#ahnnu

Ahnnu — Special Forces (NNA Tapes)

'Special Forces' by Ahnnu

Leland Jackson's first missiles as Ahnnu were a different shade of beat tape. Couch and Prohabitat stood out with their felt textures, packing miniature manipulations into far-reaching, beat-centric collages. Percussive propulsions carried his next few releases, Battered Sphinx and World Music, but whenever metered and “kit”-centric percussion surfaced, they felt separated from their concurrent sounds. Once Leland adopted his footwork-centric second moniker Cakedog, inaugurated with Menace In The Phantom in 2014, his Ahnnu output dipped deeper into collage, almost completely leaving the beats behind. On Perception, a mostly concrete affair and the first to follow Menace In The Phantom, rhythms flirted with the borders of timbre and tone. And now with Special Forces, Ahnnu explores those unbound sonics further, articulating the tonal aspect rhythm. But Special Forces pulls back from the experimental gambit of Perception; the majority of the tracks are kinetic yet sedentary, possessing an in limbo feel akin to the mysterious Ursula Bogner or even Tortoise’s coy moments. Ahnnu embraces raw association on Special Forces and, harkening back to his earlier output, works sound approximates that move and deceive like fine slices of katsuobushi dancing in steam.  

Ian Forsythe      

  Pete Astor — One for the Ghost (Tapete)

Songwriter Pete Astor has his roots in 1980s indie-pop acts the Loft and the Weather Prophets and, sonically, he's kept himself close to that sound. His new album One for the Ghost could have been on Creation Records, though it’s a little closer to the Go-Betweens' style. Like 2016's Spilt Milk, this disc could have felt like a simple retread, but Astor uses a sound too classic to grow stale to work through new concerns. “Injury Time,” playing on the end of a soccer game, captures both the feel of something winding down as well as the opportunity present at any point in a game, life, or story. Astor's mature concerns drive his lyrics now. “Water Tower” has a bounce that matches Astor's youthful appeal for a rendezvous, keeping him from sinking into nostalgia even as he folds history into the more valuable tale of his current relationship. It's a piece Astor's particularly capable of delivering — it's reflective without turning moody and it bears its speaker's age without either resistance or compliance. Astor finds a comfortable place in these songs, even as he toasts some famous final moments, but he sounds far from restful.  

Justin Cober-Lake   

                    Bat Fangs — Bat Fangs (Don Giovanni)

Bat Fangs by Bat Fangs

Given that one-third of power-pop band Ex Hex is one-half of Bat Fangs, and that the two bands sound, let's charitably say, remarkably similar, it’s not unreasonable to think of Bat Fangs as in some ways a continuation of the Ex Hex project and its spiritual goals: to rock/shred/rip, with a deadly serious wink while dangerously skirting the line between influence and impostor. In other words, the same noble goals of pop and rock since their inception. While Bat Fangs is sounds slightly darker and slightly heavier than Ex Hex, the basic ingredients remain the same: take classic pop and rock hooks, twist them with just enough sweet and sour swagger to sound new(ish), and play them with an enthusiasm bordering on naivete. Lunkheaded riffs prevail, leavened by just-clever-enough guitar solos at regular intervals. At 25 minutes, Bat Fangs isn’t a moment longer than it needs to be, and frankly, could have lost a few songs; a great five song EP is lurking inside this pretty good, nine song record. Big, loud, adolescent and nearly too cute and clever by half, most criticisms of this record are also things to praise. Whether or not you think the world needs another song called “Turn it Up” or a goth-pop update of the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” riff tells you everything you need to know about whether or not Bat Fangs is for you. Personally, I think it’s a hoot.

