The Quietus was pretty much the only survivor of the great collapse of the independent music sites of the ‘00s, and I found a lot of cool stuff over there. Such as Drool by Part Chimp, all thick slabs of fudgy, sludgy, smart/dumb, hard rocking, fragrant, pounding, meaty, hairy, take your time, dad bod, tomcat construction worker luv. Ahem. Yes. Well, it was good for me.
Jamaican dub legend Lee “Scratch” Perry put out “Rain over London,” a confoundingly cool and contemporary 3 minutes of monster subwoofing and Perry’s gnarled Blue Mahoe wood vocals tickled by magical fairies with tinkling high notes — mind-boggling stuff from an octogenarian.
Dean Blunt, the pre-eminent musical genius of the last decade, had a new one out in June as well. There wasn’t much to hum in the shower amongst the short, noirish sketches on Black Metal 2, but our Dean is the rare artist willing to serve up his ideas, feelings and vision raw and barely adorned, while refusing to package or market himself. He delivers his charred skepticism, alternating with female backup singers, in gruff, grown-up PTSD nursery rhymes. The tastiest morsels were toward the end: “ZaZa” started out infectiously funky but soon got trapped in a malfunctioning loop of spoken word disbelief and permanent-intermission guitar strumming. “WOOSAH” was a highly emotional interlude — a fanfare wrapped in tears.
Nearly a decade has passed since the demise of my deeply beloved Sic Alps and the grief does not get better, but Mike Donovan continued to melt the 60s blues-rock idiom and his fractured storytelling into new forms with Peacers and the many delights of their Blexxed Rec album.
Meanwhile over in France, Gaspard Augé, one half of acid rave power dance icons Justice, recalibrated their emphatic sound for 80s action adventure on Escapades. Yes these 12 sonic chariots were of fire and yes their eye was of the tiger — my only question: was it all in quotation marks? Either way I started off my summer smiling and saying cheese.