The title track on Leftfield‘s 2022 album This Is What We Do was cute, in fact it was pretty great in its own low-key way. But the re-worked track, called “We Do Dub,” on the new This Is What We Do. Version Excursion, is a full-on arsequake as they used to say, building up exquisite anticipation with a minute and a half of teasing foreplay before it pounds you into submission, murmuring funny little distorted je-ne-sais-quois: “yeah… rock the house… put your hands in the air…”
And oh my, what have we here? Leftfield main man Neil Barnes‘ daughter Georgia has a new one that’s fully transporting me to Candyland. She emerged in 2015 with a battle-ready edge, in the vein of MIA, but the tides of time have pulled her relentlessly toward the streamlined joys of ecstatic, Scandinavian-sounding pop. Her 2020 album Seeking Thrills was bangers galore and got shortlisted for the Mercury Prize. Her new one Euphoric is being paraded on the tasteful little billboards along Sunset in Silver Lake / Echo Park, a sure sign of having indie-arrived, and it has her best song yet on it. “All Night” puts Georgia up there with the Tove Los and the Sally Shapiros in the Pantheon of girly dance pop. Do I hear a sample from “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago? My favorite song in the whole world when I was 15? “Called up a friend and now / We’re headed to a party on the еdge of town / It takes courage just to try / Evеrything once or twice / There’s nothing on the line / Except what we’d miss if we didn’t try…”
Fever Ray has been in need of dance therapy, as Karin Dreijer‘s perfect poison canapés of the aughts with both The Knife and Fever Ray shifted into difficult-to-digest screeds in the teens. The God Colony remix of Carbon Dioxide puts the “P” back in “Party”* and it’s great to hear that iconic voice paired with something in the vicinity of fun.
[*I’m paraphrasing Rolling Stone and their brilliant line about David Byrne taking the “P” out of Party with his production work on Mesopotamia by the B52’s]
[Which incidentally they were wrong about, it’s a fantastic record.]
So here at slowgraffitti HQ we are still accepting entries for song of the summer ’23, and we received a very strong submission indeed from a lovely pair of British blokes called Jungle who have actually been tearing up dance floors for close to ten years. They lay down a bedrock of gospel-based mid-70s disco and throw in de-rigeur ’20s speedy vocals and a bit of rapping from Erick the Architect on party-starter “Candle Flame.” Get a load of the choreography in the video…
Thank God it’s still warm out as I just discovered Genesis Owusu‘s enchanting 2019 banana daiquiri of a hit “WUTD,” which pairs an Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson falsetto with some good-natured, hook-up-inducing rapping. Genesis‘ new one “Leaving The Light” is something completely different — it’s got a shouty chorus and I think it nicks an 80s new wave bassline I can’t quite place. Have I gone mad or is it a bit Oingo Boingo?
Dylan Moon, my favorite soft boy of 2022, is back with more dreamy psilocybin… art-folk? Folktronica I think the experts call it. I probably likened his sound to my beloved Autre Ne Veut (his first, self-titled album of course) when I reviewed Option Explore last year; please stop me if you’ve heard his one before… Dylan‘s new EP is called Song & Dance and its bangingest track, “Absolute,” with its alternating boy/girl vocals, harkens back to the Grand Wizards of soft, Belle and Sebastian: “Online I saw the forests and moss rose / I went offline filled up and then awoke, misted, ready / You’re the only post ever, post it one more time, thank you so much / I’ll watch it until the last night in Heaven…”
Cameron Mesirow AKA Glasser bounced around the indieverse in the early teens, getting lazy comparisons to Björk and Zola Jesus according to my research, and only perhaps registering in my world as one of the many bands/artists/apps with names ending in a friendly sounding -er. But now she’s scraping the outer limits of my homo stratosphere with a little number called “All Lovers,” a vaguely Elizabethan theater of pain ballad with a killer chorus, rendered in dark shades of blue and purple. “I never thought of what the ending would be / Guess I’m just a bruiser that way / Always falling into emotional quicksand / Always depending on a new day / All lovers beyond the curve / Your love your love your love / Will never recognize…”
Back in my formative years, the two big, colorful, influential British music mags were NME and Melody Maker. NME was always sort of music-nerdy and self-serious, a kind of proto-Pitchfork minus the decimal point scoring system, while Melody Maker was sharp and irreverent, full of venomous British humor filtered through a punk or post-punk sensibility. No prizes for guessing which one I favored. I get misty when I think back on the hunt for the latest issue; taking it home and immersing myself in brilliant writing about the luminaries of the youth culture music scene, with enormous pictures. The writers would talk about heading down to a pub called the Oporto at the end of the day for a pint, and I dreamed of being part of all that — one time I even wrote to the editor seeing if I could interview Camper Van Beethoven for them, but no response. Their star writer was Chris Roberts, a starry-eyed sophisticate who notably rhapsodized about the relentless waves of British rock genius of the late 80s — the Sugarcubes [not British – Ed.], the Primitives, the Sundays, on and on. He had a particular concept of “Blonde” as a state of being beyond the hair color. Actually part of why I write this blog is to re-create, in my admirably humble way, some of the vibe of that storied magazine.
