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June: The Albums You Should Hear This Month

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June: The Albums You Should Hear This Month

ALBUM OF THE MONTH
Jamie xx
In Colour
(Young Turks)
By Ben Gray
9/10
In an electronic music landscape where producers constantly scramble to revitalize the genre, Jamie Smith makes it seem straightforward. Smith, or Jamie xx as he’s known, is one third of the alternative trio The xx and has produced the likes of Drake and Alicia Keys, as well as remixing Radiohead and Gil Scott-Heron. His solo debut In Colour is a refreshing homage to the electronic past, using simple ideas and riffs to build entrancing melodies. Opening track Gosh is the poster child of his approach, sampling Lyn Collins and an unaired DJ Ron and MC Strings radio pilot from the mid-90s. The track’s shuffling, dusty rhythm is infectious enough before a siren-like keyboard line is added midway that propels the song to summer anthem status. In Colour is full of these moments, from the celebratory Idris Muhammad sample on Loud Places, featuring xx bandmate Romy Madley Croft, to the frenetic build that closes out The Rest Is Noise. The record’s best elements come from the unlikeliest of places, an unexpected sample here, a sudden shift in rhythm there, yet what makes In Colour feel so genuine is its simplicity and spirit. There’s plenty here that captures the laidback atmosphere of the after hours, but the album overall feels like it’s designed to fill rooms and dancefloors, especially on tracks like Loud Places and the summery R’n’B of I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times, which features Young Thug and Popcaan. In Colour lands perfectly ahead of the festival season and, though there are a few downbeat detours along the way, it captures all of its euphoria.

 

Wolf Alice
My Love Is Cool
(Dirty Hit)
By Alex Young
8/10
It’s been a while coming. Wolf Alice have long been hyped as one of alternative music’s most exciting new bands. Like fellow British guitar band Fever Dream, they seem to draw plenty of inspiration from the Nineties’ fertile alternative scene; My Love Is Cool could sit in your CD collection (if such a thing still exists) somewhere close to The Pixies and The Breeders, with a similar combination of guitar racket, propulsive, melodic bass and tuneful indie songs. Fluffy is powerful indie rock reminiscent of Throwing Muses and even Hole. Your Loves Whore is driven along by a hard-to-resist bassline, while Giant Beach throws in a chunky metal riff for good measure. Freazy has a shuffling early Stone Roses quality, coming close to an anthem, with singer Ellie Rowsell declaring: “You can hate us if you want to. Don’t mean nothing at all.” Rowsell has a British way with words (“You’re a dodgy fucker,” she tells someone on You’re A Germ) and there’s often a playfulness to the band, but they clearly have a thoughtful, emotional side, too, not least on the powerful Silk (“There’s love that is a saviour. That ain’t no love of mine. My love it kills me slowly”) and the acoustic shoegazing of Swallowtail with layers of dream-like guitars. My Love Is Cool feels like the start of something.

 

Florence + The Machine
How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful
(Island)
By Ben Gray
8/10
Florence Welch established a dramatic, grandiose sound on her first two records Lungs and Ceremonials, her debut an orchestral dance that was amplified to eleven on the follow-up. How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful has been talked up as a more introspective, restrained album. While there is plenty of introspection and personal exploration, musically it’s unbound. Ship To Wreck kickstarts the record in high tempo, skipping the tense builds that defined her previous releases. Not far beneath the skin of the song is a darker theme that typifies much of How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful: Welch’s self-destructive nature. In recent interviews, she’s spoken of the chaotic year she took off after recorded Lungs and Ceremonials consecutively. Her personal turmoil is evident throughout this record, whether it’s in the reflective regret on horn-led St Jude or her troubles with alcohol on the guitar-heavy What Kind of Man. Whereas soaring instrumentals in her past work created the most impact, the honesty of this record lands the biggest blow. Florence has once again delivered, with a record that’s even more consistent than its predecessors, a sublime mix of ballads and vast anthems that open the doors on her struggles and lets in the light.