Isaac Olson

 Jean-Baptiste Favory — Things Under (Feeding Tube)

This LP is subtitled “Organic compositions for guitars and electronics,” which clues you to the pressure that paradox and open options exert upon Jean-Baptiste Favory’s progress. He’s been involved with France’s institutional experimental music scene since the 1990s, working as an assistant to Luc Ferrari and Gavin Bryars, hosting a radio show that goes in-depth with subjects like Keiji Haino and Eliane Radigue, and lecturing at the university level. He’s also an associate of Mexico’s ultra-underground freaks, Los Lichis, which is how he came to the attention of Feeding Tube Records. While Favory’s been recording since 1990, he has never made a solo LP until now. Things Under is well matched to the once and future format of kings. Its electronic guitar treatments hearken back to a time when making six strings sound synthetic without letting a keyboard into the signal chain was a remarkable thing, and the continuous sounds in the acoustic and drone passages are more congruent with wave forms than sample rates. And Favory’s involved yet inviting melodies and affinity for sustained sounds position this record closer to well-disciplined prog than either radiophonic or cassette underground sound.

Bill Meyer

 Ezra Feinberg — Pentimento and Others (Related States)

Pentimento and others by Ezra Feinberg

Ezra Feinberg, formerly of the psych-pop band Citay and now, of all things, a licensed psychotherapist, steps out with his first solo release, Pentimento and Others. Persuasively mixing plaintive guitar picking, New Age chimes and synths, pedal steel, soft-rock flutes and bongos and a healthy, heady dose of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, Pentimento and Others certainly takes the edge off. Fortunately, nothing here ever gets so comforting as to dissipate into nothingness; just when things run the risk of stagnating or becoming a little too comforting, Feinberg, gently but surely, changes course, giving each song a bit more emotional complexity than is evident on first listen. This is particularly appreciated on “Kernel and Shell and “Pentimento”, whose poppy melodies are, at first, almost too optimistic. Feinberg has learned well from Reich how to keep his eyes on the skies and not get too bogged down in the repetition of complex patterns for their own sake, how to keep fairly complex loops and layers from sounding claustrophobic or inorganic and static. As a result, even the mellowest tunes here have a unique trajectory, and, perhaps due to Feinberg’s roots in a pop group, memorable melodies that keep any of them from drifting away entirely. Worth mentioning in particular are the driving, out of phase guitars that propel “True Refuge” and the lush pedal steel on the valedictory closing track, “Experience Near”, played by studio-hand Pete Grant, who has recorded with the Grateful Dead, Guy Clark, and damn near everyone else. Too hooky to truly be ambient and too mellow to be instrumental pop music, Pentimento and Others is a strong solo debut, whose sunny sound is sure to be a welcome companion as the days start to lengthen again.

Isaac Olson

  Fire! — The Hands (Rune Grammofon)

Don’t say it hasn’t happened to you. One morning you wake up and you really, really want to play heavy music. Stooges heavy, Black Sabbath heavy, nothing fancy but I broke your pavement with my bronto-booted step heavy. Well, it happens to jazz musicians too, even musicians like Mats Gustafsson who are already acquainted with a myriad of opportunities to play hard, fast and unencumbered by the Geneva Convention. So the mission that he, bassist, Johan Berthling, and drummer Andreas Werlin pursue when they convene as Fire! is very specific. They must play as hard as they need to but not duplicate what they do in other ensembles. Additionally they must adhere to the monolithic heaviosity of hard rock without betraying their collective decades of improvisational practice. The Hands could be subtitled, Mission Accomplished. It lurches into action with a shudder of distressed electronics and distorted bass before Gustafsson’s bass sax scoops deep into the groove with a melody that’s as simple as it is cruel. But while it sounds massive, this music is not monolithic. Variety comes from the respite when Scandinavian movie dialogue or a rumble that sounds suspiciously like a satisfied cat edges the horn aside, and subtlety manifests in the coexisting layers of rough texture on slower tunes.

Bill Meyer  

 JPEGMAFIA — Veteran (Deathbomb Arc)

