Loud And Quiet 123 – David Byrne

US Girls, Quay Dash, ********, Lucy Dacus, Nicky Wire, Shirt, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Richard Russell

Loud And Quiet

David Byrne Hope comes to town

issue 123 £ z ero

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com

Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH

I realise that for regular readers, something looks up. I don’t mean the obvious point that everything about the format of this magazine has changed – I mean the numbers. Our last issue was numbered 91, and now we’ve jumped to 123. We weren’t going to do that – we were going to stick to our irregular volumes that gave us 29 issues in volume 1, just 2 issues in our ill-fated volume 2, and the 91 issues of volume 3 that you’ll be most familiar with, printed on newsprint.

Suddenly it felt depressing to go all the way back to number 1 again just because we’ve reformatted Loud And Quiet to what we think is our best version yet.

So yeah, as we ditch the volumes model, this really is our 123rd edition. What an interesting story that was.

Stuart Stubbs

Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Marketing & Sales Manager: Dominic Haley Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Lee Bullman Contributing Editor: Dafydd Jenkins Contributing Editor: Stephen Butchard Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Aimee Armstrong, Andrew Anderson, Alex Weston-Noond, Brian Coney, Cal Cashin, Chris Watkeys, David Cortes, David Zammitt, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Derek Robertson, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Patrick Glen, Rachel Redfern, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Sarah Lay, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tristan Gatward.

Issue 123

Contributing photographers Ant Adams, Brian Guido, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jonangelo Molinari, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood,Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Timothy Cochrane.

With special thanks to Annette Lee, Aoife Kitt, Ben Harris, Jon Wilkinson, Matthew Rankin, Natasha Foley, Noam Klar, Roy Killen

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2018 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

******** . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Quay Dash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Shirt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Lucy Dacus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ed Schrader’s Music Beat . . . . . . . . . 46 David Byrne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Richard Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Nicky Wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 At Home with US Girls . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 03

Spring sounds at the Barbican Sat 17 Mar

Just Jam Reloaded with Skengdo x AM, Murlo, Kamaal Williams and more Wed 4 Apr

Simian Mobile Disco present Murmurations with Deep Throat Choir Fri 6 Apr

Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble Sat 14 Apr

Thurston Moore: 12x12

Sun 29 Apr

Mexrrissey – La Reina is Dead Mon 30 Apr

Alessandro Cortini + Sarah Davachi 11–14 May

Sounds and Visions A weekend curated by Max Richter and Yulia Mahr Fri 25 May

Field Music with the Open Here Orchestra

Money

Last year, 2.68 million people were tricked into going to see Guns N’ Roses

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

L

S D A O

O

No one is quite sure why, but for some reason being successful – at least in monetary terms – is very bad for you. This is especially true if you’re a musician: you shouldn’t operate heavy machinery after drinking alcohol, and nor should you pick up a guitar if you’ve got too much money in your current account. Both can result in the loss of fingers and/or dignity.

This phenomenon is most evident in the realm of the gig.

At its best, a gig is a shared communal experience that takes us out of the present moment and connects us to others. Most cultures participate in this in one way or another, whether that’s Southern Baptist churchgoers singing spirituals, pagans dancing around Stonehenge on the solstice, or metal heads shoving each other in a mosh pit. It’s a human need, something sacrosanct.

But when gigs are more about money and less about a shared experience things start to go wrong. In particular, I’m talking about the mega-gig.

A mega-gig is one put on by a band or artist as part of a major international tour. Aspects of the mega-gig include moving bits of stage, fireworks, large-screen projections, terrible music and monumental ticket prices. They involve rock bands staffed by old white men, cost millions of pounds to put together and make many millions more.

U2’s 360-degree tour is the perfect example. Spread over three years (c’mon, guys), it featured the band playing in the round, with a 50-metre tall metal “claw” hanging over the stage holding everything in place. They had to make three of these, which cost £15 million each and looked like part of a Soviet base from Red Alert: Command & Conquer Red, only with added impotency.

Such mega-gigs have an irresistible allure for both punters and the media. The latter loves the stats: ‘a single show consumes enough energy to electrocute all of America’s death row inmates’ or ‘it would take 10,000 children crying continuously for ten hours to fill up its water feature’ and so on. Or how in 2017 Guns N’ Roses grossed $292.5 million on the road (selling 2.68 million tickets to mostly innocent people), second only to – yep – U2, who made $316 million from us while we endured ‘The Joshua Tree’ for a second time.

The former? Well, the mega-gig creates a logical fallacy that is tricky to spot, a false equivalence between cost and quality: ‘the gig is more expensive, therefore the gig is of higher quality’ or ‘the gig is larger, therefore the gig is of higher quality’. Whereas larger size and greater cost does equal higher quality in the realm of pizzas, aeroplanes and guns, it doesn’t work for gigs.

That’s because you lose a sense of intimacy in a large crowd. Ask a theatre designer and they’ll tell you that a capacity of 2,000 is about the upper limit for an emotionally charged atmosphere. Yes, some people have had amazing experiences

MO EY N at festivals where crowds number in the tens of thousands, but this can usually be attributed to drugs and/or low intelligence – Manchester’s Parklife being a prime example.

Let’s go back to that U2 tour. Yes, it featured a giant claw.

But did the claw prevent the band from playing songs of their ‘No Line on the Horizon’ album? No, it did not. And yes, the show cost many millions to put together. But did that stop Bono from turning up? No, it did not. The audience wasn’t even treated to the spectacle of the Edge falling off the stage – that didn’t happen until the ‘Innocence & Experience’ tour of 2015.

Back in 2006, I actually went to a mega-gig. The Rolling Stones were on one of their “maybe this is our last, but maybe it isn’t” tours. The gig took place at Don Valley stadium in Sheffield. It was very cold, and most of the audience was sat down.

The band bashed through their hits happily enough, and the stage rolled out into the middle of the crowd at one point, which was sort of impressive. The sound quality was such that it felt like you were listening to the whole thing with a cardboard box on your head. I have no idea what the tickets cost (my dad bought them) but it was a lot.

Basically, I fell right into the Rolling Stones trap. I mistakenly thought seeing some old men play instruments in the far distance would be cool because it was in a big arena and the tickets cost a lot. I sort of knew it would be awful, but my markettrained mind tricked me into going anyway. (Also, part of me was thinking at least one of them would die shortly after, so I could tell my friends how “yeah, I saw them just before Keith died, actually.” Selfishly, all five have continued living to this day.)

The mega-gig is a scam, just like its American cousin the megachurch, where shyster preachers encourage the congregation to “give all they can” for the cause. We, the innocent punter, are drawn in to this leather-clad hook-a-duck, and only later realise we didn’t want the crappy plastic prize in the first place.

05

Fate

A world with Ziggy Stardust and nothing else On 3 July 1973 David Bowie stood onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon and ‘retired’. What he actually said was: “Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest, because not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” Then he played ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ (baller) and fucked off forever (a couple of months). What Bowie actually meant was that it would be the last show they’ll ever do AS ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS, he just forgot to mention that piece of pretty important information.

On purpose. It’s reported (with zero evidence but 100% 1970s’ razzle) that Bowie’s distraught fans consoled themselves with a mass orgy across the Odeon’s seats – sad, ill-treated seats that now have to sit through Lee Mack Live at the Apollo – marking a different time when venue security didn’t try to shoo you out of the door like a pigeon while the drummer is still throwing his sticks into the crowd.

Personally, I have no problem with Bowie’s choice of words in this mythical moment of rock and roll spin, even if it is kinda like calling your mum and saying: “I’m dying… (to buy a puppy)” just for a bit of attention, but we should spare a thought for the Spiders From Mars. Bowie had told Mick Ronson his plan but the others (Mick Woodmansey and Derek Smalls from Spinal Tap) had no idea. Sacking your band on stage is cold, even if you are Ziggy Stardust, and I think if David was still with us, he’d give me that.

Where Bowie instantly received a lifetime of respect was in his sleighing of a cash cow that wouldn’t be repeated again until Busted split up in 2005. I know that that sounds like a crap joke, but they’d only recently played eleven – ELEVEN – sell-out nights at Wembley Arena. No one saw Charlie leaving after that, just like no one saw Bowie killing off the alien that had made him a

06

megastar. And in a parallel universe, maybe he didn’t. Maybe Bowie stood on the stage in Hammersmith and said: “Of all the shows on this tour, this particular show will remain with us the longest… because... guys... check it out... we’re about to head back into the studio to make a new album for you cats!”

There would have still been an orgy, and Mick Woodmansey and Derek Smalls would have had a better night.

In this Sliding Doors hypothesis, we’ll have to live without some of our favourite things ever. If Bowie is to Keith Lemon his way into Ziggy there’ll obviously be no room for any musical progression at all. We’d still get the ‘Diamond Dogs’ LP, as that was pretty much a record by the ghost of Ziggy Stardust anyway, but everything you like from Bowie after that is gone. That’s no ‘plastic soul’ Bowie. No Berlin trilogy. No Bowie and Nile Rodgers linkup. Labyrinth, you get the feeling, would have still happened.

Threatening to have out the eye of any nearby, waist-high goblin with the contents of your leggings seems, after all, a very Ziggy Stardust thing to do. But Bowie’s Christmas duet with a nearly dead Bing Crosby is definitely out – a massive blow for lovers of surreal T.V. broadcasts, in which a country club chairman and drug addict rooming with Iggy Pop sing two separate songs at the same time, kind of in time, but not really. Neither skeleton appears to know who the other one is and I don’t think it would have helped the situation if Bowie had shown up with a gold moon on his forehead and a ginger updo.

While Ziggy played and played and played guitar, leg-ups would have fallen by the wayside. I’m not talking about Eno, and I’m not talking about Tony Visconti, who I’m sure would have found his way to ‘The Futures Is Medieval’ by Kaiser Chiefs in 2011 on his own; I’m talking about Lou Reed finding mainstream success with ‘Transformer’, and Iggy Pop with ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Lust For Life’. David Bowie produced those records, not Ziggy Stardust, who, need I remind you, was only interested in “jamming good with Weird and Gilly.” Ziggy was selfish.

Listen to ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, though, and ask yourself just how long diminishing returns would have lasted. It’s probably forever.

If the twelfth Ziggy album had been twelve times worse it would have still been pretty good, and definitely better than ‘Earthling’ (Bowie’s jungle album).

There’s just this issue of 2012 and Team GB. No Berlin Trilogy means no ‘Heroes’, which is bad. That would have meant our Olympic athletes walking out to a different song, and I think we all know that that song would have been ‘Movin On Up’

by M People. Sir Chris Hoy waving a big flag to ‘Movin On Up’

by M People.

I actually think that Mick Woodmansey and Derek Smalls probably welcomed the change in 1973. And who’s to say that they didn’t really know, anyway? You sense these things, don’t you? In any case, fuck ‘em.

words by abi crawford. illustration by kate prior

END OF THE ROAD 2018 30 Aug—2 Sept Larmer Tree Gardens

Vampire Weekend Feist • Yo La Tengo

• •

St. Vincent Ezra Furman

Jeff Tweedy • John Cale • Fat White Family Oh Sees • Gruff Rhys • Julia Holter Mulatu Astatke • Ariel Pink • Destroyer Omar Souleyman • Big Thief • (Sandy) Alex G James

Holden

&

The

Animal

Spirits

•

This

Is

The

Kit

Hookworms • IDLES • Shame • The Low Anthem Protomartyr • Hiss Golden Messenger • Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Damien Jurado • Amen Dunes • Imarhan • Japanese Breakfast Richard Dawson • Du Blonde • Julien Baker • Jim White Flat Worms • Mdou Moctar • Childhood • Lost Horizons Colter Wall • The Weather Station • Adrian Crowley Nilüfer Yanya • Sweet Baboo • Darren Hayman • Gwenno Insecure Men • David Thomas Broughton • DUDS • Snail Mail Plus many more acts, comedy, film, literature and art installations. Dance till you drop in magical fairy-lit woods and laugh ‘til you cry at some of the world’s foremost comedians, all while sampling delicious award-winning food and hand-selected craft beers and ales. Come make new friends under the stars and around the campfire.

endoftheroadfestival.com

★★★★★

The Guardian

★★★★★

Daily Telegraph

Relationships

When SOPHIE hooks up with vocalists they embark on mutual transformations

Relationship columns are unhelpful. We all know it. Each hot take is reductive and written under silly time pressures. They don’t let you read their messages? Dump that arsehole. They don’t mind your stubbly genitals? Keep that angel. They’re also ridiculously repetitive. They’re also ridiculously fun. There’s a perverse pleasure in placing your trust in some randomer on whether you should break up with your spouse of five years. The only writing more likely to elicit such an emotional response is, um, art criticism. If relationship columns slant towards reductive naval gazing, a music writer like myself isn’t the best person to criticise. So why not double down and combine the two?

So yes, this is kind of a relationship column. ‘Relationships’ can mean many things within music. It’s the relationships artists write about. It’s how music reflects and affects our own relationships. It’s the collaborations, remixes, and influences that get the best music made. This month, we’re looking at the producer/artist relationship, and how SOPHIE continues to subvert what that dynamic should look like.

When the electronic cult hero released ‘Bipp’ in 2013, it felt like the arrival of a singular vision for pop – one that emphasised its artifice, sex appeal, and uncanny-valley emulation of actual emotions. Before long, it became apparent that SOPHIE’s vision wasn’t so singular after all. She found comrades as part of the PC Music collective, a label/artistic statement/buzzword making waves on the Internet.

Great music followed, with lots of thinkpieces lingering close behind. Like A.G. Cook, Kero Kero Bonito and all the other eccentrics SOPHIE was compared to, her music was wrapped in so many layers of irony that the Internet had a hard time telling what to take seriously. Was a song like ‘Lemonade’ making fun of chart music or embracing it? By the time the first longform project had rolled around, 2015’s ‘PRODUCT’, some had already written SOPHIE off as a bad joke about commodification.

Then SOPHIE started collaborating with Madonna and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. Her elastic synths gave ‘Bitch I’m Madonna’

08

the edge its title sought, while the creepy/kawaii combo was a natural fit for an artist as unpredictable as Kyrary. This alien approach to dance music that had seemed so outside of mainstream acceptance complemented pop royalty from the East and West. Credits for everyone from Charli XCX to Vince Staples followed.

Something was different about SOPHIE’s status, though.

While other bankable pop producers – Pharrell, Timbaland, Diplo, Jack Antanoff – are brought on board for their name-recognition as much as their signature sound, SOPHIE is uniquely picked for her philosophy.

Let’s start with Charli. With the PC Music helmed ‘VROOM VROOM’ EP, the chameleon pop star transformed herself again.

This time, Charli became a pop diva cypher. The choruses were condensed into brash mantras. The grating edges of her voice were underlined with autotune. She struck gold when repeating the experiment with her following mixtapes, ‘Number 1 Angel’ and ‘Pop 2’, where SOPHIE produced the highlights.

Then there’s Vince Staples, whose ‘Big Fish Theory’ combined blunt rap realism with a twisted electronic pallet in a biting vision of hip-hop to come. Naturally, SOPHIE was called upon for one of the ugliest cuts, ‘Yeah Right’, featuring Kendrick Lamar. It’s the kind of instrumental that anyone could sound menacing on. Staples has always had an ear for beats, but SOPHIE allowed him to emphasise the darkness within the niche he’d carved out for himself.

Indie-pop outcasts Lets Eat Grandma had a lot to live up to after releasing an oddball gem of a debut. Every music video is filled with two kinds of comments: “THIS IS SOOO GOOD!”, and “PLEASE DON’T SELL OUT!”, sometimes written as one scrappy sentence. The duo released ‘I, Gemini’ in their teens. SOPHIE wasn’t the obvious collaborator for their follow up, but halfway through their new single, the producer’s unmistakable presence takes over. The chorus explodes. “HOT PINK!” yell the duo, their bratty vocals fusing with the gurgling production. Rather than selling out, the band embrace pop and satirise its stereotypes simultaneously with SOPHIE’s help.

SOPHIE’s production has been used by her collaborators to signify their own artistic transformations, and Let’s Eat Grandma returns at the time when SOPHIE is making her own.

‘It’s Okay to Cry’, her first solo work in two years, marks the first time she’s shown her face in a video, boldly broadcasting her transgender identity in the process. Musically, the song is unmistakably SOPHIE – aggressive, tongue-in-cheek, a little bit creepy. But there’s a fresh confidence to her vocal presence.

While her collaborators obscured their human presence to fit her style, she might have found a way to transmit her own by working with them.

words by stephen butchard. illustration by kate prior

FEET

YUSSEF DAYE S

O CTAVIAN

STEREO HONEY BAD GYAL

STELL A D ONNELLY

COIN

TOM TRIPP LO MOON

BAKAR

GAFFA TAPE SANDY

EVES K ARYDA S TEN TONNES

BLOXX

FRE YA RIDINGS

K YARY PAMY U PAMY U MIK AEL A DAVIS MAHALIA

PHOEBE BRIDGERS BENNY MAILS LET'S EAT GR ANDMA GIANT PART Y

NIKHIL D'SOUZA

IGUANA DE ATH CULT

BØRNS

MANU CROOKS

SPORTS TEAM

NILÜFER YANYA

THE ORIELLES

SLOWTHAI

HUNTER & THE BEAR

BAD SOUNDS

WYVERN LINGO

S O N S O F K E M E T

PROMISEL AND

AMA LOU

SASSY 009

GUS DAPPERTON

PALE WAVE S

PEACH PIT

SHINERS

BILLY LO CKET T

SKR APZ

HER'S

JAPANE SE BRE AKFA ST

TICKETS ON SALE

FREAK

YELLOW DAYS

GOAT GIRL

EASY LIFE

WHENYOUNG

POPPY A JUDHA

LOUIS BAKER

GAIKA

NA AZ

JOYCUT

TOM WALKER

DREAM STATE

TOM GRENNAN

EROL ALKAN

ROLLING BL ACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER

HOCKEY DAD

SAM FENDER

THE NINTH WAVE

THE KITE STRING TANGLE

THE HOMESICK

MANSIONAIR

TOM WALKER

TEEKS

HIMAL AYA S

SUPERORGANISM

DYL AN CARTLIDGE KAMAAL WILLIAMS UNDERWATER BOYS DERMOT KENNEDY SAMM HENSHAW

AND MANY MORE

Ageing

Sweet 16: The year Albert Hammond Jr. was smoking weed and writing terrible songs, wearing inflight pyjamas

First of all, in this photo it’s not a cell phone, it’s a house phone.

I’m serious. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 23. I loved gadgets. I’d change my answering machine message every two weeks. I loved stuff like that. It was the coolest phone.

This photo was January 25th 1997. I was almost 17, but still 16 here. I had my friend next to me – we were probably getting stoned. In fact, I know we were getting stoned. I love how my cigarette is almost down to the butt, too. I’m wearing pyjamas. I think my dad [Albert Hammond] had come back from a trip and those are the Virgin Atlantic pyjamas he got. I liked aeroplane stuff at that time, I guess. That was a weird time. I was figuring myself out then. By the time I was 17 or 18 I felt like I had my look going on.

At this time I was still at home, in Los Angeles. I was dreaming about wanting to write a script or make a movie, play music or be in a band. It was the beginning of falling in love with that stuff. Talking Heads. Velvet Underground. Beethoven. I was probably 17 or 18, but I got into a big crush on him. Then movies

by David Lynch. When I saw Blue Velvet for the first time I just had no words… Ace Ventura. Pulp Fiction. Oh, The Doors’ ‘Greatest Hits’ CD. I fell in love with Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison – that got me wanting to sing and play guitar. Then I saw The Beatles and saw that you could do it in a group and I was like, ‘That’s for me’.

At 16, I was writing the worst songs. Anything you love, you start doing terribly. I did some cool stuff on a four track that I’d found in the basement or the attic that my dad didn’t use. A little Tascam. It was hard because I was just, like, in a different headspace and I’d fallen in love with music and I felt like it was my own

10

thing. In my house it was almost hard for it to be my own thing, though, because I share a name with my dad – he did that. It was always like... I never, tried to separate it in my head. I think that’s also why I wanted to leave so bad.

I fell in love with singing, writing songs and playing guitar but going from not knowing any of it to actually doing it is a big belief. I’m impressed with my younger self for being so ‘go for it’.

I was not shy. I was definitely outgoing.

I’d met Julian [Casablancas] a few years earlier [studying in Switzerland] – he was just like an older brother. We’d play video games because we were the only Americans there. Sometimes you meet people and you have an energy with them – it’s just good. We did not stay in touch. It was all just random acts of life that connected us the moment I moved to New York. There is a series of events when I was 18, that I don’t know if I manifested it, but so many things happened to me that if you wrote them in a movie you’d think that they were fake.

Would I give my 16-year-old self advice? Fuck yeah! I don’t know how to say whether he’d believe me. I would have liked to have practised more and had a little more focus. I wish I could tell myself to try everything once, to open that door – because I think that’s amazing – but to not get hooked on anything and waste life. I don’t think I’d believe myself at all. I don’t think I would have listened. How can you tell someone with a blind ambition that information? It might change their blind ambition. It might bring too much reality in that it goes away. I guess you either figure things out for yourself, or you don’t.

as told to greg cochrane

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

LAST OF THE EASY RIDERS ‘Unto The Earth’

HATIS NOIT ‘Illogical Dance’

Agitated LP / CD From high in the Rocky Mountains, Last of the Easy Riders descend with Unto the Earth, its new psych-infused country-rock long-player. RIYL: Byrds, The Band, CSNY, Eagles, Gene Clark, Electric Prunes.

Erased Tapes CD / 12” Inspired by everything from Gagaku — Japanese classical music — and operatic styles, Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, to avant-garde and pop vocalists. Illogical Dance also features Björk-collaborators Matmos.

