Loud And Quiet 124 – serpentwithfeet

Tess Roby, Caroline Rose, Jenny Wilson, Metallica, Sudan Archives, Wax Chattels, Jimothy Lacoste, Ambient Music’s new wave

issue 124 £ z ero

serpentwithfeet Beneath the paving stones

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH 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 124

Until last month’s issue of Loud And Quiet we had a regular questionnaire feature called Getting To Know You, where artists would answer the same 30-odd questions each month: “What kind of biscuit would you be?” – that kind of thing. The capfree, Baltimore-born serpentwithfeet took the survey in March 2017, explaining that he had a pet shadow (“he’s lovely”) and that his advice to others was, “Unhinge, unhinge, unhinge.” These two abstract and knowingly funny answers did help us get to know a little more about Josiah Wise, and a year on we’re back for the rest – to discuss the RnB singer’s origins as a choirboy, his “witch’s nose” and to get into his startling debut album, ‘soil’.

“Keep being disruptive!” he told himself last year, and here we are.

Stuart Stubbs

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

With special thanks to Anna Meacham, Annette Lee, Frankie Davison, Joss Meek, Kas Mercer, Lou Goodliffe, Natasha Foley, Nisa Kelly.

For Daphne Covington.

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

Sudan Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Tess Roby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Caroline Rose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Jimothy Lacoste . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Wax Chattels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 serpentwithfeet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Metallica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Jenny Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Ambient Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 03

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Money

A sensible guide to living off your band in 2018 Most of us have, at one time or another, dreamed of being a successful musician. As Nickelback elegantly expressed it – after just 11 years of being Nickelback – “we all just wanna be big rock stars.” But how do you make this happen?

In the traditional model you sign a record deal. You live off the advance, then make a regular income once sales reach a certain figure. You supplement this with money from gigs and merchandise. Here’s why this doesn’t work anymore: getting signed is expensive. You might write tons of cool songs, but unless you’ve got thousands of likes on Facebook you won’t get booked for big gigs, so labels will never hear you. To get these likes you’ll have to play loads of shitty DIY gigs where the price of the taxi and the beer will be more than what you take on the door.

Even if you do get signed chances are you won’t get rich. Labels have drastically reduced the advances they pay out, so you can’t live off it for long – especially if your band has several members. And you can’t use that money for food: there’s recording costs, music videos, PR and hundreds of other band expenses to be met. Worse, this money is really only a loan: you’ll be expected to pay it back in sales. And if you don’t? Best not to think about that.

Luckily for you, I’ve prepared the following guide that will 100% allow you to become a professional musician in 2018.

The Group If you’re in a band, begin by firing all the other members. They might be great musicians and fun to hang around with, but do you think a record label or promoter will pay you more just because there are five of you? Of course they won’t. Ditch them now.

The exception to this is if you’re in a band with your significant other. Firstly, it’s not realpolitik to fire your partner – even if you do show them pie charts and expense reports to explain the decision – and secondly, being a couple in a band can be cost effective. You can huddle together for warmth, take turns raiding the headliner’s rider and, since you’ll be spending all your time playing gigs, you won’t have to spend money on cinema tickets, restaurant meals or therapy. If you have a child, recruit them too: they bring in much needed government benefits and can work the merch table.

The Gear Guitars, drums, bass – not only has it been done before, but these are also very expensive instruments to buy, maintain and transport. The cheapest new drum kit out there costs £200 (and sounds shit), while a packet of guitar strings is six quid a pop.

Instead, I recommend the recorder. It’s priced at less than a tenner, is easy to learn and can be transported inside your coat or trousers. As an added bonus, the recorder gives you instant avant-garde credentials. Or, if you’re going for that full-band sound, why not try a keyboard? A Casio SA46 can be purchased

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

for just £29 and has all the tones and beats – from Latin to world, to rockjazz – you’ll ever need. If you do insist on having a guitar like your hero Johnny Borrell, play with only down strokes to reduce string wear.

The Gaff The ideal solution is to live at home with family. This will avoid rent and provide you with food, drink and toilet paper. If you have no such family, force yourself onto the sofa of a timid friend. If you’re attractive and charming, have as much casual sex as possible and benefit from free room and board.

If you have no friends, family or sexual potential, you may be forced to rent a place. This isn’t necessarily a disaster, as you can make extra money by subletting your bathtub on AirBnB. The cheapest cost of living can be found in North Scotland, but since no one lives there it’s not ideal for an audience-based business. Rather, I’d recommend Burnley, which is very cheap (average rent is just £400pcm) and close to major metropolitan centres. Under no circumstances should you try to live within a 75-mile radius of London. As for buying a house, let me make this clear: as a musician, you will never own a house. Ever.

The Gigs It would be nice to gig at The Roundhouse, Manchester Academy or Download Festival, but opening slots at such places are notoriously poorly paid – sometimes as little as £50.

A far richer seam is to be found in local pubs. Function bands make £200-£1,000 a night. The caveat is that you have to play covers, but then again so did The Beatles. The Casio SA46 really comes into its own here as it has many famous songs preprogrammed – all you have to do is hit play.

The Graduation Congratulations! You are now a paid musician with a sustainable lifestyle, ready to be embraced by society.

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Relationships

Death is real but so is the comfort found in Mount Eerie’s overwhelming grief I think about my dad’s death all the time, but I haven’t cried about it in years, so long that I can’t name when or where. At three in the morning, I’m sobbing while ‘Crow, Pt. 2’ plays out of my headphones. Slouched up, hair matted, sinking into a hoody beneath my duvet. The final elegy from ‘Now Only’, Phil Elverum’s latest album as Mount Eerie, is in its opening guitar notes. Enveloping, sour, intimate and finger-picked, like much of the album.

I’ve been a mess for the past half an hour. My laptop keeps reminding me that I’m up soon, but it feels wrong to cut the album short. It feels wrong to be listening at all. I’m reviewing the project for this magazine, the one you’re holding, and so I had no choice, I tell myself. But the review is already finished and I know how I feel. It’s a masterpiece, my first 10 / 10, which shouldn’t be a big deal, but vanity and all that.

I couldn’t sleep. Elverum’s voice was ringing in my ears. He rarely raises his voice above a whisper. Still, the rawness of it – in its cracks, its wavering pitch and howling moans – something about it makes you avert your eyes, even when you’re wrapped up in the story. The closeness borders on voyeurism.

You can hear the house breathing in ‘A Crow, Pt. 2’’s DIY recording. It’s Phil Elverum’s house. The family home he shared with his wife Geneviève before her passing from pancreatic cancer. It’s the house he continues to share with his young daughter, whose amorphous childhood grief he describes so painfully on this song. I’ve never been to this home, met his wife, or been in Elverum’s position, but I feel like I know it all. It’s an uncomfortable admission.

The entirety of their relationship is mapped out, from the life-affirming beginning – a chance meeting full of hope and possibility on ‘Tintin in Tibet’ – to the failure to grasp out to any sense of his wife in the album’s final lines (“With arms reached and run my fingers through the air / Where you breathed, touching your last breath / Reaching through to the world of the gone with my hand empty”). It’s all painted with such specificity of emotion and place, closing in to every detail – like the postcards on a fridge on the album’s cover, or the ritual morning acts of a grieving father, on this final song.

“Death is real,” Elverum said on this album’s older brother record, 2017’s ‘A Crow Looked at Me’, impossible to avoid the reality of it. That first grief-stricken LP dealt with the immediate aftermath of Genevieve’s passing, like the most inti-

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mate of wakes. We listened to personal stories of love, misery and memory, sharing in some catharsis at an uncomfortable proximity, but one still manageable, easy to categorise. A grief record.

We’ve all heard them and been affected by them. Nick Cave just released one. Touché Amoré wrote a stunning one. Bowie even wrote his own, the brilliant bastard.

‘Now Only’ is a different beast. It’s after the wake, when the guests have given their condolences and walked out the door. It’s living on after the death of a loved one, dealing with the absurdity of it all quietly, as their memory distorts, flickering through less frequently. For many, the reality of death takes much longer to hit. We live in a surreal existence, waiting for the loved one to walk through the door, seeing them as real in our dreams. When that feeling settles, and we know it’s not the case, death is just absurd.

‘Now Only’ is that experience translated on record. To know Elverum is a real person is crushing. “This is what my life is like now,” he sighs in the album’s bleakest breath. For many, including himself according to a Pitchfork interview, the album barely qualifies as music. The songs are stripped of a protective layer of artifice that can often provide a comforting distance.

The usual songwriting formalities are stripped away. Elverum’s unfussy guitar playing colours lyrics with new shades of light, quietly guiding the listener to the places he describes with such vivid detail, into his frame of mind.

Throughout the album, he struggles with the realisation that Geneviève’s true nature is gone, his attempts to recreate her failing because of the distance time has created between them. His memory changes constantly.

The album is as much about the purpose of art as anything else.

Rating ‘Now Only’ seems wrong.

Even calling it a masterpiece feels like taking an individual’s honest grief and holding it up as a cultural artefact. It’s important to recognise that these songs and these relationships don’t ‘belong’ to us, even if Elverum is boldly sharing them. But Elverum offered his thoughts on this late stage of grief with such clarity.

The scariest thing about grief is when it’s gone, and you’re left alone. Even though these situations are so outside of my own, hearing someone else capture that ludicrous hollowing of grief brought me comfort, reassurance, and clarity. I’m crying about my dad’s death at three in the morning, lighter than I was before.

words by stephen butchard. illustration by kate prior

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S U N D AY 1 5 T H J U LY 2 0 1 8 / G U N N E R S B U RY PA R K , LO N D O N

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Fate

The Beatles really needed that ‘Nasty Nick’ moment I’ve been trying to find out when DATEBook folded. And exactly what it was. As teen magazines from the mid-60s go, it’s not a great title, is it? ‘DATEBook’ says to me crocheting tips and advice on when your knee socks look too slutty. But it was actually far groovier than that; a teen magazine that published progressive articles on interracial relationships and marijuana legislation as it exposed all manner of intolerance and bigotry to the socially aware young people of America. It also inadvertently encouraged the KKK to picket Beatles’ shows and helped set the band free.

Perhaps the date it ceased printing isn’t so important.

It was on the cover of DATEBook in July 1966 that The Beatles lost their innocence, thanks to a John Lennon pull-quote that read: “I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity!” The article it was from had originally appeared in The Evening Standard five months early, to which the British public were either amused or indifferent, but not offended. I imagine the bit they liked best was when Lennon said: “Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.” The southern states of American did not like this bit, and, encouraged by incensed Birmingham, Alabama, DJ Tommy Charles, they started burning their Beatles albums and calling for a national boycott of the group. (Incidentally, Charles seemed to have no issue with the cover-line above Lennon’s – a quote from Paul McCartney that, in relation to America, read: “It’s a lousy country where anyone black is a dirty n**ger!”).

Remember when we all stripped naked and ran down the street setting off car alarms because Nasty Nick Bateman had cheated at Big Brother? It was like that – a silly, silly time, in which Lennon was forced to give a typically insincere apology on TV. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Similar to Bateman, who would go on to write a book called Nasty Bateman: How to be a Right Bastard (that’s not even a joke), The Beatles didn’t only survive the hysteria, they thrived on it, with the fallout scorching off their matching suits that mum liked so much. In the ’90s, Take That tried to escape their nice-boy image by making Robbie Williams shave his head and Howard Donald grow dreadlocks. Really, Gary should have just dumped on Westminster Abbey.

The ‘bigger than Jesus’ maelstrom was ironically divine for The Beatles. Between the article being published in the UK to no reaction and in the States to utter pandemonium, they’d recorded ‘Revolver’ – not the kind of album made by boys as saintly as The Beatles had been perceived. But take a look at what they were playing to American audiences at the time of the burning LPs and it’s kinda depressing. At what turned out to be their final show, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966, there were no tracks from ‘Revolver’, just songs they’d been playing for nearly four years – peppy rhythm and blues numbers ‘I Wanna Be

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Your Man’ and even their cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Rock and Roll Music’. I’m not so sympathetic when I’m reminded that they were paid 95 thousand dollars (the equivalent of roughly $725,000 today) for playing just 12 songs at that show, but clearly The Beatles needed to be rammed off the road, and John’s big mouth serendipitously came to the rescue.

George Harrison had already voiced concerns about playing to crowds so loud they couldn’t even hear the band, and arriving at D.C. Stadium, Washington, to be welcomed by protesting members of the Ku Klux Klan didn’t make him love the idea any more. To keep him from leaving the group, The Beatles agreed to retire from the road, and we all know how well that turned out, from their first ‘non-toured album’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s…’ to The White Album, all the way to ‘Let It Be’, which isn’t as awful as you remember it.

Without DATEBook’s inflammatory cover-line, maybe The Beatles could have lived with playing Chuck Berry covers forever.

Which would have basically made them The Rolling Stones.

The Beatles would be playing Hard Rock Calling this summer, supported by Miles Kane. George would have left and we’d have no ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ and no ‘Something’.

As the South raged against The Beatles in 1966 Ringo had his moment to shine via the back door. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was released in tandem with ‘Yellow Submarine’ on August 5th. One song is a masterpiece and the other is ‘Yellow Submarine’, but it was Ringo’s spotlight turn that became the hit, on account of ‘Eleanor Rigby’’s religious references making nervous American DJs spin the happy tune about the big bright boat instead.

DJ Tommy Charles died in 1996, one year before Noel Gallagher proclaimed that Oasis were “bigger than God.” America seemed cool with that, whoever Noel Gallagher was.

words by abi crawford. illustration by kate prior

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

A HAWK AND A HACKSAW ‘Forest Bathing’

LM Duplication LP / CD This new album features ten original compositions by Heather Trost and Jeremy Barnes. The opening track “Alexandria” features Barnes on the Persian Santur, an ancient hammer struck dulcimer, and Trost’s string and woodwind melodies. The composition evokes the long trader’s route between what is now Bulgaria and the wealthy cities of Istanbul and Alexandria.

HAWTHONN ‘Red Godess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing)’

Ba Da Bing! LP / CD Largely guided by their own unconscious muse, the band’s chief inspirations lie outside of music, in Romantic poetry, dreams and reveries, esoteric symbolism, the history of magic and witchcraft, folklore and the English landscape.

RIVAL CONSOLES ‘Persona’

Erased Tapes CD / LP / LP Ltd Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles presents his expressive new album ‘Persona’ ‘Persona’ An exploration of a dynamic production process that combines analogue-heavy synthesisers, acoustic and electric instruments with a shoegaze-level obsession with effect pedals.

V/A - ‘Brown Acid: The Sixth Trip

URANIUM CLUB ‘Live At Acri Taun’

Castle Face LP / CD Minneapolis, a city known for producing the best, has taken no nap on these young men: the driest tone, the snappiest hooks. They are simply great and this recording captures a particularly good night. They Shred ‘til everyone’s dead, including a nine-minute jam, god help us. “Here’s something to make you feel good about the world, to know that we have extended a strong art-handshake to our brothers and sisters in Italy. Viva l’italia!

Ciao, bella.” — John Dwyer

GUIDED BY VOICES ‘Space Gun’

Riding Easy LP / CD GBV Inc LP / CD In 2018, Guided By Voices will release precisely “You heads just can’t get enough obscure hard rock, one new album, Space Gun. Once you hear it, heavy psych, and proto-metal from the late-60s & 70s! you will know why. With a renowned work ethic And for that, we’re grateful for the opportunity to and a daily pot of coffee, Robert Pollard keep laying these slabs in your lap.” – continues to outclass younger generations of Riding Easy/Permanent come-and-go rock bands.

YOUNG GUV ‘2 Sad 2 Funk’

Night School LP / CD 2 Sad 2 Funk constructs a hyper-reality of commerce, pop references and ecstasies that reveal an addictive, hyperactive emotional underneath it.Young Guv seems removed from the picture but really he’s there a little too much for his own good. 2 Sad 2 Funk is not what you thought at first, but it feels good, whatever it is.

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT ‘Blackwater Holylight’

Riding Easy LP / CD Heavy psych riffs, gothic drama, folk-rock vibes, garage-sludge and soaring melodies all collide into a satisfying whole with as much contrast as the band’s name itself.

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Ageing

Sweet 16: The year Alison Mosshart obsessed over photography and skateboarding without saying a word

Right at the beginning of 16 I got really into photography and was taking photos of myself and developing them, like this one.

I don’t know where the fuck I got that pose from.

I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida. It was a very small town, right on the beach. Really super boring. Nothing for kids to do.

It’s kinda like a retirement community, like most cities in Florida are. We had to make up our own fun so all of us skateboarded and started bands. I was really into art – I was obsessed with it, taking all art classes between skateboarding and playing music. There was a trailer at school with a darkroom in it and the teacher ended up giving me the key so I could be in there all the time. I loved it so much because I was alone in there and I could make things all day – there’s something very exciting about taking a photograph and processing the film yourself. I took pictures of people skateboarding; I took pictures of our band; I took pictures of gigs.

I wasn’t a nature photographer – I couldn’t care less.

I was not a good skateboarder, but I loved it. It was the culture from when I was 7 or 8. It was what got me into everything.

Music was involved and art was involved. I loved the artwork

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on decks and I loved all the punk rock music that went with the imagery. I skated just to hang out and then at one point we all decided to form our own band, at around 14. By the time I was 16 I’d played lots of shows and done tours during Spring Break and summertime. I was ready at 16 – I wanted out of Florida and knew what I was going to do. We’d play house shows and skate parks and rent a building just to put a show on.

Despite all of that, I was not an outgoing kid in any way.

I was insanely shy and it took me a while. I don’t remember the day when performing stopped being terrifying, but I remember that right from the beginning I loved it and was almost addicted to the feeling of being that afraid. At my first shows I’d hide behind a post or an amp. And then, gradually, I built up to standing in the middle of the stage. And then looking at people, which was absolutely insane. And then moving.

In high school I had one friend, or two – the drummer in my band and his brother. My obsessions where just so exact that the things that I liked, other people didn’t like. All the normal high school stuff, I just didn’t do it. I was very studious because my plan was to get out of there – to get into a college that was far, far away and leave Florida.

Jamie [Hince] always tells me this story – he’s like, when I first met you (and this is in England when I was 18) you never spoke a word. All you did was laugh at everything I said. That’s basically what I was like. I loved being around people but I didn’t speak. I can totally remember that time that Jamie is talking about – I remember thinking he was the coolest person I’d ever met in my life, and he was hysterical, and just so weird. I don’t know why he put up with me because I was mute, but he’d talk to me about music and bands. I really looked up to him and he encouraged me to write songs properly and play the guitar. He stuck with me because of the transformation from how I was to what happened when I got on stage. Eventually I started talking and now I never shut the fuck up.

I have this really distinct memory from when I was a little younger than 16, when I really liked Green Day, when Green Day played to 300 people. On a really rare occasion, one of my parents drove me to their show in Orlando and for some reason or another they didn’t show up again until two hours after the show.

And Green Day sat in the parking lot afterwards and watched me.

They were like, ‘we’re not leaving you in this parking lot, no way; we’re going to sit here until your parents come.’ I’ll always think that that’s the coolest thing ever, that they did that for me. They played Nashville a couple of years ago and afterwards we were playing pool and I told them that story and they couldn’t believe how cool they were back then.

as told to stuart stubbs

Mark Peters

Spectres

Echo Ladies

Innerland LP / CD / DL April 20

WTF 12� / DL May 18

Pink Noise LP / CD / DL June 8

Sat 23 Jun

Acetone & Haruomi Hosono Fri 7 Jul

Oneohtrix Point Never: MYRIAD 13 & 14 Jul

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: monumental Sat 20 Oct

Mew: Frengers

Interview

Sudan Archives

When violin meets iPad drum machine,

by Susan Darlington Photography by Nathaniel Wood 12

Interview

There’s a jigsaw piece missing from the centre of Sudan Archives.

Speaking from LA, the former Brittney Parks (“not even my Mom calls me that now”) can explain the how, the when and the what of her budding career, but the reasons why she’s chosen to put herself in the limelight remain tantalisingly out of reach.

Seemingly more at ease in the background than being centre stage, Sudan Archives has a natural reticence. She’s courteous and has a warm laugh, and her conversation contrasts with her on-record braggadocio. “I ain’t got no friends / I’m too confident,” she sings on ‘Wake Up’ over Sudanese-inspired fiddle, laid-back soul and a hip-hop beat.

The sentiment is in keeping with her narrative of growing up in Cincinnati without many friends and feeling like she didn’t fit in, which is possibly the result of her upbringing in a religious household. While her peers were playing The Pussycat Dolls and Linkin Park she “didn’t really listen to any modern music because I was in such a strict household and we only went to church and listened to music there.”

It was while in the gospel church that her interest in music was piqued. “I’ve always messed around with instruments and when I would go to church the choir would really encourage young kids to just pick [them] up,” she tells me, and not having and scores to follow, she “had to figure out what to play to their music. And so that just developed my ear,” she says, “which eventually helped to develop my own sound because I was so used to making up ideas.”

She played around with a lot of different instruments as a child but she decided to learn the violin after a group of fiddlers came into her class in fourth grade. “They played Irish jigs and stuff and I thought they sounded really cool,” she enthuses. “So that’s when I really wanted to learn violin and be like them because they played violin but they were also dancing and singing.”

A few years further down the line a teenage Sudan was being influenced by the local music scene in Cincinnati, where she attended a lot of electronic shows. “I would see these producers and they would make music off of these drum machines, these [Roland] SP-404s,” she says. It was an interest that developed further when her father gave her an iPad when she was 16.

