Apologies for the delay. Life/work shit. These have been helping me thru. What a time to be alive.
7xvethegenius Self 7xve 2 (Broadband Sound)
Great that more voices are coming out of Buffalo to counterbalance the overwhelming Griselda narrative of recent years - 7xvethegenius is way more self-consciously ‘arty’ than the Griselda crew and this wonderful set combines rugged beats with gorgeously pellucid drill/electronica constructions. The bass hits hard throughout, the guests are carefully chosen and crucially 7exvthegenius is really finding her own unique voice - intellectual, sharp, soothing, almost Simz-like in its reflection, langour and range, a child of the digital age with her head in the daisy age. Superb.
ANKLEJOHN The Four Knights Game EP (Shaap Records)
Ank can always be relied upon to send a weird transmission your way and ‘The Four Knights Game’ follows up its intriguingly cheezoid cover art with music balanced somewhere between trap-stealth, underground soulfulness and out-n-out avant-garde oddity. Nothing here is longer than three minutes but everything here suggests rewind, the pull and tension between the liquid langourous grooves and Ank’s frenzied stream-of-wibblery keeping you compelled throughout. A ten minute aperture out into fuck-knows-where.
Action Bronson Cocodrillo Turbo (Loma Vista Recordings)
At this point one has to (with yr daft head on that equates the need to make a living with the need to make art) wonder why AB actually NEEDS to make music - he’s been a master at using what he has to build his own *inward shudder* brand and he’s good at onscreen charm, foodie conviviality and I’m in awe at how he’s done it . . . but ‘Cocodrillo Turbo’ is a reminder of what a fkn great rapper he is (to the point where the cameos from Meyhem Lauren, Roc Marc and Conway feel superfluous), and the beats served up here by a rotating cast of like-minded loons (Alchemist, Roc Marci, Deringer and AB himself) suits the fetid, amazonian vibe. At times the sounds go into properly odd spaces - try ‘Turkish’ for a flavour of the mentalism on offer here. Recommended.
bLack pARty Hotline (Wolf+Rothstein/RCA)
Pervy little bastard. I love bLAck pARty’s unerring ability to create grooves that are simultaneously peach-perfect reinvocations of 80s black pop, but absolutely suck all the warmth out of them until they’re starkly post-modern collages, the reverb and decay of the voice chillingly modern, innately posing the question as to whether the togetherness and wholeness he’s recreating are even possible any more. ‘Hotline’ is this oddly broken thing - even the intended horniness becomes entropy, the lover becomes a fantasy, and the entire persona of the singer crumbles into forlorn grief for a lost moment of dreamed connection. A hymn to emptiness that walks the perfect line between caring alot whether you like it, and not caring a damn.
Namir Blade Mephisto (Mello Music Group)
Tantalising glimpse into this Nashville-native’s forthcoming ‘Metropolis’ set. If ‘Mephisto’ is any guide you’ll hear touches of Kanye circa ‘808’, Vangelis’ soundtracking the Tyrell Corporation’s new promo video, but also radiant gospel touches carved straight outta the Staple Singers second golden era circa 68’s ‘Soul Folk In Action’. It bodes extremely well.
Boldy James x Real Bad Man Killing Nothing (Real Bad Man Records)
It was clear on 2020’s ‘Real Bad Man’ (just one of four amazing albums Boldy gave us that year) that the connection between Boldy’s vicious, engrossing story-telling and RBM’s beats was gonna be fruitful and that sense of real mutual animus is revealed in every absorbing moment here. Hypnotic yet occasionally jarring soundscapes that Boldy’s narratives both sail over but also punctuate, with a sense of encroaching darkness and utterly irredeemable dankness that never existentially tips over into doom, always pushes each couplet and each new sonic antechamber into gloriously resistant life. A gritty, grainy riot for the mind.
Calibre Double Bend (The Nothing Special)
Calibre is perhaps the most taken-for-granted genius in British bass music - he has that Stephen Hendryish/Man City-ish tendency to be so regularly and consistently great you forget to give him his props and the profligacy of his releases (this is his 5th album in the last couple of years and he’s already had three singles out in 2022) kinda numbs you to the deluge. But he always hits hard and ‘Double Bend’ isn’t JUST another series of awesome d’n’b tracks. Normally Calibre’s sleeves are anonymously samey but check the eye-popping dayglo derangement on this - it reflects how the album’s opening suite seems to be a homage to the industrial/acid tinges of his youth but even when he’s digging deep into analogue ruffness there’s that same painstaking attention to detail, the masterly building of drops and surges, that characterises all his best work. Perhaps a few tracks too long but when it works it works like all Calibre does - makes you wonder whether there’s any further levels of organised perfection for music to travel to.
Camoflauge Monk Pushing Buttons (Art Dealer Music)
It’s great to hear one of Griselda’s main sonic bedrocks pushing himself away from those confines and hooking up with a more varied set of collaborators here, although the main focus of this grimly captivating set is that Buffalo life. Where normally the absence of a beat would have me concerned about by-rote production habits here CM subtly blends both the deeply riddim-led and the arrhythmic to give us a hallucinatory suite of reflection on his own process. I can’t resist this record.
