Author: David Allison

Posted in Album of the Month, Music chat, New Albums

SEPTEMBER: Moisturizer by WET LEG

Posted on by David Allison

Why have I chose Wet Leg for this month? I’m not their biggest fan although I love some of their songs and I really dig what they’re doing. But something really got my goat and I thought it was worth having a discussion about. Essentially, I was reading another one of those dreadful reactionary articles the other day (alas, I can’t find what it was, I’ve looked online, there are so many!) asking why guitar music and guitar bands are dying.

Of course, the hidden implication in that is MALE guitar bands. That’s what they mean. Because there are PLENTY of top tier guitar bands around – I want to throw Wolf Alice straight in there, who just get better and better and I was desperate to review their new album for this month but alas it’s not out yet. On top of them are a plethora of UK female led acts, from The Last Dinner Party and The Big Moon to the new-all female vocaled Black Country New Road. But leading the pack are Wet Leg, and what’s interesting about them is they really quite an odd proposition, and that’s why I want to talk about them this month.

The Isle of Wight indie phenomenon are back with a new album, their 2nd, Moisturizer after a frankly extraordinary breakout debut that has made them music press darlings on both sides of the pond. Chaise Longue became one of those songs- backed by a v clever video and look for the band – the giant hats and lobster claws – that they then referenced in a series of excellent singles with similarly excellent videos – the fabulous Wet Dream, as well as Oh No and Yr Mum. It was clear they were not a one-hit wonder, and had a playfulness as well as an edge that made them perfect crossover indie fodder – 6 Music, Pitchfork, Glastonbury, Lollapalooza – this band was made for them all.

That makes them sounds contrived and I don’t they are all, there’s never been any sense of that. But I wondered how you follow up an album like that and how you evolve. Because, though I enjoyed the first album, I had a niggling doubt that behind the unbelievable effervescent and singular personality of lead singer Rhian Teasdale was a band that perhaps, musically at least, were just a touch indie generic?

My fears were initially confirmed when I first heard the first single Catch These Firsts. I was underwhelmed. It felt harder and more driving and rocky, but I worried that it traded vibes and a groove for a lack of melody. But do you know what? I was wrong! But it wasn’t until I heard follow up single CPR that everything started to make sense to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orD1QZBBXM8&list=RDorD1QZBBXM8&start_radio=1

Wet Leg were involving in all kinds of ways. I immediately loved Teasdale’s new look, a real giving no fucks queer vibe that I am just here for all day. But actually the music started to make sense, especially when I realised that they were moving away from a UK template and drawing on a much deeper well – American 90s alt rock. Pavement! Belly! Throwing Muses! Those bent guitar riffs, the slightly atonal quality, the grunge of the riffs. It’s all there, and fuck me, actually I am starting to love this. I imagine Joey will be feeling those same references.

So what do we have as an album? Well, sure it’s a mixed bag. It starts off magnificently with CPR, but 2nd track Liquidize feels a bit by numbers. Catch These Fists I’ve come to admire, though it’s by no means my favourite song. That goes to Davina McCall, a total surprise of a track, and funny, left field love song that just steals me completely. Jennifer’s Body is, alas, the other quite generic track before we get into the magnificent Mangetout. From then on, I have to say, the back end of the album gets better and better.

The last three songs are, for me, three of the strongest and the most bold, musically. Don’t Speak is pure Belly/early 90s 4AD. And then 11.21 is extraordinary, a haunting, lovely lollopoping ballad that could easily be Billie Eilish. Closer U and Me at Home is nothing short of magnificent, a Pavement esque grunge singalong that leaves you with a very nice vibe as you bring this brisk 38 minute album to a close.

So what is that about them? Teasdale is clearly the key figure here, presenting a bold and fearless version of modern femaleness that nonetheless loses none of the playfulness of the first album. But I have to say, I’ve come round to the band too. There’s some serious songwriting chops here, and it also just sounds like a load of fucking fun. Maybe it’s also that? Maybe everyone’s sick of the boys in their leather jackets taking themselves so seriously and not even talking to their audience – yeah, we see you Arctic Monkeys, headlining Glastonbury like it was a contractual obligation. This band are having fun and they are doing things there way, and you know, I am here for it!

And you, brothers?

Posted in Album of the Month, New Albums, New Tunes, podcast

AOTM April | Saya Gray | Saya

Posted on by David Allison

To anyone on the blog or pod, it’s been hard to avoid my growing Saya Gray obsession. I chose her as my track of the year in BOTH 2023 and 2024 like a mad fool. But we are not, as of yet, talking about an artist who has broken out in any way into the mainstream, or indeed barely into the consciousness of the average 6Music listener.

So who is Saya Gray? A Japanese-Canadian musician who’s lived in Canada, Japan, and is currently (I believe) resident in London, she’s a virtuoso bass player (just watch a video of her playing bass, wow!) who for a long time has played in a series of other bands and set-ups. Slowly, in the meantime, she’s been stepping out as a solo artist and making a name for herself in the early 2020s.

Gray’s output up until has been hard to categorise. She has a magpie approach to soaking up different influences, and her songs bounce around in different zones in a way that perhaps detractors might find a bit exhausting. My TINH brothers have commented that it can feel like you’re listening to three songs at once on some of her output. But she also feels quite prolific, her debut ’19 Masters’ (was it an album? She didn’t seem to think it was, but it seemed like one to me!) in 2022 followed by two long EPs, Qwerty and Qwerty II, that both felt to me like mini albums. High in the mix are hard to fathom song titles and a CAPS LOCK throughout (“DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY” and “AA BOUQUET FOR YOUR 180 FACE”). Guy has mentioned how much the Caps Lock annoys him and I can see that, but for me, the obtuse song titles feel to me like they reflect Gray’s subtle, mysterious persona and the often complex emotions she’s trying to express.

