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illustrative purposes. Model shown is not UK specification and features optional equipment.
“Wearing the face that shekeepsinajarbythe door"
ELCOME tothe new issue of Uncut — where we continue
to celebrate the return of live gigs. This month, we һауе
reports of shows by Eliza and Martin Carthy and Black
Country, New Road - both, coincidentally, reviewed in Brighton. Meanwhile, in just afew months’ time, the Uncut team will be heading en masse to Wiltshire for the End Of The Road festival. More on that nearer the time — but suffice to say for all of us, End Of The Road will bean unmissable highlight after being deprived of live music for so long. Incidentally, you can find further updates and lineup information at endoftheroadfestival.com and on uncut.co.uk.
Elsewherein theissue, we also have our first face-to-face interview for many long months - with Leon Bridges, whoStephen Deusner meets in his hometown of Forth Worth, Texas. It’s a welcome change from the Zoom chats that have constituted our interviews lately. Ah, Ican almostsmell the coffee brewing in Leon'slocal, the Cherry Coffee Shop.
Whatelse? Exclusives with Lindsey Buckingham - he broughtupthe subject of Fleetwood Mac first, I'm reliably informed - and also Big Red Machine, the collaborative project created by The National's Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver's Justin Vernon. For this, their second album, they’ve recruited
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Onthecover: TheBeatlesby RobertWhitaker Aaron Dessner by Josh Goleman
Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold among other notable guests. His presence finallyunites on record three contemporaries whose eclectic, progressive and ambitious music has been a critical part of Uncut’s aesthetic for the past 15 years or so. Laura Barton manages to corral Dessner, Vernon and Pecknold for her excellent piece — and I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that Vernon and Pecknold have only ever met once so far, in aliftin Phoenix, Arizona.
There's more, of course. The Beatles, Curtis Mayfield, Steve Gunn,
Ripley Johnson, Mercury Rev, the Sugarcubes, Lovin' Spoonful, Martha Wainwright, Springsteen, Bowie and much more.
Before I go, Ishould also pay tribute to Alan Lewis - IPC Magazines’ former editor-in-chief, who helped launch Uncut back in 1997. Alan hada brilliant, intuitiveunderstanding of magazines, as evidenced by the many successes he was involved in. He was a lovely bloke, too, and great company in Uncut's old local, The Stamford Arms. Allan Jones, our founding editor, has given Alana great send-off on page 110. Take care.
Michael Bonner, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @michaelbonner
———————— арайда аны нн ситы Шр рааны га да i A si aaa зав LRA
4 Instant Karma! Bruce Springsteen, KarenBlack,Edward BellonBowie, sax explorers, JuniHabel
56 Lindsey Buckingham The former Mac man battles back fromthe brink with a new album and tales to tell
96 Ihe Sugarcubes Anarchive 1987 encounter with Björk, Einar andco, pondering how to ‘sleep with God"
12 Mercury Rev 62 Curtis Mayfield 100 Lives Eliza&MartinCarthy, An audience with the Catskill mountains: Revisiting his early '70s creative peak, with Black Country, New Road favourite space cadets help from friends, family... and Paul Weller 105 Books 16 New Albums 68 Ihe Beatles Baxter Dury, Genesis P-Orridge
Including: Steve Gunn, Shannon And The Clams, David Crosby, Liars, Son Volt, Sault, Nathan Salsburg, Piroshka, Liam Kazar
36 Ihe Archive
Including: The Beach Boys, George Harrison, Aztec Camera, Jackie Leven
82 Ripley Johnson AlbumBy Album
86 Leon Bridges
Revolver explored by our crack team of Fabsfans,including Brian Wilson, Steve Cropper, Wayne Coyne and many more
106 l'ilms Riders Of Justice and more
109 DVD, Blu-ray and TV Including Summer Of Soul, Bob Dylan
110 Not Fade Away Obituaries
Backhomein Texas, the neo-soul maverick
48 Big Red Machine Aaron Dessner enlists the likes of Robin Pecknold and Anais Mitchell to tell us about thesecondouting of this all-star project
Subscribe onlineatmagazines.bandlabtechnologies.com
Or call01371 851882 andquote code UCPR2021
Offer ends December 31,2021.For enquiries please call:01371851882 or email:support@uncut.co.uk
92 [he Lovin’ Spoonful The Making Of "Summer In The City"
introducesanocturnallyinspirednewalbum 112 Let (ers... PlustheUncutcrossword
1L1 My Life In Music
Martha Wainwright
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SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 3
LNOIANT KARMA!
Showtime: the Boss's namein lightsagain
Ё.
Ф \
‘sacclaimed autobiographical show makesan emotionalreturn to Broadway
RUCE Springsteen
has given a boost to
New York's Covid-hit
theatreland - not
to mention the gig-starved public — by unexpectedly reviving his hit one-man Broadway show. Theopening night at new venue The St James Theatre (June 26) was an emotional affair for all concerned, with Springsteen welling up when remembering those no longer with us, from his father to bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici to the childhood friends he lost in Vietnam. But there were
moments of humour too, as the Boss sardonically recalled his recent arrest and Zoom trial for “an act so heinous that it has offended the entire fucking United States! You, my lawbreaking bridge-and- tunnel friend, have drunk
two shots of tequila!”
An audience that included E Street lieutenant Stevie Van Zandt were treated to three songs that didn’t feature in Springsteen On Broadway’s original 236-date run back in 2017/8. After Patti Scialfa joined for “Tougher Than The Rest”, the couple gleefully tackled “Fire” — the song originally intended for Elvis Presley that became
ROB DEMARTIN
JonLandau
D.
Em. — Oldpals'act: p Bruce withPatti Scialfa; (left) inrehearsals with manager
“.. "m T
|
| immigrant Amadou Diallo by
| until September 4 at The St
THIS MONTH'S REVELATIONS FROM THE WORLD OF UNCUT KarenBlack DavidBowie JasonSharp JuniHabel
/ с
ahitfor The Pointer Sisters. Springsteen then revived the harrowing but still sadly relevant *American Skin (41 Shots)", aboutthe fatal 1999 shooting ofunarmed Guinean
New York police.
Hethen finished the show with “Г See You In My Dreams" from last year’s Letter To You, rather than traditional closer “Born То . Run”. Perhaps he felt it was a bit .- too soon for escapist celebration; perhaps he was just itching to play one of his newest songs.
In which case, all bodes well for the much-anticipated announcement of a full
E Street Band tour in 2022. (D SAMRICHARDS
Springsteen ОпВгоаашаутипѕј |
James Theatre, New York
77 д a Р ж а -— p SEPTEMBER 2021 - UNCUT - 5 | м “>
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LIS 1
INSTANT KARMA
аш a
Guidedby voices: Blackin the 1970s
wasone of the finest film actors of the 19705. Now hasrevealedher lostparallelcareer as asinger-songwriter
HROUGHOUT an acclaimed
and award-winning film
career, Karen Black always seemed to find an opportunity to sing. “She sang in Nashville, she sang in Cisco Pike... even ifit'sjusta tiny bit like in Five Easy Pieces, she found a way to sing when she and Jack Nicholson are in a car,” says self-confessed movie nerd Cass McCombs. “She snuck itin all the time, and I picked upon that."
COURTESY OF THEKARENBLACKESTATE SUNSET BOULEVARD/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES;
With Jack Nicholson
in Five Easy Pieces, 1970
McCombs has just compiled Dreaming Of You: 1971-1976, a startlingly good album of songs Black recordedin the 197os with producers Elliot Mazer and Bones Howe that were never released. McCombs first tracked her down to collaborate on his 2009 album Catacombs, after which they had planned to record an album together. But when Black died in 2013, itseemed that dream was over. Then Black's husband, director Stephen Eckelberry, discovered several boxes oftapes dating back to the early-’7os. “She had expressed this interest in singing and her boyfriend of the time had aconnection with Elliot Mazer,” explains Eckelberry. “I found some press releases from 1972 and it says they were going to make an album, but Karen was pretty big as an actor so it never actually materialised. These demos
acktoBlack: | with Cass
arefrom that time in Nashville and
alater session with Bones Howe." Black's talent as a songwriter
was obscured but not entirely secret.
Shesang three original numbers
in Nashville, earning a Grammy
nomination, and recorded songs
for several other films, including
The Pyx and Born To Win. But it
was difficult at the time for actors,
let alone female ones, to be taken
seriously as artists. “No label was
going to front her the money to do
this properly, and she was meanwhile
getting offered $200,000 to do
something like Airport 1975,"
says Eckelberry.
CASSMcCOMBS
*You can count the [successful] women songwriters of that time on one hand," adds McCombs. "It's quite sad. I’m sure there were thousands of women writing songs but there weren’t many that got through.”
. |
Whatimpressed McCombs as hesetabouttransferring the tapes was the plethora and variety of exceptional original material, which often saw Black occupy the role ofa character, adjusting her voice and music accordingly. “It’s very hard to genre-ify this but she was an actor who worked with her voice and the music is diverse,” he says. “It’s not country or folk, though she touches on both of them - it’s about where the voiceis leading her."
CCOMBS and Eckelberry
plantorelease more from
the archive, but Dreaming Of Youis a great starting place. As well as 15 songs from the 1970s, the album includes two more recent songs she recorded with McCombs for their proposed album together, showing how her voice and talent developed. “Karen helped me through some dark times, but more than that she gave me a new perspective on how to think about things," says McCombs. “She was a challenging and dynamic thinker and she permanently altered the way | organise my thoughts. This is a chance to say thank you and give something back. We all lost Karen, but through this music and her other work, we can still communicate with her." (DPETERWATTS
Dreaming Of You: 1971-1976 by Karen Black is out July 16 on Mexican Summer
T
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Scary Monsters sleeve designer onhis extraordinary experience" with
HE artist Edward Bellis one of
aselect band of collaborators
who worked with Bowie twice: first on the iconic sleeve for Scary Monsters, then 10 years later producing the art for Tin Machine II. Now for the first time he’s assembled all his Bowie work and memorabilia for a retrospective and auction. “It was an extraordinary experience, the time I spent with him,” says Bell on the phone from his home in Shropshire. “But it wasn’t until he actually died that the penny dropped about how special he was, and that’s when I started to have another look atit all.”
Bellis reminiscing on a friendship with Bowie that spanned some 33 years, beginning in a Neal Street gallery, continuing through Venice and LA, and producing some of the most stunning images in pop’s richest iconography. “I was always relating to him as just another bloke. But he wasn’t just another bloke – he was David Bowie. Every so often one had to be reminded of it. But if one treated him like David Bowie,
then you’d never get anywhere near him, you’d just bea fan. It was a tightrope.”
Their first meeting, at Bell’s debut show in 1980, was not auspicious. “When I first saw him I really did think he was an American tourist.
I thought he was so badly dressed in his red trousers and yellow shirt, and on top of it allitwas quite insulting for him to be looking at my paintings through dark glasses! SoIwasa bit standoffish at first.
whatsoever. It was like a dance. IfIsaid smudge the makeup, he smudged the makeup, but he did it in just the right way. He gotit and he knew what I was angling for."
A peculiar friendship was born. "Every so often, out ofthe blue, he would just ring up. He'd say, ‘What’s happening? What are you painting?’ We got on quite easily, except he wasn’t very fond of being teased. He was telling me about a party he'd hosted in Mustique.
Butthen gradually Princess Margaret
as hespoke he was finn LEER A | had been invited saying lots of rather and got so drunk that interesting things he had to have her about the paintings, chucked out. I said, soIstarted to listen. ‘Oh dear - she sounds And it suddenly as bad as some of dawned on me these pop stars!’ And [who he was]. But he took that very because we'd already badly and he walked established a rapport, straight off. Then
I put that out of my I got the silent
mind and we just treatment for a carried on relating as two artists, while untilit was all forgotten." Isuppose." Bell’s show includes an
Bell was initially hired to “tart up” Brian Duffy’s photography, but soon had other ideas.
“There was Duffy taking all the pictures of Bowie in this ridiculous clown costume. I had no idea what the hell was going on. So when Duffy stopped, I just dismantled it... and luckily Bowie saw exactly what I was doing. And he went with it and added to it. There was no resistance
abundance of Bowie riches, including astunning alternative version of the Scary Monsters cover, plus several amusing polaroids of Tin Machine in togas. But some of the strongest images were produced after Bowie’s death: mixed-media collages depicting him as an ancient religious icon, and an eerie death mask. “It was only later [that his death| kind of hit me,” says Bell.
A valuable friend: diptychsketch for ScaryMonsters and (below) Tin
Machine toga party
“Гуе never replayed the memories, but when they did come out, they came out so strange and so fresh... I thought, ‘I’ve got to get this all down.” ® STEPHEN TROUSSE
Edward Bell's David Bowie Collectionis ondisplay at The Dory Gallery, Llangollen, from July 16 to August 1; the online auctionruns for the same period at fineart.hallsgb.com
EDWARDBELL
Never get old:Bellin frontofa portrait purchased by Bowie
-7)
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GWENDALLEFLEM; JONATHANDURAND;MARCELLA CYTRYNOWICZ; HAROLD CUNNINGHAM/GETTY IMAGESFORKASPERSKY
AQUICK ONE
Marking 50 yearssince the passing of their legendary singer Jim Morrison, we present the
to -on sale July 8.In-depth reviews of every album, remarkable contemporary
neve Ad.
um (ШЕП
ul KS М1 AME HOARY BAND
"ТЕН
encounters and fantasticnew interviews with band- members about their incrediblelegacy: We gotfive years, says Robby Krieger. We werelucky to get that..."
hascomposed apieceofgenerative music entitled "In A Garden’ for this year's Serpentine Pavilionin Hyde Park. "I wanted to think of the music as asortofsonicgarden -aconcentrated park withinthe real park," he says.It'llbeplayingall day every day until July 23...
Some goodnewson thefestivalfront:
ishostinga one-day eventinits usualhome of Totneson Aug 28 featuring
and | ; The is coming to London
on November 10-14 with
and
many more;meanwhile,
hascurateda seriesofintimate gigs for Coventry's City Of Culture celebrations -he'llplay the famous cathedralhimself on July 31...
8- UNCUT - SEPTEMBER 2021
INSTANT KARMA
Jason Sharp: bass saxand modular synths
Meet the new schoolof adventurous saxophonists
Stetson:
ferociously
pushing their craft to physicalextremes
VEN before the pandemic
made the act of beingin a
functioning band close to impossible, Jason Sharp had been thinking about going atit alone. A saxophonist from Montreal, Sharp had put out a couple of albums on the city’s post-rock hub, Constellation Records - the first recorded as a trio, the second as a duo. But his third album was to be something new.
“Thadin my mind a solo record where I was influencing, triggering or directly controlling all the voices within each composition at the same time,” he says. On The Turning Centre Of A Still World, he plunges his rippling sax into a rich soundworld of modular electronics guided by his own heartbeat, captured bya bluetooth heart monitor. “If I felta piece needed to speed up in tempo I had to conceive of it as being increasingly more physical,” says Sharp. One track, “Everything Is Waiting For You”, was recorded with Sharp jogging on the spot, raising the tempo to a sweat-inducing 140bpm. Technology is key to Sharp's modus
operandi, a tool to transform his instrument into something much bigger. He's just one of a wave of saxophonists now working at the intersection of classical composition, jazz and electronic music as a means of developing a singular voice. Take Joseph Shabason, a Toronto saxophonist whose latest album The Fellowship is an autobiographical journey touching on his upbringing
in an Islamic and Jewish dual-faith household, and told through the language of ambient and new age. Ortake Sam Gendel, a West Coast musician whoin the past couple of years has played with everyone from Vampire Weekend to Ry Cooder. Satin Doll, his 2020 album for Nonesuch, reinterpreted a host of jazz standards — the likes of Miles Davis’s “Freddie Freeloader” and Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" – іп a woozy, hip-hop-inflected style reminiscent of J Dilla or Flying Lotus; this year, he dropped the 52-song, three-and-a- half-hour Fresh Bread. “I like to frame my sound on the saxophone from
BENDIK GISKE
different sonic angles, so sometimes an effect gives me a new wall or light to bounce off or reflect," says Gendel. “Tlet my ear guide me. I don't think about goals or concepts - just the musicIam involved with at any given moment."
Colin Stetson has rocketed experimental sax right to the edge of the mainstream, having toured with the Arcade Fire and Bon Iver while also turning out a spree of ferociously visceral solo albums. Lately he’s
visceral
| SamGendel: hip-hop ud
graduated to film scores, bringing his churning tones to Richard Stanley's Color Out Of Space and Ari Aster's Hereditary while also providing a memorable cameo on Mogwai's “Pat Stains", from their chart-topping album, As The Love Continues.
In 2013, Stetson told Uncut ofthe physical demands of playing a bass sax: “It’s a clunky, slow and heavy piece of material... it has to be man- handled." An emphasis on the physicality ofthe sax also manifests inthe work of Bendik Giske. A Norwegian based in Berlin, Giske's astonishing new album Cracks draws on his queer identity and the sounds and community of Berlin's club scene. He doesn't use electronic effects — rather, he transforms himself into а machine. “I’ve been mesmerised by the step sequencer, and have asked myself howTd create if I were to think іп those lanes: my fingers were the sequencer, my breath and mouth the oscillator, and my heart the clock."
Cracks' shimmering repetitions are gorgeous to listen to, but sound tiring to play –іп a sense, perhaps, that is the point. As Giske puts it: “I find that exhaustion reveals something about us as honest beings. Herein lies true, unmasked beauty." (LOUISPATTISON
JasonSharps The Turning Centre Of A Still World is out on August 27 via Constellation; Bendik Giske's Cracks is out Aug 27 via Smalltown Supersound; Sam Gende(l's Fresh Breadis out now onLeaving
“Iwas freeto " reinvent myself’: city escapee JuniHabel
Meet Norway s new pastoral folk voice - backedup by her talented extended family
GREW up in the countryside and now I'm
backin the countryside,” laughs 27-year-
old Juni Habel, who's crocheting a summer hat for one of her sisters in the old schoolhouse where she lives, ina village 50 miles south of Oslo. "Im never going back to the city! You just go home to your apartment and there's no fun stuff to doin an apartment. Living here I can work outside and go outin the woods and do practical things. I really like chopping wood, for instance.”
Raised nearby in idyllic, kids’-movie circumstances on a farm with her six siblings —
“a big, modern family with a lot of different fathers, very different from everyone else around” - Habel’s gentle, bucolic debut album All Ears would seem to reflect that rural upbringing. Butit was actually conceived in the city. A few years ago, she relocated with her Danish husband to Copenhagen; knowing no-one there, she was forced to find “fun stuff” to doin her apartment alone, and music was the solution. She’d played when she was younger — her grandmother, who lives with her now, gave her a guitar when she was eight, as wellas arranging piano lessons — but upon reaching adulthood she stopped.
“Treally lost my confidence,” she admits. “I quit for seven years or so. When I moved it was like a bang - the songs just started popping out. I was free to reinvent myself because no-one was watching and I could go to open- mics. l'd really wanted to find a way to
PAULBERGEN/GETTY IMAGES
TMYOURFAN —
express myself artistically and had never managed before, so it was very liberating. I was very surprised and happy, and that's what a lot of the songs are about."
The first to persuade her she was onto something was “Surrendering”, which opens All Ears with an intimacy indicative of the record's distinctive tone. "Secret, secret little tune," she murmurs over an acoustic guitar, her voice blending Vashti Bunyan's prim sweetness with Josephine Foster's delicate vulnerability. “That was the fourth song I wrote,” she recalls shyly. “Га decided, ‘Now I'm going to write a proper song, with a cool melody and pretty chorus’, and Imanaged to! It was like a secret skillInever knew I had!"
