Arab-world dance music really gets me going; something about the hypnotic/seductive thrust of it… the visions of hookahs and curling smoke… the drive to elegant pleasure pushing against jewel-encrusted oppression. Omar Souleyman is the latest one to get me thrusting my hands in the air and tracing curlicues. Apparently he started out playing “Dabke” folk music at weddings in his native Syria, cutting a custom record as a gift to the bride and groom each time, so his early discography is pretty wild. Now he’s a global star, and his new one Erbil, named after his new home town in Iraqi Kurdistan (he had to leave Turkey for political reasons) rocks very hard indeed; it’s a full on party album, lovingly crafted with perfumed and exotic local textures and flourishes of sharp, futuristic production.
Waxahatchee, the nom de plume of Alabaman Katie Crutchfield, is one of those artists that at a certain point got some hype and I got caught up in it, which is something I don’t think of myself as ever doing, and when I realized I didn’t love her after all I was grossed out, like I’d been musically groomed. I mean I think it was Waxahatchee — maybe it was a band with a similar name? My point is I was not at all well-disposed to checking out her new one, but wow, this track “Right Back to It” is a finger-pickin’, finger lickin’ basket of warm buttered biscuits. It’s a country & western love song from the point of view of the neurotic, high-maintenance one, and it gives me hope: “Your love written on a blank check / Wear it around your neck / I was at a loss / But you come to me on a fault line / Deep inside a goldmine / Hovering like a moth / I lose a bit of myself / Laying out eggshells / I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it / I let my mind run wild / I don’t know why I do it / But you just settle in / Like a song with no end / If I can keep up / We’ll get right back to it…”
I guess I’m pretty tardy to the Sega Bodega party, but from what I understand his new Dennis album is a departure from his EDM roots. This one’s a thick stew of strange time signatures, lovingly processed theater of pain vocals, organic electronic textures, bittersweet washes of emotion. Please don’t attempt to dance to it. Is it at all goth? Well, check out my personal fave “Deer Teeth“: “Bury me and keep me down with all your deer teeth / Until we meet / Feel the wings as we’re cradled on a mother swan / Until we’re gone / To lay sunken in the final ground / Slipping through millennia / Gripping to our only child and / Sleeping ’til the end of time with a / Fox crown in the ground…”
Back in the late ’80s, dance music suddenly got fashionable with indie kids — “baggy” style and “Madchester,” the Happy Mondays scene — and there was a running joke in Melody Maker about rock bands jumping ship to stay relevant and using the cliché that “there was always a dance element to our music.” It’s been a thing through the years; from the Stone Roses to Stereolab to (personal fave) Cat Power doing vocals on “Action” by Cassius. I feel like there have been others… maybe I’m just making it up but my point is you don’t really see the opposite trajectory — except now you do, with Sunset Violent, the new Mount Kimbie album. They started out as an electronic duo, in parallel with James Blake, bending dancey electronica into something that got labeled post-dubstep. Now they’ve added new members and fully moved into indie-rock. Great stuff too, cool and melancholy, finding inventive structures and texture. On “Dumb Guitar,” a dark mood drifts over the beach in summer, as new member Andrea Balency-Béarn intones “I watch the sunset violent / Lose it all in silence / Dig a hole in my mind / There’s something on this island / That’s keeping me off balance / I trip on a flaw I cannot see yet…”
Brooklyn band Gift and their Momentary Presence album were quite a sensation with the slowgraffitti faithful back in ’22, and they’re back with another burst of trippy, tangy candy sunshine called “Wish Me Away.” The shadows are all in the lyrics: “It steals my breath / Times lost I pretend / It dawns on me / This life I can’t repeat / Like sinking sand / Its gone way to fast / Will they remember me / Just in time to bury me…”
If you’re looking for something to rock your pants off and shred you into pizza cheese, Mdou Moctar is back with Funeral for Justice. It’s an uprising and a party all in one, an impassioned protest album that will get you headbanging against ongoing imperialism in Africa. His sound is rooted in the desert blues of the Sahara as perfected by Tinariwen, and pushes into the hard rock/ acid rock exosphere courtesy of Moctar‘s crazy guitar god skills. The cover art is very Steve Miller Band, and every song is a classic. “Imouhar” starts out quiet and tricks you into turning up the volume all the way, then suddenly pummels you with its full-volume rock fury. It’s about preserving the Tamasheq language incidentally.
