Two To Watch In 2023
If you're not paying attention to jaydonclover and Kilynn Lunsford you're gonna miss out on some of 2023's best music.
Is this just a craven attempt to crowbar in two albums I unaccountably forgot in my 2022 end of year lists? Yes. BUT I genuinely WILL be keeping an eye on these two as I think they’re amazing.
I think it was this song that first hipped me to the miracle that is jaydonclover. Have a listen.
The thing that struck me straight off was the sparseness, the spectral-ness, the gaseousness, the way the bass hit you where you’d expect but every other aspect of the soundscape seeemed to hinge on jaydonclover’s own imaginative reconfiguration of your expectations. Immediately sent on a spiral into her other work I realised that what’s key here is that she plays to her strengths: she knows how her voice works and doesn’t try and push it too much or let autotune take the weight, rather it’s the chiaroscuro of multi-tracked ethereality that makes this voice speak so clearly to you. And behind every jaydonclover track is this production from co-collaborator dylantheinfamous, that’s so damned odd - to this old fart seemingly as lit up by traces of Dilla and old-skool producers like Kenny "K-Smoove" Kornegay and Darryl "88" Young as anything more contemporaneous. And my god the lyrics - sharp, funny, suggestive, absolutely committed to spelling out the ambiguities and blocks and derailments of love, ‘clover herself impossibly maintaining this uniquely unplaceable persona in all this, as unplaceable as the music she creates. The 2020 EP ‘Recovering Lover’ was a beautifully sad, immaculately poised, tragic look at loss and love. By the time the album/mixtape ‘Room Service Volume 1’ dropped last October I was utterly entranced and trapped in her soundworld. Unlike 99.9% of the r’n’b I listen to this music demands nothing bar your rapt wonder - I rarely dance to it because I’m simply nailed to the spot with my mind spinning at her words and her sounds. Way beyond immersive, jaydonclover’s music is so engulfing perhaps precisely because of its unpushiness, the way it just emanates into your day and possesses like a spell.
‘Room Service Volume 1’ isn’t quite as bleakly downcast as ‘Recovering Lover’ but it’s certainly never happy, certainly is coming from a place wherein its protagonists are perhaps between true-love relationships, looking for someone/anyone, needing human contact and touch but also wondering whether those feelings of wartime (covid) need make sense now peace has broken out. Much as the concept behind ‘Recovering Lover’ emerged to jaydon as she wrote it, so her hook-first way of writing (her music is thrillingly concise in exploring melodic ideas and moving on) has enabled the themes behind this record to really come together and resonate. ‘Baggagedropoff’ sees her check in, making calls, the baggage starting to feel both literal but also a metaphor for the accumulated damage we bring to any search for love. ‘Prettier’ kicks off on a heartbreaking hook (“I could be a little prettier for you/ be a little skinnier for you/ I’ll change my hair and cut my nails and be a little wittier for you”) before flipping that offer round (“I get the feeling you don’t like my face/ is it because I put you on mute cos you’ve always got something to say?”) as this strange warped loop unfurls over dylan’s peerless beats. Technology and its effects on love in the 2020s is a big part of why this record works so movingly, it feels like a private thing you’ve stumbled across, a misdirected communication you’re lucky to bear witness to - the music is continually on the edge of almost malfunctioning, twisted out of normal shape, woozy with its own red-eyed screen-time dissipation (‘I’ve got options/ but fuck those options’), clover’s voice always gently cutting through, leaving messages, asides through the fourth wall, ghosting you while slipping shards of poison and plangency into your ear. It’s utterly unfathomable as well HOW and where this music is created - the space suggested on tracks like ‘honemoonphase’ and the astonishing ‘butmysister’ is both intimate as a bedroom and immense as a cloud, the melodies and loops always stopping short of being ‘vintage’ by the intensity of how that space is created, the thick heady air and sky-high lack of oxygen at points leaving you gasping and breathless, the stunning closer ‘checkout’ actually evanescing itself out of existence, fading like Holst’s ‘Neptune’ on rippling waves of harmony.
At one point on the remarkable ‘halfpastnine’ she sings ‘I can’t put my finger on how you make me feel’ and I can’t think of a better summation of how this record and jaydonclover’s music gets to you and suffuses under your skin. Entirely unique and consequently entirely addictive. Keep em peeled on whatever she does this year. I hope she does fkn LOADS.
Kilynn Lunsford’s music could not be more different from Jaydonclover’s but I found it almost as compelling as 2022 closed out, and it oddly seems to come from a similar place of dissatisfaction with contemporary sonic orthodoxy. Kilynn is from Philadelphia and on this debut solo album she crushes pop and the experimental together to create a record that for me was the most punk-rock statement of the year. Her own subsequent words on the record are revealing - she talks of growing up with Missy and Timbaland and being drawn towards their ‘overloaded’ impact, as well as ‘the Britney Spears of ‘Blackout’ being recorded in an empty West-Philly field, like Alan Lomax recording Betty Boop near the Delaware water gap’ - being a key mental-mood image in making this record.
Crucially this conceptualisation isn’t dry or ponderous, it’s Lunsford’s own exploration of her process now she’s no longer in Taiwan Housing Project or having to jam with a band anymore, a desire to ‘combine irreconcilable elements always allowing for the aleatoric to come through”. Lunsford and collaborator Don Bruno recorded this record with cheap broken gear and broken rhythms, eliminated space entirely from the sound (no reverb), and pushed Lunsford’s voice to an uncomfortably close and central space to the point where it feels like the music is being conjured by its traces and trails. It helps that nothing here feels over-cooked, often sounds like a first fresh take, and Lunsford’s lyrics are funny as fuck, caustic, surreal, satirical and disturbingly molten in their anger as on the blazing openers ‘Reality Testing’ and ‘Tammy & Friends’. The music, though made from elements that aren’t hostile in themselves (on the first massive highlight here the startling ‘Where The Moon Waits’ these gorgeous peals of psyche guitar), the total avoidance of predictable or expected structure in the music means it sounds like pop but is played with an entirely avant-garde impulse. ‘Freshest Taste’ and ‘North Sea Shrimps’ toy with late 70s and early 80s post-punk/electro-pop and sound uncannily like what might have happened if Telepathe had kept going, ‘Three Babies Make Ten’ is a brilliant ESG-style slice of anti-melodic refusal before ‘Vessel Creep’ recalls those moments when Kim Gordon took over and surpassed the Sonic Youth albums her tracks were part of, and ‘Public Private Dream World’ sees you diving for the rewind button with its Diamanda Galas/Grace Jones-like imperiousness. Can’t wait to hear what Lunsford does next.
Two totally different records from two totally different artists but both suggesting 2023 is going to require vigilance, ever-bigger speakers, king-sized blues and a new grinder. I’m in. Records Of The Week posts starting again next week. Happy new year.
Hi Neil, have you heard much of Biig Piig? jaydonclover reminds me a lot of her 2018 EP 'Vol 1: Big Fan of the Sesh'. Standouts are Flirt and Dinner's Gettin' Cold. Gorgeous spacey R&B.