Music, recent 002
irregular thoughts on sound
Don’t know if I’ll ever maintain a proper format with music posts, the next one could easily be a 500 word live review or something. May as well persevere with album recommendations, though in 2025 that feels like opening a sundial showroom.
RECENT RECORDS WORTH YOUR TIME AND EFFORT
Joanne Robertson, Blurrr
Robertson has been knocking around for years in places I would typically look for music but the name has escaped my eyes and her music evaded my ears until now - but for no longer.
‘Gown’ smashed my heart on first listen and the record just doubles down that oceanic depth time and again. The murk and reverb makes lyrics hard to catch, but the careful intent and nocturnal feel comes screaming through the recording and the performances. A record so good even Pitchfork and I agreed.
SuperValu, Loss Leader
This was thrown at me in a group chat where we organise recording sessions for a podcast I’m on by someone who knows a lot more about electronic music than I do. I think SuperValu is an Irish fella, not just because the project is named after an Irish supermarket chain.
My favourite Autechre record is Chiastic Slide and this puts me in that approximate headspace: chopped and ominous songs that hover into view, but some recognisable forms inside the music (hip-hop) getting sloshed about like socks in a washer.
Cardiacs, LSD
A potentially controversial venture given that Tim Smith - songwriter, vocalist, bandleader - is dead and this is a record that necessarily requires an act of interpretation on behalf of the living. Nonetheless, this is carried off with equal parts reverence and irreverence, and am happy to regard it as a proper Cardiacs record.
In case you don’t know what the general Cardiacs vibe is: like someone smashing a major key so incredibly hard with such a gleeful expression that it all becomes a lunatic clown frenzy where you might get murdered.
Prolapse, I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face
Another reformation record, this time by the Leicester-based band who were wrongly overlooked in their day for having the temerity to make interesting music during Britpop.
this might be the reformation album I have heard that still sounds exactly like the band used to. like they had material from the time and put it down on late 90s gear and played it like people a quarter of a century younger than them.
This is what I said at the time of release and I stand by it. They just picked up their strange vocal dynamic (her: sweet and coy, him: Glaswegian and aggressive) and sideways musicality and attitude with absolutely zero cringe Unc tendencies.
The Necks, Disquiet
The 20th studio effort by the veteran uncategorisable Aussies is a mere 3hrs and 9 minutes and, I am pleased to report, one of their very best.
Over three discs or four tracks the lads give us two discs and well over two hours of ploughing a brand new furrow of inscrutable polyrhythmic repetitions. ‘Ghost Net’ is staggering, both in terms of achievement and the unstable motion its soundworld represents, lurching and wobbling for 74 blissfully weird minutes. The last disc comprises two shorter tracks (still either side of 30 mins) that are a rich rippling reward for your ears.
Dream Skills and Burn Into Sleep, I Carried You For Years And The Deers Are Still Hungry
The three McLean siblings are now veterans of Britain and indeed the western world’s avant skronk weird scene by now and whilst I might have opted for a less clunky project name than this (Dream Skills is brother Don’s synth project, Burn Into Sleep is sister Lauren and brother David’s less easily categorised thing) this is a really thoughtful collaboration in the world of eerie poetry.
Tortoise, Touch
Some of the press ahead of this 8th record (so few? really? does it depend on how you count them?) has been a bit defensive about living in different cities and not being as organic as they used to be.
One review I read suggested a kinship with It’s All Around You, another record that was dismissed gently on release for its gentle perambulations rather than aggressive innovations. It does feel more nocturnal jazz ambient than the work of a post-rock band, whatever that means, but that feels more like 2025 than great guitar tone man.
Yasmine Hamdan, I remember I forget
Actively searching for music to write about to add to lists is often a fool’s errand, but here’s something I did find entirely by chance that has wormed into my heart.
Strange beast that mixes in Lebanese pop vibes with some of the darker strains of 90s minor key electro and a very now attitude of fuck-shame. I’ve been listening to a lot of Muslimgauze and Rizwan Said of late so this just fits alongside that.
