Reviews

Speakers Corner Quartet — Further Out Than The Edge (otih) It’s no easy feat to sell out the Barbican, especially without having released an album, but that’s exactly what Speakers Corner Quartet did in 2021.

As a band, they may be relatively unknown, but as individuals – and as part of a larger South London collective – the tendrils of their influence are far-reaching. Made up of Raven Bush, Peter Bennie, Kwake Bass and Biscuit, the band have been playing together under various guises since 2006. They have arguably been the bedrock of the South London musical community these past 15 years with their frequent collaborators running like a who’s who of South London talent: Sampha, Coby Sey, Tirzah, Kelsey Lu, Leá Sen, Joe ArmonJones, Kae Tempest, James Massiah, Mica Levi and Shabaka Hutchings. These are the same names that came on stage alongside the band at the Barbican to rapturous applause. They are also the same individuals who feature on Further Out Than The Edge, the debut album by Speakers Corner Quartet.

Across 13 tracks, the band paint a canvas with a multitude of hues, never allowing themselves to be boxed into a single genre or sound. Throughout, the band holds space for each of its guests to flourish. Much like their live performance, people float in and out seamlessly, adding new colours to the palette. The instrumentation and production throughout the album are floor-raising, capable of making each of the individual guests’ talents shine even brighter.

On the opener ‘On Grounds’, Coby Sey’s vocals nestle so deeply into the groove, it’s as if he’s being sucked into a riptide. Over a smouldering plucked double bass and gentle strings, Tirzah’s voice flows like smoke, shimmering softly on ‘Fix’. Leá Sen’s vocals on ‘Dreaded!’ are hushed and anxious, like a prayer. Sampha’s shimmering falsetto floats delicately on ‘Can We Do This’ while LEILAH lets her vocal range climb ‘Soapbox Soliloquy’ as if it were an obstacle course, her voice soaring above the production one moment before becoming skittish to reflect the drum rolls. Throughout the album, there is a pronounced melancholy that is as grandiose as it is intimate.

Further Out Than The Edge is the first release on Out There In Here (OTIH) records, a new label set up by Raj Chaudhuri and Kwake Bass; it’s a fitting note for a band who have taken unconventional turns at every opportunity to get here today. The quartet’s names are scattered throughout seminal London releases, providing uncredited instrumentation at times on projects. Kwake was MF Doom’s drummer and a musical director for Sampha and Kae Tempest. Numerous artists point to Biscuit as the one who taught them how to DJ or produce, while he also holds his own on the flute. Double bassist Peter Bennie’s influence looms large while Raven Bush has played in a multitude of bands.

The band itself was formed in 2006 when Biscuit and Kwake met at the Speakers Corner jam night in Brixton. “There was a call to loads of musicians,” Biscuit explains. “Loads of people turned out. What remained at the end of the jam was a cello, flute, double bass, and drums. And that was the kind of lineup.” Speakers Corner Quartet went on to release an EP in 2009, Further Back Than The Beginning; where most bands would follow it up with several releases, this group just kept rehearsing and rehearsing, while also playing to live audiences, refining their craft while helping elevate others. Members have come and gone but this iteration of the band has existed since 2011.

“The trajectory wasn’t to release music,” Kwake says. “We wanted to give people an experience that you could only have in the room.” Bush echoes him, stating, “There’s never been a rush as we’re just happy being in a room together. Playing instruments is just an extension of that and I think that’s what the community is all about, it’s just another part of the conversation.”

Throughout Further Out Than The Edge, there are harmonising vocals with the quartet playing double-dutch with the instrumentation: guests hopping in and out with ease as the band changes the direction of the ropes. It’s reflective of the larger South London community, an effortless melting pot of sound and personalities coming together to share a commitment to creativity. Over the years, the frustration the band felt at being unable to finish this project was outweighed by the love they felt for the wider community. Helping their peers and friends whose projects they strengthened grounded them as much as it inspired them. “It’s more about humbling the ego and being patient,” Bennie says.

Watching generational talents come into their own is inherently watchable, and it’s ever-present on Further Out Than The Edge. Take the standout track ‘Geronimo Blues’. Recorded in 2017, both its production as well as the viscerally vicious words spoken by South London poet Kae Tempest reflecting the frustrations of a society focused heavily on capital gains, feel timeless. “We live in the thralls of a gaggle of demons / With horsey demeanour and outdated opinions / And they sit on their lawns with their thousand-pound picnics / Fresh from a hard day of speaking in tongues and murdering children / Cutting the funds to education and healthcare / They sentence our young to a lifetime of debt,” Tempest says over grand reflective strings and a pensively plucked double bass.

After spending a decade working on others’ music, whether Tirzah or Doom, Kae Tempest or Sampha, the Quartet found that the pandemic allowed them to fully focus on their material. Working entirely remotely, they practised and recorded via the internet, building software and hardware to get the right sound for their album. It also allowed them to experiment with

Albums

ideas: robots playing instruments, something they debuted surreptitiously at the Barbican show and hope to unveil properly in the future.

By the end of the album, hope shoots through. Lafawndah and Trustfall bring atmospheric vocals over upbeat production on ‘Behind The Sun’. There is a toe-tapping pace to ‘Shabz Needs Sun’ with Shabaka Hutchings’ melodic shakuhachi flute playfully carrying the song while ‘Karainagar’, an ode to Biscuit’s family heritage and dedicated to his recently deceased mother, sees Mica Levi featuring on the album’s closer and most solemn track.

A culture addicted to corporatised saccharine pop-infused chart-topping hits is fundamentally a broken one. Without overtly attempting to, Speakers Corner Quartet has created a project that feels like the antithesis of that: prioritising purpose over spectacle, intention over the industry, all the while speaking their truth about the malaise and decay of a city they love. Further Out Than The Edge, a title coined by Tempest, is tightly melodic and luxuriously layered; instantly memorable without needing to be cheaply infectious, as it’s so gratifyingly hard to categorise. Like a tidal wave building, Speakers Corner Quartet have been biding their time. Now, it feels like the moment for their talents to be finally public, to be realised. The wave crashes and Further Out Than The Edge marks the beginning of a new phase of their journey, a new circle whose dawn comes from the natural end of another.

Dhruva Balram

wouldn’t even fill one side of a cassette, there’s a good case to be made for Tracey Denim being their de facto debut. It’s not just circumstances, either: Tracey Denim feels like a debut, too, brimming with the sort of boldly odd artistic poses that only a debut band can strike alongside a charmingly wide-eyed naivety.

What’s most striking about this record, though, is that despite working fairly tightly within the confines of idiomatic post-punk throughout, it doesn’t really sound like anything else in that bracket: opener ‘Guard’, with its childlike piano plonks over addictive, cut-up drums, offers simultaneous simplicity and complexity, and the looping montage effect of ‘Nurse!’’s disparate sections just slammed up against one another is startling. This production technique –with certain things in common with the Dust Brothers or Odelay!-era Beck – has real potency here, especially when the loops strip back to just drums and bass and are left to run, unadorned, serving Bar Italia’s clean, clever, wonky songwriting beautifully.

The album’s middle third stumbles slightly – another textbook tell that we’re in debut album territory – with the same ideas recycled and shuffled into decreasingly different iterations, but it’s nothing life-threatening, and the closing three tracks recover, hinting at grander things to come. It adds up to an internal contradiction of an album: curious, wrong-footing, and, on its frequent highs, deliciously compelling. 7/10 Sam Walton

Jam City Presents EFM there’s complete clarity: Latham set out to create an album for the club and absolutely nailed it.

In the release notes he speaks of nights in Liquid and Envy, Photek’s ‘Mine to Give’ and sticky champagne nightclub floors. Yet even with that sentimentality and nods to rites of passage for those of us of a certain age, Jam City Presents EFM is no nostalgia-heavy throwback; instead, it’s a work of gossamer production and low key summer heaters.

It opens softly with the glossy ‘Touch Me’ and its easy blend of pop, R&B and synth hooks while ‘Times Square’ is similarly understated, shifting to a minimal house beat and guitar line funk that’s like Daft Punk playing ‘Make Love’ at Jacques Greene’s house.

