ‘Say Nothing’, there’s a typically vicious takedown between songs. “Fuck being polished,” spits Dury. It’s a sentiment that Hastings seems to share. Ian Roebuck

Sleater-Kinney Manchester Academy, Manchester 27 February 2020

The fact that one member of SleaterKinney is playing something close to a hometown show here in Manchester is instructive: they aren’t the band they used to be. Katie Harkin’s mum and dad have crossed the Pennines from Leeds to be here tonight to see their daughter make up part of what is now a five-piece iteration of a group formed twenty-five years ago, four and a half thousand miles away. Not present at an Academy that is a little under three-quarters full is Janet Weiss – not in person, anyway. Figuratively speaking, her presence – or lack thereof – is impossible to ignore.

photography by eleonora collini

Last August’s veer off into dark electro territory with the St. Vincentproduced The Center Won’t Hold cost Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker their drummer. The timing couldn’t have been worse, coming after the album had been announced but before the extensive tour in support of it got underway. What the departure has done is allowed Brownstein in particular the opportunity to recraft this new iteration of the band – featuring St. Vincent sidewoman Toko Yasuda on keys – in her own image. The show is a far more stylised affair than the No Cities to Love tour was five years ago, particularly on the new tracks, none of which sound much less hollow than on record. They also feel out of place next to what is otherwise a veritable hit parade of older material; the sterile synthpop of ‘Hurry on Home’ and ‘RUINS’ kills the pace of the rock and roll groove of old. The fizzing hat-trick of ‘Bury Our Friends’, ‘One More Hour’ and ‘Ironclad’ has the sting taken out of it by the selection of a new cut, creating a weird atmospheric disconnect between band and crowd. This is a band that has undergone serious stylistic divergence before – sometimes on the same album – it’s just that this one seems to be proving a more awkward transition than before. It just doesn’t feel much like Sleater-Kinney at the minute. Hopefully, on the other side of it all, it will again. Joe Goggins

A Winged Victory For The Sullen Bruges Royal City Theatre, Belgium 25 February 2020

A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s (AWVFTS) recent album, The Undivided Five, saw Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie’s ambient neo-classical outfit attempt to navigate the spiritual bookends of existence, trying to unfurl the chain of events that saw both the sudden death of close-friend and fellow composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and the birth of O’Halloran’s first child. The 19th-century Bruges Royal City Theatre feels custom-built for their searching sound, its high-domed roof a perfect conduit for these undulating compositions. The sparse but effective lighting and smoke effects meld majestically with the opulent gold and Rubens red that adorn the baroque auditorium. The duo begin with the sombre piano strokes of ‘Our Lord Debussy’, summoning an atmosphere that grows in intensity over the next hour. During the set, there is no silence, only bridged gaps of tension that reverberate around the theatre as O’Halloran and Wiltzie operate frantically on either side of the cramped stage, with the strings and brass of the Brussels-based Echo Collective oscillating in-between. Minutes tick by with AWVFTS exploring threadbare arrangements; valuable pauses for breath before they invariably grow to a unified cacophony, strings battling one another and piano keys stabbing the brittle electronic veneer to conjure a potent aural life-force. These crescendos are spaced expertly, each visitation absorbing the theatre deeper into its celestial abyss without resistance. By the end, everybody on stage looks exhausted, stumbling through an encore like shell-shocked ballerinas, but O’Halloran and Wiltzie radiate a defiant jubilance, having re-connected sonically with a meaninful period in their lives. It’s an outpouring of cosmic bereavement and bewilderment, and a revelation to witness. Robert Davidson

FilmAlbums and Books

The Perfect Candidate (dir. haifaa Al mansour) At the start of the month of his life, during his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, Bong Joon Ho said, “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” It’s a bit of a ham-fisted intro here, as The Perfect Candidate is neither a South Korean production, nor as extraordinary as Parasite. But what is? Still, I couldn’t help but think of that when watching Haifaa Al Mansour’s latest film, and how Bong Joon Ho might have said “many more amazing worlds”. He’s right about the subtitles, of course – they remain an obstacle for even the most avid MUBI subscriber, who scrolls back and forth fishing via language first and foremost: “Oh yeah, I love world cinema, but how am I meant to work into the night if I have to always be looking at the movie I’m watching?!” The Perfect Candidate is an introduction to an amazing world and a pretty good film – a great film, if you like things low key, which is a speciality of director Haifaa Al-Mansour’s. As the first Saudi woman to direct a feature film, her 2012 debut, Wadjda, was about an 11-year-old girl who defied her parents to buy a bicycle so she could race against boys. It was a movie that kept things beautifully simple as it zeroed in on the gender culture of her country – something that The Perfect Candidate does once again, subtly celebrating the music and local landscape of Saudi Arabia as it goes. Al-Mansour’s real life strength as a Saudi woman is reflected in the story’s protagonist Maryam, a doctor in a quiet corner of Riyadh who’s constantly having to earn the respect of her male colleagues and patients, despite her abilities. When a misunderstanding leads to her becoming the first woman to run for local office she leans into her election campaign, to better the

hospital she works in (her prime/only policy is to resurface the road to the emergency room), but also to prove her worth to most of the older men in the town, including her father – a self-centred musician who hits the road with his band as he mourns the death of his singer wife. Needless to say, the backbone of the movie is its story of female empowerment and societal progress, with Maryam an easy hero to follow, supported by her two sisters. Maryam is the film – in message and dignity. Al-Mansour makes sure to not throw all the men under the bus though – something that many in the West can do somewhat conveniently in an age of increasing Islamophobia. There’s plenty of sexism to go around here, but Maryam’s father cuts a sympathetic, lost figure, whose selfish rather than oppressive. The younger character of Omar, meanwhile, represents a more modern change in attitudes towards women, while his elderly grandfather’s redemption moment in the film’s final scene is the movie’s emotional gut punch, and Maryam’s true victory. Stuart Stubbs