So what drew me to Saya? Partly, it was the excitement of hearing something that felt so genuinely fresh. But beyond that, she has an extraordinary ability to harness a beautiful melody, even if it’s presented in a post-modern wrapper, and her lyrics are often stunningly good (“I bent over backwards so many times/ I turned into a golden arch for you to walk through”). Beyond that – and this is really crucial into whether you’ll buy her vibe or not – is for me that this is an artist who in completely devoted and genuine about expressing who she is. She doesn’t yet have a giant global fanbase, but it is a madly devoted one that is pretty obsessive about her. 

Her work up to this point has felt quite disparate and experimental – even down to the album titles like 19 MASTERS (named because that was written on the tape of her recordings that she had to battle a former record company to release) or QWERTY, reflecting the randomness of those letters together on a keyboard. Even fans such as myself would acknowledge that Gray has not tried to make a ‘coherent’ record – she’s gone with her gut and it makes her work up to this record thrilling but uneven.

This album is her move to change all of that. She talks of being on a road trip and consciously writing songs for an ‘album’, a coherent piece of work that makes sense as a collection of songs. And there is no doubt that, right from the slow-burn, stunning opener THUS IS WHY (I DON’T SPRING FOR LOVE) (yes, I know, the title, the title!), this album has a musical coherence and vision that her previous work has lacked.

Firstly, let’s be clear: this is an album about heartbreak. Songs about the death of a relationship (EXHAUST THE TOPIC and SHELL OF A MAN), the ache of love loss (HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP UP A LIE?) and feeling used (PUDDLE OF ME) run through this record like a stick of record. Musically, perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it has, like so many things at the mo, a TOUCH OF COUNTRY! Slide guitar and acoustic pickings feature more prominently that in the past, and there’s a fascinating sense that Gray is pulling on a few more ‘classic’ influences – Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney – than we’ve heard from her work in the past. 

That isn’t to say that she’s lost her experimental edge. Amongst all the mellow Beatles-esque Mellotrons and nice guitars are glitchy breakdowns, tempo shifts and odd segues: all the stuff that I think makes Guy struggle to love her ;-). She’s also a magpie with her own work, reusing old lyrics that call back to her earlier songs in a way that I absolutely love (“I can make your dust turn to sparkles’ from Preying Mantis, now re-used in Lie Down). But undeniably, she is writing verses and choruses. This is, for wont of a better phrase, a ‘proper album’. Perhaps she wants this to be her ‘debut’ because nothing she’s done before has felt like an album. It certainly feels like one to listen to.

So what did I make when I first heard? Actually, I wasn’t sure. My expectations were so sky-high, I was slightly blindsided by what I (iniitally, and wrongly!) felt was a bit more of a conventional album than I was expecting. Repeated listens – and fuck me, have there been a lot of those – have totally dismantled that view. This is an absolutely stunning record, and the thing that is most stunning about it is that there at least 5 or 6 of my fave Saya Gray songs of all time on it. That is how strong I think the songs are. The pretty, accessible opener THIS IS WHY… that turns into a proper guitar groove (the most Canadian lyrics of all time: “This is why I don’t fall in love in Spring/Hello snow, I’m alone”!);  beautiful use of heartbreak glitchy autotune vocal on HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP UP A LIE; the party country, party Beatles-esque gorgeousness of SHELL OF A MAN, the absolute fucking STUNNER of bleak genius that is penultimate track EXHAUST THE TOPIC, and then the somehow redemptive and contemplative LIE DOWN, as good an album closer ad I’ve heard in a very long time.

 For those who haven’t quite connected with her, I think her recent stunning Tiny Desk concert does a great job of stripping back her songs to their essence, and you can see their beauty on their own without any bells or whistles. But as for this album, I honestly have no idea of a) whether she’ll probably break out to a wider audience or remain cult and b) what the hell my TINH will make of this album.

For me, I’m enjoying the rare experience of an artist with which I’m genuinely obsessed not just delivering but completely surpassing my expectations. For the avoidance of doubt, this is my album of the year so far (sorry Weather Station, your crown has been stolen) and it will take something obscenely good to get anywhere near it.

Posted in Album of the Month, New Albums

October: My Method Actor – Nilufer Yanya

Posted on by David Allison

There was a moment when I watching Nilufer Yanya last week at the Brudenell in Leeds, when I was hit by a strong question – what am I watching? What is this music? Yanya has been doing a few in-store stripped back sets promoting her third album, My Method Actor, which dropped last Friday.

She had been expecting that the Leeds date, like the others, were a genuine in-store in a record store or similar – and seemed a bit bemused and slightly wrong-footed to start to realise it felt more like a proper gig. She had no drummer, with only two (very adept) musicians with her, one on sax and keys, the other on bass/guitar. I was expecting, as a result, to find the songs I already knew – four or five of them had already been slipping out the last few months – to feel a little underpowered. How wrong I was. If anything, they revealed themselves even more clearly – Yanya’s gosssamer light, murmured, throaty vocal hung in the air with surprising power, and the knotty construction of her clever, brilliant songs seemed so logical when you hear them live. But I was still nagging away at that question: what is this? Girl with guitar and vocals, quite angsty lyrics. Indie guitar music right? Not really. There’s a proggy-ness to the way she plays guitar at times, and her chord structures are angular and surprising in a way that feels more like jazz than pop music. Let’s throw post-rock into the mix too just for fun.She clearly plays with different tunings for different songs and was having to retune her guitar in between (she started to relax and displayed a lovely goofiness with her interactions with the audience that were wonderfully at odds with the intensity of her performance). I still don’t know what this is. Of course, in the post-Spotify era, why should this matter? Every artist is a jukebox of influences. But I think I want to know why because I want to understand why this is such a special album – because let’s be clear, I am completely blown away by this extraordinary record.

Nilufer Yanya burst onto the scene in 2019 with her much-lauded debut album Miss Universe. She seemed to arrive fully formed, comfortably living in a sound that seemed part confessional angular indie of early PJ Harvey, and part something less easy to categorise. I liked her immediately, though I found her follow-up Painless not quite as powerful and it didn’t quite stay with me.