Veteran by JPEGMAFIA

The frenetic energy of 28-year-old Barrington Hendricks, the Baltimore-turned-LA resident JPEGMAFIA (who, it has to be said, pairs perfectly with the Deathbomb Arc aesthetic), on Veteran is catching most of its attention thanks to the irrepressibly escalating “Real Nega,” which strangles an Ol’ Dirty Bastard vocal and matches Death Grips’ energy sans annoyingly aimless anarchy. But there’s a lot more to this 19-track album (also released as a cassette, though those 40 copies are long gone), Hendricks’ fifth and first since 2016’s Black Ben Carson. Drawing inspiration from his time in the USAF, Hendricks peppers the aggro-rap maneuvers of “Baby I’m Bleeding” and “Curb Stomp” with found-sound field recordings and movie samples; “Thug Tears,” which veers between a Jeremih-esque R&B croon and standard-issue trash talk; nihilist anthem “My Thoughts on Neogaf Dying (Radio Edit)”; Brainfeeder fodder “DD Form 214,” aided by the sultry Bobbi Rush; and a song titled “I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrissey Dies,” about which nothing need be added. The key is both his ability to juggle beats and his restraint between verses, notable given the brevity of the songs (13 of 19 wrap up under three minutes, though the nearly five-minute “Rainbow Six” is my standout pick). If you’re wondering what hip-hop’s messy zeitgeist sounds like at the moment, you’d do worse than to hear Veteran. 

Patrick Masterson

  Juan de Fuca — Solve/Resolve (Pep Talk)

Solve/Resolve by Juan de Fuca

Juan de Fuca makes a mathy guitar racket, blurred through distortion into shoe-gaze-y dissonance and imbued with the nervy 1990s discomfiture of bands like Chavez. Singer Jack Cherry started the band as a solo project but has lately added bass, drums and two more guitars. The result is a dense, shimmering, sharp edged instrumental sound that cuts and stings, incongruously overlaid with crooning, longing vocals.  Weirdly, the band has picked “Instructional Video,” as its calling card for this disc, though its slack, ballady moodiness is no match for the swoony guitar swell on the title cut or the blistery onslaught of “A Place to Wait.”  Almost a win, this one.  

Jennifer Kelly 

 King Witch — Under the Mountain (Listenable)

Under The Mountain by King Witch

Scotland is north, and Scotland is cold, and Scotland is full of hyper-literate, hyper-creative people, but somehow the phrase “Scottish metal” doesn’t trip easily off the tongue (most of us would like to forget that Nazareth was ever a thing…). Under the Mountain, King Witch’s first full-length record, might begin to change that. The band doesn’t try to reinvent anything; they play a pretty straightforward version of doom. But two things set King Witch apart from their many Sabbath-worshipping peers. Most spectacular is Laura Donnelly’s voice. The lazy comparison is to Janis Joplin, but Donnelly is more than just a belter. She’s more akin to Frankie Armstrong or Ute Lemper. Donnelly can get gravelly and bluesy, but she can also find a set of cleaner, soaring tones. The other notable aspect of the band’s sound is their propensity to pair dirty, down-tuned riffs with speedy, nearly thrashy tempos and leads. To use the subgenre’s argot: this record is a lot more “Intronaut” than it is “Iron Man.” It’s also refreshing to hear a metal band that’s able to make convincingly menacing noises, but are also clearly enjoying themselves. Seriously, check out Donnelly’s chops. She’s something else.  

Jonathan Shaw

 Andy Laverne — Faith (Steeplechase)

What’s an enterprising jazz pianist to do that’s new when he has the antecedence of over sixty session credits to his name on a single label looming over his next move? Andy Laverne attempts an answer to that artistic query/quandary with Faith, an album that seeks to tweak the piano trio template through the addition of trumpeter Alex Sipiagin (fielding flugelhorn on three tunes) to the equation and the doubling of bassist Mike Richmond on cello for three pieces to further vary the sound. An underlying religious theme is an extension of Laverne’s earlier Genesis (also with Richmond) although the program of originals is never explicit in its sacredness. The opening “Touch Sensitive” is a titular distillation of his approach on ivories, one that weds a persistent melodicism with an attention to nuance and openness to the active input of his colleagues. Drummer Jason Tiemann assumes a complementary versatility, parceling a parade of beats with porous responsiveness that never tips into cocky exorbitance. A drastic departure this date is not, but it is still another laudable and sturdy brick in Laverne’s populously stacked body of work.  

