#hersker

Bondi-D’Incise / Blutwurst Ensemble — Zgodność (Insub)

Zgodność by BONDI-D'INCISE - BLUTWURST ENSEMBLE

If you want to see evidence of Europe’s connectedness, look no further than this recording. A Swiss duo composed the music and devised the background tape for a piece with a Polish name, and an Italian ensemble with a German name realized it. The name, which translates as Compatibility, corresponds to the instrumental parts and the way they interact. Strings, bellows-driven reeds, and a pair of horns weave long, curving lines together in a constantly evolving but ever continuous flow of dark, textured sound. Eerie and absorbing, it’s music to get lost in as it travels at glacial-melt velocity.

Bill Meyer

 Basia Bulat — The Garden (Secret City)

The Garden (The Garden Version) by Basia Bulat

During the pandemic, singer-songwriter Basia Bulat began to reconsider songs from her previous five albums. Oddly drawing inspiration from both Merle Haggard and Béla Bartók, Bulat brought in a handful of composers to write string quartet arrangements for her songs, reworking them into new versions collected on The Garden. Such an endeavor could lead to something ostentatious or pretentious, but the arrangements suit Bulat's writing well. Her folk-pop might get some extra class, but the strings never detract from her vocals or melodic sensibilities. “The Shore” receives more of a new instrumentation than arrangement, but the playing on this performance heighten the dynamics. “Are You in Love?” leaves plenty of space in the song, highlight the song's 3/4 pulse while steadily building the ballroom drama. Fans of Bulat's work should appreciate the new textures here, but nothing about the release requires previous familiarity. The album coheres around these performances, not their novelty, and the individual tracks play to Bulat's strengths without the need of referents. At times peaceful and at times stirring, The Garden makes for either a good entry or a good summation, depending on your perspective.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Stefan Christensen — Ruby (ever/never)

Ruby by Stefan Christensen

Every element of Ruby, from the choice of format (double 7-inch) to the artwork (Xeroxed and hand-assembled) to the broken junk shop instrumentation, is an homage to Carl Robert Talbot. A stalwart of the New Haven, Connecticut noise and DIY arts scene, Talbot died while in custody at the New Haven Correctional Center. Grief-stricken, Christensen took up cheap and broken instruments and began improvising, piecing together these eight songs that are intensely intimate and drenched in sadness. The song cycle plays out like a series of photographs, each piece reflecting its subject uniquely. A lonely junkyard banjo plucks out the skeletal and too brief title track. “Exact Formation” resembles Gate with its dirge-like flow and bleary-eyed vocals. The echoes of Michael Morley become less pronounced with “Stark Blue,” and “See Things,” the latter featuring a busted chord organ and the din of a barely audible spoken word recording. “Pardon Time” has a hopeful air to it, while “Time Elapse” evokes Two Dollar Guitar’s darker moments. The latter piece fades into a chorus of crickets that disappears as “Goffe Porch” enters with its layers of guitar melody played both forward and backward. Ruby concludes with “Luxury is God,” an out-and-out rocker that enters with Christensen announcing an impending revolution and ends with him dejectedly announcing “the stars are falling now.” The system is broken, particularly for those who suffer from mental illness. Rather than hope for a miracle, Christensen is resigned to the fact that unless something changes, many more bright lights will be snuffed out.

Bryon Hayes   

 Chris Crack — No Sample Snitching (self-released)

No Sample Snitching (Nigga Nation Radio edition) by Chris Crack

Chris Crack’s music has always been on a chill tip. No Sample Snitching may be even more relaxed than his previous albums, yet the foundation remains the same. Its slow beats are interlayered with Crack’s (wise)cracks and hilarious song titles (like “Adderall on a Empty Stomach” and “Palace of Patriarchy”). Crack remains firmly on his own turf (hardly anybody can copy him) and doesn’t go out of his way to prove that he’s a gangsta or even somebody who’s trying very hard to play a gangsta. It’s all down to earth: freaky girls, new Cadillacs, condoms at Target and trying “to get a better shit.” While No Sample Snitching doesn’t break any new ground for Chris Crack it’s still enjoyable addition to his œuvre.

