Sweeping The Nation: Now Playing 24/1
Or: catching up on 2023's best so far
Alison Eales - Fifty-Five North
The debut solo release by the keyboard player with the much admired Butcher Boy, from album Mox Nox out on March 24th, there's hints of the Magnetic Fields and Kirsty Maccoll in its insistent DIY electronic soundscape, the subtle strings and Eales' lament for Glasgow building her up and grinding her down simultaneously.
Slug - Instant Reaction
That Ian Black is an adjunct to the Field Music brains trust isn't hidden - Thy Socialite! is out on the Brewis' Daylight Savings Records label - and neither is the stylistic notes his songs often bear. The direct and then meandering arrangements! The backing harmonies! That it sounds like every period of XTC and Sparks' weird radio rock phase at the same time!
Black Belt Eagle Scout - Nobody
Katherine Paul didn't seem to get the career boost expected from the huge critical reaction to her last album, 2019's At The Party With My Brown Friends, bringing the indigenous eye to an indie sphere that hadn't yet learned to entirely accommodate otherhood. As such The Land, The Water, The Sky, out February 10th, seems to be under the radar in an undeserved way if this grand sweep of dreampop-touched insistent atmospherics and wistful vocal about representation is any guide.
Crosslegged - Only In The
New York's Keba Robinson comes on with the delicacy around spiralling melodies of a Nilufer Yanya at first, driven by insistent drum machine and what sounds like kalimba. Then after three minutes it becomes something slightly different as chiming guitar glides it home.
Young Fathers - Rice
Young Fathers continuing their path to becoming a British TV On The Radio - yeah, heavily and hopelessly unfair and reductive, but what can you do, and besides it's not like the American TV On The Radio are doing much any more - blossoms further with spiritual appeals, sub-bass and percussive insistence towards a panicked, distorted but heroic ending. Going by Heavy Heavy’s advance singles, clear a space come end of year list season. (Not a single Midlands date on either their record store or actual tours, by the way)
M83 - Oceans Niagara
Now that everybody else sounds like M83's 2011 pastel and neon circuitry amid an Eighties revival approaching twice as long as the Eighties lasted with few signs of slowing down, what should M83 sound like in 2023? Almost instrumental, interestingly, and while still in thrall to those big synth tones there's a lot more motorik and Shieldsish guitar to the enormity of the soundscape by way of Tangerine Dream (and ending somewhere oddly near Public Service Broadcasting) The constructed reality series that uses *this* as its theme would definitely get us to subscribe to their service.
Avey Tare - The Musical
Usually an Avey Tare solo project engenders a reaction best summarised as "oh bloody hell, what's this mess now?" And yet The Musical, from upcoming fourth solo album 7s, shifts seamlessly and paves its own uneven path, intricately textured with a weirdly funky bassline bubbling under a sprawling, fluctuating while still intimate landscape. With Panda Bear's Sonic Boom collaboration, maybe last year's Animal Collective return to form album has inspired them to greater heights.
Mandy, Indiana - Injury Detail
It feels natural that Mancunian acts would increasingly tap into the city's underground history of industrial synths and post-punk noise. Injury Detail is music for the route march into the core of the engulfing fire, driven onwards by military-industrial chants mostly in Valentine Caulfield's native French like a more accommodating cousin of DAF's Der Mussolini as electronic percussion of varying kinds advances and sheets of noise course over like landing 747s.
Tiny Ruins - The Crab / Waterbaby
Olympic Girls was one of the better under the general radar albums of 2019; this first track since then starts out as plaintive folk thanks to Hollie Fullbrook's intimately soft voice and hypnotic guitar before spartan strings interject pastoral dramatics.
Anna B Savage - Crown Shyness
Expanding Savage's expressive minimalism with electronic pulses, burbling synths and background sax could have been a chasing-trends disaster that undermines her strengths. It's not. Clearly it's not, it's featured here. Instead it's used in such a subtle way that plays off her rich voice, though as the album in|FLUX (February 17th) was produced by Mike Lindsay who's spent his career doing similarly in Tunng and LUMP it shouldn't be that surprising.
REALLY GOOD SONGS YOU DON'T NEED US TO ADD TO THE WEIGHT OF WORDS ABOUT: boygenius - $20, The National - Tropic Morning News, Arlo Parks - Weightless (though don't let this be a revival of the 1990 Funky Drummer over-reliance, OK?)