Maybe it’s easy to say this when an artist finally delivers the perfect record in your own musical wheelhouse, but though I’ve really tracks of hers in the past, I’ve always had the feeling that her albums can feel a bit disjointed, and I like some tracks more than others. So when she released the first single from this album early this year, the astonishing Like I Say (I Runaway), I was pretty excited. It was, as they say, an absolute banger, and right now, I think it’s going to be my song of the year.

Every song that’s followed this one has been just as intriguing, and crucially, they’ve all felt part of a maturing and a broadening of Yanya’s sound. But nothing prepared me for what those songs would sound like in the context of a whole album. Even the songs I’ve smashed to death like Like I Say and My Method Actor sound fresh and new when you hear the sequencing of this record. And let’s talk about the sequencing. Is there a better opener than Keep on Dancing this year – crisp, taut, desperate, urgent – all the things this album is about, finding yourself in your late 20s, broken relationships, fears about yourself, about how you present yourself (hence Method Actor). Then onto Like I Say which now sounds like the things it was born to do – to take you into the album as a whole. To follow that with Method Actor feels almost rude – the disgustingly fantastic guitar on that song should be against the law.

You’d think the album might be front loading the goodies, and I did worry a little on first listens that the second half was a more languid, slow-burn affair. But as each song opens itself on repeated listens, it starts to dawn on you – or it did on me anyway – that there isn’t. bad moment on this tight, brilliant 11 songs, 44 minute masterpiece. I could go on about individual tracks, but we can do that on the pod. But I have to say that the Robert Fripp prog drone guitar on Call It Love almost makes me scream with joy every time I hear it!

Shout to Yanya’s collaborator Wilma Archer, about whom I know little – but he has clearly found a way to showcase Yanya’s brilliance to full effect, and Yanya has been very effusive about his role in the record. His background in electronic music is the key to this I think – there is openness and a simplicity about the songs’ arrangements that allow the songwriting and Yanya’s lovely vocals to shine. You hear every instrument, every line. It’s a triumph.

So yeah, I’m a fan. It’s in my top 3 for the year. It might even take the top spot. I might, in fact, need to take a break soon because I can’t get enough of it. How about you, brothers…?

Posted in Album of the Month, New Albums

JUNE: All Born Screaming – St Vincent

Posted on by David Allison

This year really has been an embarrassment of riches, music wise – after a slow start, the new releases starting popping out in Spring, and since then we really have been spoiled for choice. I could have easily chosen to review the Billie Eilish album, or the Waxatachee, or the Yaya Bey, and that’s just off the top off my head.

But there are two albums that, so far, have stood head and shoulders above the rest for me. The first of those is Vampire Weekend’s, which must be one of the finest collections of songs they’ve ever released. The second of those two albums is the latest album from St Vincent aka Annie Clark, her seventh.

I do so with quite a bit of trepidation – because as regular listeners/readers will know, I chose St Vincent’s divisive last album, Daddy’s Home, for a previous blog, and it’s fair to say that it went down like a bucket of warm sick. So I nearly didn’t. But then I thought what the blog and the pod is about, and that’s to communicate our love for music – and well, I REALLY love this music.

Though I really enjoyed Daddy’s Home sleazy 70s shtick, I can see why it didn’t land with some people. Annie Clark is unashamedly an art rock musician – she enjoys shapeshifting between albums and using different personas and is pretty open about her debt to David Bowie on that front. I’m a huge, huge fan of hers (as is my partner Caroline, who adores her), but I’m also pretty comfortable in that art rock zone – I like my music with a bit of style, edge and persona. I also get that, for some people, that can be a huge turnoff – that ‘persona’ thing can feel like an affectation, and barrier in the way of the artists and the listener.

So why have I chosen All Born Screaming after the mauling Daddy’s Home got? Well, perhaps I am a sucker for punishment. But I think this album is really, really special. The first thing to note is that Clark has completely dispensed with the persona – this is just her. She’s said in a number of interviews that she was finding it tiring reinventing herself and that she also wanted to try and channel a bit more honesty about what she’s feeling. That’s also reflected in the sound of the album – she’s a huge Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails fan and you can really hear it in songs like Reckless:

The other thing I love about this record is that, despite its incredible musical breadth – grunge rock, electro pop, ballideering and even reggae (!), it flows SO well as a unified piece of work. If you want to talk about the Art of the Album, then surely this would merit a piece? What a journey this record goes on. Opening with the ethereal Hell is Near, and then segueing into the dark, foreboding and brilliant Reckless, and then – boom! – you get right between the eyes with the single Broken Man, surely one of the strongest out and out rock songs she’s ever made.

What I think is brave is that it doesn’t try and disperse the different styles across the record – more that you head from territory to territory, starting slowly then hitting the hard rocking trio of Broken Man, Flea and Big Time Nothing (another absolutely belter!). Violent Times moves the album into a whole new section with the Bowie-esque Violent Times followed but the gorgeous art-rock ballad The Power’s Out. Both explore Clark’s long held fascination with the ‘end of the world’ vibes in her lyrics.

And then the album does another extraordinary left turn. Sweetest Fruit is almost a straightforward pop banger (with a slight kink in it), but you can almost imagine it as a stadium ballad. If that doesn’t push the envelope enough, So Many Planets is a – I can’t believe I’m writing this – pop reggae track that is – I also can’t believe I’m writing this – an absolute triumph (others views are available of course, but I LOVE it!).

Things round up after only 41 brisk minutes and 10 songs with the funky and surprisingly chirpy All Born Screaming, that despite the dark lyrically content somehow feels like an upbeat climax to the album. And in that 41 minutes, Annie Clark has exhibited the full range of her incredible songwriting (and guitar playing, obvs) in a record that, for me, hangs together better than anything she’s ever done. I think it’s her finest hour. And that, brothers, is why I had to pick it for this month.