(Sidenote: An awful lot of underground hip hop producers whose prolificness is a problem - how to get excited about another EP of fucked-up stumblebum baked/fried bellicoseness? Answer: play it, dig it, and realise that you’d have been down Bongos getting this on import back in the day and that although posing problems for fucking critics the glut of this current golden age is glorious. There’s tons of reasons to be angry at the moment. Music isn’t one of them. SHIT music is obviously but I think it can be avoided now. The music INDUSTRY is as well, but that too can be ignored, as with any transaction. I spent a while blaming music for the fact I didn’t have time to listen to it, still do sometimes. That disconnect is of our own making, not music’s. We should make time to listen.)
Chyna Streetz Hourglass (Bad Influenyce)
On the same label as Rome Streetz and there’s a similar rawness and weirdness here - I really dig ‘Eve’s Remorse’ where the dankness and ruggedness lifts for a moment with a truly strange warp of funk, balallaika-riffs and tiny vocal shard-streams that undercut Chyna’s bristling rhymes wonderfully. More please.
Danger Mouse x Black Thought No Gold Teeth (BMG)
Fuck YES - what a combination, Black Thought just dropping total authority with every line and DM lashing together a monolithic slab of Stax-flecked soul underneath. Can’t wait for the full-length ‘Cheat Codes’ set dropping soon.
E Any Information (Silver Rocket)
Thalia Zedek’s presence was what initially drew me to E and there’s no denying you can hear traces of Uzi, Live Skull and Come in these tracks but there’s something totally different about the band she’s in with members of Neptune and Karate, something heavier and nigh-on industrial in the coruscating riffs and brittle belligerent beats. You are reminded of the more experimental side of post-hardcore rock (Albini post Big Black + Six Finger Satellite, even Cop Shoot Cop are recalled to me) and the songs here combine fascinating tangents that seem to dive deeper and more revealingly into the tangled trauma of fucked-up relationships than even Zedek’s own solo work. I’d call each member’s other work unromantic romance. In E, it’s just plain unromantic. Harsh, unsparing but very addictive little EP this.
Elcamino Let There Be Light (Anti Gun Violence Co.)
As with Camoflauge Monk, it’s great to hear some of Griselda’s original acolytes finding their own voices, pushing beyond the ever-dwindling confines of the Buffalo style and seeking out their own sounds: this is the best Elcam for years, and some of the delicious little bass textures and quirky loop-shards he’s blended in here are entirely new to his technique. Ruff, rugged sure, but also -as some of the startlingly honest rhyming accentuates - introspective, melodic, poignant, heartfelt where previously he was all front and facade. He’s growing up.
Kendrick Lamar Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers (Aftermath/Interscope/Top Dawg)
A sense always in the white critical narrative around Kendrick, that he is somehow floating ‘free’ of rap now - the amnesiacal forgetting of hip hop’s birthpang & eternal promise of freedom, lyrically and musically. For this listener, the Band’s idea of a great American music, a sweeping tapestry of American sound is precisely what Kendrick has created here in this album of contrasts and paradox and confusion - hyperkinetic rhymes and music that sum up ponderous moments, bubblegum hooks mashed into pivoting psycho-babble, poetry full of concrete anger and burning hunger couched in music that dubs that desire out into abtraction. The sheer fucking HOLD he takes on you from the moment the needle drops is properly unearthly, and I really don’t feel that anyone is talking about race, class, violence and the ongoing diffraction of the American nightmare with anywhere near as much magical articulacy and suggestive ambivalence as Kendrick. Incontrovertibly one of the albums of the year thus far, especially lyrically, but with Kendrick lyrics become musical and music becomes poetic. He is like no one else.
Molecular Culture EP (Flexout Audio)
Sometimes the reggae touches in d’n’b can be purely cosmetic - the odd ruffneck sample of some raggamuffin chat to cement a fake connection with dub/Jamaica even though the track often is shy of being bass-heavy. No such danger with Molecular - his productions combine absolute painstaking finesse with a nice feel of hooligan menace in the low end - check ‘Break The Habit’ loud on your headphones for that delicious tactile feel of a properly explored DAW working only to unhinge rather than impress.
Objectiv & Lupo Decisions EP (ThirtyOne Recordings)
31, as you should know, is one of those d’n’b imprints you can absolutely trust with your life and this gloriously dank EP sees you more than right: the title track has crashes as slow as doom-metal but a low-end that skulks around your vision with a true M.R Jamesian creepiness, suddenly lunging at your jugular at all the right moments of terrifying implacability. ‘Dangun’’s intro is damn near radiophonic in its refusal to leave any tone unfucked-with but when it peels back to its limber groove its full of Wipeout2097 detail and bass so thick n rubbery it’s like your own personal rumpus room. ‘Out The Block’ is Ob’s best here cos the attention to the bass detail is just off the scale (and please also check out his ‘Modbox/Jah Rule’ single that’s just dropped) but don’t overlook Lupo’s ‘Bark’ either cos the sub-sub-sub-bass pattern is so fuckin’ On-U-like it’s delicious. Doc Scott only allows the very best on 31 and the standard is kept high throughout this little slab of malevolent wonder.