She couldn’t afford to buy the equipment she heard musicians playing so instead downloaded apps that were replicas of drum machines, “because what the guy was playing beats off was a 404 and they had SP-404 apps.”

The attitude of local producers and rappers also had a profound influence on Sudan’s approach to music making.

“They were really DIY,” she says, “and they made their own music and their own beats and their own flyers. And so I think that really inspired me to do it my own way, even if I didn’t have

the tools.” She began to rethink the music she’d been making with her fraternal twin sister, too. It was what they’d always done, writing songs together that were ‘more pop’ than the music Sudan makes alone today. “That’s probably why I wanted to do my own thing,” she says, “because I wasn’t really into the pop that we were doing back then. And so I just started to do my own thing and get a little experimental.”

This epiphany led to a shift in how Sudan approached music. “I started making my own beats on an iPad and I just thought it might be cool to play violin to those beats. So I started to mix it together.”

— Dr Seuss and the possible dream — It was with ‘Come Meh Way’, which is on her eponymous debut EP, that Sudan realised she’d hit on a unique sound. “That was one of the first songs where I had a violin incorporated and singing and the beats that I make. And so when I heard that song I was like, ‘oh, this is sounding kind of like how I want my sound to be.’”

It was on the basis of this track that she was signed to Stones Throw, having fortuitously met the label’s A&R man Matthew David at an experimental show. The impulse deal is easy to understand: Sudan’s music references a number of different styles while still sounding so distinctive.

Her lyrics are equally intriguing, their elliptical and meditative repetitiveness being taken to the extreme on woozy new single ‘Water’. “They’re just very improv,” she notes. “I literally just record and say what I’m feeling. And I think they just end up having their own meaning or meanings. I used to read Dr Seuss and maybe my style is kind of like that!”

This approach to writing makes her cover of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘King Kunta’ (reframed as ‘Queen Kunta’) all the more unexpected. Perhaps predictably, it wasn’t the lyrics that drew her to the song. “I just thought it was really cool because I heard violins in it,” she explains. “There’s this violin part that comes in and out every time. And so I thought, ‘oh maybe it would be cool for me to do my own cover with like all violins and just see how it sounds.’”

It’s an experiment that pays rich dividends. She completely reinvents the track and turns its G-funk into soulful folk using little more than a violin, a loop station and beats. This is how she records most of her songs and her insistence on complete artistic control has parallels with many underground rap and electronic artists.

Her real interest, however, seems to be in production. This dates back to when she was recording with her sister. “We would

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Interview be in the studio with producers [and] even though I didn’t know how to produce at that time, I just always felt like the production wasn’t going the way that I wanted.”

It’s a studio frustration that she’s addressing with online studies. Currently taking English, she wants to get an Associates in Arts degree. “And then hopefully I can transfer to a school and study Music Technology.

“Even though I’m a producer and a singer and a songwriter, my dream would be to be a female engineer,” she enthuses.

She’s also “really into the idea of producing for other people or maybe getting to write for other artists.” Although she doesn’t have any musicians in mind, she envisages it being more mainstream work. “I just have ideas for songs and it doesn’t necessarily fit into my aesthetic,” she says. “But I just sometimes wish I could write a song for someone with a different voice than I have.”

If Sudan Archives’ natural interests seem to lie behind the scenes then musical forces are pulling her in the other direction and compelling her to be the visual focus of her work right now.

“It’s just naturally happening for me to have to be up front,” she says. “At my first music show I was just playing production beats and I was literally hiding behind a table because I was really shy!

So every time I’m up front and performing it’s kind of new.”

Her self-assurance has also been buoyed after finding

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some kind of kindred spirit in tUnE-yArDs, with whom she’s about to tour North America with. Sudan tells me: “I’m really excited about that because [Merrill Garbutt is] passionate about African drumming and she uses a folk instrument but kind of does it in an alternative way.”

The live dates will coincide with the release of new music, the details of which she’s reluctant to reveal. She is, however, forthcoming about her plans to return to Africa with the Taiwo Fund, a charity that aims to empower children at the North Star School in Ghana.

She volunteered for the organisation last year and gave a three-day music making class. “All of the kids there are already drummers so to teach them how to do electronic drums is very easy because they have really, really good rhythm. But they also get to learn how to use computers because most of the kids there have never used one.”

This is where she sees herself in five years time, not sipping on champagne from an awards trophy, having just produced a Beyoncé album. “I just wanna keep working in Africa and help people make music,” she says. “So maybe my music can give me the opportunity to travel more to do that.”

And perhaps that’s where the missing jigsaw piece lies: rather than seeking fame itself Sudan Archives seems willing to accept attention only if she can use it to help other people.

The BesT New Music

TESS ROBY BEACONS

Italians Do It Better

DJ KOZE KNOCK KNOCK

VIVE LA VOID VIVE LA VOID

Pampa Records

Sacred Bones

HENRIK SCHWARZ & METROPOLE ORKEST SCRIPTED ORKESTRA 7K!

HOP ALONG BARK YOUR HEAD OFF, DOG Saddle Creek

Tess Roby is an artist with a vision. The Montreal-based photographer and musician seems utterly original, with a restless energy toward the sublime. Ethereal and crystalline, her electronic music is dreamy and singular — a transmission from parts unknown.

Vive la Void is the new solo project of Sanae Yamada, cofounder and keyboard player of Moon Duo. The dense, shapeshifting atmospheres of the songs grew out of late-night basement experiments in the layering of synthesizer tracks, resulting in an undulating blend of ethereal swirl, low end thrumming, and electric crackle.

Like all DJ Koze records, ‘knock knock’ exists outside of trend and influence. In fact, it’s a step further beyond: absolutely every single thing here, from grooves to voices to handclaps, is otherworldly and unique.

Henrik Schwarz has collaborated with the Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley to release ‘Scripted Orkestra’. Originally performed live at ADE 2016 and broadcast

by Boiler Room, this new studio recording delves further into Schwarz’s increasingly Features guest vocalists Roisin formidable orchestral talent, Murphy, Kurt Wagner, Sophia showcasing the incomparable Kennedy, Speech and Jose thrill of seamlessly blending Gonzalez. acoustic performance with computer generated music.

Hop Along’s third studio record, ‘Bark Your Head Off, Dog’, shows the band at its strongest and most cohesive.

V/A - TOO SLOW TO DISCO BRASIL: COMPILED BY ED MOTTA

WE ARE SCIENTISTS MEGAPLEX

CHARLES WATSON NOW THAT I’M A RIVER

TOSHIO MATSUURA GROUP LOVEPLAYDANCE

All aboard Too Slow To Disco’s time-travelling private jet for an immersive exploration through 2 decades of the finest and rarest Brazilian Soul/AOR/ Funk/Pop/Jazz gems. Your captain today? “The Colossus of Rio” Ed Motta!

We Are Scientists return with their kaleidoscopic 6th studio album ‘Megaplex’. The indie rock duo are once again set to dazzle the world with ten brand new splashes of colourful and utterly addictive pop. As the band themselves put it: “We want it to be taut, to bang hard and to have a big hook every four seconds or so”

100% Records

Moshi Moshi

JOE ARMON-JONES STARTING TODAY Brownswood

How Do You Are?

Slow Club’s Charles Watson’s debut solo outing.

This debut album, by prodigious keys player, composer and producer Joe Armon-Jones, “As good as any of Slow Club’s is buoyant, celebratory and welcoming. With a background in many highs. Watson has jazz, he draws from influences in created something modern, dub, hip-hop and soul. Different fresh, exciting and potentially traditions are infused and classic” Record Collector. brought together beautifully.

A record with an unmistakable On tour throughout May, 26/5 LSO St Luke’s, London - check depth.

listings for regional shows

support Your Local independent Retailer check www.republicofmusic.com

“If Philadelphia is the capital of indie rock, then Hop Along sits at the table with its top leaders.” Pitchfork (Best New Track)

Brownswood

On ‘LOVEPLAYDANCE - 8 Scenes From The Floor’, legendary Tokyo DJ and producer Toshio Matsuura charts a new direction. The scope of the music reflects the breadth of Matsuura’s interests. It ranges from Bugges Wesseltoft’s Detroit-influenced, dancefloorminded jazz, to Flying Lotus’ LArooted, Brainfeeder beatmaking, translated from laptop-to-live, and given a new, equally idiosyncratic lease of life…Truly groundbreaking.

Interview A Canadian artist pays tribute to the English countryside, by Ian Roebuck.

Photography by Hugo Bernier

Tess Roby “We’re moving into a new phase, it’s time for a change of pace.”

So Tess Roby tells me as she watches winter melt outside her Montreal window. “It’s a hectic time at the moment because I am in the process of moving apartments and everything is colliding.

A lot of people get intense emotions at the seasonal change – sadness and happiness – but I think that is a good thing.” I tell her that we’re still waiting for spring to begin on the South coast of England, and she laughs. “My dad was British and I have been almost every year that I have been alive. I remember going once in late February and it was beautiful; it was a vacation from the long, cold Canadian winter.”

It was her father who inspired Tess’ debut album, ‘Beacon’.

After passing in 2015 his British heritage and very being was lovingly carved into the crystalline and absorbing body of work that we’re discussing today. It’s a fascinating release for Italians Do It Better, a label more synonymous with sugar-rush ItaloDisco than hypnotic, Durutti Column-esque journeys of the soul.

‘Beacon’ is bucolic and faintly operatic beside the urban night drive of Chromatics and Glass Candy. Released this month, all of Roby’s emotions are on course for a head on collision once again. “[My dad] was born in Wigan,” she tells me. “It’s funny whenever I tell anyone British he was born there they shout ‘Wigan!’ it’s the same expression every time. My grandparents moved to Parbold nearby and there is a town called Southport I know very well on the North West coast – you can see Blackpool from there.”

Sense of place is key to Roby and a cold Lancashire wind blows through every beat of ‘Beacon’. You can even sense it howling on the haunting ‘Air Above Mirage’, which signals the album’s closure. The work itself is named after the beacon that sits atop Ashurst hill in Dalton, a gloriously gothic looking watchtower looming over the English countryside, 600ft above sea level. In 1798 it would have raged with flames during the Napoleonic war, now it sits silently. “Music can impose a landscape onto someone,” says Roby. “I think it’s really powerful when a performance can transport you to a place. There is this energy that runs through the album that was definitely a subconscious energy. I had the title of the album as soon as I was into the recording. I don’t even remember the moment that I named it, I just immediately knew. There are all these photographs from my childhood of my British grandparents and my parents

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at the beacon. I have never seen another structure or anything that looks like it and I am really emotional when I go there now.

I didn’t realise that as a kid but as soon as my grand parents died and then my dad, whenever I go there now I instantly realise this place has such a profound meaning.”

Armed with this perspective it’s difficult to listen to ‘Beacon’ without sneaking glimpses of imagery capsules of time on Ashurst Hill, where Wiganers gathered to find deeper meaning. “I don’t know if spiritual is the right word,” says Roby.

“My parents told me this story about how they spent New Year’s there and watched fireworks from the top of the hill. I think about that and I would just imagine it burning when it was in the early 1800s. A raging fire on top of it, it’s quite a striking thing to imagine, having never seen that and probably never will. That’s a really inspiring thought, I can see it in my head.”

A photographer and musician, it’s no surprise to learn that Roby rejects artistic boundaries, saying: “I think audio and visual go hand in hand. The visual components of music are so important; they support each other so much. The album cover is not apparent that I am lying in the grass below the Beacon, but to me, knowing that is enough. Having that visual context, when you open the gatefold LP, there is a photograph of me as a child walking up to the Beacon that my father took. Together all these parts converge and make this piece of art. It’s vitally important that everything works together to create this.”

Once more her father’s influence is plain to see and Roby seems thrilled – energised even – to be talking about him. “Dad never called himself a photographer but he shot a lot of photographs,” she enthuses. “I mean way more than the average person, and ever since we have grown up we’ve had all these photo albums. I love seeing this documentation of my whole life and all these different people in it, all these different landscapes too – I guess he was an amateur photographer and he definitely had an eye. He was a musician as well so there was always music in the house – there is a piano in my family kitchen at home in Toronto and I don’t know anyone else who has a piano in their kitchen – it was so embedded in our house, which also feels like a very spiritual place with all these family remnants and stuff lying around.”

Fittingly, Roby asked her brother Eliot to record alongside her when making ‘Beacon’. With just a drum machine and

Interview

synths found amongst her father’s belongings, they set about creating their own personal language. “It was very important to me that it was only myself and my brother on the record,” she says. “Just because the songs were so deep with memories and I just wanted to keep it close or small… I don’t want to say it was precious, but it was important it was just the two of us.” Why not precious, I ask. It certainly seems to be from the outside looking in. “I guess I just don’t like the word precious! It sounds a little bit baby-like…” she concedes with a wicked laugh.

Living a transient childhood, Roby has always travelled with her music. “I was a member of the Canadian Children’s Opera Company. I sang in the chorus for 8 years, from 8 to 16 or something like that. It was incredibly important for me in terms of my vocal style, the harmonies. That’s what I really took from

the training – one of my favourite things to do is to build vocals on one another, kind of creating my own chorus.

“What I am most influenced by is travelling and seeing different beautiful views that are really inspiring and being in different physical spaces. There was so much I grew up with hearing, too. My parents played a lot of music from West Africa, the Middle East, India, they loved going to see these musicians when they came into town and they influenced my dad too.

Growing up with that, and of course Brit Pop was big when I was a teenager, too!”

When I try to get Roby to admit that she’s clearly an Anglophile, she says: “I don’t know about that. But I’m obsessed with the culture and things you can’t get in Canada – Penguin bars and stuff like that. I bring like three bags back. Asda, that’s where I got them last time.”

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Interview

Caroline Rose

Red is the warmest colour, by Tristan Gatward Photography by Levi Mandel 18

Interview

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Interview

Somewhere

near the epicentre of the new year’s most sarcastic groundswell sits Caroline Rose, a queer feminist songwriter who only wears red. “It’s just my favourite colour,” she assures me. “It’s not symbolic or anything. Over the last five or six years I’ve just, I dunno, weeded out everything that isn’t red.”

Caroline Rose released her second album, ‘Loner’ into the world at the close of February. The four-year fissure in her career from her 2014 debut, ‘I Will Not Be Afraid’, was filled with every material needed for a complete self-reinvention.

Where her debut plodded skilfully into rockabilly safety, ‘Loner’ is a complete musical patchwork, irreverently pitching for fans of ’00s pop music as much as ’70s punk rockers, getting in with Justin Timberlake as well as The Cramps.

“I’ve not had a falling out or anything with that kind of music, I’ve just grown to be interested in so many different things that it wouldn’t make any sense to make folk or Americana any more. It’s not been as drastic a change as people think. Over the last three or four years – since I put out that record – I’ve been actively doing other stuff. We started a band, I went through finding a different label and made a bunch of changes putting my team together. I also got way more interested in production and recording my own music. Things got punky in a lot of ways, it was a pretty natural progression that no one saw as those recordings just never came out. The timings just didn’t match up.”

And so what better gesture – more true to whimsical form – than to mark this complete style shift by naming the first track on the new record ‘More of the Same’? “When I first started my career about five years ago, I wanted a totally different thing from it. I wanted to be a songwriter mainly,” she says. “I lived in a van, writing songs for other people. My lifestyle was really basic, but reflected that kind of music.”

The dreams of being a songwriter quickly conflated themselves with the need to be appreciated as a lyricist, so much so that she admits she wanted to make ‘I Will Not Be Afraid’ a record so sonically boring that her words stood out. “But it’s hard to make sarcasm come across in songs,” she laughs. And in the midst of stylistic upheavals, Rose has never been anything but her own mouthpiece. In a record that should be lauded for its musicality alone, it’s still her humour that takes the headlines.

The record flies through songs about teenage pregnancy and gender norms; from loneliness to misogyny; from shunning industry standards in her riot grrl punk anthem ‘Bikini’ (“We’re gonna fly you off to Tokyo / You’re gonna travel all over the world / We’re gonna put you in the movies and our TV / All you’ve got to do is put on this little bikini and dance!”) to vignettes on the minutiae of hypothetical catcalling in ‘Soul No. 5’ (“I don’t have a job but I got a lot of time / Baby show me yours and then maybe I’ll show you mine”).

“All the songs people are hearing… I didn’t write those for anyone else, I wrote them for me. I think that this album is a

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pretty good reflection of my personality. It’s very reflective of my character. Although I also just wrote a song for Lana Del Rey and I got so into it. It was a song I had originally written for myself – the early nugget of it – I but it never quite fit into my style of music.” She gives nothing else away, adding proudly: “No one’s heard it yet.”

— Me and my fags — We started with contradictions and we’ll continue. Caroline Rose’s account of lonerism is one from a person with many tales of friendship on a record that thrives on collaboration. Five minutes talking to her is enough to realise she’s genuinely hilarious, not to mention perceptive and personable in a way that would make the popularity contest bow down at her feet.

She acknowledges it looks strange. “It came from the time when I created it. Most of the songs on the album were written when I was living in an apartment in Vermont. I had decorated it to look like the inside of a wacky school bus slash Mexican hacienda – it was a very weird and cool place. I’d kind of created my own little world in there. I had spent a lot of time writing songs and arrangements and production on a computer.

“I was really lonely. I desperately wanted to date someone.

It’s very isolating especially during the winter in the North East of the US. It’s very cold. The way I was living in Vermont – desperately close to the Canadian border – it’s like No Man’s Land up there. It felt like I was an island, but it didn’t have anything to do with my business life. At the time I was signed to a label that I would actively be in communications with, be sending songs and stuff. It was just my personal life. So you know, I just felt like shoving a bunch of cigarettes in my mouth and having these dead eyes – it fitted how I was feeling at the time. It’s a little bit strange, a little bit self-destructive. It’s one part humorous, one part… You know.”

The short silence takes us back to the image of her album cover, undoubtedly one of the year’s best visuals. Caroline Rose in a cherry-red tracksuit, stuffing 23 cigarettes into her mouth at once. (No, you counted…) I want to know what happened next, once the cigarettes were in place and lit up.

“It’s funny you ask that. We actually have some footage of it, my friend came over and filmed the whole thing. I had actually shot that picture originally on an iPhone about a year before the album cover was taken, so almost a year and a half ago now. Then we shot the actual album cover six months ago. We took the original in my apartment in Vermont and after we had lit the cigarettes… well, it was a no smoking building and my landlord was very strict… I was like the constant rule breaker.” She explains a story of complete small-town anarchy: “he was like ‘don’t paint the walls’ so I painted the walls teal and yellow, and then he’d be like, y’know, ‘don’t have anyone else park in your parking spot’, and I’d have people over here all the time parking in my parking

Interview

“Just when you think you’re rid of her she brings a posse full of people in and sticks a load of cigarettes back in her mouth” 21

Interview

spot. So I’d get into constant trouble and I was really, really, really trying not to get caught with all the cigarettes in my mouth.

“Then when it came to thinking of an album cover, I knew we had to have this picture but given it was on an iPhone I was like ‘this can’t be the cover, we have to redo the shoot’… we actually ended up redoing it back where we started, in my old apartment.” (She clarifies that she gave the place to a friend after moving out herself, she didn’t break in, although she laughs that that would have made a better story). “My landlord was so upset to see me, like, ‘oh god not this girl again’. Just when you think you’re rid of her she brings a posse full of people in and sticks a load of cigarettes back in her mouth. You know, I haven’t sent him a copy of the album yet, I totally should.”

— The graduate school programme — For the first time Rose also dabbled in the production of the record, working alongside Paul Butler, a man more associated with an R&B and soul output (Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul & the Broken Bones). Having talked to two dozen producers, recording sessions with some and going back and forth with her label, Rose’s story of reinvention seemed to align perfectly with her team.

“When I spoke to Paul, I needed to know that he was up for making a more experimental session with me as the stuff I heard was more soul orientated. I remember him being like ‘nooooo! This is not all I can do!’ and I totally understood where he was at and what he was feeling. It’s really easy to get pigeon-

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holed when your body of work is only reflective of one thing and I understood that, because the only things that people had heard of my music were very different to the type of music that I’d been making for the last couple of years.

“The first session we did was in this old studio in California filled with vintage synths and modular synths and drum machines, and we set everything up. We’d wake up early, go for a run and then work all day every day, and it was great. Then, for the first time, I took over the project from there. It’s something I’m planning on doing next album – producing it myself and using the budget to hire the players and work with artists I’ve always wanted to work with. This has been in the works for years now, and I needed ‘Loner’ to be an album I could use to learn from and improve my technique before I did an album completely by myself. Making this album was more like a graduate school programme.”

While ‘Loner’ is still seeping into the peripheries of music lovers everywhere, Rose is still set on the one to follow, which she’s hoping will be ready next year. “It’s not that easy when you’re dealing with a big team of business people, though. For some reason everything in business moves about 10 paces slower than art. I look at it all very differently now, though. I understand that it’s a big group of people, the record label isn’t like a big monster that’s gonna gobble up your work. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We need patrons to fund our art, but the patrons need that art to survive.”

So there you have it. We can’t end without a mention of the elephant in the room, that an American artist has released a political album in 2018. But of all the surprises, she bursts out laughing: “yeah, this was completely unplanned.” She mentions that everything was written long before Trump took office and that there was no springboard, just a reflection of how people have been feeling for a long time. “There’s a very strong feminist movement, there’s a very strong anti-discrimination and antiracism movement, people are finally fired up about these things because we have a giant fire underneath us. We’re all threatened.

