If you were around in the 90s you’ll remember what a cataclysm Tricky was, creating a revolutionary sound by distressing and decoupaging samples of classic soul and ladling Martina Topley-Bird‘s iconic vocals and his own croaky, fractured poetry over the top. His live show was otherworldly, a kind of extended séance where ghosts of his familiar songs would periodically surface and dematerialize. Anyway, I just got a hold of his 2019 autobiography Hell Is Round the Corner and devoured it in a couple of days. He describes his earliest memory of seeing his mother in a casket, and later getting a sense that she was writing lyrics through him from the other side. He grew up mixed-race in Knowle West, a white ghetto in Bristol, with uncles that killed people; he made friends with young criminals and seemed destined for a life of crime himself but he just couldn’t tolerate prison food. His sudden rise to fame and fortune is full of amazing, serendipitous moments, like when he gets some free studio time to record his first single and literally meets Martina when he finds her humming to herself, sitting on a wall around the corner from his house. He never loses his sense of wonder at being a kid from Knowle West who gets access to a life of crazy wealth and privilege.
I think of ’20s Brooklyn as a picturesque wasteland of vegan gelato, Pilates studios, Korean designer coffees and such, but truthfully it still has a vibrant music scene, and Chanel Beads are doing their borough proud with the oblique and smoky pleasures of their Your Day Will Come album. Signature song “Police Scanner” has a dusty, out of time quality, like the ’80s beamed in from a different galaxy. The chanting female vocals against strummed guitar; the swelling, off-key keyboards — it sounds like the witnessing of something vast, something you can’t experience directly. Maybe the same universe as Alex G, but further out there. “You owe it to yourself / Gotta believe in something else / Looking at the guilt / Cannot break before it ends / Self care / Self aware / Good people out of view / Soul to bare / Changes come / Something strange yeah something new / Police scanner.”
Kee Avil‘s involuted, prickly anti-folk is like thought fragments you found on bits of crumpled notebook paper. There’s a delightfully diseased and obsessive undercurrent of violence to the Montréal artist’s witchy, hypnotic melodies on new album Spine — like early PJ Harvey in a haze of painkillers. On “Felt,” she opines that “I am you, you know, related by blood to the clock / Felt, velvet / I’ve shattered your reflection to breathe / To breathe in every shard of you / I’ve woven a silk cocoon / To breathe in every thread of you… “
You know, I admired Julia Holter‘s recent album though it didn’t annihilate me like some of her previous work. Yet Julia is nothing if not determined to bring me unknown pleasures and she has arranged to contribute vocals to “What Is Not Strange?“, the new one from her dream-boat boo Tashi Wada. It’s an album of bold and unusual time signatures, its carousel of analogue instrumentation bending into shapes that range from sickly to celebratory.
Summer is supposed to be fun you guys, and bratty Sydney retro-punks Gee Tee already have another album out and it feels like getting play-beaten up by an eight-year-old and then clobbering a piñata and eating all the candy. Prehistoric Chrome is 18 tight bursts of violent sunshine — none of the songs are over a minute 40 — it’s like cliff-notes for DEVO, it’s dumber than the Ramones, it’ll keep you happy until it’s time to go to fourth grade. “CAUSE I GOT A MESSAGE FOR ALL YOU EGGS / PISS OFF DORKS I NEED YOU DEAD / I THOUGHT DOIN MATH WAS SUCH A BORE / BUT WHEN I TALK TO YOU I WANNA DO MORE / AIN’T DUMB!”
Certain artists seem to develop an ecstatic following among people like me, but somehow, I don’t know, maybe because I wasn’t an early adopter or maybe because I’m more right than everyone else, I just can’t get into them. L**a D*l R*y comes to mind, or C****** xcx. I might even sit down and make myself listen to them yet they leave no impression. On the other hand, speaking of the latter, I guess I wasn’t that into hyper-pop when it was shiny and new, but it’s slowly dawning on me what a crazy talent the man behind the whole movement is — A. G. Cook has a new album out under his own name and it’s practically Cindy Lee size — 24 tracks across three “albums,” and as usual it’s chock full of digitally collaged munchkin vocal deliciousness. It’s got a creamy middle section that’s slowed down and in the vein of proper indie rock, like he’s 2/3s of the way to becoming the new Elliot Smith. He brings such emotional poignancy to all he does, and by God can he write a pop tune. Pretty much a minimalist with lyrics, and it works particularly well on “Soulbreaker” with its mantra “‘Cause, yeah, I know when I look in my heart / You’re a soul-breaker…” Apparently he’s been shacked up in Montana with slowgraffitti fave Alaska Reid — has she been hurting him?
I suspect that Goat Girl have some roots in the rich soil of nineties soft-then-loud guitar rock invented by the Pixies and famously inhabited by Nirvana and PJ Harvey, but these particular nannies like to hang out in the soft and menacing end of things; loudness is in the subtext. Below the Waste is a groaner of an album title, but it contains a spectacular collection of dreamy, depressed ear pastries — songs that have a hard time getting out of bed, but once on their feet they guide you to gardens of earthly delight.
Beak> are another guitar band that likes exploring the green and purple underbelly of festering emotion. They’re fronted by Geoff Barrow, of Portishead fame, they sound nothing like Portishead, and they’re another band I thought I didn’t like, who knows why, but their new >>>> album is pulling me into an arty, proggy murk I just can’t say no to, in part because they’re dead poetic — “Inside guilt breaths / Feel tied to the brim, the brim / Keep it back sung / Keep it hidden in the walls, of life / You know, the seal, will light us,” pronounces Barrow, and I’m gonna have to agree.
Verraco comes from Medellin, Colombia, and his particular brand of trancey, metallic techno on Breathe… Godspeed feels like a thousand samurai swords coming at you with elegance, imagination and precision. Fierce, as the gays used to say. He’s so confident that he titles one of his tracks “Sí, idealizame,” which means “Yes, idealize me.” Incidentally the track shares its chord progression with the old Visage chestnut “Fade to Grey.”
Let’s go back to the 90s a sec before we say goodbye, to perhaps the decade’s grooviest anthem of positivity and joy (and it’s a decade that kicked off with Deee-Lite). Yes, I’m referring to White Love by One Dove — Glasgow’s answer to Saint Etienne — released in ’92. “You laugh, I smile / Mirrors in thought, these fortunes we can share / And where there is dark, there are ghosts / Who give me hope / Want to keep hold of this for you / Want to keep hold of this for you…”