Loud And Quiet 125 – The Internet

Hana Vu, ILL, Space Afrika, Sink Ya Teeth, Nico, J Mascis, DRINKS, Bodega

issue 125

The Internet Think Different

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 & Partnerships: 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 125

Growing up there was this guy that haunted me. Maybe he haunted you, too.

We don’t mention him in Loud And Quiet.

And then Sam Walton flew to LA to meet The Internet and they mentioned him straight away. They wouldn’t shut up about him. They worship the guy. I was a fool to not see it coming, considering the proficiency of a soul band like this one, who are down on sampling and, it turns out, have a habit for ducking all preconceptions about them. If you know The Internet at all, you still don’t. The Odd Future connection, Syd’s sexuality, Steve Lacy’s Compton home-life – they inform the group rather than define it, and never in the way that you think they do. And hey, who am I to speak of repping monsters – I’m still listening to the Smiths.

Stuart Stubbs

Contributing photographers Brian Guido, Cayce Clifford, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Jenna Foxton, Jonangelo Molinari, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Max Phythian, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Timothy Cochrane.

With special thanks to Alex Cull, Claire Coulton, James Cunningham, Joe Parry, Harriet Brampton, Rich Walker, Sean Newsham, Steve Philips.

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

Sink Ya Teeth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 ILL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Space Afrika . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Hana Vu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Bodega . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 The Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Drinks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Nico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 J Mascis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 03

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THOMAS BARTLETT & NICO MUHLY PETER PEARS: BALINESE CEREMONIAL MUSIC

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Money

Crowdfunding and when to swap your blood for cash Capitalism, as I’m sure even its most ardent supporters would agree, has some drawbacks. For a start, you don’t get food and shelter automatically. Instead, you must “trade” for these, and spend most of your time at something boring called “a job”.

Further, capitalism has an utterly illogical valuation system, where a kilogram of Iranian Beluga caviar costs £25,000 but a nurse’s starting salary is only £22,000.

One thing capitalism used to be good at, though, was keeping bozos from achieving their musical dreams. Then along came crowdfunding and suddenly the whole system was fucked.

Now any idiot can ask for money to pursue their delusions.

However, while a lot of crowdfunded music is bad (really bad), there’s plenty of good stuff out there, too. Here are a few examples: The Fish Police, a band that features two autistic musicians, used JustGiving to support their 2018 trip to SXSW, where they not only performed but also hosted a panel discussion on neurodiversity in music. On a larger scale, hip hop pioneers De La Soul sourced money for experimental self-sampling LP ‘and the Anonymous Nobody…’ through Kickstarter, while Gang of Four – a post punk band for fans of thinking – created their album ‘Content’ with crowdfunding cash, and donated 10% to Amnesty International.

Gang of Four illustrate another crowdfunding phenomenon: the quirky gift. While some ask you to donate to their cause for the simple joy of giving, many campaigns go one step further, offering something either truly unique or truly shit in return for your money. In the case of the ‘Content’ campaign, it was a chance to own a vial of blood donated by the band (presumably so you could create your own post punk clones and/or frame them for murder).

Unsurprisingly, rappers are best at the gift business. The Geto Boys, for example, offered fans the chance to spend a night getting pissed and high with them. Tumblr star Kitty allowed anyone offering $250 or more to name a song on her album (as long as it wasn’t too rude, which pretty much defeats the point).

Those with deep pockets ($5,000 deep) and a passion for TLC could have a sleepover party with Rozonda Thomas that promised snacks, jammies and “TLC pillow talk”. As for De La Soul, they gave up signed lyric notebooks used by the band – very cool.

Then there are some gifts you’d rather not have. Duo Brick + Mortar said they’d handle your relationship breakup for a fee of $100, although quite possibly your partner would break up with you first if they found out your music tastes, not to mention your lack of class. Singer songwriter Alistair Griffin said he’d read passages from ‘50 Shades of Grey’ down the phone for £100 (better that than play you his music). As for meals, the offer to have one cooked for you by a band member is pretty much obligatory, perhaps not surprising given how many musicians work in kitchens to pay the bills.

Some crowdfunding sites are also formalising this gift

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

option into a pre-ordering system. PledgeMusic, for example, allows artists to sell copies of their album in advance to fund its creation, which makes it more akin to an ordinary commercial transaction and less like idiosyncratic begging. For this article I interviewed folk duo Taylor and the Mason, who said doing this not only raised cash but also introduced a lot of new people to their music (however, PledgeMusic does take a 15% cut).

Finally, there are crowdfunding sites that brand themselves as investment opportunities, where you can find a whole range of musical products, most of which sound a bit shit. Current examples include Remidi “the first wearable instrument” – essentially a pair of gloves with inbuilt midi; DrumPants, an app that offers the unpleasant experience of having “an entire band in your pocket”; and FuckWhistle, the family fun whistle made entirely from penis gristle (I made that last one up). That said, crowdfunding has spawned a whole range of really stylish synthesisers, including a couple from Plankton Electronics that would cause sexual excitement for any self-diagnosed synth nerd.

So, how can you too benefit from crowdfunding? The trick is, unfortunately, to offer something worthwhile in the first place.

If you’re using it to create a new piece of art, fantastic; if you’re using it to take yourself on tour (i.e. a free holiday), then perhaps it is best to dip into your own pocket rather than asking your mates to subsidise your fun.

As for gifts, stay clear from gimmicks if at all possible. A deluxe edition of your album is great; a dinner date with your lead singer is not; “hugs” are the worst. And, unless you’re already a musical legend, no one is going to want your lyric books – much less your blood.

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Fate

What Posh Spice did Without thinking about it too much, who’s your favourite Spice Girl? Just one of the four; shout out their name now. If this were 1996 and Top of The Pops magazine, your answer would tell you everything you need to know about yourself: You’re Geri – a fierce leader who stands up for her friends and is always first on the dance floor; You’re Mel B – people know not to mess with you or those close to you; You’re Emma – a sweetheart who knows when to fight back; You’re Mel C – always on the move, you keep a cool head when others need you. Top of The Pops wouldn’t have culled Victoria like I have, but it’s 2018 and Victoria was never going to be your answer. I get that, and I’m sure she does too.

Victoria Beckham was the Spice Girls’ easy target from the moment she didn’t sing a bar in the video for ‘Wannabe’.

While the others took turns to shout into our faces, Victoria (then Adams) stomped across the back of the frame, out of time in a way that takes more skill than you think without being totally shitfaced. There is a genuinely cool moment where she nonchalantly trashes a table that two cardinals are sat at (no idea), but still it’s worth noting that in a video that starts with Emma Bunton stealing a homeless guy’s cap and discarding it in front of him, it’s Victoria that comes off as a total cow. It’s impressive, in a way.

‘What exactly is she bringing to this group?’ was always the question, ‘beyond pointing up to the sky and flicking her wrist forward.’

Since then, on the personality parade of fame, she’s not done much to win us over. For a time, people (and sometimes Victoria herself) would insist in interviews and documentaries that “she’s actually really funny and doesn’t take herself seriously at all,” but

06

they’ve even stopped saying that now. Victoria knows that she’s not your favourite Spice Girl, and she’s ok with it.

She was the first Spice Girl through the door, though, never to be replaced; not like Suzanne Tinker, Lianne Morgan and Michelle Stephenson. They’d all replied to the same advert in The Stage, placed by Heart Management, who then screwed things up for themselves. ‘Touch’, as the classic SG lineup we all know and love were called back then, spent a year ‘training’ for their great chart heist while Heart neglected to see the potential of the group they’d forced together. By the time Geri had rechristened them ‘Spice’ (still not great) they’d persuaded their managers to put together a showcase for them to invite industry A&Rs and producers to. It went so well that Heart thought they’d better lock Spice (yeah, it’s bad) into a binding contract after all.

It was Victoria’s father who gave the group legal advice against signing the deal, encouraging them to stall and go with Simon Fuller instead – and we all know what that guy’s capable of.

If this is the only thing that Victoria Beckham ever did for the Spice Girls, it’s big. Let’s say Suzanne Tinker stayed and Victoria went – while I like the sound of her very much, the Spice Girls could well have remained ‘Touch’ forever. So it would have been ‘Touch Up Your Life’, only it wouldn’t have because no one’s listening to a band called Touch. ‘Scary Touch’ actually sounds better than ‘Scary Spice’. And ‘Posh Touch’. But ‘Baby Touch’ sounds dubious at best and ‘Ginger Touch’ accusatory.

Without the group, Emma Bunton would have been forced into resurrecting her burgeoning acting career as ‘mugger’ from a 1992 episode of EastEnders, and the same goes for Mel B, who’d clogged up Coronation Street as a recurring shelf-stacker in ’93.

One hundred percent, Geri would have been a holiday rep, and a fucking brilliant one.

The 1997 Brit Awards wouldn’t be remembered for Geri’s Union Jack dress – ‘Everyday Is A Winding Road’ would have been the big takeaway live performance; ‘Wannabe’ wouldn’t have won British Single of The Year – it would have been ‘Lifted’

by Lighthouse Family. And of course Geri (let’s face it, it’s Geri who we would miss in all of this) wouldn’t have been able to bail on the group early to release a debut solo single as impressively one-dimensional as ‘Look At Me’ – a Poundland Shirley Bassey number in which she lists words she knows that rhyme and gives ‘Ginger’ a funeral in the video (showbiz grudges were much more on-the-nose in 1999).

And yeah, if we want to get real for a second, while their message of Girl Power was sometimes muddled and not always perfect, the Spice Girls did inspire a generation of young women to be loud and ambitious and unashamed at a time when popular culture had regressed to Oasis gigs where crowd and band would chant “get your tits out for the lads” for the big screen.

You’re Victoria – you’re actually really funny and don’t take yourself seriously at all.

words by abi crawford. illustration by kate prior

NEW RELEASES OUT NOW

LA LUZ ‘Floating Features’

RIVAL CONSOLES ‘Persona’

“La Luz’s surf-noir music may sound like the stuff of pool parties, but deep down on Floating Features it’s much more nightmarish” – Loud & Quiet

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

Hardly Art LP Ltd / LP / CD / MC

THE DEATH WHEELERS ‘I Tread On Your Grave’

Riding Easy LP/CD Heavily inspired by the aesthetics and ethos of bikesploitation movies such as The Wild Angels, Werewolves on Wheels and Psychomania, The Death Wheelers seek to glorify this unsung era of movie making through their sordid sounds. Taking musical cues from rock’s greats such as Davie Allan, The Cramps, Motörhead, The Stooges and Grand Funk Railroad,

Erased Tapes LP / CD

LTD - ‘Ltd’

In The Red LP/CD What happens when you put King Khan and Sean Wood from The Spits together? The results are Louder Than Death aka LTD. This 12-inch is the first collaboration between the two titans of garage-punk and the results are as bonkers as you’d hope.

MINAMI DEUTSCH ‘With Dim Light’

Guru Guru Brain LP/CD Sophomore album on Guru Guru Brain retains the principle ingredients that make Minami Deutsch so great such as their signature fuzz, thumping bass and dream like vocals. RIYL: Agitation Free, mid -era CAN, Manuel Gottsching.

YOUNG GUV ‘2 Sad 2 Funk’

Night School LP/CD On 2 Sad 2 Funk (Ben Cook/Fucked Up) 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.

COSMIC PSYCHOS ‘Loudmouth Soup’

Subway Records LP/CD/Ltd LP The Psychos are back, mate!

Australia’s most legit export since Crocodile Dundee release their eleventh studio album, 'Loudmouth Soup.’ File under: Farm Rock.

MOONDOGGIES ‘A Love Sleeps Deep’

Hardly Art LP/CD A Love Sleeps Deep’s bones rattle with all the seismic changes of the last five years since the release of ‘Adios I’m a Ghost’. While the Washington band got lumped in early on with the woodsy folk-rock/Americana movement that sprung up in the Pacific Northwest in the 2000s, the core Moondoggies sound has always been rock in the more classical sense–more Pink Floyd than Woody Guthrie. A Love Sleeps Deep crystalizes that.

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Relationships

How to mend a broken heart with any album you like There’s no one definitive breakup album but there are plenty of albums about breakups: Scottish miserabalists Frightened Rabbit just celebrated the tenth anniversary of their heartbreaker, ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’; ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, We’re Floating in Space’, Spiritualized’s masterpiece of heroin-fuelled love benders and love-fuelled heroin benders is just as great after twenty years. Then there are bands like Fleetwood Mac who have built their whole mythology around lost love. Adele has managed to milk three albums out of the failure of one relationship, while Frank Ocean’s most vulnerable moments tie breakups to themes of identity, memory and belonging. Commercially and artistically, a breakup album can be a goldmine, but the albums that connect with us personally might not even be about breakups.

I polled a range of people on the albums that have soundtracked their breakups. There were the expected candidates – Beck’s ‘Sea Change’, The Mountain Goat’s ‘Tallahassee’, literally anything by Jeff Buckley – but far more were surprising. There was the Freddie Gibbs and Madlib album ‘Piñata’, an album that seems more suited to a drug deal than a messy divorce. For someone who will go unnamed, Lily Allen’s ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’ provided solace. Most bizarrely, two people suggested the Slumdog Millionaire Original Soundtrack. “Jai Ho,” I guess. I wondered why so many picks were unconnected to obvious themes of heartbreak. And then I remembered my breakup album. Time to open old wounds…

It was 2010. I was a greasy sixteen-year-old, the kind that had just realised that he didn’t have to wear clothes his mum had bought for him, and still somehow settled on a cardigan/comic T-shirt combo. I was grappling with my sexuality the way any queer sixteen-year-old living in the rural highlands does – by repressing it. Luckily, I would grow out of my awkward closeted nature by university, and upgrade to a cardigan/band T-shirt combo. For now, I was happy being completely uncomfortable in my own skin.

There had been some threats to this easy, shadowy lifestyle, though. Close friends had suddenly started getting into dating. Not the primary school kind, where you agree that you’re dating, awkwardly hold hands and then watch YouTube videos at each other’s houses. No. This was the hormone-fuelled, confidence-boosting, popularity-flexing kind of dating. I hung around with mostly girls, friends who provided safe company in a messy part of my life where I barely had an identity. After a few jokes

08

about the lack of a threat I posed to them by a boy who literally went by the name ‘Fudgy’, I hastily decided to throw a friendship away.

The moment to divert attention soon presented itself. The Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows premiere at Vue. Two tickets, and a long bus to Inverness. She was a fellow band geek who I could easily have a laugh with. We had eaten lunch next to each other for three years. That was a commitment on its own. Maybe I DID like her? I knew I didn’t deep down, but the moment to make my move had arrived, and by ‘move’ I mean rambling through the dating question with popcorn still stuck to my cardigan. She said yes, and I had doomed a friendship.

After months of false romance, what ended it was a completely different music taste. I loved Daft Punk and Justice, she loved Disney soundtracks and Paramore. When swapping our sixth-generation iPods for the day, the problem appeared.

Techno wasn’t music, she joked. I laughed along and pretended I’d borrowed the iPod from my brother. Rather than having healthy separate musical identities, I pretended to like what she liked to blend in. I was repressing dance music along with everything else.

By the time Deathly Hallows Part 2 rolled around I had broken it off. I couldn’t lie anymore. The breaking point was ‘A Whole New World’ lodging itself inside my brain for over a week.

She was heartbroken. It turned out this had meant more to her than it did to me. We never spoke much after that.

At the height of my guilt, I discovered the album that would define the breakup. Hidden away in the small dance section of HMV was Rustie’s ‘Glass Swords’. Its shimming intro announced itself with the epic scale of a video game console start-up. Then the beats kicked in. The gritty midi-synths of ‘Flash Back’, the sugary, overexposed drops of ‘Surph’ and ‘Ultra Thizz’, and the jittery bassline of ‘Hover Traps’ all soothed me. It was addictive.

I was in love.

Without any words, the album spoke to me. It offered a world to escape into – one that was mine. I’d embraced my own musical identity. In frantic searches to see how this stuff was made, I soon found Burial, DJ sprinkles, Octo Octa – music that’s taught me about myself. Dance music was escapism, but the lineage of queer, introspective statements within it made it feel personal. I can’t listen to ‘Glass Swords’ without a drop of guilt, but it all melts away when the euphoric builds take hold, and I remember how these endearing tunes shaped me.

words by stephen butchard. illustration by kate prior

Lanzarote

06—18 MOTH Club Valette St London E8

lanzaroteworks.com

Programming

Friday 1 June

LOVERS CLUB

#lanzaroteworks

Saturday 2 June

BROKEN ENGLISH CLUB

mothclub.co.uk Tuesday 5 June Sunday 27 May

PLEUCHE

Friday 8 June

PHUONG DAN

EXPLODED VIEW Wednesday 6 June Wednesday 30 May

BULLY

THE GOLDEN DREGS Thursday 7 June

Saturday 2 June

HOTEL LUX

BEECHWOOD Friday 8 June

Monday 4 June

MAGIC WANDS Tuesday 5 June

THE SEA AND CAKE Wednesday 6 June

GOLDEN DAWN ARKESTRA Friday 8 June

WARMDUSCHER Tuesday 19 June

GIRLS NAMES Saturday 23 June

ESSAIE PAS

THE MANTIS OPERA Sunday 10 June

CRACK CLOUD Friday 22 June

LUMER

Thursday 7 June

LYLA FOY Wednesday 13 June

SOHO REZANEJAD Wednesday 20 June

VACATION FOREVER Friday 22 June

FANTASTIC TWINS

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

Saturday 23 June

SCHONWALD

Saturday 26 May

TERMINAL GODS Tuesday 26 June

DEAF KIDS

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

Sunday 27 May

LL BURNS Thursday 31 May

SAVAGE SOUNDS

Thursday 10 July

THE COSMIC DEAD

Saturday 26 May

CHRIS WEBB

Saturday 2 June

PROM

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com

Saturday 26 May

LEVITATION ROOM Thursday 31 May

TEAM PICTURE

Sunday 27 May

THE GOLDEN FILTER Monday 28 May

DENIS LLOYD Thursday 31 May

STATIC PALM

Thursday 7 June

DITZ Tuesday 12 June

MOWBECK Wednesday 27 June

JOHN MOODS

Ageing

Sweet 16: Johnny Marr’s youth TV debut and dishing out fashion karma

I turned 16 in October of 1979. I was bouncing between my parents’ house some of the time and Andy Rourke’s house most of the time. I’d go home now and then and often end up having a bit of a scrap with my mum and dad, because I’d been working on being a bit of a tear-away for a couple of years, which was all intrinsically tied up in trying to be a musician – I’d left school a year early and was making money through working in a protogoth clothes shop in the bottom the Arndale Centre called The Cave, which played great music.

I played in my mate’s band and was trying to get my own band together. We used to rehearse in a big, old mill in the centre of Manchester called T J Davidson’s Rehearsal Rooms – it was a completely horrible, cold space with asbestos everywhere, and you’d have to burn wood in the corner of the room to keep warm in the winter. Joy Division rehearsed there upstairs – the footage you see of them playing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, that’s T J Davidson’s.

I wouldn’t say they looked aggressive, but they were an arresting vision. You’d see them pushing their amps down the hall and they’d be dressed in old men’s clothes. Now, that’s no big deal, but in 1979 it was seriously freaky. Wearing a safety pin through your ear was nothing compared to wearing an old, grey, button-up shirt, old men’s trousers and a really austere haircut.

It was radical.

At 16, I also got a job on a TV show, called Devil’s Advocate.

I was working in the shop one day and this woman with a clipboard came in. She eyed me up and down and she said, “Would you be interested in being on a television show about unemployment?”

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I said, “Well, you’re in my place of employment, how does that work?” And she actually said, “Well, we’ve got a skinhead, and we’ve got a goth, and we’ve got a rudeboy, and… what are you?”

I think I probably said that I was a rocker. It was £30 a week, on Sundays, and I thought, ‘well, I don’t have much on on Sundays.’

My manager at the shop was a real tool (he ripped everyone off – he ripped the customers off, he ripped the employees off) so I told him that I’d been asked to go on this TV show and he said if I did it he’d give me a new shirt to wear, if I could find a way to mention the shop. I knew I had him on the hook then, so I said, “nah, I’m not going to do it.” I put it to him that if he gave me a new suit I’d do it, and then I knew I really had him on the hook, so I said that wanted a new suit every week. Of course, I chose the most expensive suit in the shop each week – I would have done the show just for the Johnson’s suits, to be honest, which was this legendary shop on the King’s Road in London.

I’d go on the show and try to give as little opinion as possible – partly because I was paranoid that someone might recognise me from the shop when I’m supposed to be unemployed, and also because I was always really stoned, and I couldn’t handle that under the studio lights.

This boss of mine – who, as I say, was a tool – was blacklisted from suppliers in London because he owed a lot of people money. So he sent me and Ange [Johnny’s then girlfriend and now wife] down to buy the best clothes from the Kings Road so that he could then copy the styles. The thing was, we liked the people we were meant to be spying on more than we liked him, so what we’d do is we’d be completely open about it and tell the stores, and they’d be completely complicit in then filling our bin bags with all this crap that they couldn’t sell. They’d then give us two bags of the stuff that we really wanted. We’d catch the train back to Manchester, throw our two bags in this bush and have to endure this procession of him pulling out these terrible camo trousers and leopard print kimonos and going, “Are these hip?

Will kids like these” and we’d go, “Oh man, you’re gonna flog tons of those.” We saw it as fashion karma.