So, he says nervously….over to you…?

Posted in Album of the Month, Music chat, New Albums, podcast

November AOTM: Javelin by Sufjan Stevens

Posted on by David Allison

We all like to believe that we can listen to an artist’s music on its own merits, without knowing the back story. But the truth is that context is everything in trying to make sense of an artist’s work, and while we may well spend plenty of time listening to music without knowing the story ‘behind it’, with records we love and cherish, the story of how that music came to be and what’s it’s about are a huge part of our connection with the music itself.

Likewise, finding out that an artist is a dick or holds repulsive views can have a huge impact on our listening habits – see Morrissey, or indeed even the recent Roisin Murphy palaver. I’ve barely listened to her album and I’m a big fan, I just needed a break after a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

And so it is with the Sufjan story. What an interesting place he inhabits in the pop firmament. Adored by Pitchfork and the entire indie universe, but he seems to have fans from well outside that world – he’s one of those rare artists where he seems to have broken into the public consciousness. And that’s fascinating, when you consider his output. He made his name in the early 00s as a kind of old-timey Americana folk troubadour, with albums like Michigan, Seven Swans and his breakout album Illinois. The songs had titles so long they sounded like they were titles from 19th Century novels. And let’s not forget his pledge to make an album exploring the history of every single state in the US. Alas, he’s only managed Michigan and Illinois so far, but I wouldn’t it put it past him to return to the project! And then there was his Christianity – it’s not unheard of a contemporary white indie singer songwriter to have a faith, thought it’s probably quite unusual – but it’s the fact that his religious beliefs play such a central part of his songwriting and his themes.

What’s even more interesting is that his reputation has continued to grow, despite him making a bewildering series of creative left turns – the 42 songs Xmas album! The second 58 song Xmas album! Difficult, broken electronica on The Age of Adz, and again more recently on last album, The Ascension, which we reviewed on an early pod and it’s fair to say we struggled with! Then there’s the ambient records, the soundtracks, the collaborations. He certainly covers a lot of ground, and he doesn’t seem to mind if his audience follow him or not.

But perhaps he holds his place in the musical landscape because he’s such a fucking good songwriter. His gorgeous gossamer-light voice can float above a solo piano, or simple guitar or banjo, and you think you’re listening to an angel (He’s certainly closer to God than most of us, perhaps he has access that we don’t!). On 2015’s Carrie & Lowell, it felt like Sufjan hit a musical high point, creating a breathtaking and heartbreaking collection of songs that delved deep into his difficult relationship with his mother and her partner. I read somewhere (Pitchfork?) recently that he sometime sounds like he feels things so acutely, you almost can’t bear to listen. That’s what Carrie & Lowell sounded like to me.

So here we are 3 years on from the dense, challenging and slightly underwhelming The Ascension, and here comes Javelin, and immediately, you are struck by the beauty and the scale of it. The songwriting and style is reminiscent of Carrie & Lowell, but the arrangements are so much bigger – choirs, orchestra, and interestingly, electronics too – it finally feels like he’s taken that electronica side of his work and married it beautifully to the best of his songwriting. Early single Will Anybody Ever Love Me? was stunning – as Pitchfork said, an immediate addition to the best songs he’s written – but it was only when I sat down and listened to it on headphones for the first time that I realised just how incredible it is. What a fucking song!

Listening to the album, you’re immediately hit by the themes of loss – Goodbye Evergreen, Genuflecting Ghost (such a Sufjan title!). But then again that’s not weird, Stevens has always been obsessed with life and death, the afterlife and the now. And going into listening to this, I think we were all aware of one of the big life stories that you can’t help but add to the context of listening to the record. Stevens has been suffering from a rare autoimmune disease that has left him – temporarily hopefully – in a wheelchair. Of course he’s been thinking about death, you think. He’s just had the fright of his life.

The reviews are in and they are glowing, everyone riffs on the usual Sufjan themes, it gets called a masterpiece, and you think, OK, I think I’m beginning to understand this record. And then…and then…and then…after the release, this…

Jesus fucking Christ. Not only has he been wheelchair bound for the last year, but he lost the love of his life – a man and a relationship – and let’s be clear, a sexuality – that he had hidden from the world. It is, of course, hardly a surprise that Sufjan is queer, but the fact that he went through something so unbelievably traumatic and has only just shared it with the world, after making arguably the finest music of his life. I mean, I can’t even process.

And then you listen to the album again. And you hear the opening lines:

Goodbye, Evergreen
You know I love you
But everything heaven sent
Must burn out in the end

And you realise this album is about Evans Richardson and the love that Sufjan felt for him. Fucking hell. And then you listen to Will Anybody Ever Love Me? again…

Tie me to the final wooden stake
Burn my body, celebrate the afterglow
Wash away the summer sins I made
Watch me drift and watch me struggle, let me go

And then Genuflecting Ghost…

Give myself as a sacrifice
Genuflecting ghost I kiss no more

Penultimate track Shit Talk is one of those 8 minute Sufjan songs. I approached it with trepidation, but I think it might be the most complete, brilliant and perfect 8 minute song he’s ever written. Of course, I thought it was about relationship arguments, and maybe it is, but it’s about an argument with someone who’s dead or dying.

No more fighting
I’ve nothing left to give
I’ve nothing but atrophy
Did I cross you?
Did I fail to believe in positive thoughts?
Our romantic second chance is dead
I buried it with the hatchet
Quit your antics
Put them at the foot of the bed
And set it, on fire
I will always love you
But I cannot look at you

I’m listening as I write – again! – and it still moves me to tears nearly every time. Maybe it feels a bit premature to start talking about this as the album of the year – and there other contenders – but I can’t imagine Stevens putting any more of himself into his music, and turning what must be unimaginable trauma into one of the most beautiful albums I’ve heard in years.

