Back in my day everything seemed to happen in Manchester — Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Factory Records, the Hacienda, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, bla bla bla, names names names sweetie. But honestly 21st century Manchester had not made any impression until just now. caroline have pulled over and parked in my zone, with a quietly disorienting style that stretches and tears and reconfigures songs rooted in indie textures. It’s a sort of modern dream-prog not unlike New York’s Chanel Beads, with a sexy imprimatur from indie rock’s reigning Caroline, Polachek to be exact — she warbles away on arguably the best song of their new album 2, a typically complicated little aria called “Tell Me I Never Knew That.”
The right time
I don’t even know if I’m alive
Know the right time
But I don’t wanna be somebody else
At the right time
Maybe I don’t wanna be anyone
At the right time
I don’t wanna be somebody else
How many are they?
I never told them
(Tell me, I never knew that)
Sink down, unfolding
Don’t go, I’m holding
Press on, press on him
Two times I told them
Jack Barnett isn’t the kind of guy you grab a pizza and play a little Yahtzee with; his mind is on the Waters, the Firmament, the Eternal Wisdom behind the Forbidden Meaning. These New Puritans started out as a solid little rock band, but around 2013 they had their Talk Talk Spirit of Eden moment and morphed into an all-knowing, all-sensitive, world-conquering behemoth capable of manifesting Field of Reeds, one of the great albums of this or any century. They put out another album since then that didn’t quite enrapture the slowgraffitti rank and file, but now they’re back with Crooked Wing and reprising the weighty magnificence thing very effectively indeed. That clever vixen Caroline Polachek bagged a guest vocal on this one as well!
Kathryn Joseph is a sort of feral Little Match Girl, wandering across a series of horrific scenarios with a trembling voice on her debut WE WERE MADE PREY. I perceive notes of Tori Amos, but in Kathryn‘s world there are no cornflakes or pumpkin PJs; it’s a terrain of brute survival that starts and ends with her embodying a wolf. Her jagged and bloody lyrics make Nick Cave sound like the Captain and Tennille, and man oh man can she write a tune — guarantee you’ll be humming these atmospheric, piano-based goth bangers in the shower.
Light a fire, make a bed, funeral pyre
You can call me roadkill
I am fucked here by want and desire
Just to have my mouth filled
All I am now is waiting to die
The last time we heard from long-haired Saskatchewanian Andy Shauf it was 2023 and he was warping our minds with Norm, an album of easy-listening charm wrapped around violent stalker revenge fantasies and a first-person missive from God, who was rather disappointed in us. He (Andy) has returned with his full band and an album called Foxwarren 2, a name that catches you off guard, evoking the worst in musty, humorless, straight-guy classic rock, but in fact is a nearly unclassifiable set of ear pastries built on a foundation of warped 60s-70s pop rock and snippets of campy dialogue from old movies and washes of strings and orchestral themes and cryptic lyrics that suggest the dreams and oddly flavored conflicts of someone with a very pretty voice living a life of relative domesticity. So yeah, pretty much non-stop fun, with plenty of fiber.
It’s almost like you never listеn to me
When I’m speaking, you should listen to me
I know I’ve not been listening
To what you’ve been saying
I have my own words prepared
I’ll put you right back where you belong
And though I have no formal training
On the current subject
Once I open my mouth
You’ll see how sharp I really am…
I wouldn’t think of ever repeating myself, but I’m sinking ever deeper into April-May favorite Lost & Found by Free Range, cuddling into Tracy Chapman-echoing downy melancholy and I need to at least share one more track…
Oh man, I used to be able to more or less keep track of the hot new music scenes on my spreadsheet, but these days they’re breeding so fast, and Madrid’s Rusia-IDK is apparently a collective that’s putting a little bit of everything from hyperpop to reggaeton into the blender and emerging with creative assemblages that feel both raw and polished enough to work as pop. rusowski is at the collective’s forefront, dragging us all into the future with sweetness and sharp edges, and a sense of style in the orbit of Tommy Cash.
It’s crazy ’cause I like her, her
I’m crazy ’cause I like her, her
Oh-oh, oh-oh
Nah, no me mires así [Nah, don’t look at me like that]
Ahora me gusta’ más [Now I like you more]
¿La niña de alta gama qué tendrá? [What will the high-end girl have?]
Y no sé si es de aquí [And I don’t know if she’s from here]
Y no sé a dónde irá [And I don’t know where she’s going]
¿Sus gafitas flow Gabbana qué tendrán? [What will happen with her Gabbana flow glasses?]
