On her latest one Acts of Light, Hilary Woods sculpts sound in great swaths of minor chord texture, building seductively doom-laden worlds with titles like “Burial Rites,” “Vigil,” and title of the year contender “Wife Mother Lover Crow.” She sometimes veers toward the melodic, i.e. the unreasonably lovely undead Enya evocation of “Where the Bough Has Broken,” my hot tip for her to crack the dark demimonde top 40.
Marina Herlop has followed up last year’s Pripyat with another helping of twinkly icicle collage child ghost goth called Nekkuja. The opening refrain is Catalan for “above you nothing but the flowers,” which at first sounds like she’s informing you that you’re dead, but in the context of an album about gardens perhaps she’s just singing to a favorite root? Maximum pleasure is delivered on “Karada,” on which she multitracks herself in a made-up language against harp and chirping birds, sounding like a nest of baby birds herself.
Avid readers of this blog will have noticed how bitchy I am about the bloated and bougie Fork, but I have to hand it to them, for the food eating holiday they did something quite clever and reviewed A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving by the Vince Guaraldi Quintet, which is pretty outside my wheelhouse, or was… I don’t know, some of it sounds like proto-Belle and Sebastian and it will definitely transport you to a 1960s hotel lounge and a classy carefreeness that feels unattainable in 2023.
Nicolas Jaar has been lighting up my life with his ambitious dream electronica and his unseemly handsomeness since the early teens. His latest collaboration is with New York-based Pakistani superstar Ali Sethi on an album called Intiha. Sethi is known for breathing new pop life into the ghazal, an ancient form of Arabic poetry and music based in longing and devotion, and on “Nazar Se” in particular he oozes rivulets of sweet pain, filling bathtubs with softly wept tears and fluids. I ran the Hindi lyrics through google translate and, well, I don’t know, see what you think: “Master of my life / Keep your hand on my heart / In the happiness of your future / Don’t let my dick go out.”
Charleston SC’s Niecy Blues breathes ghostly incantations over vaporous beds of desturated pastels on her debut Exit Simulation. R&B ectoplasm drifts in here and there like a memory; on slowgraffitti’s favorite track U Care, Niecy AKA Janise Robinson serves up a swoony Martina Topley-Bird croon: “Know that I hold it true / You won’t find it if it isn’t in you / Witness by severed body renew / Split the earth and I fell through / Wish I could be lying with you / There’s no space to hold it, no room / Maybe all my wishes come true / If I could keep the image of you…” The song eventually time warps into a scratchy old-time revival service, lost between dimensions.
OK look, I can watch Pen15 and pretend to get nostalgic for yahoo chatrooms just like a real millennial, and I’m really not sure how it popped up in my world but the song that might just booty bump me into 2024 is Miura, a mirrored chestnut from 2002 by Brooklynites Metro Area. A world-dominating, minimalist, ESG-evoking beat gets stabbed with Silver Convention strings; funky then ethereal females pop up just to offer “OH-oh, OH-oh” and then “oh oh oh ooOOOh…”
But if you’re more in the mood for getting thrashed about and properly pummeled, Yuko Araki‘s new one IV will take care of you with enormous industrial poundscapes, sushi chef precision, and vocals that sound like something Aleister Crowley might summon. My hot tip for maximum headbanging pleasure would be “‡Damontoid,” but the album is all bangers all the time, and if you want to exorcise your demons (and let some new ones in) you should stick around for the tortured ecstasy of final track “†Sloshing” featuring fellow traveler Taichi Nagura of Endon.
Back in 2009, Health‘s second album Get Color and their single “Die Slow” exploded on the indie scene in a swirl of weaponized long hair, a killer cocktail of industrial, clubby electro and honeyed vocals. They were ’09’s perfectly brutal LA foils to New York’s arch sophisticates Dirty Projectors. As the sand of the 2010s fell through the hourglass Health seemed to lose momentum, but they’re back and they’re in the mood for violence and their new one Rat Wars slams hardest on their tasty Godflesh collaboration “Sicko” and oh oh especially on the metallized Moroder of “Hateful” (feat. Sierra): “Who among us would die tonight, hateful and all alone? / Who among us is dying out, wasteful of all love? / Lies, all lies, hateful of all but lust / Lies, all lies, hateful of all of us…”
Smoke Fairies is a bit dodgy as a band name, innit, but Chichester’s finest, Katherine and Jessica, have captivated me nonetheless with their timeless clotted cream harmonies. “Out on the edge, vanishing light / Slip between seasons against time,” they sing on “Vanishing Line.” “Drawn out of dust / Paint me back in / To breathe in the air I’ve been missing…” Seriously pastoral shit, brah.
Darren Cunningham, better known as Actress, is an electronic artist in a world and a league of his own, creating elegantly icy, minimalist soundscapes that are a challenge to dance to but have the power to transport you into hypnotic states and heightened realities and emotion. His new one LXXXVIII is a collection of songs spookily postscripted with Battleship-style letters and numbers. On gorj opener “Push Power ( a 1 )“, a watery, cocktail lounge piano underpins a bespoke beat and ominous, repeated spoken-word chants: “Push Power… war and violence… you feel me…” Fun fact: Cunningham is or was a jock — he played professional soccer for West Bromwich Albion.
I wanna leave you with something fuzzy and sweatery, so let’s have a listen to Lust For Youth‘s beatless balearic throat lump of radiant emotion “Blue Suzuki.”
The Niecy Blues & Sethi/Jarr tracks are seeeeeending me, bruh 😩 But what I really want to know is, where is your homecoming date now? Good stuff.
Thanks for reading Adriana 🙂 And René Rucker, if you’re reading this we need your coordinates.