Spacemoth 'No Past No Future' (Wax Nine Records)

Don't let this total gem pass you by.

I was gonna try to get through this review WITHOUT mentioning the B-word cos EVERY SINGLE REVIEW I’ve read of this utterly delightful record from Maryam Qudus - a Bay-Area-based first-gen Afghani-American who here steps from her production work to lash down an absolute pop classic as musician, songwriter, performer and producer - mentions Broadcast. Don’t get me wrong I love Broadcast but my god there’s so much more going on here - I hear Abba and Aspera and Stereolab and Solex and that’s just the As and Ss, please don’t think this is yet another identikit retrieval of those trails Trish and the gang laid down. Crucially, unlike alot of music I’ve heard tagged with that B-signifier Qudus finds her own hooks, her own songs, from her own head and heart and at no point do you feel this is music remotely in hock to anything but her own spirit and uncanny pop sense. Listen without prejudice and you’ll be consumed with delight.

I do hear alot of 90s influences perhaps reflecting Qudus’ own reconnaissance through music but also reminding me of other albums this year (Wax Nine label-mate Johanna Warren’s amazing ‘Lessons For Mutants’ which I’ll be boring you about anon, and Sasami’s stunning ‘Squeeze’) wherein solo female artists have reconfigured a welter of sources from a time when they were growing up engulfed in sound, recalling similarly sui generis figures from a generation ago (Lisa Germano, the criminally forgotten Solex, Luscious Jackson, Add N To X). Crucially, though your musical mind can’t help seeking such reassuring referents it just takes one listen to the wonderful ‘No Past No Future’ for you to forget them all - this is a new thing in your life, Spacemoth music, and it’s fucking brilliant.

‘Mind Modulation’ is a nice glitchy little boy-howdy that might make you think your CD’s skipping before ‘This Shit’ starts the album proper and within a few seconds your heart is sealed to this music. Part of it is the attention to detail - anyone can be minded to set up a gorgeous pulsating motorik pop chassis but Qudus fine-tunes every aspect into this ultra-satisfying thump that’s irresistable, and then lights up those structures with hooks that you know even on first listen are contact-highs you’re gonna need again and again, and peripheral textures (here some backwards whorls of synths and vocals that are just ear-puckering) that warrant repeated exploration and listening. Also helps that ‘When is this shit gonna end?’ is a chorus the whole WORLD can get behind - towards the end of the track she builds in this multi-layered rippling strata of b-vox that makes the return of that hook immense. Two tracks in and you know you’re in the company of a master.

‘Pipe & Pistol’ has a whipcrack beat, a gorgeous Stereolab-ish melody, and an intriguing structure in which the chorus is a hushed moment of reverie before the verses buoy you in a rolling wave of exquisitely-measured psyche. The first highlight here comes in the shape of ‘UFObird’: produced dry it would still be a hypnotic slo-mo slice of poised art-pop but Qudus makes the whole track wobble and shimmer like a heat-haze, the vortices of synth beaming in like tractor beams across the soundscape. ‘Waves Come Crashing’ is just nuts - and when a producer with these skills actually allows sounds to swirl towards chaos in the context of a tight pop song oh man that is a sound I LOVE. I’m hugely reminded of the hugely underrated and forgot Aspera (check 2001’s ‘Sugared & Feathered’) on the epic ‘L.O.T.F’ - that Ronettes big beat, lyrics that intriguingly walk a tightrope tween yearning, freedom, and the security of confinement and it needs pointing out here that Qudus’ voice is a remarkable thing - controlled and understated but always utterly convincing and lit up with emotion and need.

‘Flutter Memory’ reveals Qudus’ method and how she tilts that method always away from ungenerous strictures and towards delight - the flame trails of guitar she slathers all over the fade pull the song from being a power ballad by Delia Derbyshire into something akin to Labradford backing Bjork, ‘Round In Loops’ lyrically wanders in the spaces between Qudus’ identities and slows mesmerically to a slurred stop before ‘If I Close My Eyes & Pretend’ gives us perhaps the album’s most glimmeringly glisteningly sweet synth-pop which THEN melds into the stunning 2nd highpoint, ‘Noise Of Everyday Life’. It’s already up there with Robyn’s ‘Every Heartbeat’ for me and YES I KNOW THAT’S A BIG CLAIM but just listen - perfectly poised, dramatic, warmly-pulsating, icily implacable big pop (that fuck it, I’m gonna say it, is ALSO up there with what I consider the greatest ever Eurovision song, Blanche’s ‘City Lights’ which criminally didn’t win for Belgium in 2017). ‘Berries & Watch You Cry’ steps with innate understanding into the kind of hushed spoken-word wonky guitar-pop of Movietone or That Dog before the title track closes this masterpiece out on a sublime note of freedom, freedom from the de rigeur expectations that framed and negatively formed Qudus’ identity, freedom to scale heaven in sound, always with that sound perfectly pitched between nostalgia and nihilism and new hope.

A final important note - part of what makes this album so joyful for me is that I’m very familiar with how those of us with roots from elsewhere have to struggle to be heard, have additional hurdles of both family-expectation but also the prejudices of the white curators of independent pop culture to get over. In Qudus’ case I think it’s driven not only her learning and experience, but it’s also made her intent on creating music of incredibly high standards that absolutely reflects both her background but also music’s magical ability to allow us to transcend and play with the imaginative flowerings that grow from such tangled roots. This aint just a gorgeous album, it resonates deep for those of us who need it to. Highly recommended.