PRETTIEST EYES ‘Pools’

EXEK - AHEAD OF TWO THOUGHTS

Castle Face LP / CD Recorded perfectly to harness the animal on a nice inanimate slab of plastic you can take home. For fans of Screamers, Suicide, Chrome, and yes, a hint of a down unda Birthday Party.

W25TH LP Ahead Of Two Thoughts, EXEK’s sophomore release,pushes headlong into haunted, post-punk territories conjuring the ghosts of PiL, This Heat and Swell Maps.

ONCE AND FUTURE BAND ‘Brain’

Castle Face MLP While we await whatever warlock’s potion they are brewing up next, they’ve pulled a maxi-EP Brain from the vaults for a moment in the sun. All of the mastery you’ve come to expect is at play here.

HOLY - ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS

PNKSLM 2LP / CD Musically, All These Worlds... bursts with the youthful joy of listening to David Bowies The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars or Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star for the first time.

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“Mind Minerals ebbs and flows through Ambient, Drone, Psychedelia & Space Rock” 9/10 Soundblab

on Vinyl / CD / DL

“If Brian Eno formed a stoner-rock band they’d sound something like this” Mojo

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Interview

********

We asked this band with an unpronounceable name a bunch of questions and they answered them all in Gary Barlow quotes, by Dafydd Jenkins Photography by Gaëlle Beri

“It’s a pass I’m afraid,” said the Domino Records PR person, and for a time, that was that. But what did we expect from a group known only as ********? Earlier this year, the elusive Edinburgh duo released their first and final album ‘The Drink’. The album’s a great dirty pint, brewed of everyday cataclysmic nuisances – sell-out shock-comedians, Christmas shopping, TV therapists, Reddit pages of recommended suicide methods, etc – that, eerily enough, manages to recall the dearly departed Mark E. Smith’s misanthropy, reinterpreted by disaffected art school yahoos.

Nevertheless, the mystery of ******** was all too tantalising, and we were more than willing to drink the long draught.

The monotonous voices and hammered synthesizers of Ailie Ormston and someone named Ω betray little of their personalities beyond a disaffected smugness, largely associated with the independent music scene in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the way Scots young and old generally tend to regard things down south. Naturally, we had many burning questions: who are you?

Where did you come from? What’s this “New Weird Britain” thing, then? If anything, the list of questions was a sobering reminder of music journalism’s shoehorning tendencies. Maybe it was inevitable we would bring too much of ourselves to this Q&A, but only because the enigma of ******** gave us little to work with in the first place.

An hour into our disappointment, another message appeared from Domino. The duo would be happy to answer our questions via e-mail, but we readily expected another catch.

“Authorship and individualism are discouraged; preciousness of ownership is challenged,” read ‘The Drink’’s release statement.

True to “promising and disparaging” form, all of ********’s answers here come from Gary Barlow interviews for The Guardian, The Telegraph and something called driving.co.uk.

Who can say why. It’s quite funny – especially considering it may have taken the duo longer to select and copy-paste Barlow’s answers appropriately (some more successfully than

12

Interview

others) than to provide their own. But what could be more punk-subversive than responding to interview questions in the words of a tax dodger – or worse, a televised singing competition judge? Rightly or wrongly, we expected and hoped for some structure, condolences in a world gone to shit, if not some vague sense of solidarity from artist soothsayers. Devoid of hope, we print this Q&A as if holding fragments up to the light, hoping that Gary Barlow’s exact height might hold some deeper significance in our troubling times.

How are things going?

We’re in such a good place now as a family. It’s the same for my career. I say no to so many things; I never used to be able to.

Who exactly are ********?

I’m 5ft 8in. I’d love to be taller.

How do I pronounce ********?

Thinking negatively.

How did ******** come about? How did you come across each other?

When I was 16, I took a demo tape to the publisher of a record company, who played it while I sat there. He then opened the window, threw the cassette out and said, “Never come back again.”

Reportedly, ‘The Drink’ is your first and final release as ******** .

Is this the case? And why?

Las Vegas. I often take the kids in the summer and we have a ball. It’s so ghastly and awful and manmade, and I just love it.

I don’t gamble, though – I find being in the music industry enough of a gamble.

Your inspiration comes from the everyday – but what about the music? I hear in ‘The Drink’ the influence of The Fall and This Heat, musicians who were famously dissatisfied with the music they were hearing at the time, so they made something else.

Can you relate to that feeling? What musical influence, if any, do you find carries across into your own output?

I sing and go into my own world a lot. That’s the biggest complaint: not being present.

You both seem to come from visual art backgrounds – did that also inform your approach to music?

The world was our oyster in 1993 and the Range Rover was the only car that could match my ego at that point. It guzzled fuel.

I spent my whole life filling the damn thing up.

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Interview On your album’s press release, there reads an acronym: Generally Underwhelmed. Incognito. Niceties. Not Even Slightly Suggestive. What can you tell me about “Guinness”?

It comes from having that period when I didn’t work. That really was the worst bit. It wasn’t not being famous any more, or even not being a recording artist. It was having nobody who needed me, no phones ringing, nothing to do. Because I’m still too young to do nothing. I was only 24 when all that happened. Now, at 40, I feel I’ve got more to give than I ever have.

“Authorship and individualism are discouraged; preciousness of ownership is challenged,” says ‘The Drink’’s press release.

Does this address your approach to collaborative songwriting?

If I get an hour, I reach for a book. I am reading an old Stephen King book at the moment called The Stand.

One aspect of your ethos is that you’re “capable of compromise.”

Could you elaborate?

Stephen Fry would be a brilliant dinner guest. I have had dinner with Elton John many times and he’s always a hoot: he is so brilliantly bitchy, and he loves football.

I’ve read that these songs existed in one form or another on YouTube. What made you decide to actually put them on record?

Were you approached by the label? I get the impression that ‘The Drink’ wasn’t even necessarily meant to be heard as an album.

Let It Shine.

Was there a rationale to how an album was put together from these songs, in terms of tracklisting and artwork?

My wife.

I was surprised with how I could relate to many songs on ‘The Drink’, mainly because I myself feel a similar sort of amorphous dissatisfaction with contemporary society, which I think is a central theme running through the album. Is this something you could speak to?

It comes with a government health warning. But most people have at some point got to pick themselves up – you’ve got to turn up for work and get on with it. I can be stood here, loaded with stuff, but I don’t want to tell anyone, and by you all ignoring it, you are actually helping me right now.

Google ********, and you’ll get next to nothing. Was that intentional?

The one thing I was dreading was that the last album would be on my shoulder the whole time I made this one.

Did you happen to catch the music writer John Doran playing a track of yours on Radio 3’s ‘Late Junction’, and your coverage on Tiny Mix Tapes? What happens if ******** blows up?

Absolutely everything. They were one of the few couples in history who never really argued. They were very positive. When my dad died, someone said that he was very happy in his own skin.

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If the hype is to be believed, there’s something of a “scene” currently happening in Glasgow, perhaps related to what John Doran calls “New Weird Britain” with groups like Happy Meals and stuff on Domestic Exile. Are you aware of any such a scene, or even just a shared mentality within music, arts and independent culture in the Glasgow area?

Going back to where I was in 2002. I didn’t have a record deal.

I was very fat. It was a bad place.

Have ******** ever performed live, and do you intend to in future?

I split my trousers on stage in Germany in the early ******** days.

I made the situation worse by edging over to the side of the stage.

I should have just gone to the crowd, “Look what I’ve done!”

They would have loved it.

‘The Drink’ deals with, as you say, “contemporary and indifferent existence in The West”, which I take to mean the brutality and boredom of late capitalism. Do you think of The Drink as being in any way political?

With ******** we’d explored most styles and everyone expects me to do ballads, that is what I am known for but for this, the whole folk tempo felt right. It is a very good backdrop to write something quite negative over. I realised I could get away with some really dark lyrics and it unlocked the whole album for me.

What’s next for you, as a group or as individuals?

The cancan. It’s celebratory and it would demonstrate the ridiculousness of this life.

Are things as shit as they appear in the world of ********?

I’m the last generation that started off singing in social clubs.

My parents would drive me there and people would scowl at this young lad with blond spiky hair about to come on stage. But I loved winning them around – I would make the people go from scowls to standing up clapping. That was my apprenticeship.

So when I go on tour and I have two hours to take an audience on a journey, where you have them going crazy at the beginning, you make them cry a bit in the middle and then you have them happy at the end. That to me is a lost art.

Interview

Quay

Dash

Repping trans hip-hop without being defined by it,

by Aimee Armstrong Photography by Emily Malan 16

Interview The 2010s have given us a new group of hip hop artists – such as Junglepussy, Mykii Blanco and now Quay Dash – who are diametrically opposed to the hyper masculinity that’s often tied to rap’s roots, paving the way for a new wave of queer and trans MCs. “Fuck him on a leather recliner / Smudging all my lipstick and my matte make-up liner,” Quay Dash raps on her track ‘Decline Him’. In the video she wears red PVC trousers and sparkly heart chokers while posing on a roof with prop guns.

The video, much like her others, is an example of 2010s DIY glamour. An aesthetic championed by artists like Mhysa, Klein and Charli XCX. With lyrics about Gucci and Bentleys you could be led to believe she lives the life of a lame manufactured pop star, but Quay had a tough upbringing in New York, spending time in foster homes and experiencing a tonne of transphobia after she came out at the age of 19. And despite being formerly a signed artist she is now self-managed and has complete creative control of her output. “I manage myself, I pick my own beats, I write my own music – I do everything.”

Formerly a London-based artist, I ask her about the decision to leave the underground label Perth Records (who released her ‘Transphobic’ EP in 2017), which she says she can’t tell me much about. What she does say is: “I needed to be independent again… Once I gained my independence back I wouldn’t really need a record label.” She adds that she felt it was mandatory to release a LP whilst signed to a label, and much prefers releasing music in a mixtape and EP format.

Born in the Bronx, being a rapper wasn’t her childhood aspiration, and yet Quay has shown a huge amount of versatility. As an MC, she’s rapped old school, club trap and recently collaborated with SOPHIE on the leather infused club rap banger ‘Queen of this Shit!’. “[SOPHIE] hit me up via email and we talked about working on a track together,” she explains. “We got in the studio and I wrote down some lyrics to the beat she had, and we ended up fucking it up. ‘Queen of this Shit!’ was a really good experience – working with SOPHIE is just like magic; she is just really talented when it comes to engineering, sound and producing.

I really appreciate her for looking out and helping a sister when in need.”

In person Quay has the same confidence and swagger that her persona on that collaboration would suggest. But when I ask her whether she’d collaborate with SOPHIE again she says: “Maybe not… I tend to move on and do my own thing.” She also tells me she’s going to be working on a track with Diplo, which is a big step for her as an underground rapper.

Despite the braggadocious lyrical content, she’s humble in her aspirations telling me, “every rapper’s dream is to be big, I just wanna keep this career going as long as it can go.”

She’s also produced in the past. “On a track called ‘Bitches’,” she says, “that I put out on my Soundcloud. I got so much heat over it… even family members, like my mum, they were just like, you should have rapped over it, but the thing was it was just a regular, rave track – it was just something I was

into at the time. I’m still into rave/techno/dance music but I just wanted to put it up there to show I produce as well, to show that I make beats too.”

As a transgender woman, Quay Dash is part of a small minority within her genre, working within a scene that’s often been hounded for its misogynistic and at times anti-LGBT tropes. Often accused of toxic masculinity, countless other artists (from Eminem to Tyler, The Creator) have always spat notoriously homophobic lyrics. Just recently, Migos faced a backlash for their lyric “I don’t vibe with queers” – not the first time they’ve caused a controversy, following their alleged refusal to perform with Drag queens during an SNL performance with Katy Perry in May 2017.

“They all grow up like that,” says Quay, “it’s just a way of being when your cisgender and straight – you’re not always open.

That’s what they’ll always be like until someone puts them in their place and lets them know. Until then, that’s what it is, I guess.”

Migos aren’t the only artists who’ve been criticised. Cardi B, perhaps the biggest female artist in hip-hop right now, rightly caused offence when a video emerged of her saying: “If my man cheat on me, I’m get him drunk and let a tranny rape him.”

In a time of turmoil for transgender rights, with media scaremongering in regards to public bathrooms and hate brigades from both the alt-right and ‘trans exclusionary feminists’, Cardi B’s comments feel dangerously problematic.

“She’s always talking, she’s always saying something,” says Quay. “She just runs her mouth a lot. Whatever she has to say she should just put it into music rather than running her mouth on social. It’s not only her that’s made transphobic comments, and I know she’s the new female emcee, but I don’t pay much attention to her. When she drops a song, you know, I listen to it, but I don’t really look at Twitter or anything. But what else can we expect from Cardi B? Rather than her running her mouth?”

As much as Quay Dash is open and vocal about her transgender identity, with numerous tracks on the aptly titled ‘Transphobic’ addressing those issues, she doesn’t want to be simply defined as the trans rapper she’s often written as.

“Being pigeon-holed as just a trans artist sucks. People label you but I’m not going to stop representing for my community and doing what I have to do, for all trans girls out there but also women in general, because, you know, we need someone out there with a voice in the LGBT community setting an example.”

Where it might seem reductive to tie Quay Dash to her trans identity, though, the notable lack of transgender representation not only in hip-hop but in music as a whole points to one thing. Her presence – like that of Mykii Blanco or Anohni or house and techno musician Octo Octa – is a sign of progression at a time when it’s easy to think that there’s none. “I wanna make history so that other girls can come up and do the same thing,” she tells me. “You know, I have a voice, I’m gonna keep using it.”

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Interview

Shirt

The art of hip-hop, by Katie Beswick Photography by David Cortes

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Interview

When a hip-hop musician describes his work as “Duchampian” there is, in the space his breath leaves between the end of that sentence and the start of the next, part of your mind that thinks, “Hang on. What?” Such reactions are familiar to New York rapper SHIRT, whose approach to making music is influenced by conceptual visual artists who use found and pre-existing objects in their practice. Artists including Marcel Duchamp – who famously displayed a urinal at an exhibition for the Society of Independent artists in 1917 – and John Baldessari, whose text-on-canvas piece ‘Pure Beauty’ (1968) is the inspiration for SHIRT’s album of the same name, released on Third Man Records in February this year.

“I find a lot that I’m looked at like I have three heads,” SHIRT tells me. “Every time I’ve gone into meetings along the years – or just any kind of situation where I can progress my music – I’ve been talking about it as an art practice. A conceptual art practice. Especially the last couple of years, I’ve been approaching writing songs in a specific way, where I might have, like, a sentence and I’ll go off that sentence. And it’ll start with that sentence, and the song will go off, and it’ll expand. And I’ve been trying to talk about this in terms of an art practice, because I realised a couple of years ago that the way I’ve been writing songs was more conceptual artist than your average rapper.

And every time I try to talk to that I’ve been looked at like I have three heads.”

The three heads response was certainly discernable in the reactions to SHIRT’s break out work to date – not a music release, but a fake New York Times article that he wrote about himself in 2014. Using text from articles about other rappers,

Shirt put together a profile of himself and published it on a website he had designed as a copy of the New York Times site, posted at a remarkably believable URL (nytimes.la, which has since been taken down) under the by-line of the Times’ go-to hip-hop critic, Jon Caramanica. The press reported this project as a publicity stunt, describing it variously as either a ‘desperate’ attempt for mainstream attention or a ‘genius’ marketing ploy, mostly overlooking that it was in fact a formal experiment with ideas of appropriation and authorship that have long inflected contemporary art practice, and that continue to shape SHIRT’s own work. For example, in another experiment with appropriation, SHIRT erected a 10-foot high replica of artist Damien Hirst’s ‘Mickey’ in the Queensbridge Housing projects.

“I had been reading a bunch about this artist named Kenneth Goldsmith who is a professor and a poet and a writer,” SHIRT says, recounting the Times story in that gentle, precise voice, his excitement in the work still tangible almost four years later. “He believes specifically that enough great writing has been done. And we don’t have to do more. It’s about using great past writing to describe new things and not generating new writing. That’s one aspect of what he talks about, and it was really interesting to me. So I had this idea to do a New York Times article where it would be about me, very deeply about me, but using written things about other rappers. So let’s say, articles about Jay Electronica, or certain people where there were paragraphs where you could be describing maybe my music, or my upbringing, or my life.”

The article was tweeted and retweeted by SHIRT’s fans and a mostly baffled music press, who, in the period between its

19

Interview

“Every time I’ve gone into meetings along the years, or just any kind of situation where I can progress my music, I’ve been talking about it as an art practice”

publication and the realisation that it was a fake, couldn’t quite understand why this relatively unknown rapper had a profile on the front page of the Times website. SHIRT shrugs. “It kinda like, blew up.”

One unexpected result of this blow up was that SHIRT formed a connection with Kenneth Goldsmith himself, whose colleagues forwarded the article to him. When he attended a talk by Goldsmith the following year, the artist remembered the article and invited SHIRT to present on his wider body of work to students at the University of Pennsylvania.

“He was teaching an ‘uncreative writing’ class he called it. At Penn University, and he had written all these bestseller books. It was a big deal. And for me to have this much older, amazing man take some sort of interest in what I was doing and tell me that what I was doing, there was a future in it, I need to keep going and all this different stuff, that was an incredible, incredible thing.”

— Leaving New York — Under Goldsmith’s mentorship, SHIRT – a high school drop out with no experience of undergraduate University education – applied for and was accepted to a Master of Fine Art at a university in Europe, where he has been working on the ‘Pure Beauty’ release. “Me being in school is a huge deal,” he says.

“I’m a high school drop out. I never thought in a million years that I would be able to go to a Master of Fine Art or any kind of higher education in that sense. So [Goldsmith] explained to me about this one woman that he knew in this programme and that if I put together a portfolio who knows, maybe I could apply.

And that’s what I did. I could put together a great portfolio because I had been working and I had a lot of projects to show and strong sense of what I was doing. And they accepted me.

And it really changed my life. You know I was in New York that whole time. My whole life up until then working on my own in a vacuum and this was the first time – I mean to move to another country like this, and be in a program with all international students has just been incredible.”

The Masters program heralded other things too – friendships, an expanded sense of his practice and spiritual rewards.

20

SHIRT describes the sense of poetry he feels in the connections and timing that have led him to this creative place, where he is making his best work. “I been feeling lately like I can really do anything. I have this thing about me, like, ‘we can get this done’. It doesn’t matter how crazy something seems, or how hard it sounds.”

It’s a place where serendipitous meetings continue to lead to good things. On a trip to LA last summer, SHIRT tells me how he visited Baldessari after sending a cold email to his studio, making links with another artist whose support has helped with the evolution of his creativity. “So I found a cold email. Like I found an info@baldessaristudio or something like that. So I cold emailed it. Just a small paragraph about ‘I’m from New York, I’m in Europe right now, I’m in this MA program.’ And they wrote me back right away and said, ‘John would love to meet you.’ And I couldn’t believe it. I was in a café when I got the email and I got tears in my eyes. It was a really big deal for me.

“I came to Baldessari’s work, I guess a couple years ago.

Maybe even three or four years ago. There’s a video online that was passing around of an interview that Tom Waits, the musician, narrated. And I found that [Baldessari] had a wit and had an intellect that I was really interested in. I forget exactly what in the video really attracted me, but I started looking at his work and I just became a real fan.

“And he had an artwork from the late ’60s called Pure Beauty. It was a singular work where he wrote ‘Pure Beauty’ across the centre of the canvas. But it was also a larger show – he had other pieces in the show. And in his book were reflections on, like, what’s considered authorship and what’s pure beauty and it’s not necessarily a direct thing. It’s been really interesting in that I’ve had this name for the album for a year. Even before any song was recorded I had this idea, and in my head ‘Pure Beauty’ represented that maybe the purest beauty is almost ugly.

Or maybe what we’ve come to consider ugly is actually beauty at its purest form. And that’s something I was playing with a lot. And just the implications of that, like you know, turning something on its head. Something that maybe was negative into something positive. It’s as simple as that maybe.”

Shortly after their meeting, Baldessari agreed to allow SHIRT a license to use the ‘Pure Beauty’ image for the vinyl

Interview

21

Interview

album artwork. “The entire album packaging as far as the vinyl is concerned is original Baldessari works. And my thing is not changing anything – it’s literally the cover. You know many people they take visual cues and they change it slightly, they change the words. My thing is I come from the Duchampian – I’m a student of Marcel Duchamp. So it’s very much using things that have already existed and bringing them into new light and new energy.”

The serendipity, the perfect – perhaps fated – evolution of the album continued with Shirt’s signing to Third Man, an unexpected twist of events that happened the night before ‘Pure Beauty’’s planned independent release. After years of disappointing meetings with companies who didn’t quite get his approach (or who loved the work but weren’t quite convinced enough to partner up) SHIRT had resigned himself, more or less happily, to the life of an independent artist, creating pop-up works across Europe, LA and New York, and sharing them on social media, while releasing his own music, often offering downloads for free. “In my mind I was like [‘Pure Beauty’] is just another project I’m going to release on my own. And I’m not new to that, so I decided that I wanted it on iTunes and all this different stuff. That it would be available on streaming services.

There’s ways for independent artists to make that happen.”

It was all in place, and then, out of the blue, the night before he dropped the record, “A kid that works at Third Man reached out. And they said that they’ve been watching me for the last year and can we get on the phone? And this was literally the night before the album was supposed to come out. So I decided very quickly to respect the talk. Meaning like, not just look at this as something else. I look at things very much as poetic, sometimes. Especially the timing of things. It’s like poetry to me in a sense. And so when they reached out the night before it was like a special thing. We got on the phone, we spoke.

And for the first time in my life, the first time, I was speaking to these music business people, they don’t make art, they represent like Jack [White] and Margo [Price] and real musicians.

But they were saying things that I’ve never heard before. I was finally talking to them about who I am and what I love and what inspires me. And they were saying things back that I really had never heard from music business people. I really… I felt like it was something special. So the next day I sent an emergency email to these streaming services and I pulled the album down.