Doomed to Fail: The Incredibly Loud History of Doom, Sludge and PostMetal — J. J. Anselmi (rare bird) Rock and roll has always loved talking about itself. For a genre that hasn’t been around for a century, there’s a deluge of memoirs, oral histories, and so on, many professing to be “definitive” and all hoping to become the next Please Kill Me. Pick a genre, an artist, or a year, and someone will have written 300 pages to tell you why it’s a cornerstone of modern music. Now doom metal has found its noble chronicler in J.J. Anselmi, a writer, sludge musician, and, most importantly, an avid fan of heavy music. His new book Doomed to Fail is a broad window into the

worlds of doom, sludge, and post-metal, with each chapter dedicated to a different band and its contributions to its genre. His approach lacks the intimacy of a memoir and the quirks of an oral history, but as a general overview, the book is a comprehensive account of the heaviest music of the past 50 years. Starting with the influential distortion of guitarist Goree Carter’s 1949 track ‘Rock Awhile’ and finishing with Chelsea Wolfe’s experimental doom folk, Doomed to Fail can sometimes feel like a collection of pitches: “These bands are great, here’s why.” Anselmi is at his best when he lets his enthusiasm run away with himself and his prose drifts into the phantasmagoric melodrama characteristic of doom metal. Of the stoner metal legend Sleep, for example, he writes, “Somewhere beneath an ocean of sand rests a wraithlike creature made mostly of sentient weed smoke. It wears a thick, velvet shroud.” In moments like these, Anselmi shows how doom, for all its weight and darkness, can be incredibly fun. But the format of Doomed to Fail requires Anselmi to move quickly, and as a result he sometimes moves on when you wish he would linger. The violent tension between the D.C. hardcore and metal scenes in the ’80s, for example, gets only a passing mention, along with the fraught relationship between Earth’s Dylan Carlson and Kurt Cobain (Carlson procured the gun that Cobain used to kill himself). In all fairness to Anselmi, however, his book isn’t really interested in unpacking the more fraught and complicated corners of the shared history of sludge, doom, and post-metal. This, in fact, is its greatest strength. Where so many books aim to offer a breaking insider take or an essential narrative, Doomed To Fail is simply a document of the music its author loves. “Before I get into the history of this music,” he writes, “I just want you to know that you can be doomed, too.” And he makes a passionate case for why this slow, ominous music has crawled out of the crypt into so many people’s hearts. As a historical document, that may be more valuable than any fresh tell-all or critical take. Colin Groundwater

Interview

Daydreamer

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of the year

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From Soho to Venice and back again, with Kelly Lee Owens, by Stuart Stubbs. Photography by Jonagelo Molinari Kelly Lee Owens arrived in Venice on a speed boat at sunset, wearing a fake fur coat and sunglasses. “DJs get treated the best,” she tells me at lunch the following day – a lunch laid on by Set Up, a site-specific program of music and performing arts that Kelly will close this evening, in an empty art gallery at the southern peninsular of the Grand Canal that dissects Venice in two with a backwards S. “I’ve had an idea for the photos,” she says while we wait for our food, and describes her black velvet dress with wide sleeves and gold beading, and the bridges she could stand on – “if you’re up for something a bit dramatic? Not that I want to tell you what to do… I mean, we can do whatever. Or try it and see how it goes?” I soon realise that this type of enthusiasm and consideration is typical of Owens. A little later in the day, when I ask her what time she’s on tonight, she says: “12:45, but seriously, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” Like anyone who’s never seen Venice before, we spend the afternoon walking along the canals in awe and repeatedly calling the place ridiculous, because it is – a jewel of a city built in 400 AD in the middle of the sea, on an inverted forest of 10 million trees driven into the silt of the shallows. Venice doesn’t sound or look real, especially at night when it feels like an abandoned Hollywood studio lot. Every building looks too perfectly aged, with muted colours and fading paintwork made just so by a contrived Disneyland set designer. From whatever angle you look at the place it feels 2D, and like you could push it over. As we go, Kelly eagerly tells me about her star sign. She’s a Virgo, which means she’s obsessed with details and precision, and that she’s modest, which stacks up when, as we duck down one narrow street, she insists that she’s not a top DJ, despite what tonight’s booking suggests. “The reason someone like Peggy [Gou] is so good, is because that’s what she’s doing all the time,” she says. “She’s brilliant – in record stores, finding music, every day. But that’s not what I want to be doing – I’m most interested in creating my own music.” We attempt to cross the Grand Canal in a water taxi, fail, and end up on the same side we started. At 5pm, as we walk to the venue for Kelly’s line-check, one of Venice’s 139 churches begins to toll. Up ahead with our photographer Jonangelo, she runs back, grabs her phone from her handbag and bolts back towards the clock tower, recording the bells in her voice memos with an outstretched arm. Her manager Clarisse tells me that she’s always doing things like this. “You never know,” says Kelly, “there might be a sample in that.”

When we get to the Punta della Dogana museum, housed in a low-slung 17th Century customs building, Kelly sizes it up as the festival organiser gives her a tour. “This is going to have a good sound,” she says of the main room, and she was right. I note how modest her rider is compared to other artists with their own areas in the green room. Behind the screen with Kelly Lee Owens written on it is a couple of bottles of red wine and some kombucha. “It’s because my voice is so important to me,” she says. “Anyone can do all the twiddling and mixing, but my voice is what I want to connect with, and even though this is a DJ set, I’m going to try to open with [the Howie’s version of Björk’s] ‘All Is Full Of Love’ and sing on it, because you never see a DJ do that. I’ll never take my voice for granted.” When the show rolls around, Kelly keeps her 60 minutes of techno punchy. She crunches one track to a pulp and watches the room blow up when she releases it. She’s almost out of the door when the stage manager runs after her to ask if she’ll do an encore. Her speedboat picks her up at 10am the following morning. — Where broken people go — “Do I look crazy? Because I was properly crying,” says Kelly a week later in a coffee shop in Soho. An hour ago she heard via Twitter that her friend – DJ, producer, remixer and dance music pioneer Andrew Weatherall – had died. She raises her coffee and toasts him, and remembers a man who never copped off with the business side of the music industry, who never needed to feign interest in aspiring young musicians, even having achieved all that he had. “He was on the level with everyone,” she says. “‘Oh hi, what’s your name? What are you up to? That’s really great.’ He was always interested in other people.” Kelly first met Weatherall ten years ago whilst working at the now defunct record store Pure Groove – “the key to it all”. Jobs in other record stores played their part too, including Selectadisc, on the same street we’re currently drinking coffee on. “Between here and Bar Italia [a few streets away and immortalised in Pulp’s song of the same name as‘Where other broken people go’] I’d go and dream about making music. It was before I even worked in the record store. You know Bombay Bicycle Club – me and Jack [Steadman] used to hang out a lot and he’d DJ around Soho, and we’d go to Bar Italia at 3 in the morning and get a bagel and play on the fruit machines, and jump into locked parks in central London. Dip into a gay bar. It felt like our playground, moving to London from a village in rural Wales.”