Posted in Album of the Month, Music chat

JULY HIP HOP 50th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: Reachin’ – Digable Planets

Posted on by David Allison

Some records come into your life in the perfect Time & Space (see what I did there), and to listen to them is to be transported back to that very special place.

And so it is with my choice for my favourite hip hop album of all time. Of course, choosing one is crazy, a ridiculous idea. How could I not choose IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS? How can you ignore BLACK ON BOTH SIDES? What kind of idiot doesn’t go for PAUL’S BOUTIQUE? I bounced around between some obvious big hitters, but all the while, I could feel the pull of what eventually became the very clear winner: REACHIN’, the 1993 debut for Philly via NYC trio Digable Planets. Man, what does this album mean to me? Let me count the ways, and let’s start by tracing my journey to that record.

Like a lot of 80s indie kids, my first introduction to hip hop actually came via John Peel, who regularly played everything from Biz Markie to Public Enemy on his show. The first song that really got under my skin, and indeed the very hip hop song I ever bought was the 7″ single of Eric B & Rakim’s Paid In Full – or to be clear, the Coldcut remix, sampling the Turkish singer Ofra Haza’s haunting vocal.

I flirted with a few other artist, but then fell pretty hard for Public Enemy’s IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS, which felt vital and angry but also surprisingly accessible and full of strong hooks and powerful beats. But it was the herald of the Daisy Age and the flourishing of the Native Tongues bands that led me headlong into hip hop as something I listened to on a daily basis. No need to restate the genius of De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest, but what strikes me now about their music is their playfulness and willingness to experiment, their lack of bravado bullshit, and their plundering of jazz music as much as old soul and RnB tracks.

When I went to Uni in the early 90s, I ended up making a friend with a proper jazz head, and strange though it feels to recount now, I had a year when I learned all about classic be-bop era jazz, and got to know everyone from Wes Mongtomery to Art Blakey to Dexter Gordon. Armed with this new love for a genre I didn’t previously understand, I then spent a year in the States in 92-93 as part of my degree (in American Studies). There were too many highlights to mention, though seeing Clinton getting inaugurated in Washington DC was pretty cool. But it’s the music that’s stayed with me now. Fuck me, I can remember every album I listened to that year.

The US was overflowing with grunge and post grunge at the time, which I absolutely hated with a passion. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, all those guys. It was everywhere. I retreated into random corners, discovering Brazilian music via David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label, and getting into Afro-Belgian accapella group Zap Mama (yeah, I know, nothing’s changed!). But there two hip hop albums that year that became constant friends. One was Arrested Development’s debut, which was HUGE. And the other was Digable Planets. I remember walking onto the record store near the uni campus I was on, and they were playing Cool Like That. I recognised the Art Blakey sample, and on top of it floated this playful, almost feminine male vocal, rapping with such style and panache that it blew my head off. Needless to say, I left the store with that album.

DIGABLE PLANETS were – or rather are, now they’re touring this album again! – a 3 piece from Philadelphia who moved to New York. They seem to arrive fully formed as a concept – 2 men and 1 woman, all of shared rapping duties, and who sold themselves as interplanetary insects – Butterfly, Doodlbug & Ladybug. Their album, Reachin’, felt immediately like a manifesto for a new kind of hip hop – one that was as influenced by jazz and Blue Note records as James Brown or the usual sources. One that felt slick and cool and effortlessly stylish. Both opener It’s Good To Be Here and monster sunshine groove Where I’m From seemed to welcome the listener into their world. Grooves were funky, jams were slow, lyrics and rhymes seemed to flow so perfectly with the music that it was impossible to imagine they’d ever lived apart. I was absolutely besotted.

But it wasn’t all just good vibes, even if it always sounded that way – La Femme Fetal – is an utterly blistering attack on abortion rights told through a first person narrative that builds to a wider political point, and it’s, for me, one of the most articulate and brilliant political hip hop songs ever written. I know every line. I never thought, 30 years on, that it would be even more prescient now than it ever was then.

At the end of my year in the US, I went home clutching my Digable Planets tape. No one – and I mean NO ONE – in the UK had even heard of them. Everyone was listening to Suede and Britpop was riding over the horizon. But this album has never left me, and it never will.

It’s interesting comparing this to Arrested Development’s debut, which I think has fared less well with the years. That now sounds like a kind of pop-rap hybrid who’s appeal was really obvious, but it doesn’t sounds that revolutionary today. THIS album still does – fresh, vital and forward-thinking.

The band only made one other album, the completely excellent and more overtly political BLOWOUT COMB, before disbanding. Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler went on to form the highly experimental Shabazz Palaces, who I lover and and I think everyone else on the pod hates! But they mostly disappeared from sight. And though this album went Gold in the US and they won a Grammy for best song in 93, Digable Planets seem to have got lost somewhere in the conversation about hip hop greats, which is crazy, because so many other hip hop artists have acknowledged the influence this had on them – from Mos Def to The Roots.

It’s so nice to see so much positivity about them now they’re touring the 30th anniversary of the album, so maybe people do finally understand that if you wanna get Cool like Dat, y’all need to dig Digable Planets.

Posted in Album of the Month, New Albums

June AOTM | Wait Til I Get Over | Durand Jones

Posted on by David Allison

It’s been quite a few years for soul music, which feels like it’s undergone quite the revival, with everyone from Mercury Music Prize winner Michael Kiwanuka to Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings to Raphael Saadiq to Nao to Cleo Sol, and very notably of late, Anderson .Paak, making music that can squarely be described as soul or neo-soul or retro soul or whatever the heck else you’d call it. And even on hipper projects like Sault, so beloved of us 4 on the podcast, you could make a strong argument that soul is right at the beating heart of its sound.

But it’s also a tricky genre to navigate – the history of soul music is so wide and so breathtakingly diverse, and its influence is so embedded in our musical culture, that it can be hard to find a space to make anything that genuinely feels new, and there is a lot of stuff out there that treads very heavily on existing formats. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but that old discussion that we’ve had on this blog/podcast many times rears its head once again – how can you best homage to the genre you’re working in, while moving music forwards?