I decided to wait to see what would happen. And over the next few weeks we got a deal done and they decided they wanted to release the record.” Not only that, but they signed him for a two album deal, and agreed he could release ‘Pure Beauty’ exactly as he had already created it, exactly as he wanted it, without production interference. “So the record that’s out is untouched.”

Shirt says. “This is the record, the pure and raw record that I made on my own.”

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THE DEBUT ALBUM • OUT NOW

“T H IS A L BU M IS GOI NG TO BE A GA M E CH A NGER” 9/1O A LBU M OF T H E MON T H - M IXM AG george-fitzgerald.com doublesixrecords.com

Interview

Lucy Dacus 24

Interview A songwriter making sense of the most traumatic year of her life, by Greg Cochrane Photography by Timothy Cochrane

On New Year’s Eve, during a house party at her home in Richmond, Virginia, Lucy Dacus had her fortune told. She thought why not. On a personal level, 2017 had been a wretched year – a steady conveyor belt delivering the 22-year-old bad news.

“This girl, who I didn’t even know, came to the party and gave me this year-long reading,” she explains. “Month-bymonth it was so specific. So far, it’s kind of lined up.”

In the past Dacus has been sceptical about the prophetic powers of the tarot card deck, and was taught that the pentacles (coins) were a symbol of Satan. “It’s hard to look to the future and see nothing, to know nothing,” she muses. “I still don’t know what’s going to happen, but having something to have your mind bounce off is nice. That’s why I like tarot. It gives you something to reflect on.”

It’s all part of a fresh way of thinking for Dacus, a new “mood of just trying to be open to new things.” For so many reasons the past year has been one Lucy Dacus is keen to put behind her. “I guess I could just list things,” she says laughing, but not joking. To begin, some of her close family suffered health problems, compounded by her own serious issues including a bout of appendicitis that forced her to have surgery. She was attempting to buy a house for the first time, a process that proved “trying”. Three of her tours got cancelled.

“It was a little bit miserable,” says Dacus, sitting in an east London cafe. “Towards the end of the year, I just had to laugh…

Like, come on!”

Interwoven with these practical challenges she was having to navigate something much more troubling. “I got out of a relationship in 2016, which I was waking up from in 2017 – realising that it was abusive,” she begins. “Letting myself say that, it took many months to come out of the numbness... to stop being brainwashed. So, that’s all been a growth. It’s ended up being positive, but it is difficult wondering how I let that be a part of my life for so long.”

Deepening the ordeal, still, this year of personal upheaval was set to the backdrop of Trump’s first 12 months in office.

A vociferous supporter of Bernie Sanders through the 2016 election campaign, Dacus is a passionate advocate for equal rights, attending marches and collecting donations for community organisations at her shows. To have Trump sat in the White House representing her country, she says, felt – feels – “horrible”. “It’s just absurd and I feel like I’m in an alternate universe,” she says. “It’s really hard maintaining hope.

“Coming to Europe I’m embarrassed to be an American sometimes, but then I just have to hope that people know that I am not part of Trump. I’ve thought about wearing shirts at the

airport – just like ‘not my president’. In little ways I just want to assert that opinion.”

And then there were the disturbing revelations surrounding Harvey Weinstein (and subsequently many other men) revealed in Autumn 2017, that opened out into a global conversation around the abuse and harassment of women.

“It’s been nice coming out of that really terrible relationship during a time when women are speaking up more. It feels like I’m allowed to say these things now,” says Dacus, crediting the #MeToo movement. “All these horrible, heartbreaking stories of women being mistreated are at the forefront but the solace that people are doing what they need in order to find closure and help each other prevent that happening ever again.

For one of the first times I’ve been noticing male friends of mine actually examining their past behaviours.”

While there are some early shoots of positivity, the truth is, the culmination of all of these factors left the songwriter dealing with anxiety for the first time. “2017 was a new state of mind for me – and not really in the best way.”

— The biggest small town left in America — Lucy Dacus was raised in Richmond, Virginia, about two hours south of Washington D.C. on the east coast. It’s a place sometimes described as “the biggest small town left in America.”

The family home was in the rural suburbs and she travelled into the city to go to high school. “It’s hard to tell you in one answer how my whole childhood was,” she says. “It’s a large variety of things. Overall, I’m coming out with my thumbs up.”

In her household music was always there. Her mother is a piano teacher, as was her grandmother. Picking up songwriting was never a big deal, like a second language that was spoken around the house. “That’s how music is – like, it’s just part of my life,” she recalls.

Yet the dream of being a professional artist seemed almost so unattainable that it was invisible. In her late teens, Dacus went to college to study film but dropped out, primarily because she’d end up saddled with huge debt. “That, paired with the feeling of being misunderstood in my programme,” she confirms. “I just didn’t have a lot of like minds in my classes.”

That prompted a move back to Virginia where she took a job in a photography lab developing kids’ cheesy school photos.

She’d been writing songs in her spare time and gathered nine of the 30-or-so she had together when her friend Jacob Blizard (now her touring guitarist) asked her to record them for his school project. Her 2016 debut album, ‘No Burden’, was made

25

Interview in one day in Nashville. Blizard passed school, and that album received rave reviews. NPR called it “vulnerable”, while Pitchfork said it was an “uncommonly warm indie rock record”.

As a result, 20 different record labels reportedly scrabbled to sign Dacus. She settled on Matador, and began to prepare for what should have been a joyful 2017.

The first time Dacus remembers assuming the role of historian she was seven or eight-years-old. She was writing in her journal – and she smiles now recalling her first entry.

It complained about how the babysitter spent the whole evening on the phone to her boyfriend. “There’s a point where I realise I’m journaling and so I stop and go, ‘I should probably introduce myself… I’m Lucy’” she laughs, remembering it clearly.

“It’s really cute.”

More than a dozen notebooks, and many years later, she still keeps a diary now. Sometimes she writes every day, other times, weeks go by and then she fills 20 pages. Occasionally she flicks open an old one to either “laugh or cringe” at her younger self.

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‘Historian’, then, isn’t just the title of her latest album, but also the way she thinks of herself. A chronicler, of her own experiences, but also those around her. Those pages aren’t just a document of a growing maturity, but also a therapeutic habit that helps make sense of many life events, including that recent damaging relationship. “Seeing that it had been broken for the whole time but that I was just oblivious to it, [reading about] it helps to accept that things didn’t change,” she says. “I just saw it for what it was finally, and so perspective is good.”

Those handwritten journals are sacred, which is why, when her tenth one was stolen on tour a few years ago along with a bag of possessions, it was the notebook she replaced first.

The album itself is a recent history – a narrative burrowing through those myriad dark times. Dacus knew that she wanted it to form a complete story, and wrote the track list before some of the songs. “It’s an arc” she says, that begins in a “relatable place” with the only break-up song she’s ever written (‘Night Shift’) that subsequently delves “deeper into darkness.”

“Then the subject matter gets a little more intense,” she tells me, “– going through identity crises, or loss of home, or loss of faith, loss of a loved one, loss of your life. I feel like I’m pulling people into an uncomfortable space.” She pauses. “There’s then a change where hopefully I’m turning on a light and saying, ‘Yes, all of that exists, but it’s a foil to joy.’”

It is an extraordinary piece of work. Musically it’s a colossal step up, reminiscent of recent albums by Mitski (‘Puberty 2’), Angel Olsen (‘My Woman’) and labelmate Julien Baker (‘Turn out the Lights’). The subject matter is heavy, but it’s never a dreary listen. In fact, it’s charming, funny even – like a brave smile emerging through a curtain of tears. And Dacus has a gift for lyric writing; like the eloquent way she pays tribute to the humility shown by her dying grandmother on ‘Pillar of Truth’.

From first to final note it’s evocative and powerful. “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit I had a coughing fit,” goes the LP’s opening line in ‘Night Shift’. “If past you were to meet future me,” she sings on the final line of the closing title track, “would you be holding me now?”

It’s heartening to hear that the contents of Dacus’ NYE tarot reading were largely positive. The forecast noted that she should enjoy the proceeds of her hard work, but that “something horrible happens in the summer, then there’s kind of a rebirth, growing back into, like, life in an even more knowledgeable and peace-oriented way.” Dacus is about to leave, and picks up a bag of books she’s been keeping underneath the cafe table.

“It could be wrong,” she says. “I’m not superstitious. I’m taking it in. When that does happen I hope I can take my own advice – let it be what it is, and look past it eventually.”

INSECURE MEN THURS 8 MAR SCALA

HANNAH EPPERSON TUES 10 APR SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS

HINDS THURS 19 APR ELECTRIC BRIXTON

EZRA FURMAN WED 23 MAY O2 ACADEMY BRIXTON

SOLOMON GREY OU OUT THURS 8T& FRI 9 MAR SOLD SOLD ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

SOFT AS SNOW WED 11 APR THE WAITING ROOM

GIANT PARTY THURS 19 APR SEBRIGHT ARMS

CAR SEAT HEADREST WED 23 MAY ROUNDHOUSE

MARTHA FFION THURS 8 MAR THE WAITING ROOM

ARCADE FIRE WED 11, THURS 12 & FRI 13 APR THE SSE ARENA, WEMBLEY

LUCY DACUS WED 25 APR OMEARA

PALM THURS 24 MAY CORSICA STUDIOS

KATIE VON SCHLEICHER THURS 26 APR THE ISLINGTON

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LOW ISLAND THURS 26 APR SCALA

RINA SAWAYAMA FRI 25 MAY THE GARAGE

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THE MEN FRI 1 JUNE OSLO HACKNEY

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ROSTAM MON 14 JUNE SCALA

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THE LONGCUT THURS 10 MAY THE LEXINGTON

MARTIN KOHLSTEDT MON 8 OCT ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

MADELINE KENNEY SAT 12 MAY SEBRIGHT ARMS

SOLOMON GREY THURS 25 OCT UNION CHAPEL

ART SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND TUES 13 MAR SEBRIGHT ARMS SIR WAS T U LD OMAR WED SO14 THE LEXINGTON SPINNING COIN WED 20 MAR THE VICTORIA THE GARDEN WED 21 MAR ELECTRIC BALLROOM HOOKWORMS OUT LD MAR SATSO24 ELECTRIC BRIXTON 77:78 MON 26 MAR OMEARA IDER T D OU TUES MAR SOL27 RICH MIX RINA SAWAYAMA UT WED LD OMAR SO28 THE BORDERLINE

GWENNO THURS 12 APR HOXTON HALL SIOBHAN WILSON THURS 12 APR ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH SERPENTWITHFEET FRI 13 APR VILLAGE UNDERGROUND AIR TRAFFIC FRI 13 APR KOKO JAMES ELKINGTON SUN 15 APR THE ISLINGTON GOAT GIRL TUES 17 APR THE GARAGE OTZEKI TUES 17 APR OSLO HACKNEY WASUREMONO WED 18 APR SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS

BECKIE MARGARET THURS 17 MAY ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM

THU.22.MAR.18

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SAT.10.MAR.18 SUN.11.MAR.18 WED.18.APR.18 THU.22.MAR.18

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Reviews

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Albums

Daniel Avery — Song For Alpha (phantasy sound) Daniel Avery’s disdain for the dancefloor goes a long way back. As a precocious 18-year-old DJ growing up in Bournemouth, he took a sense of pride in kicking against the tone-deaf music requests of stag and hen dos in favour of shoegaze, post-punk and thrash metal.

Now two albums into his music career, Avery’s method is considerably more nuanced, but his outlook is still all about rebellious redefinition.

You get the sense that if you gave him a colouring book, he’d happily respect the outlines just as long as you didn’t tell him what colours to use. That delight in being different took him from The Chemical Brothers to Kyuss, Spaceman 3 to Slayer, krautrock to electroclash and to a point in his career where he can seemingly do no wrong. It’s been six years since Avery switched from the Stopmakingme moniker to a name that’s been on the lips of an enviable list of dance music luminaries ever since. With kind words from heavyweights like Erol Alkan, Andrew Weatherall and Death in Vegas’ Richard Fearless, Avery’s rise has been gilded with praise, but it’s also been seriously studious.

At 32, it’s easy to overlook the fact that he’s been DJing for almost 15 years, and while he began playing warm-up sets by the seaside, it was through releasing remixes for Metronomy, Little Boots, In Flagranti and Hercules & Love Affair as Stopmakingme, and making his Fabric debut at 21, that Daniel Avery truly came to be. Frustrated by the nu-disco associations those remixes generated, and wary with how the sound of the time was evolving, that sense of otherness enabled Avery to reinvent himself as the DJ and producer he knew he wanted to be—and so began the real apprenticeship.

If commercial pilots have to accrue a minimum of 1,500 hours flight time

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before they’re allowed anywhere near the cockpit of a passenger plane, Avery put in the time to refine and hone his craft as a resident on Fabric’s hallowed sound-system. This slower, industrious approach was unlikely to create instant infamy but that drive, and restless urge, has permeated every drone, acid-dusted beat and searing techno monster that’s resonated beyond Avery’s booth these last few years.

His almost peerless debut, ‘Drone Logic’, was proof of time spent in the club with its direct-to-dancefloor intent and hinted at Avery’s impeccable ability to craft a set of tracks that was both coherent and subtly challenging. A controlled collection of icy female vocals, driving techno, otherworldly noise and shoegaze blazes, tracks like the dungeon echo of ‘All I Need’, the Josh Wink state of ‘Naïve Response’ and the acid-squelch of ‘Need Electric’ demonstrated Avery’s understanding of tried-and-tested structures but they also reinforced the idea that he didn’t (and doesn’t) have to make a show of brazenly redefining anything to make his music sound defining.

“I’ve become increasingly interested in those moments in a club when the outside world becomes little more than an inconsequential thought at the back of your head,” Avery explains. “Eyes closed as opposed to hands in the air. A light emerging from the darkness – this is the idea I repeatedly returned to in the studio. The more time you spend with it the deeper you fall.”

It’s a thought that conjures imagery of Avery shacked up in his East India Dock studio, creating the lithe, artful techno that’s quickly becoming his hallmark. Weatherall calls it “gimmick-free machine funk of the highest order” and it’s a comment that speaks to the craft and consideration invested into every track. Avery’s proven he can play to the red-light techno crowd as much as he can nod to shoegaze or effortlessly incorporate ambient. In that sense, reducing ‘Drone Logic’ to ‘dark techno’ (however well meaning) does it a disservice considering it’s set the foundations for him to deviate once again.

According to Avery, where ‘Drone Logic’ found its spiritual home on the dancefloor, ‘Song For Alpha’ takes inspiration by the late nights and hazy mornings spent on the road, and “the search for inspiration beyond the fog.” So, if ‘Drone Logic’ steered him closer to the rolling, undulating sound of James Holden and Border Community, ‘Song For Alpha’ is powered by a different kind of force.

Brian Eno and Avery’s own collaborations with in-and-out Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini serve as recognisable touchstones – alongside the pounding industrial brutality of Perc, the melodic relentlessness of Underworld and the analogous crackle of Boards of Canada – but Avery also counters the booming sound of the big room with some ambient contemplation to usher in the small hours.

As a result, ‘Song For Alpha’ is noticeably less propulsive and Avery seems to have spent less time listening to My Bloody Valentine or worrying about cleansing dancefloors to master a whole new level of frequencies. From the unremitting four-to-the-floor glower of ‘Sensation’ and the surging drone dramatics of closer ‘Quick Eternity’ to the melancholic ambient and broken beats of ‘Citizen Nowhere’, to the piercing pneumatic precision of ‘Clear’, Avery revels in these new sonic turns.

At 14 tracks, this album runs deep but it also provides those making the jump with some solid points of reference. Where ‘Sensation’ and ‘Diminuendo’ anchor the familiar techno-driven spirit of its predecessor, the woozy ‘Groan Stick’ melody of ‘Slow Fade’ also spins ‘Song For Alpha’ down a minimal, halfspeed path.

Elsewhere, the ambrosial swathes of opener ‘First Light’, ‘TBW17’ and ‘Embers’ are invitations to take a breath that would’ve disrupted the propulsive momentum of ‘Drone Logic’ but, here, they represent a textural depth that Avery pushes even further on the compositional ‘Days From Now’ as it steers into widescreen Cliff Martinez territory.

In isolation, and on most other albums, these ambient-focused moments could feel like throwaway interludes but set

Albums against the klaxon menace of ‘Diminuendo’ or the slo-mo electro of ‘Stereo L’, there’s a fastidiousness that makes everything feel intentional.

It’s a yin/yang approach his debut lacked (or didn’t need) depending where you stand on stormy techno assaults, but as Avery works through his technical repertoire with an auteur’s touch, it’s tracks like the range-finding sonar of ‘Projector’ and the growling, alarmbell clang of ‘Glitter’ that create a useful transition between the two albums. In this case, both tracks epitomise Avery’s refined hypnotic-techno but in typically nuanced ways. On ‘Projector’ a sense of space allows the stethoscope bass, chiming chords, woodpecker percussion and sweeping radar melody to work seamlessly whereas his sense of pace mollifies the roiling energy of ‘Glitter’, softening it into a dubby darkhorse that sets up the album’s finale.

And in an odd quirk of symmetry, ‘Quick Eternity’ does for ‘Song For Alpha’ what ‘Knowing We’ll Be Here’ did for ‘Drone Logic’ in closing out the album with expansive, rolling energy that’s reminiscent of The Field.

Ultimately, Avery gets the balance just right, striking a mesmeric balance between reinforcement and repetition.

He was never going to follow up ‘Drone Logic’ with another album of just throbbing techno tracks, and while you’d bet on hearing a hefty selection the next time he plays out, it’s interesting to hear him move away or, at the very least, offset the ratio on his own production – because it actually makes those moments when the squelching acid house and rumbling thunder hit just that bit sweeter.

Avery talks about his personal need for quiet and patience and his determination to explore ambient, drone, electronica and club music but connect it all in a way that shows their shared point of origin. With plays on the contrasts of darkness and light (the levity of ambient versus the darkness of techno, at its most literal) it’s encouraging to hear the confidence of his debut pull through to a follow-up that dares to tweak and toy with the parameters once more.

You get the sense Avery will always be deferential to the likes of Alkan, Weatherall and Fearless et al., and rightly so, but it’s no coincidence he’s piqued their interest these last few years. If ‘Drone Logic’ was the lightning strike, ‘Songs For Alpha’ is the progressive thunder from a producer fast approaching the peak of his powers. Right now, no-one else is colouring in-between the lines quite like Daniel Avery and these tracks are to invade your thoughts and dreams. 9/10 Reef Younis

Sunflower Bean — Twentytwo In Blue (lucky number) It wasn’t that long ago that Sunflower Bean were being talked up as NYC’s coolest young band. Given the musical delights that forever pour out of that city, it was quite the accolade. Sure, they were never going to win any awards for originality, but there was a certain frisson to the songs that made up their debut album, ‘Human Ceremony’, even if it sounded a little one paced for a group allegedly in thrall to Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, and The Velvet Underground.

There’s even less rock and roll on follow up ‘Twentytwo In Blue’, for the band have raided an entirely different era for inspiration; specifically, the soft rock of AM radio and the big Fleetwood Mac songbook.

The glam-lite stomp of ‘Burn It’ is a pleasant enough opener but then ‘I Was A Fool’ and ‘Twentytwo’ hover into view, both of which see bassist and singer Julia Cumming channeling her inner Stevie Nicks on what could be long lost ‘Rumours’ session tracks. The glam returns briefly on ‘Puppet Strings’ and ‘Human For’ before you’re thrust back into the MOR fog.

There are a few gems to be found here – ‘Any Way You Like’ is a gorgeously sweet little ballad, while closer ‘Oh No, Bye Bye’ is a charmingly wistful sign

off – but mostly they sound like they’re refashioning the cooler corners of music history. Having a great record collection and knowing what to do with it are two different things; sadly, Sunflower Bean are lacking in the latter. 5/10 Derek Robertson

Bichkraft — 800 (wharf cat) Bichkraft had their kinda breakout in 2016, when their sophomore release, ‘Shadoof ’, emerged as one of the most interesting post-punk/noise/industrial albums of the year. At the time, the Ukrainian four-piece was still writing and recording in their hometown of Kiev in a self-built studio, maximising the fascination around their obscure sound. Now, after a big stint in the US, the band is back with ‘800’, written during their tour in the States and recorded in Brooklyn under the production of Merchandise’s Carson Cox. The American influence on the new tracks is undeniable: from the very beginning, the sound of the transoceanic postpunk experience transpires in the heated guitar riffs that took over the more atmospheric sound of their previous work, with ‘Ashley’ filled by a distant reminder of Nirvana’s iconic riff from ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘13 Again’ winking at Californian garage rock. It’s with ‘Yonder’ that we finally get back to what made Bichkraft as interesting as they were: their great talent in assembling industrial tracks with metallic sounds and ’80s drum machines without ever sounding derivative or nostalgic. This time, the accuracy of the production adds a new, enhancing sharpness, even in a less refined, still very well layered track, ‘Introducing Yourself ’. Distortion and feedback pave way to a new twist in Bichkraft’s music: a vocal part with English lyrics, courtesy of Sam York (and Elizabeth Skadden in the

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Albums final ‘Some People Have All The Luck’), drawing a line linking to the best (or worst) Velvet Underground experiments.

7/10 Guia Cortassa

Nakhane — You Will Not Die (bmg) The commercial failure of Nakhane Touré’s 2013 debut album led to a period of serious reflection. Having cut his teeth on Cape Town’s open mic scene, he decided to ditch his assumed surname and the folk music that had seen him compared to Jeff Buckley and Radiohead.

He’s now returned with ‘You Will Not Die’, a collection of club-indebted tracks that address his sexual identity in relation to the renunciation of his Christianity. Autobiographical in nature, the material deliberately ‘queers Biblical language and gospel sound.’ To that end, opening track ‘Violent Measures’ is choral trip-hop while the standout ‘Teen Prayer’ could pass as an old spiritual until the lyrical double entendres are noticed.

