Field recordings of life in Kiev before the war set the stage for some hardcore poignancy in Heinali’s Kyiv Eternal album. He has an uncanny way of conveying shifting moods and emotion as he layers dusty, pixellated textures over field recordings that create a sense of a physical space and buried chatter that sounds like ghosts. On “Tramvai 14” he shares the sounds of a tram ride, complete with low rumbling and cheerful pre-recorded announcements of upcoming stops in English and Ukranian; he swaths it all in clouds of minor key, melodic, glitchy distortion that subtly takes over your soft tissues with pricklings of bittersweet memory.
When I went to see Aldous Harding last year the opening act was someone named H. Hawkline; I didn’t go in time to see him and when I checked out his music he sounded uncannily similar to weirdo goddess Aldous — even the timber of his voice. Kind of like Cher and Elton John back in the day. Anyway on his new album Milk for Flowers he swoons and flutters with batty elegance, a 20s refinement of a kind of 70s singer songwriter sound I can’t quite put my finger on… maybe Van Dyke Parks or — God help us — Steely Dan? No wait, actually Kate Bush circa “Suspended in Gaffa” would be a better reference point. It’s blithely baroque, H. gaily ice-skating over frozen meats of emotion, teardrops turning to icedrops and plinking to the ground. And ooh his lyrics… “Film is so obscene, I don’t watch it anymore / I have a video that plays just for me / I picked a dance with violence, it moved out of time / I have guilt, and that guilt is mine / I’d do it again / I don’t need happiness now…”
Just when you thought everything was serious and there was no fun to be had in a world fraught with senseless death and bad weather, along come Gee Tee all the way from Australia, breathing candy car crash beer breath into 70s style punk rock. These fuckers have tunes up the ass and an exploding head adolescent boy esthetic of ski masks and funny glasses and drag races. They’ve got the Ramones 2-minutes of stupid (un)happiness thing down and they throw in a tinny layer of keyboard that’s so silly and melodic and right.
Speaking of Kate Bush, New York-based, Korean-American Miss Grit has her own adventurous and experimental approach to building pop-adjacent weird worlds. Her Follow the Cyborg album captures the existential dread of the ChatGPT era: on “Lain (phone clone)” she ponders “And what’s the point of being so profound / When all I’ll be is contained in this so vague membrane / In what’s remembered is only where I’m found / So I’ll remember you if you will remember me.” “Like You” is powered by a bleating, Elastica-evoking guitar riff and soars into what’s left of heaven with an all-too-human chorus: “There’s no escape the world they simulate / They want a hold of you to dominate / And I try to abide / So I won’t be denied / Like you / I wonder what sits on the other side / I take off all my clothes and all these ties / And I start to cry / When they all see my eyes.”
Torontonian Debby Friday’s baseline is 80s-style dry and disaffected electronica. “Me and my Rhythm Box” from Liquid Sky comes to mind. But it’s infected by 40 years of musical influences — i. e. our Deb veers close to contemporary girlypop on “So Hard to Tell,” and drifts into rapping here and there. While her presentation is all shit-talking, girlboss, now I’m the boss bossiness, I get a vibe of playfulness and a hint of a teenager singing into her hairbrush, trying on a ferocious-wronged-woman persona, that — if you can embrace it — just adds to the charm.
I’m gonna have to do a deep dive on John Talabot. He’s from Barcelona, he’s a serial collaborator, and his latest incarnation is a collaboration with Velmondo: they call themselves Mioclono, a word associated with epilepsy which affects both of them, causing unusual electrical activity in the brain. The album is Cluster I and it will put you in a sexy trance, eight of them actually. They’re clever charmers and they start off light and airy and colorful with “Blue Skies,” seemingly a remedy to the situation set up in a snippet of dialogue they share at the top (“… my wife has never seen a blue sky in her entire life…”). But before you know it they’ve taken you to a remote compound deep in the jungle, with incense and tribal drumming conjuring up all manner of angry and placid and vengeful gods.
British crooner/rapper Ghostface600 looks a bit horror and a bit Haitian in his white, handcrafted half-mask, and he’s what they used to call well ‘ard. Maybe they still do. But vulnerability is also a strength, and whereas he might come around with his crew to shoot you dead (your own fault), he also wears his heart on his sleeve. He has a rather high-maintenance real name: Levi “Gilmàr” di Silvà Fernandez-Lynch, and his new one “HoLY GhOSt” is a lovely minor-key rumination, mournful and punctuated with spark showers of vitriol. But the one I’ve been meaning to tell you about, the one that probes me in those tender places, is “Best Company” off his Tugg Melodies Ape Coulours album. “Split personality and I need medicine / I got demons inside / Do 25 if there’s harm to your life / Ride out on ying yings with this littlе friend of mine / Ride out on doublе os, double nose / Make him stare down the barrel / For my baby i’m a lover yo / Cuddle her just like cuddle poles…”
If you know me you know Altin Gün and their stratosphere-tickling Yol album were the biggest sensation of my personal 2021 and beyond. Their sound is basically traditional Turkish music repurposed as tacky/fabulous 70s Europop, served with a healthy dollop of psych. They’ve been trickling out new tracks for a while, and their new one Aşk just came out. I always brace myself for follow-ups to favorite albums — I’ve had so much heartbreak. Simple Minds following up New Gold Dream with Sparkle in the Rain was probably the worst; the second Pretenders album comes to mind… But Aşk does the band proud. As I play it through, the tracks they had already released feel immense and canonical, like they have existed since the beginning of time.
Oh man, look at the time! I’ll leave you with four and a half minutes of pure, uncomplicated rock joy from Philadelphia’s Purling Hiss.