Ray Garraty

 Tim Daisy — Opaque (Relay)

Tim Daisy :: Opaque (relay digital 019// rcr #1)) by Tim Daisy

On this brief cassette (and slightly less brief download), percussionist Tim Daisy takes the methods introduced by his recent, remote collaborative work with Ikue Mori and Vasco Trilla into his own hands by remixing some recent recordings. Drum beats become distant knocks, vibes and glass percussion become quasi-electronic throbs, and tracks get overlaid to vertiginous effect. If you’ve been waiting for Daisy to go psychedelic, your wait is over; “Assembly A,” which takes up the tape’s first side, could easily be retitled “Electric Daisyland” on the strength of its mind-befogging spaciness. “Assembly B” occupies a different environment, in which nimbly articulated patterns and flickering tonalities jostle for space under the watchful eye of some monks whose chanting was committed to record long ago. The choice to begin releasing titles on cassette is a roots move for Daisy, who went to high school during the years that it was America’s top-selling format; keep your eyes peeled for more of them.

Bill Meyer

Madi Diaz — Same History, New Feelings (Anti-)

Same History, New Feelings by Madi Diaz

Madi Diaz has been slugging it out in the songwriting trenches for more than a decade, finally getting some traction with last year’s History of a Feeling, which Mojo called “Gorgeous and achingly candidate” and Uncut hailed as “a potent work of cherished folk beauty and open-hearted songwriting.” But she remains a songwriter’s songwriter, someone who will mostly likely find success in the craft of linking melody and narrative, rather than in performing before vast audiences. And so, with this EP, Diaz enlists three leading female artists and one fellow songwriter to re-interpret her songs. Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield leads things off with a warm, subtly harmonized version of “Resentment,” alternating country rock verses with Diaz against a minimal background of guitar, drums and bass. Country up-and-comer Courtney Marie Andrews lends her water, pure, lightly vibrato’d voice to “New Person, Old Place,” steering it ever so slightly away from indie rock into a more traditional country sound. Natalie Hemby is best known for writing songs for other singers, notably LeeAnn Womack, Kasey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert, but here she crosses to the other side. Her version of “History of a Feeling” elicits drama from throbbing waves of electronics and emotional depth from her spare, closely harmonized delivery. And finally, Angel Olsen finds both fragility and anchored strength in Diaz’s song “Forever,” with a piano and some fluttering synths to back her up. The new versions sound great, and if they send you back to Diaz’s originals, well, that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?

Jennifer Kelly

 Tashi Dorji — Dead Cities Lie Buried / Lift Comrades, Life Comrades! (Feeding Tube)

dead cities lie buried / lift comrades, lift comrades! by Tashi Dorji

When Tashi Dorji hits the road, he brings his electric guitar, and as soon as he starts playing, everyone around knows it. At home, he often plays acoustically, but as this recording (a tape if you can find one, or a download if you can’t) attests, that’s no hindrance to heaviosity. He concentrates on percussive techniques throughout Dead Cities Lie Buried / Lift Comrades, Life Comrades! The title piece is a double-time forced march, left foot chiming harmonics, right foot string-buzzing pummel. Whether the resonant toll of “Mount The Skies I” comes from an alternate tuning or physical preparation, the result is that Dorji’s strums yield a resonant shudder. And on “Fear of Wolves… Drift Onwards,” he fairly lashes the strings. The resulting music is not for all occasions, but in a time when grimness abounds, you’d be wise to keep such sounds in reserve.

Bill Meyer  

 Eels — Extreme Witchcraft (E Works/PIAS)

It’s been a quarter century since Mark Oliver Everett’s Beautiful Freak, one of the bleakest, most beautiful pop albums ever, a record which was once so important to me that I hesitated to pick up with Eels again after all this time. (There were other good albums in between, Electro-Shock Blues in 1998 and Souljacker in 2001, but still…) And while Extreme Witchcraft is by no means as searing and personally significant as that debut, it’s actually a pretty good record. Everett’s voice is as interestingly textured as ever, his melodies as sweet and his lyrics as twisted. The single, “Good Night on Earth,” moves like a man trying to catch the last train before morning, its half sung, half chanted verse chugging through desolate pop landscapes of blistered guitar and manic drum machines. “Better Living Through Desperation” adds a saw-toothed lick and maracas to the mix, stirring up an ambient angst and making it strut. E has always known how to stare down the vortex and get it to boogie, and god knows, there’s plenty of vortex out there these days.