I’ve always said that the most important thing that’s ever been in my life is Ange. I really wasn’t over exaggerating that in the book – if anything I was playing it down. I always say she made me brave. We started going out when I was 15 and she was 14, and it felt incredible to know that I’d already met the person that I was going to spend the rest of my life with – my hormones didn’t have to worry about that like other teenage boys. We were inseparable. It was really sweet. I remember that one night when I’d had a scrap with my parents and I had to sleep outside, Ange stayed with me. We slept in a bin shed on a ’70s council estate, freezing cold. It was partly really romantic and partly really tragic.

If it wasn’t a Smiths song it was a Suede song.

as told to stuart stubbs

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

Vampire Weekend St. Vincent •

Feist • Yo La Tengo • Ezra Furman Jeff Tweedy White Denim

•

John Cale

Oh Sees

•

Wild Billy Childish & CTMF

•

Mulatu Astatke

• •

Ariel Pink

•

•

Fat White Family

Gruff Rhys Big Thief

Destroyer

•

•

•

Julia Holter

Josh T. Pearson

Omar Souleyman

Titus Andronicus • Hookworms • Shame • (Sandy) Alex G • James Holden & The Animal Spirits This Is The Kit • IDLES • Iceage • Jonathan Wilson • The Low Anthem • Protomartyr The Posies • Julien Baker • Hiss Golden Messenger • Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Damien Jurado • Sunflower Bean • Lucy Dacus • Shannon & The Clams • Amen Dunes Imarhan • Stealing Sheep’s Suffragette Tribute • Japanese Breakfast • The Limiñanas Richard Dawson • Du Blonde • Warmduscher • Jim White • Flat Worms • Mdou Moctar Lost Horizons • Colter Wall • Soccer Mommy • Bas Jan • The Weather Station Adrian Crowley • Nilüfer Yanya • Sweet Baboo • Darren Hayman • Gwenno • Insecure Men David Thomas Broughton • DUDS • Snail Mail • Kiran Leonard • Cut Worms • Erin Rae Caroline Spence • Samuel R. Saffery • Snapped Ankles • Haley Heynderickx Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker • The Orielles • Boy Azooga • Marc Riley DJ Screaming Females • Anna Burch • AK/DK • Penelope Isles • & many more acts Plus comedy, film, literature and art installations. Dance ‘til you drop at the late night forest disco and laugh ‘til you cry at some of the world’s foremost comedians, all while sampling delicious award-winning food and hand-selected craft beers and ales. Come make new friends under the stars and around the campfire.

endoftheroadfestival.com ★★★★★

The Guardian

★★★★★

Daily Telegraph

Interview

Sink Ya Teeth

A post-punk dance duo do it themselves, by Max Pilley Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

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Interview

22 June 2018 is a date that’s been a long time coming for Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford. The two Norwich natives have been ploughing their own furrows through independent music both together and apart for well over a decade, but only now are they ready to brandish their fully-formed debut album as Sink Ya Teeth.

“It’s exciting, I love the anticipation,” Cullingford tells me as we share a drink in the Bank Holiday weekend sunshine after their set supporting The Membranes at Manchester’s Ritz. “And then when it’s out, it’ll be like we don’t know what to do anymore.”

The self-titled record is fizzing with rare groove sass and spacious synths teaming up with post-punk basslines to create a minimal dance style that they can fairly call their own. Uzor’s vocals range from detached cool to spiky defiance, whilst the songs often deal with the darkness that lurks just under the surface of our everyday lives.

“There are elements of exploring the fragility that you experience as a human being, particularly in terms of friendships and social situations,” explains Uzor, outlining the album’s loose central theme. “I take an element of something that I’ve experienced and I magnify it.” It’s an acutely observational songwriting discipline that ultimately lends the album a bracingly honest air, its tales of hedonism always tempered by an acknowledgement that it’s an ongoing challenge to operate as a functional adult in our current world.

Uzor and Cullingford live a ten-minute walk apart, but still tend to write separately. “Sometimes in the morning if I get an idea, I’ll open the window and go, ‘Oi Gemma!’ and she’s down at the bottom of the hill,” jokes Uzor. Alas, their Norfolk existence isn’t quite that Hobbit-like, settling instead for sending files back and forth in the run-up to their weekly practice session. “I get really excited when I hear what Maria comes back with, it’s usually nothing like what I would have ever imagined, I never get used to it,” says Cullingford.

They settled as a two-piece in 2015, after Cullingford had become involved in Uzor’s solo project, Girl In A Thunderbolt.

“If you rely on other musicians, they can’t commit very easily,” says Cullingford. “We work at a certain pace and we just want to get on with it, so it’s easy for us. We’re similar in commitment and focus.” It is a revealing comment from somebody who has spent the best part of twenty years as a member of touring bands, most notably the critically acclaimed KaitO who she played in around the turn of the century. Before meeting Uzor, she says she had stopped wanting to be in a band. “I don’t really like the politics in bands sometimes, I find it difficult. But I decided I’d listen to see what Maria was about and I thought, ‘fucking hell, I really like this!’”

It led to her joining Girl In A Thunderbolt as a guitarist three summers ago, although as Uzor explains, after her third or

fourth gig with them, the seven-year-long project came to an end.

“Our bassist had to go travelling, and trying to organise different people became very hard, so Gemma and I formed a two-piece.”

Sink Ya Teeth were formed, but with their various respective musical backgrounds, the new duo’s direction was not a given. Before the indie blues of Girl In A Thunderbolt, Uzor had gained her first experience in a garage punk band called The Incidentals. “It’s always good to cut your teeth on garage punk,” she says. “Your first band is a way to purge.” When it comes to their decision to hone in on the dance genre for Sink Ya Yeeth, Uzor is fairly relaxed about the subject. “When you’re into music, you’re into all sorts of things. You are every single type of music you listen to. I listen to reggae, to classical. Maybe I might do a solo classical album some time, or a grime album.

We decided to make dance music. I love anything with rhythm.”

Sink Ya Teeth’s experiences have taught them that there is a lot to be said for true independence. “We’re so worried that if we get someone else on board, they wouldn’t be able to keep up with us,” admits Cullingford. Having secured some funding from Arts Council England, they set about writing and recording a set of songs, without worrying about waiting for a label to pick them up. “We do our own artwork, we write the songs, and we produce, mix, record and release our music ourselves. Sometimes we do our own videos too. It’s good to have that kind of control, but it ain’t cheap!” That’s not to say that they’re adverse to the label model either: their first two singles were released on 1965 Records, but a funding issue got in the way of that. In the event, the album is coming out on Hey Buffalo, Uzor’s own label that she set up for Girl in a Thunderbolt.

The other price of artistic independence, of course, is a reliance on the day job. Uzor is a support worker and textiles teacher at a school for children who have been bullied, whilst Cullingford is a self-employed ukulele teacher for 6 to 10 year olds.

Barely a piece has been written about this duo that doesn’t compare them to the seminal New York no wave group ESG. Without a doubt, there are similarities in their economical dancepunk arrangements, especially on a track like ‘If You See Me’, but whilst Cullingford is a big fan, Uzor, who wrote the song in question, is largely unfamiliar with the group. “I think it’s probably that I listen to the same music that they were influenced by too,” she suggests. Cullingford is less sure. “I love ESG, but I don’t get the comparison,” she says. “I guess it’s the fact that it’s mostly drums and bass, but I wouldn’t say vocally that Maria is anything like [ESG singer] Renee Scroggins.” They reference S-Express, LCD Soundsystem and Shopping as artists they consider as kindred spirits, whilst Cullingford points to Tina Weymouth, Carol Kaye and Peter Hook as bassists she admires. It’s another Manchester music institution, however, that they have formed a relationship with over the last year: when A Certain Ratio saw

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Interview them supporting !!! at a gig at Manchester venue Gorilla, they reached out to them and consequently the two will be sharing a stage on multiple occasions this summer.

When a passing remark is made about possibly recording alongside Electronic in the future, the conversation strays, as so many have done recently, into the murky waters that surround Morrissey. Speaking just days after his most recent and most indefensible outburst to date, Uzor expands on how hard it has become to reconcile her teenage love for The Smiths with the

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man’s current descent into a cheap UKIP soundbite machine.

“You find out he’s a racist twat, and you’re a black person. It’s like I’ve wasted my entire teenage years on this cunt. I’m in a period of mourning, but also defiance.” Realising the potential here, Cullingford suggests that we set up a Blur-Oasis style media war between Sink Ya Teeth and Morrissey, to which Uzor, seamlessly slipping into an unsettlingly good Moz impression, replies in his stead: “Ohh I’ve never heard of them. And anyway, they’ve got a black person.”

THE MEN FRI 1 JUNE OSLO HACKNEY

BEDOUINE MON 9 JULY THE LEXINGTON

RAF RUNDELL THURS 7 JUNE BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB

KING TUFF THURS 16 AUG MOTH CLUB

LOKKI FRI 8 JUNE ROSEMARY BRANCH THEATRE PET DEATHS WED 13 JUNE SEBRIGHT ARMS

ALEX NAPPING MON 20 AUG SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS EZRA FURMAN TUES 4 SEPT O2 ACADEMY BRIXTON

ROSTAM THURS 14 JUNE SCALA

(SANDY) ALEX G WED 5 SEPT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

VIVE LE VOID TUES 19 JUNE THE LEXINGTON

KEDR LIVANSKIY OUT WED 19 SEPT SOLD THE PICKLE FACTORY

VACATION FOREVER WED 20 JUNE THE WAITING ROOM

JOSE GONZALEZ THURS 20 SEPT ROYAL ALBERT HALL

GROUP LISTENING MON 9 JULY ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

MITSKI WED 26 SEPT O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE

JIM GHEDI THURS 27 SEPT ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH IDER TUES 2 OCT VILLAGE UNDERGROUND MARTIN KOHLSTEDT MON 8 OCT ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH GWENNO THURS 18 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL GIANT PARTY WED 24 OCT THE LEXINGTON SOLOMON GREY THURS 25 OCT UNION CHAPEL LORD HURON FRI 26 OCT ROUNDHOUSE LUCY DACUS WED 31 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

GOAT GIRL FRI 2 NOV KOKO CURTIS HARDING THURS 8 NOV KOKO LAURA JEAN TUES 13 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS KELLY LEE OWENS THURS 15 NOV VILLAGE UNDERGROUND LUKE HOWARD TUES 20 NOV BUSH HALL THE WAVE PICTURES THURS 22 NOV KOKO SUBURBAN LIVING FRI 23 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS HOOKWORMS SAT 24 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN PARALLELLINESPROMOTIONS.COM

Interview Liberation through disobedient noise, by Daniel Dylan Wray Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

ILL

“I think the nature of ILL is persevering through chaos,” says singer and bassist Whitney Bluzma, in an accent that melds her Latvian roots with a Northern drawl that a decade in Manchester will land you with. “We’ve survived through several hiatuses and two band members leaving.”

This persistence is being celebrated as I arrive in a giant industrial building in Manchester where the group rehearse.

ILL are locked into a celebratory embrace, beaming with pride as they cast eyes across the finished vinyl copies of their debut

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album. Along with words of encouragement to one another, the sound of a band rehearsing can be heard thumping through the floor as the distant chants of Manchester City fans at the Etihad Stadium creep through the windows.

It’s been six years since ILL formed and so their debut album is a landmark accomplishment. Recently released on Box Records, it’s an album that does more than justice to some of the searing live shows they have been playing over the years. It’s a potent blend of jagged post-punk, clattering psych rock, acrid

Interview glam, riot grrrl snarl and doom pop, all loaded with socio-political bite and ink-black humour.

The band was born, quite literally, from the womb. Many of the members made up the improvisational collective, Womb, before forming ILL. “Womb was cool to connect with all these women but rarely did it ever sound like music,” keyboard player and singer Harri Shanahan says. “It was very congested and noisy. So we thought it would be nice to do something where we had the space to hear something.”

For the band’s first ever show, they were wrapped in bandages, depicting an exaggerated image of their supposed illness. “The band name came from initially just being dismissed as being ‘ill’ because of what we were trying to do,” says Bluzma.

“So we took it as a badge of honour rather than a slur.” Their debut album opens with ‘ILL Song’ and the opening lyrics of “putting a stress on the NHS”. The frenetic energy, screeching guitars and demented house of horrors keyboards perfectly aligns with the screams of “take your pills, take your pills.” A version of this song existed for the first ever show and was also something of a mission statement for how they would unfold.

“I’ve always had a bee in my bonnet about mental health services and how women are treated, specifically,” Shanahan says. Along with a sort of operating room gone berserk aesthetic the band employed in the early days, their previous member Rosanne Robertson could also be found utilising everything from saws to vibrators as part of their genre-colliding sound.

The band soon came up with the term “disobedient noise” to describe what they do; a description initially born from having to write a bio that soon bloomed into something of a mantra.

“For me, that term means being a woman and being loud and openly emotional and full of rage,” says Bluzma. “Growing up in Latvia, and I think this is often true of women as a whole, you get told to be quiet and polite and don’t argue with people. Or if you get bullied then to stay quiet.” This is something Shanahan echoes in terms of her UK-based life. “My family background is super religious and conservative. So I think we’ve all come up against that obedience: at home and at work, in various ways.”

So ILL became a liberating front for disobedience, noise, fun and chaos all rolled into a juddering purification you can move to. “It’s about self expression,” offers Shanahan, “and about being a bit naughty, but we do like people to have a good time. It’s not all inquiet fury, it’s inquiet fury attached to hopefully danceable beats.” Humour is also rooted into the band’s output. Even a cursory glance at titles such as ‘Space Dick’ will allude to that before you hear the lyrics. Likewise on the sludgy Swans-like growl of the hilarious but brutal ‘I Am the Meat’, with its exploration of objectification and lyrics like, “Skinny pudding-fucker / I am the meat.” Shanahan wrote the lyrics in response to “when someone said that the real meat would come from the male bands playing this gig we were on the bill with. I was like, ‘no!’ we’re the meat – we’re meaty.”

Anger and humour have an equal role in the band. “It’s fury modulated by sarcasm and jokes,” says Bluzma. Whilst Shanahan adds, “I have to laugh otherwise I would cry and probably stab

people. Humour is a great thing and when people understand the joke and are able to laugh at themselves and the wider world, it can be quite a protective thing. Empowering almost.”

Whilst the band tackle social, political and gender inequality in their songs, drummer Fiona Ledgard says: “I think it’s really important not to take ourselves too seriously.” She then goes onto to recall what in most bands lives would have been a disastrous gig but one they managed to turn into a riot. “We played in Bury in a Wetherspoons-type bar and it was just full of old men. They left the horse racing on the TV whilst we played so we started doing commentary over it. I looked over and one elderly man at the bar was just stuffing screwed up tissues into his ears.”

Shanahan then throws in an anecdote: “I remember playing one gig in Oldham and this guy just tapped me on the back and I turned around and he just said: ‘shite.’” But bad, or funny, gig stories aside, there’s still a fundamental point the band are both making and extracting from such encounters, as Ledgard explains. “I think as women it’s important that we take up space and make noise. A lot of people might not like that and it can still be a shocking or surprising thing for some people.”

A sobering realisation amidst the disordered assault of ILL is that the subjects in the songs they wrote as far back as five or six years ago are not only still relevant but have worsened. Ledgard says: “A lot of the lyrics focus around government cuts to welfare, mental health services, the NHS, arts, education. And it’s like… what’s next?” The premonition-like capabilities of the band’s songs is not lost on Shanahan either. “I sometimes feel like you write a song and it becomes true,” she says. “Like with the song ‘Kremlin’; we’re talking about perverts in Congress. Then this happened with Trump and it feels a bit like what we write about comes true. So the next song that we’re going to write is called ‘Free Pizza and Cake For Trans Women and Lesbians.’”

Whilst none of the band have any faith whatsoever in the current government to make changes in any positive and progressive way, they do have hope on a smaller scale. “Community is really, really important,” Ledgard says, “and more people are noticing that now. There is a huge sense of community that comes from music – from different scenes in different cities – there’s a support network.”

Shanahan says that if ILL can make someone feel even a little bit empowered then their work is being done. “It’s about being a cog in a larger machine,” says guitarist Tamsin Middleton, with Shahanan concluding: “We’re not going to change the world with a song, we’re not that naive, but even venting a bit is good for you – you’ll live longer. It’s medicinal catharsis we’re giving people.”

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Contemporary urban ambience from Manchester, by Luke Cartledge Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

Space Afrika Geographical identity is a tricky thing to express in instrumental music, and harder still to articulate in the third person. The power of a regional accent or distinct verbal tradition to imbue music with a sense of place is profound, and shorn of such features, sound can often seem to exist in a centreless limbo (that is not necessarily a criticism).

Of course, certain instrumental scenes have cut through with their own identifiably locational sound: Detroit techno, for example, or Parisian house. Yet in the UK, such scenes are relatively few and far between. Frequently, the dance and ambient music movements in Britain place a greater emphasis on universality and escapism than local identity or direct engagement with one’s immediate environment. Acid house, for example, had far more to do with ’60s counterculture and the radical possibilities of psychedelic and technological progression than the dour North Western cityscapes under whose shadow it flourished.

Occasional combinations of considered discourse and exceptional music have gone against this grain. The late, great Mark Fisher’s work on Burial is a prominent example: from the South London producer’s earliest work, Fisher identified a generational quality to this music, an uncanny ability to transpose the bruised environment of millennial London into gorgeous, perspective-shifting sound. At this point, I’d like to underline that I am resolutely not attempting to draw a false parallel between myself and Fisher; there is, however, something of Burial’s remarkable ability to engage with his surroundings and produce mesmerising, timeless music in the work of Manchester two-piece Space Afrika.

— Somewhere decent to live — For four years, Joshua Reid and Joshua Inyang have been producing an ever-evolving brand of faultlessly forward-looking electronic music, demonstrating a formidable literacy in what Simon Reynolds terms “the hardcore continuum”, that uniquely

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“We’re proud of the direct influence that the North West and Manchester has on our music. We walk around the city at crazy hours of the night, under the harsh grey”

progressive thread of British underground dance music that can be traced from the first stirrings of Krautrock influenced-postpunk to contemporary broken beat, post-dubstep and UK bass.

“We’d been spending a lot of time together, going out together, and being influenced by a lot of music in Manchester: house, techno, drum ‘n’ bass, jungle,” says Inyang, and those influences are audible in their earlier releases, thick slabs of industrial techno submerged in the sub-frequency abyss of 21st Century dub. Yet their recent LP, ‘Somewhere Decent to Live’, is almost entirely devoid of the consistent beats or wind-tunnel basslines which characterised releases like ‘Where To Now’ and ‘Above/ Below The Concrete’. It’s a pretty astonishing album, easily the most striking ambient record I’ve heard this year: an expansive, heady work that evokes the restless emptiness of urban life in post-industrial Northern England. So how have Space Afrika arrived at such a singular sound?

“Naturally, we started to become less and less involved with going out, and we started to have more of our own ideas, staying in and looking for a sound that we felt more comfortable with,” elucidates Josh, who speaks in slow, cerebral sentences, as if continually spinning multiple intellectual plates. “We were listening to a lot of dub – Basic Channel, that kind of stuff – as well as broken beat, German mainly, and a lot of ambient music.”

At this point, the conversation turns to the aspect of this duo that I find so striking: their relationship with Manchester.

“We’re quite proud of the direct influence that the North West and Manchester has on our music; the architecture, the design, the history. We spend a lot of time travelling, and just walking around the city at crazy hours of the night, under the harsh grey... You can’t help but absorb that on a daily basis. Although we spend a lot of time in quiet, living room type environments, you’ve always got that stuff in the background, spilling over into what you find when you’re in that quiet place. It results in music that’s a lot more natural and organic, completely related to everything you experience in the day-to-day.”

This influence is worn brazenly; as they’re keen to remind me, the titles of their releases, and indeed the name of the project, refer explicitly to notions of geography and architecture. ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’, ‘Where To Now’, ‘Above/ Below The Concrete’; this is a duo who foreground their rela-

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tionship with place in everything they do. One way in which they expand upon such foregrounding and flesh out their music into a fully-realised sonic environment is through the liberal use of field recordings. “The sounds of wind, of cans, of a train… they made sense, and inspired the theme of the whole thing. Just recording stuff on our phones or hand-held recorders, we brought those feelings directly to the sound, by just capturing it as is. The field recordings are paramount to the music,” says Inyang.

On this point, Reid is keen to interject. “There’s never a straight rule of how we put a track together. A field recording might have an energy or a story to it that we can work with directly, finding points that create a nice atmosphere, and that might lead the production. Or sometimes we can have an idea of the type of track we wanna make, whether that be a soundscape or something more club-inclined, and a field recording can be the perfect thing to carry the story of that track.” This sense of naturalism, of instinct over preconception, is a theme to which our conversation keeps returning.

— Spillover escapism — Having grown up together in Manchester, both members of Space Afrika relocated to West Yorkshire for university.

When I ask about how the move affected their creative work, I find the answer slightly surprising: “I think it’s more a progression thing, over time, rather than place. We were travelling between Leeds, Bradford and Manchester, and had an idea of what we were trying to make. As we got more confident and had more conceptual ideas, it all kind of gathered into something more freeform. Less structured to the grid, more testing stuff out.” To these two, time seems as much of a creative catalyst as location. Yet, upon further consideration, this makes increasing sense: ‘Somewhere Decent to Live’ evokes a recognisably modern-day Manchester. This is not the city of crumbling industry and sinkhole estates that loomed over ‘Unknown Pleasures’ or ‘Dragnet’; it’s the embattled shell of that town four decades on, in which the industries that were buckling back then have been inadequately usurped by service jobs and the gig economy.

