Loud And Quiet 139 – Black Country, New Road

Princess Nokia, Deep Tan, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Cartel Madras, Self Esteem, Bambara, Do Nothing, Dan Carey, Albums of the Year 2019

issue 139

Committee ruling Black Country, New Road

Spring highlights

Image: Park Jiha © Cecil Park

Damon Albarn Vashti Bunyan Richard Dawson Deep Throat Choir Efterklang Robert Henke Arthur Jeffes Park Jiha King Creosote Daniel Pioro Karine Polwart Lee Ranaldo Max Richter Ride These New Puritans Patrick Watson Andrew Weatherall Wacław Zimpel

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Book Editor: Lee Bullman Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Aimee Armstrong, Andrew Anderson, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Brian Coney, Chris Watkeys, David Zammitt, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Ian Roebuck, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Luke Cartledge, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Rachel Redfern, Rosie Ramsden, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward.

Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, Dave Kasnic, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

Issue 139

The next time you see a copy of Loud And Quiet, the magazine will have passed its 15-year anniversary. Our very first issue was printed on 25 January 2005, as a black and white fanzine that I wrote under eight fake names, including Tony Soy (RIP), Sam Little (RIP) and Danny Canter (working at the BBC). Readers would have never known it by Soy’s beautiful prose (“there’s a new funky dance group in town called The Go! Team”), but I had no idea what I was doing, even when dedicating three pages to a love letter to Carl Barat.

Of course, no one knows what they’re doing in music, which is what’s so special about it, and why we’ve spent the last year working on a new podcast about obsession called Music Made Me Do It. Tony Soy says: “Such a wicked cool podcast!”

Stuart Stubbs

With special thanks to Ben Harris, Dan Carson, George Cochran, James Parrish, Liv Willars, Louisa Worskett, Sinead Mills.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2019 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Albums of the Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Cartel Madras . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Bambara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Deep Tan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Do Nothing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Black Country, New Road . . . . . . . . . . 48 Beverly Glenn-Copeland . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Dan Carey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Princess Nokia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 ..

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Let Us Face the Future

Sea Change Festival TIM BURGESS SHIRLEY COLLINS FIELD MUSIC VANISHING TWIN SQUID

WORKING MEN’S CLUB DRY CLEANING KATY J PEARSON PORRIDGE RADIO KEEL HER AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA (DJ) RICHARD NORRIS (DJ) PLUS MORE ARTIST ANNOUNCEMENTS IN JANUARY...

www.seachangefestival.co.uk Sea Change returns for its fifth edition, a full weekend on the idyllic Dartington Hall Estate. Always intimate, always different, always special, always rare. ‘Let Us Face the Future’ as we invite more of the finest thinkers, speakers and players to the countryside.

Environment

Into a new decade, alone together It’s the end of the decade, and what a decade it has been. Wetherspoons made an app, Ed Miliband attempted unsuccessfully to get into both Number 10 and Napalm Death, and that Warhammer Nazi off YouTube got milkshaked (milkshaken?) while standing to become a UKIP MEP. What a decade the 2010s have been.

Well done everyone. Here’s another article about What Has Happened To Us. As we teeter on the precipice between socialism and barbarism even more precariously than ever before, let’s examine how the musical infrastructure of the UK is holding up today, compared to the point at which David “Scourge of the Sty” Cameron surprised nobody more than himself by becoming Prime Minister in 2010, useful idiot Nick Clegg bouncing along in his pocket like a baby kangaroo. In 2015, it was found that 35% of the UK’s grassroots music venues had closed down since 2007, and the country’s nightclubs had nearly halved in number since 2005. Iconic spots like London’s Astoria and Manchester’s Roadhouse were among the casualties.

In response, then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, set up the Music Venue Taskforce, the effectiveness of which is basically unclear (but, hey, he likes The Clash, so he must be pretty cool and really care about DIY music, right?). Its 2017 progress report, now under the mayoralty of Sadiq Khan, is full of vague recommendations and descriptions of various legislative achievements, some of which are undeniably laudable, but many of which feel rather speculative, patched together with well-intentioned principle rather than concrete, quantifiable achievement. One of the few visible results of the 2017 update was the creation of the position of Night Czar, whose first and current incumbent, Amy Lamé, has a pretty mixed track record in the job so far. Yes, she played an important role in the reopening of Farringdon superclub Fabric, but her inaction over the 2018 introduction of restrictive curfew legislation in Hackney – an area that’s teeming with far smaller, more accessible venues and clubs than the unquestionably important but hardly grassrootslevel Fabric – was widely criticized.

The plight of music venues in the UK is a familiar story, so I don’t want to dwell on it too much here, but there’s one thing I’d like to hammer home: we can’t rely on those in power to save independent culture. The British DIY underground can only sustain itself through mass, active participation, not to mention the willingness of those participants to cough up from time to time. Should we really be surprised that London’s Night Czar trumpets her role as the ‘saviour’ of a world-renowned superclub, but is rather more laissez-faire (in practical terms) when faced with the murkier, less glamorous, less lucrative issues of venues further down the food chain? Why would we expect a legacy of Boris Johnson – a man whose mayoralty was characterised by a constant stream of architectural follies, political idiocy and thinly-veiled contempt for the London working class – and now

words by luke cartledge. illustration by kate prior

under the stewardship of Sadiq Khan, an undoubtedly preferable but still rather ineffective agent of change, to do anything at all for the abstract, difficult-to-measure underpinning of the city’s cultural life? Real social change, particularly of this nature, is built at street level. We all know that Spotify and Amazon do fuck all for the artists whose value they extract so horribly efficiently; we must seek to redress the balance at an individual level, by directly supporting and participating in the independent culture from which we all benefit.

I’ll get off my soapbox to briefly re-tell the parable of an unexpected hero of the independent British music of the 2010s.

A man who valiantly fought against institutional prejudice and corporate power to champion the cause of a marginalised group.

I’m speaking, of course, of Conservative MP Matt Hancock.

The answer to the question “what if you put one of the useless civil servants from The Thick of It in the machine from The Fly with a happily tranquilised Labrador”, Hancock has done some pretty shit things while in Conservative and coalition government over the past ten years, albeit in the kind of contentedly absent way that suggests he has no real idea what he’s doing. Yet this is also the man whose letter to Sadiq Khan led to an inquiry into the use of form 696, a controversial piece of risk assessment legislation that demonstrably profiled and targeted largely BAME-led music events. Following the inquiry, it was repealed in 2017, ending a long and torrid ordeal for artists and promoters nationwide. As genres like drill continue to be the subject of much pearl-clutching from the morally dubious likes of the Metropolitan Police, the Tory culture secretary somehow played a blinder, genuinely helping the full flourishing of a resurgent grime scene. Pretty much everything else he and his government have done over the past ten years has made life far harder for marginalised people in this country, musical or otherwise, so this was quite the turnup for the books.

What I’m saying is, sometimes help comes from the least expected places, yet the only people who we know want to keep independent culture alive are ourselves. As we career headlong into the 2020s, this feels more important than ever.

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Betting

What are the chances that your favourite Christmas song will be ruined next? you’ve probably only got the rest of this year for it to remain your favourite Christmas song. I wouldn’t even say keep it to yourself – by the close of 2020, your friend who doesn’t even like music will be requesting this one on Magic’s request show and feeling very pleased with themselves. Chances of ruin: 1/4

You won’t admit it now, but eight years ago your favourite Christmas song was ‘All I Want For Christmas’. You were right to feel good about it; to watch the face opposite you crumble as you told them. They’d completely forgotten about it, and you were right; it was the best Christmas song. The problems started when that defeated face switched out ‘Last Christmas’ for your clever answer and started hammering it on Spotify.

The fact of the matter is that, since the official banning of any new Christmas songs being written following Coldplay’s ‘Christmas Lights’ in 2010, the earth’s natural resources are running low. As commerce booms and John Lewis continues to demonstrate the true devastation caused by an old pop song played at half speed on a piano whilst a pencil goes ice skating, a parsnip is reunited with its family, or a gnome gifts their fishing rod to a homeless dog (all ideas I’m willing to discuss with the company), every single Christmas song, however obscure, is now at risk of becoming the next I-hope-you-choke-on-it ‘All I Want For Christmas’.

As someone who knows nothing about betting or how odds work, I’d advise you not to lean on your local BetFred to honour any of the below, but here’s how the few remaining underplayed Christmas songs worth anything at all are likely to fair in the coming years, in terms of being rediscovered by your awful friends and a company who thinks it’s ok to depict a baby bear reassembling a rusty robot for a sick badger spending Christmas Day in hospital to sell Chilly water bottles to us stupid, stupid people.

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love (1963) I’m sorry to say that it doesn’t look good for this absolute pearler from the Phil Spector Christmas album. I mean, it’s inclusion in this year’s DFS campaign (the one where the people made of patchwork cloth put you off ever shopping at DFS) is what started me down this track. Just like ‘All Alone At Christmas’ circa 2017 – also by Love and featured briefly in Home Alone 2 –

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Driving Home For Christmas by Chris Rea (1988) Something more bullet proof is ‘Driving Home For Christmas’.

It’s survived fronting Iceland’s Christmas campaigns in 1997, 1998 and 2011, a rerelease in 2009 for the charity Shelter, and obligatory covers by Michael Ball (a man who only makes music to oversaturate the Christmas market with) and X-Factor’s Joe McElderry and Stacey Soloman. What the hell is with people’s reluctance to rinse this record about being stuck in traffic?! It can’t only be because Chris Rea looks like a shoes. Good news for us fans. Chances of ruin: 100/1 Run Run Rudolph by Chuck Berry (1958) Did I miss this track being everywhere one Christmas, or is this one of those occasions when everyone just presumed that someone else has already done it, like when only 86 people name the Queen as a member of the Royal Family on Pointless. Ebay or Argos have done this, right? With kids running all over the place and throwing wrapping paper in the air. Chances of ruin: 8/1 Mistletoe and Wine by Cliff Richard (1988) I am both sad and happy to say that I think we’ve gone past a time when ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ can do a Mariah. It doesn’t help that it already sounds like a John Lewis slow-down in its original form, but Cliff Richard so sincerely singing about the Christian values of Christmas... it’s not very... y’know... post-happiness, is it? I mean, we’ve had Guantanamo Bay now. It’s just not going to fly with people these days; most of which would probably suggest it creepy how Cliff sings through a window to a sleeping child in the video. To those people I say, ‘SHAME!!!!’ (I’m doing the Game of Thrones ‘shame’ gesture – another disgusting thing we’ve created since this golden moment of love). Chances of ruin: 133/1 Little Drummer Boy (Peace on Earth) by David Bowie and Bing Crosby (1982) ‘Little Drummer Boy’ is what happens when an elderly man finally invites his neighbour over at Christmas only to discover he’s a very confused drug addict called David. They attempt awkward conversation, think better of it and sing a song together – or rather two different songs at the same time, badly. Force this into becoming your favourite Christmas song. It is incapable of selling a single unit of anything, and matches you karaoke ability beautifully. Chances of ruin: 5000/1

words by abi crawford. illustration by kate prior

Ageing

Sweet 16: When Self Esteem became consumed with being fancied

In 2002 I was at Wales High School in Rotherham, and what I remember from being 16 is that it was the first year that people started to fancy me. And that changed my life because I’d consistently been everyone’s funny friend – like, we had last-dance etiquette, where if someone’s disco was coming up for their birthday, at school people would be asking each other for the last dance. I’d had a lifetime of not being asked, and it’d be to ‘Flying Without Wings’ by Westlife, or something, so my thing was that I’d stand by my best friend who boys fancied her whole life, and she’d be having her dance and I’d be head-banging. No wonder no one asked me out. Ever.

But at 15/16 I naturally lost a load of weight and I started singing (I learnt to sing by singing along to the Alien Ant Farm album, doing a third above that guy, because that’s my exact range) so the monster was created then, when people started saying I could sing and that I was pretty. It was the beginning of the end of my life, really [laughs], because it bore my addiction to compliments.

I was in an am-dram musical of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, playing the youngest bride, and when I look at it now, that was all these adults doing am-dram, and I was just a kid, essentially, around all this flirting. It was weird. I was still wearing

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baggy jeans and a dog collar – I was an emo before emo was a thing – but via that am-dram I remember going shopping with my mum and wanting a new pair of jeans that weren’t baggy, and that was a real loss of innocence, because I weighed up being sexually attractive versus being cool and myself. And I went to a rehearsal – with, by the way, all these adults who were over 20 – and I turned up in these tighter jeans and it was like Pretty Woman. And I was like, ‘Woah!’. It’s gross now, when you think about it, but in the moment, for all of my teens all of my friends had had boyfriends and were snogging, and I’d been terrified, constantly thinking what is wrong with me that I’m not like them.

And I vividly remember thinking, right, this feels really good, and I feel right and correct. And now, when I do all of these Me Too music podcasts and panels and write about it, I’m still realising now that the sexualisation of me as a teen felt like that’s what I was there for – it made sense because of society. But that never should be what you’re aiming for – and the least interesting thing about me is what I look like. Because that’s what’s been taught to young women, that’s why men have steamrollered us for years. If you had brains, you were a loser, and that’s where it starts.

In those formative years, I was so weird, and my imagination was mental, and the second I could just be accepted because my arse was nice, I was like, brilliant, that’s loads easier. Which is sad, because I wonder how many people look back on that time and think, shit, that wasn’t ok. But it was rewarded then – I started to get the main part in everything. Because it’s not just your friends, it’s the teachers who suddenly let you be the lead because you’re thin enough, or whatever. And that shaped my life for many years then.

So I also got the part of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors [pictured], which also starred the actor Ryan Sampson, who’s in Plebs and loads of other stuff now – it was an all-star cast. And it was also around then that we started to sneak into the sixth formers’ 18th birthday parties, which were all held at the rugby club every Friday. That was a coming-of-age thing – the first time I put on a short skirt, the first time I put makeup on. I was such a late bloomer, but I was going with my friends who’d all had sex and their boyfriends were driving us there. I was so nervous going to those parties I’d have five shits before I’d go. I’d then drink a couple of Blue WKDs and snog someone.

My other hobby was playing cricket. And this is a direct link, because around 16 I stopped playing. Because we’d play with a wind ball, but at 16 you start playing with a proper cricket ball, and I remember batting, and that fucking ball coming at me, and me thinking that it might hit my face, which was now pretty.

And I quit. How grim is that! I feel so sad for me because all of the things that were genuinely joyful in my life just got superseded by being fancied.

as told to stuart stubbs

FMD

*

Forte Music Distribution OH SEES ‘Face Stabber’ Castle Face 2LP/CD

KANDODO 3 ‘k3’ Rooster 2LP/CD

PATIENCE ‘Dizzy Spells’

Erased Tapes CD / 3x 12”

EDDY CURRENT SUPPRESSION RING ‘All In Good Time’

SHANA CLEVELAND ‘Night of the Worm Moon’

SHARDS ‘Find Sound’

RICH RUTH ‘Calming Signals’ Plant Life / General General LP

BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT ‘Veils of Winter’

PENGUIN CAFE ‘Handfuls of Night’

HEADLAND ‘What Rough Beast ’

NILS FRAHM ‘All Encores’

Erased Tapes LP/CD

Castle Face LP/CD

Night School LP/CD

NOLAN POTTER’S NIGHTMARE BAND ‘Nightmare Forever’

BIG STICK ‘Sauced Up Santa’

CFM ‘Soundtrack To An Empty Room’

Drag Racing Underground 12”

Castle Face LP/CD

In The Red LP/CD

Hardly Art LP/CD

Riding Easy LP/CD

Erased Tapes LP/CD

Agitated Records LP/CD

VARIOUS ‘Crumb: OST ’

SARAH DAVACHI ‘Pale Bloom’

Cinema Paradiso Pic Disc LP

2019’s music you can’t refuse

W25th LP/CD

Poll

Albums of the Year 2019 Our favourite albums released this year and a reminder of what they are

1. FKA Twigs Magdalene (young turks) Future RnB and chamber pop exploring feminine strength through the lens of Mary Magdalene.

7. Leafcutter John Yes! Come Parade With Us (border community) A modular synth album made with field recordings from a coastal hike.

13. Kim Gordon No Home Record (matador) The debut solo album by the Sonic Youth co-founder, 40-years into her career.

2. Aldous Harding Designer (4ad) Hannah Sian Topp’s third, most full-band record of abstract weird folk.

8. JPEGMAFIA All My Heroes Are Cornballs (eqt) The Baltimore rap collagist let loose on TLC covers and noise music.

14. Deliluh Beneath the Floors (tin angel) A droning art-rock debut from the band rebuilding Toronto’s DIY scene.

3. Little Simz GREY Area (age 101) The “boss in a fucking dress” rapping over flutes and strings and distorted drums and bass.

9. Floating Points Crush (ninja tune) Sam Shepherd’s returning album as the king of nuanced, progressive club music.

15. Dave Psychodrama (neighbourhood) A rap therapy session of plaintive piano and the young, black experience.

4. Purple Mountains Purple Mountains (drag city) The long awaited solo album from Silver Jews’ David Berman, who died a month after its release.

10. The Comet Is Coming Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery (impulse!)

Spiritual jazz plus grime, punk rock and G-funk.

16. Black Midi Schlagenheim (rough trade) How every improvisational art band wish they could play.

5. Richard Dawson 2020 (weird world) Barbed folk songs about our grotty little lives by the black-humoured bard of Newcastle.

11. Anna Meredith FIBS (moshi moshi) The composer’s second barrage of avant-pop horn blasts and MBE-awarded clarinet jams.

17. Self Esteem Compliments Please (fiction) Rebecca Taylor’s pop album of sorry-not-sorry self-love anthems.

6. Julia Jacklin Crushing (transgressive) The Australian’s deeply personal report of how awful falling out of love can be.

12. Tropical Fuck Storm Braindrops (joyful noise) Australian punk songs about the rise of aliens, Nazi witches and Brian Wilson’s psychotherapist.

18. Injury Reserve Injury Reserve (loma vista) The nonconformist debut from Phoenix’s premier experimental rap trio.

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Poll 19. Housewives Twilight Splendour (blank editions) When an unnerving punk band bin their guitars for their second record.

27. Kate Tempest The Book of Traps and Lessons (fiction) The poet’s largely beatless collection of stories about Brexit and hope.

35. Lungbutter Honey (constellation) A debut noise rock record of sprechgesang vocals and impossibly distorted guitars.

20. slowthai Nothing Great About Britain (method) How everyone feels right now; in the form of a snotty, hilarious, rap LP.

28. Fontaines D.C. Dogrel (partisan) A debut filled with tenderness and a liberal alternative to Ireland’s fading national identity.

36. Common Holly When I Say to you Black Lightning (dalliance) Brigitte Naggar’s looser, more atonal second album of creepy lullabies.

21. Weyes Blood Titantic Rising (sub pop) The Carpenters soundtracking the apocalypse, performed

by Natalie Mering.

29. Gong Gong Gong Phantom Rhythm (wharf cat) Drummerless psych inspired by Bo Diddley from Beijing’s noise scene.

37. GLOO XYZ (gloo) The first ADHD collab between wonky maximalists Iglooghost, BABii and Kai Whiston.

22. Angel Olsen All Mirrors (jagjaguwar) The American’s grandiose fourth album, made with a 14-piece orchestra.

30. Freddie Gibbs & Madlib Bandana (columbia) The second LP from the blunt thug rapper and the mythical beatmaker.

38. William Tyler Goes West (merge) An album of pastoral guitar instrumentals from the big skies of Tyler’s Deep South.

23. Nilüfer Yanya Miss Universe (ato) A debut of hiccupping pop rock and fuzzy Strat workouts.

31. Big Thief U.F.O.F (4ad) The more fragile and oblique of the two records released by the Brooklyn folk rock band in 2019.

39. These New Puritans Inside the Rose (infectious) The Barnett brothers pairing post-rave with dark orchestrations.

24. Ezra Collective You Can’t Steal My Joy (enter the jungle) The debut album from the Afrobeat and grime fusion heart of London.

32. The Murder Capital When I Have Fears (human season) The post-rock come art-punk debut from a literary Dublin band.

40. Holly Herndon PROTO (4ad) The only album made in 2019 with the aid of an “A.I. baby” called Spawn.

25. Show Me The Body Dog Whistle (loma vista) A second record of spidery anti-corporate hardcore from the NYC trio with the banjo.

33. Clipping There Existed an Addiction to Blood (sub pop) A experimental hip-hop homage to cult horror.

26. Sleaford Mods Eton Alive (extreme eating) Still the most articulate angry British music to come out of austerity.

34. Kano Hoodies All Summer (parlophone) The Londoner’s furious sixth album about his marginalised community.

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Interview Two sisters demand the greater inclusion of women and queer artists in hip-hop via Goonda rap,

by Jamie Haworth. Photography by Floyd Gonzales

Cartel Madras Growing up, sisters Contra and Eboshi Ramesh became aware that voices like their own were missing from the music they loved. “We went through school having not really seen ourselves in the media, not really seen the idea of who we were projected anywhere,” says Contra over the phone from Calgary. Both born in Chennai, India, the pair were still young when they moved with their parents to Western Canada. Developing their world views as music-obsessed teenagers, they grew frustrated with the assumption that their status as immigrants barred them from certain cultural spaces – particularly those associated with rap.

“People who looked like us weren’t really giving art a shot in Calgary,” says Eboshi, after joining her sister on the line from Toronto. “And we wanted to change that.” They made their move in 2017, teaming up to form Cartel Madras: a hip-hop duo receptive to trap, gangster rap and grime influences as well as the ambitious new sounds they heard emerging from scenes in South Indian cities. At the core of their music is an unequivocal demand for greater inclusion of LGBTQ+ and POC artists in the genre.

“We always had a sneaking suspicion that there were a lot of immigrants and women who felt the same way as us,” says Contra. “So we decided we should start making music that is reflective of our lives and see what happens.” Their message found an audience of like-minded people ready and waiting in Calgary; word soon spread of the sisters’ raucous live sets, leading to repeat bookings at venues across Canada well before they released their Trapistan mixtape in 2018. Now signed to Sup Pop, last month they dropped their new EP, Age of the Goonda.

Cartel Madras understand hip-hop’s historical significance as a form of black expression and resistance in North America, while also celebrating its global resonance. “We are continuously paying our respects to what has been crafted before us, and recognise that we’re guests into this land,” says Eboshi. “But it’s also a voice for minorities and the underdog; it’s a voice for the marginalised. We want to create a community within the genre that can make way for a new generation of queer POC rappers – those artists who haven’t been able to find their place within any established subgenres.”

Styling their sound as Goonda rap (“Goonda” meaning “thug” across many South Asian regions), they believe that

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an immediate and confrontational approach is key to securing ground in hip-hop. “It’s been for us a project of representation, and a project of reaching out and trying to speak to the individuals that we once were,” Eboshi reflects. “We want to look into these communities that we have membership to – as women, people of colour, as members of the LGBTQ+ community – and offer a fearless, unapologetic representation of those identities.”

The pair frequently express their gratitude to the queer artists who led the way in diversifying the genre over recent decades – “we are very aware that we would not even exist if it were not for a Princess Nokia or an M.I.A.,” Eboshi makes clear.

However, they are equally determined not to let their music be treated as an afterthought in the process. “Something that I’ve always felt about representative projects is that they’re always relegated to certain boxes,” Contra begins. “But you don’t always have to sound musically the way people think you should.

I think, especially for a lot of brown women growing up, saying that you’re allowed to be controversial is exciting.”

“This is very much of a project in craftsmanship and in us having an ear for music,” Eboshi adds, pointing to the duo’s diverse influences. She builds on her sister’s line of thought by highlighting the relative leniency granted to male artists who wish to broaden their sound. “Men in hip-hop get such a pass to do whatever the fuck they want. They get to go back and forth between making unique, thought-provoking music and then also dumb party music, loud aggro trap music; it’s like they’re really allowed to feel all those spaces out.”

Cartel Madras want the right to be as antagonistic and contradictory as the musicians who inspire them. “While we promote our agenda and represent important minority communities, why can’t we sound like a Freddie Gibbs?” Eboshi asks.

“You know, why can’t we sound like a Clipping or a JPEGMAFIA? Those are the experimental notes that really inform us, after all.”

— Age of the Goonda — At the time of our call, Contra and Eboshi are impatiently awaiting the release of their second EP in early November.

Interview

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Interview

Compact at only thirteen minutes in length, Age of the Goonda provides an electrifying burst of the duo’s live show energy in concentrated form. “When we are on stage, there’s a vibrancy that is a real communicative effort between us and our audience – that’s something we’re incredibly happy about,” says Eboshi.

The rapper is proud of how persuasively Age of the Goonda manages to capture such a frenetic atmosphere on record; in that regard, she feels it succeeds where last year’s “kind of slapdash” Trapistan EP fell short. “We recorded that mixtape in the basement of our parents’ house,” she explains, hesitant to call it anything more than a steppingstone towards this moment.

Declaring “Bitch, I’m bad I’m brown I’m gold” on the potent lead single ‘Goonda Gold’, Cartel Madras speak with an unapologetic directness throughout their new EP. They reclaim the bravado more commonly associated with male rappers and use it to confidently assert their identities. Songs are abrasive yet often playful: Eboshi makes a memorable threat to put a “Leonardo-di-cap-in-your-ass” on the menacing ‘Dawood Ibrahim (Woof Woof)’. “That line always gets people really excited live,” she laughs.

Contra remembers the challenge of finding the right beat to match the intensity of opener ‘Jumpscare’ – a track that the duo “really wanted to yell on”. In the end, Calgary-based producer Nevik provided the answer with a chaotic, noisy beat that felt suitably overwhelming. “He approached us and said, ‘I’m working on something really weird’,” she recalls. “He clicked play and we knew this was the track that we’d been waiting to make.” They invited the young producer into the studio once more for ‘The Legend of Jalapeño Boiz’ – a comparatively mellow song that Contra values for “allowing us to breathe a bit”.

— Thot Police — The sisters are committed to helping other creatives such as Nevik thrive in their hometown. Together with a number of

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other local artists, including rapper Jae Sterling and producer Yung Kamaji, they formed a collective support network called Thot Police earlier this year. “We want to be collaborative; we want to showcase the sound that is coming out of Western Canada,” Contra tells me. “In the past, Calgary was always been a very boom-bap hip-hop, old hat city. But it has recently become a lot more trap-friendly and has cultivated an underground sound. Thot Police is us saying, ‘We can take this to the next level; we can really put our city on the map’.”

They also want their music to celebrate the trap scene they have sensed building in South India over recent years.

Age of the Goonda’s final track, ‘Glossy Outro’, features a rich sitar riff and a cavernous beat made by Kerala-based producer, Parimal Shais. “It has this beautiful sample and is really sparse, lyrically,” says Eboshi of the song. “It’s still undeniably hip-hop, but just so Indian.” The rapper is full of praise for Shais’s work; in particular, she draws attention to his recent mixtape Kumari Kandam Traps, Vol. 1, which involves Tamil and Malayalam voices as well as English-speaking rappers. “It’s so crazy, so ambitious, and just sounds like nothing I’ve heard before.

Having those people be a part of Age of the Goonda is great: they’re doing something that we believe in, in terms of how we want to bring Indian culture into hip-hop.”

Contra and Eboshi are quick to check themselves throughout our conversation when they refer to their “fans”, whose support for their project they do not take for granted. “Those moments when someone tells us that this is important to their lives, and that it’s doing something for them – every artist wants to hear that,” says Eboshi. “When you hear your impact statement coming from the mouths of the people you’re speaking to, it’s really great.” It’s also a sign that Cartel Madras are on the right track looking forward: “We’ve always known there’s going to be more people that enjoy what we’re putting out. And so, with that sort of confidence, we enter into this terrifying industry with our heads held high.”

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Interview

Bambara There’s horror behind those picket fences,

by Fergal Kinney. Photography by Tom Porter

“No pleasure, but meanness” is a line from Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic short story A Good Man is Hard to Find.

O’Connor was from Georgia in the American South, and her often gory, always strange fiction captured something unsettling about that part of the United States – a barely suppressed darkness that, once looked at, infuses everything.

Sat in the foyer of a Yorkshire hotel, Reid Bateh – frontman of Bambara, also from Georgia – is picking carefully over those words. He repeats the line out loud. “It always struck me,” he says, “the way that the South use meanness, you see, is kind of different, it’s a really subtle thing. Meanness in that line specifically is way more intense than what it says. In the South, everything is infused with this real sort of politeness. Saying meanness could mean something truly vile – something awful.

I’ve always tried to work that into a song, and I’ve not been able to until this record.”

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Documenting that something awful – that meanness – isn’t a bad approximation of Bambara’s mission; a mission that’s never been realised so successfully as on their fourth record, Sway.

In the decade since their formation, Bambara – that’s Reid Bateh, his brother Blaze and bassist William Brookshire – have been devoted to documenting the horror that lies behind the white picket fence, and setting it to midnight black, pulverising post-punk. Theirs is a world of hard-up lives, shotgun justice and unreliable narrators, marking them as relative outliers in modern guitar music for their commitment to narrative-driven songwriting, and an almost novelistic approach to lyrics.

The band formed in the brothers’ hometown of Athens, Georgia – and there’s long been a tension between the metropolitan values of Athens, a liberal college town, and Georgia’s wider conservatism (the state voted for Trump in 2016). It is,

Interview however, a creatively fruitful tension: the college town famously also produced REM and the B-52s. Reid chews over whether Trump has had any impact on their work, suggesting that “though not in a conscious way”, the way that the characters “experience America” on Sway has certainly been shaped by his observations of Trump’s America. The band all now live in New York (their last two albums were recorded there) and distance can focus the mind on what’s uncanny, what’s strange, about where one is from.

— Southern Gothic post-punk — Sway opens with the brooding, Swans-esque ‘Miracle’, named after the song’s fictional heroine who has a tattoo on her lip saying – you guessed it – ‘meanness’. “I’m always trying to read things outside the Southern Gothic tradition,” Reid tells me, “but it’s our foundations, you know? I might not always write that way and I might be more abstract and more poetically driven one day, but this is what I’m into.”

But how do you marry that Southern Gothic sensibility with a rock band? For Reid Bateh, the lightbulb moment would be listening to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads.

Reid explains that even growing up he had a sense that “lyrics, of bands you hear on the radio or even bands I liked, could be something more”. Cave lead to Cohen, Cohen led to Waits.

“That was like a world, a little microcosm,” says Reid. “Characters overlap and you’re immersed in this world overpopulated with dark, grimy characters.”

Though their first two records (2013’s Dreamviolence and 2016’s Swarm) were solid, it was in 2018 with Shadow on Everything that the band hit their stride. That record was written to a brief; that brief being a loose concept album with an overriding Lynchian narrative – and it proved a major creative breakthrough. Joe Talbot of IDLES, who have now invited the band on tour, cited it as his favorite album of 2018. The narrative constraints of Shadow on Everything brought out the best in the group’s songwriting, but after that record they were keen to once again try something different. “I wanted it to not have a concept this time,” Reid explains, “and not have such a straight throughline of everything. The last record had a story that panned out chronologically; I still wanted this one to be stories but I wanted them to be separate enough where you didn’t need the rest of the album to get into the story – they still connect but there isn’t this through-line.”

next morning. Though the band all joke that their personal lives suffered from the experience, they’re glowing in their agreement that such intensity was central to creating the band’s most focused, most well-realised record to date. “When you’re outside in the South there’s always the sound of loud bugs and it’s like you’re immersed in a fluid,” drummer Blaze Bateh explains, “and when we’re writing songs we want our music to feel like we’re in a space. If it doesn’t feel like there’s an atmosphere the music sounds almost homeless or something.”

Discussing the writing of the new record, the word ‘obsessive’ comes up repeatedly and unprompted from each member.

“I’d wake up, write all day and struggle to get to sleep at night,” Reid tells me. “No talking to anybody, nobody.” Similar to Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategy’ cards – which uses random prompts shuffled in any order – Reid stumbled on a tactic to help force unexpected creative decisions. “I went to a thrift store and bought a bunch of random pictures; other people’s photographs,” he tells me, “so I ended up with thirty random images that people had taken on their home cameras or whatever. This goes from early on to some bullshit that was probably taken in 2010. But each one was a different world to get into and get sucked out. You look at a wall and you can make connections that aren’t there; you can see things thematically. Any time they would be right in front of me, and I’d take a break and there’d be something in one of those pictures, I was always involved in some story or other.” Even a dog referenced on the track ‘Machete’, called Lobo, took its name from a family dog whose name was sketched onto the back of a Polaroid.

What’s most striking about Sway, however, isn’t its widescreen, cinematic sonics, nor its Southern preacher fervor, but instead it’s the body count. Death stalks this record, the imagery is grounded in the mortuary, at one point Reid croons about babies drowning in baths. “I couldn’t point to a specific reason for it,” Reid says, now fixing his eyes into the middle distance, “but I was obsessed with death at the time of writing. It’s something I don’t really want to talk about.” A pause. “It’s... so heavily explored through so many other art styles, but it’s hard to say where that comes from. It it’s just something else. Obsessing, really.”

— Cabin in the woods — Returning to Athens too, and communing once again with their formative stomping ground, also proved central to the record. “The last two were all in New York,” explains bassist William, “it’s more isolated in Athens – we can really lock our selves away and work constantly.” The band operated from an old, isolated cabin, working fourteen-hour shifts before decamping exhausted to futons, and back up again the

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Interview

Deep Tan In search of weirdness, from the Slits to Britney Spears,

by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Jody Evans 22

Interview Less than 5 minutes have passed since I met Deep Tan but I already know that Wafah, lead singer and guitarist, is whipsmart and passionate, and the rhythm section of Celeste and Lucy are a combination of fearsome and laidback. I know this as they’ve showered me with the full range of their divine information and worryingly they’re about to extract mine. “Do you know your rising sign?” asks Celeste. “Oh my god let’s do your star sign chart. Right, we need your time of birth and where you were born!” As interviews go, this is far from conventional but that seems to be how Deep Tan operate. “So I am a Cancer sign, Sagittarius moon and Virgo rising,” says Celeste. “That is fire, water, earth. The Virgo in me means I am really anal, I also feel like I am the centre of everything, so I have huge ideas and I feel like I am a fiery personality but really I’m just pedantic and all about details.”

“You already know what a Scorpio I am,” smiles Wafah, which seems like a Scorpio thing to say.

As a Leo, they tell me I seek the public eye, but it’s the three friends from Hackney who are revelling in attention right now after releasing two new songs, ‘Shimmer’ and ‘Constant Inconsistencies’ on Practise Music, home of fellow buzzy Londoners Squid. “We’ve been playing ‘Shimmer’ for a year already and that shows our softer more feminine side but we also have another side,” says Celeste. “‘Constant Inconsistencies’ gives us something faster to kick our set off with but its darker and weirder like us.” On the evidence so far she’s totally right.

styling by melia beaudoin

Deep Tan have been kicking around the capital’s underground scene for around 12 months now, honing their atmospheric, haunting pop sound with peers like Sweat, Waterbaby and Madonnatron sharing the trio’s path. The band have been slowly carving out their own space and these songs feel like the next step. “‘Constant Inconsistencies’ was a B-side, but we decided to change it to an A side after people heard it,” says Wafah, clearly proud of the new direction.

“It’s been compared to the Slits and obviously that’s cool, but someone also compared it with Joy Division which is unbelievable,” says Celeste.

Having already been likened to Foals and Warpaint with their rhythmic, sometimes sparse dynamics, the Joy Division resemblance is an interesting one that sparks passion in Wafah. “It’s definitely darker, which I guess is like Joy Division in a sense,” she says. “We wanted to write a song about being let down; what it feels like to love someone but they’re not there for you – it’s confrontational and a bit more punk in its delivery.”

I mention that all of their songs seem to be about negative attributes, ‘Shimmer’ also centred in surface level people whose malice runs deep. I ask if they’re dealing in first-hand experiences with friends and enemies? “I would say it’s not out of experience,” says Celeste. “We don’t hang around with awful people.

They’re not all the same though, these songs, they’re not all negative thoughts about people, at the moment we are writing

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Interview

“They’re not all the same though, these songs, they’re not all negative thoughts about people”

a track about downing a drink.” She laughs and Wafah jumps in: “Well, I’m not sure about that anymore.” “You’re getting a glimpse into our song writing technique here,” says Celeste. “We all have our say and then Wafah changes it.”

Wafah laughs at the jibe before gently adding, “I would say I make small tweaks.”

— Britney does math rock — Deep Tan’s short lifespan becomes exciting when you begin analysing their output. The new double A single is exactly what you’d expect from a band finding their voice, the exploration of different sounds only natural. “We’re always evolving, it’s happening all the time,” says Celeste. “The song we are working on right now sounds like Britney Spears. It’s got a big club beat to it but mathy guitars, it’s Britney does math rock!” I can’t help sharing in her excitement.

You can trace back Deep Tan’s sound and typical subject matter to their debut release, ‘Air’: a track about deception that seems to float with such an effortless grace you could swear it was produced by a band on their third album, not their first single. Listening to the bilingual song (Wafah sings some of the lyrics in her own language, which is French) it’s a character assassination of liars; a take-down of those who produce air from their mouths and nothing else. “Yes it’s about that but ‘Air’ is more of an ethereal thing,” says Wafah. “It’s a metaphor about islanders who think they can swim but can’t actually swim.” This feels particularly pertinent right now, Little Britain populated by xenophobia and a fear of leaving our shores and having others joins us. “It’s definitely not political,” says Wafah, “but I can see how that would be interpreted. It’s much more of a feeling – I didn’t write it as a comment on the state of politics. I would like to have more French singing though and that may come – we do whatever feels natural to us as a band.”

Like the rest of their work, there’s a surface level of simplicity reminiscent of early The xx, but with more and more listens the tracks reveal a beautifully layered sound that the band has finely tuned as both artists and producers. Being a Virgo, of course, Celeste’s obsessive attention to detail clearly pays off in the studio and in their live performance where nuance builds and textures are vital. “Let me say, myself and Wafah love Mogwai, particularly ‘Ex-Cowboy’,” she says. “And I would say when we play middle eights, and the parts that we play together, they feel very Mogwai, especially when we play them live. Audiences have told us they can hear Mogwai in those stripped back

24

middle eight parts. Lucy is the creator of the builds and together we love playing as the rhythm section.”

— The weirder the better — Sharing a label with Squid and a rehearsal space with electronic audio-visual sister duo Waterbaby has been integral to Deep Tan’s development, but they also cite bands such as Warmduscher as inspirations, purely for having the balls to produce outsider art that might not be to everyone’s taste.

“Warmduscher and bands like that are doing weird stuff – like, so weird – but we really like it and can relate to it,” says Lucy.

“We absolutely love the weirdness of their videos and we’d love to try and create stuff like that.”

“It’s true,” says Wafah. “We absolutely want to be different – the weirder the better.”

This community spirit is in evidence for the band’s only video to emerge so far: a dive into themes of strength and individuality from Waterbaby that brought yet more layers out of their debut track ‘Air’ and teased fans on what’s to come in the future.

It’s certainly got less false teeth, two headed babies and general strangeness than the Warmduscher back catalogue, but Deep Tan seemingly prefer to aim for the mysterious over the scandalous.

Working with graphic designer Raissa Pardini on their new artwork, who’s striking atheistic is used by other artists like The Orielles and Pond, I ask the band if it’s a conscious decision to seek out females in the industry. It’s not. “No that’s definitely not happening,” Celeste is quick to say.

“It certainly isn’t on purpose and we’ve never thought of it like that,” says Lucy. “There’s a lot of extremely talented women out there right now and although we didn’t go out of our way to seek them out it’s great that it’s happening and it’s even greater that we didn’t even think about it that way.”

We retreat back to conversations of star signs as Lucy explains, “as a Taurus, a Virgo moon and a Taurus rising, I’m a double Taurus, which are supposed to be unbelievably chilled and quite stubborn – maybe I am stubborn about being stubborn!”

As we part ways though, there seems to be an astrological breakdown, with Celeste disagreeing with Wafah. “You’re not always the shy one! I wouldn’t agree with that…” she exclaims as Lucy tells me, “I think I might be the shy one; maybe there’s a competition going on.” Celeste tries to have the last word: “Neither of them are shy, in fact none of us are.”

“It’s all an act, isn’t it?” says Wafah, having the the final word, shyly.

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Interview

Do Nothing

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Interview

The results are in, and it looks like everyone gets a big old slice of nothing, by Max Pilley Photography by Tom Porter

Chris Bailey has figured out how to be himself. The frontman of Nottingham band Do Nothing, who are set to release their debut EP early in 2020, might have taken the long route to arrive at this point, but the British guitar music firmament had better steel itself for his impact.

“In the past I’ve tried to be something else, I’ve always tried to emulate something that I like,” he tells me. “But there came a certain point when I just started doing exactly what is me. We used to play quite complex music, but I just wanted to do something a bit more minimalist, that just had the ingredients that it needed and left a bit of space. And then later on you can add some fucking bells and flowers and shit when you’ve run out of simple things to do.”

If ‘LeBron James’, the lead track from the EP, is anything to go by, then Do Nothing are not quite the simple band that he makes out. Kasper Sandstrom’s guitar is clipped and chirrupy, slick and abrasive in alternating turns, grounded by the devious post-punk groove of Charlie Howarth’s bass and Andy Harrison’s drums, over which Bailey scatters a flurry of spokesung attack lines, a stream of non-sequitur exclamations. It is a wry, knowing track that side-steps the obvious confrontations of punk, detouring with unexpected left turns just when you feel you are getting a grasp on their character. As breakout songs go, it is a slam dunk.

The strangeness that lies at the heart of the track is no accident, and what’s more, Bailey suggests that this is just the start. “In the future, I don’t want this band to be exactly what it is now,” he explains. “I want to have room to make something a bit more experimental. So that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to give enough indications so that when we get a bit weirder in the future, people aren’t saying, ‘what the hell is this?’”

Bailey, when pushed, jokes that it could be described as “the Idles effect”, although he is hesitant to say the proliferation is a reaction to the politics of the day. “It’s definitely going around at the minute; there’s definitely this post-punk wave happening now. But that wasn’t the plan [for Do Nothing] initially, it wasn’t like, ‘oh, post-punk is the thing now, let’s be post-punk’. We sort of started doing it quite a while ago and we’ve just happened to coincide with this nice little buzz around this kind of music.”

With only three songs officially released, it is too limiting to categorise Do Nothing into any one style anyway. Bailey himself indicates that there could be reason to expect a greater darkness to creep into their sound palette over time. “My favourite music is really sad, downer shit. I love that stuff,” he says.

“That’s an itch I want to scratch. I want to do stuff that’s quieter and stuff that’s prettier, but I think that will come. When I say sad, I mean like Alex G; his music is really beautiful in a really simple way. That’s the flavour of his music; there’s a drop of melancholy in it. I want to drop that into mine, if I possibly can.”

Most of the early press around the band has fixated on comparisons with the dance-punk of LCD Soundsystem and the sprechgesang vocals of Mark E. Smith. Whilst the latter is an unavoidable mental leap that Bailey may have to get used to people making, the former rests entirely on a kneejerk reaction to one of Do Nothing’s earliest songs, ‘Gangs’, which even Bailey accepts invites the James Murphy parallel. Whilst he does admire the work of Smith and Murphy, it’s another luminary that Bailey has in mind when considering his own writing: “If I had to say somebody that influenced me it would be Tom Waits, in a way. In some of his stuff, he does spoken word things and his lyricism has a fair bit of humour in it which I took from him. My brother showed me him when I was young, and if I had to choose one of those people to be like, it would be Tom Waits.”

— Sad, downer shit — — LeBron James — Speaking to me in between meetings regarding the shooting of the ‘LeBron James’ video, the sense of momentum is impossible to ignore with Do Nothing at the moment. They recently headlined one of The Great Escape’s First Fifty shows in East London and have rapidly been building a reputation as one of the most formidable live acts in the country. In a year that has thrown up quite a number of sharp new guitar bands snapping at the bit, Do Nothing still stand out.

Attempting to understand ‘LeBron James’ can feel like trying to triangulate the intentions of a tennis ball cannon, such is the seemingly random bombardment of barbed, witty lyrics, like: “The results are in, and it looks like everyone gets a big old slice of nothing.” References to the ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ episode of The Simpsons and the Fyre Festival documentary dart past your ears with sudden, surprising ease. When pressed, Bailey

27

Interview

“A lot of it is very specific to me, almost in a way that makes it pointless for anyone else to listen to it”

says the song is about “fucking bastards… you know, crooks”, although he hastens to add that the eponymous 6’9” star is not insinuated in that accusation.

“It is all intentional, it’s not just random and abstract,” Bailey says, explaining the thought process behind his lyricwriting. “But a lot of it is very specific to me, almost in a way that makes it pointless for anyone else to listen to it. It’s just dumb thoughts that I have and I express them in a way that means something to me. But it always has an overarching theme or reason behind it. It seems like a stream of consciousness thing, but it is all very thought out.”