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Cover story On a Tuesday night, at the old burlesque bar Madame Jojo’s, at Soho’s most indie of indie nights ever, White Heat, Kelly would knock back the £2.50 shorts feeling completely at home. As a kid she’d been obsessed with Oasis; by her late teens she was helping Foals, The Maccabees and Friendly Fires sell their merch, driving Yannis and Jimmy from the former band to shows in her green Ford Ka. “It was a fucking bass bin!” she says. “Massive speakers in each door, and the round, cavernous pea on wheels.” Some years later, whilst working at the Rough Trade record store, she met Graham Coxon, exchanged details, “and he kind of became my mentor. When I was playing in a band he gave me a Mustang bass to play on tour, and I was like, ‘ah, I sort of cut myself and squirted some blood on it,’ and he was like, ‘great! It needs a bit of scuffing up.’ He really helped me, and he helped me in leaving the band, giving me good advice. He even signed off my American visa, so he’s a good, good man.” What strikes me about Kelly today, who has sat front row at London Fashion Week since I last saw her, as a new name in minimal techno and ambient pop, is how her “indie-ness” goes beyond the bands she used to obsess over and drink with, and runs deeper into the way she gets things done. “DIY is my vibe and always will be,” she tells me, saying of her decision to press her first two singles to 12” herself was because, “I’m very much a doer. I keep doing shit until stuff happens.” So when she finishes telling me about Graham Coxon, saying, “this brings me back to how amazing record stores are for meeting people,” I don’t even clock Kelly’s modesty – it’s not as if Coxon mentors every record store worker he meets. “But then SchneidersLaden came to Rough Trade from Berlin, with all the synths.” The German electronics store, specialising in modular synths, sound processors and sequencers, set up a concession in Rough Trade East for around a year. “I’d be able to go in there and just patch things and try things,” says Kelly. “And that was when I was like, ‘oh, the synth thing is physical.’ And I just felt connected, because before I felt disconnected, even though I was working opposite Fabric at Pure Groove. I was a Welsh girl coming from the indie, melodic, melancholic thing; the crossover for me was The Knife – like, ‘Oh god, I’m into dance music.’ I liked the rounded, warm sounds, and slowly techno and dance music got me.” She had back-up at Pure Groove too, working alongside a pre-Drone Logic Daniel Avery (a record on which Kelly would appear), and James Greenwood aka Ghost Culture, who engineered Kelly’s 2017 debut as well as her forthcoming album, Inner Song. Kelly was now feeling Arthur Russell so much that she wanted one of her own in her live band. She advertised for a cellist on Gumtree and got a response from a guy called Doug who wasn’t one but knew one. For six months, at a cost that is mathematically impossible, she fronted a synth player, her own Arthur Russell and James Greenwood on electronic drums. “That was my indie-ness coming through,” she says, “Like, ‘I’ll just front this.’ But what I started to realise was that people started to genuinely presume that I was just the singer. And

I’m really sorry to report that even now, having just done this track with Jon Hopkins [‘Luminous Spaces’], that’s still the case whenever my voice is on a track. “It was my label boss, Joakim, who said to me, ‘PJ Harvey in the ’90s, when she stood there with a single guitar and just her, was one of the most powerful things I’ve seen – why don’t you just do that yourself?’.” — Inner Song — In Venice, we only briefly talked about Kelly’s new album, when she told me that there’s no grand plan behind it, naturally avoiding how good it is. If she sees Inner Song as the natural evolution of her self-titled debut from three years ago, though, it’s no bad thing, especially for the many who fell so hard for it. It’s a record that once again divides its time between the throb of wordless techno tracks and down tempo dream pop numbers, with myriad of other influences thrown in to both. ‘On’ pulls off each style one after the other, when Kelly’s breathy vocal drops out over the blips, the pace quickens and switches to a low-end thump for the next two and a half minutes. A similar tone – of warmth and smoothness – permeates the whole album, regardless of any given track’s leading style: like the thudding ‘Melt!’, which features perfectly weighted drops, and Kelly’s clearest venture into vintage Krautrock – ‘Jeanette’. By grounding everything in the bass, Inner Song is tied together with a richness that perhaps goes all the way back to when Kelly first heard The Knife. There’s a murky RnB slow jam, too (‘Re-Wild’), some old-school two-step at the end of the otherwise meditative ‘Arpeggi’, and John Cale collaborates on ‘Corner of My Sky’ – something that, as a proud, Welsh indie nut, Kelly still can’t quite believe: “I cried when I finished the arrangement,” she says. The most marked difference is that Inner Song is sounding less dub than Kelly Lee Owens, which is a side effect of Kelly’s most direct decision when making this record: where her first album treated her voice as just another musical instrument, feeding her vocals through a Space Echo or Watkins Copicat, Inner Song lifts her voice to the front of the songs she sings on. “I supported Four Tet in America, and when Kieran saw me live he came over and said, ‘why have you been hiding your vocals? Get them up there next time.’ “But this record is also a reflection of my life. I’ve been through quite a lot in my personal life. It sounds clearer because that’s how I feel.” It doesn’t take two listens to Inner Song to identify much of it as a break-up album. Kelly is, after all, singing hooks like, “So, this is how it must go / In my way / Moving on”, and ‘L.I.N.E.’ stands for ‘Love Is Not Enough’. “What I’ve decided is to not divulge too many of the details,” she says, “especially when there’s another person involved. But the album focuses on a lot of loss. What I’ve realised is that even in the deepest and darkest of times – and this is cheesy – is that sense of hope. There’s always something