Returning to the Burial comparison, Inyang raises a fascinating point: “Yeah, we’ve come from opposite ends of the

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Interview spectrum [stylistically], and have a more direct experience of the music we’ve done in the past, but the way that we isolate ourselves in the studio maybe makes us connect with that lack of experience that you could say Burial has with his story. We’ve completely shaken off all the stuff that was immediately in our face, as people who are involved with nightclubs and parties, and we forget it intentionally. Removing that education, or not having it all, is something that’s very similar between us and Burial.” Space Afrika’s records are not post-techno or postdub in the way that Burial’s could be understood as post-rave transmissions from a city haunted by a recently-passed cultural fervour created by an artist who was just too young to experience that fervour first-hand. Reid and Inyang have experienced the culture their music references first-hand, yet through a deliberate process of self-exile they’ve arrived at a similar position of post-club remove. By trading London for Manchester, two-step for techno, and receiving wisdom for first-hand comedowns, Space Afrika have created a sublime update to Burial’s eponymous debut 11 years on from that record’s release.

My final question to the pair is short and sweet: is their music a way of engaging with their environment, or escaping from it? After a brief pause, Inyang offers a characteristically philosophical answer: “Both. Manchester, like other North-

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ern cities, doesn’t always have a lot to do, so some of the music comes out of not having the infrastructure for people who want to explore artistic methods. A lot of the time it’s a way of clearing your mind, and the process is valuable in and of itself. It’s therapeutic… and addictive.”

As we conclude our conversation we briefly touch on the duo’s radio work (they have regular slots on Manchester’s NTS and Reform Radio stations). “There’s an artist we’re excited about called Sugai Ken – we’ve played him on the radio a few times – interesting modular Japanese broken stuff,” says Inyang.

Reid speaks up with a final point: “One thing that’s shared between the music we produce and the way we put together tracks for a radio show is the story of the music as it goes on – it’s intentional. But as we said before, there’s never a pre-thought for how we’re gonna do it. It just happens naturally. I instinctively know when to come in over whatever Josh has got in his record bag that day, and vice versa.

“That’s partly because we’ve known each other for so long, but partly because we’ve got very similar minds. We’ve been apart for long periods of time – weeks or months – but we’ll send pieces of music to each other and they’ll be at exactly the same point. We progress at the same pace, in the same ways.

Maybe we’re lucky in that way.”

SOLD OUT

SOLD OUT SOLD OUT

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Crying on the subway, by Lucy Bourton Photography by Emily Malan

Hana Vu Every morning when Los Angeles-based artist Hana Vu wakes up, she listens to ‘Promiscuous’ by Nelly Furtado. Pop music, particularly the top 40s of the early 2000s, is Hana’s go to playlist first thing. It makes her feel good and sets her up for the day.

In the afternoon, or maybe when she’s writing, she’ll switch to artists that are more familiar with her songwriting style, St Vincent, Porches or Japanese Breakfast, for instance.

Hana is still growing her musical tastes and, in turn, has created a hybrid of genres in her own music. Rhythmic drumming and repetitive jangling guitars sit behind her pop bravo voice that could easily nestle within the commercial and alternative music charts. Both come together on her second EP, and her first on Fat Possum’s new imprint, Luminelle.

The refreshingly honest way Hana lists her music tastes, (Natasha Beddingfield and Michael Bublé are both what she’s been playing when we speak), could partly be down to her age.

Hana is currently 17, this is the music she grew up with, noting the brilliance of both Destiny’s Child’s songwriting and Lana Del Rey records as influences. In many ways, stars like Taylor Swift – “a genius” who she recently based her college entry essay on – are also her contemporaries, picked up by record labels at a young age just as she has been.

While Hana’s young age will always be brought up in relation to her creative pursuits – mainly because it’s so impressive – it’s not the fascinating thing about her. Instead, her age filters into a narrative about how you interact with the world in your late teens. While other LA-based bands write about the area’s idyllic beaches and lifestyle, Hana’s songwriting is carved around the relatable concept of being a fed up teenager stuck in the place you’ve always known. “I love LA, it’s the best,” she says, “but it’s so chill, you can do whatever you want. It gets old after 17 years, but anywhere does. It’s cars and the ocean, you know?”

Cars and transport in general are the unlikely protagonist of Hana’s new EP. Its title proves this (‘How Many Times Have

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Interview and I was like, that’s what it was made for!” But at the same time, this isn’t purposeful as she goes on to explain: “I read somewhere that was like, ‘Hana Vu’s music is so relatable to teen,’ but I don’t mean it to be! I’m just this kind of person and everyone’s kind of a version of each other. It feels good for me to hear that people like my songs, and know I’m not the only one crying on the subway.”

— Trial and error —

You Driven By’), as does its lead single, ‘Crying on the Subway’.

Public transport isn’t regularly the songwriting spur for artists but its where Hana spends a lot of her time; she can’t drive after all. “You can be 16 and drive but I don’t want to,” she explains.

“It feels like a lot of effort on my part.”

Instead, Hana gets the red line, the most popular in the city that travels through all corners of Hollywood before heading downtown. “It’s sort of what every valley teen takes,” she says.

Her journeys on the subway began “when I was younger… I mean when I was younger than I am now,” she laughs. She played a lot of shows downtown as part of the DIY scene, in backyards and at parties, and her “commute” was where she listened to music the most. “That’s why I love being on the subway,” she says. “I don’t really like where I’m going and I don’t like where I was, but I like the in-between. I guess transportation is a thing for me, subconsciously.” Her lyrics speak this sentiment just as she does in conversation: ‘In my dreams I am in the grey room / In my chest I’m feeling dark blue,’ Hana sings on the EP’s opening track. ‘Take the red line into downtown / I’m trying to escape you, crying on the subway.’

The teenage diary-like account that flows through Hana’s lyricism has made her music so relatable. It’s a comment about her music she enjoys hearing too, when she says, “someone texted me saying they were listening to my song on the subway

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A large reason why Hana’s songs evoke such a strong sense of feeling glum as an adolescent, a little dramatic and hopeful in equal measure, is due to the time period the record was created in, from November 2016 to now, or between the ages of 15 to 17 in Hana years. It’s also a characteristic Hana believes to be the reason Luminelle signed her after stumbling across her video on a Reddit thread: “I think what my label liked about the album is that a lot of the songs are really different from one another. But I think just depending on what time I wrote them they’re all a little bit about the same thing – being in the city as a young person it’s very lonely but also not at the same time.” By developing her songwriting at such a young age also means that Hana is selftaught, producing the EP herself through what she admits was “trial and error”.

Her set up in the bedroom of her parents’ home (“I don’t even try to record when my parents are in the house.”) is minimal.

“I don’t have a lot of equipment because I don’t have my own space,” she says. “I’d love to get a home studio going but right now I have my interface, I use a Logic keyboard, and I don’t have a proper microphone. I think for all the vocals on the EP I used my Apple headphones, but mixed it the maximum.” This effect creates a very endearing quality to Hana’s release and a sweet image too. “You have to hold them [the headphones] a little far from your face, so it doesn’t distort. Get that sweet spot, turn the air conditioning off and close your windows and you’re fine.”

At the time of speaking, despite putting out two records in her own time, Hana is juggling high school, music and a part time job. High school appears to be the least necessary in her mind. “I don’t go too often these days,” she says. “I try to go twice a week, at least. I try to do well enough so I don’t have to go.

I do all this other stuff during the day; I don’t really have time for it. And it’s almost done!” Despite her college entry essay on the brilliance of Taylor Swift, university is an idea Hana isn’t keen on either for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, “the college system in America is ridiculous; no one can afford to go,” coupled with a pining to make music “my full time thing.”

Hana’s blatant honesty continues when she mentions her ideal future too: “I did apply to college, so that might be on the cards. But if I think about what I want to do this year, I kind of just want to be a rockstar.” She lists a want for stability but views this becoming a reality through touring places like Denmark, Sweden or the Midwest rather than just moving in to a dorm room. “It’s a bit juvenile and nothing-y about the future, but right now I just want to be a rockstar.”

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“Everyone’s kind of a version of each other. It feels good for me to hear that people like my songs, and know I’m not the only one crying on the subway”

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REPUBLIC OF MUSIC PRESENTS... EVERY HOME SHOULD HAVE ONE: THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2018 SO FAR. AGNES OBEL - L ATE NIGHT TALES / AMEN DUNES - FREEDOM / AMAYA LAUCIRICA RITUALS / ANNA VON HAUSSWOLFF - DEAD MAGIC / CALEXICO - THE THREAD THAT KEEPS US TOGETHER / CHARLES WATSON - NOW THAT I’M A RIVER / DABRYE - THREE/THREE / DAPHNE & CELESTE - DAPHNE & CELESTE SAVE THE WORLD / DJ KOZE KNOCK KNOCK / DREAM WIFE - DREAM WIFE / HILARY WOODS - COLT / HINDS - I DON’T RUN / HOP ALONG - BARK YOUR HEAD OFF, DOG / IMARHAN - TEMET / JOE ARMON-JONES - STARTING TODAY/ JOHNNY JEWEL - DIGITAL R AIN / KHRUANGBIN CON TODO EL MUNDO / LOWTIDE - SOUTHERN MIND / MARY LATTIMORE - HUNDREDS OF DAYS / MIDDLE KIDS - LOST FRIENDS / MOBY - EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT / NICK J.D. HODGSON - TELL YOUR FRIENDS / PHOBOPHOBES MINIATURE WORLD / ROBERT EARL THOMAS - ANOTHER AGE / SAM EVIAN - YOU FOREVER / SEUN KUTI & EGYPT 80 - BLACK TIMES / SUNFLOWER BEAN - TWENTYTWO IN BLUE / TESS ROBY - BEACON / THE SOFT MOON - CRIMINAL / TIM BURGESS AS I WAS NOW / TOSHIO MATSUUR A GROUP - LOVEPLAYDANCE / VIVE LA VOID - VIVE LA VOID / WA X CHATTELS - WA X CHATTELS / WE ARE SCIENTISTS - MEGAPLEX / AVAILABLE IN ALL GOOD INDEPENDENT RECORD STORES. W W W . R E P U B L I C O F M U S I C . C O M

Reviews

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Albums

Melody’s Echo Chamber — Bon Voyage (domino) What’s that line about “difficult” second albums? Reading Melody Prochet’s story, it’s a wonder that ‘Bon Voyage’, the long-awaited follow up to her 2012 self-titled debut, has finally made it into the world. Heartache, disillusionment and her new found fame combined to stifle her creativity and fuel her desire to get away from music; her split from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, her partner and producer, cost two year’s worth of work alone, the drain on her resources and emotions proving too much of a burden. Then, having finally announced the new record last year on her 30th birthday, it was postponed again, an unspecified “serious accident” leading to surgery and months recovering in hospital.

But now, nearly five-and-a-half years after Prochet first charmed us all her with delightfully hazy psych-pop classics, she’s delivered another enchanting record stuffed with oddities, sweeping drama and immersive textures. The scuzzy, blown-out sounds and warped melodies of her debut have been dialed back, but a little restraint suits her too; it’s fitting that most of ‘Bon Voyage’ was conceived in the forests around Stockholm, places she describes as being “enchanting and heavenly”.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of sadness and pain buried in these songs. On ‘Breath In. Breathe Out’ she sings about being “lost in oblivion” and “Healing slow / Feeling so low” while ‘Desert Horse’, the album’s thematic centerpiece that represents her “difficult life journey”, is a dark, roiling monster partly inspired by Turkish composer Özdemir Erdoğan. The song’s woozy synths and shrieking pipes are the polar opposite to the playful joie de vivre of ‘Bisou Magique’ or ‘Crystallized’, and the sound of someone diving

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deep into their own psyche, unafraid to confront whatever they find.

It’s this strength that gives ‘Bon Voyage’ a sense of triumph. Prochet has never couched sadness or despair in maudlin melodies or minor chords, and when she does let the sun shine through the gloom the results are intoxicating; ‘Quand Les Larmes D’un Ange Font Danser La Niege’ explodes with crystalline, sky-high crescendos, while ‘Cross My Heart’, a song about the pain of separation, chugs by on an irresistible bounce and soaring strings. That she lets the song unwind for nearly seven minutes teases out the sense of optimism – that everything, in the end, is going to work out just fine.

Billing ‘Bon Voyage’ as a “soundtrack to a trip back from the brink” plays up the dramatic nature of its gestation, and Prochet’s personal struggles.

But it’s testament to her inner strength that it got made at all, and stands as proof of the human spirit’s resilience. ‘God it’s been so long / There must be some light to come’ she sings on ‘Breathe In. Breathe Out’. Turns out she was right. 8/10 Derek Robertson

Gruff Rhys — Babelsberg (rough trade) Gruff Rhys is almost excessively capable, largely because he never handles things with too heavy a hand. And so the kitchen sink drama of ‘Babelsberg’ – his first record for Rough Trade since 2005’s ‘Candylion’ – is naturally more Jarvis Cocker than Tom Waits.

On ‘The Club’ he sings about being tossed out of, well, a club, with cheery simplicity. ‘They threw me out the club, into the darkest alley.’ It’s the kind of jauntily downtrodden tune you might make up on your drunken way home.

That is, if the rest of our beer-sodden

incidents were also soundtracked by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

The orchestral backing here is soaring and delightful, and allows the album to transition easily from the humour of tracks like ‘Frontier Man’ to the gentle ‘Drones In The City’ and the surprisingly touching ‘Same Old Song’.

‘Babelsberg’ is the cinematic soundtrack of one man’s minor failures and awkward episodes, delivered with a shrug and a rueful smile. 8/10 Liam Konemann

Matt Maltese — Bad Contestant (atlantic) After years of teasing, south Londoner Matt Maltese has finally gotten around to releasing his debut album.

We’re two years on from his ‘In A New Bed’ EP and a year since single ‘As The World Caves In’. Recorded with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado in twelve days, ‘Bad Contestant’ has the touch of someone who spends time with The Lemon Twigs, with multiple parts being reminiscent of Brian D’Addario’s more Todd Rundgrenesque efforts.

‘Like a Fish’ has Wings era Paul McCartney stamped all over it, but with the very un-Beatles beginning line: ‘You said you use chocolate / When you and him take off all your clothes / Why the fuck you’d tell me that?’. It’s not bad, but the real contender for lyric of the record is ‘I bought Cranberry vodka / It’s good for your bladder / When you said that, I knew that I want you,’ from ‘Nightclub Love’.

Unlikely lines like this give Maltese his skewed appeal – it’s been done before, but remains fun all the same. So ‘As the World Caves In’ is a romantic song about a nuclear holocaust while ‘Misery’ is ironically way more optimistic, sung like Maltese is in a dystopian jazz club.

Albums For all its lyrical quirks, at times it still meanders a bit too close to generic chart pop, but with words to give Father John Misty a run for his money, this feels like it’s only the start for Maltese. If the world doesn’t end. 7/10 James Auton

Let’s Eat Grandma — I’m All Ears (transgressive) Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth conjured something beautiful and twisted, infectious and otherworldly on their debut album, ‘I, Gemini’. Armed with dated Yamaha pre-sets and a toybox of British music room staples (recorders, clapping games, windband instruments) they created the album every A-level music tinkerer wished they could make. Still, it only could have come from their own brains.

They quickly picked up a cult fanbase at seventeen, thanks to their earworm writing and eerie stage personas.

Every YouTube comment on videos of their early performances could be split into those raving about their unique approach, those calling them industry plants, and equally unhelpful fans begging them not to sell out. That’s enough pressure for anyone, but for two young people growing into their own identities, it could put you off music forever.

Instead, Let’s Eat Grandma form their own path once again with ‘I’m All Ears’, an expansive, personal collection of tracks that form a coming-of-age document for teenagers everywhere. They tackle romantic online relationships, gender, image and platonic friendships with freshness and reality. Instead of writing in tacky, faux-deep sloganeering that has often plagued people who attempted to write for a generation, they decide to write for themselves, and their clear voices create a gorgeous reflection of your own experiences.

Take lead-single ‘Hot Pink’ – an unabashedly bright song that uses neon-coloured femininity as a weapon.

The choice to work with PC Music titan SOPHIE was a no brainer – her metallic, ultra-sleek production matches the duo’s cute/scary blend well. Its shouted chorus hits like few in recent memory. We move from one of the best bangers of the year to one of the sweetest pop songs. Again backed by SOPHIE’s distinctive drums, ‘It’s Not Just Me’ is their catchiest, most straight-forward track yet. The group are careful not to lose their charisma in the innocence; the vocals turn ragged and passionate on the emotional peaks. Their topics are universal, but their sharp approach makes these familiar topics fresh.

‘Falling Into Me’ shifts gears again with fluid prog-pop, and opens with one of the oddest lines the band have ever written (‘I pave the backstreets with the mist of my brain’). It’s worth noting that their lyrics are a heady mix of vulnerable and surreal throughout. Later in the album, they write of skin peeling back like clementines and speak of the mind like a homescreen. From this point on, the band’s ideas get sprawling. ‘Snakes and Ladders’ is an epic glam ballad that feels as indebted to John Carpenter soundtracks and the darkest material from Portishead as it does old-school Bowie. The duo paint a magic lineage between the people that inspire while keeping their voices at the centre. ’I’ll Be Waiting’ is another winding anthem that combines nursery rhyme optimism with subtly complex layering and knotty rhythms. Like elsewhere on the album, it’s a cut that benefits from the addition of live drums, which feel designed to boost the heft and in-the-moment feel that Let’s Eat Grandma shoot for, vocally.

The song also happens to be one of Rosa Walton’s most captivating performances, especially as she directs the key change at the Disney Channel emulating climax.

The band get even more loose and adventurous on the backend, with the ragged nine-minute ‘Cool and Collected’ and eleven-minute closer ‘Danny Darko’.

The former takes a ghoulish pych-rock

approach, but like many tracks here, Let’s Eat Grandma pivot into new territory constantly. The stakes grow greater with each new verse, as more synths are added and melodies subvert expectations.

‘Danny Darko’ underlines all the nostalgia, drama, and scale that they’ve been playing with throughout.

Its patient, warming pace emulated the introspection and melancholy of a latenight comedown. The song is already a live staple. At their recent Glasgow show, the band began by lying on the ground, legs crossed, letting the rest of the room settle into the casual opening chord before slowly adding guitars. Then their voices. Then drums. Then more keys. Then some dance moves. Finally, they bursted into a wild recorder solo, the peak of the whole set. They ran back and forth, beckoning the audience to join in. All of that enthusiasm, confidence and wit is carried into this recorded version.

The key changes hit even harder, and now that the lyrics can be picked apart, their power sinks in.

Through all the eccentricities and quirks, it should be said that ‘I’m All Ears’ manages to be a gloriously readable pop album on first listen. For a band hailed as cult heroes one album in, this is the boldest statement they’ve made so far.

8/10 Stephen Butchard

White Ring — Gate of Grief (rocket girl) When it was originally released back in late 2010, White Ring’s debut EP, ‘Black Earth That Made Me’, sold out almost instantly. A phantasmal, genre-warping release melding harsh electronics with shrouded vocals, it revealed Bryan Kurkimilis and Kendra Malia to be one of the finest exponents of the then burgeoning witch house scene. Seven years on, the pair’s long-

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Albums awaited full-length debut gestures the unmistakable hallmarks of past time.

Having begun recording in 2011, ‘Gate of Grief ’ is openly laced with the spectre of personal battles – not least the illness that led to Adina Viarengo being drafted in to assist Malia with vocals. This goes some way to explain why, from one song to the next, it veers between pure doldrums and exultant reprieve (Kukimillis has said, “There is a lot of tragedy in this album but there is also hope at the end of it.”)

Highlights such as ‘Fields of Hate’ and ‘Amerika (Lord of the Flies)’ flicker into view like distant flares in some dark, unsettled sea. While the former simmers between synth-led ambience and trapbeat bliss, the latter is a real broody gem.

Elsewhere, the aggression that has always underpinned White Ring’s craft peaks on lead single ‘Leprosy’, which doubles up as the first song written for the album.

But while the fixation with time serves it conceptually, the sonic disconnect that pervades the uneven and drawn-out ‘Gate of Grief ’ can be traced back to the time it took for it to see the light of day. With it, one can’t help but feel that the crystallised explorations of loss on ‘Black Earth…’ were very much of their time. 5/10 Brian Coney

Girls Names — Stains On Silence (tough love) Sometimes life gets in the way. Or does it? Girls Names found themselves in an impasse that almost lead to them never releasing a new album, with a drummer gone, an unsatisfying mix of their new tracks and a stress level impossible to manage. They gave up and got back to their full-time jobs, setting music aside to find solace in a more regular life.

Regaining the peace of mind they were missing while working on the first version of ‘Stains On Silence’ eventually

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led to the Belfast band revisiting the eight songs found here. They started experimenting with techniques they never used before, playing with cut-ups and selfediting, and finally giving the record the shape they were looking for – a dark and gloomy one, so it’s not as if Girls Names have compeletly changed tack.

Aiming to cut an album fitting the post-punk norm of 30 minutes, the 38 that make up ‘Stains On Silence’ are a disquieting trip into new-wave inspired sounds. Bauhaus are the first influence to come to mind, but Girls Names sound is mellower and more sophisticated, without losing that signature dark shadow. Singer Cathal Cully’s voice (a deep baritone) is the perfect epitome of the genre’s requirements, as are the piercing synths, the vintage drum machines and the occasional metallic/ industrial sounds that act as a constant wink to the ’80s and eventually threaten to overshadow the band’s own progression. 6/10 Guia Cortassa

Oneohtrix Point Never — Age Of (warp) Maybe it’s just Kanye’s recent Twitter comeback (like a bull returning to the china shop post-refurb), but it seems ‘genius’ is back up on the sparring agenda lately. Maybe those questions never really left the arena of popular culture; is genius real and measurable? Can it be excused for unfavourable or unacceptable behaviour? Equally loved and detested, is genius inherently provocative – a name ascribed to star-children overseeing all humanity, reflecting both good and ill? Does genius perennially exist against the grain?