Pusha T It’s Almost Dry (Getting Out Our Dreams/Def Jam)
Since the Clipse days been yearning to hear Pusha T back with Pharrell and much of ‘It’s Almost Dry’ doesn’t disappoint - the opening two-fer of ‘Brambleton’ and ‘Let The Smokers Shine The Car’ hits as hard as ANY hip hop in 2022 and it’s gratifying to hear that Pharrell’s ability to lash down the kind of bassline that actually makes you feel physically sick with its sheer bowel-rattling insistence hasn’t gone anywhere. Would actually argue that with ‘Brambleton’ and the remarkably woozy ‘Neck & Wrist’ Pusha is (whisper it) progressing but do we WANT Pusha to progress? No, we want the rhymes to rotate the same lexicon, and we just want him to continue to be an artist whose producers save all their maddest shit for him. The Pharrell tracks here way eclipse the Kanye ones and the Kanye ones are great in themselves. Unreservedly reccomended and in terms of old hip hoppers coming more than correct this year get your pre-orders in for J.Rocc’s frabjous ‘A Wonderful Letter’ as well.
Quartetski Cage (Pierre-Yves Martel)
FOUR6 and One7 by Cage, played by the intriguing Quartetski who are Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion, synthesizer), Bernard Falaise (electric guitar), Philippe Lauzier (bass clarinet, synthesizer), and Pierre-Yves Martel (electric bass, sine waves). Think of that mix of instrumentation with Cage’s instructions (eg “Each player derives a chromatic tone row obtained using chance operations. Registers are not fixed. The ensemble thinks and acts as one individual, playing together as much as possible, or not. and you should picture something intriguing. It is.
Quelle Chris Deathfame (Mello Music Group)
His weirdest yet: this is not an instantaneously accessible hit, and might not instantaneously hit for you (but please do check out as much QC prior to this as you can) but my god, when it does finally sink its fangs into your bloodstream ‘Deathfame’ might just be QC’s most plangent and unique record yet. In the past it’s been easy if mind-boggling to detail the accumulations of sound Chris has confected but here EVERYTHING is wrong in the best most unsettling way, wonky as fuck, jazz pushed into industrial heaviness, rap slowed to a Butthole-Surfers crawl, rhymes doubling back on themselves, voices schizophrenically shifting tone mid song, mid syllable, refusing their own significance. Nowhere near to fathoming this masterpiece out but damn sure it’s a masterpiece. Experience it.
Revelators Sound System Grieving (37d03d)
RSS are MC Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger and his mate Cameron Ralston and they recorded their self-titled debut album (about to drop) through 2020/21 at Taylor’s home in Durham North Carolina and Richmond Virginia’s Spacebomb studio (where Ralston is the session bassist). So far, so dangerously close to ‘jam band’ but fuck me it’s a great LP as you can hear in this gorgeous 10-minute ‘single’, rump-shaking beats, jazzy horns and piano coalescing into a real hypnotic drone and moments of properly free-flowing derailment that add to a burgeoning monolithic sense of heaviness. This IS fusion, but that kinda lovely fusion that feels like a bit TOO much and also not enough, fusion that hasn’t been spoiled by its virtuosity. Diggit.
Pierre Guiseppe Sandoni Cantatas & Instrumental Works (Sony)
World-premiere recordings of pieces by Italian Baroque composer Pier Giuseppe Sandoni - known in his time as Handel’s assistant, a virtuoso harpsichordist, and as the husband of prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (1696-1778), for whom he wrote numerous arias. He’s since fallen into complete oblivion, but here Nicoleta Paraschivescu, leader of the Swiss ensemble La Floridiana, has bought together solo harpsichord pieces, ensemble string pieces and three cantatas sung by soprano Francesca Aspromonte. Sandoni’s pieces have been wrongly attributed to Bach over the years, testament to how special they are.
Marjan Vahdat Our Garden Is Alone (Kirkelig Kulturverksted)
An Iranian exile, Marjan Vahdat’s songs and voice are clearly inspired by the long tradition of Persian love poetry and love song but the yearning in the songs here isn’t just for a lover, is clearly also for her homeland. The music here was created in the bizarre lockdown scenario of Vahdat recording vocal tracks and the musicians composing and creating music that fitted with her melodies and ideas, all in isolation almost like ‘Astral Weeks’. That brokenness of connection actually works in these songs favour, leaves spaces and a sense of longing that’s sublime 0 crucially it’s Vahdat’s amazing voice that cleaves you to this music. By the by re: Iranian diaspora do NOT miss Tegh & Adel Poursamadi’s ‘Ima ایما’ dropping on Injazero soon, it’s incredible.
WEMA - Wema (!K7)
Dancefloor-directed blend of traditional Tanzanian music, afro-latin rhythms and experimental electronica. Msafiri Zawose together with Penya members Magnus P.I, Lilli Elina (whose vox are a real highlight) & Jimmy le Messurier together with producer Photay keep things nicely raw and shot through with a Gqom-style ruffness. Play loud, play out, play often, I’m a sucker for it.