Three piece girl band Big Joanie hailing from the UK have made a splash internationally, opening for such luminaries as Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill and attracting much critical acclaim. Landing somewhere between thematically punk rock and musically pop rock, they manage to sound cool and direct while lamenting about men, sex, friendship, and modern life as black women.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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This latest release from Student of Decay’s eclectic and unpredictable sister label is an unexpectedly melodic and accessible one, though it still fits comfortably within Soda Gong's ethos of exploring the more playful and trend-averse fringes of experimental music. While this is technically only Malkin's second solo album under his own name, he has been a prolific and ubiquitous figure in the LA scene for quite some time, surfacing in a number of different guises and collaborations. In fact, I just belatedly discovered that he played on one of my favorite songs from the Not Not Fun milieu (LA Vampires/Maria Minerva's "A Lover & A Friend"). Given that pedigree, it is not surprising that A Typical Night in the Pit has a very "LA" feel to it, but it is an endearingly vaporous and neon-lit one, evoking a kind of dreamlike and hazy strain of jazz. It maybe errs a bit too much on the side of atmosphere to feel like a truly substantial statement, but Malkin has both style for days and an impressively unerring instinct for manipulating light, space, and texture. If I saw a film with this as the soundtrack, I would definitely stick around to the end to find out who the hell managed to make smoky, noirish jazz sound so fresh and endearingly skewed.
Alison Chesley, a classically trained cellist, is one of those performers whose collaborations are many and varied, spanning across genres and decades in her long career. Her credits include contributions to over 100 albums
For the most part, I can always be relied upon to enthusiastically support any talented artist who leaves their comfort zone behind to explore increasingly weird and uncharted territory. I do have my weaknesses, however, and one of the major ones is my undying love for classic Mille Plateaux/Chain Reaction-style dub techno. Consequently, I am hopelessly fixated on early Vladislav Delay albums like Entain and the newly reissued Multila. That is a damn shame, as Sasu Ripatti has made quite a lot of wonderful and forward-thinking music since and I have definitely not dug into his later work nearly as much as I should. This latest album, the first new Vladislav full-length in roughly five years, is a particularly effective and timely reminder that I am an absolute chump for sleeping on many of Ripatti's major statements over the years. Rakka is quite an ambitiously intense and inventive affair, seamlessly blurring together elements of Tim Hecker-style blown-out ambiance, power electronics, techno deconstruction, and production mastery into an explosive tour de force.
Windy Weber & Carl Hultgren are ambient rock royalty and a household name among the Terrastock devout. Their music is an ethereal lattice of sparkling, layered melodic fragments like so much brightly entwined coral, and subdued, profound vocals expertly placed. It uncovers the strata of human emotion, evoking emotions like hope, sadness, vitality, and joy. I find myself irrepressibly moved to tears by their clean, beautiful creations, both live and recorded. Allegiance and Conviction is squarely within their prior sound, while still being fresh enough to warrant spending quality time with.
With a flurry of recent activity, including the Herbstsonne album also under his own name and Electric as Organum, David Jackman has been rather prolific in the past year. While I admittedly cannot say I know for sure what separates a David Jackman record from an Organum one (or why this one is credited to just his surname), Silence in that Time clearly shares some kinship with last year's Herbstsonne. Both feature his use of wide-open spaces, symmetrical song structures, and punctuations of massive piano chords, but the other details are where the difference lies.
Before his untimely passing in 2017, Matt Shoemaker had a number of releases completed and ready to be released, including Mercurial Horizon. Recorded at various times between 2008 and 2012, during one of his most prolific phases, the album was completed five years ago, but just now being released. Split into two half hour pieces, it almost seems built for cassette, but thankfully presented as a gorgeous CD by the Elevator Bath label that does wonders to capture the depth and nuance of his work. Beautiful, unsettling, and bleak, it makes for an amazing disc that was worth the wait.
The first foray into Warren Defever's teenage tape archive (last year's All The Mirrors in the House) was an absolute revelation that actively courted disbelief, but this second installment is a bit more modest in its scope. As a result, Return To Never unavoidably feels a bit underwhelming and insubstantial by comparison, but it is still a likable album that scratches roughly the same itch, as I am very much a fan of Defever's homespun, early lo-fi experiments. While there are still a healthy number of melodic guitar pieces strewn throughout the album, Return to Never is generally a more experimental and abstract affair than the previous volume. Phrases like "analogue murk" and "greyscale industrial drone" are tossed around in the album's description and they are fairly apt: if All The Mirrors captured a teenage Defever accidentally inventing shoegaze, Return to Never captures him accidentally mirroring the sounds of the early '80s noise underground (or at least calls to mind someone playing shoegaze-style guitar over such a tape). The warmer, more "ambient" passages still tend to be the best ones, but if some moments from Return to Never had found their way onto an early Broken Flag tape, I doubt anyone would have blinked or raised an eyebrow.
As a longtime NWW fan, the prospect of an ambitious, long-gestating triple LP release entitled Trippin’ Musik naturally filled me with glee and anticipation, as I envisioned another Soliloquy For Lilith-level classic. That enthusiasm remained undampened by the jabbering and splattering loop lunacy of Experimente II: Son of Trippin’ Music, as it seemed like that was intended as more of an outtake collection than a teasing glimpse of what was to come. As it turns out, however, it was very much the latter, as Trippin' Musik is often an obsessively loop-driven affair that basically expands upon Experimente II rather than transcending it. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trippin’ Musik is occasionally surprising in both its extremity and single-mindedness. This is a bizarre and challenging album even by Nurse With Wound standards.
If someone had told me twenty years ago that Cerberus Shoal would someday evolve into a '60s girl group-style family band, I probably would have thought that I had fallen asleep and was having an extremely weird and perplexing dream. Nevertheless, that improbable future has now come to pass with Do You Wanna Have a Skeleton Dream?, which is Colleen Kinsella and Caleb Mulkerin's first album to feature their daughter Quinnisa as a full member of the band. As befits such an auspicious occasion, Skeleton Dream is an especially fun and ambitious anomaly within the already unpredictable Big Blood discography. While I am hesitant to describe any release by this long-running Portland, Maine project as a "party album," such a classification would not be terribly wide of the mark here, as this release is comprised almost entirety of hooky, retro-minded pop songs. Characteristically, however, Skeleton Dream's appeal runs quite a bit deeper than a mere collection of entertaining classic pop pastiches, occasionally catching me off-guard with some wonderfully haunting and darkly hallucinatory moments.