This is stuff I’ve been singing about since I started at 16.

“I think ‘Loner’ is just reflective of… if you’re feeling a certain way, and you say honestly how you feel, then given the right atmosphere, it will seem magnified.”

AUGUST ROSENBAUM TUES 1 MAY SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS KEDR LIVANSKIY THURS 3 MAY THE PICKLE FACTORY JAMES HEATHER WED 9 MAY ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH THE LONGCUT THURS 10 MAY THE LEXINGTON JERKCURB THURS 10 MAY OMEARA TONY NJOKU SAT 12 MAY OFF THE CUFF HALEY HEYNDERICKX WED 16 MAY OUT SOLD THE ISLINGTON

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Interview

Jimothy Lacoste A guide to loving life, by Alex Weston-Noond Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

“Life is getting quite exciting.” The words now famously – in certain circles – sung by the joyfully enigmatic Jimothy Lacoste.

Jimothy’s rise to London Internet stardom has been a quick one, fuelled by viral videos in which he dances on top of bus stops, clings to the back of moving trains and runs naked down the stairs on the tube. Despite only having 5 widely known tracks, he’s already selling out shows around town, as well as performing abroad. His style – speaking rather than rapping, to bedroom-made beats, in preppy red trousers – can be described as a joyful, almost life affirming ride through the trials of being young in the capital. Jimothy tries to teach you to not get caught up in the little things – enjoy your life and look forward to the future. And don’t do too many drugs, as he attests on ‘DRUGS’ when he kicks a massive bag of coke in the air.

I met Jimothy in a small café in Swiss Cottage, and, much like his personality in his music videos, I found him to be one of the most genuine, upbeat people I will probably ever meet.

Jimothy: Let’s go slow. I don’t like rushing interviews.

Alex: Alright. So, I kinda wanted to talk about the fact you are so young. You are only 18 and you only have 5 well known songs.

What do you think your popularity is down to?

J: Yeah, I got bare. I just appeal to different people. People talk, people are just talking. But, I do have bare songs on my Soundcloud, though. It’s funny cus no one really realises I’ve got more than four songs. You click on my Soundcloud and there are like 10 there now.

The tracks that are big are really interesting, though.

There is kind of a serious undertone to them. For example, ‘Future Bae’, on the surface is just a track about relationships, but in reality it’s a track about not being able to enjoy your youth because you have to focus on making money. That’s literally what it is – me saying: “I need to sort my life out.” Y’know,

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Interview

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Interview I need to make money first. I don’t wanna go out and get a wife without owning a house, without earning money. Because at the end of the day, if I get a bae, in order for the relationship to work, for the courtship to never end, I need to take her out a lot, and I would want to take her out a lot – support her. After she loves me, though, never do that on the first date [laughs]. If I ain’t got the money, it’s not happening. I don’t think many people clock it – that there is something more going on.

A: Yeah, I saw ‘Getting Busy!’ and ‘Future Bae’ and thought they were really good. But when I heard ‘DRUGS’ I realised some-

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thing more was going on. You are asking the question, why is it calm that everyone is just on drugs all the time. There is lots about making money, getting a house and just ‘making it’ in your music. Is that down to the pressures of living in London?

J: Definitely. Seeing my mum struggle and seeing people around me struggle and then hearing that to buy a house in London is like three million for a piece of shit. I’m just there thinking this is mad. But I’m not gonna stand here and complain. I’ll just go to another country. I ain’t got time to waste here and think the government is gonna listen to me.

Interview A: You aren’t attached to London then?

J: I don’t even like London anymore. I fucking hate it.

A: Why is that?

J: Everything. Y’know, certain attitudes from certain people.

These days, the rate of knife crime has gone higher in London than New York. When I heard that I wasn’t surprised. You got these kids shanking everyone for some stupid reason. It’s not even like, “ah yeah, imma shank you cus you owed me drugs”, or something, it’s like, “imma shank you cus you’re not from my ends. I just wanna catch a body – and I will feel like a big man because I’ve killed someone. If I go pen for it, even better. I’ll get more street cred.” I think that’s ridiculous.

A: But it isn’t even just London, which is scary. Where I come from, Nottingham, it’s historically really bad for gun crime. It’s mad to see it spreading across the country like this. I totally see why you would wanna move.

J: Yeah. It’s just ridiculous. It’s like, I’ll go Berlin and I will look at the people on the train and everyone there just had a wife or a girlfriend or was in a relationship. I rated that man. I’ll go London and I’ll just see businessmen on the train. When I was in Berlin, I was on the metro at rush hour and I saw not a single man with a suit on.

A: So, is moving to Berlin on the cards then?

J: D’you know what, yeah. Or I could maybe see myself moving to Hartford. [Laughs] A: Alright. [Laughs] J: Well, y’know I can’t speak German. And I’m like too lazy to learn – I’d rather just focus on music and stuff. Maybe Spain. But again, Spain is a bit of a shithole. Well… it’s not. I don’t wanna cuss bare countries, but like, I go to Spain every summer, and I don’t know whether I like it.

A: I saw a picture of you from a couple of years ago when you were at school. I saw you saying that you hated school, basically.

Did you want to be doing this back then?

J: Definitely not. Definitely not. So I was in college and because I didn’t do my GCSEs, my school was like, “well he can’t go to any good sixth forms, he has to go to a shitty college.” I was in this class with other people who hadn’t done their GCSEs, or whatever. I was there and I was like, “I’m not gaining anything from this shit.” While this was going on I was giving a massage to this girl and she was like, “Ah yeah, this is nice y’know,” and I was like, she’s chatting shit. Then I give her another massage and she’s like, “No no, you are actually good.” That’s when I thought

I’m actually good at giving massages and I thought fuck it, I’ll just try and become a masseuse. The money is mad. So, boom, I left college and then I started this massage course. The money is decent and I don’t mind touching people.

Anyway, you got to learn the anatomy. I was learning it and I was like, OK this is hard as fuck. I was revising and nothing was going in. I did the theory test and failed. Then I did the practical test and I passed. I thought to myself, woah, I haven’t done very well. There is this certain life coach I listen to, and he says this – and I will always remember this: “If you go into anything to see what you can get out of it, 99% of the time you will come out disappointed because you aren’t doing it for the love.”

Anyway, at the time there was this woman who sent me a Burberry scarf because she liked my music and she was like, “wear this, I like you, I wanna invite you to this awards show.” When this happened I thought, Ok, I am getting good reactions to these little sly tunes I’m making, just for friends and just for the love. People are recognising them. So anyway, I read the date of this awards show wrong. I thought it was another day and she all of a sudden sent me an email like, “where were you?

I didn’t see you.” I was like, fuck – she thinks that I have parred her. I’ve just taken this Burberry scarf and I’m not coming through. So, I thought, fuck it, I’ll do a little music video for fun and I’ll wear the scarf to show her that it’s all good. That was the ‘Future Bae’ video. After ‘Future Bae’ released, I got a huge reaction. That’s when I thought I’ll start this music thing properly. It’s like this life coach I listen to says – “If you wanna get somewhere in life, get a piece of paper and write down your plans.” So I sat down and I worked out a plan, and I am still following it.

A: It’s funny that you are talking about life coaches cus everyone I have shown your music to sees you as a guy loving life. What would be your guide to that?

J: 1. Have a meaning in life. You might think, fuck, that’s difficult, but a meaning in life can simply be having a hobby. Having a hobby that you love deeply, so every time you wake up, you think, I wanna chase that hobby. I wanna do it again, and I can’t wait to do it tomorrow. Boom! You have a meaning in life.

2. Make sure you are making good money. Sustain your life, so you can keep doing that hobby.

3. Eat healthy. If you are eating like shit, you are gonna feel like shit. You are gonna end up being demotivated.

4. Stay away from toxic people. Study people’s psychologies. As soon as you are talking to someone and you can sense a certain vibe – maybe they might be a bit too demanding, maybe they might be a bit needy – that is something to be wary of. Just get out of the situation.

5. Travel. Don’t just stay in London. Get out.

6. Get yourself a bae.

A: I was listening to your music on the tube here and I couldn’t think of any music I could relate it to. Obviously, there is a rap

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Interview J: Fucking hell. Don’t do it. Disclaimer: don’t do it. End of. You’ll end up dead. I tell people that.

A: You are quite the role model, really…

J: You gotta let people know the facts.

A: What about drugs, then?

J: First of all, people think I’m against drugs. But, look – I’m not against drugs. What I am against is people using things for fake confidence. For example, if my boy got a girl’s number, but he was on bare coke, I’m not gonna rate it. But if he got a girl’s number sober, I’m gonna rate it. You can do your drugs, man. At the end of the day, caffeine is a drug, alcohol is a drug, paracetamol is a drug. Everything in moderation. Again, if I am playing at a show, and I see a couple man on drugs, I’m not gonna think, ‘why you on drugs?’, I’m gonna think they are having fun.

You aren’t gonna do drugs at my show if you don’t like my music.

That’s all I’m saying, –do your thing. With me, I wouldn’t say I’m straight edge – I drink, and I try not to do drugs. I don’t do cocaine – I don’t do all that mad stuff.

A: It’s a good work ethic, and speaking of that, what is next for you? I can’t imagine you releasing a conventional album.

J: I wanna keep that a mystery. Maybe I will come out with an album, but I do quite like just doing singles. It surprises people.

It’s more fun. I would do an album, but I would have to be in a certain state – at a certain point in my life.

A: Haven’t you been abroad playing shows recently? influence there, but nothing solid. That’s why I think people really dig your music, because it’s so fresh.

J: Yeah. It just sorta happens naturally, I must say. One example is ‘Getting Busy!’. It’s a house beat. I always thought that house beats were so nice, why does no one spit over them? I thought, I’ll do it, and it bangs, y’know what I mean? I mean, people do sing over house beats, but not the way I do. No one raps.

A: I think I am gonna stray away from straight-up asking what your influences are.

J: Well, you know what, I don’t think I could even say who. This is the weird thing about me and my brain. I’ve listened to so many songs – I always used Youtube as my playlist – but I deleted my old account and I lost all the tunes I had on there. People will hear it and think ‘ok, I get where he is coming from with this,’ but honestly, I wouldn’t even know.

A: What about getting on the back of the train in the video for ‘Getting Busy!’?

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J: Do you know what? Only two. People have been like, “oh your life is mad now – you are making it!” And it’s like, bro, I have only been to two shows abroad and they actually booked me before I blew up. The people in Paris and Milan were the first people to see my stuff and think let’s book him.

I think being recognised in London is difficult. I can imagine if I was in New York things would be different, just because of the kind of people that are there. But I think things are going ok for me right now. I got mentioned by Vogue and Grime Daily recently. I’m glad I appeal to two cultures. Not just one or the other. It’s good everyone can relate to it in some way.

A: Cheers Jimothy.

J: Thanks man.

Reviews

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Albums

Iceage – Beyondless (matador) There are few contemporary guitar groups who inspire such feverish reactions among the arts commentariat than Iceage. From the opening clangour of their debut LP, ‘New Brigade’, critics the world over were climbing over one other to proclaim the brilliance of these scarily young Danes, and as they’ve grown across the past seven years, so has the cultish intensity of the high regard in which they are held.

Not that reactions to this band have been uniformly positive: many took understandable but ultimately misguided issue with their nascent flirtations with fascist imagery, and frontman Elias Bender Ronnenfelt’s hoarse, strangled vocal (which this writer once heard described as “sounding like he’s about to be sick”) polarises opinion. Yet this is a band who inspire real fervour, positive or otherwise, and although that alone isn’t reason enough to ignore their downfalls, it is significant. After all, how many other rock bands, and stylistically familiar(ish) ones at that, can make a similar claim?

‘Beyondless’ is Iceage’s fourth album, and upon first glance, it largely picks up from where their third LP, ‘Plowing Into The Field of Love’, left off. On that record, the band radically expanded upon the brutal, gothic punk of their earlier material by way of a psychogeographical shift; whereas the first two records were resolutely Northern European, clenched-jawed garage rock beasts, shaded by the murky branches of Norwegian black metal and the dour chimneys of English post-punk, ‘Plowing…’ relocated Iceage to a nightmarish, scorched version of the American south. The fundamentals of the group – juddering, time-shifting percussion, caustic-yetcatchy guitar work, and Ronnenfelt’s unmistakable vocal – remained, yet the instrumentation was considerably more

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open and diverse. A yearning violin here, a rousing horn swell there… this was new ground for this still-young quartet. Yet they inhabited it admirably, concocting several career highlights from materials that would hardly have seemed obvious bedfellows with the razor-wire punk aesthetic with which they made their name. ‘Beyondless’, then, is the sound of a band settling further into this new skin, more confident, articulate and – whisper it – mature than ever before.

I hate to use that m-word, but it’s difficult to escape it here. Make no mistake, Iceage have not capitulated to the relative comforts of global renown by retreating into safe, money-making territory, but the neurotic, nihilistic youth that permeated much of their earlier material has been superseded by something much more muscular and self-assured.

This is a record that for all its darkness, to which I’ll return shortly, does not mope or recede: it fucking swaggers. The Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds comparison is obvious, and has been made of this band many times already, but it’s worth reiterating, if only for one reason. For all of their astonishing stagecraft and technical prowess, the true power of Cave, Ellis et al, certainly in their most recent incarnation, is one of transformation: misery into determination, solipsism into bravado, torture into transcendence. Iceage share that gift, and although there certainly are stylistic parallels to be drawn between them and those great Australians, it is in this way that the two groups are both most similar and most different.

Cave and Ronnenfelt are both capable of breath-taking feats of transformational performance, but each approaches the project in the only way he can: as himself, and himself alone.

For, as fantastic as much of the instrumentation is on ‘Beyondless’, this is Ronnenfelt’s album, more so than anything his band have released before.

He lays himself bare here, presenting us with his uglinesses as much his talents.

What a strange, complicated song ‘Painkiller’ is, for example. Over his bandmates’ fried, coursing garage romp, he details a broken relationship in a tone

that manages to be at once vindictive and self-flagellating: it’s not misanthropic as such, but there’s little love to be found.

By the time we reach the final chorus (on which he’s joined, sympathetically enough, by Sky Ferreira), the refrain “rue the day you became my painkiller” has gone from an expression of personal failure to a furious threat.

Indeed, a sense of threat pervades much of this album; rather than mounting an unflinching assault on his songs as he so often did in the early days of this band, Ronnenfelt stalks these tracks, toying with them menacingly, and pouncing only at the most opportune, effective moments. As such, there’s a good deal more space here than on previous albums, as Iceage begin to exude the confidence to allow their music to breathe a little.

Of course, the frontman’s work with Marching Church informs many of the arrangements here, but he benefits greatly from the focusing effect of his old bandmates. With Marching Church, Ronnenfelt still appeared an imposing figure, but his ambition occasionally overflowed into indulgence when cut adrift from the hardcore strictures of Iceage.

Yet throughout those Marching Church records, he presented himself as a writer of real scope and undeniable linguistic ability, and he emerges here a markedly more able, nuanced lyricist.

Take ‘Showtime’, for example; a prime slice of post-punk vaudeville over which Ronnenfelt spins a lucid, sinister yarn. He plays his role as deranged master of ceremonies impeccably, striking an unsettling balance between camp and menace as his lurid scene-setting is coloured by flickers of evil, which disappear out of sight as he peacocks along to the next line: “The seats have been bought / Overcoats taken off / The reviews, they were off the charts… / The anticipation is practically steaming the in the room… / Laurence Olivier was an old beast…”

He’s capable of far greater subtlety than ever before, and although some may miss the brute force of his early vocalisations, overall this is a welcome development.

It’s also important to acknowledge the influence of Ronnenfelt’s other

Albums side project, Var, on this record. Yes, the erotic-industrial synthscapes of that group are nowhere to be found, but elements of its billowing gloom pop up here and there. On ‘Catch It’, the gaunt, deep-set guitar lines and feral middle section nod towards the same gothy mid-’80s forefathers as Var’s ‘No-one Dances Quite Like My Brothers’. To be honest, it’d be weird if these cross-pollinations were absent; after all, Ronnenfelt is one of those performers who creates a fully-realised world around himself, and it makes sense traces of its other constituencies are consistently detectable in the output of his main project.

Perhaps only bettered by the swooning, bleakly romantic ‘Take It All’, ‘Catch It’ is the arguable highlight here; a lurching, heady beast that is as much bludgeon as ballad. It’s on this track that Ronnenfelt’s distinctive combination of drawling charisma and curl-lipped threat is foregrounded most prominently, his presence looming above the clamour and anguish whipped up by his bandmates. It’s also worth noting the development in his vocal on ‘Beyondless’; the careering yowl of old, with its somewhat tempestuous relationship with tuneful accuracy, has largely been usurped by a more controlled, throaty bellow, more commanding than angst-ridden.

What’s impressive, however, is that the oppressive desperation that’s always been the key to Iceage’s music remains; far from being whittled away in the name of composure, it has simply been, again, relocated, press-ganged out of the black metal shadows of the first two records and deposited into the heat-haze of rusting machinery and tumbleweed emptiness. Ronnenfelt is still simultaneously angry and forlorn, threatening and threatened, triumphant and vulnerable – the only change is that he can hold a tune a little better these days. For all its (relative) timbral levity, this is still a dirgey, damning listen. Neither of those things, please note, are criticisms.

But ‘Beyondless’ isn’t quite Iceage’s finest album – that’s still ‘You’re Nothing’, a record that managed to both further sharpen the brutal, no-frills potency

of ‘New Brigade’ and clear the ground for the ambitious, expansive textures this band have explored since. Yet, as if further proof were needed, this record reiterates that this is a singularly powerful group, whose influences are brazenly displayed, yet frequently transcended.

Doubtlessly, they’ll have their naysayers, those defenders of the punk-rock flame who baulk at the slightest hint of instrumental adventurism (see also: “real music” whoppers). But in truth, were Iceage ever really a “pure” punk band?

‘New Brigade’ owed as much to Mayhem, Slayer and Bauhaus as it did to Black Flag, Crass or Minor Threat, resulting in an all the more thrilling sound because of that, and they’ve hardly reined themselves in since their debut. They’re an exceptional band, and although ‘Beyondless’ isn’t an exceptional record, it is a very good one.

8/10 Luke Cartledge

Perel – Hermetica (dfa) On her DFAreleased debut record, Berlin based producer Perel delivers a collection of tracks that are entrenched within the sound synonymous with James Murphy’s label, while still carving out their own unique sonic aesthetic. Marrying postpunk, synth wave and house, ‘Hermetica’ almost unanimously brings with it this alluring infectiousness, making it an irresistible repeat. Take the cold neon flair of ‘Die Dimension’; the climax of the tracklist features the constantly looping retro synths topped with Perel’s ghostly vocals.

Yet while released through DFA records, ‘Hermetica’ also shares many sonic similarities with the material released on Portland label Italians Do It Better. Late-night drive suited tracks ‘Myalgia’ and ‘Alles’ sound not too dissimilar from artists such as Desire, Glass Candy and Chromatics. The record,

however, thrives in its darkest moments.

Although it’s the second shortest cut I have no gripe calling ‘PMS’ ‘Hermetica’’s centrepiece – unhinged and terrifying, this track unsettles the record’s emotional progression, completely contradicting the comparably bright tracks that surround it. And while it could be said that ‘Hermetica’ lacks cohesion, varying massively in terms of direction on almost every song, its unpredictably is part of its refreshing and exciting appeal. 7/10 Aimee Armstrong

La Luz – Floating Features (hardly art) It’s impossible to listen to La Luz’s third album and not reference Quentin Tarantino and Link Wray. The L.A. quartet’s shimmering surf music immediately conjures images of pool parties attended by impossibly cool people. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and these eleven tracks are far removed from the genre’s standard of girls and cars. Inspired by the physical and psychological landscape of dreams, they create a world that’s as surreal as their Dali-meets-LittleShop-Of-Horrors sleeve design.

‘Loose Teeth’, which is all distorted guitars and girl group harmonies, finds lead vocalist Shana Cleveland ‘lost in a dream’ that’s elsewhere populated by B-movie giant cicadas and lysergically fuelled space travel.

Their surf noir isn’t quite as trippy as their lyrics but nor is it as retro reductionist as it might appear on first play.

The floating, dreamy vocals and neo-psychedelia on ‘California Finally’ and ‘Golden One’ are the sound of Broadcast and Dick Dale being put through a mangle. The instrumental title track, meanwhile, is underscored by a Ray Manzarek-style organ melody and ‘Walking Into The Sun’ has the country

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Albums noir of ‘Blue Velvet’ spliced with doo-wop backing vocals.

Brought into sharp relief by a production that’s lush in comparison to the lo-fi, hissing overlay of previous releases, ‘Floating Features’ is a confident contradiction between Cleveland’s summery guitars and the dark undercurrent brought by bassist Lena Simon and drummer Marian Li Pino. It’s in this tension that La Luz dream hardest. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Caroline Rose – Loner (new west) If Caroline Rose is a ‘Loner’, as the title of her second album attests, then its contents confirm that she’s happy not to be one of the in-crowd. On the opening ‘More Of The Same’ the New Yorker rails against the ‘alternative haircuts and straight white teeth’ of fellow partygoers, while on ‘Jeannie Becomes A Mom’ she sardonically equates suburban parenthood to ‘real life’.

