Engaged in the summoning of lands that time forgot, whether it’s crude vestiges of Americana or the Styxian blues of his last record, the guitarist Bobby Would carries an iterative and sometimes thrillingly pleonastic charm as he finds new points of emphasis and scrabbles the nooks and crannies of his scuzzy yet melodious loops. His new album Relics Of Our Life for the Oakland label Digital Regress certainly bears some of the hallmarks of the Dunedin sound, depicted here as ‘the delicacy of The Great Unwashed with the heavy heart of The Verlaines and the smartness of The Chills’, but it’s really about breaking apart that sort of emotional and stylistic nexus, as Would explores everything from its forebears in the garage rock of The Velvet Underground and The Stooges with their artsy airs and punkish distortions to its successors in the slacker rock of Pavement and the mid-tempo balladry of R.E.M.
Other bands which spring to mind include the florid and even slightly wan psychedelia of Love, the surf rock and spectral wind chimes of The Beach Boys and the inveterate jangliness of The Byrds. There’s a little bit of the soft samba which characterised sunshine pop, and while the album notes also cite the ‘hymnal geometry and switched-on Palestrina’ of Popol Vuh and the cosmic elation of Terry Riley, perhaps the clearest representation of his sound would be to say that Bobby Would sits gladly somewhere between Bobby Darin and Ariel Pink with the same penchant even amidst his fuzzy repetitions for swashbuckling dynamics and fetching hooks.
Some of the earworms on Relics Of Our Life have clearer antecedents in the briskly incessant doo-wop of ‘Stay’ by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, the stoner sands of ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden and the gothic sloshing of ‘Riders on the Storm’ by The Doors. ‘All I do is thinking about you’ and ‘Why don’t you talk to me?’ are some of the petitions and supplications which Would intones to various stages of completion, riding waves of scum and foam as they stretch out beyond the sea.
The besuited Dubliner pigbaby offers a similar potpourri of genres on his debut full-length for PLZ Make It Ruins. The eleven mulched pearls of i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do run the gamut from torch songs to a sort of claustrophobic, world-weary anxiety which finds the sonic and atmospheric middle ground between Blackhaine and Brian Wilson (the frequent Blackhaine collaborator, grisaille tearjerker and White Hotel habitué Rainy Miller wound up mixing each of the tracks). From the scuttling or smothering pensiveness of ‘Meep meep said the rat’ and ‘I’m here, with you’, which introduces a characteristic swathe of muted woodwinds and brass, ‘Life moves fast, so take my hand.’ carries bird calls and other field recordings, an insidious, subtly propulsive post-punk guitar line, pitch-shifted cloud rap vocals and a glitching percussive tape hiss whose enveloping warmth is redolent of early-aughties indie standouts like Múm or The Notwist. Suddenly the air of quiet and groping desperation is dispelled by ‘The Green Hills of Cornamona’, the setting of the album’s cover, a winsome pastoral featuring bronzed saxophone and billowing strings.
Pigbaby recorded i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do in a little cottage in the Irish countryside in the winter of 2021, after he and a small group of friends lugged cellos, guitars, tape decks and samplers, plastic keyboards and portable Indian harmoniums, some of which were gathered from his mother’s attic, up a muddy hill as the rain fell and wild horses passed by. The prevailing mood is both mystically dank and sometimes deliriously heartfelt, with the accoutrements of the album such as its lowercase styling and the artist’s pervasive pig costume adding to the sense of an hermetic narrative. The songwriting veers from short epigrammatic utterances to lengthy confessionals which pluck at the heartstrings even though the listener is never quite sure how much is put-on or true, whose details steer between the musty and trite, the cod-cinematic and the keeningly familiar, always ready with an acute observation or resonant turn of phrase enough to steer us right back on track.