Jennifer Kelly

 Fruit Bats — Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021) (Merge)

Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud: Slow Growers, Sleeper Hits and Lost Songs (2001–2021) by Fruit Bats

A deep dive into the life work of Eric D. Johnson, Sometimes a Cloud collects album tracks and rarities from two decades of Fruit Bats releases. Disc one revisits territory that will be familiar to long-time fans, cherry-picking Johnson’s favorite cuts from his band’s eight albums to date. This first disc runs backwards through time, starting with the brand new “Rip It Up,” in full psychedelic sprawl and ending with the mandolin-strumming, countrified “Glass in Your Feet” from 2001’s Echolocation. Along the way, there’s a glorious live version of “Born in the 1970s,” from 2005’s Spelled in Bones, recorded in Portland and lit from within by country-soul piano and mournful pedal steel. It’s the second disc, though, that will satisfy the heads, littered as it is by demos, unreleased tracks and a swaggering cover of Steve Miller’s “The Joker.” “Feather Bed,” from 2009’s The Ruminant Band, is, if anything, even more affecting in this pared back demo, and “WACS,” recorded alongside 2011’s Tripper (and released previously as a bonus track) makes the case for the Fruit Bats as a rock band; this version includes a searing solo by Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis. If you’ve been meaning, post-Bonny Light Horseman, to take another look at Eric Johnson’s main gig, here’s your chance.

Jennifer Kelly

 Billy Gomberg — Wilderness and Luxury (Dasa Tapes)

Wilderness and Luxury by Billy Gomberg

For Wilderness and Luxury, Billy Gomberg oriented his musical practice to new surroundings. The disc was assembled in 2020, not long after he relocated across the United States to San Francisco with his young family. Like the Gombergs, this suite of modular synth explorations and field recordings moves with a determined gait. It is unhurried yet not lackadaisical. Melodies establish themselves and then decide to waft off course ever so slightly. Glitch attempts to invade, seeping in at the edges of the sound field, but Gomberg isolates it and wipes it away. There is a clever balance between percussive pings and lengthier, bent tones. It’s as if Gomberg is taking a few steps on a journey and then stopping to take in the view. This imagery is heightened by the subtle use of field recordings, which give minute glimpses into the cityscape around him. Gomberg is acting as flaneur and is beckoning for us to join the stroll. Why put one foot in front of the other and enjoy the adventure?

Bryon Hayes

 Hersker — Befængt (Caligari Records)

Befængt by HERSKER

Putting black metal and Joy-Division-inspired post-punk into a musical blender and pressing “frappe” may sound musically hairbrained — and maybe it is. But Dutch band Hersker have followed that simple (if sort of bananas) recipe and produced four strong songs on this new EP. “Stilstand” might be the best example of what’s interesting about the band’s approach: it has the goth-adjacent drama of the best songs on An Ideal for Living, when the Manchester band was at its most rough and ready. Hersker’s tremolo riffing feels effectively brittle and frigid, sounds from a second-shift midnight in industry’s indifferent production line. When the blackened aesthetic moves more aggressively to the fore (as on “Døtøje”) the buzz and distortion can get a little too thick. Hersker can’t seem to figure out if there should be more amp hum and electrical scree in the mix, or less. This reviewer would like them to pare it back a bit, to hear what an even leaner, meaner approach would do for the songs’ compelling skeletal structures. Cleanse those bones of flesh and let the ghosts run the factory for a while. In any case, this is a promising EP, an angry, alienated sound for alienating times.

Jonathan Shaw 

 Hexerei — Ancient Evil Spirits (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Ancient Evil Spirits by Hexerei

Hexerei plays an astringent form of black metal, singularly focused on making music that dances on the dizzy threshold of disorder and noisy collapse. The Finnish band’s affect boils over, the riffs roil and then attenuate, tempos crest and subside and crumble into chaos. Check out the 15 plus minute “Unholy Ceremonial Invocation”: like the rest of this LP, the song exudes a brittle, tinny atmosphere full of dust and malign detritus. It’s somewhat akin to forcing your way into a dark, unheated crawlspace in the dead of winter. The deeper you penetrate, the more the dust collects into choking pitch, and the dark keeps closing in. If that sounds like a good time to you, seek help — but first give this record a spin. All four of tracks on Ancient Evil Spirits construct haunted, vertiginously chaotic aural spaces. For all their instability, the songs develop impressive momentum and feral force. They congeal, and then dissipate, and then they congeal again. Still stuck in that crawlspace? Better play the record again, louder this time.

