Sweeping The Nation: Now Playing 2/2/23
Patrick Wolf - Nowhere Game
My, there's a name from all our pasts. Wolf's eclectic, questing journey through literary folktronics to gothic chamber to brief electropop outlier to industrial folk made him a singular, compelling force, and you kind of feel would do so even more today now we have a handle on enigmas, genre hopping and dramatic queer-coded flourishes. Except legal issues and burnout intervened, he disappeared just as an age that might have elevated him approached and he's proven less of an influence as a result than some once imagined, it now coming up for twelve years since his last album of new songs. And this isn't from one either, The Night Safari EP out on April 14th, but it's something new, reminding us of his core strengths of keening strings, electronic beats and darkly swooning, rousing melody.
Marlody - These Doubts
This is the kind of curio that had it come out on a bigger label than Skep Wax would have been given glowing promotion. by all the right people. Marlody, a former classical piano prodigy from Ashford in Kent, came across our radar late last year with the swelling piano eddies and airy, folky voice on single Summer; the album I'm Not Sure At All expands in contradictions, the sweetness and gorgeous layered harmonies rubbing against the lived experience personal and emotional pain of some of the lyrics, the arrangements recalling the lure and lull of classic 1970s singer-songwriters while using programming and textural digital instrumentation to pull such tropes thoroughly inside out in the manner of Weyes Blood or Cate Le Bon. Or, yes, if you insist, Kate Bush.
Jen Cloher - My Witch
The patronage of then partner Courtney Barnett elevated the longstanding Melbourne-based singer-songwriter into new recognition, which makes it seem a shame that first solo album in six years and fifth overall I Am The River, The River Is Me has over here at least gone under the radar when the advance singles, positions of strength in existence, Takatapui personality and heritage, have been so uniformly strong. The third deals in intimacy and shuddering electronics overtaken by instrumentation breakouts, with a video starring Camp Cope's Georgia Maq as a personal trainer that, don't know what you think, but feels like it has some kind of subtle underlying message. The album is out on March 3rd; Cloher has just announced UK dates in June.
The Orange Trees - To Dream Of Another Land
Ooh, is it dreampop time? The Edinburgh duo's second single has the organ drones and steady beat of early Beach House and in Rue Marie a vocalist of contemplative lusciousness.
House Of All - Harlequin Duke
After Brix & The Extricated and Imperial Wax, another band full of ex-Fall members emerges. This one has the mighty Steve and Paul Hanley and are led by their sometime contemporary in Gruppe Martin Bramah, who was actually singer for his old band's earliest rehearsals, alongside Simon Wolstencroft, drummer from 1986 to 1997 (and previously both nearly a Smith and a Stone Rose), and Pete Greenway from the final version. The training has paid off well insomuch as you can imagine this kind of cryptic, lurching, crepuscular hard psych from the early to mid 1980s version, though interestingly if Bramah's vocals sound like a Smith it's James rather than Mark E.
Mozart Estate - I'm Gonna Wiggle
Oh, Lawrence. Pop-Up! Ker-Ching! And The Possibilities Of Modern Shopping continues where Go-Kart Mozart and the later Denim albums left off, in a twisted novelty bubblegum world where Gimme Dat Ding is I Am The Walrus. You feel nobody else would think of going something like this with a classic pop melody.