Blessed with a smooth and soulful delivery, which resembles Benjamin Clementine’s when in falsetto, he is in essence a torch singer. This is dressed up with ’90s electronic pop and rock guitar on the likes of ‘Interloper’ and ‘The Dead’, both of which could have been cut from Depeche Mode’s ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’ had it been produced by Moby.

It’s often when Nakhane is at his simplest that the tracks are the most emotionally powerful and their torch roots most transparent. This is evidenced on the title track and ‘All Along’, which are built around piano and shimmering chillout synth lines respectively. Raw in spite of Ben Christophers’ sleek production, their heart of self-acceptance is summed up when Nakhane declares, ‘when I woke up in the morning I knew that I wouldn’t die.‘ 7/10 Susan Darlington

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Jenny Wilson — Exorcism (gold medal) And just like that we’re talking about sexual abuse and assault. Up front, out loud and mostly without recourse to metaphor. If pretty much the entire history of western art and culture has been stories of romantic love in one form or another, as conceived by men, then the last six months mark something of a revolution. An answer to the ‘But what about the stories?” question second-wave feminists asked, when they wondered how a system saturated in narrative sexism could ever be overcome.

In the video for the lead single (‘Rapin*’) from Swedish artist Jenny Wilson’s new record, ‘Exorcism’, her violent assault is depicted in gently explicit cartoon form, her body torn apart by an attacker as she is chased through a nightmare. Broken, bleeding and cut in half she collapses among the mountains, huge and broken, reliving her ordeal. Its impact is all the more poignant, coming as it does in the midst of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements – right when we are all exploring how we have been abused and exploited by a predatory sexual culture, where women’s bodies are fair game.

The album itself is an unflinching account of Wilson’s rape and its aftermath.

Set to the drones of a Prophet 6 analogue synthesiser it sounds as if it is pulling at Wilson’s pain and rage — drawing her trauma out, slowly, like a magnet. While ‘Rapin*’ recounts the attack, subsequent tracks detail her attempt to make sense of and move on from it. On ‘Lo’ Hi’, for example, she shares the secret memories that linger long after the physical assault is finished (‘His left hand shut me up / Listen close: I said no’); set to a bouncing, rhythmic instrumental it’s a frantic, emotional celebration of survival.

On ‘Disrespect is Universal’ Wilson

draws attention to the structures that create a culture where rape and assault are normalised (‘Could be any guy,’ she sings, ‘Blame the society’). Meanwhile, ‘It Hurts’ and ‘It’s Love (And I’m Scared)’ recount her attempts to reconnect in intimate relationships after the violation.

‘Exorcism’ is bold and direct, building on the artist’s history of writing through personal turmoil (her previous record, the award-winning ‘Demand the Impossible!’ was recorded and released while she underwent treatment for breast cancer). Giving this kind of work a mark out of ten seems beside the point, so I haven’t. That doesn’t mean I think it’s any thing other than essential listening.

Katie Beswick

Moon Gangs — Earth Loop (village green) Guitarist and synth-ist William Young has chosen 2018 to step out of the shadow cast by his typography-obsessed employers BEAK> and create an album of electronic loops and soundscapes that sounds nothing like his day job. Citing classical music as well as the Commodore 64’s back catalogue as inspiration, it’s an album that demands your undivided attention and a sound system that has the volume and fidelity to match its lofty ambitions.

If you think that just because music is instrumental you stick it on in the background, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Regardless, you should stick around anyway. Having started to build up a library of field recordings in recent years, Young has channelled his collection through an old Tascam 144 mixer so that connecting the dots becomes an impossible task. The cries of dismembered, roughened voices rise and fall, coming to the front of the stage and stepping back into the darkness as layer upon layer of synths advance and recede. Regardless,

Albums it sounds beautiful. ‘Familiar Machines,’ for example, takes the sounds of Blanck Mass, pulling them from bleakest winter into a space somewhere closer to spring.

‘Second Run’ and ‘Tempel 1’, meanwhile, are the kind of tunes that Daft Punk might be making if they’d never met Pharrell.

What makes ‘Earth Loop’ special, however, is the pithiness of its statements. As it climaxes with ‘The End’, three shining minutes of William Basinskiesque splendour, you’ll be fumbling for the repeat button. 8/10 David Zammitt

George Fitzgerald — All That Must Be (double six) You’d be forgiven for thinking that George FitzGerald has never cracked a smile in his life, let alone throughout his eight-year recording career. His highly-anticipated debut in 2015 documented a failing relationship, with powerful EDM and analogue heavy singles tearing up traditions of a genre already reluctant to find a steady definition. Now with his second album, he has been dealt another destructive hand, writing of the abrupt end to his living situation in his once-adopted home of Berlin.

The first few tracks are some of his best, leaving behind the occasional pitfalls and mushy, monotonous lyricism of his debut. ‘Two Moons Under’ and ‘Frieda’ play as lush, liminal electronica.

The urgency and tumult of his geographical transition wet the tracks with hardhitting realism and reluctancy. ‘Burns’ has already had a huge live session in circulation since the end of last year and the studio recording doesn’t disappoint, with sharp analogue production and a live percussive line to leave your trad-rock bands drooling. The song itself sits somewhere in the void between Caribou’s cool playfulness and Laurie Anderson’s superman, with as much potential to be one of

the new year’s biggest dance hall anthems as it allows sufficient space to wallow.

Lil Silva’s feature on ‘Roll Back’ is a devastatingly mellow interlude about the loss of a father and a husband, doing just enough to bypass trend-searching and dub-infected R&B while taking the album to the heartfelt electronic heights of Leftfield and Caribou once again. But this is where the magic stops. While impressive features by name, collaborations with Hudson Scott, Bonobo and Tracey Thorn do little to serve the album’s themes.

The ambient production on ‘Outgrown’ feels like a B-side of Bonobo’s ‘Migration’ rather than a purpose-built addition to ‘All That Must Be’ – FitzGerald’s cut-rate snaking instrumental is less ominous and serpentine than its title might suggest. ‘Nobody But You’ and ‘Half-Light’ feel nothing more than purpose-built FIFA tracks and ‘Passing Trains’ is at best a cheap imitation of Högni’s 2017 album of similar themes.

In an album of two halves, FitzGerald has merged some of his best with some of his most adamantly forgettable.

5/10 Tristan Gatward

Bambara — ‘Shadow on Everything’ (wharf cat) Bambara’s music has always represented the battle between good and evil, between dark and light, between clarity and outright chaos. On this third album, the Brooklyn-via-Georgia trio battle to continue these trends as their post-punk dirge fires the listener out of their comfort zone and straight into its own tilted cold-blooded Western rock opera. Where the band plump for more noise-based compositions on their EPs, they knuckle down on their albums for something that melds their dystopic mania with true songcraft.

The trio revolve around their razor sharp rhythm section of Blaze Bateh and William Brookfield, leaving a space for the howling and barking of Reid Bateh to manifest on top. Reid’s guitar constantly spins out tones that evoke Spaghetti Westerns, occasionally giving us wobbling shoegaze. Bambara’s mastery of tone ensures that this assault has enough depth that it never becomes tiresome. And while their strength lies primarily in malignant anger, the melancholic ‘Let Love In’esque ballad ‘Backyard’ gives the record profoundly human affectation.

The appeal of this album is it’s depth in attack, and very few artists these days make rock and roll as threatening as Bambara do. Although tracks like ‘Monument’ do play out like stone faced Birthday Party worship, the everpresent danger and cowboy charm ultimately win out. 8/10 Cal Cashin

Nonpareils — Scented Pictures (mute) Despite Aaron Hemphill’s amiable departure from Liars prior to the inception of the group’s 2017 album ‘TFCF’, his debut solo effort is pieced together and expanded from years of “unorthodox” studio experimentation – poorly situated microphones, drumming without a click track, etc.

While the results fall yards short of far out, ‘Scented Pictures’ is still admirably hideous, strained from a single-minded hunt for melody in a discordant thicket.

It may as well be said that ‘Scented Pictures’ sounds Liars-derivative. We first heard the derailed, skittering drumbeats of ‘Cherry Cola’ on group release ‘They Were Wrong, So We Drowned’, and the obtuse pop of ‘The Timeless Now’ recalls the spots of subdued electronica on ‘WIXIW’. The album’s first half buzzes violently thanks to Hemphill’s ear for uneasy harmony, but the second half ulti-

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Albums mately betrays a lack of commitment and half-heartedly settles for something like Animal Collective after the sugar rush.

There’s also bound to be filler on an album with a few neat tricks. Why are short, bare bones tracks like the introductory ‘I Can Feel the Freeze or Fade’ and ‘Fast Hat, Main Hat’ arbitrarily included when their glitchy sonic characteristics are so refined on ‘Ditchglass, They Think’? There’s nothing wrong with an album-as-archive approach, but the potential here feels only half-wrung.

With Nonpareils, Hemphill wanted to create “something plural”, the sound dynamic of a group as opposed to a solo musician. But a lot of ‘Scented Pictures’ just invokes a lone wolf producer – if not a joyless one, then one who should probably get out more often. 6/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Yo La Tengo — There’s A Riot Going On (Matador) How should a band respond to the turbulent times we’re living through? Back in 1971, Sly And The Family Stone released the dark, brooding ‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On’, their response to social disillusionment, civil unrest, and “the death of the sixties.” Nowadays, for American bands in particular, it’s increasingly difficult to ignore domestic travails and a President unfit for office, but while Yo La Tengo have borrowed that title for their first album in half a decade, they’ve swapped out the mood; instead of a morose intensity the New Jersey indie stalwarts have plumped for a dream-like haze, a cocoon of ghostly guitars and soft melodies to keep out the cold.

Recorded over a year with no producer, ‘There’s A Riot Going On’ incorporates jam sessions, taped rehearsals and soundchecks – some dating back to 2007 – assembled like a collage. There’s a lush, other-worldly feel to all fifteen

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tracks, and at times they sound positively heavenly. ‘Shortwave’ is a gorgeous ambient wash, while ‘Ashes’ is a slow, woozy number, like swimming through the fog of an afternoon nap. Innocence is a common theme too – ‘Let’s Do It Wrong’ has a childlike, lullaby quality – that suggests empathy, not rage, is the way forward. “Laugh away the bad times,” Ira Kaplan sings on ‘Forever’ over a bed of softly spoken shoo-wop shoo-wops, an alternative anthem for when it all seems too much. This is the Yo La Tengo that we need rather than the one we want. 8/10 Derek Robertson

Young Fathers — Cocoa Sugar (ninja tune) It seems like an age since ‘Tape One’ and ‘Tape Two’ signalled that something special was being cultivated somewhere in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle. With a couple of albums and a Mercury Prize under their belt, Young Fathers have decided to take their time over their next move. Three years on from ‘White Men Are Black Men Too’, a release that already pointed to growing maturity, they announced the end of their hibernation in November in the form of ‘Lord.’ A tune that somehow hops from raw gospel motifs and tinny, innocent pianos to epic, summery pop via stabs of feedback, it reminded us what we had been missing.

For Young Fathers are more than just the much-needed British hip-hop act that the press have been so keen to anoint them as.

No, half of the time their music isn’t even hip hop. Instead, they are a truly inventive pop group, eager to squeeze every last drop of the technology at their disposal.

Obsessed with layering and loops, they are much closer to the psychedelia of Animal Collective than Drake or Cardi B. Labels aside, Young Fathers are making intelligent, politically-driven pop.

‘Cocoa Sugar’’s ‘Fee Fi’, for example, a foreboding, stop-start meditation on seizing opportunities, invokes ‘Dear Science’-era TV on the Radio with gorgeously restrained production. Vocal rasps are preserved, giving the delivery a human feel that is so often filtered out of releases. Elsewhere, ‘See How’ is one of the most perfectly-formed creations to come from the trio to date, stealing Arthur Russell’s cello and pairing it with stuttering electronics and splintered falsettos, while ‘Wow’ draws on Radiohead at their edgy, motorik, Krautrock best as Young Fathers place tongue firmly in cheek and lampoon the state of the world: “What a time to be alive,” they croon.

And, yes, the hip-hop that does exist in there is superb. ‘Holy Ghost,’ an angular, de-tuned synth workout shows that this trio are as versatile as they care to be, and that verse in ‘Border Girl’ is an ear worm of the highest order. They can spit when they want, they just know they have a lot more to give. To match hope to taste like they do is a gift. 7/10 David Zammitt

King Tuff — The Other (sub pop) Completing his triptych on Sub Pop Records, King Tuff’s ‘The Other’ rejects the satirically tinged retro oddities of ‘Black Moon Spell’ and his self-titled debut and swaps it out for some uncharacteristically candid admonitions. In the foray of writers’ block and all its homeopathic side-effects of disillusionment and worthlessness, the record straddles hitting rock bottom while searching for the place – the mystical “other” – where songs are made.

While this is all this well and good, the title track does nothing to align itself with his pre-album statements. As the King sings that “Science can cure sickness / But what can cure my soul?” you forget

Albums to feel his burden as you’re drenched in a forcefully poetic dramatization, at best poorly exaggerated, and self-aggrandising at worst. Only moments later, he is taking a swim in a lake of fire…

The songs work best when there’s no self-aware or desperately intimate backdrop searching for the shadows of Conor Oberst. ‘Thru The Cracks’ soars with lavish self-production with notable assistance from Shawn Everett (War On Drugs, Alabama Shakes), while second single ‘Psycho Star’ teases the goofy hooks synonymous with the Vermont psych-rocker’s solo offerings.

For an album that mark’s King Tuff ’s “psychic reset”, it’s fair to say it’s only partially successful. ‘Ultraviolet’ feels like a cheap imitation of desert blues, and closing track ‘No Man’s Land’ is a long-overdue gospel-tinged introduction for the lo-fi memories of his time with Ty Segall. But while a strong addition in all to Tuff ’s discography, it’s still all smoke and mirrors to his selfproclaimed confessional revelation. 5/10 Tristan Gatward

Nap Eyes — I’m Bad Now (secretly canadian) Nap Eyes’ Nigel Chapman is a biochemist. You don’t get many lead singers and guitarists for indie bands that are part time scientists and then jump in a van and travel their native Canada and the US. He also finds time to meet up with the rest of his band mates who left Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the mainland and Montreal, to make great lo-fi records.

To listen to ‘I’m Bad Now’ you wouldn’t think its song structures are influenced by Green Day (one of Chapman’s favourite bands), as the laid back vocal and minimal production is more Velvet Underground. It’s a classic sound, with West Coast/Laurel Canyon jangly guitar under-

neath more prominent, fuzzy hooks.

Opener ‘Everytime The Feeling’ is reminiscent of recent Idlewild with the only thing missing being Roddy Woomble’s Scottish inflection. ‘Judgement’ has the rolling rhythm like a slowed down ‘Waiting For The Man’, where as ‘Hearing The Bass’ is ‘Satellite of Love’ on uppers.

It’s a step further down the road from Nap Eyes’ last record (‘Thought Rock Fish Scale’), the folk influence has been pared back and the result is a sound fuller round the gills, more meat on the bones, but retaining the lo-fi aesthetic and ear for melody. 7/10 James Auton

the distance time has made between him and his wife. He contemplates the distortion of memory and the purpose of art while he gets paid to tour painful elegies.

Again on ‘Earth’, thrashing guitar matches sudden waves of anger, that mellow into fingerpicked acoustic and ghostly ambience.

There is subtle craft to the stunning turns of phrase, the sequencing of verses and surprising shifts in mood. Elverum has prolonged his wife’s echo with a universal collection of songs, powerful as any literature on the human experience.

10/10 Stephen Butchard

Mount Eerie — Now Only (p.w. elverum & sun) ‘A Crow Looked at Me’ is not an album that seemed begging for a sequel. Its own existence was crushing and unexpected, just months after the passing of Phil Elverum’s wife, Geneviève.

“Death is real,” Elverum sang in its first seconds, ruminating on those three words for forty minutes of raw poetry. The songs were clear and metaphor free. There was no distance between the listener and Elverum’s grief. It was a masterpiece so intimate and specific in its painting of loss that you wished it did not exist.

But death is real. Elverum goes on living in the blast zone, as he puts it, raising a young daughter on his own, and writing songs about his dead wife.

The songs remain stream-of-consciousness pieces about her passing, with the matter-of-fact minutia of Sun Kil Moon’s ‘Benji’. Many of them reflect on events of ‘Crow’; on ‘Earth’, he revisits the ashes that were left facing the sunset a year ago to find that they are indistinguishable from the animal bone surrounding them.

Yet ‘Now Only’ is not just a continuation of the previous album. Elverum expands the scope of his lyrics to match

Chris Carter — Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One (mute) The truly weird, in a more nuanced sense than the merely unusual, is a rare and valuable commodity in popular music. In his wonderful book The Weird and the Eerie the late and much-missed Mark Fisher defined it as “that which does not belong.

The weird brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled with the ‘homely’.”

If we stick with that definition, there are few artists whose command of the weird is so complete as Chris Carter. From his work with Throbbing Gristle onwards, he has consistently managed to confront us with music’s potential to conjure the other, creating vital, uniquely progressive sound along the way. His ‘Chemistry Lessons Volume One’, his first solo record in 17 years, stays true to that mission.

In the press release for the album Carter acknowledges the influence of English folk music and the early radiophonic experiments in electronic music of the 1960s on the record, and both are audibly apparent from the outset.

He creates a lush, tactile world for his listener, lit by the pallid glow of modular

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Albums synth layers and ritualistic folk harmony, into which he allows the weird to intrude: strangely processed voices, spine-shiver echoes and displaced, barely-there beats. It’s disconcerting throughout, yet remarkably affecting, increasingly so upon each repeated listen. The uncanny familiarity of much of the fabric of the record serves as a comforting salve for the disorientating stings of oddity, constantly exposing the easily palatable with the paranoia-inducingly alien. It’s weird as hell, and that’s a very exciting quality indeed. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

SLUG — Hiddledy Piggledy (memphis industries) Ever wondered what it would sound like if Alex Turner played guitar in the band CAKE? Anyone?

If the answer is ‘yes’ then fear not – the eternal question has been answered.

It would sound like ‘No Heavy Petting’, the opening track and lead single on SLUG’s new album ‘Higgledy Piggledy’.

It’s rather good, actually. As the name might suggest, ‘Higgledy Piggledy’ is a collection full of exactly these kinds of strange musical bedfellows.

On this second album from Ian Black, the one-time Field Music bass player was aiming for something a bit more minimalist than his 2015 debut, ‘Ripe’, but ‘minimalist’ here is a relative term. While the record is primarily driven by guitar and percussion, it is also a Dada cut-up of genres and styles, from the tropical, psychedelic pop of ‘Lackadaisical Love’ to the theatrical indie-adjacent hybrid ‘Petulia’. The latter is one of the more successful tracks on the album, with its sharp electric guitar clambering around Black’s see-sawing vocal. ‘No Heavy Petting’ and album closer ‘You Are As Cold As A Dead Fish’ are similarly beguiling, as is ‘Abitrary Lessons

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In Customs’ with its cinematic strings.

But the collage does crumble in places.

The half-PC music/half-classical instrumental ‘A Soft Shoe Number’ feels incidental at best, while ‘Earlobe’ is a muted near-miss despite its impressive orchestral snapshots. Moments like these let the record down as they add to the fact that ‘Higgledy Piggledy’ is a strange album.

Although not without its charms, the ‘cut and paste’ technique is inconsistent by definition – both in style and success.

6/10 Liam Konemann

Jack White — Boarding House Reach (third man) In 2016, Jack White was responsible for the first (and, at time of writing, the last) vinyl record played in space when his label Third Man launched a zero-gravity turntable spinning their edition of Carl Sagan’s ‘A Glorious Dawn’ into the upper atmosphere. The official reason for the stunt was to celebrate Third Man having pressed three million discs since their inception but, much like Elon Musk launching his own sports car into orbit last month, there was an accompanying whiff of onanism to the whole endeavour. For Musk and White alike – both eccentric Generation Xers approaching middle age with an apparently unending lust for kooky self-promotion – their companies seem to be mutating into personality cults. On the one hand that’s all momentarily entertaining, and no doubt a jolly jape for their respective fan clubs, but, on the other, one wonders quite what the point of it all is, beyond giving each company’s millionaire obsessive founder something to fill the day.

Which brings us neatly onto White’s third solo album, a record that could only have come from the kind of bored auteur who has few self-critical faculties left.

Accordingly, if you still require confirma-

tion that the world in 2018 doesn’t need an album of scrappy electronic squiggles masquerading as electrofunk, vocoders atop horror-movie synths and, yes, a rich rockstar rapping about the perils of materialism, then ‘Boarding House Reach’ is the album for you.

It’s not that this is a terrible album, but just a rather unwelcoming one.

Indeed, when White receives no answer to his rabble-rousing calls of “who’s with me?” midway through ‘Corporation’, it’s telling: you rather start to wonder who this record is for, beyond White’s cadre of vinyl bros and, of course, the man himself. Later on White tells us, inexplicably, that he’s “in a mine shaft” before asking “can you hear me now?”. Again, the track chugs on with no reply. and for a musician so associated with fruitful collaboration, White’s splendid isolation here is disconcerting.

That sense of remoteness permeates the album. Where in previous solo outings potential solipsism has been rather brilliantly tempered by White’s playing and songwriting, both flounder here amid electronic experimentation that is neither particularly original nor technically impressive. ‘Respect Commander’, with its looped breakbeats and the sort of synthetic string hits that come preset on discarded keyboards at the back of Cash Converters, is, most charitably, a series of ideas requiring further development.

Meanwhile, ‘Hypermisophoniac’ – referring to people with particularly acute sensitivity to grating noises – opens with a series of, erm, grating noises and pitchshifted vocals before White informs us, out of the blue, that there “ain’t nowhere to run when you’re robbing a bank.” Sage advice, sure, but in the context of the album as weirdly inconsequential as any other lyric here.