Black Moth Super Rainbow, Soft New Magic Dream
Wouldn’t have pegged the Philly purveyors of vocodered out CMYK-era nostalgia pop as a long-running and still-excellent project by 2025, but life is full of surprises.
Horsegirl, Phonetics On & On
Sometimes you can just hear from listening to a record that at least one of the band has been educated to postgraduate level.
This is excellent minimal indie-rock/pop that reminds me of about 50 things in that way things can do when they don’t actually sound like any of them at all.
HOW’S THAT PENANCE GOING?
Both of the Jan 6 mulchbrains of avant pop John Maus and Ariel Pink dropped new records within a few weeks of each other and the results are: a score draw.
The main feeling accompanying With You Every Night was that Ariel Pink’s music brain hasn’t broken completely, and that he can still put together a good record. I sense, somehow, that the enlightened sidemen that brought his 2010s records up to higher levels, have departed. As such there’s a textural sameness and a playing to strengths (making things sound wobbly and woozy, give it up grandpa!).
Maus’ new one Later Than You Think exhibits his key strengths in haunted pop philosophies, revisiting his emergent epoch of the 00s at times. Whilst there’s a handful of songs as good as his best in the 16 here, it also feels like a productive dimension of his most compelling work isn’t here. His ear for putting other language to work doesn’t feel as strong. Like, one of the best songs on Screen Memories is him just singing the title of a Star Trek episode in a way that teases out the philosophical & eschatological nuances. Here it all feels a bit... obvious.
I don’t want to attribute this to his embrace of Christ, the Orthodox Christ, the son of the orthodox God. Also it turns out he did put some of the better songs on the merch table CD-R he was flogging.
FILE UNDER REASONABLY INTERESTING IF YOU HAVE NOTHING BETTER ON
The recent brutal rejection of Katy Perry’s work was framed as an overall disinclination toward a particular kind of girlbossery. True to an extent, but it misses out how she is not riding the wave driving big ticket pop, choosing to continue to deal in images rather than offer the glimpse inside the real through autofiction.
One 00s returning pop star has got the message: the new Lily Allen, a lyricist never afraid of throwing sarcastic cherry bombs at her commercial peak, goes full life grenade on new record West End Girl. 14 songs, a kind of solipsistic libretto about a partner’s infidelity, bookended by unease and attempting to move on.
As a sustained assault it is quite the thing, almost to the point where the idea that this is a poetic form comes into question: there is no alternative route, no secondary interpretation, little technique. This is 14 songs about how shit her husband is, with no further self-reflection (no judgement but she has inserted herself in other people’s relationships and formerly cheated on an ex, but in the latter case he was a bricklayer he didn’t get to put an acclaimed album out). You could argue she did that on No Shame, which tracked that breakdown, but patterns exist, people!
It’s unseemly and prurient, but everyone knows everyone’s business now, so why not get in the punches while you can, etc.? The problem is that the music rarely rises to the task, often a rotating wallpaper of stapled-together moodbeats to give the illusion of variety. Given that this is a record being taken primarily as lyric and story, part of me wondered if making the music deliberately less of a thing might have helped foreground the content more? Get Jute Gyte on the phone.
Another view came courtesy of one of the dank internet places I call home:
ive also read an absolute shit load of stuff about Lily Allen being a nightmare to work with and a complete fantasist. she’s had everything handed to her on a plate, including her music career and she is desperate to be seen as brave and authentic and its all her own work. no specific stories, just a detested nepo shithead with a need to be written about. she’s flopped around from chavette to sneering tory cunt to tumblrina to girlboss to brave autofiction martyr so who cares about this. maybe she’ll learn about AI and the next record will be the worst Grimes imitation anyones ever heard. maybe she’ll hear wet leg.