The guitars and synths that became such a feature of his previous work resurface here but take on fresh new forms. On ‘Tears at Midnight’, Latham goes full Drive soundtrack with pulsing, spacious ’80s synth pop, slides into the gorgeous slow jam of ‘Do it’, and kicks up ‘Wild n Sweet’ into housey tones, perky synth and sweeping bass. But it’s standout track ‘Reface’ where everything truly comes together: a cranky, distorted UK bassinflected banger that opens with raining synth, drifts into dreamy guitar breaks and hits with a satisfying, face-screwing beat. Mission accomplished. 8/10

Reef Younis

Bar Italia — Tracey Denim (matador)

Officially, this is Bar Italia’s third album. However, given that their first two slipped out unceremoniously on Dean Blunt’s World Music label and, combined,

Jam City — Jam City Presents EFM (earthly/mad decent) Last time out, Jack Latham aka Jam City was all in on the neon, pop-rock fantasy of Pillowland, pushing things to a wonderfully kaleidoscopic, chaotic place. But here on

Jenny

Lewis — Joy’All (blue note)

Largely written during a week-long workshop run by Beck, Jenny Lewis’ fifth album casts her as a hard-nosed Stevie Nicks. ‘Psychos’ and ‘Balcony’ have the wide-screen, soft-focus of ’70s Fleetwood Mac but there’s usually a bite in her lyrical specificity.

She may joke about being “a rock- and-roll disciple”, with songs referencing AM Radio standards such as ’64 Malibus and John Denver, but this is a picket-fence America that, under its Nashville pedal steel and bouncing soul, is full of danger for teenage girls and where the essence of life is suffering.

The edge is easy to ignore given Dave Cobb’s production quality, which gives it a vintage classic rock vibe and captures the intimacy of a live band. This works particularly well on the stomping country-rock of ‘Love Feel’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’, which draw a thread to her Rilo Kiley days and make it sound like classic rock was always her destination.

If there are moments that slip close to cliché, such as the break on ‘Love Feel’ and the ’60s girl-group spoken word introduction to ‘Chain of Tears’, then it’s done with knowing intention. This means that Joy’All is less about cynicism than the hardened will to survive.

7/10 Susan Darlington

chords and cataclysmic drums. The slow march of ‘Derail’ and ‘Reproach’ display an unyielding emotional weight, one that saxophonist and guitarist Takiaya Reed says “is congruent with the message of the music, and the heaviness feels emblematic of the world’s situation.”

New ground is explored too. Album bookends ‘Want’ and ‘Desire’ stray further into electronic experimentalism than any of Divide and Dissolve’s other work to date, with circling melodies and synthesiser drones creating an atmosphere of yearning and upheaval without the need for earth-endingly heavy guitar or drum work. More traditional heaviness isn’t sidelined for long though: the Napalm Death-like blastbeats of ‘Simulacra’, for example, push Systemic into grindcore territory.

Most impressive here is the fact that the band have maintained an unwavering commitment to their sound and to their demands for Black and Indigenous liberation. That they’ve managed this whilst also furthering aesthetic possibilities and achieving such a visceral emotional affect through their music is remarkable; Systemic is one of the most vital, rewarding releases of this year.

9/10

Tom Critten

technical prowess. ‘Tropic Sub’ channels Thee Oh Sees at their synthiest, Khruangbin’s guitar lines and ’80s Nintendo soundtracks, while ‘Areca’ blends industrial, sci-fi drones with vibrant riffs until eventually mutating into sampled drumming. The overwhelming creativity is spectacular.

‘Thung Beat’ takes an aggressive turn, and is all the better for it. Shrugging off the album’s initial dreamscape whimsy, the brothers dive headfirst into a punchier live setup. Originally combining crunchy percussion, upright bass and steel drum, and eventually ending somewhere completely unrecognisable and closer to footwork, it exemplifies the album’s heights. Its multiple pivots both within and between the songs lend an air of the best DJ sets. The tracklist seamlessly becomes a free-flowing and gloriously disorientating whole. In lesser hands it could be exhausting – Mong Tong 夢東 just about hold it together. The album eventually starts to drag, seemingly empty of the invention that makes the earlier tracks such a thrill. Lacking urgency or innovation, the tracks edge into videogame pastiche, relying more heavily on straightforward synths and plodding rhythms. On the whole though, Mong Tong 夢東’s vitality is a treat to witness. 7/10 Jake Crossland

Divide and Dissolve — Systemic (invada) The sonic and political anarchitecture of 2021’s Gas Lit saw Divide and Dissolve reach their widest audience yet with their bludgeoning-yet-beautiful battle cry against systemic oppression, skimming between the brutality of metal and the assuaging experimental soundscapes of classical leitmotifs and melodic refrains.

Sonically, new album Systemic largely represents more of the same as the duo set out to honour their core artistic intentions, but owing to the success of Gas Lit, this time round Divide and Dissolve seem more enabled than ever to express their profound intensity. Looped and layered saxophones provide the bedrock for tracks like ‘Indignation’ that continually grow in ferocity, crescendoing in a fury of opaque guitar

Mong Tong 夢東 — Tao Fire (guruguru brain) Mong Tong 夢東 are Taiwanese brothers Hom Yu and Jiun Chi, who carry their moniker through from a childhood nickname. Fittingly, its meaning is mutable from language to language: their hypnotic psych takes inspiration from anywhere and everywhere to build something constantly shifting and completely unique.

At their best, early in Tao Fire ’s tracklist, the brothers throw everything at the wall in a hyperactive display of

TEKE::TEKE — Hagata (kill rock stars) Prefacing Hagata, the followup to their critically acclaimed 2021 release Shirushi, TEKE::TEKE’s vocalist Maya Kuroki noted that the album’s title suggests “something present but also something left over from someone or something no longer there. It’s like waking up from a dream, or being connected to the other side of something.” There are numerous instances across these ten invigorating and immersive compositions where the listener is transported to another era (mostly the late 1960s) or even transposed into some kind of alternative reality.

The Montreal-based septet develop their tremendously colourful and expansive psych-rock arrangements with a variety of captivating tones from flute – a primary player on the record that shines particularly bright on the infectious opener ‘Garakuta’ and ‘Hoppe’ – which are complemented by a striking range of guitar riffs and tones which will make you think of anyone from Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, The Undertones and the unsettling tremolo on Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’.

TEKE::TEKE have poured their hearts and souls into Hagata. From start to finish it brims with personality and presents so many extraordinary moments, notably on the shapeshifting closer ‘Jinzou Maria’ which transforms from a song that could feature in a folkhorror into a sweet and wistful sedate pop melody. In all, this is an inspired body of work. 8/10 Zara Hedderman vative. While Jockstrap will pack songs with ideas, and 100 Gecs can pursue the joke over anything else, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos dial back to a more accessible balance. ‘True Life’ references an actual battle with Neil Young’s lawyer, but not to the extent that it overwhelms its glut of scuzzy, addictive melodies.

Where 2010s acts to whom lazy journalists might compare this group (Sleigh Bells, Dirty Projectors) spent their time adorning and complicating in the search for something novel, Water From Your Eyes instead dismantle and reassemble everything they’ve absorbed after a lifetime on the internet, and perhaps explain it best themselves on standout ‘14’: “I traced what I erased”. Gorgeous strings are looped into a rare emotional respite from the havoc elsewhere, and Brown’s vocals are genuinely affecting even while invoking vomit.

‘Out There’ is another beguiling highlight – a phone-alarm synth regularly interrupting a kinetic and aggressive bass-drum groove – and captures the best of the album. Thankfully, Everyone’s Crushed isn’t pissing anyone off despite any trollish intention. It’s honest, smart, refined – and simply excellent.

8/10 Jake Crossland

tic, harsh beauty of desolate uplands, colliding, combining and reforming at an unhurried pace that offers a musical approximation of the glacial speed that the landscape around us shifts over the course of centuries.

Craven Faults’ 2020 debut Erratics and Unconformities (and series of early EPs) contained idle moments which suggested that the machines had been left to correspond with each other while the human(s) in charge of composition and production had popped out for a stroll. (The musician(s) behind the project remains anonymous, which adds to the overall impression that these ageless, elemental sounds were dug out from the soil.) A more immediately alluring offering despite many of the tracks not thinking twice about hopping over the ten-minute mark, Standers is rife with rhythmic suspense and slowly evolving melodic build-ups – hooks, even – that are guaranteed to pull in and hold on to the attentive listener.