 

Toto La Momposina
Tambolero
(Real World)
By Ben Evans
8/10
Colombia’s Caribbean coastline is a vibrant clash of cultures: indigenous American Indian, African, Spanish… It’s those cultures and their music that 75-year-old Colombia singer Totó La Momposina represents. Tambolero is a modern recreation or reworking of her 1993 album La Candela Viva, one of her best known records, with some vocal and musical additions from Totó’s granddaughters. It’s a folk-based album, at turns mournful (the singer was born and raised through Colombia’s violent civil war) and celebratory. The opening songs Adios Fulana and El Pescador manage both at the same time, with uplifting melodies and laidback rhythms, but a sorrowfulness to Totó’s voice. Gallinacito and Candela Viva show off the coast’s African influence, both built on frantic, pounding percussion, and there’s plenty of Latin flair in the passionate Malanga. The acousitic guitar-led La Sombra Negra feels like a lament, while the Native Indian roots show in the flutes and chants of Curura and Dame La Mano Juancho. Toto and her band are playing at the UK’s WOMAD festival this year – should be worth catching.

 

Leftfield
Alternative Light Source
(Infectious Music)
By Alex Young
8/10
Leftfield’s 1995 debut Leftism was one of the Nineties’ era-defining albums. But, after the by-comparison minimalist follow-up Rhythm And Stealth, the duo’s relationship soured and they split. 16 years on, Alternative Light Source is an expected and welcome return, though it’s only a partial return, with Neil Barnes now running the Leftfield project solo without Paul Daley. Alternative Light Source doesn’t mess about, getting straight down to it within seconds of opener Bad Radio, which has a raw, punkish bassline, a pounding beat and processed vocals from TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe. There’s plenty here that feels like the familiar Leftfield of old; tracks like Universal Everything, featuring Channy Leaneagh from Polica, will fit seamlessly into their set. But there’s enough new ideas here too to re-earn Leftfield their spot at the top of the dance music pile. The production is obsessive and immaculate, the bass deep and heavy, the beats crisp. Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson adds a strange rant to the hip-hop of Head & Shoulders, and the album’s second half sees interesting detours, with both Storms End and Alternative Light Source showing a dark, moody soundtracky side. From the start right through to the squall of Shaker Obsession, though, ALS seems engineered to make festival tents and fields crowded with people rejoice and lose their minds.

 

Desaparecidos
Payola
(Epitaph)
By Alex Young
8/10
From the look of things, bands never really die; they just go away for a while. With recent returns from Leftfield and Blur, among others, here’s another resurrection; Conor Oberst’s old band Desaparecidos (The Disappeared) put out one album, Read Music / Speak Spanish, back in 2002, before other projects took over, not least Oberst’s Bright Eyes. Payola, their second album, 13 years on, is dominated by extremism, war, racism, refugees, austerity and mass surveillance. Oberst has tackled war before, especially on Bright Eyes I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, but the dense lyrics on Payola are consumed by the world’s grim headlines. This fists-in-the-air mix of indie rock, punk and metal, with big riffs, howling guitars and thrashed drums, is a million miles away from his recent mellow alt-country solo output. “We’re doomed,” Oberst sings on the opener The Left Is Right, which sets the tone, as do song titles like Radicalised and Slacktivist. Golden Parachutes fronts up to corrupt bankers: “…too big to fail. Never have to go to jail. When you own it, you can rob the bank,” while Search The Searches is a response to the kind of government snooping revealed by Edward Snowden. An angry record for angry times.

 

Everything Everything
Get To Heaven
(Sony RCA)
By Ben Gray
8/10
“Take me to the distant past / I want to go back,” yells singer Jonathan Higgs at the top of his lungs on Distant Past, an evolutionary tale harking back to primitive times. Higgs claims that Everything Everything’s third record Get To Heaven is a product of “the most violent year of their lives”, bluntly stating that “if you put out a record this year and it’s all smiles, then I think you’re a liar”. With the world’s terror broadcast daily into our living rooms, can you blame them for wanting to return to simpler times? Behind this record’s vivacious pop guise, Higgs and co. tackle propaganda and its corrupting influence head-on for a firing-on-all-cylinders piledriver of a record. Working with producer Stuart Price (Madonna, Pet Shop Boys), the band take bleak subjects and channel them into anger-fuelled statements of extroverted pop brilliance. Get to Heaven adds a metric tonne of impact to the eclectic alt-pop that comprised their first two records Man Alive and Arc. Zero Pharaoh fires glitchy loops and builds to a blaring climax. To The Blade is in one moment tranquil, then the next incendiary, falsettos expertly deployed. The sense of dread is often countered with vibrant melodies. Get To Heaven shows Everything Everything have an unrivalled knack for oddball, provocative songwriting that pack real punch.