Derek Taylor

  Midland — As the City Sleeps, a Mixtape [January 2018] (self-released)

It cheekily starts with the intro to La Haine, but the vibe Midland’s Harry Agius lands with such sublimity in this hour-long mix is quite the opposite, “one of my favourite times of day, between 4-5am, the witching hour, when you fall in love, spend time getting to know the things about your friends you never knew and when towns and cities feel like your own.” For a previously under-the-radar producer whose last year has included the justifiably lauded Fabriclive 94 mix, contributing to the Monolithic “immersive ambient club space” in Bristol, and recently announcing the formation of another Graded label offshoot, this refined version of the Monolithic mix is every bit as beautiful and fulfilling as its title would suggest. Featuring Steve Reich, Arthur Russell, Sun Ra, Mark Hollis, and my favorite Paris Is Burning clip, it’ll get you all kinds of soft for the day’s smallest hour provided you’re still capable of feeling anything in 2018; it even got me writing about music again, no small feat these days. Little wonder why it made the rounds as one of January’s best, anyway.

 Patrick Masterson

 Neolithic/Martyrdöd — Split 7” (Deep Six)

 Some splits just work. Bands of like minds, or like sounds, or similar thematic interests find each other, and the result is a proper record — not just a disparate sampler or an excuse to release new music. This new 7” features bands from different sides of the Atlantic, and from purportedly different genres of heavy, but it’s a remarkably cohesive affair. Neolithic are a thrashy death metal band from Baltimore, formed less than a year ago. For that recent a vintage, their contribution to the record, “Inner Adversary,” is impressively polished (inasmuch as it makes sense to call sounds this dirty “polished’). Down-tuned, propulsive, muscular riffs roll and roil through the song’s first half, setting up the breakdown that’s somehow inevitable without being cliché. The rest of the song sticks with that mid-tempo pace, sagging into a deathy discorporation. It’s as much fun as music this miserable can be. Martyrdöd’s “War of Worlds,” a buzzy exercise in Swedish d-beat indignation, is even more assured. It gallops and grinds for five exhausting minutes, occasionally opening into passages of melodic, shreddy antics. It’s all over in less than ten minutes. You’ll flip it and play it again.  

Jonathan Shaw

  Octavian — “100 Degrees (Feat. Sam Wise)” (Drilla)

For some people, when it rains, it monsoons. All it took was a Golden Globes after-party Instagram clip of Drake lip-syncing “Party Here” in early January to send the French-born, UK-via-Ivory Coast-raised Octavian Godji into the stratosphere of hip-hop’s youth vanguard overnight. The guy was literally living on couches last month when Fact did its deep dive; now he’s the toast of Camberwell (which, sure, but also: what are you the toast of?) and looking to capitalize on that momentum with “100 Degrees,” a downbeat sing-song spit that gets in and out with the pointed brevity he exhibited on “Party Here.” The difference is that these bars feel more generic; this side of Young Thug’s “Safe” or Feist’s “I Wish I Didn’t Miss You,” I’m not sure there was a more affecting musical moment last year than the “Party Here” couplet, “That’s why they wheel it up, they rewind it / You’re gonna blow, it’s just timing.” No such luck here: In a video featuring liberal use of Wingate & Finchley FC’s pitch and a whole lotta filters, Octavian delivers a deft head-nodder without twisting the rhythm or landing anything near an emotional gut-punch. As a recent RinseFM set suggested, the kid and his Essie Gang crew are taking heavy pulls from hip-hop’s current royalty; hopefully he absorbs the nuances of guys like Thug and Future without polishing off the raw, broken-throated emotional edge that’s been the cornerstone of his charm heretofore.   

Patrick Masterson          

 Spiritual Cramp—Mass Hysteria (React!)

Mass Hysteria by Spiritual Cramp

Four cuts, not one dud, and two that sound like instant classics. Spiritual Cramp, a jittery Bay-area four-piece, filters the “Class War” anarchy of the DILs through a stylized Voidoids-ish lens. Michael Bingham, the singer, and Michael Fenton, one of the guitarists, are previous partners in dark, drone-y, motorik Creative Adult. This new outfit ups the antic factor, in terse but playful off-beat-hammering beats and yelping angst that will remind you of Richard Hell if you’re ancient, or Jered Gummere from the Ponys if you’re just middle aged. “Tenderloin” is all glam-punk longing, spiked through with razor-y guitar stabs but swollen with vocal drama; it’s like a lost cut from The Homosexuals. “Wrecking Machine” is even better, rampaging along through clashing, clanging guitars, Bingham deep-voiced and deadpan amid the mayhem, a la Iggy Pop in his prime. The EP is great, but evidently, you’ve got to see them live.