An example of the confessional narrative style, ‘Crying in Burger King’ is also the record’s most varied and dissolute track, with a simple chord progression on the guitar, elegiac fiddle strains and ramshackle percussion accompanying the mawkish saga of an empty stomach and fast food tears, from the damp concrete or peatlands teasing a jazz break before immediately seguing into a blur of fusion, Cocteau Twins glossolalia and staggering Sigur Ros or Godspeed You! Black Emperor-esque post-rock. ‘I miss my baby girl.’ dabbles with skiffle, brings in a transposed fiddle and closes as a bar room shanty with choral accompaniment, leading in to ‘Texas Girl’ which serves as both climax and centrepiece.
The recollection of a stalled romance by turns glibly absurd – as when the singer in his conversational intimacy admits ‘I sat and watched her suck some guy’s gigantic dong. I didn’t expect to fall so quick’ – and searingly poignant, the text is accompanied by the wordless sean-nós melismas of a tenor with peals of giggling laughter and Michael Jackson-esque hee-hees as pigbaby warms to his subject, before hope frays and the fantasy turns sour. On a sodden bike ride from Bed-Stuy over the bridge into Manhattan on Christmas Day, the narrator listens through his Bluetooth speakers to Aphex Twin, whose . . . I Care Because You Do is cannily referenced in the album title, and Tirzah’s soothingly downbeat ‘Fine Again’, but as ‘Texas Girl’ itself swirls to a crescendo and pigbaby dwells on a sense of loss and lessons learned, the piece evokes something of Paul Simon at his most quizzical, on Graceland tracks like ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’, fittingly given some of the shared themes and locales while switching out its zephyr optimism for something more rainswept and threnodial, or ‘Gumboots’ and ‘I Know What I Know’ whose chorus and dynamics have been mined across whole songs and albums by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, another far-flung spiritual kin. Closing on a bit of music hall with harmonium and fiddle, i don’t care if anyone listens to this shit once you do is a record that’s easy to dismiss but very difficult to shake, a sentiment of a piece with the title, a promise made and held dear.
There’s a rubbery quality to the strings of the Tomeka Reid Quartet on the centrepiece of their latest suite, entitled ‘Sauntering With Mr. Brown’, especially to the guitar of Mary Halvorson, who sashays and careens with a surreal suppleness and bendy legs as Reid on the cello plays a circuitous loop pizzicato. Halfway through the piece the ensemble comes together, supported by drumrolls from Tomas Fujiwara and Jason Roebke’s burgeoning bass, as Reid’s angular bows become an amorphous cloud, dragging her bandmates along as the spokes show from their upturned umbrellas. Another quick break on the guitar and Halvorson and Reid reverse roles, with Halvorson’s six-string taking the loop and Reid, who incorporates electronics on 3+3 after previously sticking to acoustic preparations, playing long fraying arcs as the quartet ramble in search of a destination.
After taking a deep and sumptuous dive into the floridities and moribundities of Charles Baudelaire across a series of sparsely accompanied studio and live orchestral albums, the Norwegian chanteuse Susanna unveils her latest project Meditations on Love, the fruit of five years of songwriting. The swirls and eddies of a saxophone open the first single ‘Everyone Knows’, joined by a rebounding bass line and sprinkles of keys before bass clarinet and junk percussion add crunch to the proceedings. Susanna sings of an unfaithful relationship and news of that betrayal spreading across town, a furtive type of knowledge which begets the inevitable breakdown.
The saxophonist Isaiah Collier seeks to summon a divine energy on The Almighty, which features the drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode, the pianist Julian Davis Reid and the bassist Jeremiah Hunt as his Chosen Few, a quartet further sanctified on the album closer and title track by an eleven-piece ensemble known as The Celestials. On the surging and uplifting ‘Compassion’, the young saxophonist whose work has frequently paid tribute to John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra plays alongside his longtime mentor Ari Brown, the horns of the kindred Chicagoans resounding in a sort of celestial echo over roiling drums and bell chimes, with the percussion becoming more plosive as the piece swells to a climax, supernovas and shooting stars which accompany the readvent of creation.