Cover story

“I’m going to become like Enya and live in a castle with all my gay friends and cats”

Cover story hopeful in my music. It’s the melancholic Welsh girl thing. Again, I can’t help it. I’ve tried to write something in a major key and I just can’t do it. “I’ll let the lyrics do the talking, but there are many, many losses. And because of these other losses there’s this loss of self. There have been moments during these last few years when I didn’t know any longer who I was or what I wanted. I couldn’t really function.” I ask if that includes her questioning whether she doubted being an artist anymore. “Oh yes,” she says. “I was so affected, physically, by these traumatic situations that happened to me that my body was telling me no, and I’d be in bed for a week. And I had to cancel shows because I lost my voice three times. I wasn’t coping well, and I think your body is the last thing to give up. The most gutting points for me was when I had to cancel Green Man, because that was going to be like coming home for me. I’ve been working a lot on boundary stuff, and personal health – and I think we all need to be working on that. It’s this big topic right now because we’re living in this crazy society. It’s unsustainable.” She points to the opening lyric of ‘Wake Up’, Inner Song’s closing track: “Losing our minds for the short term gain / Short term everything”. “Everything is on speed right now,” she says. “Of course, I come up with a lyric and I see myself in it. That’s me – I wake up and I’m swiping on Instagram, when I’m at my most vulnerable, just awake, when all these thoughts are coming in. We wake up and are between worlds, and we let all of this information in. “That’s a commentary on human connection – “Swipe to the next frame / Swipe to the next face / Another new fate”. Y’know, depending on what way you swipe, your whole life changes, and it terrifies me. I’ve never been on a dating app, and I just can’t. I feel like if I can’t meet someone in real life, I’ll happily die a cat lady. I’ve come to that decision. I’m going to become like Enya and live in a castle with all my gay friends and cats. I’m good with that. I’ll keep making music in my castle for health spas.” —Lonerism — When she was a kid, Kelly had two horses, not because she was rich but because where she lived in north Wales people would pass them around for free because they’re expensive to keep – “‘Do you want this horse?’ ‘Yeah, sure.’” She sang in a choir when she wasn’t singing in front of the mirror. Friends would knock to ask if she was coming out, but she was busy recording the top 40 and harmonising over the cassettes. “Virgo is a loner and I relate to that,” she says. “I spend a lot of time by myself, because I need to recharge. When I was a kid I was outgoing and a loner, in a way. I got the Daydreamer of the Year award in school, and Music Lover of the Year, and I felt understood for the first time. Like, this is me. I will never get an accolade as high as Daydreamer of the Year award. As far as they were concerned it was a laugh, but I was like, ‘yes, they get me.’”

She says that she’s happy completely on her own or in the role of social butterfly, “but people don’t understand that, and think you’re false.” There’s a song on Inner Song that speaks to that, and the sense of hope that threads through Kelly’s melancholic music. ‘Night’ slowly builds to a mantra of, “It feels so good to be alone”, until it kicks on at the drop with, “…with you”. But if we’re talking about earworms from the record, there’s a line in ‘L.I.N.E.’ that nags at me for days, where Kelly gently sings, “Death begins with compromise”. It’s inspired by a quote from American singer Eartha Kitt, who was laughing off and vehemently challenging a question about her having to compromise for a man. In the context of the song, it’s obviously not referring to literal death, although it’s a topic that follows Kelly around due to her previous work as an NHS cancer ward nurse. “I could talk about death all day,” she says. “I feel it was a privilege to be there at the end of someone’s life, and it’s inevitable, so we need to be able to talk about this more. I genuinely believe that you can die well. The hearing is the last thing to go, so when my nana passed I was talking her through her death, and I would do that intuitively in the nursing home I worked at before the hospital and in the hospital. I would have days when I’d have stopped working for the day and someone’s dying and they’re alone, and I’d say, ‘I’m going to sit in that room with that man so that he doesn’t pass alone.’ “I’ve seen a lot,” she says. “The body is just a shell, and I’ve seen that essence disappear and go somewhere else.” I suppose once you’ve cared for cancer patients in your late teens, moving to London to jump over fences into locked parks, keeping in touch with Graham Coxon and finding your own Arthur Russell only to let him go again aren’t such terrifying prospects. That Kelly’s done any of them is really quite incredible, even if Google does tell me that Virgos “take their responsibilities seriously”. It also says, “If you are ever unsure of how a Virgo feels, just look at their artwork.” Before we go – so as not to end this on death (or a Google quote about horoscopes) – I ask Kelly when she hopes people will listen to Inner Song. Like its predecessor, it’s an album that will bang at her live shows, although to get a full sense of Kelly’s obsession with details and precision, the real treat comes when it’s piped directly into your ears. “You should be looking up at the sky, on your back,” she says. “I’d encourage people to do more of that, period. Trust me, an afternoon or hour of that and your perspective on life is renewed.” Daydreamer of the year.

OUT NOW “They invigorate the sense of life on the margins with this whirlwind of psychedelic pop” The Guardian www.islet.wales

O U T 2 4 th A P R I L 2 0 2 0 “From Smiths riffs to Go-Betweens shimmer” Loud & Quiet

OUT NOW

Includes singles ‘Alexandra’ and ‘I Used To Love You’

On Tour in March/April

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Favourites

Curious Worlds Nick Zinner takes us through the film scores that most inspire him, by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography by Nanci Sarrouf