It's not her only song to address her overdue urge for self-determination. On *Play", whose guitar lines ripple like Nick Drake strumming for Karen Dalton, she confronts her formerly submissive willingness to adopt unfulfilling roles — “I will never play that part again” — while, on “Demons” she concludes defiantly “the hiding will come to an end". Just as in childhood, Habel was surrounded by family: her husband Emil Petersen plays guitar on a number of songs and they're joined by her half-brother Mattis Finne-Habel on *My Love (Is A Crazy One)”, about the death of their half-sister. The record’s mixed by her uncle, Sverre Thorstensen, who’s worked with Nils Bech.
“It was avery scary experience to try to do this all by myself,” Habel confesses, "soit was good to have my family’s support on the project. Plus, of course, I had no money. I couldn't have paid anyone else to do it!” And with that, shereturns to chopping logs. © WYNDHAM WALLACE
All Ears isout now on Koke Plate
3 me E
INSTANT KARMA
UNCUT PLAYLIST _
M i iei ; vi Hey What ѕоврор
"Whenyouthink you've seen
p p malevolent murk of Double ı Negative emerges abrilliantly
| "eden kindof poprecord.
"Understand" EP avc
Two ambient Americana stalwarts contemplate the cosmos, evoking PopolVuh, Emeralds and The Durutti Column's “Otis”.
"Torn Again" EONEMUSIC
Super-producer constructs ashimmering soundbed for the poetic consolations of hislate, great countryman: "You gave me alily/Butnowit's afield.
| The Dharma Wheel
| SILVERCURRENT From Rolling Thunder to Howlin === Rain! Violinist Scarlet Rivera $3 lights up the latestrumbustious odd movie fromEthanMiller and pals.
La LUZ HARDLY ART Shana Clevelandreconvenes her spectral surf trio, with JazzlsDead's Adrian Younge helping to ratify their cinematic funk credentials.
Spencer Cullums Coin Collection FULLTIMEHOBBY
Englishmanin Nashville steps out from behindhispedalsteeltofrontanalbum of delightful, Canterbury-soundbagatelles.
"Time(Youandl) (Put A Smile On DJ's Face Mix) DEAD OCEANS/NIGHT TIME STORIES Terrific cosmic disco finessing of Khruangbin sinfectious 2020 single c/o FelixDickinson, from the new Mordechai Remixes LP.
Nanocluster Vol 1 swm-
Intriguing synth-pop symposium, with Wire's Colin Newman and Minimal Compact'sMalkaSpigelspitballing ideas with Tarwater, Laetitia Sadier and Ulrich Schnauss.
ш Former Galaxie 500 couple reconnect with Japanese guitarist Michio Kurihara for serenesongsinspiredby childhood summers andthe shipping forecast.
A Southern Gothic canvassack Imgonnaletthat dirt do its work - Nashville-basedsinger delivers her swaggeringstatement of intent; Jason Isbell, Margo Price and MattBerninger areonboard.
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT .9
MICKIEWINTERS;RICH GILLIGAN; ANNA WEBBER
Nathan | Р |
Salsburg
1
The Globe
Jay Farrar'slatest album, Electro Melodier, is his strongest in a while, and *The Globe" is a perfect place to start this month: a hymn to faith in humanity over a raging rocker with nods to The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".
2
SoLong Tomorrow
This Chicago-born artist made his solo recording debut on Uncut's Wilcovered CD a couple of years back, and now here comes his first LP, Due North. With help from James Elkington and Spencer Tweedy, Kazar's created a record that's at once classic and modern. Read more on page 34.
3
Psalm 47
The master fingerstyle guitarist and Alan Lomax archivist turns singer- songwriter here – well, kind of - with this selection of Jewish psalms, brought wonderfully to life with assistance from Joan Shelley, Will Oldham and more.
4
Promises
Fronted by Jess Viscius, this Chicago indie quintet match deep lyrics on love, loss and grief with spectral Velvets chuggers and sprightlier faresuch asthis track, as propulsive asitis wracked.
5
AllMy Cryin’
Year Of The Spider is the Clams’ sixth album and probably their best, and with Dan Auerbach in the producer's chair, their mix of 60s and ’70s grooves is given an even
10 -UNCUT - SEPTEMBER 2021
15 tracks of themonthsbestnew mu
sic
Fa iy
grittier and more infectious hue. It’s reviewed at length on page 20.
6
Sweet Little Sparrow
Though she no longer performs under the name Oh Susanna, the Vancouver songwriter has resisted any urge to similarly reinvent her music here; all the better, as this bittersweet ballad, drifting with Mellotron and canyon-wide slide guitar, shows.
7
IWasn't Good AtPicking Friends
Australia's legendary swamp- punks are back with their first album in decades, and they're still as snotty, noisy and irreverent as ever, Kim Salmon spitting out bratty linesasthe backing vocals warn of “the Ides Of March".
8
SoSimpatico
A seven-minute slice of future-soul, this is afine introduction to the latest album by Conor O’Brien, Fever Dreams. While you spin this stew of The Flaming Lips, Elliott Smith and Curtis Mayfield, check
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outthe songwriter discussing the record on page 35.
9 At TheEdge Of The World
Asif Tyler hasn't been productive enough of late, he’s teamed up with Portland's experimental folk guitarist Anderson for this duo record. “At The Edge Of The World" shows how the mix of their styles creates a third identity, vividly evocative of the Old West with
its swooping prairie fiddles and sun-baked picking.
10
Empty Hands
Led by saxophonist Pete Cunningham, this Bristol collective combine spiritual jazz, cosmic electronics and sultry balladry to create mood pieces that feel like Portishead at their most soulful. Here's a highlight of their new Visions Of Light LP.
11 The Way ThatIDo
Private Spaceis the most seductive and soulful record yet from Jones, singing drummer Aaron Frazer and the Indications. Infused
with touches of disco, “The Way ThatI Do" isimpeccably produced,
exquisitely sung and hard to ignore.
12
Big Appetite (Edit)
Angus Andrew has made the finest Liars record in a decade or so with The Apple Drop, a dark, heavy tapestry of guitars and electronics inspired by microdosing mushrooms and grappling with
Py AAD. a, | Ai, T MATHAN ИУ, AGERS MARISA ANDES"
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anxiety. Check out the slow grind of “Big Appetite” while you read our review and Q&A with Andrew on page 32.
13
No Time
Produced by William “Spook” Loveday - aka Billy Childish, the dad of frontman Huddie Hamper - this Kent garage-punk three-piece make a stylish troglodytic racket on their new LP, From Human Like Forms. Thefruit doesn't fall far from the tree, but that’s no issue when it feels this fresh.
14
All Clear
Hailing from the Derbyshire Dales, Haiku Salut have been making hushed, experimental cross- genreinstrumental music for a decade now. Thisis the closer of their new album, The Hill, The Light, The Ghost, ever ascending and suitably soothing.
15
IWon'tStay For Long
We end with Croz's favourite track from his new album, For Free, a tender rumination written and produced by his son James Raymond. “I don't knowif I'm dying or about to be born/But I'd like to be with you today", hesings over piano and ghostly horns. ©
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endoftheroadfestival.com
Buffalo guys:
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same moment in
12 -UNCUT.»SEPTEMBER2021 7
él ook
out for the
birds!®
ЕТЕК songs about bees,
butterflies, spiders and
swans, Mercury Rev’s Sean
“Grasshopper” Mackowiak
is seeking his next animal muse. “I’m looking out my door and there’s red cardinals flying by, blue jays... there’s afamily of squirrels livingina treein my backyard. The woods start at the end of my street, so we’ve had bears knock down the fence and go through our garbage.”
“There’s a lot of birds coming up,” says bandmate Jonathan Donahue, who lives even further out into the wilderness of the Catskill Mountains. “T11 leave it at that: look out for the birds!”
Six years since The Light In You, anew full-blown Mercury Rev album is almost ready. There’s even the possibility that it might be a double. “I’ve been writing alot since the pandemic,” says Donahue, “but I really can’t say how it's different. I feel the best thing I can do as I get older and deeper into this is to detach myself from a feeling that the album has to do something, as if it’s some form of weaponry. Having said that, there'll be lyricism on this new album that maybe people will be surprised by, and hopefully feel deeply connected to."
For now, the pair are looking backat 30 years of musical magic realism in their role as “walkers in- between worlds", as Grasshopper puts it. Join as they reveal the secrets oftheir mercurial revolutions...
From their base in the cosmic Catskills, Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper
recall rolling with Man Vega, deafening Bob Dylan and a ruckus at the Royal Albert Hall
Interview by SAM RICHARDS
GRASSHOPPER: We met in Buffalo at this great club called The Continental when we were, like, 18 years old. We both loved the same stuff: The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, The Kinks, The Psychedelic Furs. We just started playing together. JONATHAN: Grassy and I, we have this unspoken connection. And the origin of that must have come from Something much deeper, it’s not simply two guys who found the same record at тт the same moment in the same town.
Watching fromthe wings:Dylan
What do youremember about supporting Bob Dylan at your second ever show at Yale University in 1991? ‚ Rick Johnston, Exeter | # There wasalwaysa great distance kept between everybody else and Bob, and that was made very clear to us when we showed up. Probably with good reason. GS: Backstage there were these lines made with duct tape and his road manager said,
l'veheardsome pretty bizarre origin stories, buthow did you tworeally meet and decide tomake music together? Mark Everingham, Westbury, Wilts
*You can't cross over this line, that's Bob space!" We had the same booking agent and Bob Dylan wanted younger bands to open up shows. I think he got more than he bargained for! Iremember that our set was pretty shambolic and crazy.
J:Our songs all sort of bled into one another. There was never really a way
to gauge the reaction, soit was gonna come as this giant mystery at the end of 40 minutes. From what I could discern, half of itwas incredible booing and the other half seemed to be cheering. It was awesome. G:While we were playing, I looked over in the wings and I saw this figure standing there. It was like, ‘Wow, thisis pretty amazing. Bob Dylan's checking it out.’
DidDavidBaker really try to gouge your eye out with a spoon? s that why you've never tried to reunite the originalMercury Revlineup?
Jason Kirklees, via email
G:That story has been changed around
a bunch of times. It was just this minor thing on a plane that happened - nobody had to have their eye popped back in at the hospital or anything, and we laughed about it later. There were other times when we really did come to blows, especially when we played the Royal Albert Hall.
We had a fight backstage there that was pretty crazy. David's a great guy – I saw him last year in Chicago. But he had his opinions and we had different opinions, and sometimes it came to fisticuffs! That's why we separated after Boces, because we were going in different directions.
J:It was six very energetic particles thrown into a very small nuclear reactor. What would we have expected? Nothing less than combustion, a nuclear fission. As for [the idea of | reuniting the original lineup, it's been loosely passed around. G:It'd be fun. Everybody's into it. Dave Fridmann doesn'tlike to leave Fredonia, so he'd be the one to coax out. »
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT : 13
MICHAEL BLOOM, MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
GIEKNAEPS/GETTY IMAGES, EBET ROBERTS/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES, ANDREW BENGE/REDFERNS
uam sí = ; a p^ ат: ZR. +
The “Holes” gang's
here: the Deserter's
Songslineup, 1999
J: The first performance we ever did outside of Buffalo was at a very small bar in Fredonia. So that might be one of the few contractual stipulations that all six would agree to. That and six therapists paid for by the promoter!
Did youever hear what Bobbie Gentry thought about The Delta Sweete Revisited? Mel, Sutton, Norfolk
J: No, and on purpose we never wanted
to approach her aboutit. She's worked so hard for her reclusivity, so who are we to try to prise someone out ofthat? We didn't do it for a response from Bobbie; we did itas a celebration.
G: It was a favourite record of ours since we were kids, so we wanted to do it again in our own way. It's weird when somebody walks into the woods like Salinger and you don't hear from them again, after they've created this thing that really connects with you. On the one hand, we alllovea great mystery. On the other hand, you wanna know what makes them tick and whattheir perspective is now. But we may never know.
Whereisthe Tettix Wave Accumulator these days and will there be more showslike the onein London where you played along to Le Ballon Rouge? Matt Walsh, uia email G:The Tettix Wave Accumulator is kind of dismantled. It was a bunch of patched oscillators connected to instruments you could play through it to make crazy sounds. On Boces, I was plugging my guitar in through the Tettix Wave Accumulator
GRASSHOPPER
14 - UNCUT ° SEPTEMBER 2021
What wasitlike working with
Alan Vegaon"Dead Man"?
Pete Havering, Manchester
J:It was everything I thought it would
be and more. Whatever it is that you
can’t buy, Alan Vega had it.
G: He's almost like a shaman - he'd go into a weird trance and start delivering this crazy spoken-word stuff as we were playing along. Afterwards he kept in touch andinvited us down to his loft where he'd make all these neon crosses and stuff. He said, “You guys have gotta stop making music and get into the art world!” We found out years later that he was lying about his age; he was actually as old as my dad, but he had such a youthful presence that it was infectious.
J: It’s actually tough to talk about because I really did feel so close to him. I used to call him Uncle AI, I still havea letter of
his framed on my wall. To this day,
"Dead Man" is probably in my top
three Mercury Rev songs.
You vehadclose ties with The Flaming Lips down the years - would youever consider merging bands and making an album together? Phil Metzler, Raleigh, North Carolina G: Anything is possible. Before the pandemic, we played the Levitation festivalin Austin together and that was really cool. Jonathan went up and played with them on a few songs. There wastalk of us doing some shows | together again. _ Flaming Rev? Idon'tthink it | necessarily works that businesslike. - Myconnection with The Flaming Lips is deeper than, ‘Hey, let’s all get together and have a company picnic’. Merging two bands would be counterintuitive to the way we work. If we got together it wouldn’t be bringing baggage from both bands, it would just be long-time friends seeing what would happen. The idea isn't to cherrypick from two gardens and throw it into a basket, the ideaisthat something new would come up from the soil.
ғ Car washhairies: Mercury Rev with original singer David Baker (right), 1990
А ! м 9 PEV Tie X 2 CUL and people were like,
‘What the hell is that?’ I tried to make the guitar sound like something else. But it's almost obsolete because now there's all these computer programs. J: We've always enjoyed doing film work, improvising live soundtracks. The genesis of Yerself Is Steam was playing along to nature films, the good feeling of the penguin making its way across the ice floes.
G: We’ve done it a few times since that London show - we did Vampyr atthe San Francisco film festival when Simon Raymonde played with us - so we'd love to do itagain.
How did youget to make “The Private Psychedelic Reel" with The ChemicalBrothers?
luor Moreno, Valencia
J:It was a very dark time for me. I give The Chemical Brothers a great deal of credit for not only saving Mercury Rev butfor saving me. It's like that song, "Last Night A DJ Saved My Life" - they called out ofthe blue and said, “Hey, we're fans of you guys and would you be interested in doing something?" at a time when it felt like we had fallen off the face of the Earth: late '95, early '96 maybe. It gave me that electricity to know there's someone out there. It might only be two
What's your favourite song you ve written? Gerry McDonnell via email G: “The Hudson Line" is probably the favourite one I wrote. It was around the timeI moved out of New York, soit was about me changing some of my bad ways! And Garth Hudson played on it, which
was awesome.
i. J: Holes”. It’s more profound than the song itself or what it did for us commercially. For me, *Holes" is not something I wrote - it's someone ПУ Imet, this friend I made, and he or EN sheis always there with me. When F [really get down or find myself lost, there's this friend called “Holes”. (5
crazy guys from Britain but they're ! ADJsavedhis Mercury Revu's Snowflake listening, and that was what began my f [reitera į Midnight: Deluxe Edition own writing for Deserter’s Songs. | Donahue isout now on Cherry Red
JOSEPHINE FOSTER
FIRE RECORDS LP / CD “The album follows North American folk linage from Jean Ritchie and Hedy West through to the present, via the chugging, churning electronic (folk) rock of The Velvet Underground, all the time infused with a joyous communal warmth.” Mojo “Magnificent” **** AllMusic
мыманта „ ақты
алыныз
SUSANNA & DAVID WALLUMRØD
SUSANNASONATA LP / CD Susanna in duo with David Wallumrød on a new album featuring covers of The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits.
GOAT
ROCKET RECORDINGS LP + 7” / CD A globetrotting acid trip of an album, collecting rarities spanning GOAT’s career: standalone singles, B-sides and two enormous brand new tracks!
TROPICAL FUCK STOR
JOYFUL NOISE RECORDS LP / CD The third album from the avant-punk quad aptly titled Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cul- tural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective
шт OET ARADY
LINGUA IGNOTA
SARGENT HOUSE LP / CD Kristin Hayter, the classically trained multi- instrumentalist, performance artist, and vocalist returns with SINNER GET READY, the follow up 2019's critically acclaimed break out CALIGULA.
eB wg
NATHAN SALSBURG
NO QUARTER LP / CD New musical arrangements of Hebrew psalms by acclaimed guitarist Nathan Salsburg. Sung and played by Salsburg with support from Noa Babayof, Will Oldham,
DEAFHEAVEN
SARGENT HOUSE LP / CD Deafheaven return with their new album Infinite Granite. Produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Wolf Alice), Infinite Granite finds the band embarking on a new chapter of defiant beauty.
HOUSE OF LULL . HOLE OF WHEN |
ALEXIS MARSHALL
SARGENT HOUSE LP / CD House of Lull . House of When is the solo debut from Poet, artist, and Daughters vocalist Alexis Marshall, with songs that live in the nebulous territory where abrasive
state of contemporary panic. Joan Shelley, Nick Macri, Spencer Tweedy & James
rock fuses with high-art aspirations Elkington.
PWR XM EL MICHELS AFFAIR MEETS LIAM BAILEY
="
LANGAN, FROST & WANE
GOLDSTAR RECORDINGS LP / CD New trio Langan, Frost & Wane cross folk with flower power on their upcoming new album.
TANGENTS
TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD 2LP / CD The enigmatic Australian ensemble returns with a breathtaking new double album of elated jazz, Sdeconstructed techno, melancholy piano, throbbing ambience, and a 100-carriage coal train.
NEOLITHIC RECORDINGS LP / CD Paradise reunites band leader Alex Neilson with his ex-Trembling ‘Belle’ Lavinia Blackwall to produce an album that navigates the kosmische rock of Richard Youngs, the wyrd-folk of Alasdair Roberts and the psychedelic majesty of the Bells.
BIG CROWN RECORDS LP / CD Ekundayo Inversions is El Michels Affair reimagining Liam Bailey’s Ekundayo album featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry and Black Thought of The Roots.
THIRST НЕР
BUTS MEGA BOG ALBUM KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD WHITE FLOWERS
MERGE RECORDS LP / CD
“Horniness on an eternal loop."
PARADISE OF BACHELORS LP / CD Mega Bog returns with fantastical off-world transmission Life, and Another, the most sophisticated, exploratory, & accessible statement yet from surrealist songwriter & avant-pop prospector Erin Birgy. Featuring co-producer James Krivchenia (Big Thief).