 

Meg Baird
Don’t Weigh Down The Light
(Wichita)
By Jon Morton
8/10
For someone whose music sounds like it might be best listened to while lying down, Meg Baird doesn’t seem to be someone who sits or lies still for very long. Over the last 10 years, she founded Philadelphia band Espers, with whom she recorded three albums, before moving to San Francisco to create new group Heron Oblivion with members of Comets On Fire, along the way working with Will Oldham, Kurt Vile and Sharon Van Etten and touring with Bert Jansch. Don’t Weigh Down The Light feels like a late night record, inspired by folk music from both sides of the Atlantic, with acoustic finger-picking and soft, echoey electric guitars. Baird’s captivating voice is at the heart of it, which has echoes of Emmylou Harris and Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny. There’s heartbreak in Back To You and Even The Walls Don’t Want You To Go, and the title song is sublime, with a hypnotic guitar work and vocal. With plenty of righteous anger and apocalyptic fury from other albums out this month, Don’t Weigh Down The Light feels like a place of peace and calm in the middle of a storm.

 

Jaga Jazzist
Starfire
(Ninja Tune)
By Ben Evans
8/10
20 years into their musical career, Norway’s experimental 8-piece Jaga Jazzist are still twisting their music into compelling new shapes. On Starfire, the band, built around Horntveth siblings (Lars, Martin and Line), seem to have moved even further away from the ‘jazz’ in their name. The five instrumentals here are hard to pin down; what you really get from jazz is the sense that each piece of music could really go anywhere. After a brooding build-up, Prungen breaks halfway to a bassy synth line and a tight percussive workout. Oban has an interval of laidback lounge jazz, but elsewhere draws on house and techno. The title piece and the 14-minute Big City Music both feature almost overwhelming sonic assaults of drums and synths, combining electronic experimentation with the sound of a collective that really knows how to play together. Shinkansen might just be the best thing here, though, with flutes and strummed acoustic guitar creating a gentle psychedelic piece that subtly builds into something epic; it takes you on quite a journey, just like the Japanese trains that give the track it’s name.

 

Muse
Drones
(Warner Bros)
By Jon Morton
7/10
These are two things you can safely expect from a Muse album: that it will sound big and that it will have at least one foot standing firmly on the side of the ridiculous, if not two. The British rock band’s new album Drones doesn’t disappoint on either, with crunching metal riffs and thundering songs clearly built for stadiums. The dystopian ideas of Pink Floyd’s The Wall run throughout the album, a world of mindless psycho killers and emotionless machines. With a JFK speech about a “ruthless conspiracy”, drill sergeants yelling and singer Matt Bellamy’s lyrics (“I am free from society”), the band haven’t exactly taken a nuanced approach. As on past outings, the band sound a lot like Queen, both with the Mercury-esque falsettoed voices and the May-like solos and frenetic fretwork. Close to the end, the Pink-Floyd-meets-Dire-Straits track The Globalist is a change from the relentless pace and tone, sounding more like a love song than a warning of apocalypse (“I need your comfort from this world.”), while the closing title track lifts heavily from Ennio Morricone (play it next to Il Mercenario Ripresa) before working into a chorale finale. There’s a histrionic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach and a lack of subtlety to Drones. But it’s also a lot of fun.

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Check out our Music interviews with:
Johnny Marr
The Horrors
Public Service Broadcasting
East India Youth
Tune-Yards
Aidan Moffat
Alexis Taylor
Dengue Fever
Songhoy Blues
Albert Hammond Jr
Tinariwen
Janelle Monae
Tony Allen
Rodrigo Y Gabriela

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The post June: The Albums You Should Hear This Month appeared first on Curious Animal Magazine.


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