“It’s something I’ve been gravitating towards more and more,” says Nick Zinner, best known as the guitarist in New York band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The gravitation he speaks of is towards making more music for film. It’s not an entirely new venture for Zinner – he composed his first score back in 2009 for the film White Lightnin’ – but it’s something he’s been spending more and more time on. He’s recently composed the score for Knives and Skin, a mystical teen noir directed by Jennifer Reed that follows a young girl’s disappearance in the rural Midwest and its impact on the local community. The score is a considered yet immersive one to match the slow-build pace and tension of the film. Void of Zinner’s typical sinewy guitar work, it is instead full of enveloping soundscapes and layers of rich synthesiser. Scoring films is something that has long been on his mind, going all the way back to childhood. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. “Even when I was a teenager it was a goal of mine to score films. I’d listen to soundtrack records like Twin Peaks and the score to the Krzysztof Kieślowski film The Double Life of Veronique. It sparked something in me.” It also comes off the back of some of his pursuits outside of the world of Yeah Yeah Yeahs not entirely scratching his itches. “The more other projects that I would do and explore, the more it made me want to score films,” he says. “Like I was producing bands for a while and realising: this is not really making me very happy. But the one thing that kept coming back to me over and over was the desire to do a soundtrack – there still seems like there’s so much room to explore and that can be done in that world. There is a lot to learn and so lots of room to experiment. It’s very exciting to be a part of as I’m driven towards curious worlds like that.” As someone who has had control over his band’s output for many years, I ask him if the transition to making music for other people’s vision has been tough. “I don’t see them as being that different actually. Above all I enjoy collaboration. With Yeah Yeah Yeahs the underlying principle at my end is just: will Karen like this? It has to be something that she is going to respond to – she’s not going to sing to something that doesn’t move her. The band comes from a place of back and forth collaboration – that’s where I like to be. I like getting feedback from someone else; I like working towards someone else’s vision.” Zinner also seems to have tapped into a place in which his creative pursuits feel unbound in this world. “I was reading a piece with [Darren Aronofsky’s go-to composer] Clint Mansell a few years ago and he was talking about how he would just sequester himself away with the script until he found the sonic world of it,” he says. “I took that route with Knives and Skin and spent a few weeks in the studio with the script and came up with 40 or so two-minute sketches to see what Jennifer [Reed] would respond to. It’s a really exciting two-fold process because at my end it’s just pure exploration with your creations and innovations; an anything goes situation. It doesn’t even matter if the answer to something is no, it’s just about that moment of pure creation.”

Favourites There’s already more momentum to this pursuit too, with Zinner currently soundtracking a documentary on the OxyContin epidemic in America. “I would just like to keep doing more and more scores and have them be completely different from one another,” he says. “Starting from scratch is the best way to be for me. With film scores, that’s where I am most comfortable. I’m happy to just see how things unfold.” Here Nick Zinner picks five of his favourite film scores: Dead Man Dir: Jim Jarmusch Score by: Neil Young The first time I saw that film, I was like, ‘really, can you do this?’. It’s fucking amazing. It was this super mind-bending thing. The music fits so perfectly and it’s kind of like, fuck, why hasn’t anyone else done this? I can’t imagine that film with any other kind of score, it is just perfect. The thing with Jim Jarmusch’s films is that in principle it’s all so simple but it rides this wave across all kinds of different classifications, feelings and moods. It moves between all of these things so well – it’s a beautiful balancing act. I watch that film at least once every year or so. I saw it when it came out and I was in high school. I remember just sitting to watch it and thinking, ‘damn Neil Young is awesome.’ I don’t think it had actually occurred to me up until then. It was around this time I was also getting into Ennio Morricone, the Birthday Party and their guitar player Rowland S. Howard. There was a common thread between the guitar style of all those three for me. I probably hadn’t been exposed to that kind of guitar playing before; I was really into metal as a kid growing up. So that haunting, spare, slightly spaghetti western vibe, I don’t think I had ever heard anything like it. Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford Dir: Andrew Domink Mars – National Geographic TV show Scores by: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis I’ve selected these as a joint pick because to me they represent something of a bookend with those guys. Jesse James was the first score I heard from them and I just watched the TV show Mars and I was so blown away by that soundtrack. It’s just amazing – they have totally created a world for this show to exist in. The show goes between talking heads and then future sci-fi imagined worlds of humans colonising Mars, and there’s barely any sound in it; it’s almost all of their score and it’s just fucking amazing. It’s so beautiful and moving. The new season they didn’t do the score for and it’s terrible, I can’t watch it. It does not work. The difference between the tones and instrumentation on Jesse James and Mars is huge – Mars is mostly synth, piano and Warren’s weird but beautiful violin loops, and Jesse James is almost all acoustic instruments. Yet they can still make something, with both palettes, that sounds like something that is uniquely theirs.

Favourites Beyond the Black Rainbow Dir: Panos Cosmatos Score by: Sinoia Caves This film is super crazy. If you’ve seen Mandy as well then you know this guy has a very specific style. Even if you love it or hate it, I respect someone so much who sticks to their vision. The score is something I listen to all the time – it’s kind of the same thing over and over, creating a sonic universe that really stands apart from everything else. The guy that did it is in the rock band Black Mountain too. It’s so beautiful and weird and terrifying at the same time. It doesn’t sound like it’s from any specific era either – it maybe alludes to some of the 1970s prog stuff but it’s also really modern and timeless. In the context of the film it works so well – it heightens everything within every scene. Mandy Dir: Panos Cosmatos Score by: Jóhann Jóhannsson I love everything that Jóhann did and so to pick one that crystallised everything that I loved about him was tough. I think this is his strongest but it’s hard to say. There’s a lot of his soundtracks where I don’t love the film: even something like Arrival, which I do love, I feel like I’m a little bit more in the know about how the sounds were made. But with Mandy it was so crazy because he really went out of his zone and incorporated a lot of collaborations. Like the doom metal guitar with Stephen O’Malley – those collaborations were so mesmerising. Also just thinking about it being his last project, there’s a lot of heavy things on that score. At the same time the love scene is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard from him. It feels like this soundtrack comes from such a pure place. Wings of Desire Dir: Wim Wenders Score by: Jürgen Knieper and Laurent Petitgand I was thinking of picking Under the Skin here but I think that film’s score has had so much praise that there’s nothing new I could add to that praise. Wings of Desire was another film that I saw when I was a teenager and this one is definitely more soundtrack than score [Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Laurie Anderson, Die Haut, Tuxedomoon]. It was one of the first time’s as a teenager that I was really paying attention to the music being used and how it was being used. Also being exposed to all this new crazy music, like what is Tuxedomoon? Pre-internet, it led to me wanting to seek a lot of things out and just find out any information – it was really exciting and valuable. There were so many great musical choices made for this film to create that world at the time – it really made me take note. It was one of those films that made me be like: I have to go to Berlin. That film could have been sponsored by the Berlin tourist board.