I should say, for the record, that soul music has been one of the bedrocks of my musical taste since I was first leant an Aretha cassette by a friend in my teens. Like a lot of folk, I first gorged on Motown, Jackie Wilson & the 60s girl groups then headed into 70s soul territory via Stevie, Curtis, Marvin, Sly Stone and the rest, and by the time I was at Uni, I was getting into contemporary stuff like Mica Paris, Young Disciples and some of the acid jazz scene of the Brand New Heavies and Galliano era. I suspect my love of late 90s/early 00s R’n’B – and boy do I love that stuff – comes from the fact that it is a souped up, dance floor friendly take on soul music – which is arguably what RnB has always been! The vocals, the arrangements, it’s all in there, just with a hefty bass and drum kick.

Cut to the chase: I’m a sucker for soul music. But in the modern era, the more ‘traditional’ the soul revival sound, the less I’m personally that engaged with it. So I don’t mind a bit of Sharon Jones, but I preferred Raphael Saadiq when he’s got a bit more R’n’B in him and he’s not just sounding like a retro soul revivalist. Ditto, Kiwanuka got more interesting when he became more experimental and had the likes of Inflo on board pushing his sound into a more contemporary space.

I first came across Durand Jones via his band Durand Jones & The Indications via their big breakout single Witchoo, which I loved. However, at the time, when I dug into the rest of that album, Private Space, I found a band and a vocalist that felt a LITTLE too enamoured of Philly Soul and 70s soul disco vibes, and the exercise felt a bit too retro and stale for me to really connect with. In comparison to Anderson .Paak, for example, who seemed to be absolutely tearing the floor up at the same time with something steeped in those same influences, but felt so fresh!

Fast forward 2 years and I’m looking for an album to choose for this AOTM. I’m struggling – there is nothing that’s been recently released that grabs my attention. And then, while flicking through Metacritic, I see Durand Jones – but this time a solo album. And the reviews are INSANE. I stick it on, and from the very first track, and that gorgeous liquid string arrangement on beguiling opener Gerri Marie, I knew I was listening to something pretty special.

I’ve devoured a bunch of podcasts and interviews that the TINH brothers have shared (and that we’ll share with you in the links section!), and what first strikes you about Durand Jones, apart from his fierce intellect and strong personality, is how much this record means to him. This is him coming to terms with himself as a Queer black man from the Deep South – I think the first time he’s openly referenced that – in the astonishing confessional ballad, That Feeling (bloody WordPress won’t let the video embed in a working fashion, but go and check out the video on YouTube). It’s openly confessional, trying to make sense of his and his family’s life in Hilaryville, Louisiana, a town formed by former slaves given the land as part of most emancipation reparations – once ‘the place you’d most like to live’ according to his grandma, but now decimated by drugs and poverty.

First thing to say is that this album is constructed in classic album format – a sprightly, tight 41 minutes, moving opener leading to chugging banger Lord Have Mercy. The entire set is a homage to the entire breadth of soul music, with so many highlights that you could name any track as one. Sadie is a slice of plaintive doo-wop; Wait Till I Get Over a straight-down-the-line gospel track that suddenly drifts off into an ambient finale; See It Through a catchy AF soul jam that will surely be another single:

The closing tracks of the album are particularly strong. Someday We’ll All Be Free is a Stevie-esque ballad that mix political and emotional yearnings that surprisingly bursts into a rap in in the middle of the song – it’s a real album highlight. Letter to My 17 Year Old Self is a rather leftfield ballad, full of musical experimentation, that reminded me of Parade-era Prince. Like earlier slow jam I Want You, it wants to play with the form as well as celebrate. Finally, we end with the gorgeous, mournful Secrets, before the set ends and we just hear the sound of water, presumably the Mississippi river. Are the secrets being washed away? Or is Durand being reborn in the river? Either way, the sound of tides lap against the listener until it fades out.

This album has got under my skin like no other this year, save for Young Fathers, and like them, it’s a personal real AOTY contender, and certainly a top 10 shoo-in. So why does it work so well? I think the fact that band recorded so much as live in the studio gives it the most ridiculous energy. It’s like you’re listening to a live performance. Despite that, it somehow never feels like an exercise in retro-soul. I think that comes down to the breadth and skill of the songwriting, as well as at the very modern persona and emotions of the record’s protagonist, Durand J. He drags every inch of emotion out of every song like a force of will! Finally, the arrangements are deft and smart throughout – in particular the use of crunchy, heavy rock guitar is a genius move, and works against it sounding neatly soul-like. Listen to it muscle its way in at the end of Lord Have Mercy, for example, and it adds such a punchy layer that takes the sounds somewhere new. The whole thing is an exercise in how you make a soul record in 2023 that feels vital and relevant. Durand, we waited, and you sure as hell got over!

Posted in Album of the Month, New Albums

February: Prize – Rozi Plain

Posted on by David Allison

I’m a big fan of mystery in music. By that I mean, listening to something and not quite knowing what it means, or what the words are saying, or what the melody is doing – but somehow, mysteriously, being moved by it. Bowie is, of course, the master of this, and Kate Bush likewise. But it’s always great when you come across something in the corner of the musical universe that is somehow not quite like anything else. You couldn’t quite say what genre it is, why you connect with it, or why it specifically speaks to you. Rozi Plain falls squarely into that category for me.

I first came across Rozi via This Is The Kit, the Bristol based folk-rock band fronted by the brilliant Kate Stables. And I first came across This is The Kit, bizarrely enough on a Maison Kitsuné chill out compilation sometime in the late noughties, when I was still taking my daughter to nursery, because I remember how much she liked the song ‘Two Wooden Spoons’.

