MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
ALT COUNTRY CASE/LANG/VEIRS case/lang/veirs (Anti-) ●●●●●
What a difference a mail makes. Without an innocuous cyber-message – penned by rodeo pop poet k.d. lang, and dispatched, as she puts it, ‘on a whim’ – this lovely, cosmic alt-country album would not exist. Nor would the Americana supergroup behind it, starring lang and fellow rock’n’roll wranglers Neko Case (The New Pornographers) and Laura Veirs. And don’t be misled by the lower-case styled case/lang/ veirs nomenclature: there is plenty to shout about here.
Take the album’s opening lines, on sublime twilight porch-song, ‘Atomic Number’: ‘I’m not the freckled maid / I’m not the fair-haired girl / I’m not a pan of milk for you to spoil’, the harmonic trio sing in turn, each making their remarkable presence felt, while creating (or leaving) space for the others.
The album works best when they follow this economical trajectory; when there’s room around their melodies and harmonies and words. Highlights include torch song ‘Supermoon’, drive-pop shimmy ‘Best Kept Secret’, space-cowboy psalm ‘Down 1-5’ (an echoing serenade to the ‘endless night’), and, perhaps most strikingly, sparse-piano lament ‘Blue Fires’, which explore life, loss and language through the power of blue, (‘The hottest part of this flame burns blue / why do blue fires burn in me / yet not in you?’) As with so many country hymns on this warm, engaging album,
‘Blue Fires’ is preoccupied with finding (or losing) ourselves: in our hearts, in nature, in the galaxy (‘how can the prairie flocks keep their courses true / and navigate the stars as they do?), and it takes on the heavens in ‘Behind The Armory’. ‘We’ll make new constellations’, they sing, on an album made of stars. (Nicola Meighan) Out Fri 17 Jun.
INDIE ROCK VARIOUS Song, By Toad Split 12” Vol 4 (Song, by Toad) ●●●●●
Recorded in the living room of label boss Matthew Young, the latest Song, By Toad split 12” represents all that’s good about SBT’s DIY approach. The echoey domestic space, an emphasis on acoustic instruments and a very basic mic set-up have resulted in a collection of tracks that share a sense of unpolished intimacy, with any rough edges the aural equivalent of a potter’s fingerprints smudged into the clay. The four contributing artists each manage to contrast that immediacy with
unexpected grandeur. digitalanalogue’s wordless, piano-led ‘Café Royal’ sounds a bit like a candle-lit acoustic session by Sigur Ros.
Supermoon (aka Meursault’s Neil Pennycook) and Viking Moses remind us
how powerful a strong, clear voice can be when used as an instrument in itself instead of just a vessel for lyrics. Which isn’t to say their words aren’t wonderfully crafted too – Pennycook scoops Best Lyric on the Album with bonus track ‘Ode to Gremlin’: ‘And the last thing the world needs now is another song about the fucking sea.’
By contrast, American singer-songwriter Virgin of the Birds has a voice that’s probably best described with the faintly cruel music journo euphemism ‘distinctive’, but it proves the perfect anchor for songs that might otherwise drown in towering swells of reverb and feedback.
Given that the Split 12” series comes from a place so close to Young’s heart, he can perhaps be forgiven for attempting to cram too much in, like your friend who always overloads the mixtapes he sends you because there’s too much good music he wants to share (there are 15 tracks including the bonuses).
In fairness, there’s not a bad song in the bunch, but it does mean that some (such as digitalanalogue’s later instrumentals) struggle to stand out from the crowd. (Niki Boyle) Out Mon 4 Jul.
GUITAR POP KID CANAVERAL Faulty Inner Dialogue (Lost Map Records) ●●●●● SPACE POP ZIEMBA Hope is Never (Lo & Behold) ●●●●●
Summer albums are generally supposed to offer sun-dried deliverance for the masses from deskbound limbo via supply-side anthemic bangers and moments ready-made to be captured for an opportune Facebook post. But Kid Canaveral, ever the awkward kitchen-dwelling party guests of the Scottish pop scene, would never release something so boring. Instead, new album Faulty Inner Dialogue hides sensitive songwriting about selfies and self-doubt behind a shimmering façade of catchy riffs and glitchy beats. Three albums in, the band have established a unique sound while playing
around with genre, appropriating slacker rock on ‘Tragic Satellite’ and recalling the synth pop of Klaxons on ‘Lifelong Crisis of Confidence.’ New recruit Michael Craig, joining on keys and laptop, helps build upon the electronic elements that were scattered around the edges of 2013’s Now That You Are a Dancer. He adds melodic depth to tracks like ‘Callous Parting Gift’ which would have come off sounding shallow with the band’s previous set-up but which is presented as a fully realised example of their magpie approach to song construction. Lead single ‘First We Take Dumbarton’ is a ready-made radio hit (or would be, if there was any justice) concealing cynical observations on social media behind a singalongable smokescreen. Despite the new developments, this record retains the core of mischievous guitar pop that defined their debut Shouting at Wildlife.
David MacGregor’s wry songwriting – always sharp without being sharp-
Ziemba, aka René Kladzyk , is a Brooklyn-based performance artist and space- pop diviner, whose songs have been featured on Comedy Central’s brilliant cult hit show, Broad City. Her cheerily-titled debut album, Hope Is Never, is by turns euphoric, alienating and devastating, while it’s always quietly enthralling. It is, she says, ‘about nostalgia and memory, the way to conceive of death as that thing that connects us to eternity or the infinite’. Well, that and tiger women, seals and fires and buffalos. Kladzyk’s peripatetic CV spans visual art, music and dance (she’s been artist- in-residence at the French Institute and Culture Vultures in Fez, Morocco, and she’s composed for ballet companies and installations), and her esoteric pop is similarly varied in style and form. From the necromancing kosmische thrills of album standout ‘El Paso’, through the spectral, xx-conjuring chimes of ‘Phantom See’, to the bounding, feral 80s pop of ‘Tiger Woman’, her music spans decades, genres and elements (‘I am a fire’, she intones on balmy-rock mantra, ‘Hope Is a Fold’).
Her music taps into the power of slow-builds – in vocals, textures, moods – as exemplified in the album’s striking salutation, ‘It Curls Itself’. An a cappella madrigal that’s minimalist and beautiful, the song variously deploys Kladzyk’s voice as pulsing bassline and airborne chorister, charting earthly highs and lows, and defying the very gravity she sings about.
elbowed, witty without being whimsical – has matured well, though his choice of subject (break-ups and quarter-life crises), is perhaps a little more embittered than it used to be. Faulty Inner Dialogue sees our heroes straightened out and smartened up, employing impressive production standards and lyrical duplicity on an album that works equally well as a sociable, fun record as it does as a vehicle to discuss alienation and internal turmoil. (Sam Bradley) Out Fri 29 Jul.
In an album that’s haunted by what is there and what is not, the arrangements feel particularly well-attuned. They’re cardinal, dramatic but never intrusive – sometimes ghostly, sometimes all-embracing – thanks to drummer Rob Smith (of Thrill Jockey’s Rhyton), bassist Jimy SeiTang (of Sacred Bones’ Psychic Ills), guitarist Christian Sawyer, cellist Valerie Kuehne and violinist Natalia Steinbach. And at the heart of it all, there is Ziemba: courting loss and (sometimes) hope. (Nicola Meighan) Fri 24 Jun.
84 THE LIST 2 Jun–1 Sep 2016