If we’re to take these running definitions, one such figure that comes to mind is Daniel Lopatin – or Oneohtrix Point Never, as he is professionally known. His recent output on Warp Records seems

to render into noise the tension between living online and living IRL. It bustles like a busy Internet forum, pushed to depletion with memes and ripped horror soundtracks. As such, his mercurial style brushes culture both high and low. Think of the brazen emoji-drama of the ‘Boring Angel’ music video, or the prestige lo-fi mini-epic directed by Jon Rafman as visual accompaniment to ‘Sticky Drama’. Like Brian Eno’s landmark ambient works, Lopatin similarly draws from a utilitarian strain – not music for airports, but for the shopping galleries of our capitalist dystopia. He explores cultural memory and hidden utopianism within MIDI instrumentation (objects once marketed practically as toys) and the heightened, angsty break-up pop of the early-to-mid-2000s, as evinced in the samples of his Chuck Person project, believed to have singularly spawned the Vaporwave genre.

This is largely what crystallises Lopatin’s status as the embarrassment of electronic music, being as he is a child of the American ‘prosumer’ boom, a lineage echoed in the ease of uploading your drone album to Bandcamp for all the world to hear. It’s Lopatin’s amateurism that sets him apart from the meticulous footwork of Jlin and the lithe electronica of Holly Herndon. It wouldn’t be too big of an exaggeration to cast him as the typical figure of white, male mediocrity, unremarkable in comparison but inexplicably more popular and successful.

Anyone casually lurking might call him a hack – albeit one with a good work ethic (his latest release is something like his 15th overall, discounting last year’s Good Time film score and countless other extra-curricular activities). Genius, for what it’s worth, is usually coterminous with what some might consider disgrace, and OPN – genius or not – is one of today’s great musical disgraces. Like other artists with unending inventories of main releases, documents, and other ephemera (Nurse With Wound, John Coltrane, Merzbow), OPN makes a point to stay busy. What’s more, his audience follows regardless.

Just like label mates Aphex Twin and Autechre, you’re typically left

Albums exhausted by an album’s end. The music itself sounds fatigued, worn thin by the elements. A cult figure among the YouTube generation, Lopatin’s erratic style – from pulsing electronica to new age serenity within moments, sometimes simultaneously – imitates the velocity and vulgarity of a 30-minute Vine compilation.

Repeated listens of his latest offering ‘Age Of ’ has a similarly numbing effect. The whole world and all of history physically passes by– yelling, caressing, judging, pummelling, hand-shaking – in much the super-accelerated fashion at which the age of information seems to be travelling.

It’s all part and parcel to one of Lopatin’s influences this time around – the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), an accelerationist collective established at the University of Warwick by philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Accelerationist thought is suitably pulp-post-apocalyptic; it revels in capitalism’s rolling negation, interested in strategically hastening into chaos, faithful in an eventual collapse.

Lopatin’s vision has always been one of eternity. But whereas the drones of 2010’s ‘Returnal’ gestured at eternal return, an unbroken plane ending where it started, his recent work, ‘Age Of ’ included, moves outward in multiple directions. It’s near-impossible to follow upon first listen, a choose your own adventure book in which threads are discarded and picked up later or sidelined altogether. These inscrutable structures and jarring sounds (see ‘Warning’ for an actual headphone jump-scare) send the listener falling through different planes and dimensions. It’s transcendental experience mixed with boredom, like staying up late with a friend, channel-hopping the premium Sky package. You get brief glimpses into infinite worlds and possibilities, but they’re evaporated before any context reveals itself.

It’s no surprise that ‘Age Of ’, especially its latter half, is occasionally cabalistic, and frequently unlikable. But despite its spots of inscrutability, it may be his most accessible release yet, if perhaps not by his own hand. The surprisingly conventional, groove-lead structures of

‘Black Snow’ and ‘The Station’, accompanied by auto-tuned vocals, bear the stylistic tells of Lopatin’s collaborators. There’s James Blake’s lopsided pop song-craft, and ANOHNI’s seraphic vocals on ‘Same’ and ‘Still Stuff That Doesn’t Happen’ feel generous and open-armed, even as she mournfully sings something that sounds like “into dust, into dust”.

Oddly enough, through the mess of stimulants, I think of another disgrace of popular music. Progressive rock traded in overabundance – of pretence and muso tendencies – leaning as it did toward the dead cult of the saturnine composer genius, away from the ‘fair game’ ruckus of punk rock. Stranger still, OPN seems to want to revive the genius figure for a style of music theoretically founded on a level playing field. “‘Age Of ’ what?”, we might ask.

Ecco, Harvest, Excess and Bondage, if we’re to believe the press material.

More concretely however, a lot of the album’s mystique draws from Baroque and Renaissance thought. Firstly, there’s the predictably anachronistic metaphor of the four François Desprez engravings, lifted from a 1565 set translated as The Droll Dreams of Pantegruel. They depict grotesque human-animal-object hybrids, nightmarish renderings of typical folks from Desprez’s France; warriors with fire bellows for limbs, dignitaries with long, drooping noses. We already know what Lopatin wants us to think. “Are we not like these engravings?!” he asks, “misshapen cybernetic amalgams, with our electronic devices as prosthetic fixtures and our curated half-selves in cyberspace?” We should have known that this OPN release would be his least subtle; there’s a MacBook right there on the cover.

The album teaser boasted the incongruous harpsichord phrases we’d later hear throughout the album (the title track, ‘myriad.industries’) bringing to mind the cult of the musician genius J. S. Bach. As we know, OPN is only really able to accommodate a risky kitsch tonality ironically, so here the harpsichord phrasing stands as shorthand for “old timey”, like the opening music of an establishing

shot for a Looney Tunes cartoon. Or so it would appear.

The music video for ‘Black Snow’, directed by Lopatin, features some more confounding imagery, centrally a red devil dressed sequentially in a hazmat suit, then a dignitary’s white wig, recalling the painted image of Bach now synonymous with the man. He composes at his computer, gesturing towards a framed picture of the earth, the subject of his composition. “The Devil is playing the world…” reads one YouTube comment, which is correct in a few senses. Later in the video, the devil literally ‘plays’ the framed earth with a bow. He also tricks the world à la René Descartes’ senseconfounding malicious demon, via the grandest illusion in history: music. By now you may be thinking of Trump, fake news, and the rise of far-right populism.

This is undoubtedly deliberate.

Regardless, the Renaissance in Europe, exulted by scientific observation and empiricism, prefigured the decline of religion as a defining narrative. The anachronistic ‘Age Of ’ demands that we too become weary of grand narratives, or ideologies, as they are sometimes called.

Still, something troubles me. Is Lopatin casting himself as a new leader of a genius cult, or could he be exposing genius as a grand narrative of popular culture, the old guard yet to be toppled?

Or is all this undue credit? While some might consider him a rascal genius, I’m happier just settling for the former. 7/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever — Hope Downs (sub pop) Maybe it’s down to the name, but Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are undoubtedly a seaside band.

The Melbourne quintet’s debut record’s lo-fi jangle brings to mind sunshine and

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Albums saltwater, murderous seagulls with death in their hearts and chips on their mind. In fairness, this association might also have something to do with the fact that ‘Hope Downs’ is due out in June, and it’s finally starting to get warm in London. We all deserve a day at the beach at this point.

But there is a freshness here that feels like a holiday. Following on from their widelyacclaimed recent EP, ‘French Press’, RBCF have pulled together ten songs that drift from indie, to country, to pop, inside a single verse. The result is at once unique and familiar – different, without being too alien. On the rollicking ‘Time In Common’ they even manage to work in a hint of pub rock – or maybe house party rock, as they sing about sitting ‘on the couches, at other people’s houses.’

‘Hope Downs’ is, as the band have said, “a collection of postcards about wider things”. Snapshots of other lives.

As things heat up it’s good to get away for a while, and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have pressed the ideal mini-break into an LP. 8/10 Liam Konemann

Lumo — Lump (transgressive) They say opposites attract, which might explain how Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay ended up making ‘Lump’.

Marling, the acclaimed folk singer-songwriter, and Lindsay, one half of avant garde folktronica outfit Tunng, would seem unlikely bedfellows, but a chance meeting backstage at a Neil Young concert led to a whirlwind few days of recording and several months of back and forth emailing. The result, what the pair are calling a “cyclical drone journey album”, is an intoxicating listen, a record that baffles as much as delights and revels in its weirder moments.

Built around a resampled flute drone (every song is in the same key)

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the concept of flow and natural progression is central to Lump’s ethos; the songs naturally bleed into each other, with no defined beginning or end. Lindsay’s way with wonky guitars and Moogs conjures a muted, uneasy atmosphere, but occasionally a little colour pokes through, most notably on ‘Rolling Thunder’ and ‘Curse Of The Contemporary’, breezier numbers that evoke road trips past sundappled fields.

But it’s Marling who elevates the album from curious side project to something more substantial, knowing precisely when to let her voice bob alongside the instrumentation and when to elbow it aside and take centre stage for herself. Taking cues from the Surrealist Manifesto and the absurdist poetry of Ivor Cutler, her lyrics are a whirlwind of thoughts and ideas, tumbling through the melodies to capture the chaos of life that inexorably surrounds us all. All this might be far from her usual terrain, but she’s as captivating a presence as ever.

8/10 Brian Coney

Natalie Prass — The Future and the Past (ato) Known for her particularly unique – and somewhat saccharine – take on the indie pop confessional, Virginia born singer-songwriter Natalie Prass returns with this funky follow up to her 2015 eponymous debut album. ‘The Future and the Past’, it must be said, is notably sans the baroque-pop stylings and elaborate instrumentalism of her first album, although the absence is more than compensated for with an abundance of vocal harmonies and deepset bass grooves.

Indeed, Prass’ fresh sound and new energy came in unison with, and was inspired by, Trump’s election. Certainly, that inspiration makes itself evident in

‘Ship Go Down’, as apocalyptic synth melodies and jolting piano chords accompany Prass’ voice as she sings of a ‘wolf in wolf ’s clothing.’

‘The Future Past and Present’, it seems, could equally, in places, be just as at home in a smoky old-time piano joint as in a neon-lit noughties R&B bar.

Perfectly combining vintage hues and hazy vocal melodies with slick synth sounds and Janet Jackson drum machines, Prass succeeds in creating old-meets-new funk-soul flawlessly, as she deviates from the lavish opulence of her debut. And as she moves with the times, you have to reason that perhaps there is little room for delicacy in the world right now. 8/10 Rosie Ramsden

Lykke Li ­— So Sad So Sexy (rca) The chief concern when this fourth full-length from Lykke Li was announced was that she might’ve slipped into self-parody.

After all, if Childish Gambino derived his stage name from a Wu-Tang Clan name generator, then ‘so sad so sexy’ could just as easily have been derived from an algorithm that spits out song titles for the Swede. Actually, though, the main surprise on this album is less the change in musical direction and more that she didn’t take it sooner; her last LP, the sorely underrated ‘I Never Learn’, flew under a lot of radars but that was perhaps because nobody expected it to be a stripped-back retread of its predecessor, the stormy indie rock collection ‘Wounded Rhymes’.

Li’s association with hip hop is a storied one that goes back to debut album ‘Youth Novels’, which came to wider attention when a still-fledgling Drake sampled ‘Little Bit’; around the same time, she would cover A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Can I Kick It?’ at live shows. She

Albums returned Drake’s favour with her own take on ‘Hold On, I’m Coming Home’ a few years later, and – crucially – her husband, Jeff Bhasker, who produces here, is best known for his work with Kanye West.

Sure enough, ‘so sad so sexy’ is indeed Li’s first foray towards hip hop proper, although there’s plenty more going on too. The opening one-two both play out over clattering trap beats, but ‘Two Nights’, on which French R&B singer Amine features, owes a debt to The 1975’s ‘Somebody Else’. Drake, meanwhile, is evoked again on both the title track and ‘Sex Money Feelings Die’, particularly his ‘Nothing Was the Same’ era. The moody string backing on ‘Bad Woman’ carries ghostly echoes of ‘I Never Learn’, as does the quietly moody closer ‘Utopia’, but generally speaking this is a wholesale reinvention that, however overdue, Lykke Li wears very well. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Shannon Shaw — Shannon In Nashville (nonesuch) On her first solo album, Shannon Shaw hasn’t made a huge stylistic leap from the sound of her band, Shannon & The Clams. From the opening track, this is epic, grandiose and brassy stuff, with Shaw’s cracked voice soaring soulfully above the grandeur. ‘Broke My Own’ is sweeping, orchestral, and cut through with fiery vocals. It’d be right at home on a classic Bond soundtrack. ‘Bring Her The Mirrow’ then has echoes of Amy Winehouse’s best. It’s a hugely confident album, comfortable with its own scale, and carries an instant-hit impact – these songs are right in your face from the get go, and short and punchy too, rarely troubling the three-minute mark.

As ever with a record of this kind there’s a nagging feeling that what you’re listening to is merely brilliant pastiche,

stylistically lifted lock stock and barrel from another era altogether – that feeling emphasised by songs bearing old-timey titles like ‘Coal On The Fire’. There are, though, musicians who’ve played with Elvis contributing to this album, so perhaps the pastiche can be forgiven. It’s a good job, too, that the ancient themes of heartbreak-induced emotional turmoil never get old; and in the skilful hands of Shannon Shaw, it feels like they never will. 7/10 Chris Watkeys

Lily Allen — No Shame (warner bros) Eventually, even pop princesses feel the pressure of living in fame’s Panopticon, and on her first album in four years, Lily Allen faces that while also wrangling with identity post-motherhood and midlife hurdles of loves won and lost. ‘No Shame’ is at times emotionally wrought, with reflections on the expectations she’s placed on herself or been subjected to by others. Melodically it spans electro stylings to piano-led ballads and while collaborations including Fryars, Mark Ronson, Ezra Koenig, P2J and Cass Lowe are all present, this remains very much Allen’s own, personal record.

Opening with the fierce ‘Come On Then’, the challenge is immediately laid down to strangers passing judgment online, while giving a side-eye glance to the distance in modern friendships with the raw riposte: ‘If you go on record saying that you know me / Then why am I so lonely / Cos nobody fucking phones me?’.

It launches a first half in which Allen owns her darkness even while dressing it in upbeat sounds, reflecting on the path she’s taken, and the rises and falls along the way. By the album’s midpoint the tone has softened, the lens has turned inwards, and the reflection deepens.

She plays around with perspective ambig-

uously on ‘Family Man’ and more obviously on the kitsch ‘Three’, while ‘Cake’ closes the circle (and the album), a callto-arms on taking back control, packed with simple positivity in-between shots at the patriarchy.

There are brilliant moments of the sort of summery-pop that launched her career now softly layered with electro sounds, but also more middling strippedback mature-sounding ballads carried only on piano and voice. There’s a number of guest appearances from Giggs, Lady Chann, and Burna-Boy, and Allen’s lyrical bite is balanced rather than neutered by the newfound fragility.

In its ebb and flow ‘No Shame’ has the honesty of an artist emerging from beneath the weight of carrying other’s opinions and starting to rediscover her own identity; an artist sharpening her songwriting and bringing some muchneeded punch to our pop. 7/10 Sarah Lay

Mattiel — Mattiel (heavenly) Roll up for some vintage soul. ‘Mattiel’ is, according to the press notes, a collaboration between singer Mattiel Brown and a ‘songwriting and production team’. While that’s a common enough songwriting model, it’s an unusually frank admission to make. Atlanta’s Brown brings the lyrics and vocal melodies to the table, and with some impact.

‘Whites Of Their Eyes’ is raw and garage-y, with stripped-back production and a rough-edged cool, something akin to early White Stripes. ‘Send It On Over’ is primal and seductive, with hazy organ swimming in the background while Brown spits out lines like ‘You think nobody knows, but they know’.

The album is built on buzzy guitar riffs and the odd solo. Vintage-sounding, this certainly is.

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Albums ‘Salty Words’ is a highlight, a dose of Ennio Morricone-esque cowboy blues, but initial enthusiasm for this record starts to evaporate in its latter stages as the same-sameness of the tracks starts to mount up. There’s a sense, too, of songwriting to order, with each song ringing vague bells of over-familiarity somewhere in your mind – ‘Baby Brother’ is pure sixties US teen pop, and while ‘Count Your Blessings’ is powerfully delivered, it feels like a composite of classics. 6/10 Chris Watkeys

Father John Misty — God’s Favourite Customer (bella union) ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ is Joshua Tillman’s reckoning. Having spent his last three records building up the persona of Father John Misty, everyone’s favourite arsehole, on his fourth, Tillman’s world comes crashing down.

Mostly written over the course of a two-month stay in a hotel, the result of some undisclosed personal strife, this record is Father John Misty rewrote.

The songs sound the same but the lyrics reveal a side to him that’s rarely made an appearance until now.

On the surface all the hallmarks of a Father John Misty album are present.

There are intimate ballads that balance on a knife edge between sincerity and cynicism (‘The Songwriter’), rollicking big band anthems packed with jokes (‘Mr Tillman’) and plenty of absurd metaphors that try and disguise Tillman’s true feelings (‘Disappointing Diamonds Are The Rarest of Them All’). But Tillman’s usual sweeping social statement s are gone and in their place are lyrics like, ‘I’m in the business of living, yeah that’s something I’d say’ and ‘Don’t be alarmed / This is just my vibe.’ ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ is all the more refreshing for this change of gaze.

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The most telling moment of the album comes on ‘The Palace’; the closest Tillman gets to breaking character. The humour of lyrics like, ‘I must have been in the poem zone’ gives way to crushing realisation – ‘I’m in over my head’. It’s the central truth of the album, and even the overdramatic piano in the background can’t hide it. Father John Misty has always been self-aware but he’s rarely been so self-critical. 8/10 Mike Vinti

Sweaty Palms — Quit Now (nice swan) Scotland has perhaps the world’s richest heritage of madcap indie bands.

Orange Juice, Fire Engines, Josef K, Primal Scream, Life Without Buildings, The Mary Chain – the list goes on. A Glaswegian group that met at a rehabilitation class for ex-cult members, Sweaty Palms are very much next in line to the throne.

Raucous garage rock, debut album ‘Quit Now’ is full of real stompers, blazing strutters, and snotty, snarly punk rock kickers.

‘Winter Sports’ is a noir pop number in the vein of a particularly swampy Mary Chain, whilst ‘The Illusionist’ is a real surfabilly corker that channels the Fire Engines at their most primal (complete with nee-naw-nee-naw vocals). Constantly verging between this monochromatic take on garagey indie rock, and a far more sinister organ driven sound (on ‘Liquid Hall’ especially), it treads a fine line very well on what is an accomplished debut.

Throughout ‘Quit Now’, Sweaty Palms have a real sway to them, landing somewhere between Fat White Family’s yellow-eyed prance and Scotland’s farless maudlin heritage of indie groups. Whilst you could accuse them of simply rehashing their influences, who the fuck cares when it’s this much fun? 7/10 Cal Cashin

Jorja Smith — Lost & Found (famm) Few UK names have made a more instant splash in recent years than Walsall’s Jorja Smith. The 20-year-old has three soldout US tours under her belt, guest spots with Drake and Stormzy in the bag, a co-write with Kendrick Lamar and a Brits Critics’ Choice award. The latter has proven to be no guarantee of quality, but on this debut album, Smith shows she has more to offer than the Rag’n’Bone Mans and James Bays of the world.

Her brand of R&B is familiar: warm production, processed rhythms, sleek vocals, palatable and accessible in every way. It is easy to understand how she was so quickly embraced by the big beasts of the music industry, but in a genre that has experienced a run of groundbreaking innovators recently in the form of Kali Uchis, SZA and Kelela, Smith is a traditionalist by comparison.

In several cases, it bears fruit. The highlight of her career to date, ‘Teenage Fantasy’, is a tale of damaged romance gilded with an addictive hook, a refreshingly un-precocious song from such a young writer that justifies the Lauryn Hill comparisons. Her 2016 debut single ‘Blue Lights’ is also included, still shimmering with enough confidence to pull off a Dizzee Rascal sample.

Smith flirts with darker themes, musically on the chilly, reverb-laden, but ultimately forgettable ‘On Your Own’, and lyrically on the freestyle ‘Lifeboats’, wherein she demonstrates her wokeness with lines about the migrant crisis and its roots in market-driven inequality (‘Even money sinks to the bottom when it’s waterlogged’), a dimension notably absent elsewhere. The emotional peaks are saved for the final tracks, most notably the tearstained drama of ‘Goodbyes’, which subverts expectations with its strummed acoustic backing.

Albums It is regrettable that the album lacks any trace of contemporary advances in electronic production trends – nary a sign of PC Music, Yaeji or Arca here.

It lends a curious sense of short-term nostalgia to proceedings, and a destiny, alas, not to be remembered as a defining statement of its times that the early hype might have suggested. 6/10 Max Pilley

serpentwithfeet — Soil (tri-angle/ secretly canadian) Biblically, the prelapsarian snake was a form taken by the devil to tempt Eve into eating from The Tree of Knowledge, to which she did. This act is considered the ‘fall of man’. And among Abrahamic people it represents a tradition – a presentation symbolical of moral and religious truths.

