Actress
Ghettoville
[Ninja Tune]
Ghettoville arrives in the wake of Burial’s “going pop” and Blackest Ever Black’s popular habitation of the post-industrial starkness in which Actress has been glooming around, hoodie up and eyes transfixed, since Splazsh. Actress’ work has always impressed for its ability to affect both euphoria and despondency simultaneously, a sort of Detroit Techno for contemporary London life – Ghettoville instead splits those two impulses apart into more traditional narrative structure (if you want to try and read linearity into almost sheer abstraction, anyway).
Only codeine junkies and Autechre disciples will find something to love in the moribund exposition of Forgiven and Street Corp, introductions to the entropied world that Side A’s laconic funk, down-pitched loops and brutalist grid beats jut into. Toil away long enough and brief, subverted optimism pokes through pirate-radio crackle in the shape of Gaze’s rave synth vamps and Skyline’s major-key bass walks. R&B, hip-hop, and electro are co-opted, tied to a slavish 4/4 pulse, failing to communicate their original transcendental intent. Only the delicate Don’t offers a reprieve from metronomic rhythm, a rare moment of fragility that gets smashed to bits by the bad-trip aggression of Ghettoville‘s closing sequence. There is no real resolution. Closing movement Grey Over Blue’s title says it all: asphalt’s monolithic oppression remains status quo. The only relief from Ghettoville‘s bleak isolation is that it sounds this magnificent. – Daniel Gray
See also: Hype Williams – Black Is Beautiful, Raime – Quarter Turns Over A Living Line
Angel Olsen
Burn Your Fire For No Witness
[Jagjaguwar]
“I am the only one now”, chants Angel Olsen on Unfucktheworld, the opening of her new album. And, for the next 40-odd minutes, it certainly feels that way. Having garnered a reputation over her previous releases for an intimate, playing-in-the-room-with-you sound, she seems to have now made the jump to playing right inside your head. A distinctive vocal style that’s attention-grabbing even on quieter songs is now backed up with gravelly electric guitar and determinedly vigorous drumming on songs like lead single “Forgiven/Forgotten”. Even on gentler, more folk-patterned tracks, her voice can be utterly compelling. With the amps turned up, it’s consuming.
The faster pace and more enthusiastic performances do little to dull the edge of Olsen’s sharp and often dark lyrical viewpoint, too. Alienation and frustration are consistent themes, but even the most caustic cynicism can be undercut by a sudden epiphany. “Are you lonely, too? / High-five! So am I!”, goes one particular turnabout. On Stars, the singer longs for nothing more than to extinguish the entire universe, but by song’s end, figures that there are maybe more productive things to do with one’s omnipotence.
Never one to shy away from dealing with deeply personal and expansive emotional matters in her music, Olsen’s broadened musical palette is letting her explore these big ideas in ever clearer and more imaginative ways. The seemingly bleak attitude of many of her songs is further darkened by clouds of discord and rumbling distortion, but this only makes the gleaming streak of hope that’s shot through it all the clearer. Unfucking the world is a tall order, but, by the end of Burn Your Fire, you’ll believe she’s the only one who can do it. – Leo Devlin
September Girls
Cursing the Sea
[Fortuna Pop!]
Emerging from a fog of reverb, September Girls’ songs don’t exactly wash up on the shore so much as they crash, noisily, against a jagged cliff. With riffs that would buckle a less propulsive rhythm section, there’s a sustained momentum to their melodies that’s as engaging as it is aggressive. Mid-album standout Talking even finds a way to weaponise girl-group “oh-oh-oh” harmonies, backing them with menacing ghost-house keyboard and guitar lines.
Despite the walloping distortion and bellicose outbursts, though, the watchword here is “composure”. Even when the arrangements seem perfectly poised to sink into utter raucousness, the persistently focused drumming keeps the enterprise afloat, and coolly detached vocals drag songs ever forwards. The swirling echo that swells tracks like Another Love Song and Someone New is employed only to clarify, not to drown, some effortlessly catchy pop hooks.
Those hooks, too, serve to soften lyrics that are often aloof, or even downright icy. Many deal with relationships, but most of the viewpoints of the album’s songs are less affectionate than they are disaffected. Jilted lovers, jealous suitors, and haughty objects of devotion all figure, but are portrayed sympathetically enough to feel personable. The outlook painted by the songwriting is certainly dark, but never bleak. Only during the closer, Sister, does the musical atmosphere become oppressive, building up, exhausting, and then exploding all of the album’s constituent elements.