Jonathan Shaw

  René Lussier / Érick D’Orion / Robbie Kuster / Martin Tétreault — Printemps 2021 (Victo)

Ah, springtime 2021. That brief moment when we thought that shots might set us free. In May of that year, the 37th International Festival of Musique Actuelle convened in Victoriaville, Canada braved the pandemic and convened for an all-Canadian edition. Printemps 2021 documents an iteration one of the festival’s mainstays — a convergence of players with varying degrees of acquaintance with one another for an improvised set. René Lussier (guitar, daxophone), Érick D’Orion (electronics), Robbie Kuster (drums), and Martin Tétreault (turntables) come from sufficiently different backgrounds that cohesion was by no means assured, but a combination of assertiveness and care resulted in a performance that never went off the rails, and a diverting listen that makes one wonder, “who mixed some instant This Heat in the musicians’ Ovaltine?” Kuster’s jazz-rock drumming creates a structural overlay, and when Lussier gets heroic, they lock into grooves that bring to mind “Horizontal Hold.” Tétrault and D’Orion do their part by avoiding anything overtly disruptive, preferring to swoop in and out of the action like hawks that happen to trail sound effects in their slipstreams.

Bill Meyer

luxury elite — blue eyeshadow (Doom Trip)

blue eyeshadow by luxury elite

The first four tracks on blue eyeshadow may give you an idea that this is another background music release which deserves to be turned off immediately (unless you‘re in the mood for background music). Things dramatically improve on the fifth song “turn around” and only continue to improve. The whole tape is a kind of total recall of something you never remembered. There is nothing, actually, elite or luxury about it. It works on the surface and deceives you into thinking you heard it before. Somewhere. Sometime. “turn around” is a danceable music when you’re not in the mood for dancing. “carnival lights” is a retro cut for when you’re stuck in the present. “route 66” is a soundtrack for an old computer game when computer games are the last thing on your mind. If this sounds like one big 55 minutes long pastiche, then it is. But this kind of pastiche we may use now.

Ray Garraty

 Duncan Marquiss — Wires Turned Sideways In Time (Basin Rock)

Wires Turned Sideways In Time by Duncan Marquiss

This solo debut from Phantom Band guitarist Duncan Marquiss is a majestic blend of meticulous guitar layering, kosmische textures and a strident melodic sensibility that brings to mind fellow Scottish instrumentalists Remember Remember. Though many of these tracks spool out across six, eight or close to ten minutes in length, there’s a sense they could continue rolling on for much longer, accumulating layers of mallet percussion and curlicues of melody, like the greats of minimalism such as Steve Reich. Opener “Drivenhalle” is the most krautrock-influenced piece, climaxing in ecstatic waves of eBowed guitar. “C Sweeps” and “Fixed Action Patterns” segue into one another, together amounting to nearly 15 minutes of sun-dappled harmonics, hand percussion, and alternately fuzzy and chiming guitar melodies. The second side kicks off with “Tracks,” a bluesy acoustic guitar number, proving that Marquiss could just have easily have turned in a Fahey-esque full-length. The rhythmic delayed pulse of “Murmer Double” is accompanied by swirling synths and modulated bass, then makes a return in the title track, which builds up quite a head of steam thanks to some lovely hammered dulcimer, despite being the shortest piece here at just under three minutes. “Minor History” brings this fine record to a muted close, as cosmic synths ripple out over rootsy guitar picking.