Rozi P is a member of that band and tours and plays with them, as well as forging her own solo career. I’ve loved This Is The Kit for a long time, though interestingly I would say that they are a folk/folk rock/alt folk band. Whereas I’m not sure what Rozi Plain is. Anyway, I first came Rozi via Kate Staples, and at some point, I must have decided to listen to her 2016 album What A Boost.

Everything about that album is ‘unassuming’. The cover art, where Rozi has her hood on a raincoat, back to camera, facing a field. It’s like a not very good camera photo. It’s not artful, it’s very ordinary. She doesn’t look like a pop star at all. She never has, actually. I’ve never seen her do a ‘photoshoot’. Anyway, if I’m being honest, I liked but didn’t love that album. I guess I was expecting This Is The Kit v2, but actually it much more subtle, introspective and – yes – unassuming. It sounded like it didn’t mind if you listened to or not, it was there anyway, quietly existing in it own little corner.

How I underestimated that album. Because in the last 3 years, I bet you it’s one of the albums I’ve played the most. I return to it like a lost friend and I’m always happy to see it. And here’s the thing – I still feel like has a mystery to it, like I don’t quite know what it is. But it got under my skin like nothing else. I’ve been thinking a lot about how to describe her music, and I think that what is has is a lot of SPACE. It’s not folk music at all, the songwriting is pop music, but has an openness and a slight wonkiness that makes me thing of jazz more than anything?! Is that just me?

The mix and instruments are wide apart; it’s not fussy, it’s not trying too hard. It’s intimately produced, everything up close in the mix, and the really clever icing on the top is Rozi’s double tracked (ALWAYS double tracked!) vocal, both perfect and flat and, again, unassuming. No vocal ticks, no showing off. Subtle AF. But my god, it’s effective.

So to this new album, which has moved her sound and the conversation about what she is and what she does on considerably. This is squelchier affair, a lot more synths and swathes of electronic sound. But what remains is that commitment to the subtle, the mysterious and the gently persuasive. I don’t want to get hung up on a whole gender thing and resort to any stereotypes, but I do think this is a very female take on songwriting – it is insistent but it’s not trying to show off. And I get that someone could listen to this and miss the whole thing. To be honest, I was worried when I chose it that you all might feel that way too, and it’s been heartening to hear that she’s connecting with you.

So what’s going with the songwriting. Let’s start with a slightly fanciful quote from her own Bandcamp age:

The music of Rozi Plain has always felt like a freeze-frame. A colourful and graceful snapshot of the world, paused, suspended in time, and then gently toyed with, like stepping out of the linear world as we know it.

Yeah, I know, it’s a bit much, but it does touch on something. The songs kind of in a here and now. They’re about a current conversation, something that’s happening in real time. That’s actually quite unusual!

In Agreeing for Two, she sings:
“What should we call it
If nothing will do?
It’s nothing we’ll do
But what should we call it?”

I mean, who knows what the argument/discussion is about. But we know that feeling, right, about not being able to find common ground in a relationship?

All the way through the album, there are refrains in the lyrics that are repeated so often they’re like mantras:

If it’s a feeling/That’s going/When it goes/You even know/Help for you/Help for you/Help for you..

My god, that could be anything. Depression? The end of a relationship? Trying to help a friend? I love that space these songs give you to make sense of them in your way. Prove Your Good goes even further, reducing most of the whole song to that mantra (note it’s not Prove ‘YOU’RE’ Good but Prove YOUR Good i.e. prove that you have worth).

I’m going to go even further and do the worst thing possible: quite Pitchfork:

Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, Plain constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present in the moment.

Back to that thing about time again. Maybe that’s what keeps me coming back to her work. Listening to it puts me in the moment. I’m here and it’s now. I can work to it, I can relax to it, I can think to it. Can’t think of many records that’s true of.

I’m already loving this as much as the last record, and I’m also really grateful that it feels like a significant musical step forward. She’s not staying put, she’s on the move. And I’m very happy to be on the journey with her. Very much looking to your thoughts on this fascinating album!

Posted in Spin it or Bin It

Song for an Entrance | David

Posted on by David Allison

So this month, we’re all choosing a song for our entrance. Our entrance to what? Our own entrance to our biggest party? To our funeral? To our birth? To our wedding? To the beginning of our best DJ set? Well, that’s for us to decide. It’s the moment we arrive, we walk in, we’re wheeled in. It’s our entrance!

I immediately knew what kind of track I wanted to choose, because of my day job. I spend my life collecting tracks that I’d love to use one day in an awesome film or TV script. Of course, it almost never transpires that I get to do that, but it doesn’t stop me imagining. And over the years, I’ve amassed quite a collection. Now and again, I’m either delighted or dismayed (or a bit of both) to see them used in other stuff. Killing Eve’s brilliant use of French Ye-Ye pop, well you can imagine how gutted I was about that!

Anyway, my choice is for an entrance to a fictitious character. A me, but a made-up me. And by sheer coincidence, I actually played this track on this Sunday’s Mondo Pop show. So the Gods are aligned. It was meant to be.

OK, let’s make up some daft scene, off the top of my head. Let’s say it’s 1979, and there’s an English businessman trying to do a deal with the Sicilian Mafia. Thing is, he’s not a businessman, he’s a spy or a diplomat, and the money he’s going to hand over is the first part of an elaborate sting to catch the Mafia head honcho.

So he’s shitting himself. He needs to pull this off. When he gets off the plane to Palermo, and gets in the waiting car, and is driven to the club to meet the man to whom he’s going to hand this money over – this is the song that kicks in as he walks into the club in slo-mo, palms sweaty, eyes fixed straight ahead, trying to keep it cool. Early 70s Italian pop-funk of the highest order, and a song Tarantino would be happy to slide into a soundtrack.

So this is my entrance. It’s the entrance I’m writing for someone who doesn’t exist, in which I get to play the lead role.