Considering its position as a debut album, and the fact that a bunch of its songs have already seen release in some form or another over the past few years, Cursing the Sea is a remarkably complete work. Calming even when it roars, and still fun when at its coldest, September Girls’ music washes over you like an irresisible tide. – Leo Devlin
Warpaint
Warpaint
[Rough Trade Records]
The release of Warpaint’s latest self titled offering has come out of a cloud of a certain kind of understated hype. With one of the biggest name “alternative” producers of the ’90s – back when there was such a thing as “big name alternative producers” – behind the desk in Flood and some after-the-fact knob-twiddling in the mix from Radiohead brainbox Nigel Godrich, the album screams crossover appeal. Especially when you consider the meticulously cultivated image of laid back glamour Warpaint and their various representatives have been hard at work brewing for a few years now. It would appear, before one even hears a note, that their latest product will by no means be hard sell to Earth’s Spotify browsers. So, it’s a shame for all parties involved that the record itself is so unspeakably dull. We’re not talking a purely populist kind of dull where any sort of edge has been studiously etched away in pursuit of precious radio play. Even worse, the record exemplifies a kind of po-faced indie dullness that gives the impression the makers have abandoned the idea of chart success in favour of striving to soundtrack painfully self-satisfied, slow-motion laden, student made films on Vimeo. For the lion’s share of its duration Warpaint sounds like a version of the latest Lower Den’s album without any of the tension and drive that made that record work. The situation only worsens when Warpaint try to do something “different”. Different in this case includes a painful ESG pastiche with the word ‘Disco’ in the title and a final track which fully embraces the repressible, joyless posturing of Lana Del Rey territory. The highest praise this thing can be afforded is that it’s probably “alright” if your only half-listening to it. Avoid. – Danny Wilson
Mogwai
Rave Tapes
[Rock Action]
Guitars take a backseat for much of the new Mogwai LP, making way for electronics and keys. The chugging pace of much of the record means it lacks force, and the use of gradual crescendos in the dynamics of the tunes is expected and a bit tiresome at this stage in the band’s career. The rare addition of vocals on ‘Blues Hour’ is a welcome distraction from the surrounding nondescriptness. – Ivan Deasy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tX7UH3QB2g
Bruce Springsteen
High Hopes
[Columbia]
The carousel of marathon tours and busy release schedule may indicate that The Boss is all but invincible, but High Hopes suggests that severe memory loss is starting to take hold. Things Bruce has apparently forgotten: he’s already written Spare Parts and doesn’t need a title track that sounds exactly like it, nobody ever really liked The Ghost of Tom Joad so could do without a hard-rock reboot of it, and Tom Morello is an utter ponce with no place on any Springsteen song that isn’t for charity or something. Another inconsequential entry into the canon. – Daniel Gray
Rain Dogs
Two Words
[Project Mooncircle]
Having only been added to the Project Mooncircle roster last year, London-based producer Samuel Evans, aka Rain Dog, wasted no time in getting his first LP in the bag. The album marks a shift in focus for the producer as he takes a step deeper into song writing territory, working more vocals into the mix than ever before. Still present are those beautifully crafted beats that made such an impact on earlier EPs, alongside shimmering layers of organic synths and sizzling effects that sometimes seem to come from deep inside your own body while listening on headphones. – Dave Desmond
Self Defence Family
Try Me
[Deathwish]
Drawing heavily on the intense self-reflection and musical tumult of the first wave of emo bands, Try Me charts the fractured nature of modern living through bleak lyrical vignettes and abstractions. The inclusion of a grimly compelling 40 minute interview conducted by vocalist Patrick Kindlon with a former porn star ties together some of the thematic strands of the record but it might have been better suited to another medium rather than being crowbarred into the middle of the album. – Ivan Deasy
St. Vincent
St. Vincent
[Loma Vista]
Annie Clark’s line about a ‘party record you could play at a funeral’ is a little disingenuous – St. Vincent’s not that obsessed with hipshaking, just more so than the excellent Strange Mercy, with which it otherwise shares many of the same sonic characteristics. Clark’s music is always extremely refined, almost to a fault. Clever indie pop song follows clever indie pop song with such effortless aplomb that it is in danger of becoming blasé, such is Clark’s effortlessly intellectual approach. – Ian Lamont
Bill Callahan
Have Fun With God
[Drag City]
Have Fun With God, in which the ‘Billo does dub’ idea mooted by the single Expanding Dub, is realised, is a companion to 2013’s Dream River. As if that piece wasn’t transcendental enough, HFWG disembodies Callahan’s ruminations further via loose, spacious dub remixes. Perhaps it would’ve been more interesting if he’d dived straight in with this presentation first time around, but it also would’ve lost much of the weight of his words, found in edited heavily form here. When’s the trap remix coming? – Ian Lamont
Steve Moore
Pangaea Ultima
[Spectrum Spools]
Pangaea Ultima manages to mine the past – think John Carpenter landscapes and eerie Oneohtrix recontextualisations of 1980s technology – to produce the soundtrack of a bleak science-fiction future. Unsurprisingly the future is distinctly TRON like, our imaginations reverting to luminous blueprint lines carving infinite black space into grids of meaning on the back of endless rippling synthesizer arpeggios filtering in and out of focus for eternity. – Ian Lamont