AN AMALGAMATION OF RECORD SHOPS AND
DUBLIN - SPINDIZZY / KILKENNY - ROLLER COASTER RECORDS BANGOR - CHOONS/SABLE STARR RECORDS
ABERYSTWYTH - ANDY'S RECORDS / BANGOR - BENDING SOUND / CAMARTHENSHIRE - TANGLED PARROT / CARDIFF - SPILLERS / NEWPORT - DIVERSE / SWANSEA - DERRICKS / SWANSEA - TANGLED PARROT BARROW-IN-FURNESS – TNT RECORDS / LIVERPOOL - 81 RENSHAW LTD / LIVERPOOL - PROBE / MANCHESTER - PICCADILLY RECORDS / PRESTON - ACTION RECORDS BINGLEY - FIVE RISE RECORDS / HARROGATE - P & C MUSIC/ HEADINGLEY - VINYL WHISTLE/ HUDDERSFIELD - VINYL TAP/ LEEDS - CRASH/ LEEDS - JUMBO RECORDS / NEWCASTLE - JG WINDOWS / NEWCASTLE - BEATDOWN / NEWCASTLE - BEYOND VINYL/ NEWCASTLE - REFLEX/ SCARBOROUGH - RECORD REVIVALS / SHEFFIELD - BEAR TREE/ SHEFFIELD - RECORD COLLECTOR / SHEFFIELD - SPINNING DISCS / STOCKTON ON TEES - SOUND IT OUT / WAKEFIELD - МАН WAH RECORDS BEDFORD - SLIDE RECORDS / CAMBRIDGE - LOST IN VINYL/ CAMBRIDGE - RELEVANT / COVENTRY - JUST DROPPED IN / DERBY - REVEAL RECORDS / LEAMINGTON SPA - HEAD/ LEAMINGTON SPA - SEISMIC RECORDS / LEIGHTON BUZZARD - BLACK CIRCLE RECORDS / LETCHWORTH - DAVID'S MUSIC / LOUTH - OFF THE BEATEN TRACK / NOTTINGHAM - ROUGH TRADE/ OXFORD - TRUCK STORE/ STOKE ON TRENT - MUSIC MANIA/ STOKE ON TRENT - STRAND RECORDS / WITNEY - RAPTURE BEXHILL ON SEA - MUSIC'S NOT DEAD / BLANDFORD FORUM - REVOLUTION ROCKS / BOURNEMOUTH - AVID RECORDS / BOURNEMOUTH - VINILO / BRIGHTON - RESIDENT / BURY ST.EDMUNDS - VINYL HUNTER / GODALMING - RECORD CORNER/ HASTINGS - CLOTH AND WAX / LEIGH-ON-SEA - FIVES / LONDON - BANQUET GRAVITY / LONDON - CASBAH / LONDON - FLASHBACK / LONDON - ROUGH TRADE EAST / LONDON - ROUGH TRADE TALBOT RD/ LONDON - SISTER RAY / LUTON - VINYL REVELATIONS / NORWICH - VENUS VINYL / ROMSEY - HUNDRED / SOUTHSEA - PIE & VINYL
/ SOUTHEND ON SEA - SOUTH RECORDS / ST ALBANS - EMPIRE RECORDS / WATFORD - LP CAFE / WIMBORNE - SQUARE RECORDS / WHITSTABLE - GATEFIELD SOUNDS / WINCHESTER - ELEPHANT RECORDS FROME - RAVES FROM THE GRAVE / MARLBOROUGH - SOUND KNOWLEDGE / NEWTON ABBOT - PHOENIX/TOTNES - DRIFT
TOUGH LOVE LP / CD Day By Day is the dark-hued dreampop debut from Preston duo, White Flowers, recorded in an abandoned textile mill and produced with Doves’ Gez Williams.
FUZZ CLUB RECORDS 3LP BOX SET 1 of 9 King Gizzard bootleg albums from Fuzz Club, this discography-spanning, triple LP box-set captures a 2019 show at Alexandra Palace. Exclusive remaster by Brett Orrison (Jack White, The Black Angels).
LABELS DEDICATED T0
DUNDEE - ASSAI / EDINBURGH - ASSAI / GLASGOW - LOVE MUSIC / GLASGOW - MONORAIL /
BRINGING YOU NEW MUSIC
BRISTOL - RADIO ON / BRISTOL - ROUGH TRADE / CHELTENHAM - BADLANDS / FALMOUTH - JAM / BLEEP.COM/ BOOMKAT.COM / JUNORECORDS / MARBLE VINYL RECORDS / NORMANRECORDS.COM / PEBBLERECORDS.CO.UK / RECORDSTORE.CO.UK
17 HEATHMAN'S ROAD, LONDON SW6 4TJ - CARGORECORDS.CO.UK - INFO@CARGORECORDS.CO.UK
"Imnotinthebestplaceinmymind/Have youever beenthere?"
NAMEN
STEVEGUNN
Other You
MATADOR
A beguiling and mercurial folk-rock gem. By Stephen Deusner
TEVEGUNN likes to painta beautiful picture, then scribble all over it. “Fulton”, the second song on his new album Other
You, opens with stray piano
notes and organ chords twined around a striding guitar strum, as Gunn muses on finding calm and stillness. “The night felt so quiet, listening to the silence," he sings, then the electric guitar rampages into the song, thick and staticky and tangled, intruding on Gunn's contemplation and lingering on the fringes ofthe song like a gremlin in the works. The solo doesn't quite fit the mood orthe sound ofthe song, but that's the whole point: there can be a peculiar beauty in such stark contrasts between sounds, in the interruptions of our everyday reveries.
reinforces the song's off-kilter optimism. Theresultis a record that is all the more beguiling for sounding so fidgety and mercurial. Gunn introduces a new guitar tone on every song, and the other instruments swimin and out of the mix, surfacing briefly then submerging again, lending the songs a gentle, swirling psychedelia. The true constant is his voice, which he pushes to the forefront of these songs, and he sounds more engaged and more vulnerable than ever. Other Youis not only his best albumin some years, but also his most human. Gunnis an odd sort of guitar hero, one who definitely has the chops to shred and wail with the bestofthem but who seems unconcerned with showboating or self-regarding displays of virtuosity. No bowing his Flying V with a Stradivarius for him. Other Youisfull of similar moments oflovelyfriction | He's moreinterested in tone and texture, how the and disruption. His solo in “On The Way" sounds sound ofaninstrument might comment on the song heraldic, majesticin a prog- | he’s singing, how it might rock sort of way, upending the n қ MEM fitinto an arrangement and song’s understated sense of | Я bounce off the other elements. anticipation. “The Painter” If that occasionally leads to a makes space for a dust-up brainy kind of folk music full between a Spanish guitar and of odd tunings and deadpan what sounds likea drunken vocals, italso means that his mandolin making trouble at playing always serves the the bar. A strange two-note song, not vice versa. theme gusts through “Good That approach, along with Wind”, played on some his keen curiosity about an unidentifiable instrument or array of styles and traditions, possibly by some otherworldly has made him asensitive and entity. It could have been prolific sideman, so much unsettling, but instead it so that his collaborations №
16-UNCUT •· SEPTEMBER 2021
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 17
outnumber his solo albums. A teenage hip-hop fan growing up in Philadelphia, he toured with his first hardcore punk band before he was old enough to drive the van, then became fascinated with Indian classical music, avant-garde composers, psych rockers, folkies from every continent. Even while recording excellent albums under his own name
— including 2013's Way Out Weather, а high point - he frequently teamed ир with his contemporaries and heroes to create a mirror catalogue that stretches from the Southern folk strut of Hiss Golden Messenger to the hallucinogenic Appalachian folk of The Black Twig Pickers, from the gritty folk of Michael Chapman to the experimental noise of drummer John Truscinski.
Even asa solo artist, the sideman remains. Gunn nestles himself deep into his songs, merely one playerin a large band. His brightest and most vivid record, Other You nearly sounded like something completely different. Around the time he released 2019's relatively monochromatic The Unseen In Between, he reconnected with his friend Justin Tripp, who played on several of his early records, and they exchanged ideas and traded playlists for months. Together, they gradually unspooled Gunn’s stray melodies and lyrics into finished songs, but their first sessions in early 2020 were cancelled for obvious reasons. That lull gave Gunn the opportunity to break those songs back down and build them
up in new directions, and this version of Other Yousounds all the more colourful, distinctive and affecting. “New mutations, old salvations,” he sings on “Circuit Rider”, “ease a troubled mind”.
When he finally recorded the album in Los Angeles with Tripp and producer Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, many others), he took with him asmall but skillful backing band, including drummer Ryan Sawyer (TV On The Radio, Stars Like Fleas). They’re at their best on standout “Protection”, which opens with Gunn playing a few stray notes like he’s picking them up off the floor. The rhythm section comes with a jittery kosmische rhythm that’s part dub, part coffeehouse jazzbo ensemble, and Tripp’s Morse-code bassline anchors the song even as the other instruments threaten to peel away from it.
The title track in particular sounds slightly unsettled, with glimpses of piano and electric guitar, all held together by Tripp’s fidgety bassline and Sawyer’s insistent click of drumstick against snare rim. It culminates in an extended outro full of guitars spiralling forwards and backwards, building toward a climax even as they casually unravel the song. When he pleads for protection and “cool, clear direction”, it seems Gunn is posing those questions to his fellow musicians. “Can you play it over and over?” he asks them. “Such lovely noise in the sky.”
Even when his lyrics seem impenetrable on the page, his performances pull out
the meanings in the words and lend them gravity. Gunn’s vocal range, both octaval and expressive, has traditionally been limited, yet he’s always made the most of it. Here he finds new dimensions, rethinking his phrasing, tone and cadence. Gunn harmonises with himself through the album - a new trick that bringsout some ofthe natural grain and colour in his voice. His voice sounds both forceful but also casual on *Morning River", where he's joined on the choruses by Bridget St John.
Music - whether made by him or made by others - provides both shield and compass, a salve against confusion and isolation. When he digs for "precious metal memories" on the title track and traces the "curvature of rock", he's not shovelling soil butrifling through his record collection, chasing afeeling into a favourite song. By album's end he's directing his questions outward, seeking connection through his own music. “I’m not in the best place in my mind," he confesses on “Ever Feel That Way”. “Have you ever been there?" As the song packs itself up and puts itself away, that question becomes a poignant request for empathy, perhaps with that other you he's been singing about.
“Reflection”, the album’s standout, opens like no other Steve Gunn song: with a keyboard. The simple chords vaguely recall the Fender Rhodes on Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved A Man (The Way ThatI Love You)", but the song itself is more Todd Rundgren. It's delicate, with air around the notes and vocals, at least until the band enters with a roll of Sawyer’s snare. He might be singing aboutthe experience of listening to music, how һе can get lostin an album, lose track of the hours, and the song becomes something like a valentine to his musical heroes. *Plays in the big orchestra, follows along the rhythm," hesings. *They come extend the days." And of course the song is interrupted by a guitar solo, this time a huge, mushrooming sound that is worn and scuffed, shrill but oddly beautiful, out of place but a perfect fit.
SLEEVE NOTES
1 Other You 2Fulton 3MorningRiver 4GoodWind
5 Circuit Rider 6On The Way
7 Protection
8 The Painter 9Reflection
10 Sugar Kiss
11 Ever Feel That Way
È- Producedby: RobSchnapf, Justin Tripp Recordedat: MantSounds,Los Angeles Personnel:Steve Gunn (vocals, guitar), Justin Tripp (bass, piano, synth, drum machine, samples), RobSchnapf (guitar, organ, synth), Ryan Sawyer (drums, marimba), Jerry Borgé (piano), Mary Lattimore (harp), Ben
Boye (piano), MattSchuessler (bass), Jeff Parker (guitar), Bill McKay (guitar), BridgetSt John (vocals), Julianna Barwick (vocals), BenBertrand (baritone saxophone), Jon Leland (drums)
BRIDGET ST JOHN Songs For The Gentle Man DANDELION, 1971
"Гуе always been a fan, especially of this record, and now she's my friend. We got to know each other through Michael Chapman, whoissomeone | played alot of shows with. She's sucha gentle, forceful, amazing woman, and she can still sing and play so well. was happy she was able to sing on this record."
18-UNCUT - SEPTEMBER 2021
ON THE WAY |
Steve Gunn on the albums that inspired Other You Í
ROBERT PENGUIN т MARY WYATT CAFE MARGARET RockBottom ORCHESTRA In 5,5 O'HARA VIRGIN, 1974 Music From The jJ | 14: Miss America ^ ° 'Hesmadealotof Penguin Café VIRGIN, 1988 A 5.34 - great records, but OBSCURE, 1976 “There's asongon
thisis my favourite. It was the first recordhe wrote after his accident, andhe's coming to terms with it and transcending his pain. It changed the way he made music. He's relying more on piano, and there's a gentleness anda playfulness. | was trying to channel him on Reflection"
Justin Tripp andl talked about this group alot. They came out onBrian Enoslabel. You wouldn't hear it in the music per se, but the way they mixed folk tradition with modern andclassicalinstrumentation was important to me.llike that these are almost Irish reels played on classic instruments."
Des When YouKnow Why Youre Happy, thatllove.l thought about it alot making Other You. She has this amazing presence and this almost free-associative way of singing. She cultivates this odd energy, experimentation and language play.She'slivingin the song, and youreright there with her."
Q&A
Steve Gunn: “| was able to break out of certain patterns and cycles
There's abrightnessin the
sound of this record, a colour
to match the album cover. Wasthat something you planned, or was it something thesongs demanded?
The whole idea for the album started with me really wanting to get back to who I was as an individual. As clichéd as that sounds — I'm sure everybody who makes an album says that – I was trying to reconnect with the openness of my music on previous albums. A big part ofdoing that was connecting with my friend Justin Tripp, who ended up co-producing the record. He's known me since my early | Philly days, and we worked — - together years ago. We made Way Out Weather, and that
[ге eer
album has always been sortof 78 ee
areference point for me.
Whatmakes that particular album stand out to you?
Iremember we didn't know what we were doing with Way Out Weather. Ihadn't made many records yet, so I was just trusting my instincts at the time. So there’s an openness to the music, a sense that
we weren't confined. The albums
I made after that one were done in better studios and had more advanced musicianship, butI wanted this album to have a similar openness to it. Justin really helped me cultivate that. I was
sending him ideas for songs, and he
was being honest with me, telling me whatto try and what to cut out. We talked about melody alot, and we talked about my vocals. I tend to fall into a comfort zone with my range and my abilities, but working with him freed
me up a bit more. We built the songs up gradually, but we had to cancel those recording sessions.
Why?
The pandemic hit. The record was supposed to be made during that time, early 2020. But it made me slow down and take a step back and realise the songs weren't finished. Irethought everything and took more time. I feel like my process really changed because of all the time I had during lockdown.
Gunninthe studio: "абштпес
myself out”
Didit help tobe off the road for a while? Yes. It was a really important break. I'd been on the road for so long. I'd been all over the world and burned myself out. So it was nice playing every day and sitting up on my roof, reading a lot and chilling out. It puta lot ofthings in perspective. I wouldn’t say I had been going down the wrong
“Iwas trying to let go of the confines of who Iwas and jettison some
baggage” STEVEGUNN
NEW ALBUMS O
road, but it made me stop and get more of anaerial view of my creative life.
How did that experience change your music?
Istarted playing piano more and thinking about constructing songs in a more direct way, rather than coming into thestudio with a songin an open tuning and hoping all these awesome musicians could figure out what the hell was going on. I simplified things. I was making decisions for the sake of the song rather than for the sake of guitar wizardry. It’s funny, I’ve been playing these songs a lot lately and getting ready for gigs, and holy shit, they’re really simple. They’re easy as hell to play, and they’re all mostly
in standard tuning. Sometimes it’s a balancing act trying to actually play the stuff I’ve come up with, especially when
I can’t remember how I came up with it. But this feels totally different, in a really good way.
How did you end up working with RobSchnapf?
IthinkImet Rob through Kurt Vile.
He came out to see me play a few years ago in Los Angeles, and we started writing to each other. I really liked his approach and his aesthetic, and whenI wentto visit his studio a few years back, we just clicked. It seemed like a good environment where I could figure this album out. It's nota huge room or super fancy, butit's very comfortable. And his knowledge of gear is incredible. I had so many awesome people playing on this record, but most of their stuff was done remotely. It really was just afew of usin the studio making this record, and we felt like we could try whatever the hell we wanted.
How did that affect your vocals? Itsoundslike youre doing different things with your voice onthisrecord.
Rob was a good coach for my vocals. He helped me find a different register. I did all the backing vocals for the record, as well alot of harmony singing — all stuff I knew I could do but never really did before. Plus, I wrote some ofthe songs on piano, because you can fall into the same patterns if you're only writing on guitar. Rob was helping me break out of that. “Reflection” was important in that regard. It started as a really simple demo, just me singing and playing piano. I was thinking about Robert Wyatt and trying to channel him a bit. It was like, I'm just going to try this. And it worked. I was trying to let go of the confines of who I was and jettison some personal baggage. I’m not saying this album
is some sort of rebirth of myself. That would be ridiculous. But I do feel like I was able to break out of certain patterns and cycles that I was stuck in. I feel like I cracked some things open.
INTERVIEW: STEPHENDEUSNER
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT ° 19
Pretty good м Year (l-r): Nate | | Mahan, Cody = т Blanchard, WA HET HU " " ShannonShaw, | oT | WillSprott fy
SHANNON AND THE CLAMS
Year Of The Spider
EASY EYESOUND
8/10
HANNON AND THECLAMS are part of a decades-long tradition of musicians who have channelled bygone sounds and imagery for new audiences. The best of these acts don’t engage in rote resuscitation or simple tributes. Instead, they bring a rough-hewn edge, a wild experimental spirit or — crucially – both of those things to the act of revivalism. Amy Winehouse, The White Stripes and The Black Keys may be the most visible examples, but bands like Shannon & The Clams, and The Detroit Cobras before them, offer an equally rich and punchy take on tradition — with gale-force women at the helm, no less. They deftly stitch
20-UNCUT -SEPTEMBER2021
р
together decades and genres with пагу a visible seam. They're specialists, but they are also omnivorous, updating tried and true templates with a thoroughly modern, anything-goes attitude.
But along the way, such groups, particularly those with a '60s focus, have
been affixed with a particular designation:
retro. In a word, it relays an abiding sense of nostalgia, and a reverence for tradition. Butit also discounts the singular pizazz, and the distinctive innovation, involved in updating older sounds for modern audiences. Retro isn't bad, per se, and neither is throwback. But each suggests an artist lostin the past, one ambivalent about the world around them. And with Year Of The Spider, Shannon And
decidedly toward the future.
Bassist and vocalist Shannon Shaw and guitarist/ singer Cody Blanchard, along with drummer Nate Mahan and keyboardist Will Sprott, came together more than
? Asin pst and wams The Clams look
>
S i
adecade agoin the Bay Area of northern California after meeting through art school. After releasing largely DIY albums on tiny regional punk labels, and then theSub Pop subsidiary Hardly Art, they signed with Dan Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound for 2018's Onion, their most mature and fully formed collection, but one that only hinted at where they'd go with Year Of The Spider.
With it, they have created a multitudinous pop album that threatens lasting significance. By blending their previous '60s focus on girl group, classic R&B and garage-pop with post-'60s forms like psychedelia, glam and country- rock, they offer a stylish, seamless yet unpredictable listen, one that is threaded with palpable heartache, earworm melodies, dynamic vocal performances and sparkling instrumentation. Each compact song feels like a revelation, unfolding like the pages of a flipbook, animating movement and story at a focused, rapid clip.
Its also the band's best sounding album, recorded with clean, clear fidelity by Dan Auerbach, though the group remain loyal to their underground DIY roots through a menagerie of off-kilter textures and accents, and Shaw and Blanchard's signature vocals. He
demonstrates a lilting falsetto while she traverses haunting incantation
and formidable growl effortlessly and with evident fire, like Wanda Jackson
or Brenda Lee at a sweltering basement punk show. And though the band now open for larger acts such as Greta Van Fleet, they still transmit the physical immediacy and spiritual connection of an underground gig in any setting. Year Of The Spider retains that same spirited,
often kinetic energy - an authentic
rendering of the band onstage, despite slicker production.
The album opens like a Tarantino film. A brooding guitar solo introduces Shaw’s velvet singing, which is plagued by alooming choice. “Do Iwanna stay in the place Iwas half raised?/Haunted by the days of being young?/Or do Iwanna go toa place that I don’t know?/Take a chance and see if there still will be ame?” she asks, setting the tone for a song and an album that probes existential crisis, critical judgements and imminent tragedy. Shaw's father was diagnosed with cancer around the sametime she began writing for the album, and the pain and uncertainty ofthat new reality introduces afear and fragility not heard before from this group. “Open up, open up/ You're still here/Weary mind, bleary eyes/You’re not vanishing," she pleads on *Vanishing", a form of solace and conviction.