Water From Your Eyes — Everyone’s Crushed (matador) Water From Your Eyes have earned a reputation for trolling by clashing dumb irony up alongside genuine sincerity and musically shifting between beauty and chaos at breakneck pace. Turning on their track record, Everyone’s Crushed, their first album for Matador, sees them transform delicate synths into industrial interruption and aggressive riffs into elegant hooks, in understated fashion.

Similarly to their post-pop internet contemporaries, they take all of music’s canon at face value, disregarding snobbish critics, and fashion it into something inno-

Craven Faults — Standers (leaf) The name Craven Faults comes from a formation of geologically significant crustal fractures across the Pennines. It’s an apt choice for the epic music contained on Standers. If ancient rock formations were to develop an interest in sound production and gained access to a pile of Harmonia and Cluster vinyl, alongside a bank of analogue and modular machinery to realise their musical vision, the outcomes could well resemble Standers: vast, sturdy chunks of sound equipped with the majes-

The result is a hypnotic, idiosyncratic gem. Much of electronic music is designed for dark nocturnal interior spaces. Standers is more evocative of a wind-swept ramble over steep hillsides in search of post-industrial ruins and ancient monuments. 8/10

Janne Oinonen

Madison McFerrin — I Hope You Can Forgive Me (madmcferrin) Music is in Madison McFerrin’s DNA. Her father Bobby is an acclaimed jazz and folk singer, who had a huge hit with ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, and her brother Taylor is also in the industry. The former features on her debut album, which follows a series of well-received EPs.

Starting her career a capella, she created a distinctive style of meticulously layered and self-harmonised vocals.

These ten tracks, on which she’s also producer and arranger, remain centred by what Questlove dubbed ‘soul-appella’. ‘God Herself’, on which she’s accompanied by finger-clicks, takes in doo-wop, while ‘Goodnight’ collages silky vocals to mimic droning synths.

The album also expands on 2019’s You + I EP, on which she started to incorporate instrumentation. This creates the neo-soul of ‘Testify’ and ‘OMW’, on which her voice reaches an insouciant mid-range, alongside the chilled ’90s pop-soul of ‘Fleeting Melodies’. There are also touches of jazz, especially on ‘(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now’ and ‘Stay Away (From Me)’, which could easily fit into a Lauryn Hill set.

The fuzzy warmth of the album’s production gives it a retro vibe but the compositions, despite their nods to the past, are firmly rooted in the present.

8/10 Susan Darlington beat, and standout ‘Telecommunication’ is a baptism of electronic sounds given form by the cleansing vocals that seep through it, its affectation sitting uneasily with its artifice as it glitches into a blinding guitar solo.

Every madcap experiment the fivepiece throw out there pays off. In truth The God Phone is at its (relative) weakest when it strays into familiar territory for the band such as on ‘The Bishop and The Burner’, the sound merely menacing instead of mind-altering.

When The God Phone hits its frequently glorious heights, it’s not only a completely different beast to the Londoners’ debut album, but to anything else out there at the moment. A staggeringly confident and progressive second album that is a succession of silicone and sin, salvation and spectacle, the sublime and the simulacrum.

8/10 Robert Davidson

Shabazz Palaces on closer ‘Going Up’ is just heavenly.

The record’s biggest tune, however, comes when Kassa keeps the mic to himself on ‘Ready to Ball’. A jazzrap zinger, full of vigour and vim and verve, the combination of pitched-up Quasimoto-style adlibs and spiralling piano is as perfect a cocktail as you’ll taste all year. Kassa finds himself in a bind trying to look after himself financially and mentally, at the same time, but on this track, and indeed the rest of Animals, these anxieties are cathartically transformed into something far more powerful. 8/10 Cal

Cashin

Lunch Money Life — The God Phone (wolf tone) God isn’t dead. Or at least that’s what Lunch Money Life purport on their second full-length The God Phone, a densely-constructed concept album that tells the intricate story of a society both advanced and regressed by the emergence of scientific proof that God exists.

Not only is the narrative a departure from the world we know, but Lunch Money Life’s notoriously unfettered sound is dismantled and glued back together to produce an astonishingly fresh development that possesses a techno-spiritualcomplex at its heart.

The title track, featuring III Japonia whose vocals are either spoken, sung or rapped entirely in Japanese, is a dystopic dreamscape full of tension and intrigue. ‘Mother’ is a wild hyperpop banger infiltrated by a deep reggae-dub

Kassa Overall — Animals (warp) Very few things satisfy quite like the seamless fusion of jazz and hip hop, when swirling sax slivers around silken beats, and the trumpets get a bit involved. Kassa Overall, the supreme beatsmith and bandleader hailing from Seattle, understands this perfectly. He spent the majority of the 2000s studying jazz at Oberlin and playing drums with big jazz names, but always harboured a hunger to produce hip hop.

Animals is Kassa’s third album, his first with Warp, and sees these influences stitched together perfectly on one complete patchwork. All jazz drama and velveteen underground rap, ‘Animals’ is a glittering record also littered by features from top names in both fields. A redeyed Danny Brown verse ushers in ‘Spinning Coin’, whilst some lively interplay between West Coast royalty Lil B and

ANOHNI & The Johnsons — My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross (rough trade) It’s head-turning, but returning to her ‘& The Johnsons’ suffix is also full of purpose, like everything ANOHNI does. This original moniker was first adopted in the early ’90s, when ANOHNI was a member of Blacklips, a New York drag collective that operated far away from the ‘daylight culture’ of the city. Then, she was more drawn to freakish visual art and ragged live performance. The songs came after, out of necessity, when an increasingly hostile right-wing government gradually scrubbed and sanitised the queer nightlife that already existed on the margins. She looked to figures like Martha P. Johnson for inspiration, hence ‘the Johnsons’.

Martha P. Johnson was a secret knowledge then, even in queer circles. Queer history wasn’t a given, and it still isn’t. At the height of the AIDS pandemic, as a culture began to vanish around her, ANOHNI was keenly aware of how easily the lives and art of marginalised groups could be flattened and forgotten. “People knew me to be a repository for a certain kind of information, especially information that reached back a little bit further into the imagination of a past,” she recounted to Art Forum recently.

On her sixth album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, ANOHNI reaches out to the past and the future simultaneously. There’s an emotional pureness to her songwriting, voice and lyrics that makes it feel as if the album is expanding through time as you listen. Written and recorded with producer Jimmy Hogarth alongside a tight studio band, the record has a no-frills one-take quality of an older era. The rawness is needed for these personal documentations of communal life.

Where 2016’s Hopelessness used blunt and specific lyrical references to contemporary politics and its atrocities, this album is more guarded. She hugs her central subjects close to her chests like painful memories and lost loves. Still, the instant emotional heft remains a constant. Like many of the best protest albums, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is universal and multifaceted.

‘It Must Change’ blurs the lines between romantic love and political upheaval, all captured in ANOHNI’s commanding and vulnerable voice. She mirrors Gaye’s What’s Going On? in form, beckoning the audience to answer her question. What do you think is going on? What do you think must change? “The truth is that our love will ricochet through eternity,” she sings.

‘Go Ahead’ follows with a clattering argument. She’s defeated rather than defiant. “Go ahead and burn me down / Go ahead, kill your friends,” she screams. “I can’t stop you.” Death approaches throughout the album. Sometimes gently, as she looks back; sometimes with force. On ‘Sliver of Ice’, she stares into oblivion with the “taste of water” on her tongue. That feels like one of the more hopeful moments.

On ‘Can’t’, she’s swallowed by grief. The song is jubilant and raging, capturing the manic energy and denial that takes over in mourning. “I don’t want you to be dead,” she sings plainly, stuck on that thought as a band plays on.

It’s a powerful and honest performance, subtle sax and string lines softening the edges around her.

Then there’s ‘Scapegoat’, a masterful highpoint of her bold and uncomfortably frank lyrical style, in which she imagines killing an unnamed scapegoat. It’s a queasy, slow-motion ballad that grows more anguished as it twists on. She lets herself become the villain and victim at once, through a ghostly, deadened vibrato. “It’s not personal,” she sighs. You think of all the scapegoats similarly punished for existing.