Navigating the modern world is one of the key themes on the album, which marks a step forward from her 2014 debut’s country blues. Here the music is more widescreen; she’s bought an array of synths and samplers, and her punk roots never detract from her love of Britney Spears. It’s a shift that can at times be cartoonishly bubblegum, especially on the rockabilly ‘Money’ and the pseudo-rap ‘Soul No. 5’, which parodies the souped up cars of rap videos with a bicycle.

Her sarcasm nonetheless hits home hard on the big issues, with female objectification being dealt with on the surf ‘Bikini’ and cut-up ‘Smile!’, which has a series of pitch-shifted voices commanding women to do just that. On the pizzicato strings of ‘Getting To Me’, which deals with anxiety, Rose even drops her candy-coloured guard.

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Yet despite the heavy subject matters this is an unashamedly pop record, taking on the attitude of Le Tigre and the popdance of Katy Perry. In common with the former, the lyrics make consciousness-raising fun and never get in the way of a brassily memorable chorus. 8/10 Susan Darlington

TT – LoveLaws (caroline) What the last couple of years has taught us about Warpaint is that it must be an exhausting profession to be a third of a band that represents such a powerful voice to indie tastemakers worldwide. It must be even more exhausting when that voice has had such an aversion to introspection for a career’s worth of music that even when you thought they might have found the turning point with a track so painstakingly titled ‘Love Is To Die’ they then go and reveal that love is actually not to die, but to dance.

Warpaint’s allegiance to the strong and powerful countenance has never been a cold one, though. Over the last decade, the band has produced some of the most exciting indie rock and pop songs to come out of the genre, emphasising the joyous ability of a catchy hook here and a great chorus line there. But when you’re touring a relentless 18-month schedule with a voice that invariably doesn’t parallel your own anxieties, without a pause for breath, it’s going to leave its mark.

As such, Jenny Lee Lindberg’s debut solo record in 2015 featured some of the most soul-searching lyrics a member of the band had let out into the world. ‘long lonely winter’ chronicled the isolation of a life spent on tour, and gothic dreampop ‘boom boom’ manifested a musical breakdown. Now, under the moniker TT, Warpaint’s guitarist and vocalist Theresa Wayman is here to join the dialogue with a

resounding and devastating collection of songs about motherhood, loneliness and romance in an unromantic age.

Opening track ‘Mykki’ orbits a gloopy bass drum with psychedelic guitar lines and ethereal vocals. Strong trap influences raise their head in ‘I’ve Been Fine’ and ‘Dram’, opening with a vocal sample not dissimilar to Death Grips at their mellowest. The intricacies are so well done that even the most adolescent of vocal platitudes – “happiness is found when you stop comparing yourself,” or “hope is the only thing stronger than fear” – can be easily forgiven.

The album continues to be lyrically astute pop with shattering confessionalism. The brilliant lead-single ‘Love Leaks’ enters with an organ drone that could be lifted from a Gaelic folk ballad, pining that “I just got too empty,” while the lovesick ‘Dram’ plods in drunken splendor through an ambient and woozy hook, reminiscing of first loves. Sonically, the sultry blues riff could just as well be the theme-song to an ’80s French detective series as it could be one of the finest musical minutiae from Imarhan or Tinariwen.

When creativity is such an effective vehicle for introspection and freeing anxieties, TT has released the perfect antidote to years of bottling everything up. It just so happens that along with all of this, ‘LoveLaws’ packs all the textured synth and psychedelic punches of Warpaint’s finest, and this time with more coherency. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Wax Chattels – Wax Chattels (captured tracks) Wax Chattels are a ‘guitar’ music trio from New Zealand whose music doesn’t contain any guitars.

On their self-titled debut album they emerge more fully formed than any other

Albums young noise band in recent memory.

Recorded in their live setup, ‘Wax Chattels’ is a taut and powerful album of experimental racket that’s listenable in the same way that HEALTH were early on. The frenzied drumming of Tom Leggett, and the rumbling basslines of Amanda Cheng set the groundwork for the show-stopping lines that pulse from Peter Ruddell’s analogue synthesiser. In place of guitar, the brooding melodies and stabbing attacks of Ruddell place tracks like ‘It’ in a liminal, vague universe that feels – whilst not entirely alien – wholly different from our own, whilst Cheng’s haunting vocals open up wide, blurry spaces on the ever-building, hollowing album highlight, ‘Career’.

For a three-piece, they cover a lot of ground, too. Reverb-heavy bass allows the band to make phantomic fuzz-rock on ‘Shrinkage’ while a juttering synth turns a track like ‘NRG’ into a Liars-esque postpunk thunderstorm.

The caustic, brooding moments are where the band thrives the most, as closer ‘Facebook’ proves. Guttural and cathartic, it winds and throbs with post-apocalyptic drones as Ruddell’s spoken-word lyrics increase in intensity. One album in, and Wax Chattels already have a unique identity and singular sound. 8/10 Cal Cashin

Jamie Stewart – An Aggressive Chain Smoking Alcoholic (pinyon) Ambiguous in whom the title is referring to, Jamie Stewart’s solo debut album is a mysterious and belligerent affair. Written almost entirely on modular synths and citing Nurse with Wound, White House and Pharmakon as influences, ‘An Aggressive Chain Smoking Alcoholic’ sounds as bleak as its name suggests.

The album delves further into territories of noise then Stewart’s recent

work with his band Xiu Xiu. In contrast to the bizarrely accessible ‘Xiu Xiu Plays The Music of Twin Peaks’ and last year’s ‘Forget’, ‘AACA’ is abrasive and noisy, yet simultaneously inviting. The album is completely instrumental although at times some of the synths almost seem to emulate human screams. There’s something very satisfying about sound craft on tracks called ‘As A Favour To Me Please Kill Your Wife’s Stepfather’ and ‘Thanks For Nothing’, which are more often than not relentless and unpredictable.

Released through the label “born out of a love for music that sounds wrong, or at least is on the wrong side of right,” this album manifests that very idea – fragmented and formless ‘An Aggressive Chain Smoking alcoholic’ is an interesting new direction for Jamie Stewart. 7/10 Aimee Armstrong

Vive la Void – Vive la Void (sacred bones) We’ve gotten to know Sanae Yamada as one half of psychedelia power couple Moon Duo, standing behind her synths shaping, together with her partner Ripley Johnson of Wooden Shjips, strong waves of hammering, psychotropic kraut sounds. Now, the songwriter and instrumentalist is debuting with her solo project, Vive la Void.

Her first album is inspired by the constant motion of her touring life as a working musician, and the subsequent absence of a permanent base. Rather than exploring the restlessness and the frantic effects of such a constant deployment of the self, Yamada chooses here to focus on memory and meditation, creating musical spaces that allow the mind to spread and find some sort of cosmic conscience. The atmosphere is dilated and immersive in the 7 tracks of the record, from the opening ‘Matter’, which,

despite its concrete title, loops around a modular structure whose repetition sounds like a meditative “Om” although is robotically delivered by some machine force. When Yamada’s voice enters in the songwriting, subtle and metallic, as in ‘Red Rider’ and ‘Devil’, it’s like hearing an interplanetary whisper guiding this contemplative introspection, adding to the anti-gravitational floating of the music. Even when the tempo speeds up, as in ‘Death Money’ (the most Moon Duo of all the tracks here), or when the mood gets darker, like in ‘Blacktop’, this sense of digital enlightenment isn’t lost.

There’s a well outlined red dot among the purple and green shades of ‘Vive la Void’’s album cover, like some rediscovered awareness of a soul that hovered on an electric self insight, regaining its solid shape after 38 minutes of empyrean loss. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

Mark Peters – Innerland (sonic cathedral) The love of one’s homeland is one of the most untapped and fertile sources for musical composition; a love that like any other is deeply personal and yet somehow universally relatable. For Engineers founder and Ulrich Schnauss collaborator Mark Peters’ first solo album, eight Lancastrian beauty spots in his particular home patch have been immortalised – places that are secrets only understood by the people who have lived with them for long enough to know them intuitively.

‘Innerland’’s cover reinforces the topographical importance of these locations, even if the geography it depicts is fictional. This truly is Peters’ innerland, the meeting point of the bare facts of the natural world and his romantic longing for home. The music is ambient in nature, but closer to the organic, intricate palette

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Albums of late Talk Talk or The Durutti Column than to an Eno study in minimalism.

Tracks build momentum differently, with opener ‘Twenty Bridges’ featuring rippling, breathing guitar work that laps at the ear like a gust against a hilltop.

‘May Mill’, on the other hand, is a more frantic, blustery concoction with driving harmonica and synthetic beats that offers a sharp, biting contrast.

It is undeniably solitary music; a ranging, rambling stroll through Peters’ memories of these places. Another writer from the same place would arrive at a much different finished piece on the same subject, such is the personal nature of one’s bond with their home. A ‘Beatles story’ style guide should be set up as a trip around these eight locations – only then could this album truly be embraced in the spirit with which it was conceived. 7/10 Max Pilley

Dog Chocolate – Moody Balloon Baby (upset the rhythm) On ‘Moody Balloon Baby’ we meet Dog Chocolate at a crossroads in their career; the London art-punk quartet have seemingly refined and perfected the sound that they’ve been polishing over the last few years on albums like ‘Or’ and ‘Snack Fans’. This 24-minute blast of youth and angst is certainly fully formed – all scratchy Fugazian guitars, razor tight percussion and call and response vocals – but ultimately it comes across as too consciously weird and too on-the-nose.

It’s the lyrics that make this album feel more smug than charming. “Making waste that needs reducing / We’re the only things that cause pollution”, Andrew Kerr bellows on ‘Gone Viral’, atop seering guitars that sound like some kind of cross between hardcore ’80s punk and landfill indie. Often the band’s lyrics invoke

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a wry smile, but too often it feels as though the group aren’t as funny as they think they are.

‘Moody Balloon Baby’ is admittedly fun, and in small doses Dog Chocolate’s feral bubblegum punk is likeable. With this album, it’s a case of using each song as a catapult to launch fecal matter at the wall, with only some ideas and motifs sticking. Definitely a talented bunch, Dog Chocolate could be a great group when they sound a little bit like giddy children at the height of a sugar rush. 6/10 Cal Cashin

Courtney Barnett – Tell Me How You Really Feel (marathon) Back in 2015, as deep as the search for meaning behind Barnett calling her first album ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit’ got was a debate about whether or not she’d picked it up from Winnie the Pooh (she actually took it from a poster in her grandmother’s bathroom, but the line is indeed often credited to A.A. Milne).

This time out, ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’ is less a request than a command, and you strongly suspect that Barnett might have issued it directly to her own reflection. It’s easy to forget that the breakout success of her last album was genuinely remarkable; how many female DIY songwriters from Australia are afforded the time of day in America and Europe, let alone the kind of lavish adulation that Barnett enjoyed off the back of her first LP. The concern, then, is that the profound changes to her personal and professional circumstances will have robbed her of what had marked her out as such a singular talent; a wry observational eye and a languid purity of creative intent (“I’m an artist, man, not a machine,” she told me a couple of years

ago when I pressed her for details on when she planned to start writing this second record). Instead, it seems as if her recent experiences have only sharpened her tools and focused her perspective.

The private cost of her success is the central theme here; anger, sadness and frustration abound on stormy opener ‘Hopefulessness’, whilst the sonicallyopposite ‘City Looks Pretty’ is a breezy pop song centered around the melancholy that comes with emerging from the fog of depression to realise that life’s been going on without you. ‘Need a Little Time’ reflects on the psychologically draining effects of a suddenly elevated profile, whilst ‘Nameless, Faceless’ specifically launches a broadside against online trolls, even weaponising against them one of the more inventive insults Barnett’s received; “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you.”

It’s little touches like this that serve as the strongest evidence that Barnett’s talent has been bolstered, not withered, by her ascension to indie rock royalty.

There’s idiosyncratic flourishes at every turn, from quoting Carrie Fisher via Meryl Streep within the album’s first four lines to following the record’s two most furious punk outbursts with a song called ‘Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence’.

‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’ has Barnett more pointed, political (there’s a strong feminist bent throughout) and purposeful than we remember her from last time, but the self-awareness and incisive perception that truly define it have been there all along. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Gaz Coombes – World’s Strongest Man (caroline) Once upon a time, Gaz Coombes was the frontman of Britpop’s most wacky and zany band, Supergrass,

Albums who were never short of a goofy grin, a puppet prancing in their videos, and songs about being young, free, clean of teeth and banged up by the rozzers. But not anymore.

His third solo album, this is a Channel 4 drama of a record, in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world that may not be that far away. The absurdity of our pre-Brexit/present Trump/Russianspies-in-Zizzi world is affecting everyone and music, too. And described as being inspired by – amongst other things – Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man, Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’, Californian weed, British woodlands, unchecked toxic masculinity and hip-hop, ‘World’s Strongest Man’ is a veritable melting pot of genre-bending songs.

‘Walk the Walk’ has Coombes channelling his inner Thom Yorke, with a debt to everything Radiohead have done since ‘OK Computer’, while ‘Vanishing Act’ brings things up to date by aping MJ from Hookworms’ vocal gymnastics and visceral, guttural screams – “I’ve gotta get my fucking head straight!”.

Lead single ‘Deep Pockets’ then propels forward with a motorik beat, a Krautrock drive and falsetto harmonies. It’s a track that’s indicative of this adventurous and exciting record, which is another step forward from Coombes’ ‘Matador’ LP of 2015, helping him to avoid being pigeonholed like his former band unfairly were.

7/10 James Auton

Daniel Blumberg – Minus (mute) At twenty-seven, Daniel Blumberg already sits astride a bewilderingly wide back catalogue of bands, projects and achievements.

You’ll remember Cajun Dance Party (about which he says he feels great embarrassment) and Yuck (upon the demise of which he said he was sick of the music industry),

perhaps less so Hebronix and Oupa. It feels like this is a man who is always chasing, always dissatisfied, forever caught in that old, old conundrum of being endlessly driven to create, while hating some of the commercial imperatives that go hand in hand with that compulsion.

‘Minus’, though, is a record that will have wide appeal. The title track is a skillfully woven combination of plaintive violin, minor chords and a voice so strong, clear and sweet that you’re instantly charmed. It feels monochrome, like a grey sea under a greyer sky. “I’ve been away for a year / Doing all my drinking and all my drugs,” sings Blumberg. “I’ve been thinking that I think too much,” over a melody strongly reminiscent of Sparklehorse’s ‘Eye Pennies’.

‘The Fuse’ is a piano ballad of which Elton John might be proud, slashed across with some Neil Young harmonica, haunted by a broken-hearted string section and cauterised with a blast of hugely bombastic electric guitar. It’s a big, tumultuous fireball of a song, and it feels odd to say this of Blumberg but you could imagine it being played under an open sky to tens of thousands. Then there’s the mutant waltz of ‘Permanent’, while ‘The Bomb’ proves once again that in the right hands the simplicity of just a piano and the human voice is often route one to the soul of the listener.

There is discordance and angst aplenty here too – ‘Madder’ is tortured and awkward, and on ‘Used To Be Older’ Blumberg sings, “I zip up my mind like I zip up my jacket.” These are the outpourings of a unique mind, grafted to the songs of gifted songwriter. 8/10 Chris Watkeys

Soccer96 – Rewind (slowfoot) The fact that Soccer96’s Dan Leavers and Max Hallett refer to themselves as ‘Danalogue’

and ‘Betamax’ and have a single named ‘Megadrive Lamborghini’ should give you an idea of what they’re about. But while there is an evident affection for bygone techniques baked into ‘REWIND’, it’s clear that the duo are driven by more than mere retro obsession.

Traversing musical terrain as diverse as Boards of Canada, Mount Kimbie, Roots Manuva and Squarepusher at his jazziest, this is a wonderfully varied collection that feels like something genuinely new. ‘Time Flows’, featuring Fred Stidson, is the album’s undoubted standout. A sleek trip-hop number, it evokes the Bristol Sound of the early 1990s, complete with a bridge that’s straight out of the gaming scene from back then.

Elsewhere, the sampled patchwork of ‘Constellation’ is a superb dub workout, while ‘Button Basher’ is a fractured slice of jazz percussion that shows the diverse range of their powers. Soccer96 have gone a bit under the radar. Make sure their story ends up more PlayStation than Dreamcast and get yourself a copy of this.

8/10 David Zammitt

Half Waif – Lavender (cascine) In the year and a bit since Donald Trump took office, there have been many musical attempts to reconcile with the new face of America. Few have been as effective, or as affecting, as ‘Lavender’.

Much more than an anti-Trump album, and dense with skilled synthwork, this is a deeply personal reckoning of one woman’s life in Trump’s America.

Through explorations of her Indian heritage and tales of her time touring the country, Nandi Rose Plunkett creates an all-encompassing tale of the two years since her last album.

Opening track ‘Lavender Burning’ sets the mood for the album, search-

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Albums ing for calm in a world that seems to have lost any sense of it. Inspired by her grandmother’s rituals, it’s a lament, penned on tour, of missing and home and losing meaning.

While he’s never mentioned by name, Trump’s presence is felt throughout, woven into its fabric by Plunkett’s undeniable skill for soundscapes. On ‘Torches’ and ‘Silt’ she crafts two songs that both depress and inspire, filled with tales of burning landscapes and failing relationships. Meanwhile, on ‘Keep it Out’ she crafts a cinematic pop track that will no doubt wind up on the soundtrack of every high budget political drama if it hasn’t already.

‘Lavender’ is Half Waif on defiant form and using the full breadth of her songwriting talents. Versatile and precisely put together it’s both a funeral song for life before the chaos that seems to plague the world today and an attempt to inspire life within it. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Jon Hopkins – Singularity (domino) ‘Singularity’ begins and ends on the same note. It’s a small, seemingly trivial detail but it’s one that subtly and instantly defines the album. Hopkins’ initial vision for it was one of hyper-connection; each track interlinked to create an ecosystem where beats emerged from melody and bass bloomed from atmospheres in kind of amorphous evolution. But that didn’t happen.

Frustrated by the technical inhibition of that process, he abandoned it – in fact, Hopkins largely abandoned the idea of following any process at all. Instead, ‘Singularity’ is a reflection of him finding inspiration in meditation, Tibetan breathing techniques and an exploration of psychedelic states.

Even with all of that transcendental freedom, there are still the details you

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expect from a producer with Hopkins’ meticulous approach. So, where Ross Tones (aka Throwing Snow) looked to nature and a selective use of field recordings to create a digital cycle of life, death and rebirth on last year’s brilliantly ambitious ‘Embers’, Hopkins applies similarly technical nuances here – from a thunder recording tuned to become the sub bass in the title-track to the call of a Scops owl reimagined as the melody in closer ‘Recovery’, to recording two pianos then painstakingly cutting them together, note by note.

It sounds lofty and a bit conceited, but Hopkins is no stranger to conveying (and nailing) a broader concept. The success of his fourth album, ‘Immunity’, came armed with the intent of mirroring the story of a night out, and while his initial ambition for ‘Singularity’ didn’t work, it’s not too surprising to discover he dived deep into something else.

“I got obsessed with the idea of connectivity – of a single note drone acting as a bridge between tracks and moods,” he explains. “This record [is intended] to be listened to in one sitting, as a complete body of work. It’s designed to follow the build, peak and release of a psychedelic experience.”

So, if that single note bookend brings his concept of connectivity to life in a very audible way, he also makes it fairly easy to connect the dots throughout the rest of the album. Tracks like opener ‘Singularity’ and ‘Neon Pattern Drum’ heave into soundwave slow life, ‘Emerald Rush’ bathes and soars in a static-laden angel chorus, while the choral euphoria of ‘Feel First Life’ and the plaintive piano calm of ‘Echo Dissolve’ offset the punctuated, thudding beats with gentler moments of reflection.

These tracks are essentially Hopkins’ field notes from some kind of higher state; points plotted on an arc that are propelled by singular intensities but co-exist as one universal thrum. And as the album’s apex, ‘Everything Connected’ embodies that intent as a 10-and-ahalf-minute “techno bastard” that picks up on the brutality of ‘Open Eye Signal’, sweeps to the mountain-top then plunges

into stormy subterranean depths and writhing frequencies.

It sets up the latter half of the album for respite and reset with the undulating majesty of ‘C O S M’ pulsing with a force that sits just below the surface of sunshine bursting through trees, light refracting and feeling the blood pulse through your veins before the grinding electronic intro of ‘Luminous Beings’ gradually cedes to soft sub bass and floating melodies and, eventually, the soft finale of ‘Recovery’.

As a standalone track, the latter seems incidentally light compared to what precedes it, but as the album’s climax and realization of Hopkin’s instinctive sonic journey, it’s importance becomes clearer in the aftermath as its final, hanging note completes the cycle.

Harsher critics may argue that that commitment to the concept means the latter half of the album tails off, but if these tracks were created with the intent of capturing one fluid experience, you expect a producer as scrupulous as Hopkins has had his eye on how ‘Singularity’ comes to life on stage.

And with the monstrous techno heft of tracks like ‘Everything Connected’ and the suspended transcendence of ‘C O S M’ hitting hard on record, the prospect of those being amplified and reimagined through giant sound system speakers promises to be colossal.

“I experienced such joy and freedom making this music,” Hopkins say, “the process has felt like a beautiful exploration of shared consciousness. It has guided me through the last two years.”

You don’t have to believe in the transformative or research the ‘Wim Hof Method’ the way he has to truly understand the album, because if you strip away the concept, ‘Singularity’ still stands as a collection of tracks that power through everything from rugged techno and transcendent choral music to solo acoustic piano and psychedelic ambient that resonate beyond meditative exploration. But stick with Hopkins’ vision and his open-minded take on an altered state becomes an experience that reveals itself a little more with every glorious listen.