Most jarring of all, though, is ‘Ice Station Zebra’, a sort of funk-rap workout in which White pushes a series of neat grooves around his impressively tight session band before deciding the best augmentation to this shuffle is a rather desperate rap. “Listen up if you want to hear,” implores White, but the gut response is quite the opposite; for

Albums someone who’s cultivated a career around effortless, virtuoso cool, the strain in White’s voice is saddening to observe.

Perhaps most frustratingly for ‘Boarding House Reach’, though, is that alongside the sonic mess there are also flickers of the inclusive, addictive and propulsive musicianship for which White earned his, ahem, stripes. The libidinous strut of ‘Over and Over and Over’ is a reminder of the sort of delicious simplicity that White does best, and although it was, tantalisingly, originally earmarked for Jay Z, White’s gospel hollers are more than a match. ‘Why Walk A Dog’, too, about the advantages (and moral perils) of pet ownership, is a terrific example of White’s talent for curio songwriting, and the album’s closing pair are a delight: The beautifully hammy old-country waltz of ‘What’s Done Is Done’ is full of genuine soul played with expressiveness, love and longing, and ‘Humoresque’ is a warm and contentedly tired ballad set to the tune of Dvorak’s famous piano piece that bathes its outro in brooding jazz chords.

It’s a strange way to conclude a strange album, the final two tracks as nonsequitous as anything that’s gone before it but, thankfully, also saving the most pleasant taste until last. White himself has proudly described ‘Boarding House Reach’ as “bizarre”, and he’s not wrong.

More concerning, though, given White’s fondness for conceptual heft, is how lightweight it is. So preoccupied he seems with how he could make an album this strangely self-absorbed, he never stopped to wonder if he should. 4/10 Sam Walton

Dungen and Woods — Myths 003 (mexican summer) Sometimes records take on the characteristics of the place and circumstance of their making – it bleeds from every note and transports you

as it plays. ‘MYTHS 003’ is such a record.

Born from a residency at the Mexican Summer-hosted Marfa Myths Festival in Texas, it is imbued with the heat, light and space of the desert as the psychedelia of Stockholm’s Dungen and the indie-folk of Brooklyn’s Woods seamlessly blend.

Recorded in just a week, it hints at the deeper connection between the two artists, who bonded while touring together in 2009 and found the passage of time had done nothing to dull their mutual understanding of the other’s style. The seven tracks of mellow, trance-like beats and warbling soundscapes are unification rather than a lead-and-follow approach, even on the tracks contributed by each frontman rather than written in situ.

The shimmering fragility and retro lounge of Jeremy Earl’s ‘Turn Around’ and the liquid gold meditative chanting of Gustav Ejstes’ ‘Jag Ville Va Kvar’ form the collection’s peaks and remain true to each style while also giving space to the ensemble. And the rest of the album is no less special. From the percussive and star-speckled ‘Marfa Sunset’ to the re-energised and vocal-mirroringmelody of ‘Morning Myth’, to the funk spiralling beat and keys call of ‘Saint George’, each track is fully rounded and finessed, making this a beautiful record of gorgeous psychedelia-infused indie folk.

8/10 Sarah Lay

Essaie Pas — New Path (dfa) Marie Davidson’s relationship with the dancefloor has always been complex. On 2016’s ‘Adieux au Dancefloor’ she bid it farewell, yet on ‘New Path’, her 5th record in collaboration with her husband Pierre Guerineau as Essaie Pas, she probes its darkest regions in one of the most compelling electronic records of the year thus far.

While it would seem counter-intui-

tive to push heavy focus on one half of the duo, Marie Davidson steals the spotlight on everything she seems to appear on, whether it be Not Waving’s EBM banger ‘Where Are We’ or her work with David Kristian as DKMD. ‘New Path’ sees her cold spoken word deliveries and retrofuturist production style gel perfectly with Guerineau’s.

Although primarily described as a synthwave act, this new album shares as much In common with industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle as it does the duo’s DFA contemporaries, via unhinged string and field samples that jitter sporadically across lead single ‘Complet Brouillé’ and the fuzzy hums and computerized monologue on the title track.

The parallels to industrial music are perhaps down to the record’s conceptual influence, based as it is on Phillip K. Dick’s dystopian novel A Scanner Darkly, with tracks such as ‘Substance M’ alluding to its plot. The album itself is named after the rehabilitation clinic from said novel and it sonically translates its intense themes of drug addiction, mass surveillance, death, grief and loss. And while at first glance ‘New Path’ could appear to be a collection of hard techno tracks, it’s as traumatic and corrosive as the material it draws from. 9/10 Aimee Armstrong

Bishop Nehru — Elevators: Act I & II (Nehruvia) Bishop Nehru is one of hip-hop’s chosen ones. Plucked from the masses of NYC boom bap revivalists by MF DOOM himself at just sixteen, he was being touted as the next Joey Bada$$ before the latter had even had the time to blow up.

‘Elevators’ is Nehru’s and DOOM’s second album together, with the pair also enlisting Canadian wunderkind Kaytranada to helm production for half the album. As such it’s a project in two acts, act one master-

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Albums minded by Kaytranada and act two by DOOM. While both are extremely talented in their own right, there’s no denying that DOOM’s half shines brighter. On ‘Elevators’ Kaytranada’s otherwise energetic and upbeat production style is often lacking in bass and impact, a problem compounded

by Nehru’s vocal, which lacks the confidence and depth of many of his peers.

That’s not to say there aren’t highlights. ‘No Idea’ and ‘Up Up and Away’ both pack a punch, the latter by far the most recognisable Kaytranada cut on the album. In fact, with it’s spiralling piano and heavenly vocal samples it might just be the best track on the album. It’s not until the DOOM produced ‘Again and Again’ that Nehru really hits stride though, coming through with a faultless flow and confident hook over a wild, jazzy beat. ‘Potassium’ continues that hot streak and you begin to see why DOOM thought so highly of this young MC all those years ago. There’s something special about this kid, but on ‘Elevators’, I’m not convinced that Nehru, DOOM or Kaytranada have figured out what it is. 6/10 Mike Vinti

The Beat Escape — Life Is Short The Answer’s Long (bella union) There is a fine line between a song riding high on a delicate beauty and a song passing by on a wave of indifference. Montreal duo The Beat Escape teeter-totter around the line throughout this debut album, landing on the unfavourable side a few times too many.

The most successful moments come when they harness their energy and create tracks that have a clear forward momentum. ‘Seeing Is Forgetting’, for example, features a nocturnal, chrome synth pulse that gives the surrounding cloud of misty, chilly electronic textures a gravitational core around which to form.

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It is no surprise that this is the track that convinced former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde to sign them up to his Bella Union label. The liveliest track is ‘Moon In Aquarius’, a rippling, flickering, polyrhythmic studio concoction.

Alas, it is not always so arresting. Opener ‘Sign of Age’ is a slow build to nothing in particular, a track too cool ever to show its hand and as such too cold ever to make an impact. Understated, handmade electronic music is notoriously tough to get right, but we are a long way from Boards of Canada or Four Tet here.

‘More Dreams’ and ‘Then I Drift Away’ come far too close to being taken literally, whilst ‘Limestone Alps’ gets done in over five minutes what most others get done in two. ‘Life Is Short The Answer’s Long’ is competent but lacks the impact or noteworthiness to take The Beat Escape to the next level yet. 5/10 Max Pilley

Unknown Mortal Orchestra — Sex and Food (jagjaguwar) When ‘Sex and Food’ was announced in early February, Unknown Mortal Orchestra main man Ruban Nielson revealed that, with it, he “wanted to embrace this abandoned genre of rock music that I keep reading is ‘dead’ and invite people to hear what this living dead genre sounds like in the UMO universe.” An admirable pursuit, sure, but a remarkably self-effacing one at that. In the progressively singular world imagined by UMO, an invitation to their take on said living dead genre has been wide open since 2011.

But there is particular reason for Nielson to feel a little brazen about ‘Sex and Food’. While the Auckland quartet’s slinking brand of psychedelic soul has yielded some moments of real magic (not least on the lysergic-dappled swagger of 2015’s ‘Multi-Love’) a record of fully-

fledged cohesion and vision has felt just a little out of reach. Until now. A slick trip bursting with earworming indiefunk bravura, ‘Sex & Food’ is a triumph.

Where the hazed-out strut of ‘Major League Chemicals’ reimagines CSNY at their most fuzzed-out, and ‘Hunnybee’ proves an early peak marrying quintessential summer festival “moment” via fullon, 1999-era Prince worship, snarling lead single ‘American Guilt’ conjures latter-day Zeppelin bombast and distils the aplomb that colours ‘Sex and Food’ through and through. Better still, in true UMO fashion, first-rate comedown vignettes such as ‘This Doomsday’ and ‘The Internet of Love (That Way)’ seal the deal. 9/10 Brian Coney

Mouse on Mars — Dimensional People (thrill jockey) Mouse on Mars’ Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner return with one of the most welcomed and surprisingly innovative comeback albums of recent memory. Originally entitled ‘New Konstruktivist Socialism’, ‘Dimensional People’ employs a wide cast of collaborators including Justin Vernon, Beirut’s Zach Condon (Beirut), and Bryce Dessner of The National. Perhaps ‘New Konstruktivist Socialism’ would have been a more fitting title, the album employing spatial composition using object-based mixing technology, playing with the possibilities of sonic design and collective musicianship. Mechanical objects are combined into abstract mobile structural forms.

In an aesthetic move, away from seminal their seminal albums ‘Niun Niggung’ (1999) and ‘Idiology’ (2001), ‘Dimensional People’ sees Mouse on Mars delve into acoustic and electronic experimentation, reworking ideas and finding new contexts for them. These recurring sounds, memories and ambiences create

Albums an otherworldly, unique experience.

Here, musical themes are split over multiple tracks (‘Dimensional People pt. 1 - 3’) allowing for a slow progression – a technique clearly inspired by ambient techno.

This is again hinted at on ‘Parliament of Aliens pt. 1 - 3’, tracks interspersing all three parts, the final part being a denouement for the previous.

Locking the groove at 145 BPM, inspired by Chicago footwork, ‘Dimensional People’ is a multi-faceted puzzle revolving around a singular harmonic spectrum and rhythmic scheme, offering up a satisfying singular mix of jazz and techno, unlike most contemporary offerings. 7/10 Alex Weston-Noond

Frankie Cosmos — Vessel (sub pop) In the time it’s taken you to read this review, Greta Kline will probably have written and recorded an entire album. The prodigiously creative New Yorker has issued 52 long-players since 2011.

Her approach may have advanced from her lo-fi Bandcamp days but her anti-folk spirit remains alive on these 18 tracks, which range from 30-second sonic haikus to fully-fledged ’90s indie-pop duets. A less ambitious Waxahatchee or a more conservative Girlpool, her songs have a superficially throwaway quality in their out-of-tune recorders, false piano starts and slightly wavery high notes.

Yet for all of this intentional amateurism, the unexpected tempo changes and melodic hooks have an undeniable craft that could easily be polished for more commercial success if that’s what she wanted. It’s nonetheless part of her appeal that she’s shunned this is favour of spontaneity and the aural imperfections of reel-to-reel tape.

It’s a style that captures her lyrical autobiographies while giving her three

band-mates the freedom to play with the musical arrangements. The indie-punk ‘Being Alive’ – a Bandcamp track that was re-worked for the album – and ‘Cafeteria’, which starts out like prime Blondie, epitomise this in their juxtaposition of conversational intimacies with jangled guitars.

There’s also an understanding of the band’s limitations, with the sketchily drawn indie-folk of ‘My Phone’ and onehanded piano on ‘Ur Up’ sounding like home alone Dictaphone recordings. It’s a reminder that, despite the band mentality, Frankie Cosmos is very much Kline’s musical vessel. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Goat Girl — Goat Girl (rough trade) Goat Girl have emerged from the same South London scene that’s given us Fat White Family and, more recently, Shame.

They’d also signed to Rough Trade before they’d released anything on record.

Between their geography and the timeline of their rise to prominence, there’ll be suspicions in some quarters that the fourpiece have yet to put the hard yards in.

In fairness, when the message they have to convey is as stirring as this self-titled debut suggests, concerns over how much they might have earned their platform seem petty. They put pen to paper with Rough Trade the day after the European Union referendum, which marred what otherwise would have been a celebratory day, and they’ve channeled their anger into ‘Goat Girl’, which is scored through with scathing commentary on everything from Brexit to prejudice, to the slow decay of the band’s hometown.

Only two of the album’s nineteen tracks breach the three-minute mark and there’s something wholly refreshing about a band so unwilling to overthink their work. Similarly, they don’t sound as if they’ve lost much sleep over

how cohesive the record would end up sounding, given that they veer wildly between unvarnished post-punk, swirling psych and undulating slow burners.

7/10 Joe Goggins

Creep Show — Mr. Dynamite (bella union) Let’s not take this too seriously.

We are now in a world where “music as escapism” doesn’t just come gift-wrapped as a catchy pop song, but where you’re staring deep into the theatre of the absurd, being governed by a white skull-doll who goes by the name of Mr. Dynamite. Within this world a t-rex is diagnosing itself with make-believe diseases, pink squirrels are playing video-game synthesisers and the only point of reference – the Tokyo metro – has suddenly become laden with influential German robo-pop.

Creep Show is a Frankenstein’s monster of a project, merging the progressive balladism of John Grant with the dark analogue electro of Wrangler.

The result is befitting of a band that has been “bubbling away for decades in a petri dish containing spores of seventies sci-fi, bad taste and broken synthesizers.”

It is disjointed, at times unlistenable, but utterly brilliant.

Musically we are taken everywhere.

A vocal interlude in ‘Modern Parenting’ recalls the sovereignty of old-school Sugarhill hip-hop, while effortless funk and groove seeps through the automated basslines of ‘Endangered Species’ like muddy water through a leaky pipe.

The only point of cohesion is that it is completely incoherent, and no one can be sure if this is just one big joke.

While even the oxymoronic closing track ‘Safe and Sound’ is nine minutes of esoteric dance music, it offers a rare platform for Grant’s sumptuous vocals. However innovatively Creep

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Albums Show have crafted their debut album, at the end of a bizarre ride it is a comforting reminder that some serious musical faculty resides at the bottom of the chaos.

7/10 Tristan Gatward

Mark Pritchard — The Four Worlds (warp) It’s been said that storied electronic producer Mark Pritchard’s musical style deals in simplicity and surface dazzle. But 2016’s ‘Under the Sun’ signalled a shift from the ’90s techno of Jedi Knights toward bold impressionism and lavish arrangements – a gamble that payed off. Just listen to it! Thom Yorke’s tiny voice. The hard left turn into folk laments. The colours and flourishes of vaguely medieval melody. It’s neobaroque, both ornate and mournful. So why does ‘The Four Worlds’, an alleged extension of the same universe, feel so drab and antediluvian in contrast?

Granted, it’s hard to be too disappointed with a work that isn’t an album as such. As part of a new project between long-time collaborator Jonathan Zawada, ‘The Four Worlds’ lends its audio to Zawada’s glitchy visuals, which explains Pritchard’s sudden revert to rudimentary, plateauing sounds. It’s too early to tell whether the as-yet unreleased accompanying film will suddenly pull things into focus. Nonetheless, Pritchard’s sonic regression is strikingly unremarkable.

The progressive house introduction ‘Glosspops’ is oddly pedestrian, as if lifted from some lesser producer’s cutting room floor. The rest – bar the competent bit of dark ambient title track closer – are pallid and stripped versions of what we’ve already heard from Pritchard. But what turns this record from innocuous to annoying is the vague, Radioheadshallow political “commentary” of its spoken word tracks, featuring Gregory

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Whitehead and The Space Lady, suggesting Steve Reich’s tape experiments with none of the heft. A lacklustre chronicle, indeed. 3/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Preoccupations — New Material (jagjaguwar) The last Preoccupations record had them facing up to an identity crisis; they were having to ditch the Viet Cong moniker, the fallout from which had followed them incessantly. As inelegantly as they dealt with the controversy to begin with, when they finally faced up to the issue and reinvented themselves as Preoccupations, they did so with real nuance; the very musical philosophy of the group, you felt, had been subtly tweaked, just enough to almost trick you into thinking this was, again, a new band. The Viet Cong record had been subject to constant comparison to Women’s ‘Public Strain’, given that Matt Flegel and Michael Wallace were in both groups, and ‘Preoccupations’ began to lean away from ‘Viet Cong’’s walls of shimmering guitar and towards its own, cleaner post-punk sound.

On ‘New Material’, the Canadian band continue down that path apace; the lines on this album are lean to the point of being clinical, and the tempo is relentless, with the prominent rhythm section rattling along with more purpose than on either of this album’s predecessors. So set in stone is the record’s sonic identity – in thrall, clearly, to the likes of Wire and Joy Division – that the most exciting moments creep up on you; the quiet harmonies on ‘Disarray’, for instance, or the fluttering synths that run through ‘Manipulation’.

Viet Cong are now firmly in the rear-view mirror, although given how indebted they remain to their influences, Preoccupations don’t quite feel like their own band yet, however well they wear melodic moodiness. 7/10 Joe Goggins

MIEN — MIEN (rocket recordings) It should go without saying at this stage, but let it be known: supergroups seldom surpass the sum of their parts. Comprising The Black Angels’ Alex Maas, The Horrors’ Tom Furse, Elephant Stone’s Rishi Dhir and The Earlies’ John Mark Lapham, MIEN may not yet be an exception to this rule, but their debut album offers up a release bridging their respective sonic worlds in mercurial fashion.

With the seeds of the project being sown as far back as 2004, John Mark Lapham’s vision for MIEN was for the quartet to re-imagine “Black Angels as Nico in her ’80s industrial phase mixed with George Harrison and Conny Plank.”

Ambitious stuff and no mistake, but ‘MIEN’ is a feature-length exploration that doesn’t fall short of that description.

From the first rippling sitar lines of opener ‘Earth Moon’ to highlights including the Technicolour Motorik stomp of ‘Black Habit’ and ‘(I’m Tired Of) Western Shouting’ – an early peak marrying miasmic textures with totemic percussion – this record is a uniquely tripped-out, tentrack traipse of psych-soaked trial-anderror. Fortunately, error here is in very scarce supply. 8/10 Brian Coney

Soft As Snow — Deep Wave (houndstooth) Norway: land of the midnight sun, an enviable social system, and – increasingly recently – some superb music. Soft As Snow are a London-based Norewgian duo whose EP ‘Glass Body’,

Albums four years back, announced them as artists with an inventively twisted take on dream pop. ‘Black Egg’ is the hypnotic opening to their debut album; a scene setter for the uneasy, coldly distant atmosphere that pervades this album. The vocals, where there are any, are often muffled, buried or distorted under music that is by turns brutal, grinding, relentless and sometimes just plain weird.

The title track sounds like lateeighties Madonna fed through a wormhole in space; the song comes at you from a distance, transmitted from the ether rather than merely emerging from your speakers. ‘Tropical Speed’ meanwhile has all the clanging, breakneck energy of a Prodigy track hacked to bits in an industrial grinder. Rest assured that if the machines finally take over and wage an apocalyptic war on mankind, this vicious cacophony will be their soundtrack.

‘Sleep / Slip’, ironically, sounds a lot like insomnia feels – the slightly fevered waking dreams of a disturbed mind.

There is, however, the odd moment of melodic beauty amongst this dark storm; beautiful, defiant vocals that sound like a battle cry.

‘Deep Wave’ is an album that oscillates wildly between menace and beauty.

This is not cerebral music. It’s visceral and wonderfully dystopian. It needs to be played very loudly, and perhaps in a darkened room. This is music that bypasses thought, and connects directly with your gut. 8/10 Chris Watkeys

Baloji — 137 Avenue Kamiana (bella union) Baloji isn’t one to limit himself.

His new record is a sprawling tableau that blends funk, soul and hip-hop with traditional African rhythms in a mass of multicultural influences. He has lifted musical styles from his native Democratic

Republic of the Congo and filtered them through the lens of his Belgian upbringing, feeding in elements cherry picked from Zimbabwean, Nigerian, and Ghanaian music. He manages to navigate the chaos even as the record flits not only between genres but between languages, as on the French-English hybrid ‘Spotlight’, a buzzing exploration of our obsession with technology and the masses of time we spend staring into screens.

Lead single ‘Soleil de Volt’, with its strutting guitar, is equally electrifying – Baloji’s tribute to the enterprising attitude citizens of his childhood home, Lubumbashi, take on when services have been cut.

In places, things get introspective, like the spoken word track ‘La Derriere Pluie/ Inconnue a Cette Adresse’ in which Baloji touches on the pain of being separated from family, but it is done with such a gentle hand that the piece avoids drifting into bleakness, on an album designed to move to. 7/10 Liam Konemann

Bon Voyage Organisation — Jungle?

Quelle Jungle? (columbia) Parisian producer Adrien Durand has, for a decade, been creating records that pay no attention to borders between lands or styles, like on this expansive debut LP. There are specific references to certain corners of the world at times – ‘Soleil Dieu’ features Haitian percussion, for example – but the real joy of Bon Voyage Organisation is in the unfamiliar combinations of flavours. At any given time, ’70s Hong Kong pop melodies may mingle with Eastern European rhythms and sub-Saharan African vocal inflections.

Durand has spoken in interviews about travel, but in terms of global human migration rather than gap-year tourism.

And so lead single ‘Goma’ is named for a city in DR Congo that is home to a rare mineral used in the manufacturing of iPhones, but this is no bleeding heart protest song about globalisation, rather an undeterred celebration of life. Politics is addressed (the title is likely a reference to the Calais encampments) but never given in to on this glossary of human talents, channelled through house, funk, disco, jazz, prog and countless other traditions. 8/10 Max Pilley

The Skull Eclipses — The Skull Eclipses (western vinyl) Spencer Stephenson of Botony and Raj Haldar of Lushlife were a natural fit. As individual artists, they’ve already explored the fusion of underground hip-hop and psych – though these two have explored pretty much everything. With ‘The Skull Eclipses’, they find new focus. Their debut as a duo is a dark, mood-oriented collaboration that hides depth beneath a woozy layer of reverb.