Tim Clarke  

 Iván Muela — Monologues (Rusted Tone)

Monologues by Iván Muela

Like a lot of us, London-based ambient composer Iván Muela spent considerable time by himself over the last couple of years, communing at home with moody drones and ecstatic bursts of electronic sound, as he tried to soundtrack the shifting atmospheres inside his head. Monologues presents five of those interior landscapes, from the quietly luminous altered piano tones of opener “Whisper,” to the long, slow-building, church cathedral grandeur of “Yell.” Despite the titles, none of these tracks are especially loud, not even “Howl,” which shivers with a subtle dread, its pure, clear tones brass-like against a velvet background of silence. “Hum” wanders pensively through wood-wind-y timbres, picking its way through a lovely solitary space, while “Say” lofts up long, gradually shifting notes in wordless, shape-less meditation. Pandemic lockdown made everyone a little crazy, a little too enamored of the movies that ran inside our own minds, but Muela has found something beautiful in that forced looking inward. Tune in to his frequency.

Jennifer Kelly

 Nail Club — Mise en Abyme (Hot Releases)

Not to take anything away from the mythos of the electric guitar, but if you listen to the right records it can certainly sound like synthesizers are (despite a rich history of evoking gleaming, Apollonian futurism) uniquely positioned to generate sounds so scuzzy they make the racket a good gutterpunk band can thrash out sound classically refined in comparison. Nail Club’s Sara Storm makes a bracingly muddy variety of synthpop that leans into that latter quality, with stiff, blocky rhythms, dense screes of squarewave fuzz and vocals distorted and layered somewhere in the middle of the mix until you’re less hearing words and more just the impression of someone in distress or maybe reproachment. Mise en Abyme literally means “placed into abyss” (more figuratively the quality you get when you look at yourself between two mirrors, or the Droste effect), and the 30 densely disorienting minutes of music here certainly live up to that billing, especially on “Opening Night” and “Mirror”. So come on in, the abyss is fine.

Ian Mathers  

 Night Gestalt — Thousand Year Waves (self released)

Thousand Year Waves by Night Gestalt

Night Gestalt is the work of Swedish musician Olof Cornéer, who creates slow, sad ambient music using pump organ, synths and samples. At its best, such as on opener “As & Em” and “Rogue Echoes,” Thousand Year Waves has the kind of thickly textured and immersive tones familiar to fans of artists such as Abul Mogard, Loscil and even some of Thom Yorke’s solo work. Plus, on “Midair Drops,” the deep, down-tuned voices and hissing background textures evoke the chilly urban atmosphere of Burial. However, when the vocal samples move upfront in the mix, as in “Primal Reasons,” the listener is wrenched out of a reverie and confronted by what sounds like politicians addressing the harsh reality of socio-economic deprivation. A worthy topic, of course, but not something you want to be forced to think about during an otherwise hypnotic ambient album.

Tim Clarke 

 Pastor Champion — I Just Want to be a Good Man (Luaka Bop)

“Talk to God,” urges Pastor Champion, an itinerant preacher who traveled America’s byways with a guitar on his back and the spirit in his music. Later, in “I Know You’ve Been Wounded,” he acknowledges the shortcomings of many churches (“I know you’ve been church hurt”), but nonetheless celebrates a direct connection to the holy. You get the sense that Pastor Champion didn’t have a lot of time for hierarchies. He delivers his message in a fine, soul-stirring tenor, serrated with rough edges but strong and true. He sounds a bit like Charles Bradley, though I think the late Bradley would have had no problem characterizing himself as an entertainer, whereas Champion would not. In fact, he refused to participate in this release or any secular exploitation of his music. The album was delayed until he passed away in 2021. But if we all missed the hand-clapped, guitar-strumming power of Champion’s live ministry, we’ve got the rough and moving record of him. In the lead up to “To Be Used by You,” he helpfully names the guitar chords that make up his song, ever the teacher, so that future gospel singers can follow behind.

Jennifer Kelly  

 Ploy — The Edits (Deaf Test)

The Edits by Ploy

Want the best remix of Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” you’ve ever heard? Then step right up to Londoner Ploy’s latest release out on his own Deaf Test imprint, the second such 12” after November’s Rayhana EP. Made “last summer, in the dizzy heights of post-lockdown mania,” the man born Sam Smith has featured on such esteemed labels as Hemlock, Hessle Audio and Timedance, but this 200-copy white label is less about his usual gravity-defying rhythmic wizardry and more about simply turning up the heat. On the A is the aforementioned Khia remix here known as “Lick It,” a real rinse with an effectively light two-step affectation; on the flip is “Breathe,” which speeds up and airs out Blu Cantrell’s 2003 single with Sean Paul, and “Move Your Body,” which takes Nina Sky’s (remember them?) “Move Ya Body” and makes it an air raid siren. If you’ve forgotten why you missed going out during the pandemic, these three edits ought to invoke a proper pining. Good luck getting a copy, obviously.