Instrumentally, the record is reserved and tasteful, leaving space for the writing to have the desired impact. Still, there’s interplay, cohesion and a sense of timelessness: the record would have had just as much power if ANOHNI were sitting at a piano 60 years ago. Take ‘It’s My Fault’, an eerie song of the shared ecological guilt that we place on ourselves; its jazz and folk inflections evoke Simone and Mitchell.

The record’s final third is weighty and existential, especially ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’, which explores survivors’ guilt, geological decay and end-of-days panic. In the background of the record, ANOHNI sees herself joining her fallen sisters, fading before our eyes. There’s hope in the closing moments, where she acknowledges the power of being part of a queer lineage.

Pain colours My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, but there’s also an abundance of life, and an outstretched hand. ANOHNI documents it all, to nourish those who move forward. 9/10 Skye Butchard to a sublime, global-scale response. Since then, he has created prominent records like I’ll Tell You What and Established!, cementing his position as the godfather of Chicago footwork. His new album Legacy Volume 2 continues this excellent run.

It’s an anthology of tracks created over an extended period of time, inspired by words and sounds he found during his days and nights in Chicago. Opening track ‘Eraser’ positions us with a dark, dynamic, bass-line and vocals that really set the tone for the breezy marathon ahead.

Returning to his iconic, repetitive vocal loops and rhythmically syncopated drums he’s again able to produce a collage of multi-flavoured dancefloor numbers; ‘Say Grace’, for example, is filled with sharp-edged drums, choppedup vocals and atmospheric samples that create a story for its listeners. Pure artistry at its finest.

Legacy Volume 2 adds a more minimal yet playful filter to Chicago footwork than previous RP Boo albums, allowing the emotional and humorous samples of his vocals to take the front seat and challenging dancers to showcase their talent; see the way that ‘Pop Machine’ is built upon an accumulation of recorded cuts taken from and inspired by a day at work on a broken money machine.

An innovator inside and out, RP Boo has long had the ability to take selected recognisable samples and cook up a glorious, chaotic masterpiece; with Legacy Volume 2, he’s done it in style yet again. 8/10 Jazz Brown

RP Boo — Legacy Volume 2 (planet mu) It’s been ten years since RP Boo (Kavain Space) released his album Legacy

McKinley Dixon — Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (city slang) Named after the trilogy of novels from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? is McKinley Dixon taking a beat, and a breath, after his intense, complex studio

debut For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her.

On first listens, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? can feel like another rich, busysounding album, but repeat listens showcase the progressive intent Dixon wanted to demonstrate this time around. “I was making these really dense and chaotic songs, stuffing whatever thought I had into five-and-a-half minutes,” he shares in the release notes.

In Loud And Quiet’s review of that debut, we said that Dixon was “a string quartet away from baroque pop bedlam”. But here he is, organizing a fleet of live instrumentation (from keys to strings to gentle bass) with a focus that refines and complements his powerful lyrical energy.

‘Sun, I Rise’ has the orchestral swells alongside Angelica Garcia’s deep, lustrous vocal but Dixon’s biting narration keeps it hard-hitting. ‘Mezzanine Trippin’ is more chaotic and desperate with a jagged staccato beat adding a Tyler the Creator ‘Yonkers’-era intensity. And ‘Run Run Run’ burns a bit brighter with crisp boom-bap percussion and twinkling piano lending the track a musical lightness that almost belies the seriousness of its gun crime commentary.

At this point, Dixon isn’t just an increasingly vital lyricist, he’s a conductor, arranger, and vivid storyteller who wonders and wanders but locks in with an instant, metronomic click. He might have been more selective here but his stories aren’t diminished for it. 7/10 Reef Younis if it was really belting down outside my windows. A mixture of house music and post-punk, with distorted vocals over vintage drum machines and a sonicscape that spans from the most obscure industrial sound to the lightness of yé-yé French pop, the Manchester outfit’s music-making crosses and destroys any possible boundary of genres and attitudes, creating a detonating new palette. Recorded in a variety of unusual locations – Bristol shopping malls, Gothic crypts, West Country caves – the album is packed with novel acoustics which set its sound apart. Valentine Caulfield, Scott Fair, Simon Catling and Alex MacDougall have also spoken about the way in which they draw their inspiration from films where the language of cinema is disrupted, and masterfully apply the same treatment to their music. Adding another layer of exotic, unsettling mystery are Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics in her native French, whose delicate musicality clashes against the roughness of the sound. All this means that I’ve Seen A Way sets the bar pretty high for a debut. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

Zamrock group for resting on their laurels, but Zango regularly treads new ground. The album is a far groovier monster than anything from their extensive back catalogue. ‘By The Time You Realize’ and ‘Avalanche of Love’ maintain their signature psych rock edge while keeping more than one eye on the dance floor, elevating the album above pure intrigue towards something that is genuinely exciting on its own merit.

The funk flows effortless throughout, resulting in an album tailor-made for late summer. The sunny day synths of ‘Malango’ scream September barbecue, while you can almost hear the ice lollies being cracked out underneath the William Onyeabor-tastic beats of ‘Streets of Lusaka’.

By keeping one eye on the future, WITCH have ensured they won’t be defined by their past. Don’t call it a comeback. Zango proves there’s a new chapter ready to be written by this lot. 8/10 Jack

Doherty

Mandy, Indiana — I’ve Seen A Way (fire talk) ‘The Driving Rain (18)’, the central track in Mandy, Indiana’s debut album, I’ve Seen A Way, is introduced by the sound of pouring rainfall. The listening experience, up to that point, had been so alien that I had to stop to understand

WITCH — Zango (desert daze sound) A group’s history can be inhibiting to a review, dictating the direction of the writing without focusing on the music at hand. This is especially true when tackling music by artists rediscovered after years in the musical wilderness.

Thankfully, Zambian icons WITCH make things incredibly easy. Zango, their first album in over 39 years, follows their 2019 comeback documentary WITCH: We Intend To Cause Havoc and sees the group enter their second act revitalised, completely free from the weight of their past.

You’d forgive the legendary

Amaarae — Fountain Baby (interscope) Amaarae is taking a worldwide approach to pop on her record Fountain Baby, taking inspiration from every corner of the globe along with orchestral instrumentation and the hooks of classic R&B. However, the album’s aesthetic being stretched so thin has left the overall record at a bit of a loss.

‘Angels in Tibet’ seduces you with falsettos that lure you in and bass-tone whispers that make you lean even closer; soon, you’re under the hypnotic groove of Amaarae. There is a hint of PinkPantheress in the cutesy sound of some parts of the record such as ‘Co-Star’ and ‘Sociopathic Dance Queen’. This album already has 2023 written all over it; prepped and ready to be sped up for TikTok and to march around in platform Crocs. The production is water-tight and the short tracks keep your attention as the sonic references bounce from Spain to Japan. It’s a genuinely global sound, and Amaarae is dancing to its inclusive beat. However, Fountain Baby doesn’t sound timeless and it is against the clock as it braces itself for the next wave of pop as voted for by the relentless churn of the internet. Perfect for the present, this second record will be a reminder of a time in space but might not travel past the barriers of 2023. 6/10 Sophia McDonald

Speaking ahead of the album Greg Ahee, guitarist and ‘musical director’, said: “People always talk about Joe’s lyrics as a narrative, like he’s telling a story, so it only made sense to use the music as you would in a film to elevate that story”. The story at the start of ‘Fun In Hi Skool’ is pure ominous dread. It’s all bovver booted menace with snatched vocals spitting the first syllable and snubbing the rest of the word. The impression left is of rage with an urgency. There’s a featherweight feel to Alex Leonard’s drums, lithely skipping in patterns like those The Raincoasts brought to Odyshape. The sound is of a band in perfect harmony, though the words are from a man in total despair: “I hope that you had fun in hi-skool / I hope that you had fun and didn’t know / The dark shit bad words foaming in your mouth.” like a scroll to map the transit of dream to paranoia to memory, scribbled as always in Marshall’s dock-yard existentialism where death is but a “vacuum” that brings us together.

The album’s deepest point ‘Hamburgerphobia’ is a surprisingly intricate polemic; paralleling the emptiness of commodity with the formlessness of love. Possessing a Dostoevskian morality, its narrator slips into nihilism while eating a hamburger under the murderous gaze of a flock of birds. Fingers burger grease wet, love’s ghost enters his mind like a Trojan Horse; seeping through “the minutest miniscule gaps of time and space”, the traumatic love forever existing in a “fugue state”.