The production is thick but full of purpose. ‘All Fall’ is a sturdy introduction. Booming drums, resonant bass and slick hand claps make for a strong backbone for Halder to rhyme over. The thick effects could swallow up a lesser MC, but his dexterous verses use internal rhymes and staccato quips to stand out.

The project is a celebration of art-rap charisma. Open Mike Eagle pops up for a typically quotable verse on ‘Gone’ (“…wonder which republicans know what a republic is”) while the less vocal Shabazz Palaces member, Baba Maraire, delivers a joyous sung vocal on ‘Pillars’.

Given how much the album pulls from 2011’s ‘Black-Up’ it’s not the freshest collection, but the potential and cohesion will excite many underground rap fans. 7/10 Stephen Butchard

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Live Rainmaker Cafe 1001, London 9 February 2018

Nils Frahm Barbican, London 21 February 2018

Ten minutes into a four-night sold-out Barbican residency, Nils Frahm picks up the microphone lying on a mat at the front of the stage and says: “Hopefully everything works out tonight. Sometimes things go wrong, sometimes things go better. But this… I had a very good start to the show, I think.”

The Berlin-based composer has long been a pioneer in the realm of soaring, contemporary, classical, glitchy, experimental, electronica. His seventh studio album, ‘All Melody’, was released last month on Erased Tapes to critical acclaim. It’s his most ambitious and inquisitive collection to date, and ‘The Whole Universe Wants To Be Touched’ is a brief, ethereal welcome to the evening with choral samples, before the weaving ‘Sunson’ demands complete attention.

The stage is set in two halves.

To the left, a felt-prepared piano is the centrepiece of a homely-looking picture; to the right, a grand piano stretches out beside a god-knows-what line-up of harmoniums and analogue synthesisers. It’s chaos at best, a key-enthusiast’s fantasy, but the ease and elegance with which Frahm moves between instru-

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ments is mesmeric. I suppose it’s to be expected of a man whose latest release both sonically and thematically orbited a single, self-created room, transformed from broadcast centre to bespoke studio in Berlin’s iconic Funkhaus.

Even his self-built pipe organ has made the trip to England. It’s too vast to join the display in front of us, but Frahm operates it remotely as it sits backstage in its very own dressing room, with its very own tour bus to enjoy afterwards.

He introduces it to us by playing a chirpy little interlude that sounds like a pan-pipe remix of a Nokia ringtone. He acknowledges this, of course… “It’s a little more uplifting than some of my other instruments. I think you need that in depressing countries like England and Germany.”

The versatility of the set continues, shifting from Balearic beat in ‘All Melody’ to the balletic ‘My Friend the Forest’. A lavish light display fades to a single spotlight for a haunting rendition of ‘Forever Changeless’, Frahm’s shadow twisting around him while – to use Frank O’Hara’s line – everyone, and I, stop breathing.

A brief encore includes percussive toilet brushes drumming against the table-top of the grand piano, before ending on ‘More’, the most unsullied piano work of the evening. The standing ovation that followed could have lasted hours. Tristan Gatward

As recent additions to Bristol’s music scene, Rainmaker are already making an impression. The post-punk quintet signed to regional imprint Quit Yr Job Records at the close of the year for the release of three-track EP ‘Shelly’, which was enough to gain plaudits with coastalscene heavyweights and Big Jeff alike.

Making their London debut in the Brick Lane back-room obscurity of Café 1001 seems suitable, although poor curation from this evening’s promoters sees the band headlining a night of twee singer-songwriters and college bands.

And hey, if the £3 Red Stripes are taking their toll, why not take a rest on one of the ten plush leather sofas at the back?

All this somehow adds to the band’s spectacle. The set starts with enticing introspection, shifting to glitchy shoegaze and riff-heavy rock. The anthemic ‘Moose Is Loose’ sets drinks flying, while ‘Hurricane Season’ possesses all the teasing and humouros traits of one of Foxygen’s finest. Tristan Gatward

Jen Cloher The Deaf Institute, Manchester 14 February 2018

As Jen Cloher notes towards the end of tonight’s show, the vast majority of Australian musicians never make it out of their own country; much less get to tour as much as Cloher has on the back of last year’s bruised and beautiful self-titled album. The breakout success of her wife, Courtney Barnett, who plays guitar in the backing band tonight, has undoubtedly been integral in bringing Cloher to international attention – when she dusts off 2009’s ‘Fear Is Like a Forest’, she acknowledges that it was Barnett’s cover of it with Kurt Vile, on last year’s collabor-

photography by tom howard

Live ative ‘Lotta Sea Lice’ LP, that was the first that many people had heard of it, and her.

Her songwriting, though, shines all on its own, and the truth is that tonight’s set feels a lot more playful than the album it leans so heavily on; intensity on record is consistently swapped out for bright and breezy guitar pop, especially on ‘Showgazers’ and ‘Great Australian Bite’. Moments that are relayed faithfully include the sprawling set centrepiece ‘Analysis Paralysis’, which unfurls slowly, but for the hour or so that she’s onstage, Cloher rattles through her back catalogue with the sort of purpose you’d expect from somebody who’s been plugging away for over a decade to be here. Joe Goggins

Kelela The Roundhouse, London 22 February 2018

Given her past leanings to British subgenres such as UK bass and UK garage, a headline show at the Roundhouse has definite significance for Kelela. Even during the set she utters, “I’m so used to being the support act.”

Despite this implying a musical homecoming for the American singer, she is almost certainly outdone by her support

photography by ant adams

act, Rina Sawayama, whose performance is littered with sonic odes to ’90s and ’00s pop music, channelling the production of Britney Spears and N-Sync. Aesthetically it is just as vibrant, as she sports lime green and red hair.

Kelela, on the other hand, guns for something a little more profound than fun. She opens the set on ‘LMK’, perhaps her closest thing to a pop banger. But the song is stripped of its immediacy; she toys with it and slows it down. Where there was once immediate joy, there is in its place something more reflective, leaving her on the back foot from the off.

Last year’s debut LP, ‘Take Me Apart’, floated on the periphery of the mainstream, granting her much acclaim.

This provides the bulk of tonight’s material as Kelela glides through tracks with stunning vocals and choreography, but she lacks a certain edge – that extra something she had during the days of her ‘Hallucinogen’ EP. One of the gig’s peaks comes when she performs the Arca-produced ‘A Message’, a texturally diverse number that, for a second, makes the R&B star make a lot of sense.

The problem is that Kelela’s not quite as odd as an artist like Arca, or as fun as Rina Sawayama, or even someone like Jessy Lanza. It makes it all the more frustrating when she closes with ‘Rewind’, which at long last breathes life into the entire venue. Aimee Armstrong

Shopping The Eagle, Salford 3 March 2018

Shopping, touring their new album, ‘The Official Body’, produced by Edwyn Collins, performed on the banks of the River Irwell, in the shell of an old two-up-twodown terrace (the upstairs fireplace now floats above the stage), a stone’s throw from both flash Deansgate apartments and estates where, as a local-born wag put it, you can find the one thing money can’t buy – poverty.

The band, part of the spark that ignited London’s Power Lunches scene (which feels reanimated tonight), are an inspirational template for clever, fun music based on ostensibly ego-less collaboration.

The songs from the new album do not deviate too far from the template of danceable post-punk that, while having its own subtleties, resides somewhere between A Certain Ration, ESG, Au Pairs, Delta 5 and bassist Billy Easter’s old band, Wetdog. That’s a pretty good place.

As soon as they begin with their new single, ‘The Hype’, the crowd warm like they are hearing an old favourite and a similar response is elicited from several songs from ‘The Official Body’.

Beginning with descending bass notes reminiscent to ESG’s historical banger ‘U.F.O’, ‘Shave Your Head’ is particularly well-received as drummer Andrew Milk narrates what seems like a rumination of the vacuity of hip selfcreation that develops style without interesting conversation. Do correct me if I’m wrong, at least some of their new songs develop this theme. ‘Discover’, another new one received rapturously with unembarrassed dancing that makes red brick dust crumble off the Victorian brickwork, seems to ruminate upon identity, the creation of the self and loneliness.

Behind Rachel Aggs’ spikey guitar, Easter’s dance-inducing bass and Milk’s never-overdone drumming, there is a depth of feeling and thought that other bands struggle to muster while being so entertaining. Patrick Glen

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Film and Books

I, Tonya (ai film) I remember the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer because of Tonya Harding. One US ice skater (Nancy Kerrigan) had been kneecapped, allegedly by another (Tonya Harding), as I understood it, in a bitter feud and scramble for the gold medal. As a 12-year-old, I fixated on the story with all the grownups in the world. It seemed completely fictional to me, and yet the soap opera simplicity of good versus evil was too comfortable to

encourage analysis, and so Harding became a shortcut for ‘villain’. As Margot Robbie as Harding puts it in Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, “People loved me, then they hated me, then I became a punch line.”

Based on “true, irony-free, contradictory interviews” with the real life main players in what tra nspires to be a heart-breaking tale for everyone involved, I, Tonya is part biopic/part whodoneit? that doesn’t pretend to know the answer.

How could it when Harding is shooting at husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and then looking down the camera and telling us “I never did this” as she reloads?

Or when the violent Gillooly repeatedly physically assaults his wife and denies that it ever happened?

Gillespie enjoys hunting for and questioning the truth, perhaps because he’s been forced to, but away from the matter of the assault on Kerrigan, especially, we arrive at one convincing reality – where

Tonya Harding is no monster, but rather a victim herself, at the hands of her abusive, TOUGH-loving, neglectful mother (played by the brilliantly blue Allison Janney) and a doofus or two from the school of Napoleon Dynamite who are easy to laugh at if you tell yourself that none of this stuff happened.

Mostly though, Harding is a victim of her lower class upbringing, in an elite ice skating world where she never fitted the beauty-pageant-on-ice mould. Margot Robbie portrays the struggle brilliantly, sewing her own costumes that will never do and training like Rocky. She’s unapologetic and has picked up her sweary aggression from her mother. She’s sympathetic without being nice. She always says that it wasn’t her fault. You get the feeling that she can definitely handle herself, but cripple a teammate for a clearer shot at gold?

I’m not so sure. It was much easier to pick a side in 1994. Stuart Stubbs

We’re Going To Be Friends — Jack White & Elinor Blake (third man books) In We’re Going To Be Friends, Elinor Blake’s illustrations bring the White Stripes’ paean to the purity and adventure of childhood friendship alive and the result manages to be heartfelt, sincere, kid-friendly and cool, and probably the only children’s book to feature a portrait of Chicago blues legend Son House. Third Man Books, Jack White’s publishing house, is as detail- and quality-obsessed as his record label and vinyl pressing plant and the book looks just how the song sounds. A ideal gift for fans of hardcore Detroit fuzz blues and the under sevens. Lee Bullman

Sundog: Selected Lyrics — Scott Walker (faber and faber) For over four decades now, Scott Walker has operated on his own terms, drifting occasionally and out of fashion but never really seeming to give a shit about that. Sundog is a collection of his lyrics written over the last forty years, and the deep, sonorous and gentle boom of his voice rumbles beneath every page. The words are unpredictable, stripped back and suffused with sharp-eyed ennui and cigarette smoke.

Collected together like this, Walker’s lyrics stand up on their own without musical accompaniment and make the case for his earning the title poet, amongst his other epithets. Lee Bullman

To Throw Away Unopened — Viv Albertine (faber and faber) Ex-Slits guitarist Viv Albertine’s follow-up to her punk memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, is an uncompromisingly honest and often brutal narrative in which she carries a candle into the shadowy corners of her life that most would shy away from. To Throw Away Unopened unpicks a tight tangled knot of family, relationships, identity, distance and belonging and holds nothing back as it captures and re-examines the moments that meant something. As with her first book, Albertine’s writing is direct and unaffected, a world away from irony and pretension. Lee Bullman

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Interview Post-punk inspiration in grief, caffine and Dr Frasier Crane, by Ian Roebuck Photography by Andrew Mangum

Ed Schrader’s Music Beat

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Interview “What I love about Frasier…” Ed Schrader explains as I attempt a well-timed interjection, “is you have different voices playing out these plots.” He rapidly continues: “The dad’s a rugged salt of the earth guy, Frasier’s the posh egomaniac and then Niles is more Beta.” Schrader’s now at one hundred mph. “I feel like they are all playing out different aspects of an argument that I am having in my head,” he finishes with a ta-dah.

“The thing is, you’re going to have to fight to get some words in. He will just keep talking,” long time friend Devlin Rice tells me, as Schrader pours another cup of coffee from his Baltimore kitchen. “Oscar Wilde said ‘we are multitudes’ but I digress, it’s always good to relate to the young audience by making Oscar Wilde jokes.”

There are multiple warnings from Ed Schrader’s Music Beat about the length of our discussion but nothing prepares me for the psychological dissection of Frasier within minutes of starting. “My birthday was a week ago,” says Schrader. “Mr. Dan Deacon gave me three different Frasier sweatshirts, one has the dog Eddie on it, another has the logo and the last one has Frasier wearing a very nice cardigan, probably taken in early Frasier and Cheers crossover days.”

Ed Schrader’s Music Beat are a provocative post-punk duo (comprised of Schrader on vocals and Rice on bass) who released two visceral full lengths in ‘Jazz Mind’ (2012) and ‘Party Jail’ (2014). In the years since they’ve added Baltimore’s own Dan Deacon as Producer and created their new album ‘Riddles’. Now they are a trio of Frasier super-fans and comfortable in their new skin. “We went in with a bunch of material, which would have been a logical follow up to ‘Party Jail’, says Rice. “We are proud of both records but it felt like we wanted to push ourselves to see what we could do sonically.”

“I got to the point where I thought, well I could bang on a drum and yell ‘Rats!’ for the next 15 years or maybe challenge myself a little bit,” says Schrader. “I feel like the early records are this big ink-well and you’re scrawling images on the cave wall but with ‘Riddles’ we took out the felt tip pen and we wrote the constitution, we tattooed it on Dan Deacon’s back.”

The result is a remarkable album by three friends determined to break new ground. With Deacon on board for his first project in this role they’ve created a rich textural landscape far beyond their previous work full of beautifully dense pop songs that are still enjoyably off-centre. “That’s true,” Rice says, “this process really brought out abilities which we haven’t been able to tap into before. You see Ed at karaoke and he’s normally burning the house down…” He laughs as Schrader croons away in the background. “Don’t go breaking my heart,” he gladly sings before explaining, “I look forward to the studio as most people would look forward to the dentist but Dan made it feel like home – we were literally in his home.

“Dan would get me to sing a song I was familiar with so he’d say how about Police’s ‘Tea in the Sahara’, which is a really trippy song where Sting is singing about a mythical figure, so I would keep singing that over and over, then he’d shout OK change the words, now change the tone, now just get rid of the

words and hum, now think of something red, now something blue, it was like What about Bob?, you know?”

“Dan was Richard Dreyfuss,” laughs Rice.

A tight unit who stayed up all night recording after watching Bar Wars on cable TV (another lengthy digression), the newfound patience paid off. “There were songs that sounded like b-sides for ‘Party Jail’ and Dan said let’s take a step back,” recalls Schrader. “He said, ‘hey I really enjoy these demos but I think you need to say something new.’ Meanwhile, as John Lennon said, life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, and there were all these tumultuous life issues that were happening. Dan was having relationship problems and both Devlin and I dealt with death in the family. My Step Dad died and that’s who a few of the songs on the album are about. When those types of things happen you are sucked into reality. A lot of my early art I would put on different hats and I feel I was running forward and when he died it forced me to stop and be present.” For a moment there is silence. “When he died I was in Puerto Rico standing on top of a mountain,” he continues. “He was someone I had a mixed relationship with so I didn’t know what to feel at first; I thought I will just go about my day and get through it. We got into the car and started driving and this Phil Collins song came on from the ’80s and he was a big fan of Phil Collins – as soon as I heard it I lost it. It was called ‘Do You Remember’.

“I apologized to my girlfriend for making the whole day weird and she told me it was OK. Meanwhile we are zigzagging this crazy mountain and there were chickens on the road.

I started laughing because I thought he would appreciate this.”

“It’s all in the song ‘Culebra’,” says Rice. “Just take a listen.” Which I do. The closing track of the album, it’s a haunting tale full of Schrader’s typically cryptic lyrics but there’s something more direct about this new shape that takes the breath away.

And it wasn’t just Ed who experienced upheaval during the recording process. “Upheaval seems like an understatement,” says Rice. “My brother died when he was 28 of Cystic Fibrosis. In the last 5 years of his life as his world became smaller I moved back home with my parents to help with the maintenance. Having conversations with him about death and being with him as he died as a family was incredibly beautiful. In a snap moment, everything in my life was answered, I felt very strongly pushed in a direction with the band, being away and being on the road made sense to me. I just thought this band is so cool and I love it so much.”

Somehow the topic turns to coffee again. Rice puts on another pot as Schrader tells me about their favourite vice. “It blew Dan’s mind because he only just started drinking coffee towards the beginning of recording,” he says. “He was like, ‘Jesus guys you drink so much of this stuff.’” It makes sense when you know that Rice has a job roasting specialty coffee.

The band are even running with their own blend (Ed Schrader’s Music Bean’s) to coincide with the album release.

Is this the reason you talk so much, I ask. “Yeah,” says Rice. “Good luck trying to wind it down as we just keep going.”

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Interview

Paranoid Mania and Ecstatic Joy How David Byrne arrived at ‘American Utopia’ – a record that celebrates the finer things in life when cynicism feels like the only option, by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography

by Gabriel Green 48

Interview

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Interview

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Interview

“What’s heaven like for a chicken?” ponders David

Byrne with curious, darting eyes, before rocketing his head back and breaking out into manic laughter, exposing a set of pearly white teeth to match the creamy London hotel suite he sits in.

It’s a question Byrne poses on his new record, ‘American Utopia’, on a song called ‘Every Day is a Miracle’. The responding lyric goes: “Full of roosters and plenty of corn / And God is a very old rooster / And eggs are like Jesus, his son.” It’s a song loaded with other similarly incongruous proclamations, such as, “The Pope don’t mean shit to a dog / And elephants don’t read newspapers,” and it explores what it must be like to be, “a cockroach in the cosmos of your heart,” before clearing up any confusing matters by declaring, “the mind is a soft-boiled potato.”

“There’s quite a few songs that have to do with imagining how the world looks from the point of view of another creature,” Byrne clarifies. “I think the implication is to try and look at things from the point of view of other people, but I pick creatures because it’s sometimes more fun. Then you just go on from there and then you realise that our own conception of these things must be just as limited as theirs. We fancy that we’re a lot smarter than chickens, and I hope we are, but…” he stops himself and begins laughing again, something that will punctuate the entire conversation. “In some odds we must be just as limited and I think there’s something in that in the record.”

The ex-Talking Heads frontman is an immediately fascinating and striking man. His bright white hair wrestles it out with film director Jim Jarmusch for best hairdo for a mid-60s New Yorker; he wears a grey suit and crisp white shirt with black-rimmed glasses tucked between the buttons, and he sports two-tone golf shoes but with the spikes removed. “They are comfy,” he says when asked about them when walking through the hotel lobby and into a lift. “I suppose they are good shoes for men who like to stand all day, that’s what golf is really isn’t it? Standing.”

Byrne comes loaded with nervousness and gives off a sense of slight discomfort. His eyes are a constant back and forth and up and down, rarely making eye contact for longer than a few seconds. He wriggles in his seat back and forth, legs crossed and then uncrossed, hands on the table and then on his lap and back again or clinging to his icy glass of water. He is at once loquacious and phlegmatic, loose and rigid, stumbling and flowing. There’s an undercurrent of panic from time-to-time, like he’s sitting in a job interview (which ostensibly he is) but this is broken up by bursts of laughter to ease any slight awkwardness. Byrne is idiosyncratic but he’s good company and very funny. He gobbles

up laughter with the same voracious appetite as he reportedly does his food and if you laugh at something he’s said, it’s like a thumbs up for him to sink even deeper into his own. The title of a track by The Feelies (a group unquestionably influenced by Talking Heads) immediately springs to mind when conversing with Byrne: ‘The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness’.

Such anxiety and nerves has been key to Byrne’s career, though. The nervy, jittery, sparse and scattered sounds of Talking Heads’ early period is a manifestation of such selfproclaimed oddness. “I used to be very tense and nervous, I couldn’t relax,” he told Jools Holland back in 1994 when asked about this on his show. Holland – a remarkably, and consistently, inept and inattentive interviewer – misses the humour and the ‘Psycho Killer’ lyric-quoting response. Byrne continues: “I knew I had to take that step up and be that nervous person behind the microphone. You get it out in the songs and then you don’t have to kill anyone in real life.” Once again Holland misses the sandpaperdry, ink-black response and continues to ask an utterly inane question about Byrne’s hands as the humour flies over his head with the force and speed of a thousand fighter jets. No wonder Byrne occasionally comes across as strange or uncomfortable on TV. Today, he is far from the man as seen on other television appearances, such as The David Letterman Show in 1983, when he looked as though he was praying for an ejector seat to fire him out of the studio with every new question asked. Nor is he the man on American Bandstand with Dick Clark in 1979, when he froze up on air to such a degree that Clark had to turn the microphone to bassist Tina Weymouth and ask, “is he always this enthusiastic?” to which she replied, “I guess he’s organically shy.” Weymouth is correct, Byrne is shy, no question about it.

But lacking enthusiasm? Resolutely, no. Byrne is bursting with it.