No es mi sensación ni nada, ah, ah-ah-ah [It’s not my feeling or anything]
Tengo su mirá’ clavada, ah, ah-ah-ah [I have her eyes fixed on me]
Rico Nasty isn’t the trendiest young rapper at this point — she’s all of 28, egads, but ignore LETHAL at your own peril; it’s end to end fire. Her palette famously includes punk and power chords; her flow is chainsaw sharp and fucking hilarious, and she even fits in a not-totally-cringey love ballad… for her son. The chorus on “Eat Me” is one of the Great Moments in Hip Hop History :
Me (Me), me, me (Me), me (Uh-huh)
Me (Me), me, me (Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh), me
But let’s please also luxuriate a bit in “TEETHSUCKER“:
I’m tryna pop out like a titty
I’m tryna pop that bitch like wheelies
Think she popped too many pillies
Now that ho keep talkin’ silly
Not with the bull, we not bool
I keep a tool at your medul
Just hit the pool
He got the best poker face, I think I’ma use him for a mule […]
Let me kick back, let me spit facts
Bitches all caps like big ass words
I’m gettin’ money, curvin’ nerds
I got a house up in the burbs
But I still pop out, lookin’ disturbed
Basic hoes get on my nerves
You did it worse, I did it first
She’s out again, go call the nurse
If you got bands, I go bar for bar
These hoes don’t golf, they ain’t up to par
We loved our Electronic Body Music back in the 80s. DAF, Nitzer Ebb, the mighty Front 242 and their ilk made a fetishy, militaristic, hyper-masculine black leather dance racket that paired so well with a certain dark and minimalist gay bar esthetic of the time, epitomized by the One Way in Silver Lake. Frankfurt’s Das Kinn (actually a rather mild appearing french-fries eater named Toben Piel) is barking new life into the genre with Ruinenkampf, so life is officially good. Das Kinn means “The Chin,” so extra credit for an excellent band name.
Du hast geträumt von einem Wir [You dreamed of a we]
Wir haben geträumt von starken Händen
[We dreamed of strong hands]
Er hat den Traum nach Feierabend noch genutzt
[He used the dream after work]
für Present Perfect und die Evaluation und
[for the present perfect and the evaluation and]
Oneironaut sei wachsam [Oneironaut be alert]
Oh – wenn du deinen Traum lebst [Oh – when you live your dream]
Albtraum! Albtraum! [Nightmare! Nightmare!]
OK sure, I guess I’m a little tardy to the 404 million party plays of Diet Pepsi by Addison Rae, but when has there been a sexier slice of cooing, vanilla-flavored pop to pull on your tight jeans to? I’m so ready to be losing all my innocence in the back seat.
We’ve taken a look around his avant-house before, but I need to report that Brisbane’s Maxwell Byrne, better known as 1tbsp, has been busy teaming up with Latin American musicians for a series of woozy dance romps including the booty imperative “Isso” with Brazil’s MC Pânico.
Whilst other artists streak across the sky and fade from memory, Actress just keeps unspooling his unhurried, understated tapestries of brilliance, typically on a bed of sculpted white noise or tape hiss or dust on vinyl. BabyU Lar==, off his new Tranzkript 1 EP, drops a kind of hyper-pop vocal sample into the trancey proceedings, putting you into a state of sugar rush hypnosis.
Rainy Miller‘s from Preston, in Lancashire, which (I looked it up) turns out to be just north of newly trending Manchester. His new one, Joseph, What Have You Done, starts out rather inauspiciously — one hates to be mean but “Mud in my Mouth. (Predetermined Definitions)” is poetry slam emo-vomiting that hurts my spirit even more than my ears. Hold on though — Joseph soon ramps up to the glorious, Tricky-esque brooding rage of “Vengeance” (featuring Graham Sayle, lead singer of High Vis):
Tears from the sky and they soak all through me
stoking up the fire that’s below
Dug beneath my eyes on my own no, yeah
I could walk the miles that I walk
Hold a couple gripes that have grown all skewed
dripping from the sides of my lows
Maybe I could try gettin’ myself through it
But I don’t think I could feel…
Vengeance on the rise and then go but
You and I won’t stop until they all go do it
In conclusion let me just say that I feel like I just finished gushing about The Smile but Thom Yorke is already out there vamping across another album of unseemly genius, this time a collab with Mark Pritchard, the highly decorated veteran of breakbeat, jungle, techno, drum and bass etc. etc. whom I’m ashamed to say I’m almost entirely unfamiliar with. Anyway, Tall Tales feels like a step forward and deeper into the explorations of quivering electronic moods and textures and dream and nightmare states of The Smile and Radiohead; it’s end to end rich and captivating and btw is it me or does La Thom sound like she’s channeling Diana Ross? I mean sometimes. In any case she (Thom) is a unicorn — a middle-aged rock star who’s already scaled every mountain and is still out there blowing our minds bi-annually. “The White Cliffs,” criminally, isn’t one of the four singles, but we’re making it our slowgraffitti Staff Pick.
I’m feeling the same cold room
Every now and then
A face that keeps changing
Every now and then
Another direction
Blowing in the wind
Nothing but empty promises
Every now and then
All over the same four thoughts
Every now and then