Protomartyr — Formal Growth in the Desert (domino) Protomartyr have now released six albums, but ‘The Author’, the penultimate track on their latest, Formal Growth in the Desert, must be their tenderest moment to date. Stripped of esoteric references, double speak or adoptive voices, it’s an ode to singer Joe Casey’s now-deceased mother. With a cracked and rasping baritone the vocalist barks out directives for the listener: take a seat, celebrate the lives of those who created us, and cherish those we love. As the song plays out the band contort into a jittery and celebratory outro. It’s a surprisingly good fit for what often sounds like a post-punk function band, hired to play out the end times.

Those schooled in the Detroit fourpiece’s previous output will be familiar with Casey’s fine lyrical form and noteworthy delivery. The frontman swills his words around like they’re hard liquor; spitting some phrases out with contempt, whilst savouring other stanzas. Over album opener ‘Make Way’’s Spaghetti Western evocation of vast spaces, the vocals act as a comforting hand on the shoulder. The lap steel meanwhile ushers in new territory for the band.

Now into their second decade, it’s interesting to note how the musical landscape has shifted since Protomartyr’s inception. In that time a doom-laden sprechgesang has gone from niche to du jour. In ‘3800 Tigers’, against guitars like furious pistons, Casey imagines his beloved Detroit Tigers as baseball world beaters. In this fantasy his team’s form, like their class, is permanent. Six records in, the same could be said for Protomartyr. 9/10 Theo

Gorst

King Krule — Space Heavy (xl) King Krule, real name Archy Marshall, doesn’t burst back onto the scene. Rather, he sails in like a battle-worn Ulysses, guitar strings mouldy from moonlighting as an oar, his vessel sinking under the weight of the “heavy traffic in my brain”. Space Heavy, his fourth album under the King Krule moniker, is another contemporary slice of British psychological horror. Monotonous, muted, and claustrophobic, the 15 tracks here unfurl

Its eeriness bleeds into the pathology of King Krule’s sound, a sort of rusted jazz which occasionally gives way to psychotropic-induced dreamy-trip-hop. Like everything else on this disorientating album, it feels alive until the moment you realise it’s an apparition.

Primal, tense, and recursive, Space Heavy serves as another layer in the masterful and deeply unnerving project Marshall has embarked upon as King Krule. It’s an omnivorous sound that continues to eat up all the physical, mental and mythic space around us, growing more monstrous by the day. 8/10

Robert Davidson

Christine and the Queens — PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE (because) Christine and the Queens’ follow-up to 2022’s Redcar les adorables étoiles is conceived as “a prayer towards the self” and, like its predecessor, makes for a dark, inscrutable listen. Still grieving his mother, Redcar’s (aka Chris) lyrics are strewn with references to angels, though it’s not explicit whether they denote a benevolent or harmful presence. It’s just as tricky getting a foothold on the music, which careens from wistful synths to drum and bass to prog to piano ballad. Even when tracks like ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’ hint at R&B, they’re accompanied by basslines so dark and nihilistic they make you write off any hope of an afterlife.

Madonna also haunts several tracks, but don’t expect any pop escapism: the cyborg-ish spoken interlude in ‘Angels Crying in My Bed’ only augments the sense of alienation. Then there’s the bizarre sampling of ‘Canon in D Major’ in ‘Full of Life’ – a comment on the triteness of ceremonial music to mark the inescapable march of time, or just another bewildering twist? Lead single ‘To Be Honest’ offers a moment of relative clarity, with Redcar laying out the vulnerable sensation of experiencing life “Like a movie / Played by another star”. With his mother gone, Redcar must shed yet another skin and learn a fresh set of lines. PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE reckons painfully with loss, desperately seeking meaning as it thrashes towards the shore. An immersive if demanding listen, it positions death as the ultimate piece of theatre –and one which definitely won’t come with CliffsNotes. 7/10 Orla Foster is one such work. Inspired by the intestinal disease that has plagued him in recent years, this is much more than a mere reflection of physical health, the six interconnected songs are an exploration of the relationship between the body and soul via thoughtful and heartwrenching balladry that captures the essence of pain, frustration and fatigue. It’s an unflinchingly personal exploration of the physical and emotional turmoil that he has endured in recent years. Recorded in one continuous take, with minimal overdubs and manipulation, the more freeform compositions and improvised nature of songs act to intensify the hurt, almost wail-like vocals and result in an experience that is remarkably candid about the turmoil it represents. Perhaps GUT’s greatest achievement, though, is that it captures a moment of true humanity, mapping both the beauty and anguish of life, even at the most difficult moments. It’s a record that invites you to explore the depths of emotion while asking the question of whether the things that don’t kill us truly do make us stronger. 8/10

Dominic Haley

us that we should be. After all, humanity is always leaning toward self-created entropy – “You’re dead if you float, and you’re dead if you sink” (‘Devil’s Den’). Judge makes such a strong case of our inescapable nature, he renders the grungy life of a sewer rat (“If you had seen the bull’s…”) or that of mere furniture, far more appealing.

Clearly, Squid’s bleak heart is potent as ever, but the band’s motorik post-punk that has kept it pumping is no longer, as they’ve taken a daring, expansive detour in sound. Enlarged, proggy instrumental passages textured by hypnotic synths and wailing brass sections mark a significant shift from Squid’s usual groove-driven approach. But they better frame the band’s pseudoimprovised style, giving meandering musical ideas more space to evolve and wander; there’s a lack of structure, yet the experience is far more arresting.

As the end of the world weighs heavy within the group’s chest, the restlessness of Bright Green Field is still present. O Monolith won’t have you surging toward the stage alongside others like some frenzied layered cake of bodies, but it will still move you, suspended in air as part of some weird seance instead, chanting the same fragmented words spoken by the amorphous voices of “If you had seen the bull’s…” This ever-evolving, multi-legged creature is a mere squid no longer. 8/10

Kyle Kohner

Daniel Blumberg — GUT (mute) The word ‘inspiration’ gets bandied around a lot in music. Most of the time, you can find it thrown about almost casually, lazily cataloguing the various references and touch points that help an audience connect to an artist. But, once every so often, a work comes along that does the word justice – something that channels raw emotion and says something profound about the human condition. It’s not putting it lightly that Daniel Blumberg’s latest album, GUT,

Squid — O Monolith (warp) Inconceivably, Squid have reset the benchmark of their boundless creativity on towering new record, O Monolith, a sprawling endeavor that sees them scale new sonic breadth, experimenting, mutating and extending their many limbs in new directions.

Lyrically, Squid remain buried in cynical abstraction, writhing under the thumb of late-capitalist malaise, ecological existentialism and other worldly toil. A sense of hopelessness culminates when drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge, personified as a cabinet on ‘Overgrowth’, repeats sneeringly, “Are you a cynic, just like me?” Well, they definitely convince

Jayda G — Guy (ninja tune) A tape whirrs, rewinding and fast-forwarding, searching for the man captured inside. That man is William Richard Guy, Jayda G’s American father. He recorded these tapes in secret with her sister, for Jayda to discover when she was older. It was an act of preservation after he learned of the illness that would cut his life short before she would grow into adulthood. In them, he tells his story.

Now, the Canadian electronic artist honours him through song, weaving fragments of these tapes into an album that’s inspired by his life as a snapshot of Black America and familial love. Arriving not long after the breakthrough success of ‘Both Of Us’ mid-lockdown in 2020, which brought new fans, wider opportunities and even a Grammy win, the album also ventures into sleeker pop sounds and an upbeat palette.

But this more polished sound is often at odds with the deep and worthy story at the heart of the record. The tape recordings struggle to be made out as they clash with what surrounds them. While her last record, Significant Changes, used fittingly meditative deep house sounds to explore her blend of dance catharsis, Guy is lacking in sonic identity to give it weight. While tracks like ‘Blue Lights’ and ‘Scars’ are skillfully made pieces of dance-pop, they feel oddly functional given they were clearly made with love and affection. Part of this translation issue rests on Jayda G’s vocal performance, which is often muffled and disconnected. It’s a personal offering, and although that’s absolutely valid, perhaps it is one that will resonate more with its creator than with a general audience.

5/10

Skye Butchard

Hak Baker — Worlds End FM (hak attack) Nostalgia is a powerful tool. Just glance at music’s cyclical nature and you can see there’s money to be made in the reminiscence game.