Not only is such enthusiasm documented through his fecund career – one that includes eight Talking Heads albums, numerous solo and collaborative records, books, films, soundtracks, installations, exhibitions, a record label, a radio show, musicals and more – but also in his manner when speaking of his work. Aside from releasing a new record, Byrne has been touring the world with a lecture entitled Reasons to be Cheerful: a scattered look at some of the good being done and progress being made all over the planet in a time of what can often feel like unrelenting misery. “I thought these talks would give the promo schedule a little more variety and something else to talk about besides my record,” he laughs. “It’s looking at good innovation, renewable energy, positive drug policy... a lot of different

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Interview stuff.” This was born from a period of sourness that Byrne was the past. I’m not very nostalgic.” As for what makes for a fruitfeeling. “I was feeling pretty miserable,” he says, “and still do ful collaboration in the eyes of Byrne, he says: “I think somea lot of the time. I’m not a miserable person most of the time times the ones that are the most successful are...” once again but I wake up and read the paper and feel angry, depressed and his stops himself to chuckle and show off those teeth. “It’s like... cynical. I thought that’s not very healthy for myself and it’s not good fences make good neighbours. When you know where the boundaries are and you set those rules in early, it makes it go very productive, so I thought what can I do?

“The title references an Ian Dury song. It was written very smoothly. Creative boundaries, I mean, not like ‘get out of during the Thatcher era, so there was probably a similar feeling. It the room! get out of the room!’” was a period in which people were writing a lot of angry songs and — The Observer — he came out with ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, which seemed a little perverse at the time. But I thought that was a good thing to do.”

Byrne’s latest album, and arguably his career, is defined by This ties into the un-ironic title of his latest album, ‘American Utopia’. It’s Byrne’s first solo album in 14 years but it didn’t an earnestness coated in oddness. Making the ordinary extraorstart out as one. “At first I thought it was going to be another dinary. The inanimate emotional. A sort of abstract sincerity.

David Byrne and Brian Eno record.” he says. Eno features briefly Coming across too directly or as preachy was a concern to Byrne on the album, as do a range of guests including Oneohtrix Point when doing such an album as ‘American Utopia’ complete with Never’s Daniel Lopatin, Sampha and Jam City. “It started off with the lectures. “I’m very wary of that,” he says. “I’m wary of doing anything where it seems like I’ve got me writing over some drum tracks answers or that I’m telling people what he [Eno] had. They weren’t fleshed they should be doing. More often I out with all the instrumental bits but ask questions, or in the Reasons to be they sounded really interesting. I got “I am saddened by the Cheerful thing I’m pointing out things excited and worked over those and that other people have done that can then added some other musicians. low level to which U.S. be encouraging, rather than saying, I kept playing them for Brian and he ‘you should do this.’ As I was wrapping would add more but then eventually he politics has sunk. The up the record, it felt like it seemed to said, ‘I think this is your record now,’ hate, vindictiveness, pose these questions or make obserand I said, ‘yeah it does seem that way’. vations about who we are and what It wasn’t my intention to run away with personal insults, racism am I, what are we about, what do we it but that’s what happened.” and pandering – it want, all these kinds of things and…”

Byrne’s collaborations with he pauses before the laughter kicks in Eno span decades. They last worked seems that the worst again. “It doesn’t answer any of them.” together on 2008’s ‘Everything That aspects of the Internet Byrne has long been an observer Happens Will Happen Today’ but over a concluder, plucking thought, they met in 1977 when John Cale took have come to life” insight and intrigue from seemingly Eno to see Talking Heads support the nowhere, like a scientist moving from Ramones. Byrne found himself back at experiment to experiment. A keen Eno’s having his mind ripped open by cyclist, he sucks in cities, places and the sounds of Fela Kuti and they further bonded over their shared fascination with scientific approaches people as he moves through them like a rolling sponge. In 2012, such as cybernetics. Eno would go on to produce three seminal he spent days listening to and recording the sounds of London to Talking Heads records (‘More Songs About Buildings and Food’, such a degree that he worked out the city beats at exactly 122.86 ‘Fear of Music’ and ‘Remain in Light’) as well as collaborate with beats per minute.

And much like Byrne glides through the world, absorbByrne on 1981’s masterful ‘My Life in The Bush of Ghosts’. Byrne credits their ongoing relationship to eclectic interests. “Some- ing and observing, his new album drifts through genres, times we’ll have conversations and not talk about music at all. characters, points of view, moods, tones and grooves. In an I think that has kept our friendship going, but also distance,” he emblematic fashion of his whole output, it feels like the presentation of a painter’s palette as much as it does a finished paintsays, referring to them living in different countries.

Presumably Byrne and Eno continue to creatively spark ing. St Vincent’s Annie Clark spoke of Byrne’s ability in this because of a matched desire to move forward, avoiding the past department when they collaborated together in 2012 on ‘Love and not repeating themselves? “Yeah,” Byrne says. “Although This Giant’. “David is capable of so many shades and moods and I realise I am going to repeat myself in some ways, whether one of them is a rare combination of paranoid mania and ecstatic there’s certain themes or points of view I return to unwittingly, joy,” she said. “It’s a really unmistakable, singular tone. He also but musically I try to avoid it as much as I can. It’ll happen but has an ability, lyrically and musically, to talk about or address I’m not trying to recapture something; some glory days from big subjects in a way that never feels pretentious or lofty.”

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Interview Such big subjects that Byrne manages to address with this blend of paranoid mania and ecstatic joy are rooted in the current political climate. This is a clear impetus for his exploration of an American Utopia and to seek reasons to be cheerful.

In a 2016 journal entry on his website, he wrote: “I am saddened by the low level to which U.S. politics has sunk. The hate, vindictiveness, personal insults, racism, and pandering – it seems that the worst aspects of the Internet have come to life and turned into flesh and blood.” So, is ‘American Utopia’ a political record

by Byrne’s own definitions? “In a certain way but I’m certainly not singing about any specific issues,” he says. Byrne is subtler than that and instead he plunges into areas of abstraction and absurdity to explore such themes. Humour is a big tool for him too. “It’s an antidote for me and it also can disarm people. Sometimes you can get people to entertain an idea or something they might not normally accept or deal with or think about if there’s a little bit of humour involved.”

Skating around political discussions it’s clear that there’s one man at the centre of a lot of this upheaval, yet the giant breathing fatberg that is President Trump is yet to be mentioned directly. So what does David Byrne think of his president? He starts, of course, by manically laughing. “Erm... wow... erm...

I feel like him getting elected is a symptom of something else.

I feel like it goes quite far back. I’m old enough to have felt that, for me, there was a shift in the ’80s and there was an acceptance of a more cynical attitude, a more money-grabbing attitude. I feel like that never really went away – the Reaganomics of trickle down theory and all that kind of thing. That was really cynical and was proved completely wrong but that has never really gone away and it keeps going. Then you add in other factors like people living in their bubbles and getting their news from Facebook and the vast inequality and all these other things and you have a perfect storm. Then the country elects a reality show meathead, and you go alllll...right.” He recently went as far to say, “he’s a fucking racist.” to Rolling Stone.

photo: ugo dalla porta courtesy: fondazione prada

— Fear of failure — The role of music as a healing process is something Byrne has long explored and discussed. He’s previously mentioned he felt that he was “mildly autistic” and probably with “an undiagnosed case of Asperger’s Syndrome” in previous years but he feels music brought out his confidence and that he “grew out of it.”

Byrne feels like in many ways he’s gradually been unlocking more of himself and his own abilities as the years and projects have gone on. “Yeah, it’s taken time,” he says. “Sometimes I imagine if I had died early on that I wouldn’t have been done yet, I’d only be half finished.” he says, leaving it open to interpretation if he’s referring to his creative output or his own personality construction.

Despite this ever-growing confidence with every new project that he embraces, he still worries about the impact and results of his work. “Yeah, I still have a fear of failure,” he says.

“But I also don’t have a huge fear of taking risks and trying things out. I’m willing to try things but I think one of the reasons

I am is because there’s nobody with a gun to my head. If I’m not happy with it I can just say, ‘fine’. I’ll fail on my own terms and I’ll be the one to blame.”

I ask if the fear of failure is rooted in letting himself down or his audience?

“I think it’s myself,” he says after a brief pause and jittering around in his seat some more. “I have a certain amount of pride and ambition in my work. Of course I’d like it to be heard and enjoyed by as large a number of people as possible but I can also be just as happy if it’s a smaller audience that likes it – that wouldn’t be deemed a failure.” In 2009, he told the Telegraph that, “I never get stuck or run out of ideas but I don’t always hit the peaks.”

His voice sounds glorious on this record – pristine, confident and glowing. This is an area that, over the years, has unearthed new parts of him and subsequently altered the tone of his music. “I realised some years ago that I enjoyed singing.

I think in the early days it was an act of desperation, I needed to get things out and then at some point it became pleasurable. The very act of it became enjoyable. Which worried me a little bit.

It was great because it made me feel good but on the other hand I thought maybe all the edge that comes from that desperation is going to be lost. That maybe I’ll sound too happy. The singing may have improved but I think the oddness is still there.” The same goes for Byrne’s relationship to dancing. “I didn’t used to do a lot of dancing,” he says. “I did more twitching than dancing early on but now – even though it’s still not really conventional – there’s more pleasure in it.”

Of course dancing is a central image burned into the minds of many when they think of David Byrne. In particular, his astonishingly unique moves as captured in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 masterpiece, the live concert film of Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. Bryne’s moves are swan-like, both in a sense of like a swan landing and gliding on water – the presentation graceful and fluid – and also the spectacle that you’d see if you peeked below the surface of the water to see kicking and twitching legs moving chaotically – a blend of discordant harmony.

‘Stop Making Sense’ comes into conversation as Byrne has described his plans for this tour as, “the most ambitious since ‘Stop Making Sense’”. This will consist of a completely empty stage, all players mobile and on wireless mics and amps, no risers, drums but no drum kit. “Completely clutter-free, it’s all about us moving around,” he says.

Asked if he loves ‘Stop Making Sense’ as much as the whole world seemingly does, he replies with a simple, “Yes, I do,” before going on to talk about the simplicity of the idea and the pragmatics of the set-up of the show, something Byrne became fixated with. In the wake of Demme’s death last year, he elaborated more on the beauty and uniqueness of the performance itself and what Demme plucked from it. “Jonathan’s skill was to see the show almost as a theatrical ensemble piece, in which the characters and their quirks would be introduced to the audience and you’d get to know the band as people, each with their distinct personalities. They became your friends, in a sense.

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I was too focused on the music, the staging and the lighting to see how important his focus on character was – it made the movie something different and special.”

Byrne’s particular, difficult and occasionally demanding side came out during the making of that production. He became so obsessed with the details and the aesthetic presentation of the set that he wouldn’t even allow a bottle of water on the stage because they could reflect light and appear out of place with the all-black set. Similarly, any brandings on the guitar amps were also covered over in a matte black paint to avoid light and to make sure they didn’t catch a distracted audience eye. He even confessed, with much shame, to throwing microphones in the direction of the crew during the production, as a result of obsessions turning into tantrums.

He understands that his idiosyncrasies have occasionally had negative repercussions but he tells me it’s something he’s comfortable with. “Yeah, I accept it and I embrace it,” he says.

“I have moments when, like all of us, I may fly off the handle and yell at my friends or workmates or something and realise it was a really stupid thing to have done but I’ve survived most of those things. Most of the time I think I can manage the odd. I can embrace whatever oddities and peculiarities I have.”

— The albatross — When Talking Heads broke up in 1991 it resulted in some bitter animosity. Byrne would go on to describe the group as being in “an ulcer-making world” and Tina Weymouth in particular has spoken spitefully of Byrne, once describing him as a man “who is incapable of returning friendship.” The group briefly reformed in 2002 when inducted into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame but the discomfort was palpable. When brought to the stage they all stood sheepishly behind the microphone, waiting for someone to move forward to speak. Instead, Byrne ducked behind the whole group and hid, ensuring he’d be last to talk, if at all.

“I’m incredibly proud of everything we did,” he says when I ask him if the rabid love for his old group has ever felt like a burden. “The music we made, the shows we did, all that. But yes,

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sometimes, you have to try and escape from the albatross of your own reputation and move on and sometimes an audience does not want to move on. I think it’s worked out fine but there have been periods where it’s been a bit of a struggle to get an audience to move on with you but I’m also not the only artist that’s been perverse and gone out and said, ‘oh I’m not going to do any of that old stuff ’. After a while you go, ‘wait a minute, they’re good songs. If you do some of those, you’ll have a better show.’” This is a philosophy that Byrne will be carrying forward with him on the ‘American Utopia’ tour, as Talking Heads classics will be played alongside new material. “There’s a lot of them that I still like.

There’s some that I think remain more relevant than others, so they get carried through. It’s much easier to integrate that stuff now and it has been for a while.” As ever, a full-on Talking Heads reunion looks deeply unlikely and unwelcome.

It would also be antithetical to how Byrne has lived out his creative life to date. Whilst many considered peers of his continue to stumble forward presenting a living waxwork version of themselves as they hammer out old songs from old times with waning enthusiasm and depleted relevance, Byrne has offered multiple versions of himself across multiple art forms to create a career of David Byrne’s – a personal army of delightful oddballs.

For a period around the turn of the millennium, Byrne used to carry with him, glued to his shoulders, a big red knapsack containing a toothbrush, passport, Swiss army knife, flashlight and sewing kit. Just in case. He is an artist who is ever ready to follow the future wherever it may take him, in any moment, and he has no intention of changing this or the person behind it anytime soon. “Years ago I was having relationship problems and I went to a therapist,” he says “and…” he stops himself and rips into head-shaking laughter once more. “She was telling me that I was doing really well and that I might be done soon and I said ‘oh no, no, no. Don’t fix me completely.”

Lanzarote

03—18 MOTH Club Valette St London E8

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Saturday 10 March

BLACK DOLDRUMS

#lanzaroteworks

Saturday 24 March

HAPPY MEALS

mothclub.co.uk Tuesday 13 March Tuesday 6 March

THE ALTERED HOURS

Wednesday 28 March

ARLO

SOCCER MOMMY Friday 16 March Wednesday 7 March

SUNWATCHERS

HERE LIES MAN Saturday 17 March Friday 9 March

BEACHTAPE

LAZY DAY

Saturday 7 April

RROXYMORE

The Lock Tavern 35 Chalk Farm Rd London NW1 lock-tavern.com

Monday 19 March Saturday 17 + Sunday 18 March

USA NAILS

MILD HIGH CLUB Friday 23 March Friday 23 March

IMARHAN Saturday 24 + Sunday 25 March

MARTHA Wednesday 28 March

SPORTS TEAM Monday 2 April

MIDDLE KIDS

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com

Friday 2 March

DENT MAY Tuesday 6 March

YEHAN JEHAN Wednesday 7 March

ADAM GNADE Friday 9 March

MARK SULTAN (BBQ)

THE WYTCHES

The Waiting Room 175 Stoke Newington High St N16 waitingroomn16.com

Thursday 1 March

HELM Saturday 3 March

NATHAN GREGORY WILKINS + JOE SPURGEON Thursday 8 March

MARTHA FFION Friday 9 March

TASHA Saturday 10 March

ALI KURU Saturday 17 March

SHEDBUG Friday 23 March

IDENTIFIED PATIENT

Thursday 8 March

MOTH TRAP Friday 9 March

THE VAGABONDS 77 Saturday 10 March

THE NEW TUSK Wednesday 14 March

TREEBOY & ARC Saturday 17 March

MNNQNS Saturday 24 March

WEIRD MILK Thursday 29 March

WESLEY GONZALEZ Friday 30 March

WARMDÜSCHER Saturday 31 March

DRAHLA Sunday 1 April

THE PARROTS

Interview

Everything is recorded

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Interview

Richard Russell’s new collaborative project exists as part of London’s multicultural heritage, by Sam Walton Photography by Mahaneela Choudhury-Reid and Ed Morris It’s difficult to pin down why Richard Russell is famous. Ask someone who, like him, came of age in the late ’80s and they might remind you that he was one half of Kicks Like A Mule, the rave one-hit wonders whose track ‘The Bouncer’ – with its “your name’s not down, you’re not coming in” catchphrase – crash landed in the top ten in 1992, leaving Russell briefly as one of the poster boys for a scene that was deemed by John Major’s Conservative government as the most dangerous since punk.

Somebody else a little younger might point to his position as head of XL Recordings, which Russell took over in 1993 and transformed from a fairly unremarkable dance label putting out disposable 12-inches with titles like ‘Energy Dawn’ into an admirably broad church that foreshadowed modern-day post-genre musical appetites: under Russell’s stewardship, XL broke acts as diverse as The White Stripes and Dizzee Rascal, MIA and Badly Drawn Boy, Vampire Weekend and Basement Jaxx. It wasn’t all cult favourites, either: after hearing a demo on MySpace in 2006, Russell also had the foresight to phone a then-unknown singer called Adele Adkins. Ten years on, two of the most popular albums of all time have an XL logo on the back.

Say the name “Richard Russell” to a certain kind of recent music fan, though, and they won’t tell you about raving or XL Recordings. Instead, they’ll point you toward Russell’s creative rebirth in the past decade, after taking a back seat at the label, as an auteur producer – the sort, like Rick Rubin, Steve Albini or Quincy Jones, whose renown extends beyond the realms of the credit-scouring subscribers to Record Collector. Gil ScottHeron’s and Bobby Womack’s final albums were made under Russell’s supervision – both of them as much triumphs of manmanagement as they are artistic expression, and both of them increasingly identified as modern classics – as well as a clutch of debuts from emerging soul and RnB musicians.

Russell has claims to fame, then, even if none of his past lives have thrust him directly into a spotlight. His latest project, though, might alter that. The first album to feature his name on the cover, ‘Everything Is Recorded By Richard Russell’ is a collaborative record born of a series of Friday night jam sessions over three years at his own Copper House studio during which the rule was that, yes, everything was recorded. “There just isn’t anything that can really replicate that process of being together,

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so I thought, ‘let’s just play’,” he explains, leaning forward on the mid-century leather sofa in his studio’s lounge area. Above the sofa hangs a painting that depicts fabled bluesman Robert Johnson flanked on either side by Kraftwerk founders Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter, in a neat summary of Russell’s tastes.

“It felt like a completely natural thing but people aren’t doing it so much in this era of recording.”

— The contacts list — While Russell insists he’s wearing only his most recent musical hat in his capacity as the curator/producer/facilitator/artistic director of ‘Everything Is Recorded’ (“yeah, there you go,” he deflects, when offered a list of job titles he might currently like to pick from), the truth is that the spectres of his previous endeavours nonetheless loom large. For one, this is a record that only someone with a contacts list as deep as his could execute: Sampha is the vocal lynchpin, but there are also appearances from Giggs and Wiki as well as newcomers Ibeyi, Obongjayar and Ghostface Killah’s son Infinite, and behind the scenes lurk contributions from titans old and new in the form of Kamasi Washington, Damon Albarn, Mark Ronson, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno. The sprawling nature of the record’s assembly, too, makes this no territory for a music industry rookie.

For another, there’s also an understanding that while Kicks Like A Mule’s novelty is a lifetime ago for Russell, that generation’s sense of togetherness bleeds through ‘Everything Is Recorded’: although stylistically rather slippery – each of its tracks nods towards a different genre, be it soul, grime, RnB, dancehall or some cocktail thereof – the album retains coherence thanks to an almost familial-feeling thread that’s redolent of the UK soundsystem scene from the turn of the ’90s, the most

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enduring members of which were The Wild Bunch (who would spawn Massive Attack) and Soul II Soul.

“I think the Soul II Soul and Massive Attack thing is absolutely relevant, yes,” he agrees when asked about the inspiration behind the album. “They were the sound of the record collections of the people who made them being given equal importance with the new performances by the people who were there in the room.

And I think, as much as there is a blueprint to this record, that probably would be it.” Gorgeous album opener ‘Close But Not Quite’, in which Sampha duets with a huge, respectfully unaltered Curtis Mayfield sample, bears out that model perfectly.

Centrepiece ‘Mountains of Gold’, too, anchored by Grace Jones’ version of ‘Nightclubbing’ but adorned by a phalanx of rappers, singers and instrumentalists, does likewise.

That said, while the record’s ethos is throwback, Russell is no nostalgist. “I don’t really look at that era with any level of sentimentality,” he admits, of the pre-digital age. “The equipment was clunky, especially for samples, and although I suppose there was something good in that, I really like programming in Logic. Also, I think with the enormous amount of stuff that we recorded, that would’ve been difficult 25 years ago with all the tape that would’ve been involved...”

He drifts into heartfelt considerations of the virtues of old synths versus virtual instruments, but there’s a sense that technological pragmatism wasn’t the only reason that held ‘Everything Is Recorded’ back until now. At one point Russell cites making the Gil Scott-Heron LP in 2010 as “100% a turning point for my life”; at another we discuss the debilitating illness that left him with temporary full-body paralysis in 2013 and bedbound for a year. And orbiting all this is the Copper House itself, where everything was indeed recorded, and which was only completed after his recovery.

Interview He acknowledges a sense of musical planets aligning.

“I couldn’t have made it before now, or I would’ve done,” he says.

“It wasn’t made before I made those other records, it wasn’t made before I was ill and it wasn’t made anywhere but here.

“Not just here though,” he says, gesturing up the stairs to the studio’s live room. “It’s a London thing as well, because I think that’s a sound. London just has a history of multiculturalism, musically, making a reinterpretation of things. And you could probably argue it’s a West London thing too – although not necessarily West London as is, but maybe West London as was.”

— The fire of London — That distinction feels pointed, especially for someone who’s made his home and career for a quarter-century in Notting Hill. Does the London of 2018, with its vast expense and inequality, and particularly West London, with its helipads and oligarchs, still punch its weight culturally?