9/10 Reef Younis

Albums

Prophet – Wanna Be Your Man (stones throw) Plucked from certain obscurity by Peanut Butter Wolf ’s Stones Throw Records, Prophet is back from the ’80s with an awful lot of love to give.

Including re-recorded versions of tracks first released three decades ago, ‘Wanna Be Your Man’ is not only a fondly stitched together photo album of funk’s heyday but an important release in its own right.

As it journeys through funktronica, R&B, g-funk and synth-pop, its clean, tight 808s, bass slaps and synth stabs are executed with just the right amount of tension, and they serve as a reminder of the influence of funk on the wider pop landscape, from West Coast rap to the out-and-out plagiarism that has climbed its way up the singles charts in recent years. Perhaps most notable, however, is the sheer joy of this music, with Prophet’s heart worn on the sleeve of his faux military jacket throughout.

As tender, longing ballads (‘Wanna Be Your Man’, ‘Tonight’) give way to straight up declarations of lust (‘Dream’, ‘I do’), the earnest simplicity of Prophet’s is a refreshing throwback. If you’ve ever dreamt of a record that sounds like early-Prince-meets-Dâm-Funk or JamesIngram-gets-locked-in-a-studio-withJames-Pants then you’re in luck. 7/10 David Zammitt

Forth Wanderers – Forth Wanderers (sub pop) It’s been two years since the last release from sloppy, young, New

Jersey band Forth Wanderers, but with their self-titled second album – their first for Sub Pop – they show time has honed their sound making assured anthems of heartfelt songs.

The process of songwriting between keystones Ben Guterl and Ava Trilling, where the former sends instrumental demos to the latter before bringing in the rest of the band to collaborate further, continues to create strong but vulnerable songs. Trilling’s emotionally honest words, documenting and reflecting relationships both with others and herself, soar against sharp guitars and intricate melodies to create a rock record with a lot of heart.

Opener ‘Nervermine’ sets the scene with an undulating tune as swooning vocals reflect on a past lover, while recent single ‘Not For Me’ sweeps through with uplifting pace and power vocals. Across the rest of the album there’s touches of country twang (‘Taste’), late night smokinesss (‘Be My Baby’), and percussively building indie swagger (‘Temporary’).

Throughout it’s bursting with the uncontainable energy of glorious garage rock.

7/10 Sarah Lay

Parquet Courts – ‘Wide Awake’ (rough trade) What now for slacker rock? I’ve always had the feeling that Parquet Courts were late to the party. Had they appeared a few years earlier, they might have enjoyed the cultural cache and critical acclaim heaped on fellow New Yorkers The Strokes and Interpol. Then again, perhaps they’d have endured the same struggle to break free from that scene’s gravity. As it is, they’ve defiantly followed their own outsider instincts, pairing literate, savvy rock with skittish punk and fizzing guitars.

Six albums in, it’s a template that’s established them as creatively restless, cerebral

indie stalwarts, refashioning the past for their own ends.

The classic stoner japes of ‘Light Up Gold’ and ‘Sunbathing Animal’, chronicled with such wit by Andrew Savage and Austin Brown, always carried an edge of sarcasm, their frat-rock signifiers used as a weapon against lethargy and apathy.

Savage was 24 then; he’s now 32, and like most post-thirty, socially conscious artists, he’s concluded that gentle ribbing is no longer the answer. “We are conductors of sound, heat and energy,” he hollers on opener ‘Total Football’, a rollicking romp about collective action that ends with a very pointed, “Fuck Tom Brady”.

It sets the tone of ‘Wide Awake’ nicely; anger and frustration pour out of every track, their response to living in “a hateful era of culture”. “What do I call bullshit?” Savage asks on ‘Normalization’, just one of many questions he poses.

He skewers each target with a canny venom, and no-one escapes unscathed; even his own, ineffectual protestations are served up with disdain. And while produced by Danger Mouse, their music has lost none of its spark or rough charm; their best moments are still fuelled by rambling, atonal guitars and the relentless chug of Max Savage’s drums. Even their wilder songs – the carnival funk of the title track, or the Franz-Ferdinandon-Valium breeze of ‘Back To Earth’ – sound assured, the band broadening their own horizons while never losing focus. Parquet Courts have always been adept at transcending their slacker forebearers, and ‘Wide Awake’ is yet more proof of their burgeoning legacy. 8/10 Derek Robertson

Ryley Walker – Deafman Glance (dead oceans) If Ryley Walker’s last album represented a slightly shy attempt to ditch

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Albums his finger-picking throwback folkie reputation, occasionally dabbling as it did with jazz chords and non-standard song structures while remaining tied to the balladeering guitarist trope, then ‘Deafman Glance’ is the sound of the Chicagoan taking the plunge: on his fourth album proper, Walker has embraced motorik rhythms (‘Opposite Middle’), the sort of knotty arrangements where instrumental parts crawl into each other’s sonic space (‘22 Days’) and insistent drones and washes that offer texture to his existing downbeat songcraft (‘Can’t Ask Why’). And although a strand of alt-country melancholy lingers, its recontextualisation here within a post-rock orbit makes repeated listening progressively rewarding.

While much of the album is concerned with timbre and groove, and the spectres of the likes of Tortoise and the Sea And Cake loom large, Walker still finds space for some of his broadest melodies yet, and the resulting effect – earworms slathered with dirt and abstraction, or smudged by painterly marks – leaves ‘Deafman Glance’ as the natural successor to Wilco’s 2002 masterpiece ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’: characterful, cohesively realised, simultaneously steeped in tradition and experimentation, and admirably concise. With ‘Deafman Glance’, Walker’s days as a troubadour have been brilliantly dumped. 9/10 Sam Walton

Alexis Taylor – Beautiful Thing (domino) It’s hard not to hear Alexis Taylor’s voice and immediately get in a Hot Chip frame of mind. Even now, on his fourth solo album, there are moments where you have to pinch yourself lest you start to expect Joe Goddard’s voice creeping in.

‘Beautiful Thing’ sees Taylor working with a producer for the first time

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in his solo career, joining forces with the former co-founder of UNKLE and then DFA, Tim Goldsworthy, who, while not doing Taylor any favours in the ‘this isn’t a Hot Chip album’ department, adds some more meat to the album’s occasionally brittle bones. The clearest example of this is the album’s title track, a glitchy disco number that takes various musical refrains, chops them up and throws them back at the listener to piece together.

Taylor’s vocal chops shine brightest, as they always do, on the ballads.

‘Roll on Blank Tapes’ and ‘Out of Time’ are the strongest slow burners; the former a homage to the music culture Taylor has spent his life obsessing over, the latter a textbook example of how to close an album with flair. Though there’s something to be said for ‘Hit Song’’s knowing chord structure that makes it sound like Taylor is about to launch into ‘Make You Feel My Love’ at any minute.

However, it’s the country-esque ‘Oh Baby’ that’s the real highlight of this album. Opening with skewed electronics and pounding piano chords, it’s jubilant and driving, a slice of Americana spiced up by Taylor’s natural songwriting skill and timeless falsetto. 7/10 Mike Vinti

Benjamin Lazar Davis – Nothing Matters (11a) Brooklyn’s Benjamin Lazar Davis already has a somewhat impressive portfolio of bands and collaborations to his name, notable amongst them a co-writing credit on Joan As Police Woman’s latest album, and involvement with the venerable Okkeril River.

This though is his first release as himself, and after a musical history like his, setting out one’s own artistic identity might be a daunting thing. Album opener ‘A Love Song Seven Ways’ is a lyrically clever, very delicate song; that delicacy

most obviously carried in Davis’ vocals, poised on the cusp of falsetto and floating on a bed of eighties-tinged melody.

Stylistically, this music is something like Elliot Smith meets a low-key Yeasayer – pure-sounding, chilled out, sometimes downbeat pop, with the occasional backdrop of a big sounding drum track from the eighties.

But songs like ‘Somebody’s Speaking For Me’ verge on the ponderous and there is very little real heft to the rest of ‘Nothing Matters’, which possesses a lightness that is sometimes beguiling but is more often just too faint to have any meaningful impact whatsoever. At times it flows very easily, and pleasantly, like a sunny, ephemeral daydream; but ultimately it lacks the strength to make you want to go back to it. 5/10 Chris Watkeys

DRINKS – Hippo Lite (drag city) DRINKS focus on the more surrealist elements of Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley’s respective projects. Here, the results are otherworldly and unfamiliar, but amidst the visionary weirdness, there’s also a faint hint of nostalgia at play. While ‘Hippo Lite’ sounds fresh and exhilarating, it could also be an undiscovered obscurity from a bygone era.

DRINKS’ debut LP relied on a mutual appreciation for psych, albeit a frantic and singular interpretation of the genrel; ‘Hippo Lite’ examines the idea of isolation and the juxtaposition between discord and harmony through the use of field recordings (or “night sounds”), according to Le Bon in the records typically cryptic press release.

Opener ‘Blue From The Dark’ counteracts ‘Hippo Lite’’s general chaos, with a nursery rhyme-like refrain that is gentle and introspective. Elsewhere, ‘Real Outside’’s twisted weirdness marries Le

Albums Bon’s renowned instrumental jaggedness with erratic, out-of-tune melodies. It’s these nuances – the contrast between light and dark – that bring the record to life.

The use of field recordings as instruments creates a newfound exoticism. ‘In The Night Kitchen’’s sharp guitar and subtle piano elicits fuzzy recollections of distant memories, while nature’s various background noises denotes solitude – a subject that creates the thematic framework of the LP. One song in particular sums up the peculiar brilliance of this unity, and that’s the penultimate ‘Pink or Die’, a song in which two worlds collide. The interplay between Cate Le Bon’s clear, resonant vocals and Tim Presley’s delicate harmonies adds a sublime, dream-like edge to its organ-filled, wonky pop exterior.

The likes of ‘Hippo Lite’ don’t come around too often: an album that negates the usual connotations of pop music and takes it somewhere completely new. On the surface, it’s a record about contrasts: strange vs. conventional, melody vs. chaos – things that, despite their disparate qualities, go well together. You could say the same about Le Bon and Presley, but some things are made for each other.

With DRINKS, I can’t think of a better partnership right now. 9/10 Hayley Scott

Aidan Moffat and RM Hubbert – Here Lies the Body (rockaction) For the last 20 years, Aidan Moffat has made an art form of cajoling emotion. Whether it’s creating a Highland sense of comfort, an inebriated menace or scything stories with caustic wit, his spoken word delivery has always found a perfect balance between the melodic and melancholic – and it’s no different on ‘Here Lies the Body’.

As always, the guitar and voice are the heart of the record with Moffat’s

grizzled words artfully interlacing revealing monologues, deadpan deliveries and dramatic soliloquys with a gruff ease around the delicate, spidery guitar work of RM Hubbert.

On the tender woodwind of ‘Quantam Theory Love Song’, Moffat might posit sweet thoughts like “let’s stare at the stars and see what we want to see” but on ‘Keening for a Dead Love’, his voice hangs heavy over a slow, sombre procession of strings and piano. And while his low burr reverberates through the theatrical campfire tale of ‘Wolves of the Wood’, it’s ‘Mz. Locum’ that has Moffat at his funny and forlorn best as he nails heart-on-sleeve unrequitedness (“without her I live, but less so”) with a nod and a wink (“she’s a bombshell in leggings / A goddess in jeggings / But she’s best when they’re all on the floor”).

The result is a set of songs that come to life with a storied, bright-eyed wisdom, but no single track captures the Moffat dichotomy quite like ‘Party On’.

Set against the backdrop of a samba carnival drum line, you’d think he’s switched Falkirk for Fortaleza. 7/10 Reef Younis

Twin Shadow – Caer (warner) What would you do if I told you that ‘Caer’, the latest offering from George Lewis Jr.’s Twin Shadow project, sounds like a twenty-first century mash up of Donell Jones (remember him?), the Back Street Boys and David Bowie? I hope your answer is that you would immediately log in to whatever streaming service you subscribe to and listen to it, without hesitation. Because this is an album that’s really worth your time.

Yes, it is like lots of music you’ve heard before, sort of, but this record manages to reference its influences without sounding either derivative or

nostalgic. ‘Caer’ coheres as utterly it’s own thing – surprising, fun and tender in equal measure.

This is RnB-inflected pop that gives way to mediations on uncertainty and discomfort. On ‘Bombs Away’, the trippy opener, Lewis reflects on the threat external pressures pose to a relationship. Then there’s the synthy ‘Brace’, on which he is bracing for a fall (fall, not incidentally, is ‘Caer’ in Spanish) – it’s a longing, hungry track that feels like those moments before the wind changes on the story of your life. Other highlights include the poppy ‘Saturdays’, and the searing ‘18 Years’, an examination of how fear holds us back, leading to lives filled with regret. I also liked ‘Littlest Things’, with its sad, painful melodies and melodramatic, musical theatre twist, and ‘Too Many Colours’ – the kind of sultry lounge sound you can imagine playing in the bar just before you pick up a really good onenight-stand. 8/10 Katie Beswick

Robert Görl – The Paris Tapes (grönland) Written while Robert Görl was lying low in late ’80s Paris, avoiding military service in the Bundeswehr, ‘The Paris Tapes’ is a collection of 9 track that catalogue his musical explorations post Deutsche Amerikanische Freundschaft (DAF releasing their last album in 1986).

When reviewing albums in this context, it is of the upmost importance to dethatch yourself from the work they did prior to the release – as to not remain biased.

DAF had an unprecedented influence on the dance music that came after them, albums like ‘Alles Ist Gut’ and ‘Gold Und Liebe’ undoubtedly created EBM and were a massive influence on techno – but we have to ignore this unmatchable legacy here, and just look at these discarded sketches.

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Albums The fetishised idea of the reissued “lost classic” has become unavoidable since the advent of the Internet, and while the fetishisation of this stuff is warranted when the music is actually good, it all too often isn’t. Luckily, the music here is actually of worth. Sounding more like Patrick Cowely’s homo-erotic lo-fi disco tracks than anything DAF ever did, ‘The Paris Tapes’ was for Görl an exploration into making music more melodious.

A popular criticism of DAF in the ’80s was that it was “just rhythm”, and while Görl and his partner Gabi Delgado-Lopéz did rebel against this, it is clear this was playing on Görl’s mind. It’s satisfying in a creaky way, but this is also its downfall.

They are demo tapes – these tracks were never meant to be heard. Perhaps it’s even unfair to criticise them, in that sense, but it is undeniable that these tracks would be far stronger with better production and Gabi singing over them. 7/10 Alex Weston-Noond

Speedy Ortiz – Twerp Verse (carpark) The world is being swallowed up by slime. At least, it is according to Speedy Ortiz. The video for ‘Lucky 88’, the lead single off new album ‘Twerp Verse’, shows just that: a viscous, toxic green ooze seeping across the ground and threatening to consume everything in its path. The clip explores our absorption in technology and a reluctance to engage with the wider world, even (or maybe especially) as it wastes away in front of us. In some ways, ‘Lucky 88’ and its video are a statement of intent for ‘Twerp Verse’. The track explores singer Sadie Dupuis’ loss of faith in her former political role models, but with wordplay like “I once was lost but now I’m floundering” it speaks to a disillusionment that infects all aspects of life.

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This dissatisfaction is clear elsewhere on ‘Twerp Verse’, like in ‘Villain’’s takedown of awful ex-partners and on the twitchy, anxious ‘Lean In When I Suffer’. ‘Backslidin’’, too, is emotionally downbeat but instrumentally sharp, borne along by lilting grunge guitars.

Musically, ‘Twerp Verse’ has more in common with Sadie Dupuis’ home demos than previous Speedy Ortiz records, with a lo-fi production sound that gives the album a sense of lightness in spite of the themes of frustration. Even the lightheartedness of the album’s title is key – on ‘Twerp Verse’, Speedy Ortiz are refusing to get bogged down in the slime.

But they want you to know that it’s there.

7/10 Liam Konemann

Grouper – Grid Of Points (kranky) On her tenth album, 2014’s ‘Ruins’, Liz Harris boldly stripped away some of the vast textures and restless energy that typified her music to deliver a collection of desolate piano pieces, carried by a whisper. She was still obscured, but this time by silence and a foot placed firmly on the sustain pedal. Her lyrics were beautiful on their own, but hidden through a ghostly, hushed delivery. She provided a canvas for her audience to place their own emotions onto.

The tracks on ‘Grid of Points’ would have fit on ‘Ruins’ easily. It offers those same tender, minimal piano pieces, using a clever blending of intimacy and distance. On ‘Parking Lot’, you can hear the hissing sibilance as she moves her tongue to sing the word ‘inside’. You can hear a quick catch of breath as her multitracked vocal reaches up into its high end.

‘Grid of Points’ is undoubtedly vaster sounding than ‘Ruins’, the thick reverb allowing Harris’ voice to ring on and fade into piano notes. It’s also more

empty feeling. The melodic runs feel as if they’re repeating each other as the album moves on. When Harris is working with an already simple set up, moments of stagnancy stand out. The ascending piano riff on ‘Birthday Song’ is particularly familiar, like a lesser take on what was wistfulness captured on ‘Holding’ from ‘Ruins’.

Even some of the found sounds feel repeated. The passing of an airplane at the end of ‘Breathing’ is a jolt out of the spell she had over us, which could be a powerful ending, emphasising the album’s quietness. It reminds of a beeping of a microwave that stirs the listener out of a trance at the end of ‘Labyrinth’, again from ‘Ruins’. That moment from that album was nothing but a happy accident, the noise happening after the power came back on after an outage. Here, it feels forced, and it’s even less forgiving when the traffic noise continues for another two minutes, making up a good bulk of the track. When you remember that the record is only twenty-two minutes as it is, the moment is even cheaper.

Harris made ‘Grid Of Points’ in a week-and-a-half of inspiration. It certainly captures that place she was in, and welcomes the listener into it, but this is a fainter record than ‘Ruins’ in every sense. It seems that’s the point. Fans of Grouper’s songwriting will find gorgeous moments to wrap themselves up in, but they’re more fleeting than the long-lasting wistfulness of the album it pulls so heavily from. 6/10 Stephen Butchard

The Body – I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer (thrill jockey) On the record shelf of hipsterapproved metal, couched between Sunn O))) and that Deafheaven album with the pink cover, sits Portland’s The Body.

Albums Having spent almost two decades exceeding in their own stylistic field, collaborating with likeminded alt-doomers (The Haxan Cloak, Thou, Full of Fire), ‘I Have Fought Against It…’ could only be business as usual: metal, on their own terms.

Despite their usual all-caps darkness (the Bohumil Hrabal reading on the album closer is particularly pantomimic) the most likeable thing about the duo is their self-referential approach to genre.

With semi-scriptural and apocalyptical titles like ‘Blessed, Alone’ and ‘The West Has Failed’ (the latter sampling reggae musician Eek-A-Mouse for bonus proselytising), the unbearable nihilism of Chip King and Lee Buford make them one the best ‘parody’ metal bands about.

Honestly, who else outside of ’90s gangsta rap would be pictured in press materials wielding a very real-looking shotgun?

For a duo whose best work exists in long form, IHFAIBICAL is full of… well, fire. I maniacally bobbed to heavy-hitters ‘Off Script’ and ‘Nothing Stirs’ (Kristin Hayter from Lingua Ignota’s snarling vocal on the latter demands repeated listens), and got lost in the ambient dread of ‘Can Carry No Weight’, which probably warrants the runtime of epics from 2014’s ‘I Shall Die Here’. But that’s just the thing; the charm here is in the work’s accessibility. A great entry point, and decent fodder for noise night at your local vegan café bar-cumgrooming salon. 7/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Sparkle Hard (domino) Although the Jicks have now made far more music than Stephen Malkmus’ first band Pavement ever did, it’s difficult to ignore a certain Wings-esque aura that lingers nonetheless: cosily comfortable, confident as only a band comprising four successful 50-somethings can be, and unashamed

to quote their younger selves, with each passing album the sense of the Jicks as the ultimate middle-aged alt-rock comfort food becomes more entrenched.

That’s no bad thing, though, when said food is as well prepared as this.

Opener ‘Cast Off ’ picks out an unmistakably Malkmusian hook with it’s very first line, and infectious melody runs throughout, via either pleasantly chugging guitar riffs or Malkmus’ own charming tonguetwisters, delivered with as deliciously little effort as ever. Accordingly, ‘Middle America’ and ‘Refute’ both hit the sweet spot of melancholy and quirk, and even ‘Bike Lane’, a song about Freddie Gray, the black 25-year-old who was beaten to death in the back of a police van, remains eerily upbeat. Things only falter when paucity of songcraft is badly masked with novelty effects units, and even then it’s a tribute to Malkmus’ ear that a vocoder can’t entirely derail proceedings.

No amount of studio circus tricks can disguise the continued evaporation of Malkmus’ edge and urgency, but that’s not to say that the Jicks have given up trying, and ‘Sparkle Hard’ is a perfectly pleasant album that will elegantly sate a particular hunger. 7/10 Sam Walton

Kali Uchis – Isolation (virgin emi) When she appeared on the cover of Loud And Quiet back in July 2017, Kali Uchis described herself as a music “dork”. As a teenager, she would spend her time scouring stores and downloading tracks, searching for new and exciting sounds.

This hungry, eclectic musical taste has resulted in a debut album that is a true mash up of styles, as if Uchis has taken every record she ever loved and distilled its essence, mixing the results into a delicious aural perfume, fused with the warm base-notes of her native Colombia.