Patrick Masterson

 Pylar — Abysmos (Humo Internacional)

Abysmos by PYLAR

Doom-drone meets hermetic monks? Hard to say precisely what’s going on when you press play on this new release from Spanish freak collective Pylar, but things surely get weird in a hurry. Vibrations, rumbles, keening squeaks and melodic moans gather, intone, wrap into one another and build. It’s all pretty dire and doom-struck, a soundtrack for a tough afternoon with way too much mescaline. Perversely, it’s also sort of fun, especially “Crepitación Solar,” which descends into some dizzyingly grim declivities and jerks and shimmies with a spazzy, jazzy sensibility, until it doesn’t, and the bum-out begins in earnest. Pylar’s characteristic mode is low and slow, with an abundance of foreboding squelching and cultic chanting floating and fading atop the thrums. Other folks do this sort of thing—see Neptunian Maximalism, or Sunn 0))) at their strangest. But Pylar does it with a spirited whackiness that feels downright possessed.

Jonathan Shaw

 Sharif Sehnaoui — Recoil / Recant (Al Maslakh)

Recoil/Relent by Sharif Sehnaoui

Sharif Sehnaoui is a guitarist based in Beirut, Lebanon, where he has been one of the of the forces driving the development of an experimental music community for twenty-odd years. In his organizational capacity, he is a co-organizer of the Irtijal Festival, which brings like-minded performers to Beirut, and the proprietor of the Al Maslakh label. As a musician, he has recorded on his own, as a member of Karkhana and the A Trio. The pandemic determined both the content and form of Recoil / Recant. Given the country’s disastrous economic condition, hard copies just aren’t in the budget. And because Sehnaoui was stuck in his house on lockdown, certain ways of performing weren’t available to him. So, he pursued the concept if “unprepared guitar,” which essentially means that he foreswore effects, electricity and unconventional implements in favor of fingers and an acoustic instrument. The album’s two pieces each clock in at just short of half an hour, and each deals more directly than Sehnaoui has in the past with familiar guitar vernacular. The music often feels like a distanced, abstracted response to flamenco music, whose gestures have been unmoored from their cultural context to wander through the back of Sehnaoui’s mind and out through his nimble fingers.

Bill Meyer

 Terrine — Les Problèmes Urbains (Bruit Direct)

Terrine - Les Problèmes Urbains by bruit direct disques

A terrine is a mixed, gelatinous dish that is cooled, sliced and served quivering on a plate. Terrine is the recording project of one Claire Gapenne, who seems to do similar things to sounds. A random stroll through her Bandcamp page suggests that she has roots in old-school industrial music (ie, pre-disco Cabaret Voltaire distorto-clank, not 1990s pop metal made by junkies for adolescents set on annoying their parents). Gapenne dices simple electronic licks, samples of what might be some household free improv jams and wine-sodden sing-alongs and other sounds that were probably lifted from records, mixes them up with a bit of dub-inspired echo and serves them on a black vinyl platter; it’s up to the listener to supply the quivering. Since the beats jump around a bit, that’s the only way you’ll dance to this stuff. But when no one’s watching, Mr. Jello-shoes, that’s just what you’ll be doing.

Bill Meyer

 Yard Act — The Overload (Zen F.C.)

Yard Act’s James Smith may have one of the most common names in England, but as far as vocalists go, he possesses a rare spark. Given Smith’s thick northern brogue, the most obvious comparison is probably the late, great Mark E. Smith, but contemporaries such as Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson and Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw also spring to mind. Smith’s words tumble out effortlessly in a colloquial, observational stream, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, such as these lines from “Dead Horse”: “Are you seriously still trying to kid me / That our culture will be just finе / When all that's left is knobheads / Morris dancing to Sham 69.” The standout song is “Rich,” which pairs a two-note bassline with some of Smith’s most inspired vocal delivery and a wonderfully executed video. Musically, The Overload struggles a little to match Smith’s fizzing inventiveness, and occasionally the vibe strays too close to 1990s baggy for comfort. Nevertheless, this is a fun and promising debut.