So, considering this prelapsarian snake and its ties to the original sin, we are met with serpentwithfeet – a tattooed pentagram inhabiting his forehead, along with two words: ‘HEAVEN’ and ‘SUICIDE’.

There is an indisputable satanic air.

Yet the Baltimore-born Josiah Wise produces an angelic voice, pure and unwavering. ‘cherubim’ exemplifies this perfectly, not only a continuation of the biblical themes, but an inversion of them.

‘Boy, every time I worship you, my mouth is filled with honey / Boy, every time I build your throne, I feel myself growing,’ serpent sings alluding to the act of fellatio. Returning to this idea of ‘the fall of man’, in the trajectory of ‘soil’, ‘cherubim’ calls back to the cherubs God placed on the entrance of the Garden of Eden, ensuring neither Adam or Eve could eat from the Tree Of Life and become immortal. However, the story here is twisted – ‘cherubim’ is a song of self-discovery; being unsure of your one’s sexuality.

This dichotomy between the black, gay existence and one of Christianity is

present throughout the whole, intensely spiritual album as mantra-like abstractions fill its repertoire. It would be easy to place Wise within a lineage of African American Spiritualism – Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra. Similarly, it is clear he also belongs to a lineage of black classical singers who, for one reason or another, invested their talent outside the classical white realm – Nina Simone and Kirk Franklin come to mind. The expulsion of African-American innovation from the widely accepted canonical narrative is representative of the culture of exclusions that is still largely prevalent.

Despite this apparent easyplacement in the continuum of music, serpentwithfeet exists beyond genre. ‘soil’ is supported by production marked with a joyful indeterminacy (in a good way) – Katie Gately, mmph, Clams Casino and Paul Epworth all contributed, leaving the album sounding remarkably collaborative, while the words were solely penned by Wise – sweet whispers of love in all forms; unrequited, lost, new-found etc. ‘I call all your ex boyfriends, and ask them for a kiss,’ he croons on ‘fragrant’.

It’s destructive in how personal it is.

9/10 Alex Weston-Noond

Lithics — Mating Surfaces (kill rock stars) Now that we’ve had enough time to retrospectively digest it all, let’s face it: the would-be ‘revivalism’ of postpunk in the mid-2000s dredged up some insufferable trash from both sides of the Atlantic. With a name directly referencing something that consists of stone, Portland, Oregon, quartet Lithics are, forty years on, a rock solid pay-off in the genealogy of what once made the architects of DIY post-punk – from the Slits and Pere Ubu to Devo Gang of Four – so compelling.

Lithics’ sonic cubism consistently intrigues on their debut album. From fistclenched opener ‘Excuse Generator’ to breakneck closing blitz ‘Dancing Guy’, it’s an unfurling tapestry of interlocking DIY minimalist art-punk where precision and abandon prove uniquely compatible.

Despite pinning early 1980s Fall worship a little too visibly on its sleeve, the bobbing ‘Still Forms’ is a real triumph early on, while the five-minute ‘Boyce’ – the longest track by some distance – wields dissonance with remarkable aplomb. Elevating promise to certain brilliance, Aubrey Hornor’s languid vocals are fully present yet deftly unemotional on ‘Mating Surfaces’’ dozen combustions.

On each of them, Lithics have zero dearth of confidence and it really stands to reason.

9/10 Brian Coney

Grimm Grimm — Cliffhanger (some other planet) There’s a sense of innocence about ‘Cliffhanger’, the second album to be released by Koichi Yamanoha as Grimm Grimm. So hushed are most of its twelve tracks that Yamanoha sounds like he was unaware he was being recorded. There’s a brush of guitar here, a wistful melody there, and some stoned synth holding them together.

This creates the impression of an acid-trip Syd Barrett on ‘Ballad Of Cell Membrane’, on which metronomic percussion interplays with phased guitar, while on ‘Final World War’ it’s like the Pink Floyd man is strumming over a Galaxie 500 song. On the title track, meanwhile, Dee Sada delivers a homespun folk ballad in the style of Vashti Bunyan.

The innocence is nonetheless stripped of all pleasure due to the faded out nature of its shoegaze leanings.

‘Hybrid Moments’, an unlikely jangly guitar cover of the Misfits, ends with a

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Albums greying backwards tape and ‘Afraid’, on which the repetitive Spaceman 3 beat gallops under the more reflective surface track, is void of all emotional colour.

It’s a washed out pastoralism that’s also undercut by occasional slices of menace. Opening theremin instrumental ‘Diagonal Green’ has the unnerving quality of a Wicker Man-esque B-movie, and the Radiophonic Workshop bleeps and voices on ‘Orange Coloured Everywhere’ could be the theme-tune for a particularly sinister children’s programme from the ’70s. These elements distort the bucolic homeliness and make for a strangely melancholy release. 5/10 .Susan Darlington

Stuart A. Staples — Arrhythmia (city slang) Tindersticks auteur Stuart A. Staples is one of the few songwriters of his generation bold enough to take the time he needs to tell his stories. On this first solo album in over a decade, he gives us four tracks that span the best part of an hour, and it feels just right.

Opener and briefest track ‘A New Real’ mixes mutated electronics and clattering found sound percussion, over which Staples repeats, ‘Was it once love?’, crafting the most twisted torch song you’ll hear all year. It follows the pattern that defines the record, starting out in a clear, often beautiful place, but taking unforeseen detours, ending in an altogether more unsettling, mangled state, never out of danger. It calls to mind those sleepless nights where casual thoughts inevitably succumb to your innermost guilt and fears. The most Tindersticks-like track is ‘Step into the Grey’, a slow-paced narrative that climaxes with a pulsing blend of crying strings and stuttering drums.

The title ‘Arrhythmia’ suggests the importance of the unpredictability of

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time, and when 31-minute closer ‘Music For ‘A Year in Small Paintings’’ arrives, it is a study in patience. Omnichords, lapping guitars and a musical saw keep the pace steady, and for once Staples resists the dark-night-of-the-soul discursions, remaining lucid throughout, never combusting or seeking to break free from the restraint. 7/10 Max Pilley

Kamasi Washington — Heaven And Earth (young turks) The proverbial advice on how to eat an elephant (“one mouthful at a time”) could easily be adapted for Kamasi Washington’s cosmic jazz behemoths. His latest, comprising two suites (‘Earth’, first, then ‘Heaven’) of well over 70 minutes each, might not be as protracted as his three-hour debut, but it remains a foreboding prospect to try and finish in a single sitting nonetheless.

Accordingly, there are two distinct ways of attempting to get through ‘Heaven And Earth’. The first – song by song, and therefore in roughly ten-minute chunks – is intensely rewarding, allowing the listener to focus on Washington’s complex arrangements, solos that veer from fluttering to feral, and gorgeous interplay of spiritual, almost devotional music with irresistible groove: this way, the tender melody of ‘Testify’, the rhythmic tics of ‘One Of One’ and ‘Streetfighter Mas’’ RnB strut can all be savoured.

The other, perhaps more conventional method, taking in the full canvas in one go, unfortunately requires stepping back so much that virtually all detail is lost. It’s not that Washington’s compositional style or choice of timbre combinations is formulaic, necessarily, but after nearly two and a half hours of the same choral swells and pieces of similar length, structure and pace, something rather unattractively macho replaces Wash-

ington’s nuanced, delicate writing: the emphasis shifts towards size, power and endurance rather than expression and sensitivity, and as final track ‘Will You Sing’ begins, the response is one of relief rather than the enjoyment that a track this yearning, climactic and inventive should elicit.

An edit of ‘Heaven And Earth’ that preserved, say, just the vocal tracks, would result in a masterpiece of coherence and retain Washington’s clear desire for heft. As it is, everything here might be fine delicacy, but together it’s too rich for all but the biggest appetites.

7/10 Sam Walton

Snail Mail — Lush (matador) ‘Lush’, the ten-track debut album by Baltimore-born Lindsey Jordan, could quite easily score a coming-of-age cult classic, or, at the very least, act as the perfect backdrop for a scenic and melancholic drive home. The classically trained indie musicians, otherwise known as Snail Mail, here dreamily crafts dripping shoegaze charm and cutting lyrics to precisely narrate – and soundtrack – the pains of adolescence.

With all the summery dream pop charm and vocal power of the likes of Japanese Breakfast and Fazerdaze, and the DIY, bedroom-recorded innocence of the earlier Frankie Cosmos releases, Snail Mail is effortlessly on trend without being derivative. French horns, twinkling guitar hooks and cathartic lyrics (‘Don’t you like me for me?’ and ‘If you did find someone better I’ll still see you in everything for always, tomorrow, and all the time’ are my particular favourites) allow Jordan to flawlessly and inimitably capture all the self-consciousness and raw emotion of a teenager in love, or, as the case me be, in heartbreak.

Albums Best of all is that this 18-year-old’s debut carries no trace of the childishness, schmaltz, or irritating precociousness that is so evident in the music of some of her contemporaries. 7/10 Rosie Ramsden

Virginia Wing — Ecstatic Arrow (fire) When metronomic deadpan doesn’t work as a vocal style, a record can be prone to sounding more like your operating system than a carefully considered piece of art. “Alexa, can you turn off your background noise?” for example. “I’m sorry, even I don’t understand this,” and so on and so forth.

For each part that ‘Ecstatic Arrow’ is self-possessed and monotonous, it also runs with the energy and freedom of Frank Zappa or Lonnie Holley; musically magnanimous and lyrically altruistic. The ambient tug of last year’s release has been replaced with the Krautrock aesthetic of Stereolab, raised on a careful diet of leftfield jazz and the New Romantics. The result is one of the year’s most original and exciting records. ‘Ecstatic Arrow’ is defiantly the Manchester-based duo’s most sentient and direct album to date.

But while the hypothetical Siri launches its lawsuit against its avantgarde alter-ego in Virginia Wing’s fourth album, you are hit by the innate humanity within what appears, at face value, to be musical superficiality. The introductory twangs of ‘Be Released’ recall Holger Czukay’s ‘Persian Love’ as much as they sound like someone’s performed a system update on the Human League: less repetitive but with all the new wave and experimental punch.

The voice of Alice Merida Richards takes on its most robotic self in ‘Glorious Idea’ and ‘Relativity’, the latter a bastion of the deadbeat disco with vacillating synth pop sitting above the propulsive

off-beat percussion. Elsewhere, as we’re greeted by the cheery strum of ‘Eight Hours Don’t Make A Day’, Richards sounds akin to Nico: “It’s so hard to follow through on the things you said you’d do…/ I made plans for the weekend / I made plans for the future.”

The thread that runs through ‘Ecstatic Arrow’ centres on ‘The Female Genius’, a cognizant response to the “renewed strength, optimism and clarity” the band say they found at the Swiss home of long-term collaborator Misha Hering, where the album was recorded. The resilient lyrics don’t prevaricate, humourous and cutting: “I’m not performing, I’m here for appraisal, I could be silent if that’s what it takes” and “I meant what I said. Nearly every last word.”

Even the brilliantly titled ‘Every Window Has A Curtain’ – one half bizarrely proverbial, the other amusingly profound – cuts with the same musical candor. After the admission that there’s an ocean of meaning to define, Richards asks, “did the day invade the night or did the night invade the day? That’s yours to explore.” There are no answers in ‘Ecstatic Arrow’, just a huge, open space in which you’re invited to work them out.

9/10 Tristan Gatward

giving the album an undeniably retro character, as if it’s just stepped out of the Hacienda at a point when its authors can barely have been toddlers.

Not that ‘Sink Ya Teeth’ is merely an exercise in period style: accompanying the splodges of early Chicago house smudged into New Order-esque onefinger guitar is a series of rather timeless melody hooks that suggest lingering pop fondness lurking behind the motorik machine funk. Particularly impressive in this regard is the delightfully misanthropic ‘Friends’, which completes three minutes on a single chord without ever losing its bite, and the delicious minimalism of ‘If You See Me’, which renders its serpentine harmonies all the more satisfying. Meanwhile, the insistent throb of ‘Glass’ finally answers, in style, the question of how ‘I Feel Love’ would’ve sounded had Donna Summer been from East Anglia.

There are missed marks when, as on ‘Substitutes’, overly epic trance synth swooshes invade the album’s sleek aesthetic, but for the most part, ‘Sink Ya Teeth’ is a nourishing, moreish, and appropriately tactile collection of dance music on which to chew. 8/10 Sam Walton

Sink Ya Teeth — Sink Ya Teeth (hey buffalo) Sink Ya Teeth are Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford, a pair of inveterate DIYers from Norwich who have built a cult fan base by pressing up their charmingly understated homemade electro in the form of zines and 7-inches. Their predilection for old-fashioned media suits the music: primitive drum machines rub shoulders here with monophonic synth bloops, rubbery bass lines and vocal delivery that alternates between dark yearning and icy, post-modern detachment,

Kadhja Bonet — Childqueen (fat possum) Kadhja Bonet’s second album can only be described in terms of colour.

The sumptuous arrangements soar in deep paisleys; the classical strings are drenched in Disney rainbows; and the LA musician’s octave swooping voice is the warm orange of sun-baked earth.

‘Childqueen’’s ten tracks display the kind of vintage soul and funk that in an alternative world would have seen her collaborating with Prince. It’s also the kind of release that provides the flipside

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Albums of Janelle Monae: where she turns similar influences towards a futuristic world of dirty computers, Bonet looks firmly back to the Age Of Aquarius.

Within the first two minutes of the album there’s a flute solo, followed shortly afterwards by vibes and a chattering dawn chorus. An album of earthy concerns and positivity, her new age adages promise the listener that ‘Every morning brings a chance to renew’ (over the chilled drummer’s march of ‘Procession’) and that ‘Everybody knows everybody’s got a second wind’ (the supple soul of ‘Second Wind’).

With vocals that effortlessly soar into a range only detectable by bats on the Blaxploitation funk of ‘Mother Maybe’, the album creates a beautifully insular world of a more innocent time. The problem is that it’s so disconnected from present day that it’s more like unearthing a lost soul classic than a genuinely new release. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Suicideyear — Color The Weather (luckyme) As his moniker suggests, New Orleans based producer James Prudhommes is embedded in an emerging scene in which hip hop collides with emo aesthetics. Unlike artists like the late Lil Peep, though, he creates dreary emotional music that doesn’t rely on depressive bars. Prudhommes shoots for something profound, but on this third LP, via a heavy reliance on clichéd ‘emotive’ and ‘introspective’ production, ‘Color The Weather’ feels like advert music at best.

The sound design is bleak and forlorn at times but the brushed trap beats and chopped ‘n’ skrewed vocals can’t help but sound done to death.

Prudhommes is part of a continuum deeply rooted in Internet culture, and, like the rest of us, he discovered a

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lot of what he knows about avant-garde electronic music online. The problem is that Suicideyear’s finished poduct doesn’t bring with it the intricacy and unique flair of similar artists like Iglooghost and Oneohtrix Point Never, even when it hones in on interesting themes like trauma and betrayal and the mechanisms we use to cope with them.

The textural innovation is nearly there on the second half of ‘Tired’ – a genuinely satisfying moment – and Flashes like this do give the impression that one day Suicideyear could become genuinely special. 5/10 Aimee Armstrong

LICE — It All Worked Out Great Vol. 1 & 2 (balley) In the UK today, there’s a deluge of very good garage, punk and rock groups that aim to capture the uncertainty of post-Brexit Britain. In fact, there are so many of these bands it’s becoming difficult to not grow weary of apathy and anger. On ‘It All Worked Out Great vol. 1 and 2’, Bristol band LICE lay down eight songs that prove that they’re the most exciting, inspiring and genuinely deranged new guitar band in the country.

Guitar bombast that owes a debt to Sabbath and Bauhaus fights with an unruly rhythm section, cooking up a sound that is raucous, rural and rabid.

Musically, the band sound in constant conflict, and that’s before you even hear the manic drawl of frontman Alastair Shuttleworth, perhaps the most exciting component of this group. No doubt Shuttleworth will be compared to Mark E. Smith for his spoken-word delivery (that’s more barbed like Sultans of Ping FC), but this man is a creature far more wild-eyed, more volatile, more wacky.

This is no drunken slurring. At times his voice cracks under the intensity of his

growls; at others he maniacally cackles like a hyena, as he casts an allegorical spotlight on the most vile and tilted case studies to be sonically documented in recent memory.

Opening gambit ‘Stammering Bill’ sees Shuttleworth’s rabid delivery address characters from farmers with OCD to perverts with speech impediments, whilst ‘Little John Waynes’ is a satirical take on pro-life activism that opens with the line ‘A cowboy can’t be tied down, when he’s cowboying around.’

National guilt anthem ‘Love Your Island’ then attacks complacency above lethargic guitar cries, whilst country teasin’ penultimate track ‘In A Previous Life’ sees the word ‘parasite’ spat in the most amazing way. On this double EP (it’s over in under 20 minutes), LICE lay down the perfect blue-print for a kind of guitar music that taps into the vulgar nature of our times perfectly. 9/10 Cal Cashin

Soulwax — Essential (pias) Sometime last year, Soulwax locked themselves into their DeeWee studio for a few weeks with the intent of twisting Pete Tong’s melon. Fresh from recording their one-take album, ‘From DeeWee’, the Dewaele Brothers weren’t content to compile a 2-hour Essential Mix of other people’s tunes, so they set about creating their own.

‘Essential’ is the result. Carved out of the first hour of that set and committed to record, it’s a fairly technical exercise with each song based around a variety of voices saying the word “essential”.

So where ‘Essential One’ crackles into chaotic life like an opening to a 2ManyDJs set, the slinking, Euro-pop of ‘Essential Three’ feels cool and clinical; where the futuristic tubular bells of ‘Essential Six’ clang and ripple, ‘Essential Eight’ has that

Albums trademark Nite Versions rhythm, zany melodies and pots ‘n’ pans percussion.

But underpinned so literally by this essential essence, the album feels like a disparate collection – a kind of electronic taster menu of Soulwax cut, chopped and re-rubbed a few different ways. Take the thesaurus regurgitation of ‘Essential Eleven’ and set it against the deep techno patience of ‘Essential Ten’ or the dark, acid squelch of ‘Essential Nine’ and one of those tracks always sounds out of place.

In that sense, ‘Essential’ is less of a complete album and more of creative concept for a live set come to life. There’s enough to dip, cherry-pick and still turn up some serious dancefloor fodder but, as a complete collection, it’s literally Soulwax by numbers. 7/10 Reef Younis

Hilary Woods — Colt (sacred bones) Sadness needs company, and Hilary Woods’ ‘Colt’ is the perfect accompaniment to life’s darker moments. There is something liberating about her debut album away from JJ72, despite its allencompassing melancholy.

Woods’ emotional intelligence – her ability to turn intense personal feelings such as grief, abandonment and mutating love into beautifully crafted songs – elicits the same qualities heard from the likes of Grouper and Julee Cruise.

This emotive reach is rare: opener ‘Oxygen’, for example, illustrates the desolation felt in the absence of a lost lover, but the song’s dream-like fluidity feels like a long, enveloping exhale. The beauty of this album, then, is built on the idea of hope and coming to terms with life’s complexities. ‘Colt’ is a lesson in catharsis, where the instrumental layering – from piano, synth, tape machine, field recordings, and old string instruments – culminate in a beguiling collision

of acoustic and electronic worlds. Woods’ voice lingers in the distance, with the instruments forming the majority of her narrative. Her melodic impulse shines brightly on ‘Take Him In’ – a track that confronts desire and the turmoil of it not being reciprocated.

Despite its claustrophobic tendencies – due to this overwhelming exploration of loneliness and solitude – ‘Colt’ is a healing, empowering, human record, largely thanks to Woods’ understanding of melody and the impact it can have on one’s senses and emotions. 8/10 Hayley Scott

Leon Vynehall — Nothing Is Still (ninja tune) If you’ve been tracking Leon Vynehall’s work over the last few years, ‘Nothing Is Still’ emerges as something of a pivot. Prior to this, you’d have found him artfully crafting likeable lighttouch house music but inspired by his grandparents’ transatlantic emigration to 1960s New York, his first Ninja Tune release has him focused on a sound that’s much more storied.

In fact, ‘Nothing is Still’ dispenses with anything resembling a 4/4 beat.

Instead, Vynehall builds and blends field-recordings with dense melodies and the sombre, emotional weight of a 10-person orchestra to create a series of audible Polaroids.

On ‘From the Sea/It Looms (Chapters I & II)’, there are shades of South African producer Felix Laband’s sweeping prettiness and depth as gulls and the wash of ocean waves create a sense of place in his musical biography. ‘Birds on the Tarmac (Footnote III)’ is a brief little interlude as it too creates a strong sense of place, brightly skittering around somewhere on New York’s busy streets, presumably. Elsewhere, ‘Trouble, Parts I, II & III (Chapter V)’ adds some turmoil

with its heavy dredging beat, synths that seize the hairs on the back of your neck and whispers that climb the walls before the shivering sense of terror gives way to the magnetic rising strings and ambient melodies of ‘Ice Cream’.

An album of little mysteries, you never quite know the story but Vynehall’s considered textural snapshots make you want to find out. 7/10 Reef Younis

Apostille — Choose Life (upset the rhythm) Glasgow’s Michael Kasparis has had an undeniably varied musical past. From playing in hardcore groups like Anxiety and The Lowest Form to running his own DIY record label (Night School), he is no stranger to change, which is what ‘Choose Life’ – his debut LP as Apostille – sees him doing: a considered effort to tone down the humour found previously (albeit not completely) and build more confidence in his voice.

