Le Poisson

It isn’t often that one finds oneself overwhelmed purely by an artist’s nose for pop. Grace Ives very clearly has every sense attuned to an ear-worming hit; practically every tune on Girlfriend is a banger, the only thing that can force one of these tunes out of my head is another one. 

Light-Years was supposed to be a cultural moment and its failure to achieve anything resembling that is the fault of both artists equally. Premier’s beats are typically luxurious but immobile and trudging. Nas rolled out the sort of comfortable, mundane bars he was so guilty of doing in his dreadful stretch of 2004-17 (with added crypto). Light-Years should have been a celebration of legends; instead it was exceptionally dull.

Even after the Go! Team developed from a solo outfit into a band, it took over a decade for them to lose – albeit temporarily – the raps and double Dutch chants that had made their sound remarkable. The Scene Between marked a shift to more straightforward noise pop with a series of prominent and sugary lead vocalists, more subtle sampling and a lot less audial identity. 

Aye, the one with the Led Zep cover/interpolation/reinterpretation. I find it so interesting how Zorn has often attempted to align himself with the conventionally cooler side of rock, the sex and menace and swagger. To me, of course, he’ll always be too nerdy to exist in that same universe – even the aforementioned Led Zep track ‘9X9’ cannot help but overcomplicate – but he’s cooler in his own way. Otherwise, The Crucible has the Moonchild Trio (again, that is Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn and Joey Baron, one of the most productive musical vehicles of Zorn’s career this century) on good form. 

In 1986 Peter Brötzmann released a live album as part of a group called Last Exit, which also featured Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson. You’d probably call that release rock, though in its absolute loosest, noisiest sense. Brötzmann and Laswell’s follow-up, however, is very much not rock. Low Life is even less structurally and instrumentally bound, most interesting in its soundtrack-esque approach to atmosphere – the closest I’ve ever heard to Brötzmann making ‘mood music’.

Is 20 years a bit young for a band to be in legacy act mode? Perhaps, but there have certainly been more youthful retirees than the Clientele – and few peak eras were more productive than the band circa 2000-2010. Music for the Age of Miracles is fairly typical legacy fare: an ever-so-slightly overlong collection of songs that were new but did not sound it, often harking back to specific prior achievements in the band’s catalogue, all totally comfortable for listener and artist.

So often the measure of success for electronic music – at least in the minds of fans, and especially breakcore heads – is degrees of aggression or gnarliness, how much something tests a listener and must be endured. Bogdan Raczynski’s music has rarely succeeded according to those criteria, but it has in plenty of other ways. Alright! is drill ’n’ bass with line upon line of dreamy synthesiser, one man’s lone quest to fashion his own electro-utopia. It is just a shame that its markers for success were so narrow: Alright! would be Raczynski’s final release before he was forced to take a 12-year hiatus due to his music career becoming economically unfeasible. Electronic musos, open your ears. Alright? Alright!

You get the feeling that any mistakes in the musicianship on Fake Train only added to the quality of the overall art. This is well-written, pop-inclined but fairly unspectacular post-hardcore of the Big Black and Sonic Youth schools but its critical thrill is its looseness. Guitar music prone to collapse at any moment. 

Every era has its luddite classics and the 2000s had no shortage of ’em. Alongside the likes of Kid A and, erm, Muse in its scepticism of modern life was Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, which anxiously spiralled about the promises, impacts and disappointments of technology. Much of the same themes remain totally on-the-nose today, but why get depressed about it? Instead, celebrate the longevity of an indie classic!

Impala, the first Songs: Ohia foray into hi-fi and full-band, was somewhat shy and awkward, its clumsy organ more a forced artistic shift than Jason Molina’s own instinct. Axxess & Ace, by contrast, embellished and elaborated upon Molina’s art. Restrained when required but sprawling with electrics, strings and backing vocals when not, it both accentuated Molina’s songwriting and made it more open and accessible. 

These are trying times indeed, made all the more trying by subpar new James Blake music. Blake is essentially known for two things, the distinction of his electronic production and the power of his songwriting. Trying Times half-asses both. The electronics are tepid, even nondescript, the writing rife with boring sop and the sort of mindless platitudes one so often gets from the detached celebrity class. 

Living does not persuade me that Mark William Lewis is any more worthy of fame or celebration than any other Hackney hobbyist. He audibly loves Dean Blunt, just like everyone else in this city right now.

Ralphie Choo puts so much effort into concocting an atmosphere; mellow, dreamlike pop smothering the whimsy of Tyler, croons of Frank, latin tinges of Rosalía and a few dashes of trap. But that effort is deceptive: too often these textures are no more than a palette, rarely particularly purposeful or well explored. It is easy to get convinced that there is more to Supernova than there is. 

In the 2020s the way Beverley Glenn-Copeland expressed his spirituality shifted. Less of The Ones Ahead is in a new age style and even less is communicated with poetic, abstract lyrics. Instead the subjects are joy, love, belief – all of which, I’m sure most will agree, are often at their greatest power when expressed with unwavering directness.

Kim Gordon’s first trap record The Collective swaggeringly fashioned its own version of the genre. Play Me is more varied but less bold and more clearly tied to trap norms; Gordon is now participating in a genre rather than redefining it. It’s still cool and well done, just less potent.

Much of the same krauty folk loops as 2008’s Un día and with similar appeal, though with a little more ambient space, a few more meanders and much fuckin’ weirder album cover.

Fakemink’s most besotted are as here for the production as the lyrics; even when the beats are not his own, they’re a marvel of weightless patter and post-bloghouse shimmer.