This is a real summer record, erupting with tunes that are almost guaranteed to lay the soundtrack for whatever holiday you take this year. There’s the hip-hop inflected ‘Just a Stranger’, with a memorable cameo from The Internet’s Steve Lacy. Then the sultry, steaming cabaret sounds of ‘Flight 22’. On ‘Your Teeth in My Neck’, ‘Dead to Me’ and ‘Feel Like a Fool’ Uchis sounds like vintage Mary J. Blige, with a smooth R&B twist and that deep syrupy voice that cracks in all the right places. 8/10 Katie Beswick

Jess Williamson – Cosmic Wink (mexican summer) The turning point at which Jess Williamson finds herself on the release of her third album will be familiar to many a singer-songwriter. As she describes it, her music to date has been defined by “heartache, depression and sadness”, but after an inspiring move from Texas to Los Angeles, her outlook has changed. On ‘Cosmic Wink’ her commitment to the familiar confessional, emotionally wrought persona has if not waned, then been negotiated with so that it can operate alongside a more playful and open writing style.

It is a frequently successful formula, with much of this front-heavy album being carried along at a clip with a casual, confident melodic flair. Arrangement-wise, Williamson does not push the boat out, relying instead on an appealingly unshowy, largely acoustic guitardriven palette. Opener and lead single ‘I See the White’ is typical; a warm embrace to welcome the listener, in much the way that early period Elliott Smith might have done. Williamson’s vocal is commanding without being commandeering, singing still of broken-heartedness, but with a renewed faith in the healing power of time. 7/10 Max Pilley

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Live Big Thief Koko, London 5 April 2018

Fever Ray The Troxy, London 20 March 2018

Obfuscation has always been integral to Karin Dreijer Anderson’s live appearances, whether that meant shrouding herself in druid robes, hiding behind a half-melted pig mask – as she did at Sweden’s P3 Guld awards ceremony in 2010 – or rendering herself anonymous by blending into a chorus of dancers miming vocals, a la The Knife’s divisive ‘Shaking The Habitual’ live show. As she explained to The Guardian in 2013, “It’s always fun to try out different roles... I would like to quote [gender theorist] Judith Butler, who says, ‘We are always in drag.’”

Dreijer is currently in the midst of playing her most striking role yet – a technicolour expression of her fluid sexuality. For where her 2009 debut as Fever Ray set the isolating experience of motherhood to electronic soundscapes that ranged from moody to oppressive, 2017’s surprise follow-up has been feted as a coming out record, celebrating queer desire and dark, dance floor-ready pop in equal measures. Assertively extrovert in its delivery and often high-energy, ‘Plunge’ instantly sounded uniquelysuited to live performances, and her latest tour does little to dispel that notion.

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Tonight she’s flanked by five female musicians, sporting ostentatious outfits that variously feature blue fur, black latex and a cartoonish, neon-orange muscle suit. Dreijer herself is bald, with bloody red rings daubed around her eyes and lips, and wearing a cropped t-shirt emblazoned with the legend ‘I heart Swedish Girls.’ Backlit by multi-hued strip lights, the overall effect falls somewhere between BDSM-style Harley Quinn cosplay and B-Movie asylum escapees. It’s joyously tongue-in-cheek and hugely fun, and large swathes of the audience take the choreographed interplay as a cue‑ for their own enthusiastic dancing.

Accordingly, it’s the more energetic material that works best. The majority of the set is focused on songs from ‘Plunge’, but tonight’s version of debut album-cut ‘I’m Not Done’ is bolstered by a pounding house beat courtesy of the two percussionists. From the new record, ‘Wanna Sip’ glimmers with industrial menace, all distorted siren sounds and sing-shouts, while ‘To The Moon And Back’ is the brightest, most accessible moment of the set – and indeed, Dreijer’s career – were it not for the line “I want to run my fingers up your pussy.” The entire room bellows along. Tonight the Troxy has been transformed into a safe space for the “queers and weirdos and freaks”, much to Dreijer’s delight. Gemma Samways

The final date of Big Thief ’s European tour is a special one from the moment it begins. Koko’s many ornate storeys towers above Adrianne Lenker and her band, who tonight operate with an altered dynamic. With guitarist and co-vocalist Buck Meek on a solo tour, the usual, enchanting co-dependency between the two is replaced with a vulnerability.

That doesn’t mean it’s not sometimes playful, like the early set appearances of ‘Shark Smile’ and ‘Mythological Beauty’. On the flipside, 2016’s ‘Parallels’ and ‘Mary’ are delivered with a pining, fragile majesty, while the yet-to-berecorded track ‘Orange’ also receives an outing as the show continues to tip-toe between the woozily stoned and the nervously existential.

They encore with a pin-drop performance of ‘Pretty Things’ and a thunderous rendition of ‘Masterpiece’, the audience’s’ vociferous response wholly justified: “I saw the masterpiece,” they sing. “It looks a lot like you.”

Tristan Gatward

Young Fathers Barrowland, Glasgow 24 March 2018

“What a time to be alive,” Alloysious Massaquoi shouts. The crowd are cheering, pounding their feet and the band stares stoney-faced, absorbing that energy. Young Fathers have just walked on stage and instantly have an incredible presence. That line may be sarcastic on ‘Wow’, but he means it now. While the experimental hip-hop group are cult heroes across the UK, they’re essentially pop stars in Glasgow.

It’s a set that injects freshness into the older material – particularly 2013’s ‘Queen is Dead’ – but it’s this year’s ‘Cocoa Sugar’ album that sounds particuphotography by luis kramer

Live larly gigantic, biting and intense.

With their silhouettes emphasised by a neon backdrop, their every movement feels important, whether fluid or carefully rehearsed. On ‘Tremelo’, the trio huddle together around a single microphone. On ‘Shame’ they move around each other, shaking the sweat off their faces. Highlight ‘In My View’ has them standing in a solid line. They trade melodic lines, their voices curling round each other like a punk Destiny’s Child. The whole thing is crisp, concise, clear. Fittingly, there’s two songs from Trainspotting II. “We’re from Edinburgh, but we’re home tonight,” says ‘G’ Hastings as they depart. Stephen Butchard

Charlotte Gainsbourg Village Underground, London 29 March 2018

Twenty minutes before showtime and people are spilling out of the doors. Pitch up late and you’ll be caught in the bottleneck looking at a wall for the evening.

Gainsbourg has long been a surname recalling the musical establishment, but it wasn’t until the release of her third album that everything aligned.

‘Rest’ is an evocative collection about grief and family trauma; finally, a crit-

photography by katie willoughby

ically-acclaimed record worthy of the family name – a relief for the singer and actor, I’m sure, whose anxiety comes from the self-imposed pressure of her father’s legacy and her love for him. It’s why so many people are looking at a wall right now, happy to just listen.

She tiptoes out to sit at a keyboard.

The understated performance is offset by luminescent squares constructed around her that blend with the tempo. ‘Deadly Valentine’ is the night’s standout. The already funk-heavy bassline is accentuated with a three-minute IDM interlude that feels like Caribou and Kylie Minogue playing with Daft Punk. ‘I’m A Lie’, too, is transformed from fairground pop to powerful breakbeat.

But there’s a disconnect. Polite clapping meets her most exciting and textured intermissions, while the melodic but occasionally deadbeat moments seem to be savoured the most. ‘Rest’ – a beautiful, complex eulogy to her half-sister – is swallowed up by the room and barely recognisable until the devastating spoken word segment.

It’s strange; you wouldn’t think the same crowd offering a very pleasant applause to end the hour-long set was the same that were nervously murmuring between themselves when Gainsbourg rhymed “douchebag” with “scumbag”, covering Kanye’s ‘Runaway’ minutes earlier. Tristan Gatward

SOPHIE Heaven, London 13 March 2018

From the outset it’s obvious that SOPHIE’s new stage show isn’t going to be a typical gig. It begins before the songwriter and producer has already arrived on stage. A decoy DJ is sent out, not to impersonate her but to replicate her style in a set that froths with forgotten EDM, pop-punk and blasts of breakbeat techno.

It’s a move that ultimately challenges not just the conventions of a normal show, but also that of the ‘pop star’. Who is SOPHIE? Does it really matter? What’s happening right now? Those questions persist when she does appear on stage, joined by singer Cecile Believer, who then takes over singing duties for the night.

Some may have been disappointed by the reality that SOPHIE wasn’t performing in a conventional sense.

Fine. But from another perspective, it’s clear that she was orchestrating a more thought-provoking performance. One that’s sole purpose was to distort and deconstruct the conventional expectations of ‘the gig’. This isn’t £15 to see the hits – instead the crowd are greeted with bursts of white noise, songs you don’t recognise and the person you paid to see not being centre stage.

It’s a sense that grows throughout the set, and arrives at an apex when the audience is subjected to 10 minutes of Mark Fell-esque abstractions into drone and noise. It’s willfully challenging, and certainly not the norm for Heaven on an average weeknight.

She does play the recognisable stuff, too – thumping cuts like ‘Hard’ and ‘Pony Boy’. ‘It’s Okay To Cry’ ends the set will SOPHIE appearing in the kind of dress you’d wear to a funeral. But they feel like snapshots in a performance that’s striving for a much greater resonance.

A night of confusion, then.

Exploded expectations. Searing noise.

Dancing. As SOPHIE grows beyond the PC Music family and establishes her own path it’s clear: no boundary or norm will be left unquestioned. Alex Weston-Noond

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Film and Books

A Quiet Place (paramount) For people of my generation, who saw the original Jurassic Park in the cinema at the age of 11, suspense in movies conjured by silence pretty much topped out with the velociraptor-in-the-kitchen scene. For an earlier generation it was Jaws – the stillness of the open water before the attack.

That’s not to say that we’ll never jump again, to a well timed shrieking face at the window or even an unexpected explo-

sion in the next X-Men movie, but for a thriller called A Quiet Place, the element of surprise that’s so clearly its big weapon is somewhat blunted. Spoken about as “that new, scary film without any sound” (there’s lots of sound, by the way), how could you not sit down to watch it in a fashion so guarded as to detract from what turns out to be its one purpose?

John Krasinski’s directorial debut (in which he stars alongside wife Emily Blunt) is a barren, post-apocalyptic tale in which unexplained creatures (of the Stranger Things variety, that click like Predator and flex their faces) have killed most of mankind, seemingly because we make too much noise, which I completely agree with. That is to say that these preying monsters react to sound – stay silent, stay alive. Kransinski, Blunt and their young family (there’s no need for character names as they can hardly talk to each other) are holed up in rural

America, surrounded by wheat crops for an extra nod to M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, although A Quiet Place also hints of War of The World.

There’s plenty of ambient sound from the beginning, and an effective score for a bleakness that permeate the opening 30 minutes. With talking at a minimum and always whispered, it’s inevitably something of a slow start, which doesn’t sound like much fun, but it’s here where it feels like there’s something new and interesting to A Quiet Place. But the catch 22 catches up with the movie – continue like this and you’ve got a strange, mainstream Foxtcatcher; inject in stalking CG monsters for the cast to stay silent and still in front of and you’ve got the velociraptor-in-thekitchen scene for the next hour. A Quiet Place goes for option B, and while it’s not quite as one dimensional as that, it’s not far off. Stuart Stubbs

Ill Will — Michael Stewart (harper collins) Michael Stewart’s last book, the hip revenge thriller Café Assassin, was an absolute killer. Ill Will is even better.

In his latest novel Stewart takes Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, a book the author has been haunted by for decades, and lays out the ethereal, brutal tale of Heathcliff’s missing years, solving some of that character’s raw, dark mystery in the process. Stewart’s obsession coupled with his relentless research create the backdrop against which he projects a shadowy, compelling and revelatory tale. Ill Will is a superb book, as good as British fiction currently gets. Read it...

Lee Bullman

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: An Art Book — Reinhard Kleist (self made hero) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds exist at the point where myth meets reality and as such are well suited to cartoonist Reinhard Kleist’s muscular, confident style.

Whether telling the story of Cave and his band of desperados in monochrome comic-book panels or full page full colour portraits, Kleist’s artwork is consistently beautiful, capturing the band in murderous frontier town saloons, drinking green tea in some mid-eastern souk and sailing a pirate ship through choppy seas.

Drawing on Cave’s thirty-year career, An Art Book is illustrated with the wit, respect and humour. Lee Bullman

All Gates Open: The Story of Can — Rob Young & Irmin Schmidt (faber & faber) You might expect a biography of Can to bend the rules a little and it does; All Gates Open is not one book, but two.

The first deals with the band defining themselves as the quintessential krautrock outfit and draws on interviews with band members, Cologne scene makers and industry insiders to tell the story behind the legendary recordings and live shows. In book two the band’s enduring legacy is examined via interviews with film-makers, artists and musicians such as Bobby Gillespie, Mark E. Smith and Geoff Barrow, who took the Can sound to their hearts. Lee Bullman

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Midnight chats Available via all podcast apps and at loudandquiet.com

‘SCANDAL’

Interview It’s dark and sad in New Zealand too, by Dafydd Jenkins Photography by Frances Carter

Wax Chattels “Apparently they can live up to 90 days.” It’s around 8pm in Auckland, New Zealand, and Peter Ruddell, keyboardist and vocalist of post-punk trio Wax Chattels, has crickets behind his fridge.

Their chirping permeates our entire conversation but the sound, if quite loud, isn’t exactly unpleasant. It’s a common occurrence these days thanks to New Zealand’s hottest summer on record, but that doesn’t make it any less of a nuisance. “If they’re still in there, it’s 3 months of this shit, man,” huffs Ruddell.

If not quite the nation’s ecology, New Zealand’s cultural exports continue to resonate with the UK and US, not least because of the nation’s place in the global imagination. “You

46

know New Zealand is sometimes called Godzone – like God’s Own Country – and made out to be this place that everyone should emigrate to, a place where there’s nothing but beaches and sunshine,” Ruddell says. Much of the scenery familiar to Brits looks holiday-brochure pleasant: palm trees and glorious weather at one end, deep green bush and sheep farming on the other (with the occasional Hobbit and rap-funk-comedy folk duo). “It’s all lies,” Ruddell half-jokes.

Apart from Flight of the Conchords, two things come to mind when you think of New Zealand music; buoyant jangle pop, and the legendary Auckland label with which the genre is now

Interview

synonymous, Flying Nun Records, home of acts like The Bats, The Clean, and a host of other influential ‘the’ bands. Recent signees Wax Chattels’ fitful, downcast post-punk fits the label’s other, stranger canon, starting with the misanthropic noise of The Dead C and continuing today with the vocally-nimble freak folk of Aldous Harding. Admittedly, this divergent timeline is less well-known abroad, but frequent Flying Nun co-sign, Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks, is set to raise awareness, according to drummer Tom Leggett: “I guess they want to remind people that it’s dark and sad here in New Zealand too.”

Sure enough, Wax Chattels’ debut album channels outward anger at the state of New Zealand today, citing P-houses (meth dens), abject poverty and a high male suicide rate as only some of society’s insurmountable problems. “I don’t know that the darkness is a conscious thing we have in mind when we make music,” says bassist and vocalist Amanda Cheng, “but it’s always there.”

— Days spread thin — So, are Wax Chattels an angry band? The three of them can’t help but stifle laughter. Leggett clarifies: “It’s just funny – whenever I try to describe our music to my non-musician friends, I end up using terms like that – fast, or angry.” Indeed, a cursory glance at the group’s wholesome Instagram reveals a trio keen on visiting burger joints and playing heaps of live shows. The topic they want to discuss with me most is this: what does the first total stranger to hear their self-titled debut, due out in May, think of their handiwork?

It’s a startlingly clear-minded debut, I respond in less prostrating terms – taut with whiplashing rhythms, and obtuse jazz voicing (the three met at jazz school in Auckland University), recorded with nary a glint of studio trickery. In truth, ‘Wax Chattels’ was recorded almost exactly a year ago, over the space of two hectic nights (starting at 8pm, out by 4:30am) in a windowless studio, with the lights dimmed for effect. “Then I’d go to work in the morning,” says Leggett, recalling days spread thin.

The sessions were made doubly pressing by Ruddell’s impending departure to China to work as a language teacher, so they took to the studio of producer and Auckland legend Jonathan Pearce (The Beths, Artisan Guns) at the first available slot. With ‘Wax Chattels’, you often get the sense of days numbered, and all the uncertainty of being a musician in your twenties. It’s as if they had a day to condense all of themselves into one fearsome document, in fear that they may never get the chance to do so again.

Really, it’s a rare thing: a thoroughly realised first album.

Not that Wax Chattels need my approval. The group can count among their fans the actor-activist Gillian Anderson,

also known as Scully from The X Files (even the mere mention prompts a holler of joy from Leggett). Contacted on a whim

by Cheng via Twitter upon the release of their single ‘Gillian’, Anderson gave them a “full-on endorsement”. Naturally, the story was picked up by the New Zealand press (“One in a Gillian reply to Kiwi band’s tribute,” read one headline). “She even quoted what we said in an interview about it from this link I sent her, so even if she just skimmed it, that was still pretty cool,” says Cheng. I tell the group that I’m currently in the middle of watching The X Files’ second season, in which Scully is abducted by aliens and largely absent from the show’s main action – a narrative device bred from filming constraints related to Anderson’s clearly visible pregnancy at the time. “Nah, you don’t wanna bother with that season,” says Ruddell.

A tour of America is in the pipeline for the group, which would probably be more daunting had they not recently returned from a run of shows in East Asia. “China was brutal,” says Ruddell. “Get up early early, get to the venue, soundcheck, get dinner, rinse and repeat – with only one day off for the entire leg. That was trial by fire. When you’re touring New Zealand you basically play weekends. You’d drive down to Wellington or something, play a show on Friday and Saturday night, then drive back up for Monday morning and turn up at your regular job.”

The group’s extensive tour of small shows in “tiny cities” across China were matched by surprisingly big appearances in Taiwan: “we played this gig that was to be this particular venue’s final show, so they put on this huge party, with a film crew getting the whole scene. It was just chaos – totally great”.

New Zealand in the past has seemed like its own microcosm, a series of big fish in a small pond, but more bands like Wax Chattels are seeking their fortunes abroad these days.

Ruddell clarifies: “the scene in Auckland, if not the country in general, is really strong at the minute. More importantly, people are really pushing and figuring it out.”

Among the restless are groups like the “fucking sick” noise-turntablists The All Seeing Hand and noise pop stalwarts Die! Die! Die!, a key inspiration for Wax Chattels, who regularly make stops in Europe. “Bands have recently had larger aspirations, going overseas a whole bunch more than groups five or ten years ago – making a real go of it. It used to be that bands of…

I don’t want to say it but, slackers, just wanted to stick around.”

“All it takes is to see a band you know head overseas,” Cheng adds diplomatically. “It’s what gets you thinking, ‘oh hey, we can do that too’. It begins to feed a sort of collective ambition.”

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Interview

Playing in the dirt The fermentation of serpentwithfeet,

by Stephen Handler.

Photography by Levi Mandel

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Interview

49

Interview

50

Interview

Bury anything deep enough and it will change. The weight

of the earth creates so much pressure that transformation is inevitable. With enough time, a buried thing becomes something completely distinct from what it was. Often, people regard this process with discomfort or, worse, disgust. It makes them think of death and decomposition, of bodies turning into bones.

At first glance, to bury something is to leave it behind.

Take a closer look, though, and you’ll see that buried things come back more often than not. Bones fossilise, seeds grow. For centuries, cultures around the globe have buried food underground for weeks, even months, then dug it up and eaten its fermented form. Put something in the soil, give it time, and there’s a good chance it will return to you better, and stranger.

Josiah Wise, who records under the moniker serpentwithfeet, has been thinking about this a lot in the past year.

Reflecting on his new album in the Fort Greene neighbourhood of Brooklyn, he takes a long pause, reflects, and says, “It’s so beautiful to me to think about fermentation.” He means this quite literally. Over the course of our conversation, he frequently reminds me, “You got to get your probiotics!” But he means it on a much deeper level as well; fermentation, the process by which sugar is gradually converted into acid, is at the root of his new, debut album ‘soil’. The record is a testament to how giving things time to ferment is good for your art, good for body, good for your soul.

— To begin with obscurity — Serpentwithfeet first made his name in 2016. There’s a good chance you saw him before you heard him. Here’s the thing: serpentwithfeet has a large pentagram tattooed on his head, along with, in thick capital letters, the words “HEAVEN” and “SUICIDE.” (He has grown his hair out since then, obscuring the text, but the pentagram still occupies prime, visible real estate). He has a silver septum piercing that’s roughly the size of an eyeball, along with a variety of other pieces of jewellery. At the time, he sported a shaved head and strategic eye makeup that made all this defiantly apparent. The look was fierce, with an undeniable whiff of the satanic. The same can be said of the name serpentwithfeet itself, a reference to the prelapsarian snake, the form assumed by the Christian devil to tempt Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Altogether, it certainly grabs your attention.

It was a surprise, then, when the man wrapped in the iconography of the occult sang like an angel. On his stirring first EP, ‘blisters’, serpentwithfeet mixed classical and electronic music with a voice fluent in the sounds of gospel and RnB. If that combination wasn’t unique in itself, the intensity of the approach was. A full throttle fusion of each genre at its most melodramatic, serpentwithfeet’s music was a hell of a strong cocktail.