It’s analogue synth Pop with a capital ‘P’.

All true pop music speaks to us, and Apostille promises an escape from reality.

The opening ‘Fly With The Dolphin’ is a mission statement and testament to what consistently follows – melody and purpose is pushed to the fore, backed to the hilt by brutish rhythmic production and a deep singing voice that often resembles David Byrne’s. ‘Feel Bad’ then sounds as if it could have been co-written with Kasparis’ own label spearhead, Molly Nilsson.

Of the record Kasparis has said: “I wanted to write a song that sounded like you were full but hadn’t had enough, so ‘Choose Life’ is eight of them.” He’s onto something with this collection that meshes John Maus histrionics with a new romantic light touch, and hitting *NSYNC along the way on ‘In Control’.

7/10 Alex Weston-Noond

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Live

Test Pressing Festival Various venues, Tottenham 28 April 2018

In my own opinion, the key to a successful festival is diversity. Don’t get me wrong, I love hardcore and acid house as much as the next guy/girl, but unless I’m in the mood, facing nine hours of the same thing can be pretty hard work. That’s why I’ve always tended to enjoy festivals more than all-dayers. When they’re done right, there’s always something new to keep you guessing.

Diversity was definitely the name of the game when it came to the inaugural Test Pressing Festival. Either by accident or design, this new one-wristband, multi-venue festival taking place among the warehouse spaces and new bars near Tottenham Hale, London, managed to cram in a kaleidoscope of different settings, atmospheres and genres; even with the site being bisected by a huge retail estate, which means to get from one venue to the next you have to stroll past Carpet Right and The Carphone Warehouse.

Leaving the photographer to watch Lone Taxidermist wrap the crowd in cling film (above), I headed to the other side of the festival to see Croatian Amor play Five Miles. A brutalist bar and brewery,

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complete with monolithic concrete walls and sinister red lighting, the location fitted with the Copenhagen-based producer’s menacingly seductive soundscapes perfectly and was the ideal way to ease myself into a night spent wondering around N17.

With no real plan in mind, I trekked across to the other end of the festival to the warehouses near the station where the more psychedelic-leaning bands on the bill were playing. I managed to make it to see DUDS as the wound up their slot. The first British band to sign to John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records, their sound might lean more towards the tribal, motoring post-punk of ESG or Liquid Liquid than Thee Oh Sees’ more naturalistic space rock, but that doesn’t stop the crowd throwing themselves around like maniacs.

Thirty seconds later, I stumbled straight into I.R.O.K as they started their set next door. Mixing the afro-futuristic funk of Parliament with the ‘bovver’ dance of the KLF or mid-career Prodigy, their set up kicks off with lead singer Mike Title belting out Tottenham Hotspur songs at the top of his voice. Dressed in a white gown and coming across like Jimmy Pursey meeting a cult-leader, he spends the first couple of songs leaping into the crowd and scaling the speakers imploring those there to join in the madness.

Eventually, the soundman who was clearly concerned about the battering his equipment was getting stops the gig and sternly begins to lecture the band on the cost of P.A. cabs. It might have broken the fourth-wall a bit, but in terms of pure surreal spectacle, it takes some beating.

After a bit more exploring, I end up at Styx; a massive industrial warehouse-turned-weird-tiki-bar where Test Pressing’s main headliners are appearing. Fuelled by some of the strongest tasting rum punch I’ve ever come across, I watched Metz use their typical intensity to deliver a greatest hits set of sorts.

All in all, Test Pressing’s debut year can only be described as a success – a 12-hour joyride through a wilderness of moods, genres, and spaces, where there was never really any problem getting in to see anything. It’ll be exciting to see what they come up with next. Maybe they’ll convince Burger King to let them set up in their drive-thru. Dominic Haley

Stella Donnelly The Lexington, London 8 May 2018

Don’t be fooled by Stella Donnelly. Her stark smile and unassuming arrival to the stage suggests a certain coyness, but beneath the fingerpicking melancholy and soft Aussie twang lies a powerful feminist folk heroine who’s set to conquer the dirty tactics of patriarchal menace. “They probably all just think I have a yeast infection,” she chuckles reflecting on the ridiculous title of her newly released EP, ‘Thrush Metal’.

“My poor mother,” she adds with a guffawing grin.

Armed with only a mic and a washed out Fender Strat, Donnelly’s tender yet brutally frank vocal delivery vividly illustrates everything from obnoxious relationships (‘Mean To Me’), disaster tinder dates (‘Should’ve Stayed At Home’) and her encounters in bars with catcalling tradies (‘Mechanical Bull’). photography by luis kramer

Live Despite the looming cloud of her very tangible struggles, she often manages to keep the mood light, throwing about odd bits of commentary or adding the occasional cheeky remark.

Then, demanding complete silence, there’s a piercing stillness amongst the audience as Donnelly recites her usual disclaimer for standout track ‘Boys Will Be Boys’. It feels like the #MeToo movement has unveiled an appropriate leader as her ode to all rape victims everywhere poignantly addresses the perspectives of both male and female members of the audience. Weighing down the issue with disturbingly lucid narration, Donnelly demands change by making it all just a little too close for comfort. Ollie Rankine

Kamasi Washington Albert Hall, Manchester 4 May 2018

For the first time in the 21st Century, a contemporary jazz musician is filling medium-to-large venues with a young, non-jazz-specific audience, which in part suggests that this form of music, once considered dusty and passé, is in fact teaming with life, and may even hold the key to unlocking the 2018 malaise.

photography by max phythian

Forthcoming album ‘Heaven and Earth’ – which squarely confronts the difficult co-existence of Washington’s spiritual consciousness with the modern hard reality – is on display tonight when he and his seven-piece band launch into ‘Fists of Fury’, their interpolation of the theme to the eponymous 1972 Bruce Lee movie. Two furious, flailing drum solos and a bowed upright bass attack mirror the lyrics from Patrice Quinn’s lips: “Our time as victims is over/We will no longer ask for justice/Instead we will take our retribution”. It is sobering and Manchester knows it, but they are still dancing.

“Diversity is not to be tolerated, but celebrated,” are Washington’s words as he introduces ‘Truth’, a confounding fifteenplus minute explosion of ecstasy. Five different melodies spin and dive together in spectacular formation before our eyes.

The ‘Heaven’ half of the new album is represented in the form of ‘The Space Travelers Lullaby’, a far more enchanted, celestial concoction that features a keynote trombone solo from Ryan Porter.

By the time they conclude with ‘The Rhythm Changes’ from the first album, 105 minutes have evaporated.

Whether Washington proves to be the vanguard for a new wave of crossover jazz artists or just a glorious one-off, he is achieving what no other has in his field for some time. That he has done so without compromise is extraordinary. Max Pilley

The Streets Brixton Academy, London 25 April 2018

The Brixton Academy two-pint cup is the stuff of legend. Everybody loves them – especially Mike Skinner, apparently, who tonight wants to see every double-sized beer in the place held aloft. “Who’s got one of the two-in-one cups?” He asks. “Hold ‘em up.” There’s no shortage. For a certain generation, The Streets are synonymous with youthful drama and parties, mad nights out and boring nights in; a bic lighters and booze kind of band. It turns out, seven years after Skinner called time on the project the whole thing is just as rowdy, even if Skinner is now a dad approaching the end of his thirties, having previously said that this is exactly what he didn’t want to be doing at this age. Whatever the motivation to get back on stage, it’s no lazy cash in – Skinner is all in, illustrated by the fact that his voice sounds horse from weeks of touring and he’s got his top off crowdsurfing.

Billed as a ‘Greatest Hits’ tour, that’s exactly what it is. Skinner might reference himself as a “cult classic, not bestseller” in the second song of the night, ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’, but given this is a soldout three night run (with an identical tour to follow next year) there’s some who’d beg to differ. There’s plenty more milage in this road – bigger shows, for sure.

The Streets MK II are a tight outfit, the interplay between Mike Skinner and Kevin Mark Trail as slick as it ever was on tracks like ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’. But for all the bangers – and across the The Streets’ five LP catalogue that’s handily the perfect amount to fill 90 minutes – they never passed up an opportunity for fragility. So, yeah, there’s wild renditions of ‘Has It Come To This?’ and ‘Fit But You Know It’, still loads of fun, but ‘Everything Is Borrowed’ and ‘Never Went to Church’ are strikingly tender. Even the new stuff sounds descent. A night that ticks the nostalgia box, tugs the heartstrings and leaves everyone washing Carling out of their hair. Beautiful. Liam Konemann

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Film and Books

Grease (paramount) On June 16, Grease, the only musical worth knowing about, will turn 40 – the age John Travolta was when he played 18-year-old Danny Zuko. You should watch it again. Even if you watched it last weekend. We should all be watching Grease every two to three days. Nobody didn’t feel better after watching Grease for the one thousandth time.

Believe it or not, though, not everyone has seen it, and if that’s you, its limited

cinema run this month is the perfect opportunity for you to realise how empty your life has been, and to understand why Scientology continually throws Tom Cruise under the bus rather that the waxy, indestructible Travolta.

Grease is a love story set in the final year of high school – a tale as old as time, it seems, but that’s thanks to Grease. It’s set in the late ’50s to give it some artistic colour and make the songs feel more integrated (or vaguely so – don’t worry, the songs are genuinely good, except for ‘Beauty School Dropout’). The cool boys’ gang is called The T Birds, and the girls are the Pink Ladies. You’ll know all of this even if you’ve never seen it. But here’s how the movie really breaks down through the eyes of someone who believes that we should all watch Grease every two to three days...

Danny and Sandy hook up on a beach one summer. Danny falls over a sandcastle, which he takes in good

humour. Post-holiday romance, at school, Rizzo (40) and Jan (26) are clearly propping up the Pink Ladies. Zuko and Kenickie (53) do the same for The T Birds.

‘Summer Nights’ improves every night you’ve ever had down Flares (keep an eye out here for the lone guy in the background joining in with Danny’s bits on his own).

Sandy the square meets Danny at a pep rally. It’s a classic Rizzo setup – Danny invents negging by actually saying, “that’s my name, don’t wear it out” to Sandy. Rizzo continues to pie Sandy in this way. Danny does the best fake laugh in movie history when Sandy calls him jealous.

‘Hand Jive’ ends with a spectacularly shit front flip by a TV host. An animated sausage jumps into a hotdog bun. The big race ends when one of the cars isn’t up to driving through a puddle. A man inexplicitly dances like a duck so when a car starts to fly at the end you think nothing of it. Credits. Best movie ever. Austin Laike

Let The Good Times Roll — Kenney Jones (blink publishing) Kenney Jones was in three bands that came to define the sound of the ’60s and ’70s. He played drums for archetypal tough mods the Small Faces before Rod Stewart Joined and they hit the bottle, bought velvet pants and swishy scarves and became the Faces. Then, when Keith Moon died, Jones was called up to drum for the Who. The open and honest Let The Good Times Roll follows Jones from his humble Eastend roots to rock superstardom and all that that entails, and includes an iconic supporting cast, which includes David Bowie, the Rolling Stones and anyone else who mattered. Lee Bullman

Working for the Man: My Years with James Brown — Damon Wood and Phil Carson (ecw) James Brown, Mr. Dynamite, The Godfather of soul, Mr. Please Please himself and the hardest working record man in show business, couldn’t have been any of those things without his bands. Brown was a notoriously hard taskmaster who expected (and got) perfect funk from the musicians playing behind him. Working For the Man details the six years that Damon Wood spent playing guitar in Brown’s Soul Generals and highlights some of the lessons he learned. It also interviews some of the people he met as he studied funk and soul at the dancing feet of the master. Lee Bullman

Rhapsody in Black: The Life and Music of Roy Orbison — John Kruth (backbeat) Roy Orbison emerged from the crucible of Memphis’ Sun Studios, the tiny, magical rockabilly storefront that gave us Johnny Cash, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and in doing so turned the whole world upside down. Orbison went on to produce some of the greatest singles of the 20th century – songs that can still make the world stand still – and in Rhapsody in Black, John Kruth tells the story behind those songs, giving clues to the deep, wide and very real sadness and tragedy that informed the tone of one of the most original voices in rock ‘n’ roll.

Lee Bullman

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Interview The best thing you can do with your iPhone is turn it into a hat, by Dominic Haley Photography by David Cortes

Bodega “Technology is definitely the big issue of our time,” ponders Bodega’s Ben Hozie across our long-distance line. Suddenly, it sounds like his brow is furrowing. “I think about this stuff a lot.

I mean, whether you want to think about it or not, it’s definitely thinking about you.”

The air hangs dead for a couple of seconds before his bandmate Nikki Belfiglio deftly jumps in to punctuate his argument.

“It’s kind of like punk rock in a way,” she says breezily. “It was born with all these good intentions but has turned into Frankenstein’s Monster. Frankenstein’s Monster with two cameras for eyes.”

It doesn’t take a detective to figure out that modern communications, rebellion and paranoia sit at the heart of what Bodgea do. For the New York-based art punks, the Internet has created a culture of self-obsessed, inward-looking, knownothings. People who, in the band’s own words, “have playlists who know them better than their closest lover.” Whether it’s Belfiglio’s bizarre headdress, which seems to be constructed from discarded iPhones, or the band being replaced by an orchestra of laptops and tablets in the new video for ‘Jack in Titanic’, their critical gaze is firmly fixed on the disappearing border between our online and offline lives.

However, speaking as Mark Zuckerberg is simultaneously atoning for his company’s sins in front of the US Congress, it suddenly feels like Bodega’s brand of playful Dada-esque needling has captured the zeitgeist. ‘Endless Scroll’, the title of the band’s forthcoming album, might mockingly point towards a society of zonked-out social media addicts, absentmindedly surrendering their agency to click-bait and status updates, but in the wreckage of the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal, somehow it seems like the joke has just got real.

With the rest of the world suddenly jumping on the technophobic bandwagon, Hozie is surprisingly, if understandably, ambivalent about the role the Internet is playing in his life. “It’s not like we’re saying; ‘shut the electricity off and let’s go live in the woods,’” he laughs as we talk about the realities of being a musical act in the 21st Century. “When we made the video for ‘How did it Happen’ a lot of people said, ‘isn’t it a bit hypocritical that you’re making a 360 video when you guys are so against progress?’ I was like, well, yes, but our whole band is hypocritical. That’s pretty much the point of Bodega, we’re pointing out

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these things while simultaneously engaging with them.”

“In the end, it’s a really funny document of our scene,” continues Belfiglio. “Like, you can now get a ‘real’ Brooklyn NYC show streaming through your computer and you can now see for yourself how unexciting the whole thing actually is. It un-glamorises the whole idea. I mean, imagine if we had VR back in the CBGB days or whatever, all you’d see is how lame it actually was most of the time.”

Bodega see themselves more as Adam Curtis style documentarists than straight-up political punks. First meeting at an Of Montreal show in 2013, Hozie and Belfiglio appear to come from opposite ends of the musical spectrum; the former coming from the noise/art scene of the late ’00s and the latter having her roots in New York’s vibrant club scene. “When I first met Ben, he was wearing a train conductor’s hat,” chuckles Belfiglio when I ask the pair how they first came across each other. “I was rolling on ecstasy at the time, so it was true friendship from the very start.”

As a result, the band tread a fine line between social commentary and dance-floor-ready jams. “I’m not really a big fan of live music; I think they need to change the script a little bit,” Belfiglio tells me. “I’ve always wanted to play music that is very bass heavy. I like songs that have that kind of groove that goes directly into your pelvic area. The ones that make you feel sexy and make you want to dance.”

Despite their sound (not a million miles from James Murphy in ‘North American Scum’ mode), Bodega has had some difficulty connecting with their audience in the past. Initially going by the name Bodega Bay after the town in the Hitchcock classic The Birds, the group shortened their name a year or so ago, partly due to the fact that they were constantly being miscategorised. “Journalists are so lazy,” Hozie sighs, “one of the reasons we dropped the ‘Bay’ bit is because everyone kept thinking we were a surf rock band. I mean, leave that shit to Dick Dale, right?”

Bodega’s ‘Endless Scroll’ is due out on the highly influential What’s Yr Rupture, and already large portions of the US music press are touting the band as fellow travellers to their label mates Parquet Courts. The similarities are definitely there; both bands display an erudite wit layered over a broad canvas of post-punk influences, but for me at least, the record the band’s

Interview

debut should really be compared to is Wire’s ‘Pink Flag’. Lyrically, both have themes that challenge the anaesthetising effect of commercialism, but while the Watford punks filtered their attack through Chuck Berry, Bodega are looking more in Kool and the Gang’s direction.

“It feels like there’s no room for irony in America right now,” muses Hozie as we talk about the new record. “I think one of the reasons why we had the whole surf rock thing, especially during the Obama years, was because we had this fake sense that everything was going to be OK. It’s sad in a way; some of those bands were super fun, but it never felt like they had that much to say.”

“A couple of years ago, it felt like we were coasting,” says Belfiglio. “Like, backslapping ourselves for all this ‘progress’, and then, all of a sudden, it has all slipped back.”

The thing that makes Bodega such an aberration in these modern times, though, is that rather than spreading their

message through viral videos and Spotify playlists, rather like Idles, say, the Brooklyn five-piece are building their reputation on the back of a fearsome live show. Playing six shows at this year’s SXSW, the band impressed pretty much everyone with their energetic, forthright gigs. “We’ve allowed word of mouth and energy to carry us through the bog,” explains Belfiglio. “You wouldn’t be able to find a lot of information about us online; we haven’t got much of a presence.”

But, then that’s the point, right? Bodega are all about creating something that feels true and real, just as the world has started to feel like everything is staged and manipulated. Hozie puts it best. “For me, rock’n’roll is at its most exciting when it’s let loose and can be spontaneous. It has a power to create a moment that, rather than reminding you of some idea of the past, can make you live right here in the now. I mean, you can get that from a record, but it’s much harder. Especially, when all you do is stare at a screen.”

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Search

The Internet feel that they’re one more album from greatness,

by Sam Walton.

Photography by Nathanael Turner

Undeniable 49

Interview

The back garden of a family home about a mile from the

beach in Venice, Los Angeles, is where I first see Matt Martians’ Jamiroquai tattoo. Under the afternoon sun, he rolls up the sleeve of his hoodie to reveal an outline of the band’s Buffalo Man logo standing proudly inked three inches long on the inside of his left forearm, its toes turned out beneath flared trousers, not-quitejazz hands, and trademark horned hat set at a jaunty angle.

“We’re all going to see them at Coachella on Friday,” Martians tells me excitedly, gesturing to his bandmates beside him, “and I’m fanning out, I don’t even care: ‘Return of the Space Cowboy’ is one of my favourite albums. ‘Mr Moon’, on that album, is my favourite song of all time. I love Jamiroquai.”

It’s an unexpected reference point in a conversation that, so far, has taken in The Neptunes, Sly and The Family Stone, Solange, Kendrick Lamar and Thundercat, all of whom feel like more legitimate bedfellows of The Internet, the soul band that keyboard player Martians founded with singer Syd when both were still members of controversy-courting teen rap troupe Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, and which now includes guitarist and 19-year-old production prodigy Steve Lacy, bassist Patrick Paige II and drummer Christopher Smith. Jay Kay’s high-buffed paper-thin muzak feels too plastic for even The Internet’s poppier moments, but Martians’ ardency is nonetheless palpable, if unexpected.

Even more unexpected, though, is the cause of such ardency. The topic has arisen following a discussion about which bands are the most universally liked – and Martians reckons Suffolk’s finest purveyors of gossamer funk-lite pop are his trump card: “Even if it’s not an album, everyone at least has a song,” he insists. “Everybody likes something by Jamiroquai.” As he starts to tell me how happy he’d be if his band and their new album had the same level of “undeniability” as ‘Emergency on Planet Earth’, I resist suggesting that behind a fairly moreish single or two lurks a symbol of late-20th-century wine-bar acid-jazz smuggery; a guy who collects Ferraris despite a driving ban, who wears Native American headdresses for fun, and who became a ’90s punchline (literally, after The Fast Show’s legendary “Jeremy Kwee” sketch) for his preposterously inauthentic behaviour.

Not, one suspects, that it would’ve mattered if I had: not only are The Internet fiercely supportive of each other, mutually protective of their own individual tastes and self-assured enough not to give a Cosmic Girl what other people think of their favourite music, but they also clearly revel in debunking preconceptions so deeply that a love for appropriated and rather uncool Brit funk wouldn’t even make the top ten.

Indeed, the back garden of this family home, which belongs to the band’s married-couple management team, is where I discover that The Internet are a major refraction from their origins. After all, here is a bunch of urban millennials steeped in RnB who are rejecting samplers, drum machines and software in favour of old-fashioned musical instruments, without sounding retrograde; here is a group of young black musicians fronted by a gay woman in Trump’s America, who

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have little interest in making music directly about identity politics, and yet still deliver a positive social message; here is an act from Los Angeles that want nothing to do with the glitz of Hollywood, the grit of Compton, or the glamour of Beverly Hills, and yet unmistakably represent their home city; a band that sprang from the brattiest hip-hop collective of the last decade, but count zero MCs in their number.

This is a story about a band with the ambition to name themselves The Internet and still top the Google search rankings; a story about a band who challenge you to expect the unexpected in their music, their presentation, and their attitude.

This is a story about a band who have become Odd Future’s oddest spawn.