Hak Baker is the latest in a growing group of musicians to give the mid-’00s indie sound a whirl. His debut album, World’s End FM, takes a chunk of Jamie

T and Pete(r) Doherty’s cheeky chappy schtick and combines it with a thick glaze of scruffy pop sheen, resulting in a collection of songs that, while inoffensive enough, fails to truly tap into the spirit of the decade’s best offerings.

The slightly-too-earnest air surrounding ‘Bricks in the Wall’ and ‘Run’ exudes serious T4 on the Beach, trilby hat energy, doing nothing more than remind us that, despite how it might have seemed at the time, a lot of music back in the ’00s really wasn’t all that.

It’s a shame, as at times Baker hints at an enticing, more aggressive edge. The pointed, Mike Skinner-isms of opener ‘DOOLALLY (Unreleased)’ and the angular rock of ‘Telephones 4 Eyes’ offer a brief window to what he is capable of, but these darker moments are few and far between, for the most part Baker falls back on that signature indie pop sound that threatens to deceive.

With Worlds End FM, Hak Baker shows once and for all that, as enticing as nostalgia might be, things never sound quite as good the second time around. The reality of the past is rarely as good as the concept. 5/10 Jack Doherty producing star-studded leftfield compilation albums to raise AIDS awareness (1993’s No Alternative, 2009’s Dark Was The Night, etc), have commissioned a parade of contemporary American jazzers to have their own pop at Ra’s mushroom-cloud-laying masterwork, with the likes of Georgia Anne Muldrow and Angel Bat Dawid each taking turns over a mesmerising hour.

If the prospect of 60 minutes of the same tune seems a bit much on paper, however, fear not: this is some of the most engaging, startling and imaginative jazz playing you’ll hear all year, full of exactly the sort of chaotic structure, mind-warping improvisation, eye-popping variety and inescapable groove worthy of the tune’s author. Muldrow first moulds the song into a sort of mournful G-funk elegy, then Bat Dawid goes full cosmic squawk for a three-movement, half-hour version that frequently gazes over the edge of madness. Philadelphia quintet Irreversible Entanglements (who feature Moor Mother among their number) steal the show, though, with a wild trip through free skronk, sarcastic marching band pageantry, and eventually a glorious post-hip-hop stride that feels, simultaneously, as strong as an ox and like it could collapse at any minute.

Various Artists — Red Hot & Ra: Nuclear War (red hot) Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’ might be the Jupiter-born free-jazz maniac’s most malleable tune. Starting life in 1984 as the opening track on his album of the same name, there brimming with fucked-up be-bop modal slink, it was then reimagined four times over a single 40-minute EP by Yo La Tengo at the turn of the millennium, re-emerging as everything from onechord krautrock mantra to loose-limbed electronica deconstruction.

Now, twenty more years on, New York’s Red Hot Organisation, famous for

Collectively, the four interpretations here serve as a brilliant barometer of the vanguard of American jazz in 2023 – urgent, visionary, and (despite/because of the apocalyptic subject – delete as applicable) bursting with life. 9/10 Sam

Walton

Tinariwen — Amatssou (wedge) On Amatssou, pioneers of what has been dubbed as ‘desert blues’ (though the term does little justice to the complex and diverse music of the Sahara) Tinariwen have written the soundtrack for a world that still cannot shed its colonial biases towards ‘world music’. Driven by the political turmoil in Mali, Amatssou stands as a testament to the struggles of the Berber tribe against the Salafists.

With Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel featuring on two tracks and Fats Kaplin and Wes Corbett on banjo and violins, Tinariwen’s new album combines their signature guitar and percussion-based groove with American-style country. Thankfully, the combination is not as much an Americanisation of Tinariwen’s Tuareg roots as it is an endearing and a complementary ingredient on the album.

Recorded in a makeshift tent studio in an Algerian oasis, Amatssou is perhaps Tinariwen’s second-most explorative work, after their 2019 album Amadjar. From the get-go, it immerses you in a landscape rich with call-and-response chants and complex rhythms, thanks to the percussive flair of Said Ag Ayad. The rhythm section on the album moves further away from the stereotypical ‘desert blues’ imagery; although the ghost of their 2017 track ‘Assàwt’ still lingers over ‘Anemouhagh’, the repetitive dynamics provide agile transitions between the varying moods of the album – from the bright nuances of ‘Kek Alghalm’ to the duskier overtones of ‘Nak Idnizdjam’.

On Amatssou, Tinariwen foregrounds the urgent threat to Tuaregs in Africa, inspiring more artists to join the rebellion. And in doing so, they remain loyal to their musical roots, despite the diametrically opposite geographies that coalesce on the album. 8/10

Shrey Kathuria

Arlo Parks — My Soft Machine (transgressive) Arlo Parks jumpstarts her new record longing to be “seven and blameless, going over the handlebars”. A born nostalgic, now she even misses pain: a good old-fashioned knee scrape instead of all this abstract dread. Still, given the well-documented anxieties of her generation, it’s fitting for an obsession with healing to gurgle through the music, her pain underwritten by beats so ferociously peppy they could be plucked from 1990s breakfast radio.

As on her debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, Parks’ soft, lachrymose voice turns stray lines into mantras, but she’s best when she ditches the meditation to pin down singular, piquant images: a “puppy dog trapped in a smoke-grey Honda”, the feeling of being “scared to speak as I catch a whiff of your rosehip tea”. For all the introspection, you don’t suspect her of navel-gazing. She unloads baggage on a one-to-one basis; like piercing eye contact in a crowded carriage, building intimacy by recognising the frailty in her peers, then throwing them a lifeline. She lets Phoebe Bridgers share the load on ‘Pegasus’ and drops it altogether on ‘Devotion’, a crunchy, carefree anthem to lust. Mostly though, the mood is mournful, Parks daydreaming about absconding the endless adult search for validation. “I just wanna eat cake in a room with a view,” she sighs on ‘Room (red wings)’. On ‘I’m Sorry’, things hit rock bottom when she admits finding it “easier to be numb” – surely a waking nightmare for an artist used to experiencing every pinprick of emotion on a vast scale. But for anyone who might relate, My Soft Machine is a lovingly compiled care package. Let’s hope someone’s boxing one up for Arlo too. 7/10

Orla Foster

have been crafting innovative and boundary-pushing music since their beginnings in an east Birmingham council estate in the late ’80s.

As the band’s ninth album and long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s critically-acclaimed Post Self, Purge has some pretty big shoes to fill. Described by the band as the spiritual successor to 1992’s Pure, on paper at least, this is a set of songs that revisit the group’s dalliance with ’90s hip hop and acid house, but it’s hard to tease these influences out on the record. Mostly, the tracks here sound like layers upon layers of muddy, compressedto-death guitar pressing down on some misguided turntable scratches. From opener ‘Nero’ all the way to track six, ‘The Father’, this is an album that has you feeling like you’re listening to outtakes from a mid-career Korn record or the soundtrack from a ’00s horror shooter.

Like a Lindt chocolate, though, there is a reward towards the end. Purge closes on a one-two punch that, while not climbing up to the heights of classic Godflesh, at least manages to recall the band at their inventive best. Closer ‘You Are The Judge, The Jury and The Executioner’ is the standout, a brooding slice of throbbing industrial electronica that becomes ever more horrifying and haunting as it builds.

Being generous, this is a record for the die-hards. However, in the grand scheme of things, it’s hard not to feel like Purge is a step backwards from the masterful intensity of Post Self. 3/10

Dominic Haley

Godflesh — Purge (avalanche) Godflesh, the underappreciated legends of British metal and industrial music,

Dury — I Thought I Was Better Than You (heavenly)

Baxter

Baxter Dury opens his seventh studio album with an existential crisis: “Hey Mummy / Hey Daddy / Who am I?” Immediately, he sets the tone for I Thought I Was Better Than You, a record that delves deep into Dury’s life and, crucially, how he has dealt with the complexities of having a famous parent: “Why am I condemned because I’m the son of a musician?” he ponders on ‘Leon’.