Funny but I try and take the art as intended these days. I’m all for people doing weird and possibly regrettable things in their art, even if they did go to Bedale’s. So a single thumb up, though I’ll probably just read the lyrics again in future. Even if they were all co-written…
DUDS OF Q3 AND Q4
The ongoing Taylor Swift juggernaut continues to mow down any forest in its path. The Life of a Showgirl toured a youtube visualiser around the cinema and for a record that has ‘fallen off’ sales wise, it has done better than you will ever do.
First couple of tracks have some ideas (i. odd five bar loop ii. do Tegan & Sara) then the other ten start up (oh wait I thought Ruin the Friendship was ok) and they’re all the work of a savage and cynical monster, especially Wi$h Li$t. To quote a friend’s view on this:
‘Have a couple kids that call me Pa, that must be what it’s all about’ sang Bob Dylan aged 29 on his 1970 album New Morning. ‘Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you’ sings Taylor Swift (35) here. Two generational poetic icons surveying the end of their youth and extolling the virtues of domesticity. How will I value this modern version of Sign on the Window?
I hate this. Like proper, proper, prooooper fuckin despise it. There is genuinely nothing to like here. The $ in the title are grotesque under any interpretation. We’re dyin up ere and Swifty is acting like money doesn’t mean anything. Sure....for you! Others may want luxury but she wants the simple life. She tells us she wants a basketball net in the drive? Just buy one. They’re honestly gonna be like what $20 in Target? The whole conceit is disgusting. There is unnamed ‘they’ who want material things. Who are they? I’m guessing the haters. My friend, you are thirty fucking five, let the haters go. Or perhaps she means all of us: the peasants and serfs who might deign to want things unlike the great billionaire and her big dick husband to be.[…] Absolute TRASH. I’m gonna do something I very rarely do with sincerity, I’m gonna give this minus stars. I think a fair rating for this song is -**
and another friend weighs in:
My addition to wishlist (I refuse to add the dollar signs!)-
American (white) pop music forever (much like screen culture in general !) has a natural vampirism towards Black American artistry but equally because this is about racism can equate this art history to monstrous racist archives they personally created (minstrellsy)
And also will just fundamentally misread this as if we’re talking about hip hop this is a working class art form where it would be nice to not just have a home but also dignity and abundance!
Exhibit a wtf was this
Which like when these are the lyrics:
“They want that
Yacht life under chopper blades
They want those
Bright lights and Balenci’ shades
And a fat ass with a baby face
They want it all”
The underlying thesis feels like unlike you hos (Kim) my ass is flat and soul is righteous because my performative displays of wealth will be kitchen appliances only!
I couldn’t say it any better: more of a music man, and the music here is beyond uninspired.
The hype train and algorithm tried to push the new Geese record (Getting Killed) but it sounded like some music school wankers trying to play Phish recorded by someone who doesn’t know how to mix. Rotten stuff.
My sore tooth relationship with Richard Ashcroft hit new depths on Lovin’ You, a barrel-scraping effort comprised of stuff he did ages ago and in some cases actually previously released, hoping you didn’t notice. The opener sounds like he’s rapping over the theme to The One Show and gets worse from there.
Ashcroft has only got two lyrics since he went solo in the late 90s: i. I love my wife and ii. I am a maverick to whom laws do not apply. Most of them are the former, here, without really giving anything about the relationship other than cliche. After it finished, I had to conclude that he may be in the conversation for rock’s worst lyricist, a genre full of bad wordsmiths:
I ain’t playing their games
I am nobody’s fool
Yeah, I know how it feels
I broke those rules
I wonder if he considered 30 years ago he’d be reduced to this:
Inarguably the worst record I’ve heard this year. Can’t wait for his new one.
0800 GIVE-A-SHIT HOTLINE
Radiohead tour
Deliver Me From Nowhere
new Tame Impala discourse
AN OLD SONG I HAVE ENJOYED AN UNREASONABLE AMOUNT IN THE LAST FEW MONTHS
I can’t listen to this at the moment, actually, because it is the most potent earworm known to man.
Feel free to recommend things or tell me how wrong I am in the comments.