He pauses. “Well,” he offers, “this is the only place where J Hus happens,” leaning back as if he’s nonchalantly just played an ace. “That sort of thing’s not happening anywhere else.

There’s still life here. I mean, rap music from London is much better than rap music from New York and I never thought I’d find myself saying that. That’s meaningful and exciting.

“In fact”, he adds, ever hopeful, “I think the city is pretty on fire for new music actually – sure, West London is pretty fucked, but London on the whole is pretty on fire.”

Russell’s optimism runs through his patchwork album and beyond. The recent live presentation of ‘Everything Is Recorded’ featured twenty-odd musicians recreating the album’s songs in the round, all playing a game of musical catch with one another as one song unfolded into the next. Russell contributed synth and programming work from a corner of the stage, evidently

still not entirely on board with being the star of the show, satisfied instead that the team he’s assembled, fantasy football-style, is more than the sum of its parts.

That role of puppeteer is clearly where Russell gets his kicks now. “Running a label, I’d ended up doing something where I never got my hands dirty anymore, and I ended up without any tools, which I really missed,” he explains. “You just had the phone – you’re there to facilitate other people. I facilitated people to have a lot of freedom to express themselves and to make some really good things, but I needed to extend that courtesy to myself, too.”

Earlier in our conversation, Russell ascribes that managerial-curatorial touch simply to “listening to a lot of music, reading a lot of credits, and being able to interpret who’s doing what and who’s going to get on with who.” It seems that if there’s one thing for which Richard Russell should be famous, in whichever guise, it’s exactly that.

Living with Guillain Barré Syndrome: “Not as bad as one would think” Guillain Barré Syndrome is a rare autoimmune disorder that attacks the nervous system and leaves one in five sufferers permanently paralysed.

Russell was affected for a year, but remains sanguine: “Although Guillain Barré Syndrome was brutal, and there was a lot of time in hospital, I had it worse in my twenties with depression, because that’s where the loneliness comes in, that’s when people really feel alone. The one thing that was useful during that time was that I did keep working, but it wasn’t easy – it was like chewing tinfoil a lot of the time. But it’s funny: having had a physical illness like I had, it’s less of a struggle. I had a full-body paralysis, and though that’s terrifying, you get a lot more sympathy because people can see it, whereas for someone walking around with depression it’s a lot more difficult. The Guillain Barré Syndrome wasn’t as bad as one would think – when you’re inside it, there’s a bit of peace. It quietened the noise down for a bit. But depression is worse than anyone would think.

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Tell Me About It

Nicky Wire

The Manic Street Preacher discusses the most non-Manics thing his band has done – get older,

by Reef Younis. Photography by Phil Sharp 62

Tell Me About It No band defined my teenage years in the same way Manic Street Preachers did. In the preceding years, I’ve undoubtedly claimed a handful of other bands were just as influential, but the reality is they never truly came close. Why? Because the Manics are a band I can vividly plot over a decade of my life against. From debates about their best album born at the back of Wrexham Wetherspoons 20 years ago (and that still flare up today) to winning tickets on Radio 1 for their 500-capacity gig at the Cardiff Coal Exchange a lifetime ago in 2001, the touchpoints are various and many. I could also thank my cousin for turning me onto ‘Gold Against The Soul’ in a painfully expensive Virgin Megastore or Brian, the owner of Moonlight Records, for providing a steady supply of live bootleg CDs from under the counter. But it was watching them sweep the ’97 Brit Awards as the triumphant ‘Everything Must Go’ propelled them to a fame they (admittedly) didn’t expect or massively enjoy that felt like a personal vindication after the aftermath of Richey Edwards’ disappearance.

In the ’90s, Wire, Edwards and Bradfield (sorry Sean) were the A4 icons I gravitated towards the most – Richey with his fragile torment, Nicky for his unashamed glamour, James with his militaristic intensity – posters cut from Melody Maker and plastered on my bedroom walls. In that context, it’s almost improbable to think of Wire as a near 50-year-old man, and while it’s a reality that also ages me as a fan, it’s a realism he’s all too aware of himself.

In the context of the Manics’ own history, a decade would’ve been a lifetime had they followed through on the contemptuous promise that preceded the coruscating ‘Generation Terrorists’ and split up on its release, but, thankfully, they’ve embraced their longevity with an awareness, grace and relevance that didn’t always seem possible. As a fan, I might have drifted in and out over the last decade but as Wire attests in our conversation, “you go back to something because you remember how it made you feel.”

History, then, becomes a prominent topic during our conversation, even with ‘Resistance is Futile’ – the band’s thirteenth album – released next month on April 13. It’s easy to forget the fact that the Manics were relentlessly prolific in the band’s early years. Most bands would be happy to celebrate a 10-year anniversary with a deluxe re-issue but when you’re juggling 10 year anniversary releases with 20 year anniversary tours and new albums in between, reconciling, celebrating and reflecting on 32 years of history becomes unavoidable.

“I saw a tweet the other day that had the original poster for our first gig at the Crumlin Railway Hotel” It was 32 years ago and I thought for a moment, ‘fucking hell, that’s actually older than me!’ then I realised I’m 48 or 49 or whatever. I think sometimes the best route is almost delusion and to just keep ploughing on because the moment you look back too much it’s actually really frightening. Those kinds of things do take your breath away.

“We just wanted to sign for the biggest record label and sell as many records as we could, on our own terms” Right from the start, we were always absolutist about wanting to become as big as we could. I think that’s what made us stand out at the time in an indie world of elitism. With ‘Generation Terrorists’ we were too young to pull off what we were trying to do but there are still five or six songs that we still play every night.

In some respect, we did what we said we would… we just didn’t do it on the scale that we hoped.

“I’m thankful I was young when I was young because it felt easier to make a point” The kind of posters on my walls used to be Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Morrissey. Back in the ’80s, there were certain things that you followed which were mixed with politics, poetry, miserablism and isolation. In many ways it was easier because we lived in a cold war environment which was much more black and white and easier to take sides, politically. Now, it’s much more difficult to navigate.

“It takes a lot of fucking effort to be that big” We made ‘The Holy Bible’, which was our least commercially viable album, and then out of nowhere we made your biggest commercial album in ‘Everything Must Go’. At the time, it was an album a year and I think towards the end of ‘This Is My Truth…’ is the only time where everything felt a bit overstretched. ‘Know Your Enemy’ was a reaction against that scale.

“I’m guiltier of looking back than James or Sean” They are better at being cold and dispassionate in terms of starting something new and fresh but as someone who did history and politics at university, I think I get caught up in it a bit too much. Because I’m so heavily involved in the marketing and the artwork, I’m always looking at angles and thinking about the mistakes we’ve made. It actually ends up being a healthy balance because they are much more blunt and just pretend to listen to me, really.

“I’m always thinking about the kind of album we need to make next” I think every album checks a box, depending on the kind of Manics fan. ‘The Holy Bible’ and ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’ are on the darker side but then ‘Everything Must Go’ and ‘Postcards From a Young Man’ still have that depth but are bright and pop.

Then you have ‘This is My Truth’ which is long and boring and

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Tell Me About It musical, but ‘Futurology’, for instance, even before we made it, I knew the theory was going to be European art movement, we’d go to Hansa studio and record it in Berlin. Sometimes, it doesn’t need any of that and you just write the best songs you can.

“The idea of melancholia has always dripped through the Manics” Richey and I were addicted to the sadness and loneliness of poets like Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath and Phillip Larkin. Obviously at the start it was mixed with slogans and anger but something like ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ is really imbued with a sense of Welsh melancholy that felt at home in the neon wilderness of Tokyo.

I think we’ve always had that sense of longing from the beginning, and it does come out in a different way with age. The words aren’t as angry or contemptuous because I’d never want to try and write as amazingly as Richey did. It’s just not my style to cram that many words in, but I think a track like ‘International Blue’ could have been written by us 25 years ago because it has that youthful love of something.

“I just haven’t got the fortitude I once had” Responsibility preys on my mind a lot. I still live close to my brothers, my parents live about 10 miles away in Blackwood, so I’m visiting them more as they get older. And then there’s the responsibility of having kids. It’s just not as easy as it was being 25 or walking to school wearing a dress. It doesn’t stop me doing anything, it just adds a weight to everything trying to marry all those elements together. It’s also stuff like walking the streets that I used to walk and the way those memories flood your mind.

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I wish I could be as cocksure and indifferent to other people as I was – as we all were – back then, but now I think I just have more doubt and confusion.

“We’ve still got songs to write” I really do believe that. I think with this album I’ve risen outside myself, probably because I have to face up to the fucking maelstrom of being my age. A lot of the songs on the album are minitributes to people like Yves Klein, Dylan Thomas and the places that inspire me. I’m still obsessed with words and I still think we’ll do something really wide and expansive as a band in the long-term, so I’m not so worried about that; it’s more where we fit in the world. Luckily, we still have that sense of being relevant.

“Survival is a good word” It gives us the energy and dedication that we need for us to be our best. It’s having that slight desperation, and when you’ve seen so many fucking bands come and go, and you look back at the fact that they’ve split up, reformed, come back and then returned to obscurity, we just hope we keep getting more time.

“Sometimes I think it would be nice to feel that there was less in your life” With words, it’s always easy to think you can do something with them in isolation but then when we play back a song like ‘Hold Me Like a Heaven’ and it feels equal to most of the things we’ve done, as long as those moments are there, and as long as we don’t turn into caricatures, we won’t prevail but we will survive.

The BesT New Music

robert earl thomas aNother aGe Captured Tracks

robert earl thomas is not new to making records. a founding member of indie outfit Widowspeak, he lent his talents as lead guitarist for four albums across seven years. Intricate and beautiful, ‘Another Age,’ his rockindebted solo debut, was born gradually and purposefully, in those rare moments of solitude between tours.

DaPhNe & Celeste DaPhNe & Celeste saVe the WorlD

ameN DUNes FreeDom Sacred Bones

Balatonic

With every album, Damon mcmahon aka amen Dunes has transformed, and ‘Freedom’ is the project’s boldest leap yet — tough and joyous, rhythmic and danceable; a true NYC street record.

‘Daphne & Celeste Save The World’ is an album of giddy, ridiculous, restlessly inventive pop, created by electronic producer Max Tundra. These genre-bursting songs touch on time travel, succulents, pipelines under the ocean, and the enduring friendship of two live: people who, long ago, told us 30 April: Brighton - Prince Albert, all to ooh stick You. 1 May: Leeds - Headroom House, 2 May: London - Omeara

aNNa VoN haUssWolFF ImarhaN temet DeaD maGIC City Slang

City Slang

this menacing and magical new full length album was recorded on the gargantuan pipe organ in Copenhagen’s “Marble Church”, and produced by Randall Dunn (Earth, Sunn O))), Wolves in the Throne Room).

Following their acclaimed 2016 debut, ‘Temet’ sees Imarhan step out of the shadow of their cousins tinariwen.

★★★★ Mojo ★★★★ Q 8/10 Uncut

There’s a palpable desire to update the Tuareg sound for a new demographic. Broadening their sound beyond the meditative desert blues of their debut, experimenting with tempos and incorporating elements of funk, disco and rock. ★★★★ Mojo 8/10 Uncut

DabrYe three/three

PhoboPhobes mINIatUre WorlD

seUN KUtI & eGYPt 80 blaCK tImes

DIta VoN teese DIta VoN teese

Demob haPPY holY Doom

Michigan’s Dabrye makes his long-awaited return with ‘Three/Three’, a razorsharp rap album that brings to completion a prophetic trilogy. Guests include DOOM, Ghostface Killah, Jonwayne, roc marciano along with an unfettered celebration of Detroit-area talent with Guilty Simpson, Phat Kat, Kadence, shigeto and Clear soul Forces.

Nothing is stable, everything is usually on the brink of collapse, yet Phobophobes have dragged their weird and wonderful dark psychedelic rock’n’roll into the light of ‘Miniature World’, their debut album, released through prolific London label Ra-Ra rok records.

seun Kuti and the original Egypt 80 band at the top of their game on this heavyweight new Afrobeat set, tackling black consciousness, government hypocrisy and young Africa’s obsession with america. Featuring Carlos santana on the title track.

Dita’s first album, tailored by sebastien tellier.

‘Holy Doom’ pinballs between pure holiness and the lure of the devil, often within the space of one whirlwind song. Includes the singles Be Your Man, and loosen It

Ghostly International

Ra-Ra Rok

Strut

“Hard to beat for fire and fury.

Fela would be proud.” Mojo

Record Makers

“Her self-titled debut is an homage to the serge Gainsbourg school of songwriting, a record that sees the Queen of burlesque turn chanteuse, as a kind of modern day brigitte bardot.

The album features ten alluring, sensual, and seductive tracks of softly-delivered talk-singing with a distinctly French feel.” highsnobriety

support Your Local independent Retailer check www.republicofmusic.com

So Recordings

“...like the Vines libidinously licking the sleeve of rubber Soul on a revolving bed. It’s seedy and funky and excellent.”

Guardian

My Place In far west Toronto, at one of the final stops on the subway, Meg Remy lives with her husband and collaborator Max Turnbull, who also records music under the name Slim Twig. Opposite their apartment above four garages there’s a giant cemetery and the Humber River. Meg describes her quiet neighbourhood as “full of mostly old people” and she likes how unhip it is.

Inside her place there’s everything you’d expect to find in the home of US Girls – an outsider pop project that, over the course of ten years and six albums, has fully embraced a life of DIY creativity that goes hand in hand with Remy’s rejection of consumerism and her fight for gender equality.

To say there are books everywhere suggests there’s no order to them, but that’s not the case. The shelf above Meg’s computer is strictly for books that have already been read; the cupboard in her bedroom is for all those that haven’t. The stack on the right is of plays and scripts; the doorstep ones on the tree stump table are by other strong women like Yoko Ono and Clarice Lipsector. There are books for reading, books for studying, books for making flyers and T-shirts, books for elevating

rubber plants. They’re partly why Meg and Max live without an Internet connection at home. “The conversations we have from reading are far greater than if we vegged out online,” she says.

Elsewhere, neatly collected photos and original artworks point to a resourcefulness that’s seen US Girls go from looping droning cassette tapes into an experimental strand of hauntology to new album ‘In A Poem Unlimited’ – something far easier on the ear than those early records informed by relationships with bad men, drugs and depression. It’s Meg’s second album for 4AD, where she continues to sing like Ronnie Spector, and also Kylie Minogue when her voice softens and Toronto collective The Cosmic Range slip into shronky lounge (‘Rage Of Plastics’) and down tempo disco (‘Rosebud’).

It’s the first time that Meg has collaborated with a live band, although when you’re mistaking ‘Mad As Hell’ for an ABBA/Shangri-Las cut-n-shut, don’t think that she’s singing ironically – ‘In A Poem Unlimited’ remains an album of women grappling with power and dark reflections on acts of violence.

Meg showed me around her flat.

At home with US Girls Words by Stuart Stubbs Photography by Colin Medley

Clipart Books These are full of little images and fonts, and I use these for all the design work that I do, when I design stuff for other bands – flyers or US Girls shirts. You can scan them in, use them in Photoshop or you can Xerox them. I did the Darlene Shrugg album artwork with these books.

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Hair Art This is a piece of art by a Canadian artist called John Dixon who draws with hair. This is a piece made with my husband Max’s hair from when he was three-years-old. John Dixon is Max’s mum’s high school boyfriend and they remained connected and friends, and he was doing these works a lot when Max was young.

My Place

Closet Office I’ve always been a fan of turning closets into extra rooms.

We don’t have that much stuff, so I turned this one into my office.

I’m here every day. Or I’m at the library because we don’t have Internet at home. I work on something in the closet and then I go to the library and I send it there. Last year we finally bought a TV,

but we don’t have Netflix or anything – we get movies from the library, because you can order them in and they’re free. I mean, we have our phones for the Internet, but we don’t have enough data to be on them all the time. When we’re on the Internet we’re on it for a purpose – we can’t veg out on it.

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My Place

Playscripts These are all plays. I got into reading scripts a couple of years ago. I didn’t know anything about theatre and had never really seen a play before. I made a bunch of notes and started reading a load of plays. Playbooks are so cheap, and you can get, like, all of Pinter’s plays in one book for 10 bucks. I like reading dialogue and how it flows, and using my mind to make the pictures of what’s happening. It grabbed me.

Frank Sinatra Photograph This is a photo of Frank Sinatra visiting a kindergarten, and he’s trying to talk to a little girl and she’s just crying. I think it’s hilarious. I’m a fan of Frank Sinatra’s music, but I think that the idea of him, this original heartthrob… I don’t know… he’s this good looking, talented man who can then go off and do whatever he wants and he’s going to be protected. There’s this saying where I’m from: ‘you can’t fool kids and you can’t fool dogs,’ and I think it’s true. Kids know when something’s up, and this girl is crying, and that probably bothered him.

Photo Booth Photos In this tin box I have around 15 years worth of Polaroids and photobooth photos. There’s one real photo booth left in Toronto, where the images are developed in there while you wait, where all four shots are different. I used to do all of my press shots in there.

I’d hang up a different background each time and send them off to the press. A whole shoot for three dollars.

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Oblique Strategy Cards I made these by hand. Brian Eno does sell them, but they’re too fucking expensive. They’re over 100 dollars. Mine are exactly the same because I just printed the list off of the Internet. The way they’re being sold for so much money almost feels antithetical to what they are. Maybe if he sees this photo spread it’ll make him think twice about charging so much.

My Place

Statues of Mary These are a hangover of my Catholic upbringing. I’ve picked these up from all over the world. There’s a glow in the dark one from Portugal that’s super funny. You can always find a Mary somewhere. My grandmother had them and my mother had them and now it’s almost like a tradition… something that I feel guilty about, y’know what I mean? The Catholic religion is beyond anything that I can comprehend, and I’m completely against it, and yet I almost fetishise these little totems of this woman.

Charles and Lady Diana Mug I kinda collect Diana stuff in the way that I collect the Mary stuff.

That comes from my mum as well. Diana was kind of the patron saint of divorced ladies. She gave all the divorced ladies hope that they would get better when they left their husbands. I guess it started when I was touring in the UK, and, like Mary, that’s another person who was distorted for other people’s motives.

Bruce Springsteen Portrait I used to mention Bruce Springsteen in interviews and when I was onstage to put it out there that I’d love to meet him, but it’s still not happened. But my Bruce obsession has dwindled a bit – not with the music, but, y’know, he’s the perfect example of when art and commerce meet. I have a hard time getting over the fact that he’s stock-piled so much wealth, so don’t ever look up peoples’ net worth – that’s what I learned. I was like, ‘I wonder how much Bruce is worth,’ and then I looked it up and was like, ‘Oh fuck!’ It’s like 300 million. I’m sure he gives a lot, but you could give more, because the thing with all these people is it’s still coming in each year. Forget the new albums and tours, just the back catalogue!

I just don’t understand why he’d keep so much. You can’t even spend it. It’s almost as if you could give everything away because it’s just going to be replaced.

The thing is, he’s legitimately worked hard and had some luck and got to where he is, and so that’s the perfect story that the Powers That Be want to instil – there is inequality, but it’s up to you to overcome it. If you want to pick yourself up by your bootstraps, look at Bruce Springsteen. I think a lot of people who like his music and go to his shows have gotten into that idea.

We have to!

Autographed Martha Reeves Photo Martha Reeves played at a free show with Smoky Robinson in downtown Toronto and she was way better than Smoky. Beyond!

She was giving autographs after the show and it was pretty amazing to see her up close – all of her jewellery, and to hear her speaking voice. She was pretty sweaty having come off the stage, and this is a pretty Photoshopped photo, but hey – she’s earned the right to do whatever she wants with her image. She was super sweet. I don’t think I said anything. She was in control.

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Sting and Shaggy have made an album together. For real. You will be able to own an official copy of it from April 20.

When this news was announced last month, the Internet went nuts. At first people made snide comments as a coping mechanism. It was overwhelming, wasn’t it? But by the time Sting and Shaggy posted the record’s title track on YouTube, the comments spoke for themselves: “Interesting one”; “Well, I gotta admit, I liked it more than I thought I would…”; “Greetings from Argentina”.

As a visual guy, I’m more interested in this arresting cover image (and it is arresting). What they’ve done right and what they’ve done wrong.

Out of respect for serious reggae, let’s start with the good – Shaggy. Shaggy’s holding it down here. It’s time for him to be serious for once so he’s not doing what he normally does (make his eyebrows go really high). The glasses are probably there to mask the strain in his eyes to keep those eyebrows from popping up. You can see just how much effort it’s taking from his upper lip, but give the guy a break – his eyebrows are down. Probably.

Still being styled by Topman after all these years is also a really nice touch, and can I just point out that it’s Shaggy

who’s looking at the camera, not Sting!

Shaggy is owning his space; we can’t be sure that Sting is aware that this photograph exists.

That’s what Sting wants us to believe. He wants us to think that Shaggy is just another fan who was too embarrassed to ask for a photo, so he’s slyly positioned himself nearby for a holiday photo. Sting knows exactly what he’s doing – make no mistake. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Sting is holding his guitar? Come on – he knows how uncomfortable Shaggy feels about not playing an instrument. This is a power play. Sting doesn’t even have a strap on the guitar. Do you know how hard it is to play a guitar standing up without a strap?! Sting is saying, “I’m Sting. I will not be looking at the camera. I will not even be untucking the top left pocket of my jacket. Live with it.”

This kind of disrespect upsets me almost as much as the choice of Instagram filter used here (Nuclear Summer), and the sleeve’s real low point, the font.

I know it looks like a cool bit of Tippex graffiti but take a closer look at the S’s and G’s. That’s a font! I’m pretty sure you can choose that font on your Moonpig order. Shaggy probably looked at that and said, “Maybe we could actually write it out in Tippex and scan it in?” to which Sting would have replied, “Let’s not fuck about with that – I’ve turned the computer off now.”

12 politicians you didn’t know are actually made of mashed potato

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illustration by kate prior