Shaw peels back her power on “All Of My Cryin’”, a soulful psych-pop missive where she meets Blanchard's falsetto in harmony so close it feels like blood relation, the sort ofunspoken bond forged byalong running creative partnership. The same is true of standout “Midnight Wine”, where it’s difficult to tell them apart as they narrate the down-and-out tale ofa terror-soaked loner over pulsating organ and a stomping beat - part murder ballad, part blues howler and part psychedelic daisy chain. Taken together, the music of Year Of The Spider is anything but stuck in the past. Its novel sonic alloys, and punk rock spirit, very much ring of right now.
shannon Shaw and Cod Blanchard, ۰
NEW ALBUMS O
P24 SONVOLT
P25 DEANBLUNT
P27 ANDERSON EAST P28 LITTLESTEVEN P29 WILLIE MASON
P31 KATHERINE PRIDDY P33 THESCIENTISTS P35 VILLAGERS
Tokugoya
BAMBALAM
Japanese psych meets krautrock legends: aface-melting wipeout
touwemym There was something к „inevitable about
the eventual mind- meld of Japanese psychlords Acid Mothers Temple and krautrock lifer Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru: they share a similar love of sensory overload and extension-through- repetition. Tokugoya is their third album proper, after a number of Guru Guru Fest collections early last decade. It's a curious collection that cleaves more to the monolithic mantras of Neumeier's host outfit, no doubt reinforced by the versions here oftwo Guru Guru classics. “Next Time See You At The Dalai Паша” is particularly thrilling, Makoto Kawabata's guitar an unruly, storm-bringing force, drilling through the changes. JONDALE
Step 13 SUBMARINE CAT
More acid country grooves from
Brixtonragtags EUM Thirteen albums
in, Alabama 3 find
1 themselves releasing
their first without
founding member
Jake Black AKA
The Very Reverend Dr D Wayne Love.
However, despite nods to death and
rock'n'roll tragedies throughout, the
party still rages here with aplomb,
with the opening “Whacked”
merging acid-house grooves with
gravel-voiced tales of hedonism.
The band’s Happy Mondays-meets-
Hank Williams shtick still proves
a successful combo throughout —
from the tender “Everytime I See
A River" to the stomping “Тһе
Lord Stepped In (Taking Back
Control)” — and finds the band
sounding potent and energised.
DANIEL DYLAN WRAY
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 21
ANNA WEBBER
«
2" Crosby mêre
| thanmere navel-gazing |
DAVID CROSBY
For Free
BMG
8/10
THE renewed and T reinvigorated Crosby's жа twilight productivity ; 5 continues apace as 17% he approaches his = &. воњ birthday this
e 1 August. For Free is his fifth album since Croz, 2014’s comeback after a 20-year absence from the studio, again with the guiding hand of his multi- instrumentalist and producer son James Raymond and the same core of musicians, now dubbed the Sky Trails Band.
Yet, while the record’s 10 tracks are elegantly shaped by players plucked from a younger generation, there are strong contributions of both pen and performance by more veteran figures from the main man’s past too, not to mention asleeve portrait painted by Joan Baez.
The title track first saw service on its writer Joni Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon, stripped back here as an intimate piano ballad with Texan singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz as duet partner.
It’s anumber that Crosby has intermittently sung live over the past 50 years, its lyrical eavesdropping simplicity appealing “because I love what it says about the spirit of music and what compels you to play”. That compulsion, to play for free, was the ethos behind the self-financed Croz and the collections that followed, adesire to pursue one's art regardless ofits commercial potential.
22 ° UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
Tapping into that lifelong joy for what he does informs the opening “River Rise", co-written by Raymond and Michael McDonald, the latter weighing in with exquisite harmonies. It's a sweet and gentle evocation ofthe California-soaked vibes о those days when he, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash first discovered the beauty in the blend of their voices.
Farly explorations of what became a signature sound are also recalled on the self-penned "IThinkT", as are the pitfalls that tended to befall Crosby along the way, examined through older eyes (*They don't tell you when you arrive/All the things you need to stay alive/ There's no instructions and no map/No secret way past the trap"). It’s tempting, on more than one occasion, to view its maker as a sage-like figure imparting the wisdom of both triumphs and wrong turns.
Crosby is just as confessional and
| articulate a writer on “Shot At Me", a
Laurel Canyon guitar-pickin' resolution to keep to the straight and narrow (“You’ve got to find your lifeline and pick up your thread] And tell your story before you're dead"). However, don't be tricked into thinking the album should be filed on thesame shelf as motivational guides
| orself-help manuals. Thereremains a
rather playful appetite for self-deprecation here, an endlessly attractive willingness to laugh at one’s own shortcomings
and foibles.
SLEEVE NOTES
1 River Rise (feat.Michael McDonald)
21 Think!
3 The Other Side Of Midnight
4 Rodriguez
For ANight
5 Secret Dancer 6ShipsIn TheNight
7 For Free (feat. Sarah Jarosz)
8 Boxes
9Shot AtMe
101 Won't Stay ForLong ڪڪ Producedby:
Dan Garcia, James Raymond Recorded at: TheBamboom Room, Altadena; Hz Werks, Van Nuys; Joel Jacks Studios, Santa Ynez; Groove Masters, Santa Monica; Stubbs Recording, Spring Hill, Tennessee Personnel: David Crosby (vocals, guitars), James Raymond (guitars,
bass, piano, synthesisers), Dean Parks, Steve Postell, Shawn Tubbs (guitars), Andrew Ford (bass),
Abe Laboriel
Jr, Gary Novak, Steve DiStanislao (drums), Greg Liesz (pedal steel), Steve Tavaglione (tenor sax), Walt Fowler (trumpet), Sarah Jarosz, Michael McDonald, Gracie Raymond, Becca Stevens, Michelle Willis, Brian Wilson (backing vocals)
It’s not all self-reflection and navel-gazing; For Free is awash with illustrations of Crosby’s talent to tell stories as a detached observer, whether or not he wrote the story himself. The slick, mid-tempo “Rodriguez For A Night” is cinematically richin its sketches of outlaws, angels and drugstore cowboys, and would have sat neatly on its composer Donald Fagen’s own solo high-water mark, The Nightfly. Even here, though, Croz the narrator is feasibly singing about a version of his younger playboy persona (“I confess he had some qualities that might attract a foolish girl/An effortless charisma, and a clever way with the world").
Fagen fashioned the song specifically for Crosby, a showcase for his friend's often underappreciated jazz phrasing, the laconic punctuation of the vocal mirroring the sharps and flats of the brass melody (also in evidence on the lost love lament “Secret Dancer"). However, if any one man has the most assured handle on the singer’s strengths, it’s Raymond, assembling eloquent but unobtrusive musical mosaics that fit Dad like a glove.
He's no slouch as a writer, either, drawing upon what one imagines is eyewitness accounts of the older man’s past indiscretions. “Boxes” floats along ona wave of, to use a divisive phrase, yacht rock, seemingly at odds with a lyric that touches on recurring struggles (“I’ve tried so often to summon my better angels but they’re over the horizon once again/
I already tried to lock them all away/ Up high where the blood runs thin").
Raymond is also responsible for arguably the most emotionally affecting song on the album, closer *I Won't Stay For Long" (its “one, two, three" count-in the sole contribution of another erstwhile “casualty” Brian Wilson, but that’s by the by). Inspired by Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus, a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and his attempt to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead, Crosby inhabits the rawness of the lyric with both the stately grandeur ofa Shakespearian thespian and the smoky 3am introspection of Sinatra in his prime.
“I’m standing on the porch like it’s the edge of a cliff/Beyond the grass and gravel lies a certain abyss,” he sings, on what he calls his “painfully beautiful” favourite track on the album. It's a commanding performance bringing down the curtain оп aset of songs that, in the space of an economical 40 minutes, crystallise everything that makes Crosby such an alluring, vital and still relevant force.
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Luc
cre Ua
Beer є With Special Guests
UK TOUR 2021
ro Nov Bristol
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o2 Dec Ramsgate o3 Dec Brighton oy Dec
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New Single The Calm Before The Storm OUT NOW
The Debut Album BEAST
Out Sept 2021
Download from: freyabeer.com*,
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| г rthawainwright.com
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W @WainBright
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PETERS
with Special Guest
Kim Richey
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FRAZEY FORD M "^ "AME | А j 11 April STAMFORD Corn Exchange
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ISMAEL QUINTANILLA Ill, SHERVINLAINEZ
24 -UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
O NEW ALBUMS
AMERICANA
1 Country, bluegrass, folk and more j
F
——
SON VOLT
Electro Melodier
TRANSMIT SOUND/THIRTY TIGERS
8/10
Socio political 10th from seasoned Illinois quintet
тті НАР everything gone as u planned, Jay Farrar might still
| belooking back rather than | forwards. Last year marked | 25yearssince Trace, his debut -album as leader of Son Volt, the band he founded after the demise of alt.country avatars Uncle Tupelo. But global events meant that the anniversary tour never happened, forcing the singer and guitarist to hole up and contemplate an uncertain future instead.
The upshot of his new labour is Electro Melodier, arich, impassioned set of songs that essay a global nation in flux. Farrar didn’t intend to follow one political record (2019’s Union) with another, but he says, “it always seems to find a way backin there”. These sentiments reach their most powerful expression on “Living In The USA”, which addresses a homeland built on spurious notions of freedom, choking on fossil fuels and offering up the rule of law to the highest bidder. “Илеге” the heart from days of old?” he despairs. “Where’s the empathy?/Where’s the soul?” Equally scornful, “The Levee On Down”
سے -一 一
AnewFeliceBrothersLPis always cause for celebration. Due in mid-September, From Dreams To Dust yeproc draws its unique ambience from being recordedin a renovated 19th-century church in Upstate New York.Ledby siblings lan and James Felice, the revamped quartet that debuted with 2019's Undress are joined across 12 songs by Bright Eyes' trumpeter Nathaniel Walcott and pedal steel player Mike Mogis. Earlier that month, Grammy-winning producer and engineer David Ferguson takes the mic for the first time on Nashville No More ratpossum. Described by recent collaborator Sturgill Simpson as 'abona
fide card-carrying legendary hillbilly genius’, Ferguson's CV includes Cowboy Jack ҮП Clement, John Prine апа ШЕ s Mes
shames American history - specifically Andrew Jackson and his role in the Cherokee removal - and its bloodied legacy.
Yet Electro Melodier is finely weighted between anguish and hope. “The Globe", a fiery throwback to Son Volt's earliest days, draws sustenance from the age of protest, sensing very real change on the street. And for allits low-key blues and accompanying background hiss, “War On Misery” is essentially a call for togetherness and compassion. Stylistically, in keeping with recent works, the album aims for the spot where folk, blues and country converge. Farrar’s acoustic guitar isan unwavering presence, though multi-instrumentalist Mark Spencer (on slide, lap steel and organ) provides much of the texture and shade. “Diamonds And Cigarettes” isa prime example, with Laura Cantrell duetting with Farrar on a salute to his wife of 25 years and “all the hard lessons with no regrets". Against a backdrop of disquiet, Electro Melodier is ultimately mindful of counting life’s blessings, “friends to care for and places to be".
ROBHUGHES
Johnny Cash's American Recordings series. Some big-name help is at hand for this 10-songset too, with Margo Price fetching up on "Chardonnay" and Dan Auerbach, Jerry Douglas, BélaFleck andRonnie McCoury among the players. Ferguson notes that making asolo albumis the hardest thing: "You've got to learn how to listen to it like you're listening to somebody else. Man, that takes gumption.” And look out for Pokey LaFarge's follow-up to last year's troubled Rock Bottom Rhapsody. The more upbeat In The Blossom Of Their Shade NEWWEST moves away from the swing and blues-style that made his name, preferring pr instead a pursuit of “the perfect summer afternoon soundtrack". | Expect deep soul and killer grooves. ROBHUGHES
MARISA ANDERSON & WILLIAM TYLER Lost Futures
8/10
Wandering guitar solijoinforces
Separately, Marisa Anderson and William Tyler have carved their own deep furrow in the field of roots guitar music. On Lost Futures, they team up for ajoint piece that shows their close artistic affinity. The body of the album is given over to gorgeous, baroque instrumentals such as “Hurricane Light” and “Pray For Rain”, the pair moving together with the grace and intimacy of seasoned tango dancers. But there is variety here. “Something Will
Care" isa droning raga that thrashes
darkly for six minutes, while "At The Edge Of The World" is vulture-pecked Mexicana with wailing strings courtesy of Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez.
LOUISPATTISON
GASPARD AUGE Escapades
6/10
Debut solo album fromFrench electronicaaesthete
Thecrunching intensity ofthe musicthat Gaspard Augé made as one half of f Justice may have blinded F some to the fact that these
23 Frenchmen had quite the grasp of melody. Escapades is hardly subtle, but by toning down the impact a notch, Augé’s personal aesthetic – a breezy blend of European electropop, cinematic symphonics and prog rock pomp - slides into focus. Theresultis an exquisitely polished music that sometimes strays a little into fromage. But where it works, as on the epic “Force Majeure” or “Belladone” — think 80s erotic-movie score given thumping piano house makeover — it can sweep you off your feet. LOUIS PATTISON
AZURE RAY Remedy
FLOWERMOON
7/10
Omaha folk-pop duo endlong hiatus with further loveliness
After a flurry of releases in the early 2000s, Omaha scene mainstays Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor have reconvened to harmonise with much less regularity – indeed, nine years have passed between 2012’s gentle-hearted
As Above So Below mini-album and this successor. While the new songs’ whispery delicacy is not such arare quality now
that even Taylor Swift follows the same winsome path, Remedy still proves why Azure Ray remain special. Their fealty to Troubadour-era songcraft is one reason why, with the gorgeous “Phantom Lover” and “The Swan” evoking the most heart- rending moments of Judee Sill and Carole King as heard through a dream-pop gauze. JASONANDERSON
BIG BIG TRAIN Common Ground ENGLISHELECTRIC RECORDINGS
7/10
Prog history buffs turn an eye tocurrent events
This neo-prog institution has areputation for extrapolating skilfully turned, multi-part
I prog yarns from obscure historical episodes. Common Ground's opener instead takes a more contemporary focus, as "TheStrangest Times" places us in March 2020 waiting for “the PM's 5pm address". The accompanying piano-led romp is stirring and immediate, but the scene is seta little too prosaically. They’re on stronger form elsewhere as “Atlantic Cable” weaves vocal harmonies and instrumental flourishes around the story of the first transatlantic phone lines. “Black With Ink""s meditation on the destruction of ancient libraries is similarly powerful, while “Dandelion Clock"'s lament to ageing, gorgeous piano reverie “Headwaters” and shapeshifting instrumental workout “Apollo” show three more sides toa versatile creative force. JOHNNY SHARP
JADEBIRD Different Kind of Light GLASSNOTE
5/10
Smoother second outing for US-focused Brit songwriter
Any singer-songwriter with streaks of Americana in their musical DNA would surely love to recordin Nashville with Dave Cobb, but on Jade Bird’s second long- player it’s debatable how much good
it has done the Brit School graduate. While tunes like “Honeymoon”
and “Trick Mirror” havea graceful Fleetwood Mac-style charm, they
lack the lyrical bite that was one of
her early USPs, and the vocal rasp heard on live performances seems smoothed off. She’s at her best when stinging lines like “I’ve been asleep
at the wheel my whole damn life" from “Punchline” come to the fore, reflecting a charismatic performer capable of more than just radio-friendliness. JOHNNY SHARP
MAX BLOOM
Pedestrian uıTIMATEBLENDS 7/10
Endearing introspective solo LP from former Yuck guitarist-vocalist
Indie post-rockers Yuck were co-founded by Max Bloom and Daniel Blumberg, who played together in Cajun Dance Party. Blumberg has since gone on to release two excellent quasi-experimental
solo albums, while Bloom’s solo work offers a similar feel of meditative introspection tied to a more traditional singer-songwriter style. The title track
of his debut album opens with
a plaintiffriff on piano before boosting into something more substantial
as Bloom, working solo, delivers a
full band sound. He finds a Teenage Fanclub-style melancholic charm on songs like “America”, “How CanILove You” and the excellent “Palindromes”, while “All The Same” and “Twenty- Two” head into heavier territory.
PETER WATTS
DEAN BLUNT
Black Metal 2 roucutrape 8/10
More dark stuff from UK rap's trickster prince
From the warped club tracks he made as half of Hype Williams to his more recent output as Babyfather, Dean Blunt’s music has been characterised by its obscurity and taste for the conceptual. But Black Metal2 — a sequel to his 2014 album, also on Rough Trade – shows offa rare side to Blunt: a soul-baring sincerity. Perhaps being on а storied indie label is the concept. Assisted by ethereal vocals from collaborator Joanne Robertson, “Mugu” and “La Raza” channel dream pop and post-punk, even as Blunt’s dry, matter-of-fact raps draw on the lingo of the streets — of poverty, violent rivalries and doomed romance. LOUISPATTISON
BNNY
Everything FIRETALK 7/10
Chicagoans debut is oneraw reckoning with grief Asthenameimplies, Bnny's debut album contains multitudes. Written partly during atumultuous relationship and partly inits aftermath, following the death of songwriter Jess Viscius's partner, thealbum tracks a cycle of love, loss and griefin confessional vignettes. "Ambulance" is a foreboding opener, with its whispered prayer of a refrain: “IfI can’t see, then no-one dies". The *before' is fractious, two-chord Velvet Underground cool - the sultry "August", the minute-and-a-half burst of “Time Walk" — the ‘after’ like eavesdropping on something private. Viscius’s vocals cleave so close to
the bone the lyrics emerge onlyin snatches: “forgive me”; “open your eyes”; “please stay". LISA-MARIEFERLA
MOLLY BURCH
Romantic Images CAPTURED TRACKS 7/10
Austin songwriter goes synthpop
With Romantic Images, Texas-based singer-songwriter Molly Burch trades in her twangy band fora suite of shiny synthesisers, offering 10 smitten
pop songs inspired by the hope of
MARISA ANDERSON & WILLIAM TYLER
NEW ALBUMS Ө
BB REVELATIONS ШИШ
United throughloss andhauntological concepts
ARISA ANDERSON and
William Tyler's new LP
Lost Futuresis haunted by two cultural figures no longer with us. Both Anderson and Tyler played at Bike Chain Rain, a tribute concert to Silver Jews frontman David Berman in Portlandin January 2020. "David was amentor and friend andhis passing was very hard andstrange, says Tyler. The pair hung out, played a little guitar, and resolved to make arecord together. That recordborrowsits title from Ghosts Of My Life: Writings On Depression, Hauntology And Lost Futures, a book by the late writer and theorist Mark Fisher.