Jennifer Kelly

 The Spook School — Could It Be Different? (Slumberland/Alcopop!)

Could It Be Different? by The Spook School

“Do you like the way that you look naked? I don’t know if any of us do,” sings Nye Todd on this third full-length from Glaswegian Spook School, a band steeped in the jangly, joy-filled, bashing vulnerability of C86 pop.  The twist is that Todd is trans, and so the boy-girl tropes of classic Sounds of Young Scotland indie take on non-binary fluidity with a fresh, frank matter-of-fact-ness.  Not that it’s a gender studies seminar.  No Could It Be Different? is brash with clanging guitars, fizzy with hooks, bristling with rattling rhythms, determinedly upbeat in the face of trouble.  “Bad Year” starts from the bruised, beaten-down corner where a lot of us have been licking our wounds lately, but it erupts into multi-voiced, exhilarating choruses and crescendos of jubiliant pop.  It’s been a bad year for everyone, but “being sad is part of being alive,” as “Alright (Sometimes)” asserts, and this record is, indeed, very, very alive.  

Jennifer Kelly

 Stray — Into Darkness CD (Iluso)

Into Darkness by Stray

“John Russell is an acoustic guitarist,” says Wikipedia — not anymore. The 63 year-old London-based improviser, who has played in groups with Evan Parker, John Butcher and Roger Turner, started plugging in a few years ago, but until now his only recording on the instrument was a duo with Thurston Moore on With… (Emanem), which documents his 60th birthday concert. It’s all he plays on Into Darkness and it’s tempting to focus entirely on the experience of hearing a famously quiet, nuanced player kick out the jams. Or at any rate kick the wah-wah pedal that seems to be attached to his foot throughout the 51 minute long set. Russell fills up space like never before, with feedback and elongated tones that ooze and flow like molten lava. But there are three other guys in this band — saxophonist John Butcher, bassist Dominic Lash and drummer Ståle Liavik Solberg — and the switch to electricity has not blown Russell’s aesthetic fuse. He’s still a listener, and it’s a gas to hear him pose contrasting tones and shapes to Butcher, whose been playing with Russell since the 1980s. In a partnership that long, it’s possible for other players to get left on the outside, but not Lash; after a tectonic early exchange with the drums and guitar he becomes a presence inside the music, causing it to shift and redirect at the center of gravity. And Solberg, a Scandinavian who seems to have made a place for himself on London’s improvising scene, is restless but apposite, making things happen without demanding that you notice. Amplified or not, Russell is still finding ways to make music that is renegotiated second by second.

Bill Meyer 

 Jozef Van Wissem — Nobody Living Can Make Me Turn Back (Consouling Sounds)

In 2007 Jozef Van Wissem recorded Stations of the Cross, a CD of solo lute performances, in airports. During the centuries when his preferred instrument was popular, cathedrals were the noblest things men built. Now our most impressive buildings are devoted to travel and commerce; what better place to ponder eternity than in a terminal lounge? Nobody Living Can Make Me Turn Back is another expression of Van Wissem’s effort to tend his centuries-deep mystical awareness amid the trappings of modernity. 

On the back of the album he stands garbed in robes next to a backlit cross, and inside you’ll find a quote from the writings of Henry Ruso, a beatified German monk who lived in the 14th century. The video for album opener “Virium Illarum” looks like something out of the plague years. But the tune’s production scrambles centuries. Van Wissem’s made a lot of nakedly acoustic music whose main concession to modernity was the way it merged the palindromic structures of vintage lute music with modern minimalist discipline. The artificial reverb on “Virium Illarum” drags his Latin chanting into the present, and the ceremonial beats are so electronically distorted that one fears that a subwoofer was mortally harmed in order to make them.  And on “Your Days Gone Like a Shadow” a lute subjected to surf guitar amplification lurks behind the wheeling layers of voice and acoustic strings. These manifestations of modernity cast a reflective light on the tracks where Van Wissem returns to his classic methodology, tracing melodies forward and backward like lutenists have done for centuries.