Dury isn’t the first songwriter to dissect the influence their parents had on their life but it certainly a fascinating concept when the work presented is a confrontation of the impact of having Ian Dury as a father. Now in his 50s, and only a few years shy of the age his father was when he passed away, Dury candidly expresses how it feels to be a “prisoner of famous parents,” and how it has affected his own lengthy career; he’s a musician with a wealth of ambition and ideas when it comes to his work that is sometimes disregarded by people expecting him to merely recreate his father’s material. “Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean / But you don’t sound like him, you just sound like Ian,” he intones on ‘Shadow’, one of the many highlights on the record.

Musically, however, there are traces of Ocean’s influence in the woozy production and pitched-up vocals on ‘Celebrate Me’. Working with producer Paul White, together they’ve crafted a broad work that encapsulates the many moods of Dury’s self-examination. It should be noted that I Thought… serves as a companion piece to his 2021 memoir, Chaise Longue; the two share characters, and musically it complements the text very well. In this regard, the ten songs are often minimal in their design – an infectious foundational beat here, a bright piano chord there and a healthy dose of captivating guitar licks throughout. Dury’s languid delivery is often paired with (and sometimes takes a backseat to) a number of captivating female cadences, courtesy of Eska Mtungwazi, JGrrey and Madeline Hart which bring a great warmth to the rich textures swirling around ‘Leon’ and a gorgeous sentimentality to the emotive closer ‘Glows’. A rewarding listen that gives the listener a greater understanding and appreciation of Baxter Dury’s artistry. 8/10

Zara Hedderman

Jeremy Tuplin — Orville’s Discotheque (trapped animal) It’s not often you come across an album that shifts between throbbing hair metal-like synths, sumptuous electronic beats and sweet acoustic guitar riffs with lyrics about being a “disco Shakespeare”, dreams and delusions pinned by Tarantino characters and regrets tinged with wit: “Could have stayed at home watching Strictly instead of having my heart destroyed”. It’s also impressive that this record, from Somerset singersongwriter Jeremy Tuplin, throws so much colour at the canvas, with all the individual strokes complementing one another to make a really captivating (and remarkably cohesive) body of work.

The overall concept of Orville’s Discotheque draws inspiration from the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the central figures roaming the expansive world that Tuplin has developed with his Sad and Lonely Disco Band. Certainly, disco plays a significant part in the musicality of this excellent LP in its many stomping beats and vibrant synth arrangements. Yet, there are moments such as ‘Wonderful Time’ where chugging fuzzed guitar heralds Yo La Tengo met with Van Halen-like flashing synths; melding grunge with glitter. Elsewhere, Tuplin also engages with sentimentality on softer compositions ‘Love Town’ and ‘Devil Dances’.

Often, the combination of Tuplin’s nonchalant cadence and astute comical lyricism evoke Jarvis Cocker on the Strokesesque ‘L.O.V.E.’ and perhaps most effectively on the richly-textured highlight ‘A Dancer Must Die’, where the listener hangs onto his every word for the great rewards of lines like, “I thought I was invincible / But I’m just Leonardo di Caprio / A washed-up actor in that film about Hollywood”. Orville’s Discotheque once again demonstrates Jeremy Tuplin’s dexterity as a songwriter who has the ability to convey his brilliantly absurdist musings with great sincerity; musically, too, his enveloping arrangements are abundant with style.

9/10 Zara Hedderman

Foyer Red — Yarn the Hours Away

(carpark) There exists a paradox at the heart of Foyer Red’s music. Mechanically, ruthlessly impressive with its agitated rhythms and desire to duck, dive and deceive at every turn, it also has an almostnaive sincerity to it, its wide-eyed delivery captivating in its emotional directness. As with their debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, Yarn the Hours Away is twee as fuck, a glorious collision of free-flowing, filter-less observations and abrupt changes in tone and time signatures that is sure to force the most confused of jigs.

It comes as no surprise to read inspirations include acts such as Omni on Foyer Red’s Bandcamp page. The vocal pingpong between Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers on ‘Unwaxed Flavored Floss’ and interlocking instrumentation on ‘Barnyard Bop’ delight in their precision. There is also more than a touch of the intensity of Los Campesinos! on tracks such as ‘Etc.’, a song also boasting perhaps my favourite lyric on the record: “If nature is unjust, then change it if you can.”

Foyer Red’s ultimate USP however is their collective ear for a melody amongst the mayhem, with the closing two songs, ‘Big Paws’ and ‘Toy Wagon’, among their best. The former is replete with twists and turns each as lush as the last. ‘Toy Wagon’, which initiated the growth of the band as they searched for a guest vocalist, meanwhile adopts a softer, less frantic pace. The apparent paradox is an illusion; this is up-front, earnest music for up-front, earnest hearts. Just don’t try and keep pace.

8/10 Ben Lynch

The Golden Dregs Village Underground, London 6 April 2023

The Golden Dregs arrive at Village Underground fresh off the plane from their US tour, having presumably fulfilled their mantra “to get away sometimes”, introduced to us from their first single, ‘American Airlines’, taken from their new record On Grace & Dignity

Benjamin Woods (the Dregs’ frontman and songwriter) greets the audience with a modest “we thought no one was coming” before admitting that the last three months’ anxiety about an empty room was lightly “stressful”. Their opener, ‘How It Starts’, is charmingly accompanied by a few subtle amp adjustments, with the odd mic stand raised and then lowered again just to find the ultimate sweet spot. Woods eventually finds his stride sitting on top of a tall, monolithic monitor as he pours out the symphonic track ‘Before We Fell From Grace’ (luckily, the songs metaphor wasn’t enough to jinx his tentative position).

For such a wholesome bunch, perhaps more obviously suited to a large and leafy outdoors venue, it may initially seem like the Dregs had breached the wrong stage door. However, the large, dim lit chamber of the Village Underground is the perfect setting, large enough to produce a heart-warming echo yet intimate enough to feel like you are witnessing something totally unique and deeply personable. Such is my feeling from their standout performance of ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’, a dark horse off the record whose hair-raising harmonies are enough to send any audience member into a deep and inescapably cathartic slumber.

This is a group completely un-saturated by the constant camera flash or the press-branded microphone; The Golden Dregs emit a rare kind of purity. I can’t help but leave thinking I’ve seen one of the most exciting bands in the UK right now.

Leo Lawton

the London Palladium. “But these days, I can’t joke about this sort of thing,” he confesses, acknowledging the ornate carved wood, stained glass and velvet drapes, and sounding genuinely awed to be playing in such an august old room.

But if Kaplan’s provocateur tendencies are showing signs of waning, then perhaps that’s fair enough: after all, 66 is a perfectly acceptable age to begin to mellow, and having led Yo La Tengo through well over a thousand gigs since 1984, there’s a sense too that he and his band have earned their stripes. That’s not to say that this is some sort of victory-lap tour, though; tonight’s first set is almost entirely dedicated to the band’s latest record, with only a trio of deep cuts thrown in for balance, and even the second, normally slanted towards the band’s more famous, noisier songs, retains the feeling of three musicians pushing themselves and each other.

Sure, there’s a smattering of “hits” (such that a band with no discernable chart history has those), and ‘Autumn Sweater’ sounds as slinking and mesmeric tonight as it did 25 years ago, but the real joy here is in beholding such a rich tapestry of sound over the course of an hour: driftwood instrumentals like 1997’s ‘Green Arrow’ fade into the almost-groovy electronic manipulation of ‘Before We Run’, dainty melody (‘Big Day Coming’) sits alongside scabrous noise (the astonishing, extended version of ‘I Heard You Looking’, featuring some of the wildest and most expressive guitar playing you’ll witness anywhere in rock music currently), and yet running through the diversity is a sense of gently cerebral, idiosyncratically warm melancholy.

Yo La Tengo

London Palladium

14 April 2023

“In the past, this is where I would say something obnoxious like ‘Jeez what a dump’,” remarks Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, two songs into tonight’s first set, admiring the Edwardian grandeur of

After they sidle back on stage for their now-traditional encore of cover versions, Kaplan tells an agreeably rambling story about Yo La Tengo’s first ever London show, at Camden Dingwalls, where there wasn’t time to rearrange the drum kit to accommodate drummer Georgia Hubley’s left-handedness, so they just played 20 minutes of feedback instead. Ostensibly, the story is a tangential way of introducing their cover of Motörhead’s ‘Bomber’ (“This band would defi- nitely have played Dingwalls,” concludes Kaplan), but it’s also indirectly revelatory of Yo La Tengo’s consistent approach over the past 40 years: then, as now, the band are creatively unruly but practical, utterly uninterested in people-pleasing yet joyfully inclusive in their bloody-mindedness, and bustling with melodies while always ready to unleash sonic hell.