"My manager and friend Ben Swank had given me the book based on my interest in how to integrate this whole concept
of hauntology into more idiomatically folk and American music, says Tyler.He had the book in his bag as he and Andersonhunkered down tomake the record, andat first the title was just a placeholder. Says Anderson: "Tome the phrase is about the choices we have at any given moment, апа how by definition, the action we choose leads to a different outcome than the unchosen action. A perfect analogy for the act of creating and improvising music." LOUIS PATTISON
newfound love. It’s a fine framework for Burch’s gossamer voice, which shifts from breathy incantation
to rhythmic rubber-ball bounce à
la Кеуіп Morby with nary a seam. “Emotion”, a collaboration with dream-pop labelmate Wild Nothing, marksthe album's apex. The problem? This neo-disco banger overshadows therest ofthe record, leaving the listener longing for those sametypes of compact, entirely snackable treats. ERIN OSMON
CHORUSING
Half Mirror westernviny 7/10
Analogue gearhead 5 first, fiveyearsinthe making
Given his passion for DIY electronics and aday job with Moog Music calibrating and building synths, it's awonder Matthew O'Connell didn't get down to his debut album sooner. But evolution must run its course and the Raleigh, NC-based singer-songwriter and producer spent years drumming in Louisville punk and hardcore bands. No evidence of thatis audible here, though. Instead, aspare and seductively lonesome pooling of bluesy folk and electronics that eschews “folktronica” and nods
to Martyn, Hollis, Crosby and Jason Molina. O’Connell lets it flow wider, too, as on psychedelic jam “Midday Sun” and “Watching The Beams”, which echoes Cloudland Canyon’s kosmische melts. SHARONO'CONNELL
LUCINDA CHUA
Antidotes 4» 8/10
Bewitching compilation of south London musician's early work
By combining her 2019 debut EP with this year'sfollow-up, FKA Twigs' touring cellist Lucinda Chua offers thelistener insight into her evolution as a composer. Where “Antidotes 1" combines abstractimagery with imaginative audio experimentation - cello tone warped beyond recognition on
“Feel Something", textured vocals, delicately layered, on “Semitones”
— “Antidotes 2", produced after a nine-month break from writing, addsanelegance and solemnity thatis bewitching to listen to. Chua's extraordinary voice soars above a barely-there arrangement of piano and soft string harmonics on “Until I Fall"; atmospheric piano composition “An Avalanche” is tender and hypnotic. LISA-MARIEFERLA
ЅЕРТЕМВЕК 2021 UNCUT: 25
ELI JOHNSON
O NEW ALBUMS
Nine
FOREVERLIVING ORIGINALS
Fifth LP in two years from the mysterious London soul collective. By John Lewis
Ма 2019 interview, the singer- songwriter Michael Kiwanuka credits his producer and main collaborator Inflo for giving
him the confidence to appear
on camera. “I was always
terrified of pushing myself and appearing in videos,” says Kiwanuka. “But Inflo told me how important it was for fans to see the artist they're listening to. It helps them connect."
Would that Inflo took his own advice. Inflo is a producer and multi- instrumentalist based in London, whosereal name (according to his label's listing at Companies House) is believed to be Dean Wynton Josiah Cover. For all his deliberate anonymity he's actually quite a big namein the biz: he's won Mercury and Ivor Novello awards for co-writing and producing albums for Kiwanuka and the London rapper Little Simz; hetook The Kooks inafunkwards direction on their
26 ° UNCUT - SEPTEMBER 2021
SLEEVE NOTES
(rather good) 2014 album Listen,
and he's also written, arranged and produced for artists as diverse as Jack Pefiate, Tom Odell, Jungle, Belle & Sebastian, The Saturdays, Max Jury and Portugal The Man.
But, even better than all these achievements, Inflois also the main figure behind an enigmatic Brit-soul collective called Sault. They’ve done no interviews, no photo sessions and have no press agent, so their albums appear to leak out without warning. In 2019 came two albums named, rather confusingly, 5 and 7. Two more followed in 2020: Untitled (Black Is), released in June, and Untitled (Rise), released in September. There are standout tracks on all four albums: Rise featured the plaintive piano-led, Donny Hathaway- ish “Little Boy”, the poetic punk-funk of “The Beginning And The End” and the dreamy disco of “Strong”; Black Is included the trance-like Afro-funk of “I Just Want To Dance" and the Afrobeat of “Bow” (featuring Kiwanuka); while the first two LPs featured some cracking punk-funk oddities. But really, there are barely any duff Sault tracks.
Using assorted singers and poets, they seem to change in genre from track to track, drawing from halfacentury of soul, funk and other black music, inviting comparisons with one of those “anthology” projects like Gorillaz,
Handsome Boy Modelling School or
Mr Jukes (indeed, Inflo was initially rumoured to be Damon Albarn or Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton).
Where Sault’s two 2020 albums addressed the George Floyd murder and the BLM protests with a host of US poets and singers, Nine is a much more London-centric affair. The only American voice on the LP is a sample of an African-American woman on *You From London”, gleefully identifying someone as British before asking them if they know the Queen, eat “crumpets and shit” and have bad teeth. An immediate counterpoint comes froma Slack-jawed, London-accented rhyme from Little Simz, which references Oyster cards, Overground lines and shopping at Morrisons.
It’s one of many street-level voyages through the capital, starting with two white-knuckle rides through its erimier postcodes. “London Gangs” uses a twitchy synth bass, afunky ride-cymbal pattern and some discordant post-punk bass riffs to tell a thrillingly grim story of revenge, crippling pride and horrific peer pressure; “Trap Life” is a tale of knife crime and police suspicion based around a monstrously funky breakbeat. Both sound weirdly similar to Gorillaz songs (something that will only fuel the Albarn rumours) and flirt with the sonic tropes of grime and hip-hop, but there is none of rap's traditional braggadocio here. The thugs and gangsters on display are sweet and tender hooligans, viewed through the female gaze, their arrogance a mask for crippling insecurity. The only male voices on the album are interviews with young black Londoners, who tell despairing tales of broken homes, murdered fathers and the stresses caused by petty gangland rivalries.
Some American critics have compared Sault to Soul II Soul and they certainly share a celebration of black London, but any Daisy Age positivity has been replaced by a weariness and anger. On the gorgeously string-drenched “Bitter Streets”, Cleo Sol sings a sorrowful hymn to a once-sensitive boyfriend who “made friends with a gun”; “Alcohol” is awonderfully drowsy old-school soul ballad in 6/8 about the pain caused by alcoholism. The only optimism here comes from identifying problems and defiantly working through them. "Light's In Your Hands" is a piano-led ballad about how a young man from atroubled home has the power to reinvent himself; the title track, “9”, is a Noel Gallagher-esque dirge about a child from a broken home, which Springs to life when it suddenly morphs into a joyous slice of Rotary Connection soul positivity. *One day you'll make it, one day you'll be free", sings an ecstatic Cleo Sol. *Before you lose yourself, don't forget to dream".
CHVRCHES
Screen Violence virciwem 8/10
Genre-mashing synthpop bliss
With nearly a decade ofsublime electronica behind them, Chvrches maintain the momentum of 2018's Greg Kurstin- produced Love Is Dead, and here, on the self-produced album number four, still sound like they have everything to prove. Screen Violence is a punchy and determined effort, full of big hooks and awash with glittering synth textures. Lauren Mayberry’s characterful vocals are frequently astounding, whether treated (“He Said, She Said”, “Good Girls”) or left to soar organically, such as on the shimmering “California”
and the smoky, dream-pop of “Violent Delights”. The Robert Smith-featuring “How Not To Drown” is a notable treat. ANDREWPRICE
JOSIENNE CLARKE A Small Unknowable Thing
CORDUROY PUNK
7/10
Indie-folk queen asserts her independence
After five albums with Ben Walker
and one with her «band Pica Pica,
Clarke went to live
ona Scottish island, where she wrote her 2019 solo debut
In All Weather. Self-produced and self-released, the follow-up is even more defiantly unchaperoned — and something of a departure as she blows up a quiet storm. The gentle sweetness of her voice has taken on an added self- assertion that fits well with a new sonic experimentalism, from the off-kilter jazziness of "Super Recogniser” to the fuzz guitars and pounding drums on “Sit Out”. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
THE COLD STARES
Heavy Shoes mascot 6/10
Darkness pervades Indiana-based duo's fifth LPin seven years
Acancer survivor
АЕС With a brutal
10| backstory, Chris
Tapp burrows into
f the dark side of his existence on Heavy Shoes, hammering the bass strings of his guitar to grind out heavy riffage
on nearly interchangeable tracks like “Take This Body From Me", “Hard Times” and “Prosecution Blues”. Here, as on their previous LPs, Tapp and drummer Brian Mullins are perpetuating a Midwestern brand
of blue-collar blooze rock that’s been around since the ’60s in the service of emotional exorcism. The album is so suffocatingly grim that the appearance of the spare, syncopated garage rocker “In The Night Time” is a massive relief, suggesting a possible lifeline fora band drowning in despair. BUDSCOPPA
DARKSIDE
Spiral MATADOR 7/10
Challenging, captivating arrangements from artisan duo The latest from
Dave Harrington
and Nicolas Jaar is
f their long-awaited
Ж follow-up to 2013’s
: Psychic. As on that album, the on-off duo have assembled a patchwork-like array of musical ideas and moods, and explored some experimental niches. Springing
to life with icy metallic plucks, “Narrow Road” grows into a haunted, somewhat downbeat opener, with Robert Fripp-esque guitar snaking around the mix defensively. As the record continues, we hear similarly decaying constructs, with ramshackle guitar (“The Question Is To See It AIT") and odd, barely standing rhythms (“Inside Is Out There”). Though not everything here works, Spiralremains consistently intriguing throughout. ANDREWPRICE
INDIGO DESOUZA Any Sha pe You Take sapptecreek 8/10
North Carolinan delivers second album steepedin alternative ‘90s goodness
| The anguished howls that fill the middle
of the aptly titled
М2 Real Pain" indicate
Ж just how high the
Fa anxiety levels сап sometimes runin Indigo De Souza's second album and first for Saddle Creek. Yet the Asheville-based singer and guitarist has a knack for couching herraw and remarkably candid lyrics in fuzzy, hooky songs that are as jagged as they are exuberant. In so doing, she somehow filters the ragged ethos of Gen X alt.rock heroes like the Breeders and Dinosaur Jr through a Gen Zsensibility. De Souza's ability to balance the brute force of “Real Pain” and “Bad Dream” with something as sunny as “Hold U” is another reason to look forward to more of her shape-shifting. JASONANDERSON
MADIDIAZ History Of A Feeling ann
8/10
Emotions laid bare amid incandescent instrumentation
The break-up album is a time-tested concept that in its best forms transmutes betrayal, loss and heartache into resilience, clarity and healing. With History Of A Feeling, Nashville-based singer, songwriter and guitarist Madi Diaz deftly carries the torch, fusing stripped-down, bleeding-heart acoustic meditations with bursts of fiery instrumentation, her glossy voice at once tender and insistent, rhythmically narrating her loveworn journey with precise, clever
turns of phrase. Ifyou can get through “Man In Me” and “Crying In Public”
without tearing up (possibly in public),
there may be no hope for you. ERINOSMON
ANDERSON EAST Maybe We Never Die
ELEKTRA/LOW COUNTRY SOUND
8/10
Thestudiosaplaygroundon audacious postmodern mélange
Asan Americana singer-songwriter, Anderson East - an Alabama preacher's son blessed with a irich, rangy voice —
is right out of central casting, and his first two albums put him comfortably in that rustic box. But on his third LP, the 32-year-old and his co-producers, mentor Dave Cobb (Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell) and bandleader Philip Towns, have gleefully tossed the box aside, enlivening East’s introspective R&B/gospel/country-rooted songs with every sonic trick imaginable — including jeep-rattling funk basslines (“Falling”, *Drugs"), 1980s-treated
drums (“Hood Of My Car”), Sam Smith-
style falsetto grandstanding (the
title cut) and mid-century orchestral opulence (“If You Really Love Me”). Atturns playful and philosophical, this inspired act of stylistic liberation delivers one infectious moment after another. BUDSCOPPA
STEPHEN FRET WELL Busy Guy
SPEEDY WUNDERGROUND
8/10
Tender, no-frills third by under- statedBritish songwriter
Fretwell’s personal, slow-burning style saw him support
the likes of Oasis, Travis, Elbow and Athlete backin the noughties, but his last album came in 2007. Re-emergence has come with the knowing title of Busy Guy, which shields a touching and intimate series of songs, recorded in a couple of hours with Dan Carey. Using mostly acoustic guitar and some keyboard, Fretwell delivers a series of poignant vignettes. Several are rooted in
MadiDiaz
London geography, including two
of the highlights — the exceptional “Embankment”, which starts with a drowning in Chelsea Harbour, and the gorgeously meandering, flamenco- infused “Almond”. PETER WATTS
THE GOON SAX
Mirror Il «pon 8/10
Thirdfine albumin as many attempts by Australiantrio
Brisbane high- school friends
James Harrison, Louis Forster and Riley Jones took some time apart before recording Mirror II, which breaks a three-year silence. It's a considerable relief to discover that, upon reuniting with a somewhat expanded sonic palette, they have not deviated from their core virtues: drolly mordant lyrics, instinctive tunefulness and the lo-fi new-wave sensibility that carries itall.Instant deadpan classics such
as “Tag” and “In The Stone” would prompt comparisons to early Go- Betweens even if Louis Forster’s father wasn’t Robert Forster, butas any such references are about the highest praise imaginable, The Goon Sax should not be daunted by them. ANDREWMUELLER
GREENTEA PENG
Man Made «zw 7/10
Stylishnu-soul debut cloakedin heauy stoner fog
Visually arresting and withacompelling back story, rising nu-soul sensation
south Londoner Aria Wells - feels suspiciously like a major-label marketing department’s wet dream. But behind the surface noise, Wells undeniably possesses an alluringly woozy, smoky, languid voice. Nodding to Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu and her teen heroine Lily Allen, her meandering paeans to sensimilia and Spiritual emancipation are mostly hazy cosmic jive. But her high-calibre production team, led by Slowthai and Skepta collaborator Earbuds, ensure standout tracks such as “This Sound”, “Earnest” and “Sinner” are lush confections of jazz, dubstep, grime, trip-hop and psychedelic soul. More style than substance at times, maybe, but invariably rich in promise. STEPHENDALTON
SEPTEMBER 2021: UNCUT · 27
ELLIOTTLAUREN, ALEXAKING
O NEW ALBUMS
THEHELICOPTER OF THEHOLY GHOST
Afters «scope
8/10
1 With its original demos neglected following a bout of amnesia caused by anear-fatal car
d crash suffered by Billy Reeves, founder of Sophie Ellis- Bextor vehicle theaudience, Afters is unsurprisingly dominated bya morose beauty. Almost two decades later, his songs are now fronted by The Bluetones’ Mark Morriss, whose hushed restraint characterises “Difficult Song” and guides “I Will Never Hurt” towards a brass blowout, while journeyman Crayola Lectern’s piano provides their vital backbone. “Tony Got A Car” swells dramatically mid-song, but the album’s bookends, luxurious laments “Slow Down” and “I Didn’t”, seta rarely disturbed tone for this resurrection. WYNDHAM WALLACE
ISHMAEL ENSEMBLE
Visions Of Light SEVERNSONGS 7/10 The second LP by this Bristolian jazz 2 collective goes deep | -” into club culture. ж“. Harp-heavy astral jazz drones mutate
into ambient waltzes; rolling blip-hop loops are overlaid with ecstatic tenor sax solos; juddering techno beats
mix with electronic burbles; tribal rave anthems get an experimental makeover; “January” isa doomy Joy Division ballad straining for sunlight and positivity through the angelic vocals of Holyseus Fly. But the best bits keep the jazz spirit alive: "Looking Glass" sees harpist Stanlaey singing
a trippy, one-chord Indo-jazz epic in an appealingly squeaky howl, while the title track suggests Alice Coltrane’s band fronted by an android. JOHNLEWIS
IXTAHUELE Dharmaland SUBLIMINAL SOUNDS
8/10
Left unrecorded
by Eden Ahbez, the
И prototypical hippie responsible for Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” іп 1948, then 1960’s cult beatnik-exotica album Eden’s Island, Dharmaland was discovered a decade ago as sheet music in Washington’s Library Of Congress. If Swedish quintet Ixtahuele’s belated interpretation lacks its creator’s eccentricities, it’s nonetheless respectful: Ahbez’s bamboo flutes
28: UNCUT • SEPTEMBER 2021
and drums are present, and his final collaborator, Joe Romersa, adds gruff Leonard Cohen-style vocals to “Fire Of The Soul”. Kadhja Bonet’s also wordlessly seductive on “Manna”, while “Scenes I-III” is 15 minutes worthy of any Tiki culture or Martin Denny enthusiast. WYNDHAM WALLACE
DANKO JONES
Power Trio mateincermany
7/10 Teges The title of Danko 7 ' Jones 10th album | very much describes the view in their
mirror: the Canadian threesome, named for their singer, have long upheld
the guitar-bass-drums creed with
a fervour verging on the fanatical, forging asound somewhere between the bubblegum garage of Green Day and the wall-of-fuzz punk of Husker Dü. Power Trio tampers with the template not even slightly, a collection of big-hearted, good-humoured, riff-revving rockers. The picks include “Let’s Rock Together”, which sounds exactly like a song entitled "Let's Rock Together" should, and “Saturday”, a bait-and-switch paean to the joys of domesticity which makes the most of Jones' vocal resemblance to AC/DC's Bon Scott. ANDREW MUELLER
DURAND JONES & THEINDICATIONS
Private Space COLEMINE/DEAD OCEANS
POWER TREO
8/10
EN Since five Indiana University music majors formed Durand Jones &
Тһе Indications nearly a decade
ago, these collectors of vintage-soul 455 have become adept at “reverse- engineering" those sounds, as drummer and co-vocalist Aaron Frazer puts it, into compelling original music. Inspired by Philly Soul, Curtis Mayfield and early disco, the quintet’s third LP - arriving on the heels of Frazer's delightful, Dan Auerbach- produced solo album - attains orchestral grandeur on intricate
set pieces, including the title track, while the seductively swaying groove of “Witchoo” could inspire anew
generation to swarm the dancefloor and do the hustle. BUDSCOPPA
JUNGLE
Loving In Stereo awa 7/10
With dancefloors empty and funa scarcity for so much ofthe past two years, Jungle’s characteristic exuberance takes
on not just a curious urgency but a surprising weightiness, too. Of course, anything that exudes carefree good times may now feel awfully precious. Inany case, Tom McFarland and
Josh Lloyd-Watson's well-trusted blend of neo-R&B, French Touch and retro-disco gains new zest on the duo's third album thanks to stylistic detours into acid-jazz classiness (*Goodbye My Love" featuring Swiss-Sri Lankan R&B breakout Priya Ragu) and David Axelrod-style psych splendour (*No Rules"). Elsewhere the formula wears alittle thinner, but few can dispute the irresistibility of “Talk About It", a big- beat banger that Norman Cook ought to envy. JASONANDERSON
GARY KEMP
Insolo couvei
6/10
Spandau reunions laid to rest and Floyd- related Saucerful Of secrets activity on hold, Kemp returns
to solo billing for
the first time in 25 years onan album he says focuses on “the paradox of solitudein an urban landscape” and “how the past infects our present”. Queen’s Roger Taylor pounds along on the stately power ballad “Too Much” and its lament to a world overburdened with bad news, the soulful “I Am The
Soul man: Little Steven
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Past” forms a loose trilogy of self- reflection with Kemp pondering the paths that led him to the present day, whilethe gospel hues of "Our Light" recall the “boy as pale as milk” of
his youth. TERRY STAUNTON
LES FILLES DE ILLIGHADAD
At Pioneer Works sanetsounps
7/10
Hailing from the remote Niger village of Illighadad, Les Filles are a predominantly female band whose 2016 self-titled debut album and 2017 follow-up Eghass Malan were recorded in the open-air studio ofthe desert. In 2019, they travelled to the US, wherethis album was recorded live in concert over two nights at a Brooklyn arts centre. The six songs, all from their earlier albums, are stretched out to infinity and if thestyleis broadly familiar from the Tinariwen template, the guitars and polyphonic vocal chants have an even more hypnotically relentless groove than characterises the work oftheir Tuareg soulmates. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
LITTLE STEVEN & THE DISCIPLES OF SOUL
Summer Of Sorcery Live! At The Beacon Theatre омс
7/10
NES Available as a 3CD, FA SLPvinylsetand ^L Blu-ray video, this is an epic monument to ап extravagant ше concert Van Zandt and his house band gave in November 2019 to showcase his then new album Summer Of Sorcery. Alongside the new material, he delivered 20 more storming tracks in what constituted
4 a die | [1 E. EE
arock-soul tribute to the spirit of the'60s, with guest performances by Peter Wolf, Bruce Springsteen and Nils Lofgren among others, and covers of songs by the Animals, the Youngbloods, Electric Flag and the J Geils Band. Look out, too, for Van Zandt's autobiography, Unrequited Infatuations, duein September. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
MAPLE GLIDER To Enjoy Is The Only Thing
PARTISAN
7/10
Love, faith and loneliness оп Australian's autobiographical debut
= Tori Zietsch of Maple Glider wrote the songs that would become her firstalbum halfa 1 world from home: in Brighton, where, on a break from exploring the planet, she sought to document it all. Although recorded on herreturn to Melbourne with producer Tom Iansek, the album plays like homesick bedroom recordings committed to tape: sparse, confessional, intimate. “Good Thing" is its emotive heart, astunning just- before-break-up song that swells from an acoustic strummed beginning to a full-on howl of pain and confusion by the third chorus; piano-driven opener “As Tradition” reckons with relationships and religion, and feeling out of place in both. LISA-MARIEFERLA
WILLY MASON Already Dead
COOKINGVINYL
7/10
Dusty andintimate alt.country fromUS troubadour
E uw ч | After getting excellent _ notices when still T -inhisteens partly ıı thanks to the blessing 2227 of Conor Oberst, =" Mason continued to accrue superior co-credits — he's worked with Mark Lanegan, Dan Carey, The Chemical Brothers and Brendan Benson among others - without quite breaking through on his own. This first solo album since 2012 sees the songwriter combining lo-fi country with contemporary textural sonictrickery. But his own now more careworn voice is the key ingredient, bringing renewed pathos to tracks like the groove-laden "Reservation", the beleaguered *Oh My Country" and upbeat closer “Worth It". PETER WATTS
MCLEOD
Brother mooranrouce 7/10
Aheartfelt eulogy soaked in melodic grandeur
Multi-instrumentalist Colin McLeod's debut soloalbumisa highly personal tribute to 711 # lt his late elder sibling Norman, with whom
| heranaStockport recording studio,
and who was previously the founding art director of this very magazine. Memories are shared in the Leonard Cohen whispers of “Borderline”, “Look Of Love” deals more directly with searching for light in the midst of grief, while the soulful dance groove of “Let The Wolf Run Free” celebrates a life well lived. The cream of the north’s session talent (with whom the brothers worked regularly) lendahandona record that sparkles with musical invention and thought-provoking examinations of the human condition. TERRY STAUNTON
JAMES McMURTRY The Horses And The Hounds
NEW WEST
9/10
Loftyreturn: avisionaryraconteur withmuchtosay
Just his second
set of originals
since 2008, Texan McMurtry's latest lifts storytelling-in-song
| to meticulous new levels. His sad-sack protagonists face troubles everywhere but the weight of mere human existence is evident too — especially on the brilliant psych-op tale “Operation Never Mind”. All-star guitarist David Grissom (Dixie Chicks, Joe Ely) provides intuitive roots-rock rhythms and leads, while powerful drumbeats sometimes clatter like guns, especially amid the hyper- intense, bluesy title track. McMurtry’s dustbowl voice, meanwhile, catchy yet gruffas ever — and highlighted by “If It Don't Bleed" — gets to the heart of his unique perspective.