Released by TriAngle Records, whose founder Robin Carolan is also serpent’s manager, ‘blisters’ featured five concise but intricate tracks that explored queer experience. Label-mate and Bjork-collaborator The Haxan Cloak produced. It’s a pairing

that made sense. The Haxan Cloak’s heavy and ominous soundscapes paired nicely with serpentwithfeet’s surface aesthetics: eerie, arcane, occult. Refracting its themes through a dark prism, ‘blisters’ treats love as something eerie, mystical, and transcendent in equal parts. The EP featured the stunning ‘four ethers’, a blend of baroque strings, ominous drums, and serpent’s soulful voice. The title refers to an esoteric concept that lies somewhere in the intersection of philosophy, astrology and paganism; its obscurity is largely the point: ‘Your name is impossible to know / You’re like my four ethers / How the hell do you know the four ethers?’ In the accompanying music video, serpent is dressed in flowing red, orbited by hovering points of weird, golden light.

Immersed in Haxan Cloak’s dark and immersive production, replete with references to karma, ethers, and retrograde states, ‘blisters’, and by extension serpentwithfeet, was infused with a sense of the mystical. Love was a gnomic mystery and the man singing about it had a strong link to the supernatural, with one foot in our realm and another foot someplace beyond.

In person, however, Josiah Wise is a deeply grounded individual. He mulls over his word choice and speaks with intention, softly and slowly. He is a fountain of practical wisdom (hint: get

51

Interview

“If you want to play Chopin, if you want to play Schubert, do it, but if you don’t get in, if you don’t get to play at Carnegie Hall, that’s not the end”

your probiotics) and musical knowledge. More importantly, he has a strong command of who he is as a performer and a person.

That security is central to ‘soil’, an album firmly rooted in the physical world, in which serpentwithfeet’s vision of love is less mystical but no less sacred.

— Reinventing the choir boy — Many of the songs on ‘soil’ have been fermenting for years.

The lush lead single, ‘bless ur heart’, started to form in 2009 when Wise was a senior at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

It took him nine years of personal and musical growth to reach the version that concludes his personal album. In some ways, however, the process of fermentation goes back even further.

Wise’s extraordinary sound has been developing since his childhood in Baltimore, where he was immersed in the music of the Christian church, when he began to formally hone his voice at age eleven.

Wise wasn’t initially interested in classical vocal training. When his mother asked him if he wanted to try out for the Maryland State Boys Choir, he responded with a firm no. But that didn’t matter to his mother, who had already signed him up for an audition anyway. “As an 11-year-old, I was like, ‘I can’t believe you!’ But she was like, ‘Boy, you are the child and I am the mother.’ So I went, I auditioned, and I ended up loving it.”

This was serpent’s first serious introduction to classical vocal performance. Even as a preteen, however, he began to encounter to the problematic aspects of the choir’s culture that would influence his relationship with the genre for years to come. Wise was troubled by the lack of diversity in the choir and the class undertones of “lofty classical songs.” “There wasn’t much room for the black voice,” he explains.

Fortunately, he was able to find a better home for his gifts when he entered high school, Baltimore City College, a public magnet school for gifted and talented students. In addition to a strong academic program, Baltimore City College was home to an internationally competitive choir. By the time he was 14, Wise was traveling with the group to Europe to compete and coming home with trophies. More importantly to him, though, was the makeup of the group. “It was all black kids, but our repertoire was predominantly classical. And that blew my mind.”

He committed to developing himself as a world-class vocal performer. Every day, he spent three to five hours singing after finishing class. That still wasn’t enough. After learning about an

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exceptional vocal teacher at Morgan State University, he called her almost every day for a year. One day she finally answered, Wise remembers, “and she said, ‘Boy, come.’” The lessons set him down a path to becoming a classically trained opera singer.

By the time he graduated from University in the Arts, he’d mastered his instrument and developed a working knowledge of French, Italian, and German. He casually recalls taking Russian diction classes so he could perform ‘Lensky’s Aria’ by Eugene Onegin. “I wanted to perform in the opera houses, I wanted to perform at the Met. I really wanted that life,” he reflects.

But when Wise was ready to take the next step in his career, a roadblock sprung up in his path – he didn’t get into the graduate vocal programs to which he’d applied. The traditional trajectory he had followed so closely for so many years suddenly fell out from underneath him. Shut out of the classical world, he had to find a new way forward, and fast.

The years that followed were difficult, but formative.

Wise travelled, moved to New York, worked whatever jobs he could find. He explored and embraced his sexuality; he loved and lost. He got the tattoos on his head. When he could, he recorded music, experimenting outside of the classical domain and throwing the results up on Soundcloud. Reorienting his stance on the classical world was an important part of this process. “So much of my self-esteem relied on that, but I couldn’t see it for a long time,” he remembers. “I wanted this world to give me the green light, but it proved to me that there wasn’t a space for me there.”

But if the classical world seemed to reject him, he didn’t reject classical music wholesale – his music makes that obvious.

He retains an obvious passion for the genre; indeed, that passion seems to have only grown as his interest in other genres has developed, and he remains a wellspring of knowledge on the subject. At one point he digresses to explain the genius and influence of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, casually offering a rundown of his work, complete with composition dates. Dvorak’s 9th symphony From the New World, which was called “the greatest symphonic work ever composed in [the United States]” when it was first performed in 1893, was profoundly influenced

by African-American music.

“He sat with older black folks and indigenous folks of America and had them sing their traditional songs to him. He was heavily inspired by black American spirituals,” serpent explains. “Dvorak basically said that if America can get over this racist shit, African American spirituals can be the new frontier for classical music.”

Interview

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Interview

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Interview While Dvorak was in the United States writing From the New World, he taught the violinist turned composer Will Marion Cook, a composer of particular importance for serpentwithfeet.

Marion Cook wrote the first black musical performed on Broadway, Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk. Serpentwithfeet stumbled on his biography and was blown away by the breadth of his influence. He was equally stunned by how little he had ever heard about Marion Cook’s story. “I read this book from cover to cover,” he remembers. “Before him, there was no syncopation, or many of the characteristics we think about with Broadway.

He brought that.” And yet no one had ever taught this to him.

“I’m just like, I should have known that.”

The expulsion of African-American innovation from canonical narrative is just one more unfortunate example of a culture of exclusion that continues today. Serpent reflects, “For me, knowing how much of our music shapes not only Wise classical music, but shapes pop music... Think about all the whimsy you hear in trap music, and how that influences pop music.

All this stuff is stuff that black kids are doing in the middle of nowhere, that are anonymous.”

Serpentwithfeet’s response to this century old story is to follow the path of Nina Simone and Kirk Franklin, who he cites as inspirations. Both Simone and Franklin were and are exceptionally gifted classical singers who invested their talent outside the classical realm and have had an extraordinary influence on music at large, classical and otherwise.

“There’s this thing where black people, and I speak for myself, want to be a part of the black classical world. That’s fine if folks want to do that. I wanted that, and I do think there needs to be black people everywhere, no matter what genre. But there’s many of us who are vying for a position in this white classical canon, not even understanding that there’s so much weight around creating your own thing.

“I’ve always known black people to be part of the classical world. Historically, we know that black people have their handprint on classical music, [because] black music is so expansive,” he says. “It’s easy to get miffed by not getting accepted by white people. It’s easy to want to be a part of that conversation.

But I’m like, we have the juice. We have the ideas. We have the soil. The soil is literally with us.”

Serpentwithfeet is a child of this realisation; if the classical world would not have him, Wise would have to build a world for himself, one that could be home to his many prodigious gifts.

“If you want to play Chopin, if you want to play Schubert, do it, but if you don’t get in, if you don’t get to play at Carnegie Hall, that’s not the end. Do your own thing. If you want to do Brahms, then girl, add a trap beat. You can make it your own thing, there’s not just one lane.”

This idea is central to serpentwithfeet’s first full-length.

“With ‘soil’, I was thinking a lot about how I have my own goal,” he tells me. “I want to invest in what comes out of me naturally.”

But a great many things naturally come out of him, from gospel to snares. On his remix of Bjork’s ‘Utopia’ track ‘blissing me’, he sings, ‘I don’t have enough clothes to dress all the people I’ve

become,’ but ‘soil’ is in many ways an attempt to do just that – to draw together all of serpentwithfeet’s disparate selves and wrap them in a strange, single whole, while still honouring each of the things that renders them unique.

— Flamenco in metal heels — Coming in at just under 40 minutes, ‘soil’ is an economical album crafted with precision. Serpent worked with four producers that reflect the range of his interests and influences: producer mmph and sound designer Katie Gately (two of serpent’s TriAngle labelmates), hip-hop producer Clams Casino, and the prolific Paul Epworth, best known for his production for high-profile artists like Adele and Rihanna. But while each of these producers brought something of their own approach to the record, the sound is ultimately Wise’s.

“Before this project, I don’t think that I felt so confident as a producer,” serpent recalls. “I knew that I had ideas, but I don’t know if I let them carry as much worth as they could. So working with Paul Epworth, Clams and Katie, and mmph, I felt like, after those studio days, I felt a little more grounded in my knowings, a little less shakeable.”

Wise often turned to producers when he needed direction on how to reach his final destination. He recalls asking Gately to help him create the sound of “flamenco in metal heels,” and mmph remembers working to capture the sounds of Pop Rocks and sticks falling down. At times, they looked past instruments to get the sound they needed. Gately remembers using bowling balls on ‘bless ur heart’ to create the sense of something living underground. “It’s not just the sounds, it’s how it all fits into his world,” mmph tells me.

“All the songs changed until the final day,” serpent remembers. “I wasn’t comfortable with songs just being good.

I wanted the songs to feeeel as explosive as possible. I wanted them to feel incendiary. I needed them to feel combusting.”

Some of ‘soil’’s qualities are easy to identify. “I wanted this album to dance more. I wanted it to dance, I wanted it to vibe heavy,” says serpent. “But most importantly I wanted the vocals to really come through. A lot of that is just mixing. I chisel production, I definitely chiselled and subtracted things. I never wanted the production to eclipse what was going on vocally because text is so important to me. I take a long time to work out how I want to say things and how I want to sing things.”

The production of ‘soil’ may have been a collaborative learning process, but the lyrics were all serpent. As a lyricist, Wise has a knack for small, sensory details. There is a deeply sensuous quality to ‘soil’, in its music and its lyrical content. Unsurprisingly, the record has an earthy texture, and the language is rich with imagery of roots, trees, seeds, things that live and grow in the dirt. More generally, his language has a fierce physicality; he has a gift for capturing the tactility of the language he uses in his music. Mmph recalls Wise using the term, “seeing where the body takes you” as a way of feeling out whether songs had this quality. When he sings “I love you from the space beneath my

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Interview feet,” on the album’s extraordinary opener, ‘whisper’, Wise channels the emotion up through his body. Listening to these songs, it’s as if you can sift through them with your fingers.

The record also has a powerful scent, if such a thing is possible. Songs like ‘fragrant’ and ‘waft’ are explicitly aromatic.

“I think about smell often,” serpent says. He claims that his sense of smell isn’t more attuned than anyone else’s, but then recalls with a smile, “My Mom would say, ‘You have a witch’s nose!’” It’s hard to disagree. While working on the album, he was interested in the theory that smell has a powerful impact on romantic relationships. In some schools of biological and psychological thought, it’s argued that partners unconsciously seek each other out by smell. This has certainly proved true in Wise’s case. “So often I will smell men before I see them,” he says. He recalls one time at a party in London where he caught a whiff of someone behind him. “It was a funky, pungent smell, and it was so beautiful to me. Out of the blue I was really turned on.” So when, on ‘waft’, he sings, “there can be no love where there is cologne,” he means it quite literally.

— A pageant of grief — Wise engages with the writing process very differently than he does performing. Indeed, as a writer, he seems capable of maintaining an impressive degree of detachment. All the songs on ‘soil’ confront the practical and emotional demands of love, never shying away from the pain that comes with the experience. But none of the songs emerge from a specific relationship, despite their seeming specificity. “I want to be careful when I write that I don’t exploit my own romantic life, because I think that can become abusive to the people I date and abusive to myself,” he says. “I can talk about men that I used to be with and not break down, in the same way that I can talk about my favourite TV show that got cancelled.”

But when he performs, or even listens to some of these songs, he can be overcome with emotion. ‘mourning song’, where he sings, ‘I make a pageant of my grief,’ is the best example of this. “Every time I listen to it, I’m almost in tears,” says serpent. A song about sadness doesn’t have to be sad, though.

Wise says that that track is one of the most fun songs in his repertoire to perform.

In recent years, it has become increasingly important to serpent to experience sadness in this way. He returns to the idea of fermentation. “Grief is like that live bacteria,” he says. “It’s good for you to miss and to long and to wonder, and not regret, but reflect. Running away from your grief is why people are sick. I think it’s really good for your stomach to weep, to weep uncontrollably,” he says. “Being sad doesn’t have to be this sad, isolating thing. It’s like the film Babadook. You cannot run from your grief. The more you run, the more it’s going to knock.

And it’s gon knock, and it’s gon knock, and it’s gon knock. You have to feed it!”

These days, Wise sets aside time to laugh and time to cry.

He doesn’t bury feelings so much as plant them, and the result is

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a personal and artistic blossoming. It seems that he couldn’t have one without the other. As he gets ready to leave, he suddenly speaks at length and with an urgency he hasn’t used all day: “In America, there’s this fast track. You go to college, you get a job, you get a retirement plan, and you die. But it doesn’t have to be that linear. It can be, ‘you go to college, you drop out, you go back to college, you become a veterinarian, you become a vegetarian, you become Atheist, you die and you come back to life. There’s so many ways to exist.’ I think I always thought, ‘I have to graduate from undergrad, then go to grad school, then go to the opera house, then I’ll become a fabulous opera singer, and then I’ll die.’ That’s how I saw my life. I didn’t know, ‘Ok, you’re going to be broke, you’re going to be unemployed, you’re going to fall in love with a boy, you’re going to think that you wasted time and realise you didn’t waste time. You fell in love, it invigorated you to love yourself more, and then you’re going to write a song. Then you’re going to be a little bit stronger.’”

There’s no summation better than that. Wise finishes, resumes his thoughtful and collected manner, and gets up to work on the next thing. But like ‘soil’, which took nearly a decade to ferment to the point ready for public consumption, it seems like serpentwithfeet is content to let new ideas set and germinate for the future. When asked about future plans, he keeps things general. He wants to move somewhere warm. “Sweating is an important part of my process,” he notes. But most of all, he says, “I want to garden. I want to play in dirt.”

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MOJO

UNCUT

“A chandelier made of strobe lights” DAZED AND CONFUSED

“A powerful, brooding, enveloping return” CLASH

“Delicate minimalism” THE GUARDIAN

NEW ALBUM OUT NOW CD / VINYL / DIGITAL

Retold

Under the covers

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Retold Lars Ulrich recalls how Metallica regrouped in 1987 after the death of their friend and bassist,

by Daniel Dylan Wray

cleared of any misconduct and the band have remained without a concrete answer ever since.

This period found Metallica at something of a crossroads.

They were three albums in, with the killer opening trio of albums (‘Kill ‘em All’, ‘Ride the Lightning’ and ‘Master of Puppets’) freshly behind them, but now with a dead friend and bass player, and a world of grief ahead of them. They initially took it hard.

Anthrax were supporting Metallica on that tour and guitarist Scott Ian recalled in his 2014 autobiography of spending the night in the hotel bar with Hetfield and Hammett after the accident. “James was heavily sedated and drunk at the same time,” he wrote. “Kirk said doctors had given James a bunch of sedatives because he was freaking out, but they didn’t put him to sleep so he kept drinking. We were all in a room together and James kept pounding beer, vodka, whiskey – whatever was within his reach.” He later goes on to describe the scene getting even more intense and sad. “James suddenly started crying and screaming, ‘Cliff! Cliff!’ Then he became destructive. He kicked over lamps and threw bottles of booze. Frankie and Charlie looked at each other and without saying a word mutually decided to get James outside before the hotel had him arrested. I stayed inside with Kirk. We could hear James down the street screaming Cliff ’s name over and over. I was completely heartsick.”

Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, had been taken to hospital with a broken toe as his band mates went about drinking themselves into a state back in the hotel. This was a state

Photography by frank white / kevin hodapp

On September 27th, 1987, Metallica were travelling on their tour bus after a gig in Sweden. Shortly before 7am, with the whole crew asleep, they were awoken as the bus veered left to right, throwing the band members around like ricocheting pinballs.

The bus then flipped over, landing on its side, as bodies crashed and thudded against smashed glass and broken furniture. There was confusion and chaos and screaming all around as band members crawled out from the bus in the still, dark morning, yelling one another’s names to locate people. Gradually people were found and marked safe and well, with the exception of their bass player, Cliff Burton. Burton was trapped under the bus, his legs poking out. He had been hurled from the top bunk through the window, out onto the roadside verge before the falling bus then landed on him, crushing and killing him. Only hours earlier, Burton and guitarist Kirk Hammett had drawn cards to determine who could pick the best bunk to sleep in. Burton drew the ace of spades, the obvious top card for any metal band, and decided to pick Hammett’s own bunk to sleep in that night.

Hammett cleared his things and moved elsewhere.

The driver of the bus said he had hit black ice and lost control of the vehicle. Metallica’s frontman, James Hetfield, was unconvinced and paced the road up and down in nothing but his underwear searching for ice. He didn’t find any. Suggestions of alcohol or drug use by the driver have been made over the years, as well as that the crash site was representative of that of someone who fell asleep at the wheel. The driver was later

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that the band would collectively remain in for some time in order to cope with the unimaginable scene of seeing your friend and creative partner killed in a traffic accident you survived.

“We didn’t understand the process of grieving or the process of pain,” Ulrich tells me today, in the back of a car on the way to a sold out arena show in Prague. “We basically just kept going, put the blinders on, compartmentalised everything and then just jumped in the nearest vodka bottle and off we went. I don’t think you have the tools to sit down and really process what was happening, so it was just a case of keeping going because that’s what we knew.”

— Garage Days — With all of this to take in, the band retreated to the studio.

Their minds weren’t fit to focus on an album so they opted for an endorphin-release session of covers. The long out of print EP ‘The $5.98 E.P. / $9.98 CD: Garage Days Re-Revisited’ has now been reissued on vinyl. On it, the group cover Diamond Head, Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie and Misfits. The latter band could be seen as a subtle tribute to the late Burton, who had a Misfits tattoo on his upper right arm. Ulrich says it was a way for the band to let go and regroup, to find new focus but to also have some fun, something that wasn’t around in droves during that time. “Cover songs had been a significant part of Metallica’s story,” he says. “We started out as a cover band and playing

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other people’s material has always been a part of who we are – it’s inspiring. It’s a place we go to to have fun, to loosen up; it’s a place that balances the seriousness of how anal we can be when we make our own records. So playing cover songs becomes more of a jam, more of an energy outlet – the songs are already written and we don’t have to sit there and worry about how the third chorus is going to go.”

This idea of throwing themselves head first into new projects became the modus operandi for how Metallica would work for years. Head down, guitars loud, pummel on. “That time there was no other way,” Ulrich tells me. “You’re 23 years old, full of spunk, ready to go, shit is happening and being on the road is this free, autonomous place where you don’t have to do anything other than play music and travel around. There was no family around at the time. We were raring to go. Sitting still and doing nothing was not something we were very good at. We were always jumping from one thing to the next.”

This momentum carried them through to their 1988 release, ‘...And Justice for All’, and despite being four albums in and gaining popularity, their 1991 mega-selling behemoth, ‘Metallica’, was still a few years away. During this stage Ulrich recalls still feeling like the band were operating as outcasts. “At that time we were very much hovering on the fringes of the leftfield,” he says. “The mainstream hadn’t caught up to us yet, so we all still felt like outsiders. We were alienated and awkward and disenfranchised and way outside of the mainstream, all just

Photography by kevin hodapp / ulf magnusson

Retold

Retold

wanting a sense of belonging to something. So we found solace in strength in numbers with the bands that were weird and awkward like we were.”

Weird and awkward didn’t last for long and Metallica became enormous (and very much the mainstream) but Ulrich almost laughs at the idea that that was ever part of a plan. “I don’t think we ever had ambitions because I don’t think we could ever imagine a world in which what we were doing was the mainstream.” Nonetheless, it came and the group dealt with the surge as best they could. “You just do the best you can. Luckily, we all got through it and nobody ended up disappearing for three months or ending up in a gutter somewhere. We were lucky that our internal DNA somehow was able to get us through it without any major casualties that come with success.”

— Some kind of monster — Years of heavy drinking, internalising or avoiding grief, moving a mile a minute and making music that requires huge physical exertion must have eventually caught up with the band?

“If you see the documentary that came,” Ulrich says (referring

to the very intimate 2004 documentary, Some Kind of Monster, that enters into a world in which Metallica appear to be crumbling due to internal conflict), “I think that is an indirect result of us not really taking the time to process any of this stuff along the way. So we had about two years of pretty chaotic internal dynamics, which I think you could argue in a bigger picture was a result of just going and going and going, and never taking time to self-reflect or check in with each other and take the temperature of the band, internally.”

Being a founding member of the band since 1981, this is the only time where Ulrich felt like the future of the band was something he gave thought to. “The only time I’ve felt like it could stop was when Hetfield went away to go and deal with his issues in 2001,” he says, in regards to Hetfield checking himself into rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. “I wasn’t sure what was going to happen on the other side of that. For about six months it was a little uncertain. Other than that, I would say the idea of stopping has never been a part of our outlook.”