— Love the playa — Venice Beach is like a human coral reef. For three miles of seafront, from the fishing jetty at the south end to Santa Monica’s old-timey Pacific Park amusement pier in the north, it seems as if every specimen of human life is on display. Wetsuited surfers clamber on and off their boards, in and out the waves, while leathery lifeguards keep lookout from their baywatch platforms. Just off the beach, skateboarders shimmy along the rails of the skatepark with white buds in their ears, occasionally popping out of bowls to leap over trash cans like a series of flying fish. Next door, basketballers showboat in two-on-two hustles, the sound of the metal nets ringing like cash registers with every successful jump shot.

Further up, the Muscle Beach outdoor weightlifting gym attracts men and women shaped like inverted triangles with heads, each of them curling and flexing to ghetto-blaster EDM. Between the sea and boardwalk is a thin strip of pavement up and down which a parade of rollerblades, bicycles and the odd mobility scooter glide serenely in an almost parodic display of beachfront life. Like a sun-kissed Camden market, tat shops line the prom, selling overpriced ice cream, “Fuck Trump” knickers and weed paraphernalia, while roadside hawkers lay out on old picnic blankets their paperclip sculptures and lurid jewellery.

Somewhere, a guy is playing tight drum breakbeats; nearer by, two MCs bounce around the pedestrians and tourists, handing out their CDs and rhyming at whoever will listen.

Fifteen miles up the coast is affluent Malibu, home to movie stars and millionaires; ten miles inland, the Hollywood sign perches on the side of Mount Lee, surveying its trilliondollar empire. Twenty miles southeast, beyond the airport and the Inglewood oil fields, lies the unforgiving grid of Compton.

The hipster neighbourhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake are an hour’s drive away.

But just a block back from the ocean, Venice reveals itself as the true countercultural base of Los Angeles, rainbow-coloured houses lining the canals that gave the area its name, dilapidated row-boats rocking against the banks. Pretty bungalows fronted with neatly trimmed succulents are inter-

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Interview “Second album we had solidified ourselves as a band, and that felt really cosy—” “But with ‘Ego Death’ we had to hit it out the park or go home,” continues Martians, Syd nodding. “We either had to settle for being the band that made cool funky music on the downlow, or step up and become the band that’s like, ‘that’s my shit!’”

Enter a 15-year-old resident of Compton, who in a matter of weeks went from noodling in Syd’s studio when he thought nobody was listening, to co-producing ‘Ego Death’ and injecting just the x-factor that Martians was longing for.

— The temptation of Steve —

spersed with unpretentious bars, corner stores, and junk shops patronised by a mix of old and young, black and white. With an atmosphere entirely different to anywhere else in this often unforgiving megacity – somewhere between hippie commune and modestly faded seaside resort – it makes sense that Venice is where The Internet as a band was born. Their music, a slinky reboot of neo-soul, as much in debt to the flower-child sprawls of Curtis Mayfield as it is to mid-90s Janet Jackson and Erykah Badu’s calm self-possession, suits the mood; their songs advocate for gentle collective subversion, psychological, social and emotional emancipation, and good old-fashioned love.

Although four members are now spread around the city, and Martians is based back in his hometown of Atlanta to tend to his elderly parents, Venice is where it began for Syd and Matt in 2010, sharing a house just off the ocean. Back then, when not making beats for Odd Future, Syd and Martians were a bedroom-based duo, accompanied by Paige, Smith and a keyboard player named Tay Walker whenever they gigged, but following a perfectly acceptable debut of laid-back soul (‘Purple Naked Ladies’), and a couple of guest spots on Odd Future mixtapes, they made album two (the improved ‘Feel Good’) as a straight-up five-piece. After that, Walker was briefly replaced

by Jameel Bruner (little brother of bass virtuoso Stephen, aka Thundercat), whose most crucial contribution before departure was introducing the band to his high-school jazz group buddy Steve Lacy just before they began recording their break-out, Grammy-nominated album, ‘Ego Death’.

To say that Lacy revolutionised The Internet’s sound is perhaps an exaggeration, but not much of one. His laconic, languorous way with a guitar chord defined the mood of the band’s third record, elevating their sound from a fairly understated project to something with more heft. “That’s the difference between ‘Ego Death’ and the other albums,” agrees Martians. “We found our sound. On the first two albums we knew we’d developed a cult fanbase—” “First album we weren’t even a band,” butts in Syd.

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Steve Lacy has a homemade bracelet around his wrist that says ROCKSTAR★STEVE spelled out in miniature dice. It was chucked onstage by a fan at a recent gig, and he’s grown fond of it. No wonder: despite being a native of Compton, still living with his parents in the house where he grew up, The Internet’s guitarist is more rock than rap, and is reasonably contemptuous of his hip-hop neighbours. “It was a thing in school: if I told my teacher I’m doing music they auto-assumed, ‘oh you rap’,” he explains.

“But I was definitely more, ‘I might be a producer, I might play guitar, I want to do something more so-phis-tic-at-ed’.” He rolls the final five syllables around his mouth with an absorbing confidence, raising one eyebrow in nonchalance as he goes.

“I actually caught onto Odd Future a bit late anyway because when I was younger I was super Christian, so it hurt my little Christian ears,” he goes on, Syd cackling at the thought of her old band corrupting baby Steve. “My parents brought me up in the Church, so Odd Future was devil music, but I was still very aware of my surroundings, always watching my back,” continues Lacy, implying that parental protection from the degenerative influence of Compton’s preeminent musical form couldn’t extend to the city’s further reputation. “When I’d take the trash out, I’d run to and from the house, and I still do that – like, just now, I just ran to the car to get my bag, for no reason. I run

Interview

places because you gotta move fast: when I was younger, and shit sounded close to my house, I would duck down, just in case the bullets went close to the house or anything. But they never did, because my mum was paranoid: she’d seen her friends’ kids getting recruited, and made sure I didn’t do shit like that. What that means for me now is that I’m the most oblivious person from Compton you’ll ever meet, and I choose to stay oblivious.

I’m in my own world of guitars and synthesisers in my bedroom.

And that’s cool – that’s where I found imagination and escapism, through sonics and music.”

That escapism wasn’t entirely straightforward, though – while it’s true that guitar was Lacy’s first love, it was only once he’d completed the latest edition of Guitar Hero that he traded one with buttons for one with frets and strings. “Guitar Hero’s my game,” he says with a blissful smile. “Shoot me in the head in Call Of Duty I probably won’t notice, dunk on me in 2K, I’ll get my ass whooped. But there was a point when I was playing those songs over and over on Guitar Hero and acing them that I was like, alright, I need a real guitar. World Tour in particular was where I found love for Jimi. It had ‘Wind Cries Mary’ and ‘Purple Haze’ – made me feel like a total rock star. I was like, I wanna be this guy, so I hopped off Guitar Hero and onto the real thing.”

Armed with a Rickenbacker and a year of tuition from seasoned LA session player Jairus Mozee (“shout out to him!” exclaims bassist Pat when Steve mentions his mentor), Lacy began teaching himself music production, first via a clutch of apps on his phone, and then simply on the job: after joining The Internet aged just 15, production credits followed on both Syd and Matt’s solo albums, with J Cole and Isaiah Rashad, and, last year, on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘DAMN.’ Lacy turns 20 this month, and by any metric his last five years have been like a rocket launch. Most adults would be daunted by that sort of trajectory, let alone someone so young, but after a couple of days in his presence it’s clear that Lacy isn’t most people: his ability to adjust to new surroundings is almost chameleonic, to the extent that it’s impossible to imagine him

being fazed by anything. Cool but never distant, poised but never arrogant, Lacy exudes a Jedi-like kind of calm control, as if no situation is unfamiliar – a trait that he reports acquiring the moment he joined The Internet.

“They raised me”, he says, affectionately, recalling his recruitment. “I remember when I first started hanging out with them, I shifted from a regular teenage kid to an artist real fast. At first I was like, this person is a celebrity! I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again!” He flaps his hands in mock panic as he tells the story. “I don’t know if I’ll ever have a music career! I’m 15 years old! But I remember trying to get a flick in the studio back then, and being said no to. After that, I remember feeling like I didn’t want a photo, because wanting a photo comes from feeling like you might never see that person again. After that, it was like, I’m going to see you again, so that’s all good.” His calmness returns, shrugging his shoulders like his origin story is no big deal.

Not that Lacy, or the rest of The Internet, is particularly interested in reminiscence. After the giant leap forward of ‘Ego

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Interview

54

Interview Death’ three years ago, each member recorded solo albums to “let out a bit of pressure”, according to Syd. Now back together, all focus is on ‘Hivemind’, out this summer, to make it two hits in a row and therefore, according to Martians, cement the band’s reputation: “I have this theory that if you make two undeniable albums you can tour for the rest of your life, because you have enough for a whole set,” Martians explains, ever the quintet’s pragmatist. “I think ‘Ego Death’ was the first undeniable Internet album, and if you have two albums back to back, then you’ve shown you’re consistent, and people will respect that.”

Lacy, meanwhile, is more gnomic. “The new album feels like the age I’m about to turn,” he chimes in. “You remember how when you’re about to turn 13 from 12, you’re like ‘holy shit I’m a teenager, time to step up’? It’s the same feeling – I’m entering my twenties, and looking forward.”

— Girl empowered — “Now I’ve got you right where I want you / I check my posture / Come at you proper, girl,” sings Syd on ‘Mood’, one of The Internet’s new songs. A sultry, humid horn section swoons around the track’s hammering drum patterns, and the overall effect is one of deliciously anticipatory, almost predatory seduction. “Next time I take you out, girl, don’t you keep me waiting,” she tells her date with an audible pout, half promise half threat.

This is no new direction for The Internet’s singer and main lyricist: ever since Syd, now 26, caught fame as Odd Future’s DJ and producer in her teens, she’s been writing and talking frankly about the virtues of sex, lust and love with other women. But nonetheless it remains inspiring and attractively assertive to hear a woman sing with such candour about an issue so often condescendingly fetishised – even giggled at – by straight men.

Indeed, after the litany of male sexual aggression stories that have peppered recent news, the sound of an empowered but still marginalised woman asserting herself, ensuring she gets what she needs, makes a dearly welcome and encouraging change.

Sure, love songs as bedroom-oriented as Syd’s have been a soul staple for as long as the genre’s existed, but her recontextualising of the trope adds spice to a form that, in 2018, is in danger of becoming both boringly procedural and, with the backdrop of #metoo, rather discomforting.

But while Syd is happy to accept her relatively rare position as a young, black, gay woman fronting a band, she’s less willing to allow her particular identity politics to seep into her writing. “Sure, I understand I represent gay women,” she admits, “and I feel comfortable with that because I feel comfortable in my sexuality, and that’s the best way to be if you’re representing a group of people. But they say write what you know, and I’m just doing that.”

She says she doesn’t keep up with current affairs because they depress her too much, and while she acknowledges that another of the new songs, ‘Come Together’, is about “how each tragedy raises the voice of the people a little more, whether it’s a police shooting, a school shooting, a hurricane, or Trump”, on

the whole she prefers to keep her political thoughts opaque and write from her own experience.

The rest of the band, however, are less self-censoring.

“You want to be desensitised to that kind of news, but you can’t be,” explains Martians of the inspiration behind ‘Come Together’. “With us being of the demographic that’s in danger right now, it’s hard to ignore.”

“I’m half way,” adds Pat, up to now fairly quiet. “Some days I’m desensitised, then I’m like, fuck. The worst for me was the one that went viral on camera – Alton Sterling. That fucked me up. I cried and then drank, and drank and cried.”

“Was that the guy who got choked out?” asks Matt.

“No man, that was Eric Garner,” Pat answers, shaking his head before turning to me, the only white person in the room.

“You see how many we paste up? That’s the fucking shame of it: ‘What, that one? No, this one.’ It’s fucking crazy. But I literally saw this guy pass away, watching him get shot and then struggle for his life, and that fucked me up because right before that he was just selling CDs, and my nigga had a family and shit.”

“What’s really fucked up,” adds Matt, “is that all black kids you talk to, above or below 18, have a story about a run-in with the police. It’s not like one person is like, oh I’ve had problems with the cops. Every person you talk to has multiple stories.”

Pat tells his own astonishing tale of being followed for 15 miles by the Beverly Hills PD, way out of their jurisdiction to Adams and Arlington (“if you’re from LA you know that’s a fucking far follow”), after he dropped his then-girlfriend home one evening. “The magnitude varies—” “Yeah the magnitude varies,” continues Matt (once pulled over by six cops for hesitating at a traffic light), “but the fact is everyone has had a situation where they felt uncomfortable for no reason, and the Internet is enabling people to go, ‘okay I’m not tripping here’. Before, you might think it was an isolated thing – like, I’m in the South, they’re just racist, or I’m in LA, of course this shit goes on – but now you’re like, hold up, this is happening everywhere, in every city. Before, there was no way of us knowing what was going on in Iowa. I mean, how would we know about murders in Iowa before?”

“How would you know about anything in Iowa!” interjects Pat, smiling, group laughter lightening the mood. “Except for Slipknot, of course. Shout out to them, they’re fire.”

— Let’s dance — “Shit man, let’s talk about music some more!” implores Pat, to further appreciative chuckles. It’s a telling request: while The Internet are certainly engaged with the world’s wider problems – and observing them discuss these issues as a group of friends around a dining table for half an hour feels surprisingly intimate – their albums are not observations of an explicitly black experience in the same way as, say, ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ or ‘A Seat At The Table’. For The Internet, music is not just a vessel for political statements, but a statement in itself, and that’s by design. “It’s our duty to make people come together,

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Interview

but on top of that to let go too,” Martians says, trying to resolve the dissonance between the last half hour of political criticism and the foot-tappers that populate ‘Hivemind’.

“Music is so political now that sometimes it’s good to help people forget their worries and achieve some escapism, so that’s why there’s only one song about it on our album and it comes first. We say our thing, and then: let’s dance. Hearing political music is great,” he adds, “but I always feel best during tumultuous times when I’m listening to music that has nothing to do with what’s going on.”

But The Internet are not just light-hearted fun in heavyhearted times; their music is more balm than opiate, and accordingly makes up just as integral a part of the post-Trump American socio-musical diet as those who top the end-of-year lists for their campaigning diatribes. Quite what part that is, though, is difficult to pin down. As I watch them mess about on the Venice canals, I try to think of another act even remotely similar. The sight of five mates who appear to have formed a band almost by accident – “the funny thing about the band is it’s just a small portion of our hanging out,” Matt tells me earlier – is reminiscent of the early Strokes, but it’s difficult to imagine this lot ever falling out as spectacularly. Attitude-wise, the band occupies the same role as a lot of the psychedelic soul groups seemed to in the early ’70s, parsing contemporary social angst into groove, swagger and gently shimmering love songs, but there’s none of the accompanying darkness or paranoia here. Instead, over the two days I spend with the band, I’m struck most by the amount of laughter that abounds between them, whether it’s Pat and Steve coining new words, Matt sharing his collection of unflattering freeze-frames from the band’s videos, or even drummer Chris, the quietest of the lot, serving up a killer punchline from nowhere. Perhaps, I conclude, just like Martians’ deep love for Jamiroquai, some things are better left unexamined; this band feels fairly peerless, connected to countless others via collabo-

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ration and mutual appreciation, but really, in appearance and demeanour, in a field of their own.

— Virtual insanity — Idly browsing Instagram on the Saturday after returning home from LA, I pause on Matt Martians’ latest post, taken backstage at Coachella the previous evening. He’s proudly flashing his Jamiroquai tattoo once more – but this time, grinning amiably beside him in a baker-boy hat, is Jay Kay himself.

“Space Cowboys”, reads the caption; Martians’ expression is one of sheer fanboy glee. Still slightly bemused by the Jamiroquai love, I DM the pic to my editor, accompanied by the astonishedface emoji. “Pull the cover story!” he jokes back, as I attempt to reconcile the immense likeability of The Internet with their strange taste in funk frontmen.

Returning to my timeline, Steve Lacy’s up next, also with a backstage Jay Kay (this time in a green velvet trilby with an Aztec-style band). “Legend”, writes Lacy, his smile as wide as goalposts. “If you know, you fucking know!!!”. Piqued, and feeling a little obliged by my hosts the previous week, I search for ‘Jamiroquai’ on YouTube, and below the big singles it serves me the band’s 2002 hit ‘Love Foolosophy’. I find myself awaiting French robot voices, and suddenly realise that for all Jay Kay’s nobbish tendencies, this is rather fine Daft Punkian disco pop.

The video ends and YouTube suggests nine more, among which is the clip for The Internet’s new single ‘Roll’. The track opens with the same irresistible shuffling drums as Daft Punk’s debut single ‘Da Funk’ and right then, like the decoding of a cryptic cipher, a web of beautifully navigable musical connections – from Jamiroquai to Daft Punk, back up to The Internet, and all the way into YouTube’s darkest psychedelic soul caverns – suddenly opens up. I spend the rest of the day uncovering hidden gems; it turns out that The Internet really is full of links.

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Interview

DRINKS Two musicians accept their smart phones and remember Mark E. Smith, by Hayley Scott Photography by Cayce Clifford

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Interview There’s a strange beauty to the music of DRINKS, and when you consider the extraordinarily singular talent behind this pairing, it’s easy to see why: the project takes the best aspects of Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley’s solo work – Le Bon’s erratic exploration of melody and chaos, and Presley’s gentler psych leanings – and creates a particular kind of skewed magic when combined. Their disparate musical upbringings (one grew up on American hardcore, the other cultivated by her parent’s music in rural Wales) also informs the label-rejecting, genre-defiance of their music.

The pair’s latest, second album, ‘Hippo Lite’, reaffirms an unconventional approach to song craft and pop music. It’s a more relaxed, atmospheric version of DRINKS, but it’s still exceptionally weird.

I spoke to the pair at their home in LA, to talk about their time spent recording in France, lazy journalism and Mark E. Smith anecdotes.

T: I always find when you go somewhere to make a record, and you exist in this bubble and you don’t really ever leave it, then you tend to make something a lot more cohesive – something with a lot more character, you know?

Hayley: Hi Cate, hi Tim – how are you both today?

C: Tim’s not allowed to talk! [Laughs] He likes it a lot, he thinks the people there are the best.

H: It must’ve been really hard to come back to the hustle and bustle of everyday life after that.

T: Well, no. As soon as we got onto the motorway to leave and we both got phone reception the dream was over. It was so sad how quickly we went back to normal. Especially because to begin with we were saying things like “this is brilliant! Let’s get rid of our smart phones!”

H: Tim – have you ever been to Wales? It must have been quite a shift culturally from your base in LA.

Cate: We just woke up!

Tim: I’ve got rolling pins in my hair! [Laughs]

T: I love it actually. I think in my mind I thought it would be the same as the rest of the UK but it really isn’t. I like it a lot, I have to say.

H: Tell me about how your partnership as DRINKS came about?

C: We met in 2013 when Tim’s band [White Fence] opened for me in Santa Monica and we liked what each other were doing.

About six months later I moved to Los Angeles and we became friends. We always said we should do something but never thought we ever would, and then Tim needed a guitar player for the White Fence tour and I stepped in and that was kind of the beginning of us working together. As soon as we got back from tour we got into a rehearsal room and luckily it immediately worked as a musical partnership. We just loved writing and playing music together and it soon transpired that we work really well together, which isn’t often the case.

H: You recorded ‘Hippo Lite’ in an old mill in France – the way you described it in the press release sounds really idyllic. What was it like to record in a place like that, free from all distractions?

C: I think it was instrumental in being able to shut out the outside world. That press release – there’s a bit of poetic licence there, but genuinely, we had no Wi-Fi, no phone, and no reception, and for the first few days it was kind of unsettling but after that it was just glorious – you know? I felt much less anxious than I usually do. We had to go into the village to check our Wi-Fi and to begin with there was this urgency that was like “I have to check my email!” but then after a few days I was like, fuck it – we’re in this beautiful house and we’re here to make music. You realise that there’s so much of that kind of clutter in the modern world. Even here during recording I noticed, between takes of songs, that I’m checking my phone and it drives me mad. It’s like a horrible disease.

C: Even after living in LA for four years I don’t think anything is ever going to break through this accent. Tim thinks I sound like an alien.

T: I have never heard anyone who sounds like Cate in Wales.

C: That’s not true!

T: I swear, I haven’t. I don’t know, I can’t tell the difference. I can tell the difference between a Welsh accent and an English one, but Cate’s is stranger.

H: Tim – I know you spent a bit of time in The Fall. How did the news of Mark E. Smith’s death affect you?

T: Yeah, I was real sad. I had just left Manchester literally the day before, and it was so strange because I was thinking about him in the airport, and I saw a Manchester United poster or something – his football team…

C: No – Man City was his football team.

T: Oh, Man City is what I mean, the blue one! I don’t know about football at all. But anyway, I was thinking about him, and I had this strange moment where I thought for a second – like in a daydream – I should just not get on the plane and go visit him or something. That went through my brain for a split second and then I kind of woke from the daydream, got on the plane and left. When I landed in San Francisco I turned my phone on and then I found out that he passed away. So yeah it was really sad

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Interview for me. He was always really kind to me, and I think that’s a big feat knowing that he’s gone through so many members and all that, so to know he actually liked me was very comforting.

H: That is quite an achievement, because I’ve heard so many bad stories – as well as good – but I like to cling on to the nicer anecdotes.

C: He was always very kind to me, too. When he used to come and see DRINKS he’d call us Snacks. It’s a terrible joke but the way he clung on to it was so funny: “yeah yeah I’m just here to see SNACKS, you know that band SNACKS” and so on…

T: He did it in that way where it was like I don’t give a fuck about your music but I just want to see you.