And in the meantime, back in the real world, I can at least slip it into our headphones, and walk down the road, in the middle of my own personal movie…

Posted in Album of the Month, Music chat, New Albums, New Tunes

SEPTEMBER: Gemini Rights – Steve Lacy

Posted on by David Allison

There are certain genres of music that I just can’t get enough of – Girl Groups of the 60s, 70s folk rock, Noughties Scandi electro pop, Native Tongues hip hop, basically anything French. Bring me more of any of these, and I’ll lap it up. And right up there with my absolute fave genres is what I’d call wonky R&B. It’s definitely R&B but it’s got a little kink in there – I’m talking everything from Miguel to Greentea Peng to Lucy Pearl to Solange to – yes, of course – Frank Ocean.

Some of those artists you could almost call soul music, and of course the line between soul and R&B has always been a difficult one to draw. But what you can hear is where that wonky R&B draws its inspiration. We’re talking 70s Curtis Mayfield at his most rootsy-ish, bit of Sly & The Family Stone, but perhaps the cornerstone of these influences is early 70s Stevie Wonder – and in particular, that incredible trilogy of albums that ran Talking Book – Innervisions – Fulfilingness First Finale.

What made those albums so groundbreaking wasn’t just the Moog synths, or Stevie’s ability to push the sound of soul music forward. It was also that they were deeply musical and driven as much by melody as they were by grooves. They expanded the language of soul/R&B and freed it up in such a profound way that they essentially became the template for so many artists who followed. Just like the shadow The Beatles have cast over rock since they recorded, I think Stevie did the same for R&B. Prince, surely the greatest innovator that followed Stevie, was clearly hugely inspired by that template – and he was just as comfortable singing an out and out pop song (Raspberry Beret) or a slow soul jam (If I Was Your Girlfriend) as he was writing a groove (Get Off).

I am SUCH a sucker for music influenced by these artists – that mixture of soul and groove and melody but also a bit of experimentation and oddness, just like Prince and Stevie had, is absolute catnip to me. To say that this album falls right into the centre of that universe is possibly even an understatement. If someone could have created an album for me, it would be this one. So I’m aware that my response is a personal one – well of course it is, all our responses are – but I don’t necessarily expect everyone to feel the same as I do!

So. Steve Lacy. Not a rock star name, certainly not an R&B name! I really liked The Internet, particularly their album Hive Mind. Sprouting out of the pretty out there Odd Future collective, they did a nice line in a forward thinking R&B jams, that, coupled with their sexually liberated/queer vibe, made them feel fresh and interesting. Steve joined the band half way through their life (they’re still going, but haven’t put out a record since 2018), and immediately added a missing layer to their sound. He then made a solo album, Apollo XXI in 2019 that I admired more than I liked. I found it frustrating – he was exactly the kind of artist I liked, and I willed myself to enjoy it, but there was something missing. You ever done that? You know the artist is capable of making something you’ll love, but somehow they haven’t delivered.

In all honesty, I wasn’t loving the look of many of the new releases when it came to this month, and then I noticed Steve Lacy had a new album out. And then I heard Bad Habit. And I was like – OK, THIS is the music I was hoping you’d make, Steve.

But nothing prepared me for how much I was going to LOOOOOOVE this record. What is that I find so beguiling about it?

  • Massive genre hopping? TICK
  • Sunny melodies mixed with angsty lyrics? TICK
  • Sexually ambiguous AF? TICK
  • Several genuine bangers? TICK

Opener STATIC is a perfect intro to the album – lyrically odd and personal, a weird mix of yearning, resentful and self-loathing (pretty much the album’s themes in a nutshell), before it ends with this beautiful cascading melody and incredible (5? 6?) part harmonies.

And then – oh boy – then the album gets going proper, and for me, Track 2 – 6 are the best sequence of songs I have heard on an album this year and better than most in any year. HELMET is Stevie meets Prince funky, with a giant slice of emotional angst thrown in. MERCURY, maybe my favourite song on the album, is a delicate Bossa Nova number with incredible harmonies, and a beautiful melody. I’ve probably listened to it 50 times already! BUTTONS is a Prince style slow jam with falsetto and lyrics of yearning and regret. BAD HABIT is a fucking slow banger with a refrain that will stick in your head for weeks.

(A sidebar: This got me thinking about great sequences of tracks and here’s 3 that immediately sprang to mind:

  • Tracks 2 – 6 (Slip Away – Wreath on Perfume Genius’s No Shape
  • Tracks 3 – 6 (Revival to Desire Lines) on Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest
  • The Opening 3 tracks of Mos Def’s The Ecstatic
  • 2 – 5 (Lost Ones to Doo Wop) on Lauren Hill’s the Miseducation...

A good discussion for a show sometime?)

Brother Joey has already suggested that he thinks the album falls off after this (though he also admits he hasn’t quite had time to connect with it yet). I’m not on board with this. BROTHER CODY is a strange, ethereal tune but I love it as a giant leftfield turn, full of gay desire and 80s synths. But my god, I love AMBER so much – I initially dismissed it as a bit of a filler, but it’s now completely won me over, not least that incredible moment where it moves from solo ballad to an entire choir of voices coming in. It reminds me of Frank Ocean at the absolute top of his game. It literally gives me goosebumps every time I listen. Give it some time and I hope it’ll do the same for you.

Then we’ve got another giant album highlight, SUNSHINE, a gorgeous sunny slab of delight, love Foushee’s voice on this, and the whole dreamy vibe.

Finally, we end GIVE YOU MY WORLD, in which Steve plays out his Prince obsession in a pure slow jam vibe. How much you dig this will depend on how much you like Prince style slow jams, but for me, what better way to close the album?

And then it’s over. 35 mins. That’s another big plus. What a statement and what a tight, lean way to express it. 35 mins, and then I go back to the beginning and press play again.

For the avoidance of doubt, this is currently my album of the year, and I’d be astonished if anything tops it. I doubt you’ll feel quite the same as me, but I hope this little gem of an album has got under your skin….