LUKE TORN
SAM MEHRAN ColdBrew
WEIRD WORLD
7/10
Posthumous collection of indie outsider slo-fi gems
Sam Mehran was best known as a member of short-lived new- rave upstarts Test Icicles - along with Blood Orange's Dev Hynes - who then retreated into his own world of psychedelic bedroom pop. Over the years he released a stream of trippy nuggets as Outer Limits Recordings, Matrix Metals, Green Crack etal, assembling an intriguing body of work. Cold Brew arrives three years after he took his own life, aged 32, and collects the tracks he was working onin LA before he died. Overseen by his father, it'sa bittersweet mix of bubblegum grunge and bite-sized glam that underlines his knack for uncanny pop.
PIERS MARTIN
THEMURLOCS Bittersweet Demons
7/10
RIV LATIONS BIB
WILLY MASON
NEW ALBUMS O
7
- ua Е
On a nine-year wait fornew songs that live in real time’
lilly Mason started working on what would become Already Dead,
his first album since 2012, in Martha's Vineyardin the summer of 2019, whenit was “hot and crazy outside". Starting with the lyrics and then adding layers of guitar and keyboard, he finally presented the songs to collaborator Noel Heroux in November 2019, who noted that Mason's songwriting had "shifted significantly", with more sonic complexity than Mason's folk-inspired singer- songwriter origins.
“Noel helped me expandits biological complexity,’ says Mason. “His use of effects pedals and distinct editing style have alot to do with the
sound. | was also influenced in the arrangements because I've playedin alot of local bands since my last album and | wanted to make music that was fun to play with a group." Theresultis an album that's raw,unexpected and compelling, with tracks like "Reservation" occupying a Tom Waits-style space between tradition and experimentation. A tour is planned. ` There is a European tour booked for November and we are starting to line up dates this summer in the US," he says. These songs are meant to live in real time. We just got to perform them once before everything shut down. lam most excited to give them another ride." PETER WATTS
Infectious tunes with 705 dressing onquintet's fifth
As you might expect ofaband featuring two members of King Gizzard & The Lizard ү Wizard (singer/
C keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith and bassist Cook Craig), The Murlocs channel a torrent of ideas into their records and have little truck with genre demarcation. But for this smart, fun and emotionally resonant set they've settled on pop-rock with а 70s bent, specifically late-era Bolan, John Lennon's solo debut and ELO, while “Illuminate The Shade" suggests White Denim as kindred spirits. Other standouts are the harmonica-splashed “Skewiff” (very early Lennon) and stonking closer *Misinterpreted", whose power-ballad build - and message - is as poignant as any
you'll hear this year.
SHARON O'CONNELL
LUKAS NELSON & PROMISE OF THE REAL
AFew Stars Apa rt FANTASY 8/10
Finding joy amid the fears of aworldunder siege
Largely written while riding out
the pandemic with his family in Texas, Nelson’s latest collection was knocked into shape during a brisk three weeks recording at Nashville’s iconic RCA Studio A. Hope springs eternal on the waltzing *We'll Be Alright”, on which Lukas’s laconic drawl sounds uncannily like dad Willie, hymnal Southern soul collides with stately country on the title track, and the strength of love through hard times warms the heart on the erin-inducing dustbowl shuffle of “More Than We Can Handle”. Nelson’s paeans to familial bonds form a loose song cycle that frequently surprises andis capable of effortlessly lifting the listener's spirits.
TERRY STAUNTON
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 29
EBRU YILDIZ
MICKIEWINTERS
NATHAN | SALSBURG
Psalms oane 8/10
Talented folk guitarist makes his bow as a singer — in Hebrew. By Sam Richards
NATHAN SALSBURG lives onan old tree farm just outside Louisville, Kentucky, with his partner Joan Shelley, their newborn baby daughter, a cat, a couple of goats and a barnful of old 78s and roots reggae 45s. He has a dream day job working for the Alan Lomax Archive and a burgeoning reputation as an intrepid folk guitarist, having released three solo albums
and backed up the likes of Shelley, The Weather Station, Shirley Collins and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. But there was still something missing.
Since forgoing the synagogue for the church of hardcore punk as a teenager, Salsburg felt he had lost touch with his essential Jewishness. And so, over the last few years, he has taken to leafing through a book of Hebrew psalms and turning them into brand new songs. It’s the kind of practice that would seem to satisfy his curatorial mindset, but unlike Salsburg’s two recent low-key Landwerk releases — which found him playing along to loops from that prodigious collection of 78s as a way of convening directly with the past — Psalms is a ‘proper’ album that marks the emergence of Salsburg as a singer- songwriter in his own right.
Certainly, Salsburg is more conscious than most of the shoulders on which he stands. On Psalms, he was keen to
30- UNCUT -SEPTEMBER2021
reference various styles of Jewish music, whether that bethe folk music of Maghrebi Jews in North Africa or the happy-clappy "American nusach" played in the Jewish summer camps he attended as a kid. But these stimuli merge naturally with his usual folk, blues and post-rock influences, becoming something fresh and his own.
Where Landwerk was slow-moving, eerie and solemn, Psalms is cautiously rousing. Opener “Psalm 157" begins with anorgan drone, introducing a resonant acoustic guitar riff reminiscent of Saharan desert rock. Salsburg's playing is bright and purposeful, capable of driving a song forward as well as filling in crucial detail. Singing mostly in Hebrew, his voice is low but not gruff, with Israeli singer-songwriter Noa Babayof providing harmonies but more often simply doubling the melody an octave higher. The aim was to remain faithful to the source material by shaping these psalm fragments into songs that listeners could play or sing along to themselves; Salsburg achieves this with simple and inviting refrains that avoid tweeness or banality.
In places, though, his ambitions are bolder. The beautiful *Psalm 33" is freighted with yearning, even when singing phrases that, in the English translation provided, may struggle to
SLEEVE NOTES
1Psalm 147
2 Psalm 19 3Psalm 47 4Psalm 90
5 Psalm 33
6Elli, Elli + Psalm 42 7 Psalm 104
8 O You Who Sleep + Psalm 96 9Psalm111 ڪڪ Producedby: JamesElkington and Nathan Salsburg Recordedat: Earthwave Studio, Shelbyville, Kentucky;Hefty, Chicago; The Loft, Chicago; ComboMusic Studios, Be'er Sheva, Israel; various home studios Personnel: Nathan Salsburg (guitar, vocals), Noa Babayof (vocals), James Elkington (dobro, organ, percussion, piano), Will Oldham (vocals), Joan Shelley (vocals), David Asher Brook (trumpet), StephenBurns (flugelhorn, trumpet), Jean Cook (viola, violin), Jacob Duncan (clarinet), Nick Macri(bass), Spencer Tweedy (drums)
engage secular listeners (“Sing gladly, O righteous, of the lord”). Salsburg’s evident passion for the project and his earnest mission to reconnect with his Jewish heritage provides the emotional trigger.
The overall effect is not unlike Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans, an album that drew heavily on the songwriter’s religious upbringing to say something about his relationship to the world in the here and now. On Psalms, it’s the arrangements — by close friend and regular collaborator James Elkington - that really elevate this album beyond the level of quaint personal project. A canopy of clarinet and strings lends the music a verdant, mystical quality, with Salsburg’s quizzical guitar figures often answered by astirring burst of flugelhorn. “Psalm 104” is swathed in descending piano chords and Hammond swirls, supporting a melody that nods to Lou Reed's “Perfect Day”, itself a kind of urban hymn.
“O You Who Sleep” — based ona poem by the medieval Hebrew poet Judah Halevi – іѕ the only song performed in English, but it provides enough lyrical fibre to give you astrong impression of Salsburg’s infectious, can-do worldview (“As birds shake off the dew of night when they wake/ Like swallows soar/And free yourself of time/That seething sea”). It’s credit to his newfound confidence that it takes you a few lines to realise the elegant lead vocal is being sung by Salsburg himself and not actually Will Oldham, who adds a counter- melody midway through.
You might suspect that a quasi- conceptual venture such as this serves partly as a protective shield for its creator, to avoid the messy business of revealing too much of themselves. But actually the opposite feels true here. For a musician who has up until now released largely instrumental music or played sideman to others, Psalms finds Salsburg stepping up to the plate as a songwriter and delivering a rich, full-blooded experience. The words may be centuries old but his emotional commitment to these songs and the way they throb with meaning and urgency - even in alanguage that will be unfamiliar to most listeners — is mightily impressive.
пап эаіѕрига have gotten weary of doing solo guitarrecords
When did yourealise this book of psalms might make fora good source of material? | wanted to do something Jewish, even if only for myself. It occurred tome that the psalms wouldbe agreat place to look as they're written largely in afirst- person voice andpart of what they are areinjunctions tosing. It made for a wonderful, almost daily practice. | waslooking for something alittleless decisive thanliturgicalhymns; the
| psalms feellike they're more seeking
thanfinding.|don'treally observe Jewishly, and part of this was finding my ownmeans of observance.
WasmakingPsalms aless dauntingprospect than writing awhole albumof your own lyrics? Yes, absolutely.Ihaveno desire to add my own writerly voice
to the conversation, Би have gotten weary of doing solo guitar records. | didn't think this would be a whole LP of singing, butreading the psalms again, justhow often we are enjoined to sing, there wasno way aroundit.So some of it was me getting over my insecurity about stepping out as a singer.
Could we therefore expect more singer-songwriter albums from youin future? Um, we'llsee! We've been working onanew Joanrecord - she's got atonofnew songs. Апа l've been doing various things here, mostly with Will[Oldham], but also accompanying other singers. Goingbackto thatstuff was amassiverelief because the pressure was so muchless intense. I'm definitely not writing it off, but categorically l'm not going to become asinger-songwriter - there are too many good ones already! INTERVIEW: SAMRICHARDS
WILLIE NILE The Day The Earth Stood Still
RIVERHOUSE
8/10
NYC songwriting maestro's _ А return
S Hammering f feverishly into the new normal - the (hopefully) post- pandemic world — Nile’s title track offers up celebration and togetherness, with disease and idiocracy pushed into the back mirror, and guitars and organs to the fore. Within this 11-song set, tracks such as “Off My Medication”, witha Sex Pistols buzz, are countered by traditional-style folk ballads like “The Justice Bell (For John Lewis)”, racial justice at centre stage. “Blood On Your Hands”, pulverising the politics of late, longtime peer Steve Earle providing a sinister answering stanza, belongs in Nile’s upper echelon. LUKE TORN
JIMNOIR
Deep Blue View poox 6/10
Mini-album fromthe Mancunian ee و ا Roberts
Some ofthe tracks
F on this six-song LP
» sound like promising preparatory sketches rather than finished pieces: potentially intriguing cinematic miniatures
filled with drones, synth strings and tinny synth voicings, like D] Shadow soundscapes made on a Manchester City Council budget. But Jim Noir has also crafted two killer songs that are worth the entrance fee alone. The
title trackis a tangle of dreamy major sevenths, brushed drums and hushed vocals over a heart-tugging John Barry string arrangement; while the dreamy baroque ballad “Have Another Cigar” is aseries of wonderfully angular chord changes, delicately orchestrated with glockenspiel and woozy strings. JOHNLEWIS
MAARJA NUUT
Hinged ÕUNAVIKS 8/10
Luscious electro-folk lullabies id theBaltic Bjork
277 Combining
| storytelling folklore, acoustic instrumentation
ж 7 andlo-fi electronica, NE ФЕЈ Estonian singer- composer Maarja Nuut occupies a unique niche in experimental folk- pop. She has been dubbed the “Baltic Bjork”, a reductive but unavoidable sonic parallel when her third solo album contains tracks like the sublime organ-powered hymnal *Vaheala Valgus/I Hear Behind The Moon" and the tape-warping techno-tribal nursery rhyme “A Feast". Guesting on several tracks, Swiss avant-jazz percussionist Nicolas Stocker lends
Vig,
Ра
MAARJA NUUT
On sampling local ghosts, buzzing insects and barn cats
stonian composer, singer and violinist Maarja Nuut spent her
globe-trotting childhood steepedin the classical and folk tradition, working with choirs and orchestras. But her eclectic albums have mostly taken a more experimental direction, blending acoustic andelectronic elements, loops andbeats and avant- world textures.
The title of Nuut's new album, Hinged, has a playfully bilingual double meaning. In Estonian, she explains, itinvokes "departed spirits or souls of all living things, be it you or the old linden tree in my backyard." The album was partly inspired by Nuutinheriting a farm from her grandmother, where she sampled the sounds of "local ghosts’, buzzinginsects anda
an agreeably wonky, honking
groove to Nuut’s lush vocalese layers in “On Vaja/In Need” and a deliciously wobbly metallic clang to “Jojobell”, which sounds like the Clangers having arave. Joyous. STEPHENDALTON
PIROSHKA Love Drips & Gathers
BELLAUNION 7/10 Band of shoegazeall-starsreturn todreamyform Since Lush’s mid- 2010s reunion only | lasted long enough ^J toyield one EP of <= "0 new material, one of the great pleasures offered by Piroshkais the chance to hear Miki Berenyi find her flowasa songwriter again. The chiming and charming likes of *Scratching At The Lid" and “Wanderlust” are typical of the second effort by the band Berenyi formed with her partner and former Moose guitarist KJ McKillop, Modern English bassist Mick Conroy, and Justin Welch of Elastica. There’s plenty more of that vintage shimmer and shine on “VO”, a tribute to the
wild barn cat called Vanja.
Nuut has astrong track recordof collaboration, including with Scottish trip- hop producer Howie B, American psych-rocker Sun Araw and Estonian electronic composer Ruum. On Hinged, she enlists Swiss jazz percussionist Nicolas Stocker. “lim abit obsessed with drummers and their different ways of approaching groove, Nuut nods.
While recording Hinged in lockdown, she would dance around the modular synths in her seaside studio. 'One of my favourite things on earthis to dance for hours and hours, and forget everything else,’ she says. It's certainly something l've missed very much during the silentisolation times." STEPHENDALTON
n"
late 4AD designer Vaughan Oliver, and “Familiar”, six pearly-dewdrop- filled minutes of Cocteaus-worthy loveliness.
JASON ANDERSON
KATHERINE PRIDDY The Eternal Rocks Beneath
NAVIGATOR
8/10
Long-awaited debut album by English folk s great white hope
Э Tts three year since 3 Priddy's debut EP Was chosen by Richard Thompson as his 'bestthing Гуе heard all year,
SO she’ S had plenty of time since to mature from youthful prodigy into fully developed artist. You can hear inthese 10 self-penned songs what attracted Thompson's ear, for the likes of “Indigo” and “Icarus” have more in common with Vashti Bunyan and Bridget St John than the current neo- trad school of Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby. Her gentle fingerpicked guitar and haunting voice are accompanied by gorgeous string arrangements that evoke Robert Kirby’s work with Nick
NEW ALBUMS Ө
| Drake, whose songs Priddy covered
rather spectacularly online during lockdown. NIGEL WILLIAMSON
ALEX REX Paradise
7/10
Ex-TremblingBells man finds peace of asortinscabrous garage-country
The sudden death of Alex Neilson’s brother Alastair in 2017 made his second Alex Rex album, Otterburn,
a purging, feral, По memorat This fourth record moves towards a more sustainable model of Glasgow underground indie, scattering absurd lyrical sparks, while the musicis licked by steel guitar, swelled by gospel harmonies and acid-fried. "What's Shouted In The Dark (The Dark Shouts Back)" typically hymns “the collapsed star of her navel/ Voice like bells in Wells Cathedral/And me like a hostage strapped to a table". There's a buoyancy to even the most lacerating lines now, a liberating
relief in pressing on.
NICKHASTED
REZO
Travalog
REZO
7/10
Atmospheric calling cardfrom
a Celtic = — Irish duo Colm
REZO O'Connell and Rory
McDaid inhabit a hazy
hinterland between жәе melodic electronica and the moodier proto-Americana of, say, Sparklehorse or Mercury Rev. This debut LP flits from minimalist odes to artist Tracy Emin's kitchen-sink upbringing (“Girl From Margate") to bluesy ruminations on the blurring of days under Covid quarantine (“Life During Lockdown") to the delicate Simon & Garfunkel folk harmonies of “This Is You”, on which O’Connell duets with his daughter Rosa. Influences are worn on sleeves throughout but the varying sonic palettes weave together beautifully, belying the fact that the tracks, through necessity, were recorded remotely, with McDaid hunkered down at home in Malaga. TERRY STAUNTON
Katherine Priddy
TAAVIARUS
CLEMENSHABICHT
Summoning
The Apple Drop r. 8/10
| LISTENER
expectation is something that
most bands who have stayed the course must contend with, choosing either to acquiesce to it, meet it halfway or defiantly turn their backs and wear the consequences. Liars, however, seem to have never even acknowledged its existence. A luxury long afforded them by their record label, maybe, but far more an indicator of their protean constitution.