What brings all that to mind is the new French Band En Attendant Ana, whose sound harkens back to C-86, a cassette issued by NME in, well, ’86 actually, that came to define a kind of jangly, low-fi, girl-next-door rock that for several minutes was considered quite cool by youngsters like me. On EAA‘s “Wonder,” off their new Principia album, Margaux Bouchaudon‘s vocals are a freshwater brook spilling down dewy, verdant hills, but there are jagged rocks in the lyrics: “How does it start? Where does it begin? / Does it always take luck or disease? / The way I cling on to my needs / The way I make myself at ease / Through yours…” The pastoral vibe with chewy self-hatred filling transports me back to the heyday of the Sundays, did I mention them already? I hope I did because they were life-givingly rapturous and the great Chris Roberts discovered them, did I mention that?
Julia Holter is such a treasure, with a catalogue that spans the outer reaches of avant-garde, rock, classical, baroque pop and beyond. in 2018 she made a masterpiece called Aviary, and I know the M word gets thrown around a lot but listen for yourself — I’ll eat my hat if you don’t agree. Since then she’s kept busy with singles, collaborations and a movie soundtrack. She’s also a surprisingly spectacular live act, in fact (brag alert) I saw her kill at Primavera Sound 2019. She just popped up on the rather gorj new track Illumina, a dreamy, pattering thing by London DJ Call Super, AKA Joseph Richmond Seaton (a suitably posh name for collaborating with a queen).
“Twice,” Little Dragon‘s very first song on their very first album, was a dark confection of pain and regret and clarity and poetry that’s unlike anything they’ve done since, but it carved out a special place in my internal organs for the band. Yukimi Nagano‘s voice belongs on the U.N. Cultural Heritage list, and she has wrapped it around something quite special on new track “Slugs of Love,” a withering but danceable take on the empty hedonism of the influencer era: “Dancing on the wall / So hot / Looking for truth / O whoah / Dancing on the moon / So hot / Looking for / Sleep talker / Sleep walkin’ / Taste making little slug having a feast at the table…”
I’ve mentioned West Yorkshire alt rapper Pretty V before in these pages, but I’m starting to realize he’s seriously like a Dean Blunt level musical genius, with a similar disregard for self-promotion. As of this writing he has released 19 albums just this year! And everything I’ve had a chance to listen to is cool AF, materializing in a million different musical universes, from a tiny-voice lullaby like “Invisible Chance” to the outer-space hip hop of “RAVEN” to the housewife-on-Valium cooing on “52,” his collaboration with Archy Marshall aka King Krule.
Some of my more rabid fans think of slowgraffitti as a kind of sacred text, a divinely inspired guide to all that is good and great in the world of contemporary music, but I try to gently discourage all that. The truth is that I too am fallible, and never more so than in letting a new release by Goddess and veritable Firmament in human form Elizabeth Fraser get past me. Her project with hubby Damon Reece is called Sun’s Signature and they had an EP out a full year and a half ago, but fortunately an extended version with remixes has emerged and yeah, it’s heavenly and ethereal and suitable for levitating on a warm breeze amidst tiny points of light. On “Bluedusk,” Liz trills “Though the dream of love may tire / In the ages long ago / There were ruby hearts on fire,” quite intelligibly, so not quite on brand. Check out what a bloke named LUMP did with the track:
So on Sept. 8 the new Róisín Murphy album dropped in the center of a tempest of online controversy after she dipped her toe into the youth gender medicine debate. Hit Parade is a beast of an album, the work of a powerful artist wielding both muscle and vulnerability. Her baseline is 70s diva soul, but vortexes of passion land her in all kinds of unusual places, and, spookily, her lyrics often read like a response to the online vitriol directed at her in recent days. On opener “What Not to Do” she croons and croaks “Show me, teach me, how to be / Turn me into anything you need … Tell me what not to do / Whether I’m hoping, against hope / Tell me what not to do / I get it on, when I want…” “Fader” is heartfelt retro R&B, but producer DJ Koze brings subtle futuristic touches as Róisín flourishes her peacock feathers: “They won’t choke the life out my vain jokes / The fun’ll go on, oh oh yeah / I’ll meet my maker, sometime a little later / In the meantime, to you I belong / There’s no pain without the gains of feeling something true / Free bird, I can swerve and I can swoop / I lay eggs every single time I think of you / Only free birds flying high / Could decide to ride to Venus…” So many highlights, but I’m gonna share the delicious Moodyman remix of “What Not do Do“: