June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June

Albums

Shannon and the Clams - The Moon Is in the Wrong Place

Shannon and the Clams have been a fixture of the garage rock scene for a long time now. Their blend of 60’s girl groups, psych-rock and punk has given them a ton of hits, and fantastic live performances have made them a mainstay in their hometown of Portland, OR, as well as festivals across the world. Their energy and songwriting is unquestioned.

However, this album feels different - much more raw - and there’s a very good reason for it. In 2022, Joe Haener, a close friend of the band and Shannon Shaw’s fiancée, died in a car accident, mere weeks before their wedding. Every song on the album is about him, and the feelings of agony, shock, and grief that came from that experience.

It changed their entire creative process. In the past, Shaw and guitarist Cody Blanchard had largely written their songs independently and brought finished songs to rehearsal. Suddenly they were spending all their time together, doing marathon jam sessions, trying new instruments, and diving into much darker emotions than they ever had before. The result is truly astonishing. They’re so vulnerable here. The opening track, “The Vow,” was written by Shaw before Haener’s death, with the intention of surprising him with it at their wedding. Listening to the lyrics with that in mind is truly heartbreaking, and the fact that they follow it with the strained, furious “The Hourglass” is an abrupt turn that captures the shock of having someone suddenly torn away. Even the title of the album is full of pathos. “The moon is in the wrong place” was something that Haener said to Shaw when he was poking fun at her interest astrology, but it also evokes a sense of a universe that no longer makes sense.

I knew that this was a great album before I did this research, but now that I know the context, the lyrics hit differently. I was headbanging to it - and I still do - but knowing how intense the emotions behind it are, I’ve gone from appreciating it as a great rock album to understanding it as an artistic document of this band’s experience of grief. Great rock music is always emotional, but it’s rare to have such a clear understanding of the pain that led to its creation. The Moon Is in the Wrong Place is one of the most powerful musical productions I’ve heard in a long time.

Pye Corner Audio - Entangled Routes

As I’ve been doing research for this blurb, I’ve been trying not to roll my eyes at some of the terms floating around Pye Corner Audio (aka Martin Jenkins), like “hauntology” and “mycorrhizal networks.” Unfortunately, once you parse that ridiculous intellectual-ese jargon, it actually describes his music pretty well, and since everyone who talks about this guy insists on using them, I’ll get into it a little.

Hauntology: starting in roughly the 2000s, there was a movement in which artists took aesthetic elements from the kind of mid-20th century media that we normally wouldn’t think of as “art” (cheesy electronic music you’d find in educational videos, weird visual warping, white fuzz on old VHS tapes, poorly-acted PSAs, bad audio tracking, visual artifacting in low-rez images and videos, etc) and turned it into menacing, psychedelic, disorienting music and video art. Good examples would be Boards of Canada, the TV show Look Around You, Tobacco, etc. It’s supposed to be “haunting” - hence, “hauntology.” The grad student in me is annoyed that they borrowed “hauntology” from Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx because my reading of that book suggests that it was intended as a dire warning against political and economic triumphalism (in particular the common impression at the time that democracy and capitalism had achieved victory over all other systems and global conflict would inevitably come to an end - see 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama), and using it for this microgenre seems more like a general description of how like, the past comes back sometimes or whatever, and in this music it’s like kinda spooky, I guess. Also, why are we talking about Derrida right now?

Anyway, yes, if you accept “hauntology” as a microgenre/aesthetic movement, this is it. It’s got all the warbling, droning effects of 70’s-80’s experimental music, which was weirdly echoed in the interstitial music of news shows and ads for new consumer technology like the Commodore 64. It’s also, as indicated above, kinda “haunting”.

Mycorrhizal networks: this one is Jenkins’s description of his own work. There’s been a lot of scientific interest in the communication networks of fungi and plants, which span incredible distances through intricate webs of roots and veins. According to Pye Corner Audio, this album is an exploration of human attempts to listen in on these communication networks. It’s there, I think. There’s something about the swirling arpeggios that evokes a complex tangled system, and the slow synth patches evoke a kind of otherworldly logic. I haven’t been able to find any interviews in which Jenkins really breaks down what he has in mind here, but I think that as an aesthetic, it kinda makes sense.

Ok so there’s all that. Pye Corner Audio is beautiful, haunting music. Stay tuned for next month because I’ll also be checking out his aliases, Head Technician and House in the Woods.

Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown

Of course it’s inevitable to compare Beth Gibbons’s solo album to her time with Portishead. It’s been more than 15 years since Third came out, and she hasn’t released a whole lot of music in the meantime, so it’s about all we have to go on. At a glance, the two projects couldn’t be more different. She’s ditched the trip-hop beats and electronic textures that made Portishead iconic in favor of acoustic guitars and orchestral compositions, and instead of being mixed down into the production, her voice is front-and-center. Portishead could sometimes feel a bit removed, dissociative even. Lives Outgrown is much more personal.

But the connection is there. Obviously, there’s the melancholy. Lives Outgrown proceeds at a meditative pace, dwelling on every syllable, and Gibbons’s strained delivery carries through from one to the other. I’d even argue that the compositions have something in common. The slow-paced swell of the orchestra reminds me of some of Portishead’s slower pieces.

Of course, the themes are quite different. Portishead’s most famous songs are about love, bad relationships, and depression. Lives Outgrown is about motherhood, menopause, and the loss of friends and family. It’s powerful, like meeting an old friend who is startlingly honest about the 15 years since you saw them last.

It’s a beautiful, powerful work. I hope we hear from her again soon, but that’s not really her MO. After all, she mentioned to Pitchfork that she was working on an album way back in 2013. Assuming that this is what she was referring to, she certainly took her time to get it right.

Der Dritte Raum - KOMMIT

As usual with producers, there’s precious little on the (English-language) internet about Der Dritte Raum, even though he’s been around for decades. If you’re a techno fan you might recognize his track “Hale Bopp,” which was released all the way back in ‘98. It still holds up today, I think. I wonder what I would have thought if I listened to it 10 years ago. Would I be into it or would I think it was cheesy?

This album, KOMMIT, is a response to the end of the pandemic lockdown in Germany. It’s a return to the exuberant nightclub life, and a beautiful spacey journey unto itself.

Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa​/​Brazzaville 1969​-​1982)

I’d love to do a deep dive into the history of Congolese music here, but just isn’t enough time or space to do justice to it. Kinshasa, the capitol of The Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaïre), is in kind of a Twin-Cities relationship with Brazzaville on the other side of the Congo River, and they played off of each other in the development of the Congolese funk sound. Kinshasa is often thought of as the hub of central African music, giving rise to bands like African Jazz, O.K. Jazz and African Fiesta, but Brazzaville is home to the radio stations that spread the word.

I’ll admit here that I’m cribbing very heavily from the Bandcamp article and I’m going to let you read the rest yourself since I won’t be able to tell you a whole lot more than that, but I encourage you to do so. It touches on a number of interesting topics like the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko funding a three-day music festival in the runup to The Rumble in the Jungle, and James Brown’s defining concert there.

There’s so much to be fascinated by in the history of music. Here in the US, we’re well acquainted with the political dimensions of musical events like Woodstock, Motown, gangsta rap, the rise of swing, and punk, but most of us know almost nothing about how music played similar roles in other parts of the world (and of course it did!). Personally, I’m taking this moment to sign up for the Analog Africa newsletter. They’re the group that put together this compilation, and they have a healthy back catalog of music from around the world and short articles on how/why that music came about. It’s great stuff.

Tracks

Ammar 808 - Geeta duniki

Tunisia-based artist Ammar 808 is known for travelling to collaborate intensely with artists from other cultures - in this case, he went to Chennai in southern India to gather the sounds of street musicians, temple music, and local genres, and transform them into bass-heavy dance music. I absolutely love this track, which is a collaboration with a Carnatic musician named Susha. Carnatic music is largely narrative, and I’d love to know what this song is about, but I haven’t been able to find the lyrics anywhere, and I probably wouldn’t trust the translation anyway.

I could easily have put this album, Global Control / Invisible Invasion above, but this one is the real standout. It’s well worth listening from beginning to end.

Boris Blank - Vertigo Heroes (Part I)

I was absolutely delighted to learn that Boris Blank is one of the guys from Yello. This is a gorgeous, mysterious soundscape that totally makes sense as an extension of what Yello was up to. I’d also suggest looking at this picture of Blank as a kid, who has a haircut that I would kill for today.

Angélica Garcia - Juanita

I’ve about 99% convinced myself that this Angélica Garcia is not the same one as Angelica, who did that song “Angel Baby” in 1991, although I kind of wish it was. This Angélica Garcia is an experimental pop artist living in LA, whereas the other one was… well… a pop artist living in LA. But one was active 30 years earlier. Um, I think.

Anyway, “Juanita” is a haunting production with a complicated structure and a great Latin rhythm.

Moktar, Saad El Soghayar - Haraka "حركة"

I’m definitely going to be revisiting this Egyptian-Australian producer. It’s a bassification (I’m coining that term now, thx) of Arabic instrumentation and vocals. I love it.

Sierra Farrell - Fox Hunt

Sierra Farrell is the real deal for folk/country music: a van-life busker that’s been through the ringer of drug addiction and bad relationships. Her story is kind of romantic, in that she was kind of nomadic, going up and down the West Coast until eventually, she had a viral video that captured the attention of Gary Paczosa of Sugar Hill Records, got sober, and now hangs out with people like The Black Keys and Ray Lamontagne. There are a number of great country tracks on the album Trail of Flowers, but my sensibilities drive me to this upbeat bluegrass track first (even though nothing in her history would suggest to me that she’s ever been on an actual fox hunt).

PVRIS, Tommy Genesis, Alice Longyu Gao - Burn the Witch

The only name on this track I was familiar with going in was Alice Longyu Gao, who’s one of the more intense experiment hyperpop artists out there (and a bit too intense for me, I’ll admit). A cursory search turned up a couple more PVRIS tracks that I want to dig into, but it seems like Tommy Genesis is more of a traditional pop artist. I probably won’t give Genesis a lot more attention, but I have to think that she helped tone down Alice Longyu Gao a bit and turned this into a great pop/hip-hop track that drops into a punk-influenced chorus.

Wallace - Papertrip

The label Rhythm Section is a pretty solid place to look for great, straightforward house music.

Night Tapes - drifting

Night Tapes feels like the kind of band that will have an album any minute now. They’ve got a lot of pop tracks going back to 2019, so it just seems inevitable that the time is coming. This is more of a callback to the indie dance-pop that took over the college radio airwaves in the 2000’s. My mind went immediately to Cut Copy’s “Lights and Music” and Passion Pit’s “Sleepyhead.”

Arnaud Rebotini - Curiosa

This track is part of Arnaud Rebotini’s soundtrack for the French erotic biography film Curiosa, which I’d never heard of until writing this blurb. The bell arpeggios here are kind of John Carpentery, which suggests that there’s a sinister dimension to the movie, but it’s supposed to be… not very good except for the sexiness. At least the music is great?

Nilüfer Yanya - Like I Say (I runaway)

File this one under “wasn’t this in a movie or a TV commercial or something?” If not, it will be. The melody is catchy and pretty, and the roaring guitar at the chorus provides a nice counterpoint. If you haven’t heard it, it’s worth visiting her debut album Miss Universe as well.

Yoasobi - アイドル

Well, I’ve been trying to figure out why this track sounds so different from Yoasobi’s other stuff, and Japanese wikipedia finally revealed to me that it’s the opening theme song to an anime show called Oshi no Ko (anglicized as My Favorite Idol or Their Idol's Children. It can be a little frustrating when your favorite track by an artist turns out to be a one-off for a specific project like this, but I did also turn up “怪物,” a great dance-pop track with an absolutely gorgeous music video.

Louis Cole, Metropole Orkest, Jules Buckley - Things Will Fall Apart

Here’s another one of those cases in which three artists who I don’t care about come together to make some magic happen. Louis Cole’s voice is a little too beautiful for me, Jules Buckley’s beats are a little too mainstream, and Metropole Orkest is… well… they’re basically just a brass band. But if all three of those tones come together, suddenly you’ve got something.

Delilah Bon - I Wish a Bitch Would

Delilah Bon is very consistent in that all her tracks are metal-hip-hop-screamo about violence against women. I think this one would be at home in a revenge film that I would totally watch.

Cosmo Sheldrake - Stop the Music

I love a weird “uh-uh-oh-oh-ee-ee” and I love hand drums and I love handclaps.

Tinariwen - Anemouhagh

I don’t know what the local name is for this genre of guitar-led North African music, but Tidal once gave it to me as a playlist called “Saharan Guitars,” so I guess I’m going with that for now. This one is one of the bluesier tracks I’ve heard, and that guy’s creaking voice is fantastic.

Paranoid London & Joe Love - One Self Love

A few months ago I was just filling this thing with industrial techno. Funny how these things ebb and flow like that. Anyway, as my friend said, “I don’t like industrial techno. It sounds like a rave in a Matrix movie.” To which I say, “Exactly.”

Helado Negro - Colores del Mar

I like when an artist like Helado Negro does something with a little mystery.