Even during the boom period of the band, when they were selling millions, Ulrich says they didn’t really have time to sit back and soak it in but, more importantly, he feels that was antithetical of the nature of the band. “We’ve never been very comfortable acknowledging our accomplishments,” he says. “The culture we grew up in was not one of ‘look how cool we are, look how many records we’ve sold.’ We were always shying away from that and just getting on with it, so we would never really sit there and bask in it because that wasn’t really the culture of the scene that we were a part of.”

As Metallica have gone on, releasing 10 studio albums, they have managed to seemingly create a new generation of young fans with every passing decade. Think of a person in a Metallica hoodie and the image associated with it is just as much a 14 year old as it is a goateed man in his 50s. So what is it about the endless thrash of Metallica that continues to resonate with young people? “I think it’s our good looks,” jokes Ulrich before going on to become the most animated he has been during our conversation. “It’s fucking crazy, dude. Every night half of these kids riding the rails down in the front row are like 15 – it’s fucking insane. Every show. At least half the audience for each show are usually experiencing Metallica for the first time.

“I think Metallica and hard rock are about connecting – it’s about connecting to something greater than yourself, it’s a place where you can go and feel accepted and welcome and I think especially in those crazy years of puberty, and when all sorts of nutty stuff is happening, that a hard rock show, a hard rock record or a hard rock band is a place where you can find safety and comfort and feel that you’re with likeminded people who are going through the same things.”

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Tell Me About It

Jenny Wilson

The Swedish artist still wants you to dance to her new album about her own rape, by Katie Beswick Photography by Oskar Omne

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Tell Me About It

At some point after the release of her last record, 2013’s ‘Demand The Impossible’, written and recorded as she underwent treatment for breast cancer, Jenny Wilson, the Swedish singer-songwriter known for her electro-inflected music, was raped. It was six months before she was able to pick up an instrument again.

“I was paralysed, I guess,” she says. “It was like a burden to have this awful topic waiting there for me. I had absolutely no idea as to how I would approach it.” There was never any doubt that she would approach it, though. Speaking the truth of her life, however difficult, Wilson tells me, has long been her way of facing up to the challenges of life. Her fifth studio album, ‘EXORCISM’, released this month, is the product of this truthtelling mindset – a brutal yet strangely upbeat documentation of the assault and its aftermath.

Composed around the electronic drones of her Prophet 6 analogue synthesizer, ‘EXORCISM’, as the title suggests, marks Wilson’s attempt to unburden herself of trauma. The video for the opening track ‘RAPIN*’, animated by Swedish artist Gustaf Holtenäs, epitomises the album’s unflinching relationship with its subject matter – this is a victim finding the depth in her story, taking back control. I met with Wilson to discuss the album, and its place in the story of her life so far.

“My wish with this album was to just tell my story” Not make it political. Not making any statements. Tell my story to get rid of it. Very egoistic. My closest friends were like, ‘Are you sure you’re gonna be so honest about this?’ They were warning me. You have to take it very, very easy and very slow. But when #metoo happened, everything came from a new perspective, because people were ready to talk, ready to listen, ready to understand that this is something that’s so fucked up with the society. It is part of taking a step forward, talking about things. Putting shame on the predator instead of keeping the shame yourself.

“I never think about the audience” Not when I write lyrics. When I write the music I do think about somebody who is going to listen to it. I improvise a lot, and I collect mistakes more or less, but if I didn’t have an audience for my music it would be much more crazy and strange. But I remind myself that someone is going to listen to this music, and then I edit it so it becomes much more of a smart package, something you can listen to and dance.

“The only kind of intellectual thought I had about this album was to make something very, very physical” Something you can actually move your body to. I didn’t want to make a cry record, where you listen and cry at the lyrics

and everybody gets the blues. I wanted to encourage and empower people. It was a complete physical feeling and physical struggle. I couldn’t think about what I would write, it just had to come. I felt very naked because I didn’t search for inspiration anywhere, I couldn’t do that; it was too close to me. Too personal I think. And therefore the lyrics are what they are, you know. Completely lacking metaphor: pretty much up front. And I wanted it to be as naked and brutal as possible without using anger as my source. I wanted it to be the words from a person that is very fragile and hurt. But the music is energetic and powerful and very fun actually to be in the middle of.

“I think I was about five or six years old when I first put words on what I wanted to become in the future” What I wanted to become was an artist. And I was actually really good at painting and drawing. I stuck to that until I was perhaps, I don’t know, 13, 14 – then I started to write. Poetry, short stories. And then I dropped out of high school because I was so convinced that I would become a writer. I went to a writers’ school and started to write. I was the youngest student in the class and I discovered that the other people there were so much better than I was. I was pretty restless. And in all that I discovered music.

“I was very, very influenced by PJ Harvey” She was like the flash that came through my whole system.

I fell in love with her and the way she used her music, her voice. I started to kind of copy her and nobody knew that I was doing this because I kept it as my secret until I felt I had something to show. I started to completely 100% go into the universe of music. I started a band called First Floor Power and we were living – totally living – in our rehearsal space. We didn’t eat, we didn’t do anything; we were so broke we were just rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing. And I felt so comfortable in music, in every part of music. It felt like my language.

“My dad, he is very DIY” We were always encouraged to do things. To use our imagination and all that. But it was not an academic family; it was not very intellectual. For example, to draw, that was just a tool to do something that didn’t cost a lot of money. Your imagination doesn’t cost anything. It was never: ‘do something to express yourself ’, ‘try to use words to express yourself.’ It was a pretty shut down family in many ways.

“My mother died when I was 14, of breast cancer” And nobody talked about it, ever. I was 14, my younger sister was 10 and my older sister was eighteen. So we became like small

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Tell Me About It

islands, all of us. And I really climbed into my world of creating things, writing. I was writing a lot of poetry at that time and drawing. But my upbringing has definitely influenced me in the way I live my life, the way I work. I think I was perhaps sixteen when I saw all the secrets around me. And I thought I will never ever be like that, I will always talk, I will always express myself.

If I have kids I will tell them things. I can’t stand all the hiding because that makes you so small.

“I made a decision that I am going to use my voice to say things that mean something to me” My intellect is so much bigger than my father’s. He’s a super kind man, he’s very artistic, but if you don’t ever say anything you can’t go further in your life, and it’s all meaningless. That also made me a very lousy student, because every time something didn’t talk to me, or didn’t make any difference in my world, I just left the building. I dropped off a lot of school, because I felt this doesn’t really say anything to me. This doesn’t make sense for real. So I’ve been an impatient and quite a progressive person I think. Sometimes I still am. Sometimes I feel it’s quite a burden.

“Taking care of kids is something very concrete” I have had children for so long now. My oldest son, he’s 16 and a half. So my career as a solo artist, I always had the family; always had the kids. And for me it’s good because I get too manic. I think if I only had my art that would completely take over. My entire system. It’s good to have something that breaks the inside world.

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“It’s a really sweet story about how I came across the guy who made the video for ‘RAPIN*’” He’s a young art student. I had never heard his name, never seen anything he had done. And one day I was scrolling on Instagram and I saw a beautiful painting and I thought ‘wow, who’s this guy?’ And I clicked into his account and I was like ‘Oh. He’s doing animations as well, that would be so perfect if he’d like to work with me and make a video.’ Because I had this idea to make a very, very brutal video – but to make that with actors, I didn’t want to go that way. I wanted to do something hypnotic and beautiful at the same time. And I went to visit him and I talked about my project and about what I wanted to do, and we started to give each other a lot of inspirational material, references. I invited him into my life. I felt if we are going to do this it’s got to be a collaboration and it’s got to be safe. So we started to see each other, talk a lot, and I told him my story, which is more or less the lyrics of ‘RAPIN*’ and then he started to work. The image with the big body by the mountain, that’s his idea. And I think it is completely brilliant. It completely describes how you are so little but you are so much inside of your body that you become only a physical, big creature somehow.

05—18

MOTH Club Valette St London E8 Friday 4 May

HELIOCENTRICS Monday 7 May

ED SCHRADER’S MUSIC BEAT Tuesday 8 May

SPECTRUM Wednesday 9 May

HER’S

Lanzarote

lanzaroteworks.com #lanzaroteworks

Programming

Sunday 10 June

CRACK CLOUD The Waiting Room 175 Stoke Newington High St N16 Tuesday 1 May

BAD BREEDING Thursday 3 May

VACATIONS Friday 4 May

ALEKSANDIR Saturday 5 May

Sunday 13 May

GNOD

PHILIP JONDO Saturday 5 May

Tuesday 15 May

MANSIONAIR Wednesday 16 May

THE BUTTERTONES Saturday 19 May

THE UNDERGROUND YOUTH Tuesday 22 May

OUR GIRL Wednesday 23 May

AIDAN MOFFATT + RM HUBBERT Thursday 24 May

SKEGSS Sunday 27 May

EXPLODED VIEW Saturday 2 Jun

GHOST CAR followed by

GUSTAV GOODSTUFF Friday 18 May

KHIDJA Tuesday 22 May

BUZZ KULL Wednesday 23 May

CUCKOOLANDER Thursday 24 May

HELENA DELAND Friday 25 May

HIRO KONE Thursday 31 May

STATIC PALM Wednesday 13 Jun

HOTEL LUX

SOHO REZANEJAD

Shacklewell Arms

The Lock Tavern

71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 Wednesday 2 May

BENIN CITY Thursday 3 May

CALLUNA Friday 4 May

LADY BIRD Monday 7 May

SECOND STILL Wednesday 9 May

QWEEN KWONG Thursday 10 May

HATCHIE Friday 11 May

THE CAVEMEN Saturday 12 May

BLUE HOUSE Thursday 17 May

ACID DAD Saturday 19 May

PETER KERNEL Thursday 24 May

HABIBI Saturday 26 May

LEVITATION ROOM

35 Chalk Farm Rd London NW1 Wednesday 25 April

VINYL STAIRCASE Friday 27 April

CASTORP Sunday 29 April

BEACHTAPE Friday 4 May

THE MENSTRUAL CRAMPS Tuesday 8 May

BARE TRAPS Friday 11 May

THE RESTARTS Sunday 13 May

BOYTOY Tuesday 15 May

RASCALTON Wednesday 16 May

BODEGA Tuesday 22 May

AMYL & THE SNIFFERS Saturday 26 May

TERMINAL GODS Saturday 2 June

PROM

Essay

Feel the room The new wave of ambient and its emotional powers,

by Stephen Butchard

There’s a moment ten minutes into Brian Leeds’ new album, ‘Make Me Know You Sweet’ (under the name Pendant), that I keep going back to. All the odd alien textures that have been surging and gradually building melt away to leave one decaying tone. This tone fills the mix, enveloping you in an eerie stillness.

The metallic whooshes and watery rushes that have coloured the track dissipate. An electronic kick is the only anchor, and even that is loose and scattered.

The album is full of little moments like this, where Leeds makes subtle shifts feel gigantic, and where incrementally morphing textures feel weighty and passionate. Words don’t quite capture these moments outside of some hammy descriptors. That amorphous palliative quality has long been part of ambient music. It’s why so many have trouble writing about it, opting for hyper-academic musings on its aestheticism, existentialism and the sublime.

It’s also the reason ambient albums can feel so personal.

Leeds works from Brian Eno’s original mission statement to

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“induce calm and a space to think”, but he does so while forging a world all of his own, a world built on unusual textures to sink into. His repetitive loops truly feel infinite, allowing them to influence your mood without even thinking about it. When I’ve been struggling with productivity, I go to Pendant, and an air of calm washes over. Its power to dull sensory distractions makes a good case for the music-as-therapy argument.

We talk about ambient as background music; it’s undoubtedly created with atmosphere in mind above all else. But it’s often background music for one. Its traditional usage as a tool for productivity lends it to solitary headphone listening, while the intangible yet hyper-specific emotions and landscapes it can conjure will be unique to each person. Sure, ambient artists can tour the world and connect with crowds of hundreds, but unlike other forms of electronic music reliant on rhythm and direct structure, it’s not clear that we’re feeling the same thing at the same time. We’re not bobbing our head to the same groove.

Instead, we’re inside our own heads, more than with immediate

Essay forms of music. All of this pre-amble is to say that ambient music is bloody great, and a lot more emotional than it’s given credit for.

This will be stating the obvious for many, but it’s something that needs to be stated plainly.

Ambient is in a renaissance right now. Artists like Brian Leeds, William Basinski and Ryan Sakamoto have been exploring the form in their own beautiful, distinct ways, while others across dance and experimental like Bibio, Gaussian Curve and Grouper are turning to the genre for inspiration, mining new ground in their own corners. The genre is in the best position it’s been in years, but it’s also at an odd crossroads, threatened by corporate influence at one extreme, and elitist fans at the other.

— Please do stop the Muzak — Many ambient artists are skilled and acclaimed, but they’re operating in a niche that’s never going to sell out Wembley. This isn’t anything new; many of them are undoubtedly writing for a different purpose than fame. The more worrying aspect of this is that the genre is frequently commodified, which adds to the perception that ambient is not just background music, but valueless music.

Last year, Spotify was accused of creating ‘fake’ artists on some of its most popular chillout playlists with names like ‘Deep Sleep’ and ‘Peaceful Piano’ – the kind of music a Brian Leeds or Nils Frahm excel at. The artists in these playlists were gaining tens of millions of streams, but most didn’t have any sort of online presence, or any other songs in their back catalogue.

In the New York Times and Vulture, the company was accused of controlling the rights to these songs. The reality was more complicated. Several composers had been commissioned to write for these playlists specifically, with upfront payment and potentially reduced royalty costs. The deal suited all parties, and listeners got what they wanted. So what’s wrong with that?

The main issue with streaming platforms curating their own music this way is that it allows them to guide our ears away from the independent labels and artists progressing the genre.

It’s no surprise that the first Spotify-curated track appeared within a style frequently brushed off as Muzak. In the early days of Eno, when ambient was literally used to fill public space with an artful take on elevator music, that misconception made sense.

But the genre has expanded since then. The intent of ambient depends of the individual making the music.

What Spotify are saying, whether they mean it or not, is that this music is disposable – stripped of its individuality on a faceless playlist, its highest potential for emotional involvement removed.

— Sound snobbery — Like other forms of experimental music, ambient suffers from its inaccessibility to newcomers. But this is not an issue of having to ‘learn’ how to listen to the music. The struggle comes from having to bypass fanbases that too frequently fall into

traps of elitism and superiority. Forums, comment sections and clubs are full of white dudes ready to explain exactly how you should listen to ambient, exactly what its artistic purpose is, and exactly why you don’t get it. Part of that elitism comes from pure passion; when you’ve existed long enough in a niche genre that doesn’t get as much attention as you’d wanted to, a sense of ownership sets in. Newbies simply weren’t there through the harder times, to see what makes the genre worth following.

It also comes from the link with academia; countless papers have been written on the experimental form, and many reviews focus on the intellectual qualities of the genre. This is not a bad thing, but it’s when we begin to view music discussion as something to win at, we dismiss individualism, which is part of what makes ambient so powerful. I say this because I love the genre.

The pretension is at odds with what is a deeply emotional style.

For music critic Oliver J of Youtube channel Deep Cuts, ambient has also been a deeply personal genre to explore, though his experience with elitism has not been as prominent.

“With every genre, there is bound to be a crop of elitist individuals who make it their mission to make others feel stupid or misinformed, and that’s a shame,” Oliver says. “But generally I have found communities online for these types of music particularly welcoming, open and helpful. Many of the most interesting left-field music discoveries I’ve made over the years has been a result of conversing with these people in these kinds of communities.

“I can’t stand elitism when I see it in action though – it’s not big or clever to talk down to someone for not having the same level of knowledge as you, so pipe down!”

For Oliver, the personal power of ambient outweighs any of that: “The subjectivity and variance of experiences with ambient music is one of the things that fascinates me so much.

The experience I have with William Basinski’s ‘The Disintegration Loops’ might be entirely different to someone else’s. That fact alone makes the world of ambient music a rich one, rife for debate and discussion.”

— Music of living lived moments — In an excellent historical ambient deep-dive for FACT, Lawrence English wrestles with the terminology of the genre to question its future: “Ambient had, like so many musical terms, become profoundly diffuse – a product of sloppy application and overuse,” writes English. “There were moments where it could mean just about any music that might be used as an audio blanket, something constant and lulling, within which you might be gently consumed. As the ’90s unfolded, ambient’s usage in tandem with chill-out and an exploding list of electronic music genres further eroded the promise of its determinate qualities.”

At the end of his detailed, measured piece, English throws out a thought that deeply connects, for me: “Ambient is a music of lived moments.”

Ambient, even as it evolves, has remained attached to our lives through how and where we use it. For me, it’s an inspiration

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Essay

to heighten productivity, for Ryan Bassil of Noisey, it’s a way to calm crippling anxiety and debilitating panic attacks. The best way to celebrate the genre would be to highlight some of those moments that have stuck with me as of late, to demonstrate just how impactful this form can be, even when floating in the background. Here are a few artists and tracks changing the genre.

1. Gaussian Curve – Impossible Island Gaussian Curve’s first album, ‘Broken Clouds’, is unique among ambient albums.

Not only did it bring together three legends in their own right – Gigi Masin, Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk – but it was also written and recorded on the fly, in just three days, despite how meticulous it sounds. A chance weekend together produced a dreamy collection that recalls easy summer memories. ‘Impossible Island’ is the standout, the warm, jazzy guitars and bright keys flowing effortlessly over each other for an unhurried seven minutes of bliss.

2. Bibio – Branch Line The dance producer had tinkered with gentle ambient textures before, but ‘Phantom Brickworks’ was his bold dive into the form. On ‘Branch Line’, low-fi piano and rainfall feel like its conjuring ghosts as it works its magic over sixteen minutes. Traditional in style for ambient, the track represents the way a piece can feel massively important when the time you’ve spent with it tangles the music with memories. These soft sounds have become embedded with my own emotions, tinting them differently with each listen.

3. Ryuchi Sakamoto – Zure ‘Async’ disproves the argument that ambient always lurks in the background. There are plenty of subtle moments, but Sakamoto’s fragmented, disturbing palette is nothing short of thrilling when taken in its entirety.

‘Zure’’s glitchy textures and scratching white noise are fit for a horror film.

4. Visible Cloaks – ‘Terrazo’ (featuring Motion Graphics) Like ‘Async’, there’s no way Visible Cloaks could be left hanging in the background. Their melodies and textures are intricate and blindingly bright. ‘Terrazo’ is a stunning fusion of jazz, Japanese music and digital tinkering. It feels like being sucked through a phone screen from the year 2300 and finding yourself in a gorgeous new world. It shows that ambient can be as energising as it is calming.

5. Lord of the Isles – ‘Tocpe 28’ Danny Krivit’s ‘Parabolas of Neon’ EP with Edinburgh’s Firecracker records soundtracks a night in the city’s club scene, and the lonely bus journey home afterwards. I know, because it’s soundtracked my own ventures to the Scottish capital. ‘Tocpe 28’ is the blurry exit, blood still whirring from the last song. It’s the first intake of cold city air as you climb the steps from a stuffy basement club, and the quiet walk to your home. Krivits captures the euphoria, cool down and melancholy in just a few swells of synths and keys.

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Interview

There comes a point in every great artist’s career when they can stop recording their own songs and simply cover other people’s. These artists include people like Rod Stewart, Tom Jones and David Essex. They all bow down to Cliff Richard, and if they don’t, they should. Time and time again, Cliff corners the Mother’s Day market because he’s willing to go the extra mile on the sleeve art.

While Rod Stewart takes another selfie with his bowtie undone, look what Cliff is bringing. And this isn’t even his best piece of artwork.

For ‘The Fabulous Rock’n’Roll Songbook’, Cliff has been brave. It’s a record celebrating the first wave of ’50s rock’n’roll, obviously, and Cliff – never a man to let subtlety get in the way of the message he wants to deliver – has thrown every logical trope at this image. Whether this whole shoot was Cliff’s idea or someone else’s, who knows exactly what he’s all about, at no point has Cliff said, “I dunno, guys – isn’t it a touch on-the-nose?” and I massively respect that. It looks like the picture on the back of the Smiffy’s wig box in your local fancy dress shop, where they’ve photographed the whole of Austin Powers to show you how good the rest of your costume could look.

We’ve all watched Cliff speak eloquently on BBC Breakfast about how he was the British Elvis back in the day, so let’s take a look at the font he’s used for his name here. It’s the font Elvis used on his debut album (the one the Clash paid homage to on ‘London Calling’). It’s a reference for the heads; a reminder that he knows his shit. And that he was the British Elvis.

The tight, black flares and classic Cliff twist/lean is for his core audience – the calendar buyers. Cliff clearly knows what side his bread’s buttered and gives the people what they want. Do you seriously think he’s not fully aware that the top five (!) buttons on his granddad vest are undone!?

Is it unfortunate that the position of Cliff’s hands make it appear that he’s about to be hit by a car, only for that car to in fact be behind him? Yes. Yes, that is unfortunate, but without ever paying attention to it, you’re fully aware that this is THE Cliff Richard pose, aren’t you? I am.

What I like most, though, isn’t the hands, or the blue-tinted aviators, or even the striking resemblance to Han Solo – it’s that out there somewhere there’s a photographer’s hard drive with a hundred takes of this same shot on it. Where the lean isn’t quite on point. Where the hands look terrified. “Let’s do one where you really twist now, Cliff, on three...” Fabulous.

The 4 TV shows that not even Claudia Winkleman will laugh at

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illustration by kate prior