Tell me about it If Steven Umoh’s voice sounds unusually knowing, prematurely wise, Thames inflections bleeding into his native Nigerian accent, anchored between rapping and singing, then that’s because he’s lived a lot of life in his 27 years. Born in Calabar, a port city in the south of Nigeria, he moved to London aged 17, then Norwich aged 19, and it was in Norwich that he would become Obongjayar, finding his creative feet. Now, without having released a full album, Umoh’s stock amongst his peers couldn’t be higher. As well as working with people like Giggs, Sampha and Ibeyi, he collaborated with Kamasi Washington on XL label boss Richard Russell’s debut solo record, on the track ‘She Said’. Speaking about the impact of Obongjayar’s work on his own, King Krule explained, “if I wanted to encapsulate something, he has done it for me. When I see his stuff, I’m like, damn that’s fucking amazing.” Obongjayar’s music is hard to define, pitched at a kind of electronic Afrobeat minimalism. Across three EPs – Home, Basse and now Which Way is Forward – Obongjayar has taken ideas from downtempo hip-hop, new soul, electronica, even ambient. All gates are open. Where last year’s Bassey was focused on the women in his life and how he related to them, Which Way is Forward deals with his most serious subject matter so far: the personal, the political, the spiritual. The EP is, he explains, “a mirror that allows you to look inward, to understand trauma, to heal.” “One of the first things I bought was a bootleg Fela Kuti CD” I was always into music but never had the opportunity to grow up around it or even actively go out and buy it. I was just listening to stuff that was around. I wasn’t actively listening to music; it was very passive for me when I was growing up. I wasn’t super into anything; it was just stuff that my uncle would play in the car or stuff that I’d hear on the radio or whatnot. It was just like American hip-hop, predominantly that and a little bit of Afrobeat. Then I bought that bootleg Fela Kuti CD from the local music shop, and that was when I thought I was actively trying to get into listening to music. But that just came and went. I was 13, 14 at the time and it was just cool. It didn’t really have any impact on me at the time – I just thought it was cool. I knew I wanted to make music but at that point I wasn’t really trying, or thinking about it in that sense, I just wanted to be exposed to something that was relatable to where I was from. “Moving to Norwich was when I really found what I wanted to” My mum moved to London, and moving to be with my mum and getting an education for myself was why we left Nigeria. I moved to Norwich just because I wanted to be independent of my mum; I wanted to go somewhere else. I felt that the lifestyle I was trying to live in London… it wasn’t who I was and I wanted to get away from it and start again. Didn’t want to go to university in London because that thing would have continued and I wanted a fresh start. I went to the art school in Norwich to study graphic design and that’s where I met my closest friends, who opened my eyes to a lot of things musically and culture-wise. I dabbled in recording when I was in Nigeria but when I moved to the UK that

Tell me about it

Obongjayar Race, trauma and spirituality in modern Britain, told in Steven Umohâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own words, by Fergal Kinney Photography by Duncan Loudon

Tell me about it strong idea of what I’m doing and who I am, but there’s still room for growth, as with everyone. You never really know who you are until the day you die. ‘Still Sun’ is a track about not allowing yourself to be down, or not beating yourself up when you’re down, it’s a cycle isn’t it? You’re down, you’re up, there’s a whole cycle of emotions you go through as a human being. If you’re down, it’s not the end. That’s not the final form and you can get yourself out of that rut. Don’t go and do something that’s going to fuck your whole life up, just keep going man.

meant I had more access – the internet was quick, I had access to things like YouTube and SoundCloud. I was intrigued and interested by what was going on. But Norwich was where I really found what I was trying to do musically, what I was trying to get to. I’ve seen both sides of music – I’m part of the generation that bought stuff on iTunes, but then I remember a Bon Iver album coming out on Spotify a week before it was released properly and that was a massive thing. I remember the point when it became as predominant as it is now. “My song ‘10K’ – about running – is a bit of a metaphor” I thought the idea of people who wake up every morning and go for a run was interesting – I put that against the idea of waking up and just going to work, or just getting it, you know what I mean? That’s part of my ritual: I wake up every morning and write or do something that relates to what I’m doing to better myself. That was the idea behind it – not necessarily physically getting up every morning; it’s more of a metaphorical sense, like just trying to survive the day and prep yourself for the next day. That could be writing lyrics or writing a song or trying to make sense of the day before, it’s a good exercise to do and it sharpens your mind, keeps you on point, you don’t miss anything. “I’m spiritual, but not religious anymore” I believe in humans and people. When I say spirituality, I don’t mean a God, I mean I believe in people and that we’re in control of our own futures. I’m talking about human beings and being in control of your life. No one’s going to do it for you – coming out from the sky and picking you up – you’ve got to do it yourself, or the people around you. I have a perspective on life and a

“I wasn’t ready to make an album before, but that’s changed” An album is a huge deal and you need to figure out what you’re doing before that happens. The next thing I’m going to do will be an album, I just felt I wasn’t ready for an album up until the most recent EP. I wanted to understand what I was doing a little bit more. I now can’t wait to get to the studio. It’s something new every day – new ideas, new sounds, you never get bored. And it’s also repetition isn’t it – you’re in the studio with people who’ve been doing things a while, you pick things up, you do it in your own solo format and make it yours essentially. That’s pretty much what I’ve done. The reason my stuff sounds the way it does is because I’m being myself and doing things I enjoy rather than following a formula or trying to do something someone else has done – that’s why I think the music sounds the way it does. I take what I need technically, but me and the producer, Barney Lister, we just try and do our own thing rather than following anything. You just get used to that and it just gets better and continues to get better. “If the colour of your skin is different you’re treated differently in Britain” It doesn’t matter where I’m from, how much money I’ve got, what I do in society, doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t care who you are, it doesn’t know who you are, but it knows you’re Black or Asian. These are stereotypes that have been put on people of colour for the longest time and is how society is run. The EP is trying to change those stereotypes; I’m trying to get people of colour to understand that we can flip the stereotypes if we fight for it. With those things I’m talking about my experience as a black man in Britain, a Nigerian man in Britain, the things I face when I go through security at the airport and the things I’ve gone through personally. The idea of racism is glossed over now because it’s Britain and it’s so covert, and not as overt as it is in other places – we gloss over it but these things are very prevalent in our society. People like myself have been through a lot worse and a lot of different things that go in that way, so ‘Soldier Ant’ is talking about my experience of being black and Nigerian in Britain, and understand that because of my blackness, it’s a given that I will experience these things.