Yo La Tengo have become one of the great modern alternative rock bands, and are only improving with age. Sam Walton Dog Unit

Servant Jazz Quarters, London 20 April 2023

It’s palpably mid-April. The seasonal showers and the initial whisperings of spring sunshine are struggling against the stubborn dregs of a perma-grim winter. Sheltering from the elements inside Dalton’s Servant Jazz Quarters are Dog Unit, a buzzy London four-piece promising “post-rock to dance to”.

The show is the latest in a series of ‘Dog Unit and friends’ collaborative events. Tonight’s guest is Alice Hubble, self-described as “one lady at home with an enormous collection of synthesis- ers”, who also brought a friend along to wrangle the sizeable mass of Moog and Roland gear that engulfs the duo on stage. Following a set of synth-driven dub-psych, Hubble promises a “non-prog wig-out” between herself and tonight’s headliners. Donning custom boiler suits, Dog Unit enter the stage alongside Hubble and begin to experiment.

Collectively feeling their way through a seemingly improvised set, across a 30-minute span they transmute from quiet kosmiche to driving drone, employing early electronics of bands like Japan with the post-rock kraut inflection of Can. They pass lead lines around effortlessly with a palpable sense of enjoyment emitting from the stage.

Collaboration done, Dog Unit launch into their own set. They bring a workmanlike ease to their music; it’s serious and academic but approachable and unfussy. Deft percussion, deliberate guitar work and pulsating basslines are key throughout as the band deliver a set of both new and old material. Tried and tested tracks like ‘Absolute Unit’ and ‘Barking To Gospel’ offer a precise heaviness whilst new cuts like ‘John X Kennedy’ display the nimbler end of their sonic slant.

Tonight’s show proves that the buzz around Dog Unit is warranted and gestures towards larger stages; their danceable post-kraut rock is piquant to even the most discerning ears whilst remaining approachable enough to please more laidback audiences.

Tom Critten

Shit And Shine Cafe Oto, London 27 April 2023

2007 was a pretty momentous year for me. Sick of working dead-end warehouse jobs, I moved down to the capital on the vague promise of better prospects and better parties. Fairly quickly, I found another dead-end job in a shoe shop and survived by sleeping on a lot of people’s couches. In fact, London life kind of sucked, until a mate invited me to see a band they’d heard about called Shit And Shine. Dressed in plaid shirts and wearing little bunny ears, their sound was thunderous: a cacophony of rapid-fire hip-hop beats and samples ripped from Guy Ritchie movies. I left the gig feeling like I’d been let in on a secret.

Sixteen years later, here we are again. Backlit by a projected loop of ’80s TV shows, they deliver a set that is equal parts caustic and absurd; a madcap, almost-improvised free-for-all, with songs bookended by strange snippets of dialogue pulled from eye-rolling London gangster movies. It’s like no one knows how to take it, and as the first couple of tracks roll into one another, there’s a slight recoil from the crowd, the wooden chairs pushed back a few centimetres to make room for the sound. But then, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, the crowd click into gear, and as S&S relentlessly and methodically build their sound, the room becomes more and more filled with gyrating bodies.

Nothing can exist for a little under two decades and not change, and S&S have certainly evolved between now and that show back at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, yet the main takeaway from tonight is that they still have the same vibe, but a different, perhaps even perfected approach. Dominic Haley

Rye Lane (dir. raine allen-miller)

Rye Lane opened in limited cinemas before being plopped onto Disney+ in record time, where I hope it gets passed around fans of genuinely not shit rom-coms. They do exist, y’know – the fans and the films, despite the best efforts of Netflix Originals and those daytime Christmas movies that didn’t exist three years ago; the ones that are on Channel 5 and Christmas 24 (ffs), and are American but set in a fictional European kingdom – usually called something like ‘Belgradia’ – where the princess is stranded because of I don’t know, and she bumps into (quite literally) a widowed father who looks like a piece of wood, with a horrible seven-year-old who just wants a mum… and so on. You know the story without seeing any of them, which, to an extent, is something you can level at all romantic comedies, but even the bad ones used to try.

If you’re thinking, “no they didn’t”, Rye Lane is almost certainly not for you. It is, after all, 100% a romantic comedy, playing the romantic comedy game, albeit in a decidedly modern setting of young Black Peckham rather than early-30s west London, where blokes stutter women into bed, and where nobody is Black. That is, after all, what people mean when they label a rom-com “very British” – an imagined London where every day is the boat race.

Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut takes its stylistic cues from Peep Show more than it does Richard Curtis, with plenty of POV close ups and such a liberal use of a fisheye lens that it does get a bit much at times. The story is a classic – of a heartbroken A. (Dom) meeting by chance an overly confident B. (Yas), who is probably heartbroken too, but is dealing with it by pestering A. for the remainder of the day, exploring where their obvious connection might lead to.

Because Britain isn’t all posh guys tripping over walls to the sound of Texas, the lead characters of Rye Lane eat spicy pork in Brixton Village, break up over dick pics, duet Salt-N-Peppa’s ‘Shoop’ at karaoke and fall in love to a soundtrack from free-pop producer Kwes, with a helping hand from Tirzah.

As refreshing and overdue as the representation of Black communities in British romantic comedies is though, it wouldn’t mean much if Rye Lane wasn’t so genuinely funny. Not just rom-com funny; funny funny. And, of course, romantic, although that’s never a given. The story is true to the genre, with a frustratingly hurried finale, to be honest, but the connection between Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) can’t be bettered, as Rye Lane proves that love stories are timeless, but they need work to remain relevant.

Stuart Stubbs

The North Will Rise Again — Alex Niven (bloomsbury) The sheer volume of public discourse that has been devoted to caricaturing and generalising about the North of England over the past decade or more is almost impressive. From reactionaries like Matthew Goodwin to elected reactionaries like Keir Starmer, the effort to pander to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the ‘Red Wall’ (a term that’s always been rhetorical rather than sociological) from across the public sphere looks not so much concerted as desperate at this point. In this context, Alex Niven’s The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands is a very welcome intervention.

Niven mounts a convincing argument that from the industrial revolution to the present day, England’s Northern half has consistently been a site of tech- nological, cultural and political innovation, a heterogeneous region of possibility rather than the flat-capped, flat-vowelled lump that both its detractors and some of its more ostentatious ‘defenders’ might have you believe. In precise yet enthusiastic prose, he traces a lineage of radical Northern cultural and social production, from the Vorticist art movement’s infatuation with early-20th-century Newcastle through the modernist poetry of Basil Bunting and Barry MacSweeney, the futuristic urbanism of T. Dan Smith, the pioneering experimental sound of Delia Derbyshire, all the way up to more recent, familiar dissidence from the likes of Factory Records and Andrea Dunbar. Perhaps the most powerful passages of The North Will Rise Again are its most intimate; as in his previous book, New Model Island, Niven has a striking gift for weaving his and his family’s personal experiences into a broader project of cultural and political critique. His late father gazing up at the great empty skies of the English-Scottish border country with German kosmische blasting through his headphones; Niven searching for countercultural profundity in ever-moreneoliberal Manchester; childhood trips to see his friend Jonathan at his eccentric family home near Hexham, during which the creative aspirations and dreams of escape that would drive Everything Everything, the band they eventually founded together, initially took root (only to be disappointed years later upon contact with the cold machinations of the 21st-century music industry).

If less tactfully deployed, these vignettes could dull the sharpness of the book’s overall argument, individualising rather than democratising the writer’s desire for a more dynamic understanding of the North. No such problems here: Niven maintains a clear sense of (leftist) political commitment throughout, much of his argument proceeding from the fundamental truth that England is one of the most regionally unequal nations in Europe and the social consequences of that inequality are as culturally complex as they are morally and politically unjust.

Luke Cartledge

DREAM WIFE

SOCIAL LUBRICATION

Lucky Number

The return of Dream Wife is a moment worth savouring, with the band in electrifying form with an entirely self-written and selfproduced third album.

Hyper lusty rock and roll with a political punch, exploring the alchemy of attraction, the lust for life, embracing community and calling out the patriarchy. With a healthy dose of playfulness and fun thrown in.