C: We were playing in the Soup Kitchen one night and this really excited kid came down to tell us that Mark E. Smith was looking for us. I’d met him before and he’d been a bit abrasive and a bit swaggering but this time he was so gentle and we embraced him and he embraced me and gave us both a kiss and it was just lovely. He was like a really sweet, bad uncle for about an hour and then he stole Tim and gave him some wise words about the Welsh. He said Welsh women are demons and never go to Wales because they’ll eat you there.

H: Was he a fan of your work then or was he just there to say hi?

T: I know that he liked White Fence. So much so that one night when he left the stage he said go up and play this White Fence song, ‘The Love Between’ – so we had to play that, to fill up three minutes while he left the stage to go do god knows what.

So I know that, which is really cool. DRINKS, I’m not so sure, but he came to our shows, which was nice.

H: Cate – we spoke briefly before about the way in which journalists write about you and the general attitude towards women musicians. For example, you’re a really talented guitarist but are always referred to as simply a songwriter. Is it still a big issue for you or do you think attitudes have changed?

C: I think people are just lazy and there’s such a short attention span these days. People will write something without thinking, not realising that when you put something on the Internet you’re actually publishing it. Often I don’t think people are doing it deliberately, but when you are in a position where you’re writing anything that’s going on the Internet then you have a responsibility and people should just take more care with the kind of words they use because sometimes it perpetuates this inequality. I especially notice it with DRINKS because there are two people who are doing the exact same thing yet one is elevated to being a musician and the other one is simply a songwriter, which is such a flimsy word.

I think I’d been on a really long flight once and I was a bit

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angry and tired and I saw a post saying DRINKS are coming to Portland, and they called me a songstress and they called Tim a musician and it was the first time I’d actually been like, THIS HAS MADE ME SO MAD! It was on an Instagram post so I commented saying “so is Tim not a songwriter or does his penis exempt him?” It’s the first time that I ever reacted to it because it was the last straw; it just really fucking annoyed me. They apologised and said, “you know what, we didn’t think and were just trying to use different words for you both.” But they’d have never done it the other way round – they’d never have said songwriter Tim and musician Cate. There’s just this kind of inbuilt sexism.

Then Tim took a screenshot of the interaction and was like “yeah, go on Cate! We should use the same words to describe men and women because we both do the same thing!” and it was kind of funny because then everyone was like “yeah Tim you’re right! Go on Tim!”. [Laughs] T: Honestly, I just think it is lazy music journalism. A songwriter is not a terrible thing to be – it’s not that – we’re both songwriters and that’s fine. It’s just that I want to know more about who we’re talking about. Is she just a songwriter or does she play guitar or does she produce?

C: It annoys me when people call me a songwriter, but that’s just an annoyance of mine. When it’s in comparison to Tim that’s when I get a bit mad. We’re so progressive in so many ways in society and there’re these moments when you realise how regressive some aspects are and it’s kind of really sad. It just seems that we are getting caught in a loop that stops us from progressing.

It’s really simple: everyone just needs to be really vigilant about the language they use.

H: What’s coming up next for DRINKS? C: We’re hoping to do some UK shows. There’s no point in a band like DRINKS doing a lengthy tour because there aren’t many people who want to see us [laughs]. Maybe London, Manchester and somewhere up North. We’ll see – I’ve grown an aversion to touring since I’ve been a furniture maker. Then Tim’s just finishing a new White Fence album so I suppose I’ll be living in that world for a bit. We’re going to make sure the few shows we do are very good!

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Retold

Nico:

The Manchester Years 62

Retold Life after the Velvet Underground, in the industrial North,

by Daniel Dylan-Wray

Nico modelled for Chanel, appeared in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, sang for The Velvet Underground and released a string of truly inimitable solo albums that influenced a vast range of artists from Elliott Smith to Throbbing Gristle. Yet despite such accolades landing her with true cult hero status, there’s some periods of Nico’s life that don’t fit as neatly and glamorously into her timeline: such as her seven years spent in Manchester between 1981-88.

Moving from Paris to New York, the German-born artist left the modelling and acting world and leapt into a musical one, famously falling into Andy Warhol’s circle and onto the The Velvet Underground’s seminal debut album. Between 1967 and 1974 she then released four solo albums. Her debut, ‘Chelsea Girl’ – penned by friends and collaborators like Lou Reed, John Cale, Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne – is a collection of wistful folk-pop, humming with breezy, infectious melodies and hushed vocals that feel like extensions of the softer side she brought to the Velvet Underground.

When encouraged to write her own material, Nico gained a new sense of individualism on albums such as ‘The Marble Index’ and ‘Desertshore’. Gone were the gently plucked acoustic guitars and sweet vocals and in was a droning harmonium, songs about death and decay and a voice that plunged new depths and forged new tones. This period birthed a newfound identity both sonically and aesthetically: gone too was the blonde hair and pristine white clothing and in was dyed hair, black clothing and scuffed motorcycle boots.

Nico became seemingly less concerned about appearing conventionally pretty, vocally. After over a decade of feeling defined by her appearance and beauty, she embraced a vocal style that seemed to both challenge and redefine what constituted a beautiful voice, as it often echoed out like a ship’s foghorn slowly rumbling amidst a thick smog. Not only did this strange yet innovative new music – along with her newfound anti-conventional aesthetic – come to define Nico’s most creative period, but the albums became the definitive avant-garde neoclassical works of the entire era. As John Cale – who produced the bulk of Nico’s solo work – says in the 1995 documentary Nico: Icon, “If you look at what she was writing at that time, there was nobody else doing anything else even remotely similar.”

What comes next is a lesser known, unexplored black hole of Nico’s life.

— Another ruined city — After 1981’s ‘Drama of Exile’, Nico found herself in the rather unexpected city of Manchester and remained there for the best part of a decade. Initially paired up with a local promoter

(who replied: “who’s he?” when asked to put her on), Nico soon found herself managed by this man, Alan Wise.

James Young, who became a piano player in Nico’s band between 1981-86 and wrote a memoir about his time with her (Songs They Never Play on the Radio), recalls his first unexpected encounter with her, saying: “Out of nowhere there was this German lady on my doorstep with an old friend, Alan Wise.

Before I knew it, Nico was taking over my flat. First she colonised the bathroom and once she’d ‘freshened up’ she took over the kitchen, as she wanted to make lentil soup. She carried a bag of dried lentils with her, like a nomad.”

Wise had looked up Young when on tour with Nico in Oxford. You might have guessed that the freshening up Young refers to was actually them seeking out a place for Nico to take heroin. By this stage she was deep into addiction with the drug.

Later on that evening, Young got to see the other side of Nico, the one that wasn’t shooting up in his bathroom and making soup in his kitchen. “I was struck by the individuality of her music and persona, singing those strange medieval lullabies at her harmonium in an Oxford disco. It was totally incongruous and rather wonderful. I immediately grasped that this was a unique and original artist.”

Young soon found himself leaving his academic life in Oxford behind and moving to Manchester to join her band.

Basing herself in Manchester during the 1980s may seem a bizarre choice for someone who has a history attached to the elegance of 1950s Paris or the bohemian boom of 1960s and ’70s New York but Young feels the city was something she could relate to. “Nico liked Manchester. It was a dark gothic city and was in a state of semi-dereliction at the time; empty Victorian warehouses, factories closing down. She said it reminded her of Berlin, the ruined city of her youth.” Graham Dowdall, who was also in Nico’s band, echoes that she gravitated towards the “post-industrial landscape and griminess,” but also adds that there was the allure of “cheap smack.”

Nico lived in various places in the city, from flats in Prestwich to squats in Hulme. Young recalls her having close to no possessions during this period. “Just her harmonium and a bag with stuff in: her notebook, drug works, incense and reading material.”

Stella Grundy saw Nico for the first time at 16 and had her life changed. At Manchester Library Theatre in a room thick with cigarette and marijuana smoke, she recalls a set that was “beautiful, powerful and dark.” Ignoring the heckles for Velvet Underground tracks such as ‘Heroin’, Nico played Grundy’s request of ‘Frozen Warnings’, which she’d nervously called out for. “I was enraptured. From that night on I decided I wanted to be an artist, writer, singer – anything to be part of this world.”

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Retold Grundy would go on to be in bands such as Intastella and in 2007 wrote a multi-media play about Nico that ran for two years and is also now available as an eBook.

Grundy recalls seeing Nico drink in the local pubs of Prestwich, where apparently she would play pool with the locals who had no clue who she was. Occasionally she’d be pestered by people that did. “She didn’t like fans of the Velvet Underground mithering her about those times, although she was happy to write messages and autographs for people when asked. I’ve been shown a few of these items. Some people were unkind to her and took advantage though.” Grundy saw this up close as her boyfriend at the time even went backstage and stole her heroin needles as some sort of cultural memento from the “queen of the junkies”. Grundy even recalls being told that someone had stolen her diary.

— A proud addiction — The day-to-day existence of Nico during her Manchester years resembled that of most heroin addicts: shooting up or trying to get gear to shoot up. She described herself as reclusive and lived in places with blood-splattered walls from syringe splats, which she shared with other local users and musicians including John Cooper Clarke. There were periods she would live off a diet purely of custard and would claim, with some pride, to go prolonged periods without bathing. Young feels that this period of perceived disintegration was not necessarily all sordid demise and the destruction of a talent but instead an extension of Nico’s redefined personality. She took pride in her greying hair, sagging skin and needle-marked arms because they were the antithesis to everything she had once been told she was wonderful for. “She seemed to be embracing the scars of time and addiction saying ‘this is who I am.”

As a result, in terms of writing and recording new music, the Manchester years were some of Nico’s least productive. But fast money was often required to pay for her heavy addiction, and a way to get that was by touring. Wise would organise shows in the UK, across Europe and even as far as Tokyo and America – something that could often prove problematic given the needs of Nico, as well as the needs of some of the other touring parties who had their own chemical needs and personality idiosyncrasies. Young remembers “a hopeless tour of the USA, playing clubs in the boiling heat of summer. No money. Nico withdrawing. Arguments and bickering, all in a car with the air conditioning switched off to save fuel.”

Both Young and Dowdall remember the repeating drawled line of “are we near the border yet?” coming from Nico when on tour and then a sort of pandemonium erupting: things being hidden and stashed, including in Nico’s underwear and in her anus. Young recalls even being given a handful of used syringes from her that he quickly had to throw out of the window into the nearby water before reaching border guards. “Her running out of smack at the wrong time – like before a gig – was always a big problem,” he recalls, “meaning one of us would have to go

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out and hustle for a connection on the street and inevitably get ripped off.”

On top of this, Nico and her manager had a volatile relationship on and off the road. Dowdall describes it as: “very complex and not entirely healthy, although both got a lot of positive things out of it.” Similarly, Young repeats this dysfunctional image. “Alan was a very intelligent guy,” he says. “He was also highly emotional. He developed a passion for Nico that was not reciprocated and this was a source of deep frustration for him.

They had endless arguments. They lived by constantly tearing at each other like a crazed married couple. At the same time they were close friends. I would say that apart from Ari [Nico’s son] Alan was closest to Nico. I was never that close to her; my relationship was more professional. I realised early on that getting close to Nico meant sharing a propensity for addiction. Alan was a valium addict and his father had a chain of pharmacies.

He understood the chemistry of need, he could facilitate. He responded to people who were ill, whether physically or psychologically. He went under the sobriquet of ‘Doctor’ and took damaged people into his care.”

Stella Grundy feels this dependency was a potentially damaging one at times. “As a child of the 1930s she did defer to men a lot,” she says, “allowing them to make decisions for her and not always the right ones. She would constantly be without enough money and of course heroin does not come for free.

I actually think she just allowed people to control her like the drug. She was brave and talented and I believe lacked confidence and still felt she needed a man to help her when actually she didn’t. Her best work for me was her solo, playing the harmonium.”

Despite the savage addiction that controlled much of Nico’s existence, and the occasional shambolic and failing gigs in which her dark European music felt out of place with the shiny pop of the era, there were also moments of magic to be found.

“She was actually really positive and encouraging to work with,” recalls Dowdall. “I remember playing with her and the mic was broken but Nico started to sing acoustically. Every hair on my body stood up. Her voice was huge and resonant with all the weight she carried. She also taught me instantly to deviate anything, she was a trooper – no mic, no problem.”

Nico and her band, the Faction, would make one last studio album, 1985’s ‘Camera Obscura’. The following year she made some significant changes in her life, as Young tells me: “In ’86 Alan persuaded Nico to go on the methadone programme, especially since her main reliable dealer had been busted and was in prison. I think this was a mistake. Methadone is a horrible drug, it zombifises people. I didn’t like what it was doing to her.

I guess it made her easier to manage – no more running around to find a connection. Her health seemed to decline after that. We did a concert in Berlin at the Planetarium together and it was clear that she wasn’t well. She wanted to go to Ibiza to rest and review her life. I think she knew she was dying.” A short time later, in 1988, whilst in Ibiza, Nico did die, suffering a brain haemorrhage whilst out on a bicycle.

Retold

“Out of nowhere there was this German lady on my doorstep with an old friend. Before I knew it, Nico was taking over my flat�

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My Place Inside the home of the Dinosaur Jr frontman, by Stuart Stubbs Photography by Dustin Condren

J Mascis Amherst, Massachusetts, is pronounced ‘AM-erst’, giving rise to the local saying “only the ‘h’ is silent.” When I ask J Mascis what his hometown is like, after a customary slightly-too-long pause, he says: “it’s pretty quiet.” Still, it’s a slogan that looks good on a tea towel, in a small town known for its three colleges, poet Emily Dickinson (“Nick Cave tried to visit her house last week but it was closed,” J tells me) and Dinosaur Jr. Mascis was born here, stayed for college because he didn’t try getting in anywhere else and lives here once again following an extended time spend in New York to make it with the band.

“New York was the first place where Dinosaur were accepted,”

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he says. “We couldn’t catch a break around here. We met Sonic Youth and other people who seemed to like us.”

He now lives in a large, understated house that has been his home for the last twelve years, shared with his wife and their son. It was previously owned by Uma Thurman’s father, a professor of religion, and is one of those white-slatted, detached properties with a yard that wraps around its four sides.

Mascis welcomed us in and showed us around, failing to disappoint with his collections of skateboards, Big Muff pedals, vintage figurines and an abundance of the colour purple – all the things you’ve always hoped that J Mascis surrounds himself with.

My Place Grover Here in the dining room I have Grover [from Sesame Street]. I got this puppet recently but I had the same one when I was a child and it was the most memorable present I ever got. I looked to see if I could find one on eBay since I still remember that it was the most satisfying gift I ever received, somehow. This one doesn’t have the same vibe, but I was 7 or 8 when I got the first one, one Easter.

Tony Bennett painting Tony Bennett gave this painting to me when I played with him once. He painted it – it’s a Tony Bennett original. That was both the high and the low of my career. I was really psyched to play with him, and so were all of my Italian relatives and then they cut me out when it came out, so that was the low point. I even saw a picture of us together in something like People magazine when they were advertising it, and then they cut me.

Velvet Underground banana I was a big Velvets fan when I was young. I got to meet Lou Reed once, and it was pretty awesome. I’d seen him around a lot in New York, but he always looked in a pretty bad mood, y’know, and you’ve heard a lot of stories… But I played with Pete Townsend at this show, and then he played some Velvet Underground songs with Pete Townsend and he was in a really good mood afterwards, so I’m glad I waited until then to meet him.

Another hero of mine that I had the chance to meet but didn’t is Jimmy Page. I felt bad for him. He played on Saturday Night Live with Puff Daddy and afterwards I saw him in the hall and he was all sweaty. It seemed like a sad moment so I didn’t want to talk to him. Because at first I thought it was a joke. I was out on the floor when they were playing, and I was like, ‘he’s playing with Puff Daddy?’ So I was laughing at first, but then I got really sad after about a minute of watching it.

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My Place

Rolling Stones skis I ski on these all the time. They’re probably quite rare, but then again who wants them, too? I got them from a college ski sale and they’re pretty good skis so I use them a lot. I’ve tried to get Dinosaur skis made, but there isn’t much of a demand for them.

It’s easier to get skateboards made. The most extravagant piece of merch that we’ve got made before is probably a turntable.

Motorhead has some skis, too, and we’re not talking about in the ’80s – this is ten years ago or something. But skis have gotten hip again, because kids don’t want to snowboard with their snowboarding parents.

Records There are a few more, but this is most of my records. I don’t have a one-in-one-out policy with my records yet, but I do have that with my bikes and a little bit with guitars. I’ve got six or seven bikes because I cycle a lot. There’s a big bike path that connects the town, so I’ll go to the Whole Foods on the bike path every day, or I’ll go to the next town, where there are more shows. I wish they’d had the path when I was a kid because it would have been easier to buy records. These days I stream music if I’m in the car, but if I like something I want it on record. I can’t get into it otherwise.

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Fisher Price / Lego J Mascis I bought some old Fisher Price Sesame Street things for my kid but he started abusing them, so I thought I’d just put them in here and he won’t even realise they’ve gone. The Lego is supposed to be me. I played at the Lego factory near here and they gave me that as a present. It was pretty amazing at Lego – there are these guys there who just build these crazy things. One of them was building a life size model of the Liberty Bell – that’s all he was doing all day! What an amazing job. I think only the one guy that booked me was a fan. Everyone else was talking while I played.

My Place Photo of Matt Dillon and Allison Anders I have this picture of me and Matt Dillon and the director Allison Anders. We were on a movie together – Grace of My Heart [1996]. It was fun seeing how a movie is done, except Matt Dillon was supposed to be like Brian Wilson and I was his engineer, and then he tried to start talking to me in character when the scene was over – y’know, method acting – and I couldn’t do that. I had to walk away from him. I just put my hands up and was like, ‘I can’t do that.’ I’ve done a few films with Allison Anders, and I was in The Double, by Richard Ayoade. I like acting. I don’t think I’m very good at it, but I like checking it all out. The bottom photo on the far right is me and Richard Thompson [of Fairport Convention]. I interviewed him for Interview magazine because he liked a cover I did for a covers album of his songs. He is someone that I go to see live a lot still.

Skateboard desks These are from Neil Blender. He was a big skateboarder and he did the art on his boards. He gave me one of the boards and I became friendly with him in the late ’80s. He was a great skater back then. The middle one is the only one I’ve skated on, but it had rails to protect the art. Neil later did some artwork for me, too [for J Mascis + The Fog].

Big Muff museum Before the Internet, someone stole my Big Muff pedal when I was playing with GG Allin. I then realised that I really needed it when I tried to do a show without it at CBGB’s and everyone was like, ‘you just don’t sound like yourself – something’s weird.’ I realised that I had to get another one so when I’d see them on tour I get them because that was my sound. It turned out that some of them are rare, so instead of china in the china cabinet I set up my Big Muff museum. I don’t use any of them – I just have the same one that I bought as a replacement and I just use that.

Signed Tony Alva board I met Tony Alva a few years ago, which was exciting. He was the biggest skateboarder in the ’70s. He was the man. There’s a movie about him and he’s in that Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary – he was in the Zephyr skateboarding team. This is the kind of board that I used to ride. I’d ride a lot of ramp and half pipes and quarter pipes. I did see Tony Hawk once, at six in the morning at my local airport, which was strange. Walking out of the airport, he was like, ‘J Mascis?’ I’m like, ‘Tony Hawk? What the fuck are you doing here!?’ He’s very tall.

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Interview

Neko Case has a new piece of artwork coming out on June 1. This one comes with 12 songs, which I’m sure are actually pretty great. Maybe you’ll get a chance to check them out next year, once you’ve stopped staring at this image. I’ve tried to look away, but I can’t. It’s the best piece of artwork I’ve seen that features a woman with 98 cigarettes in her hair. Where her hair is so long that it’s been made into a scarf. Where the fags/hair combo has set fire to her shoulder. Where an ooze of black tar spells out the words ‘Hell-On’ on her collarbone. Where she looks like Celine Dion but is Neko Case. I’m not making this up – look!

Before we unravel this nightmare and what it represents (it’s Trump, isn’t it?), I need to tell you something about how record sleeves work. If you’re doing it right you need to ask yourself one question when designing your album art – would I wear a T-shirt with this on? In this instance, it’s a solid no from me. Do you think Neko Case gives a shit about that?! The world’s vaping itself inside out and Neko Case has 98 fags on her head! You probably didn’t even know that there were still 98 fags in existence.

The point is, Neko Case is flouting the T-shirt rule and I

like how pissed her merch team would have been about that.

On the cigs front, let’s tackle those first. I think it’s fair to say that they represent mankind – resolutely individual and simultaneously oblivious to how alike they/we are, especially in the modern, consumer world, as they/we clamber over one another for selfish survival atop a head/planet.

Stupid cigs/us!

As glaringly obvious as the cigarettes are, though, the other elements are more mysterious. What’s with the hair wrapping round into a shawl, beyond a reminder of how freaky hair is?

And is Case even aware that her shoulder is on fire? She looks like she’s casually adjusting her dress at a wedding.

There’s a good chance that this whole cover is designed to bate YouTube commenters into writing ‘Gurl is on FIRE!!!’, in which case, mission accomplished.

It’s a good cover, right? Good because you’re not sure that it’s not shit. Good because you don’t want a T-shirt of it, although didn’t you say that about the cover for ‘Performance and Cocktails’ by Stereophonics?

My only gripe with this one is the repetition of ‘HellOn’, in black sludge (a nice touch) and also in that cheap, condensed, sans-serif font (yuck). It’s a little over-cooked, isn’t it? A bit cowardly? Unless... it’s not a comment on +1 culture, is it? Oh yes. VERY nice.

The man behind all the best lyrics on ‘Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino’

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illustration by kate prior