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Environment

No Music

on a Dead Planet 62

Environment

How Naomi Klein and the fantasy land of Coachella helped inspire Savages drummer Fay Milton to found Music Declares Emergency, by Luke Cartledge Photography by Timothy Cochrane

In the side room of a modest community centre-cum-café in East London, Fay Milton is a little flustered. “It’s been…” she struggles to find the words. Hectic? “Yeah, that’s one way of putting it.” To be fair, she’s got a lot going on at the moment. Best known as the drummer of post-punk band Savages, one might expect Milton to have had a quieter period since the group went on hiatus following the touring cycle for their last record, 2016’s Adore Life. Apparently not. In the intervening years, she’s embarked upon new project 180dB with Savages bassist Ayse Hassan, toured internationally as a session drummer, and formed Music Declares Emergency, which is what I’m here to talk to her about. “Basically, for me, everyone I’ve met who’s involved in the climate movement has had this moment where the penny drops and you realise how fucked we are,” she says, frankly. “I had that when I read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. It’s like eating the apple from the tree of knowledge – you can’t go back once you’ve read it, and you’ve got to do something about it.” So she did. “At that point [in 2016], I was really deep in touring with Savages and I didn’t have much of an outlet,” she recalls. “I was going to parties and telling people the world is going to end, and it just felt like no-one cared. It was really frustrating. At that time my response to it was to make some videos about it, and I interviewed some really interesting people – Tom Morello from Rage Against The Machine, some people from NASA – but that felt like all I could do at that time. I tried to speak to people about making our touring a bit greener, but it didn’t seem to be as much of an issue for people at that point.” She’s visibly frustrated by the memory. Fortunately, it was to become a more salient issue soon enough. In late 2018, a group of climate activists launched a new initiative, called Extinction Rebellion (XR), and Milton made sure that she was involved from its early days. “It just felt like suddenly there was something that was hitting the nail on the head, and all these people were coming out of the woodwork who’d been thinking the same thing,” she says, and it was as a result of the Big Bang of XR that the founding elements of Music Declares Emergency began to coalesce – albeit with a literal ocean between them at first. “I’d been working closely with XR on putting together the first Rebellion action. The week that it happened [the first long-

term ‘occupation’ in April 2019], I had to go and play Coachella in California. It’s a fantasy land, in the middle of the desert but full of grass that’s watered all the time, it’s incredibly commercial and artificial… it’s a great festival but it’s a distillation of the fantasy world humans live in – like, this isn’t reality. And I was seeing all these images from my Whatsapp groups of what was happening in London, and it looked like fucking Woodstock, like I wanna be there.” Yet at Coachella – arguably a bastardised, cash-soused descendent of the original, iconic Woodstock – nobody seemed to particularly care. This didn’t make any sense to Milton as she watched the actions unfold at home. “It just felt like music needed to be part of this, because what was happening felt like festivals when I first went to them, with this real spirit of community and coming together. And if music’s ignoring what’s going on then music’s getting out of date and needs to change. Music represents society and if it’s moving into this fantasy world, that’s not cool. “Anyway, I got back and it was the last day of that Rebellion action, and there was this citizen’s assembly in Marble Arch. I just bawled my eyes out crying because it was so emotional.” That night, invigorated by what she’d seen, she resolved to start a music-specific climate initiative, and began laying the foundations for Music Declares Emergency. — Safety in numbers — From the beginning, Extinction Rebellion and its fringe activists have been subject to significant criticism. The climate “sceptic” tendencies of the right take issue with its perceived hypocrisies, barely concealing their contempt for the issue; the activist left, though broadly supportive of the movement’s objectives, have expressed concerns about the group’s tactics, and particularly its relationship with the law. Last year, the grassroots legal support group Green & Black Cross issued a rare public statement, explaining why they had withdrawn their backing of XR. They cited “serious concerns about how senior organisers… are approaching legal observation and policing”, which conflicted with their role of “supporting people at risk of police and state violence”. It’s not an uncommon complaint among experienced organisers of direct action and protest movements when discussing XR.

Environment

“Everyone I’ve met who’s involved in the climate movement has had this moment where the penny drops and you realise how fucked we are”

Music Declares Emergency is a separate entity to XR, but it’s closely affiliated to the larger group, sharing members and co-ordinating its actions. With this association comes the potential of similar criticism – but Milton is resolute in her work. “We don’t have the luxury of time here. It’s better to have values than just hide away, even if not everything completely falls into line,” she asserts. “The system needs to change.” This defiance is rooted in a deep familiarity with, rather than a dismissal of, the arguments that have been made against XR and the wider climate movement in recent years, and that has a great deal to with the logic behind Music Declares Emergency. “There’s a huge barrier to musicians getting involved in the climate movement, and that’s that they feel like hypocrites,” she says. “Being a musician involves taking a lot of flights, so people feel they can’t speak out – not only will they get called out on it, but even within themselves they feel like they’re being a hypocrite and they don’t know how to take a position. But that’s not gonna go away, and we need to deal with it. There’s a lot of mental health issues in the music industry, and if you’re worried about climate but you have to fly for work there’s a real cognitive dissonance which is really unhealthy. But if we get loads of people together, it’s safety in numbers, and if we can know that our industry is making its best effort to work to appropriate, science-based targets, then musicians can feel they have the right to speak on this stuff. “The climate denial movement, funded by the fossil fuel industry, are changing tact, ‘cos you can’t deny climate change any more, and they’re placing the emphasis on individual change – recycling your plastic bottle and doing your bit – and that’s not going to make any difference if governments don’t set real targets. What we need to achieve is fucking enormous and it’s so much bigger than one person’s action. It’s achievable but it’s about the people who are in charge making changes.” So far, this macro-focused approach seems to be working. Nearly 3000 artists, organisers and music fans, including big names like The 1975, Foals and Billie Eilish, have signed up to the group’s “Declaration”, which asserts the following: Music Declares a Climate and Ecological Emergency. We call on governments and media institutions to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency. We call on governments to act now to reverse biodiversity loss and reach net zero