Over 20 years, change really has been
Liars’ only constant.
Their 2001 debut was as an NYC-based four-piece, whose They Threw Us AllInA Trench And Put A Monument On Top was a set of pleasingly rowdy and abrasive tracks that cut Gang Of Four- and The Pop Group-style post-punk with US hardcore, but closed with a 30-minute, psych-doom raga. Singer Angus Andrew later claimed Underworld’s Beaucoup Fish was actually its inspiration, which illustrates the nature of Liars’ entertainingly unknowable mindset. Done with that, they switched to monstrously degraded noise-rock with dread-filled beats for the witchcraft- themed They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. After relocating to Berlin, they followed up with 2006’s bravura Drums Not Dead, which thrust brutalist beats to the fore while mixing fields of electronic static and no-wave guitar scree with warm, ambient drifts. Subsequent albums variously featured more structured songs, introduced strings and piano, delivered mutant dance music and more. In terms of consistency, Liars have never yielded an inch.
Which is not to say that they've been unstable. The creative partnership of
32°UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
SLEEVE NOTES
1 The Start
| 2Slow And
| Turn Inward
| 3Sekwar
| 4Big Appetite
| 5From What
| The Never Was | 6 Star Search
7 My Pulse
| To Ponder
8 Leisure War
| 9KingOf | The Crooks | 10 Acid Crop
11 New Planets
| New Undoings | НЕН
Producedby:
| Angus Andrew | Recordedat: | Oceanic Studios,
Brookvale, NSW, Australia Personnel: Angus
Andrew (vocals),
Mary Pearson Andrew (vocals,
| additional
production),
| Cameron Deyell
(guitar, bass, keys,
| vocals, additional
production),
| Laurence
Pike (drums,
| percussion, keys, | vocals, additional | production),
TanaDeyell and
| RichardDeyell
(backing vocals)
Andrew and guitarist Aaron Hemphill lasted until 2017, at which point Andrew suddenly found himself adrift. However, that split opened a fresh chapter and he made two albums in self-imposed isolation in the Australian bush, TFCF and Titles With The Word Fountain. Computer-created, they leaned on field recordings, earlier scrapped material made over and acoustic guitar craft; both were documents of their author’s external environment and inner turmoil. The Apple Drop is also a kind of mind map, representing change on several significant fronts. Firstly, it’s a stepping out of solitude and a return to teamwork for Andrew, with guitarist and bass player Cameron Deyell, drummer and percussionist Laurence Pike, and Mary Pearson Andrew, his wife, who sings and collaborated on the lyrics. On a deeper level, the record represents shifts both conceptual and perceptual resulting from Andrew’s quitting of SSRI medication and self-administration of psilocybin. He told Uncut: “I took the ’shrooms in all forms. Some group-guided ‘hero doses’, also microdosing in regular and not so micro ways." Therecord also sees him looking back at Liars' history (a first) and considering connections between records (hewas keen to foreground drums again),
| revisiting themes (thereappearance
of Mt. Heart Attack, the character that represents fear and anxiety on Drums Not Dead,is crucial) and reviving a few ideas abandoned in previous album sessions. A balance has been struck between live instrumentation and digitally treated sounds, both in experimental pieces such as closer “New Planets New Undoings”, whererumbling electronics and unintelligible vocals wash over treated keysin a gentle ebb and flow, and in songs with more conventional structures, including the TV On The Radio-toned “From What The Never Was" and “Big Appetite”, which suggests nothing so muchas aswinging Nine Inch Nails. Liars’ unpredictability has previously manifested not as genre switching but as apparent randomness within individual tracks and wilful disruption of the flow of the albums as set pieces. The Apple Drop is less obstreperous on both counts. It begins gently, with the floppy (off)beat pattern, subtle electronic drone and feel ofa corrupted Disney score that is “The Start”, then builds steadily to the dark, mid-point intensity of the monolithic “Star Search”, which summons both the ominous dread and sublime beauty of space and sees a resolution of Andrew's ongoing conflict with Mt Heart Attack. The measured climb-down before exitis via the terrific "Leisure War", with its groovy synth, Fripp-ish guitar passage and clattering beats, and the slow-fried thump of “Acid Crop", which connects to the well known “acid drop" and so supplies the album's title. It underlines one aspect of Andrew’s existential thinking too: “What we do now will forever define us/What we do now will absolutely define us/ What they do may somehow hurt us but/ What they ever gonna do about what happened to my mind?" He's clearly referring to something much broader and deeper than artistic definition but Andrew's mercurial mindset is again the key to Liars' singularity. If The Apple Drop is more, in light of their history, а considered experiential teaser than a synapse frazzler, it's his choice. Once more, expectation can go to hell.
ee ОЛ ШЕН
Angus Andrew onthe WhatdidCameron How did taking
power of musicianship DeyellandLaurence psilocybin affect
and mushrooms Pikebring? themakingof Firstand foremost, I'd say the album?
How did therecord thatthey brought alevel of Ithinkit had a profound
initially take shape? musicianship and skill that effect. Specifically, on
Ihad written demos that felt I'dnever had the privilege of howrecordedsounds
bigger than me.In my mind, Icouldhear them growing large, if fed correctly. Sol was aware the record wanted
to expand and develop symphonically.|romanticised acoustic architecture
and envisioned the sonic possibilities of letting the work breathe. Throughout the process, it felt like the album andthe narrative continually asked for "more".
working with before. For me, this kind of felt like picking up anewinstrument for the first time, in that the possibilities seemedendless. The second mostimportant thing they brought was just a complete willingness to support the vision - to allow me the space and freedom to take the work wherever | feltit should develop, despite it possibly going against their instincts.
were processedin post- production. l feel like even а small amount of psilocybin canunlock a physical musical connection, one thatreverberates beyond intellectual perception and into something much more primal andinstinctual.llet this physical connection guide most of my musical decisions. INTERVIEW: SHARON O'CONNELL
ALASDAIR ROBERTS OG VOLVUR The Old Fabled River
DRAGCITY
8/10 Scottish folkie's Norwegian fusion
То categorise Glasgow-based
| Roberts as a folk singer ignores hisfondness
| Ш for exploratory collaborations. Likewise the Oslo- based band Völvur, who tend to give traditional forms a playful battering. When Völvur’s Marthe Lea sings on “Nu Rinner Solen Opp”, the bell-like clarity ofher voice rings out over scratchy, wheezing drones. Roberts has the deceptively tentative cadences of Will Oldham, pitching in a flexible space between joy and exultation on the seasonal prayer of feeble love, “Orison Of Union". On Robert Burns’ “Song Composed In August”, the voices blend beautifully in a seasonal (temporary?) celebration of love. ALASTAIRMCKAY
SHAUN RYDER
Visits From Future Technology
SWRX
6/10
Ryder aims to kick-off the post- lockdown party, with mixed results
ФЯҒҰМ Though some
Й artists revelin
И an obscurantist
EN Surrealism, there's Ж. a sense that, with
| u Shaun Ryder's self- admittedly “nonsense” new record, deliberately bonkers lyrics, such as on the jellyfish-oriented lead single “Mumbo Jumbo”, underline a lack of real substance. That being said, Visits From Future Technology does reveal the former Mondays man quite clearly having the time of his life, and there are some undeniably head-bobbing cuts, such as “Close The Dam” and the tight-guitar-centric “Straighten Me Up”, which sounds like a great forgotten baggy banger. But this is balanced by arange of tracks that sound fairly sub-par, while the less said about the unforgivable “Pop Stars Daughters”, the better. ANDREWPRICE
REY SAPIENZ & THE CONGO TECHNO ENSEMBLE
Na Zala Zala
7/10
High-octane Afro-rave from Congolese party troupe
From its home base in Kampala, record label Nyege Nyege has uncovered
an impressive underground
strain of African electronic music that mixes technical creativity with raucous energy. This Uganda-based trio – fronted by rapper-producer Rey
Sapienz, who grew up against the backdrop of the Second Congo War
— play a breakneck fusion of techno, dancehall and frantic hand percussion atop which vocalists ricochet around like pinballs. But Na Zala Zalais more than party music. On the contrary, there’s a heaviness of spirit here, a sense of hurt to “Dancehall Pigme" and “Posa Na Bika” thatif anything only intensifies the frenetic energy. LOUISPATTISON
THE SCIENTISTS
Negativity IN THERED 7/10
Celebrated Aussie garage-punk veteransreturn
“Thought Iwas іп
the ‘in’ crowd, but that would never
be allowed,” yowls Kim Salmon on the opening song on this return of his band's 1981-86 lineup. Ifit’s rather more ofa stretch 40 years on, there’s still some justification in his claim to be an outsider, and Negativity sees the four refreshed and diverging from swamp/surf type, ready to throw afew punches. The malevolent, Stooges- and Suicide-styled noise of their definitive Blood Red Riveris less apparent, but attitudinal chops and unpredictability abound, notably with flanged, scuzz-rock epic “Seventeen” and “Moth Eaten Velvet”, asweet, undisguised tribute to Lou Reed
and co, with strings. SHARONO'CONNELL
TREVOR SENSOR On Account Cf Exile Vol 1
HIGHBLACKDESERT
8/10
Illinois drifter seesanew hard rainfalling
Sensor spent much of ON the four years since his ACCOUNT debut, Andy Warhol's OF _ Dream, dogged by
EXILE visions of personal
a and American decay. Theresultant apocalyptic songs see
him slam his razor-edged rasp against
the wall, volume bleeding into the
=
So,
Rey Sapienz& TheCongo TechnoEnsemble |
可 E \ ` з A : * 4 а v т ы a
red, asif dynamiting past the pain. Then in a desiccated croon, “Sawdust Chokes The Wind” makes aslumped prayer for company in a forgotten town, like a post-industrial Sinatra. This is rock’n’roll of great personal purpose, finding gleeful resolution in recognising how bad things have got, and still refusing to buckle. Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs comes to mind, in the discernment of beauty in dismaying times. NICKHASTED
SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE The VeiledSea
THREELOBEDRECORDINGS
7/10
With his new one, Ben Chasny proves that the only constant is change.
TheSix Organs leader has spent
his career defying expectations. Over the past 15 or so years he's morphed from freak-folk ambassador to psych-rock blaster to textural drone architect with nary a blink — asort of gnostic trickster. A new album from him is always a curious proposition and, with The Veiled Sea, he distills his unpredictability into one single work, presenting alineup of songs that have little to do with each other beyond the realm of an omnivorous appetite. Electric guitar blitz. Beats. Free jazz. A Faust cover, even. It’s weird and enticing, hypnotic and jarring. In a word: it’s Chasny.
ERINOSMON
THE SHADRACKS From Human Like Forms
6/10
Medway three-piece s garage-
punk secondLP - A band produced
by Billy Childish
and featuring Billy
Childish's son, Huddie
Shadrack, on Billy
Childish's favourite
Soccer Committee's Mariska Baars
LA
record label are going to sound a lot like Billy Childish, which is no bad thinginthe caseof The Shadracks. Rumbling opener *Don't Let Go" sets atoneof down-and-dirty garage punk, with Huddie supplying superb Dave Vanian-inspired vocals on the jagged new wave of “You Can't Lose" and the title track. It’s not all one-paced: “You Are Adored” brings a pleasing moment of gothic tenderness, while “Did You Like It Then” offers a sweet, country- influenced ballad.
PETER WATTS
SOCCER COMMITTEE
Tell From The Grass morc 9/10
Minimal oneiric miniatures via the Netherlands
On her first album
in 14 years, Mariska
Baars of Soccer
Committee makes
great virtue of very
little. As with its predecessor, the 2007 album sC, Tell From The Grass features Baars' lovely, unforced voice, and a smoky, mottled guitar thatrecalls the muted tone of jazz guitarists such as Barney Kessel. Atits most layered, as on the wispy folk of “Hazy” and “Interstellar”, it’s a little like Cat Power circa Moon Pix and You Are Free. But more often than not, it's more bare-boned - just the essence of the song: one note, and then, slowly, carefully, the next.
JONDALE TEXAS Нівмс 7/10 Sturdy pop soul, Бо пеш andre-upholstered | [It may be pure coincidence that Texas's first album in ТТЕ four years shares its ТЕ A AS Hi name with a revered Memphis record label,
but there's no denying the smooth erooves of Willie Mitchell and Al Green isatemplate for several cuts here
(*You Can Call Me", *Unbelievable"). Its perhaps expected, as Sharleen Spiteri and bassist co-writer Johnny McElhone say much of the material is basedon revisited sketches unused from 1997's multi-platinum, soulful White On Blonde, although “Just
Want To Be Liked" follows a more cinematic, mariachi-flavoured country cantina path, and the Wu-Tang Clan collaboration title track unashamedly lunges ata pop jugular.
TERRY STAUNTON
MICHELE SIBILIONI
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 33
NEW ALBUMS
DISCOVERED
ALEXA VISCIUS
LIAMKAZAR
Due North
WOODSIST/MARE
8/10
Infectious debut from Jeff Tweedy and Steve Gunn sideman. By Michael Bonner
| DURING lockdown, Liam Kazar found new ways to make aliving. With his regular gigs playing in Jeff Tweedy’s live band on hold, Kazar opened Isfahan — а delivery-only kitchen, named after a Duke Ellington song, whose cuisine is inspired by his Armenian heritage.
Such resourcefulness has been evident throughout Kazar’s career so far. As a teenager in Chicago, һе was amember of Kids These Days, an eight-piece musical collective whose sole album Traphouse Rock was produced by Tweedy. Since then, Kazar has busied himselfas a journeyman guitarist, performing with Tweedy, Steve Gunn, Chance the Rapper and Daniel Johnston. Before the pandemic, he and some friends put together a David Bowie tribute show.
Inevitably, Kazar - born Liam Cunningham - arrived late to a solo career. He finally made his debut solo recording on Uncut's Wilcovered compilation in 2019, where his version of “Sunloathe” came bathed in warm slide tones that foregrounded the George Harrison influence on the original. Meanwhile, the first sightings
of Kazar'soriginal material arrived last year with “Shoes So Tight", asprightly, soulful jam built around Kazar's core band: Spencer Tweedy on drums, Lane Beckstrom on bass, Dave Curtin
_ manning a punchy Prophet VI and co-producer James Elkington on pedal steel. The video found
34۰ UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
Kazar in full Pierrot make-up, inspired by Lindsey Kemp - but with his mop of tousled brown hair, he looked more like Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Tour. The song was a terrific calling card from an artist who, nine years after his recording debut with Kids These Days, had at last found his own voice. “I lost afew good years killing time,” he sings on “So Long Tomorrow”, which seems like he's doing himself a great disservice: Due North might have been along time coming, butit’s very much the work of someone who’s benefitted from spending along time watching others do it well. Much like a chef at a pop-up restaurant, you might say — following treasured recipes and putting his own spin on them.
Tweedy, of course, is an influence - but notin ways you mightimagine. There's something of Wilco's inherent intensity in the thrumming, needle-y guitarintro to “Shoes Too Tight", and on “On А Spanish Dune", which recalls the mellow and soulful temperament of Sky Blue Sky. You can also hear Tweedy’s lyrical dryness in lines such as “I hang my coat on any old hook/But I prefer the second from the left” on “So Long Tomorrow”, and his fragile songcraft in lines like “It seems I haven't changed/ Half as muchas I let you down” on “Something Tender”.
But instead of Tweedy’s affable, rumpled narrators, Kazar has Swagger — even when addressing matters of the heart. “Don’t leave me hanging on the laces of your shoes,” he sings on “Old Enough For You”. But it’s hard to sound
SLEEVE NOTES
Lane Beckstrom provide
Foxhall and Мааа
and “Shoes Too Tight”,
you'll hear pianos, +30 ong synths and multiple Tomorrow 。 guitar lines artfully 2 Old Enough For You enter and depart the 3ShoesTooTight 50095, but they never 4NothingToYou risk overwhelming their 5 OnASpanish momentum. Even the Dune more reflective songs e ӘПЕРІП arerichly textured. The 7I veBeen soulful grooves of *Give Where YouAre My Word" and spacey 8NoTimeFor n А Eterni expanse of “Something ernity б 9 Give My World Tender" both find a 10 Something complementary space Tender between Elkington's | anything other than quu lachrymose slide and confident when the Producedby: theanalogue burblings music swings like this. LiamKazarand froma Korg. Then there’s Spencer Tweedy and JamesElkington ”Kazarsvoice.Hehasa Recordedat:
slightly theatrical croon,
tight, upbeat backing - Studio, Chicago; indebted to Bowie and everything is lit up, like Flying Cloud, David Byrne, that brings the first day ofsummer West Shokan: different weights of — while Kazar and Refuge Arts, feeling to the songs. He Curtin’s array of synths Appleton, WI projects playfulness to provide infectious Personnelincludes: the up-tempo strut of undercurrents. On “Old LiamKazar(gtrs, “So Long Tomorrow” Enough For You”, Kazar bass, keys, vocals), hit also warmth to : Spencer Tweedy . pes
and his cohorts sound the wistful “I’ve Been
(drums), Lane like they’re channelling Beckstrom (bass), Where You Are”. Talking Heads, while JamesElkington Even with lockdown, “Shoes Too Tight” (pedal steel, Due North has taken boogies along on perc) AndrewSa three years to complete, crunchy, glam grooves. (vocals) which suggests that He maintains this wide- | Kazarhastakenthe open spirit of optimism timetothinkeverything
on “Frank Bacon" - “Keepin’ my feetonsolid ground/I’m never gonna let you down” — where Elkington's slide twangs playfully against Kazar's layered guitars. But Kazar has evidently worked hard not just on his songwriting. His arrangements have grain and depth, even on deceptively lighter songslike *So Long Tomorrow"
Liam Kazar: "There's a deep
sharedmusicallanguage"
Whathave youlearnt from Jeff Tweedy andSteve Gunn? KAZAR: Thebiggestthingl ve
taken from Jeff andSteveis that writingsongs andplaying themis a wonderful and harmless way tolive your life.| feellucky to have toured with two folks who ve beenatit
for some time andstill feel like
it's a worthwhile venture.
Youhaveastrongrelationship with Lane Beckstrom and Spencer Tweedy. What do they bring to the table?
That's wherelstarted.Firsttwo people outside my family | played music with, whenlwas about 12. | knew they were great but then you meetnew people andrealise youre lucky tohave come up playing with musicians like them. There's a deep
through. After all, having spent so long at the side of other artists, wouldn’t he want to ensure his debut album was good enough
to hold its own in such exalted company. As the final synth whooshes of “Something Tender” evaporate, Due North feels like Kazar coming to terms with his place in the rock’n’roll firmament.
shared musicallanguage.|!can talk through asongideain about one minute with those two. They're lovely!
Who are your key influences ontherecord?
AlGreen's The Belle Album was
my biggestinfluence. The acoustic guitar playing on "AII'NAI is brilliant - definitely wherelgotthe ideatostart "Shoes Too Tight" with an acoustic guitar solo.