Renowned for his unique tenor saxophone whisper, Oded Tzur conjures a lovely burnished glow on ‘Renata’ as the instruments of his quartet melt into one another while carrying distinct melodic lines, from the rising and falling arpeggios of Nitai Hershkovits whose piano plays an elegantly spare solo in the middle of the piece, to Petros Klampanis on plucked bass and the sinuous, bristly percussion of the new group member Cyrano Almeida. Esecutori di Metallo su Carta, the anticlassical ensemble founded back in 2016 by Enrico Gabrielli and Sebastiano De Gennaro, offer a typically lively take on the ‘Synchronia in quartetto’ of the Reichian minimalist composer Fulvio Caldini. And as she prepares to roll out her hotly anticipated debut album, Tems solicits a tender touch on the buoyant and club-oriented ‘Love Me JeJe’ which interpolates the 1997 Afro-soul classic by Seyi Sodimu and Shaffy Bello.
Hot on the heels of The Magic City compered by Meshell Ndegeocello and last year’s incendiary pulling apart of ‘Nuclear War’, the nonprofit Red Hot which combats AIDS and promotes equal access to healthcare through pop-culture collaborations unleashes the most jam-packed volume to date in its ongoing series of reinterpretations of works by the great Sun Ra. Headlined by Kronos Quartet, the album Outer Spaceways Incorporated will feature a cavalcade of alternative icons from the performance artist Laurie Anderson and the Sun Ra alto saxophonist and Arkestra leader Marshall Allen to the footwork pioneer RP Boo, the black quantum futurist and spoken word poet Moor Mother, billy woods and Elucid of Armand Hammer, the minimalist Terry Riley and the scabrous sound artist and instrument maker Evicshen. On the early teaser ‘Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie’ with Laraaji, the new age maestro takes a sample of the early track with doo-wop vocals from the Cosmic Rays and fortifies it with swathes of synthesizer plus celestial squiggles of reversed kalimba and electric autoharp, which like Kronos Quartet’s strings are buried well within the mix to add a holographic, trance-like dimensionality to the ripple of deep groves and fusion comedowns.
Finally on what he describes as an Afro-surrealist anti-opera, the double bassist Nick Dunston draws from the poetic and folkloric texts of Octavia E. Butler, Toni Morrison, Ted Chiang, Richard Hugo and Gabriel García Márquez to summon the libretto for one of the records of the year in COLLA VOCE. With Maria Reich on the violin and viola, Anil Eraslan on the cello, Tal Yahalom on the guitar and Moritz Baumgärtner on drums and other percussion providing the accompaniment and the JACK Quartet comprising the violins of Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, the viola of John Richards and Jay Campbell on cello in Dunston’s own words ‘exponentially multiplying resonance and mass’, the Brooklyn composer enlists four outstanding vocalists in the form of the frequent Fire! Orchestra collaborator Sofia Jernberg, the latinx improviser Isabel Crespo Pardo whose levitational poemsongs with Henry Fraser and Lester St. Louis shone brightly on la espalda y su punto radiante earlier this year, Friede Merz who ‘masters the rare art of being in several places at the same time’ and Cansu Tanrıkulu who expands her vocabulary through the use of live processing.
Produced by Weston Olencki, who recently took a sojourn into the staggered heart of Cajun isolation for Longform Editions and sees the blues in every colour from ramshackle steel fabrications to deep azure, COLLA VOCE is full of fractured choruses, sub-operatic swoons and jowly or creaking glottis as the four vocalists use every outcrop and every inch of their orifice, from an inlet and aerated larynx to the tongue as a motorcycle ramp and snarling or puckered lips, often shaping the mouth for its percussive possibilities. Meanwhile strings sometimes crisply articulated steadily congeal into fraying and ominous drones, a fledgeling tornado which starts kicking up dust with a rasping sound as it gusts and swirls.
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Laraaji & Kronos Quartet – ‘Daddy’s Gonna Tell You No Lie’
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Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few – ‘Compassion’ (feat. Ari Brown)
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Nick Dunston – ‘Blinding, Joyous, Fearful’
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Tomeka Reid Quartet – ‘Sauntering With Mr. Brown’
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Tems – ‘Love Me JeJe’
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Esecutori di Metallo su Carta – ‘Synchronia in quartetto op. 80b’