greenhouse gas emissions by no later than 2030. We recognise that the emergency has arisen from global injustices and will work towards systemic change to protect life on Earth. We acknowledge the environmental impact of music industry practices and commit to taking urgent action. WE WILL: Jointly support one another, sharing expertise as a collective industry and community; speak up and out about the climate and ecological emergency; work towards making our businesses ecologically sustainable and regenerative.  If all this sounds rather grand-scale, well, it is, and it has to be. However, Milton also has some pragmatic insights and suggestions that may feel a little more achievable on the ground. “As an industry we’re tackling some key things: singleuse plastic in venues, which isn’t as easy to implement as you think, but it needs to be done so let’s just do it. Recording, manufacturing, merchandise – fast fashion is incredibly polluting – the main thing at this point is speaking up and speaking out, encouraging music fans, the public, to speak about it and use common sense. “One of the biggest things music fans can do is thinking about how they travel to gigs. There’s a lot of talk about artists flying around the world, and rightly so, but actually, in terms of emissions much more is released into the atmosphere by fans travelling to shows. So if you can walk, cycle, take public transport, ride-share… that’s all really important. It doesn’t feel like much but if everyone does it, that’s huge.” — Beyond politics — 2020, then, is off to a busy start for Fay Milton. On 31 January – the day the UK left the EU – she and other Music Declares Emergency organisers travelled to Brussels to meet Frans Timmermans, European Commission Executive VicePresident for the European Green Deal. “He’s amazing, a huge music fan,” Milton beams. “He’s been to Pukkelpop 30 years in a row, he goes to Glastonbury, and we talked about how there’s such power in music and it can be used to effect change.” The symbolism and timing of the trip is significant. “Music, like climate change, transcends borders, and our actions should do that as well. The UK music industry is vast and spreads way beyond this little island.” She concurs with

Environment

XR’s mantra that their campaign is “beyond politics” – a phrase that’s attracted criticism in itself. With that in mind I suggest that serious engagement with “capital p” politics should be considered. “The issues are the issues, and whoever’s in charge, no matter what party, needs to make the changes,” she counters. “You could ask an 8-year-old child and they’d know that fossil fuels are bad and we don’t want more of them, and yet there are coal-fired power stations that are still being planned – they’re not even old ones, they’re gonna build more. These are things that governments have the power to change. Policy is really important – things aren’t gonna change unless they’re put into law. But that’s why we need to keep getting out in the streets and getting public support.” A big year beckons. Milton and Hassan are working on a 180dB album, “featuring loads of amazing people”, and a summer of festivals and some “very exciting” Music Declares Emergency projects lie ahead. Balancing it all can be tricky, says Milton. “I’d have the record done by now if it wasn’t for all this

climate stuff. They’re both quite difficult and insecure things to do – there’s a lot on my mind!” That balancing act has informed the creation of the record. Reluctant to tour heavily while being so visible a climate advocate – “it’d wig me out to get on a plane all the time while doing this – that’s just about personal choice, it’s not a judgement on anyone else” – 180dB remains a studio-only project for now. Milton seems to be enjoying the freedoms that this affords the work: “We can think ‘what kind of music can we do if we don’t have to think about touring this?’” By finding a way to further attune her life to our ecological reality, it sounds like Fay Milton has hit upon new modes of activism and art-making that were hitherto unavailable to her. There’s something in that.

In the fallow months when Shaggy and Sting aren’t releasing an album together, I find inspiration by fishing on Google for album sleeves from the past. Google then returns images like this one, because it hates me. It features a clown (on the left) and the boy from Jerry Maguire. Let’s talk about clowns for a minute, because you’ll only find it distracting otherwise. Personally, I can take or leave clowns. They don’t bother me. BUT… they don’t always do themselves any favours, do they? I don’t think this particular clown could begrudge the screams, is all I’m saying – his hair is clearly styled using his own sweat, his mouth seems to be sliding off the right side of his face (c’mon mate, that’s an easy fix), his nose is a crushed strawberry (?), and his eyes aren’t actually open; those are his eyelids with lines painted on them. (Just think for a second about how creepy it would be to be in the company of one other person who then closed their eyes – hard to know if it would be better or worse if they weren’t dress like this, isn’t it?) It all looks above board with the title, though. And there was only one font to go for here. But don’t you think ‘CIRCUS IN TOWN!’ sounds more like a warning than

a celebration? It’s not ‘The Circus Comes To Town’, or even ‘The Circus Is In Town’; simply ‘CIRCUS IN TOWN!’, like ‘MIND THE GAP’ or ‘KILLER IN PARK’. I’ll tell you who gives zero fucks about any of this – your man from Jerry Maguire. Look how nonplussed he is by the monstrosity in front of him. “The human head weighs 8 pounds.” He’s actually happy. He’s loving the freaky clown with the mouth that’s sliding off the right side of his face. He’s even got his arm around him, and it’s clearly making the clown feel uncomfortable. Sure, he’s always dreamed of a little boy sitting with him instead of screaming in his face and running away, but it’s literally never happened before, because of all the things we’ve already covered. He has no idea what to do, and can’t even summon the energy to blow up his yellow balloon. He’s thinking, ‘what’s this kid’s fucking problem – he’s weird.’ And y’know what, I’m kind of on the clown’s side there – who looks at a clown in this shape in that way? I mean, really? The big question is: does this work as an album sleeve? And the answer is, clearly, absolutely it does not. ‘CIRCUS IN TOWN!’ could have featured a happy Ring Master, a strong man and a trapeze artist. And perhaps a clown with his mouth on straight. Instead it features this impossible game of spot the hostage.

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Articles inside

Reviews

Music Declares Emergency

Obongjayar

Nick Zinner

Delmer Darion

Tara Clerkin Trio

Anna B Savage