Ifl were to order delivery tonight from|sfahan, what would yourecommend? KashkiBademjan, Persian eggplant dip; Jingalov Hat, Armenianherb- stuffedhandpies; Aash-e Dogha, yoghurt soup with lamb meatballs; Mussakhan, Palestinian roast chicken; SabziPolo with Tahdig, crispy rice withherbs andsaffron; Fereni, rose water pudding with fig preserves. INTERVIEW: MICHAEL BONNER
TORRES
Thirstier merce 8/10
Mackenzie Scott unleashes her inner joyonexuberantfifthalbum
“T wanted to channel my intensity into something that
felt positive and constructive, as opposed to being intense in a destructive or eviscerating way," says Mackenzie Scott of Torres’ latest. This desire to create joyous intensity is apparent throughout, from the raucous guitar-growl-meets- seamless-pop-swagger of opener “Are You Sleepwalking?" to the grunge- pop of the title track. Scott's ability
to weave between monster guitar eruptions, refined pop and stripped- back moments that allow her voice
to soar is a constant. This approach applies all the way until the album’s closing moments, refusing to go out on a delicate note and instead ending on a Nine Inch Nails-esque blaster. DANIEL DYLAN WRAY
ХАМ TYLER & MAD PROFESSOR
Clarion Call arwa 7/10
Sweetreggaefromformer Mission Controllers
Fife-based Tyler
has sketched an eclectic career, including a successful collaboration
with producer Kramer. She first encountered Mad Professor when she and her former partnerin Technique, Kate Holmes, contributed to Mission Control's Dub Showcase. Apartfrom a couple of dub deconstructions, the Professor keeps it light, pushing Tyler's sweet, airy vocals to the top of the mix, notably on the delicious “Silver And Gold". There's a gentle call for unity on “Clarion Call” but the highlight is an extraordinary cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Be Here To Love Me”, acountry lament reborn as lovers’ rock. ALASTAIRMcKAY
U-ROY Solid Gold U-Roy trouansamaicaseme 6/10
Last will andtestament of the legendary toaster
Thetitle suggests aretrospective compilation but although Solid Gold includes remakes
of several U-Roy classics, it's an entirely new album representing his final recordings before his death in February 2021. His vocals — as exuberant in his seventies as half a century ago — were recorded in 2018 by Trojan Jamaica's mainman Zak Starkey who then overdubbed further contributions from Shaggy, Clash guitarist Mick Jones, Sly & Robbie and others. Highlights include a thrilling duet with Ziggy Marley on
“Trenchtown Rock” and an echoing, dubby take on “Man Next Door” with Santigold, who was born the year U-Roy recorded his original DJ version of the song. NIGELWILLIAMSON
SUZIEUNGERLEIDER Му Name ls Suzie Ungerleider
7/10
Thename has changed but - thankfully - little else has
Vancouver songwriter Suzie Ungerleider traded for nearly
25 years under the name Oh Susanna,
in which guise she released an impressive catalogue
of smart, waspish Americana. Her ditching of her previous identity seems a combination of desire to at once completely embrace her songs and dissociate herself from the less savoury heritage of the Stephen Foster song whose title she'd borrowed. Itis no slight against My Name Is... to suggest that it hasn't made much difference. On tracks suchas “Ships” and “Mount Royal”, in particular, Ungerleider remains a superlative scene-setter
and storyteller, with a voice managing the rare combination of being at once delicate and careworn. ANDREWMUELLER
VILLAGERS
Fever Dreams гоммо 8/10
Immersive fifth fromlrish collective
Over five albums, Weller collaborator Conor O’Brien has strived to combine his distinctive but fragile
= voice with music that applied folky sensibilities to more expansive and busy R&B productions. Atits best here, this produces minor masterpieces like the shimmering romance of “The First Day” or “Circles In The Firing Line", alithe and bristling combination of John Grant and John Misty, which repeatedly pulls the rug from under your feet with its cheek. The dense and atmospheric “Song In Seven” is another highlight, while “Full Faith In Providence” brings the mood down a notch without reducing impact. PETER WATTS
MARTHA WAINWRIGHT Love WillBe Reborn
PHEROMONE RECORDS/COOKING VINYL.
8/10
Awelcomeretum after five years
Wainwright wraps her gloriously unique voice around 11 original songs. Opener “Middle
E 5 Of TheLake" һаѕа rockier feel than she's dabbled in for sometime, with loose drumbeats and dusty guitar giving her a perfect framework for her bombastic delivery. Elsewhere there's “Getting Older", which opens witha slight salsa sound before turning into something the
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Frontman Conor O'Brien on “becoming unmoored”
onor O'Brien finished recording backing tracks for the new
Villagers album as Ireland's nationallockdown began inspring 2020.Recording had startedin a spirit of collaboration at the end of 2019 as aseries of full-band jams but were finished by O'Brien in relative isolation, workingremotely with brass, woodwind and string players. Villagers fine sixth LP, Fever Dreams, bristles withideas that emerged from both stages of this process. "| wanted to feel that collective sense of discovery with the musicians l'’d been playing with for the previous few years, he says of the initial recordings. ‘I think
youcan hear the excitementin the recordings. There were quite a few eureka moments - simplifying So Simpatico’ springs to mind, as does sitting at my piano and ‘Momentarily’ spilling out over the course of anhour or two. Jamming ‘Restless Endeavour’ with the band andrealising it was becoming something special andunmoored.”
O'Brien is looking forward to going on the road for the first time since December 2019. "| just want to play music in a roomfull of people again; this crazy year-and-a-half has revealed to me the importance of ashared creative expression. | feel like l'm going to explode with excitement.” PETER WATTS
Patti Smith Group would’ve turned their hand to The gorgeous title track, meanwhile, dives into heartbreak and misery and comes up hopeful. Wainwright wrote it in “its entirety within 10 or 15 minutes”, and that fizzing creativity is audible across the whole record. HANNAH VETTESE
WAVVES
Hideaway FAT POSSUM 7/10
Nathan Williams gets reflective and returns tohisroots on seventh LP
Returning to his parents' backyard shed where he made much of his earliest material, Nathan Williams connects back with his origins - as wellasthe record label that released his 2010 breakthrough King Of The Beach. The fuzz-heavy pop-punk he was making back then still echoes loudly here but by connecting with producer Dave
Tatts off: Wavves
Sitek, the material also sounds crisper. “Thru Hell” is an infectious anxiety anthem that sets the tone for an album rooted in the insecurities of getting older. “It’s been torture existing this long,” he screams on the hard-hitting “Hideaway”. However, Williams has
a clear knack of peppering his dread with plenty of pop-heavy hooks. DANIEL DYLAN WRAY
DANIEL WYLIES COSMIC ROUGHRIDERS Atoms AndEnergy
LATENIGHT FROMGLASGOW
8/10
Cosmic sensibilities оп 1970s-styled seventh from Glaswegian singer
— Daniel Wylie had amomentin the
zm spotlight when Alan McGee took the best songs from Cosmic ‘Rough Riders’ two self-financed albums and released them in 2000 on his Poptones label as Enjoy The Melodic Sunshine, ajangle- pop classic. Wylie quit his own band not long after. Atoms And Energy is his seventh solo album. Basic tracks were recorded in Glasgow in 2019 and completed in lockdown but much of it sounds like a great lost LA singer- songwriter album from about 1971, with echoes of CSNY, Love, The Beach Boys and the Neil Young of After The Gold Rush. ALLAN JONES
SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT‘ 35
RICHGILLIGAN, GAÉLLELEROYER
"Youresittin inadentist schair/Andthey've got music for youthere”
THE BEACH BOYS
FeelFlows: The Sunflower & Surf's Up Sessions 1969-1971
CAPITOL/UME
Weighty boxset uncovers the full extent of a wonderfully fertile
ICONIC ARTISTS GROUPLLC/BROTHERRECORDS INC.
transitional period for “America’s Top Surfin’ Group”. By Rob Hughes
N15 August 1970, The Beach Boys repaired to Brian Wilson’s house in Bel-Air, setting up in the studio downstairs. Sunflower, their new album, was due out in a fortnight, but the band were already sketching ideas for a follow-up. Wilson laid down a basic track for * Til I Die”, a song he'd been struggling with for some time but was yet to perfect. Mike Love,
meanwhile, unveiled the quietly rapturous “Big Sur”.
Trailed this June ahead of Feel Flows – a major compilation centred around Sunflower and its 1971 successor, Surf’s Up — “Big Sur” finds the band in their preferred milieu: hymning the glory ofa California that’s part real and part fantasy, where crimson sunsets are followed by dutiful golden dawns and bubbling mountain springs feed inexorably into the ocean. A less mellifluous version of the song would surface as the opening section of Holland’s “California Saga" in 1973, but the original is far more persuasive. Much bootlegged but widely unavailable until now, its belated appearance teased the possibility of a trove of hidden revelations within The Beach Boys’ catalogue.
36 > UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
BEACH BOYS
FEEL FLOWS
Feel Flows makes good on that promise. Produced by Mark Linett and archive . manager Alan Boyd - the capable hands who delivered 2011's The Smile Sessions – it's asetas vastasitis remarkable, containing no fewer than 135 tracks, 108 of which have never been officially released before. Strung across five CDs are various live cuts, outtakes, demos, alternate mixes and isolated backing tracks that show the full extent of The Beach Boys' endeavours at a critical point in their history. The tragedy back then, as the late '60s gave way to a new decade, was that most people had stopped listening to The Beach Boys. After a string of dismal-selling albums, Capitol showed no interestin extending their contract beyond 1969. And Jimi Hendrix's tart assessment ofthe band as a “psychedelic barbershop quartet” confirmed the suspicion - certainly among those who still only equated The Beach Boys with sand, sun and breakers - that they just weren't made for these heavier, more socio-political times. Released with the full co-operation ofthe surviving members, Feel Flows attempts to finally lay waste a tired myth. The Beach Boys were brimming with ideas for Sunflower, each memberspurredbyanew №
Hittinga
second
peak: The
BeachBoys
circa1970's | Sunflower
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SEPTEMBER 2021 : UNCUT · 37
ICONIC ARTISTS GROUPLLC/BROTHERRECORDS INC.
Carl Wilson (left): the spiritof The E Beach Boys” @ 1 ғ.
sense of artistic liberation. Brian Wilson was slowly returning to action after the psychic collapse that followed the aborted Smile sessions, though he would never again bethe dominantforce that had captained Pet Sounds. “Brian probably knew he couldn't make a whole album at that point,” says Bruce Johnston in Howie Edelson’s comprehensive liner notes for Feel Flows. “So we got the best out of Brian and also discovered the other guys in the band could write. And it was interesting. It had alot of textures as far as the songs, the voices, the leads."
Rooted in remastered versions of Sunflower and Surf's Up, Feel Flows stakes anumber of claims. The accompanying livetracks prove that, at their best, The Beach Boys could be a pretty formidable rock'n'roll band, an attribute not always givenitsrightful acknowledgement. Carl leads the charge on a heroically vigorous "It's About Time", from 1971, flanked by fat horns and whirling organ. The same applies to Al Jardine's “Susie Cincinnati", recorded at an Anaheim show in 1976 during the “Brian’s Back!" campaign, marking the eldest Wilson's return to the live stage. Meanwhile, a 1972 rendition of "Long Promised Road" is nothing short of majestic, as is a Carl-steered “Surf’s Up",
CarlAndThe Passions - "So Tough" | BROTHER/REPRISE, 1972 Bolstered by the addition of Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar from Carl Wilson protégés The Flame, The Beach Boyslocate the sweet spotbetween West Coast pop and experimental daring. Of Brian's minimal contributions, Marcella’ is the keeper, while two Dennis tunes ("Маке It Good" and "Cuddle Up") were rescued from an aborted solo album. Standout moment is “All This Is That’. 7/10
38 - UNCUT .SEPTEMBER2021
of Brian’s studio delicacy for a jazzier kind of ebb and flow. Carl’s creative awakening is a key aspect of Feel Flows, beginning with “Long Promised Road" and the
title track, both written with Beach Boys manager Jack Rieley. He emerges as a fine musician too, but it’s his capacity as an arranger and producer that guides the band's aesthetic. Brian had a point when hecalled the youngest Wilson brother "the spirit of The Beach Boys".
Thatsaid, it's Dennis Wilson who reveals himself as arguably the true star of Feel Flows. Having partially filled the Brian void on 1969’s 20/20, Sunflower saw him reconcile the twin poles of his songwriting with the vivaciously rocking “Slip On Through" and the sensitive “Forever”. Here, on disc five, arethe gorgeous remnants ofa lost solo project, tentatively titled Poops/Hubba Bubba. Co-written in 1971 with Daryl Dragon, later to find fame as one half of Captain & Tennille, Dennis’s songs achieve a new kind of elevation. “Behold The Night” isa harpsichord ballad pitched between anguish and longing, allthe more striking forits understated elegance. *Old Movie (Cuddle Up)" was revamped for the following year's Carl
And The Passions - *So Tough", butis
much more effective as a wordless chorale, joined by the similarly blissful “Hawaiian Dream”. But it's the crystalline, piano- led “Medley: All Of My Love / Ecology” and “Before” (the latter punctured by distorted guitar) that signify his unbound talent, both serving to foreshadow the wounded, soulful beauty of 1977's Pacific Ocean Blue, Dennis's solo debut.
SAILING ON
mmm Е
Holland
BROTHER/REPRISE, 1973 Temporarily shifting
E 5 basetorecordinthe Еа. Netherlands only EX brought their homeland closer, as evinced by "California Saga’, a three-part eco suite written by Mike Love and Al Jardine, with contributions from American poet John Robinson Jeffers. Aside from "Funky Pretty’, Brian's major offering is arevived "Sail On, Sailor’, co-written with Van Dyke Parks and expertly delivered by Blondie Chaplin. 8/10
Unsurprisingly, given its sheer size, Feel Flows also makes room for a fair share of curiosities. Disc two closes with а cloying cover of “Seasons In The Sun”, produced by Al Jardine and Terry Jacks at Brian’s house in the summer of 1970. Never mind that Jacks would turn it into a huge solo hit a few years down the line. Here, sequenced together with Love’s “Big Sur” and Dennis’s “Sound Of Free", it feels like The Beach Boys are merely slumming it.
The decidedly odd “My Solution”, also from the Surf’s Up sessions, makes its bow too. Recorded on Halloween night, it finds Brian going full Vincent Price, playing the mad scientist over descending chords and various sound effects. “Sweet And Bitter”, sung by Mike Love, is more intriguing but equally strange, essentially a healthy living manual with a jokey plug for the Radiant Radish, Brian’s short-lived grocery store in West Hollywood.
A good portion of discs three and four are taken up with in-progress backing tracks and a cappella cuts from the Sunflower and Surf's Up sessions. And whilethisis hardly a new tactic for Beach Boys compilers, it does at least underscore how the rich complexity of the syncopated vocal arrangements were such an integral part of the band’s identity. More directly engaging are the alternative takes. A stretched-out version of the august “’ Til I Die", with a lingering bass and vibraphone intro, attempts to inject Brian’s existential crisis with a misplaced feelgood factor. No longer is he lost on the ocean or perishing іп a valley. Instead, he declares, “I found my way". By contrast, a sparser take on *Surf's Up" (only one of several variants on offer throughout) only accentuates its allusive vulnerability.
Feel Flowsis emphatic proofthat The Beach Boys never stopped making sublime, artful, spiritually invested music, no matter how far they'd fallen in popular opinion. Post-Pet Sounds, the incentive, as Al Jardine observes, was “to find a way to move on beyond ‘Good Vibrations’. That wasthe pinnacle." In that context, Sunflower and Surf's Up represent their second great peak.
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Three more essential post- 71 Beach Boys albums Í
2: Love You Î BROTHER/REPRISE, 1977 "I The successor to 1976's
solo Brian project before falling under the Beach Boys banner. Synths and keyboards abound, but theres an endearingly imperfect quality to the texture of many of these songs, which slalom between pensive ballads, celestial meditations, marriage, schooldays nostalgia and tributes to TV host Johnny Carson. Weird and welcoming in equal measure. 8/10
BEACH BOYS
in, t FEEL FLOWS
SLEEVE NOTES
DISC ONE Sunflower - Original Album Sunflower - Live + Bonus Tracks
DISCTWO Surf'sUp - Original Album Surf'sUp -Live *Bonus Tracks
DISC THREE Sunflower Sessions 1969-1970 ACappella
DISCFOUR
Surf's Up Sessions - ACappella +Bonus Tracks
DISC FIVE
Bonus Disc
1. This Whole World 2.Add Some Music To Your Day 3.Don't Go Near The Water 4.Surf'sUpPart 1 5.Soulful OldMan Sunshine
6.l'm Goin' Your Way
7. WherelsShe 8.Carnival (Over Тһе Waves/Sobra Las Olas)
9. It's Natural 10.Medley: All Of My Love / Ecology 11.Before 12.Behold The Night
13. Old Movie (Cuddle Up) 14.Hawaiian Dream
15.Settle Down/ Sound Of Free
16.l' ve Got A Friend 17.'TillDie 18.BackHome 19.Back Home 20.Won't You TellMe
21.Won't You TellMe 22.Barbara 23.Slip On Through 24. Susie Cincinnati 25.My Solution
26. YouNever Give Me Your Money 27.Medley: Happy Birthday, Brian / God Only Knows 28. YouNeedA Mess Of Help To Stand Alone
29. Marcella
Al Jardine Bruce Johnston
How were things in The Beach Boys camp during the late 60s? AL JARDINE: It was difficult being
a Beach Boy in the years after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Tough, really tough. And of course there was increasing negativity with the Vietnam War. It wasn't very cool to be
a Beach Boy, it wasn’t "Fun Fun Fun” any more. So we were hitting a big wallof change. Things were definitely moving quite rapidly and we were just on the edge of it.
How did the band deal with Brian's withdrawal from leadership?
BRUCE JOHNSTON: Brian was kind of peeling back a little. It's kind of like a running track; you're going to get tired out. You're not going to win the Olympics every year. We had a recording contract and product requirements, so the other guysinthe band suddenly had more of a chance and started writing. I don't think we created as many hits, but certainly, artistically for the guys, it was like: *Hey, Ican do that!" Brian would bein and out ofthe studio and wouldn't produce every track, so you had different tones ofthe band in terms of writing, singing and production. It was areally interesting period. JARDINE: We all filled the vacuum that Brian created. He was always there, but notin a dominant way, not at the forefront any more. It was more of a supporting cast role. He was more or less following the lead of his younger brother Carl, who was beginning to become areally good producer. And
"Everybody was turningonandwe werekindofturning
off": TheBeach BoysinLondon, November 16, 1970
myself and Mike, of course, and Dennis, who started to make his own category of music. He was like his older brother, but in a different way. So things started to open up for us, individually.
How did that manifestitself in the studio?
JARDINE: We were expressing ourselves without drugs, which of course is completely contrary to what was going on at the time. Everybody was turning on and we were kind of turning off, into the transcendental state of mind, encouraging people not to use drugs. Mike’s into it, I still doit, McCartney does it. We all still meditate in our own ways. It really does help a great deal and the music reflected that. It was amore passionate and subtle kind
of music. For instance, “Our Sweet Love" [on Sunflower], was something that Brian had started, then Carl and I finished it. Itwas just a beautiful little love song. We put those kinds ofthings on there because they were really good songs, not because they were about some cultural shift, trying to be something we weren't.
One of the most striking things about that era was Denniss emergence as a songwriter. Did youknow hehaditin him? JOHNSTON: None of us did, including
BRUCE JOHNSTON
ARCHIVE O
Dennis. In January 1966 we were in Japan and had alot of time on our hands. We played about 14 shows, so I started showing Dennis how to play the piano and how to chord. Ikind ofunlocked what was already in there and he started putting it all together. I think his song “Forever” is fabulous.
Whatdo yourecall of the Sunflower sessions? JOHNSTON:I think that's thetime when the band was asfriendly as it could be. Everybody was cheering everybody else on with their songs. I did “Deirdre” апа “Tears In The Morning" and Brian had “Add Some Music To Your Day” and “Cool, Cool Water". It's just a great album, Iloved everybody's songs
on there. And I kind of like that Sunflower is underrated, because I think that makes it
. really special. You have to dig a little to
find it. Sunflower is my favourite Beach Boys album over Pet Sounds.
Everybody seemed to continue that forminto Surf s Up... JARDINE: We were just doing what we had to do. We were literally putting our careers back together again on Surf’s Up, by finishing the songs [from Smile] and creating a few others, like “’Til