I don’t think I’m a sentimentalist, surely not? But put the right heart-swelling, end-credits ballad in front of me and I will melt into a salty soft boy puddle. New York band Lightning Bug have not one but two of ’em — “December Song” off their new one No Paradise is a love song from a tree to the sun. Metaphors, eh? “The Right Thing Is Hard to Do” off their previous album swoons even harder, as frontwoman Audrey Kang connects her own habit of hiding with the instinct to “build a wall / Of steel that rises grim and tall / And turn away those seeking shelter most of all..” The solution? “Love steady grows / So I’ll let it grow, grow and grow…” This is girl power at its girliest, and the “December Song” video is even extra so… Please stop laughing at me and Audrey — we’re fragile.
BIG|BRAVE are heavy and they’re from Montreal and people seem to categorize them as metal, but to me they sound more in line with 90s Big Guitar bands like Cranes and Sonic Youth and PJ Harvey. A Steve Albini kind of band. These people are seriously sensitive — “i felt a funeral” is inpired by an Emily Dickenson poem. Their new one A Chaos of Flowers tastes deliciously goth — Robin Wattie‘s little girl lost vocals juxtaposed with great, growling waves of guitaric emotion, and there’s a song titled “chanson pour mon ombre” (“song for my shadow”). I’d love to get Robin Wattie together with Audrey Kang for an interpretive danceathon.
As reported in these pages, our beloved Merve has announced she’s quitting Altin Gün, and yet they’ve just released a new single with her on vocals called “Vallahi Yok,” and it’s as fun and impassioned and exquisitely childlike and ready for Eurovision ’72 as anything in their catalog. According to Mrs. Google the Turkish lyrics translate to “If I were the sun to rise, what would you do? / If I were to become the wind and crush your hair / If I loved, if I fell in love and left your mark / If I ride, come to me for a little while, my love / Why don’t you lay your head on ours and reach out and hold my hand? / Hold me, my love, shake me warmly / What about the waves and the shores?”
Digging this Morwell album, Into the Light. He’s a British-Croatian and he decoupages snippets of hyperexpressive pop-spirituality speech to build grooves of oversaturated hyperbole, bringing to mind The Art of Noise, or Byrne and Eno‘s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. It finds that sweet spot where it can be taken at face value or as parody, and it’s all set to fresh and inventive dance-adjacent concoctions.
I thought my techno days were well behind me, but then along came this irresistible coil of manly and muscular industry from distinguished UK DJ and producer Perc:
…which led me to Perc‘s collaboration with r3ll1k, the post-punkish “Платье.” Hard to find anything about r3ll1k online; there’s a long-abandoned FB page that puts him in Saint Paul, MN, but I mean his song titles seem suspiciously Russian. Платье translates to “Dress.” The album is Удали мой номер (“Delete my number”) and it’s pretty great. Is he Heidi-ing N Closet? I mean, just to be clear, I fully support Ukraine, but r3ll1k is putting out some bangers.
In conclusion, can we just expend a few thought bubbles on Tierra Whack? She is having quite a moment with her unique flavor of art-pop-hip-hop. Her guest rap on the new Chief Keef is a monster of speed and size that will wrestle you and pin you and make you cry uncle, and her new World Wide Whack album is raw and funny and ridiculous and so much fun. “Oh, what is that shit I smell? Me” she offers on “Chanel Pit.” / Mhm, I am that shit you smell, yes / Mosh pit smellin’ like Chanel / Microsoft, I’ma excel / Nine, ten, eleven, fuck 12 / House lookin’ like a motel / I don’t play farewell / I don’t like to show you, might tell…”
Oh but before I say goodbye — what is this corn pudding corner of heaven from 2017 that just found its way into my ear-shafts? I’m not gonna editorialize, please just give yourself over to it.