The four members of Do Nothing are long-time friends from their school days in Nottingham, playing in various bands until settling on the current lineup in 2017. As mentioned, their early incarnations tended toward penning over-complicated arrangements, due in part to their collective admiration of bands like Adult Jazz. Bailey’s own musical background is a little more linear, however. “My dad is a folk singer in an a cappella group, which is adorable. I grew up with four-part harmonies ringing through the fucking house,” he says, explaining that it has led to him having an indelible bond with the music of Simon & Garfunkel (“I love them endlessly, they’re my favourite thing”).

These days, they share musical tips whilst on the road, just as every band since time began, with their current obsession being Richard Dawson’s 2020: “he is the king of new music, as far as I’m concerned,” Bailey enthuses.

Their start in Nottingham came thanks to early support from the fabled venue The Maze, which announced its closure earlier this year, in a move that is echoed in towns and cities throughout the country. Bailey believes the loss of such institutions means it is becoming less easy for new bands to make their first steps. “I was thinking about this the other day: if I was a kid starting a band now, where the fuck would we play? I guess we’d play covers in a pub or something.” Despite that, there is a tight group of young artists in the city that give hope that the independent spirit will triumph, from established acts like Kagoule, who Bailey describes as “the fathers and mothers of Nottingham alternative music”, to newcomers like Megatrain and Alice Robbins.

With recording and mixing for the EP all but complete, thoughts are already starting to turn towards a debut album. “It is a very scary idea to me. I want it to not just be a collection of tunes that we’ve done. I want it to be its own thing,” Bailey tentatively explains, evidently sensing the weight of his own expectations. It is already clear that Do Nothing are a band that think carefully about their every move. 2020, prepare yourself.

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

Georgia — Seeking Thrills (domino) As a 35-year-old who’s wasted more time staring at a computer screen than is healthy or recommended, every so often there’s a little serendipity when the gaming and music worlds pleasantly collide. Back in September 2019, I could have hummed you the hook of Georgia’s ‘Started Out’ by virtue of playing PES2020 – not that I could’ve told you what the track was or who it was by with any real confidence. Until now, obviously.

Thanks to the latest version of PES, I was listening to Georgia before I actually knew I was listening to Georgia. It seems like a strange lead-in for an artist releasing her second album but Seeking Thrills isn’t just a step removed from her self-titled debut, it’s almost in a different world – and Georgia sounds like an artist rewired.

Her debut was a brilliant mix of broken beats and brooding basslines that owed as much to MIA’s scything delivery and Death Grips’ sonic brutality as it did Kate Bush. But at the time of creating Georgia, she was mired in the separation of her parents, tracks like the menacing beat-driven intensity of ‘Move Systems’, the angry, industrialism of ‘Be Ache’, the heart-on-sleeve rawness of ‘Heart Wrecking Animals’ and twisted Fever Ray-evoking ‘Nothing Solutions’ hinting at the depths of that emotional struggle.

“I was going through quite a heavy period with drinking and other sorts of substance abuse,” Georgia admits. “My friends sort of gave me an intervention.

I always thought that when I’m drinking I’m just a fun person. But actually, deep down, I was in a bad way.”

The result: she went vegan, quit smoking and went to clubs sober, focusing on the concept of dancefloors as places to heal, rather than just forget. For two years, Georgia didn’t drink, went to bed early and dedicated herself not only

32

to creating the new album, but to working out her own place in it. After years as a session drummer for other artists, it was a realisation that helped give the new album a sharper focus and put Seeking Thrills into a fresher context as the synth-charged, carefree soundtrack to going out and happily not giving a fuck in a way that wasn’t as destructive as it had been before.

This time, instead of darkness, there’s vulnerability and empathy, and a sweeter sense of melancholy in lyrics like “Although your skies keep changing/ You know, I will still be waiting” on ‘Never Let You Go’ or the hopeful admittance of “I don’t have much in terms of money now/ I don’t have material gifts for you” on ‘About Work The Dancefloor’.

Buoyed by the buzz around the lead singles, Georgia decided to push back the album release from mid-2019 to early 2020 in a move that’s helped to make her ascent feel even more familiar, and, who knows, even potentially reel in a few more unsuspecting PES fans.

An ode to the dancefloor, the record’s appeal lies in its unashamedly literal spirit with songs about jaunts to Tenerife set against playful pop lyricism and the rhythmic drive of Chicago House and Detroit Techno – influences Georgia was keen to incorporate into the album’s sound.

“I was listening to the whole of Trax records,” she explains. “Frankie Knuckles, Mr Fingers, Marshall Jefferson and that whole scene, but also Detroit, like Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, Kevin Saunderson. I got into a rabbit hole of that scene, and just how it shaped pop music of the ’80s. Like, seeing how Depeche Mode were at Frankie Knuckles’ Powerhouse nights; Madonna was on the floors in Detroit listening to Underground Resistance.”

It’s an energy that characterises the album’s standout moments, none more so than on the trio of openers, ‘Started Out’, ‘About Work The Dancefloor’ and ‘Never Let You Go’. Where the former combines dreamy electro-pop with a house bassline, the latter two tracks shift into ’80s synth nostalgia and Belgian electro – and it’s unlikely any album in 2020 will deliver a

one-two-three punch that walks the line between pop craft and dancefloor intent as gleefully or as credibly.

Frontloading the album with the singles was a bold move, and while Seeking Thrills doesn’t quite sustain the hook-laden energy throughout, it’s no real sleight considering how high the bar was initially set.

As a session drummer for the likes of Micachu, Kwes, and Kate Tempest – and as it did on her debut – rhythm and percussion plays a defining role here.

Where ‘24 Hours’ is a big, bright statement of twinkling melodies and driving synth, and ‘Til I Own It’ is a slower, more vocal-led meditation for the after-hours drive home, ‘I Can’t Wait’ hits with a percussive, poppy offbeat; the deep bass bump of ‘Mellow’ slaps; and ‘Feel It’ – a track initially released in 2017 following the release of her debut – harnesses the rawness of that more tumultuous period with a snapping breakbeat as Georgia ditches the vocal tenderness for a more raucous Landan twang.

Amidst more familiar rhythms, ‘Ray Guns’ nods to her time at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies where ethnomusicology led her world music interest to Balinese Gamelan (percussive ensemble music), reproduced here as something that falls between MIA and Boys and Diamonds era Rainbow Arabia.

Elsewhere, ‘The Thrill’ celebrates Georgia’s inner drummer with a cavalcade of drum machines, pads and handclaps set to a chunky, voguing bassline (“I used 909s – the drum machines that would have been used in Chicago and Detroit, and everything you hear on the album is analogue. I’m obsessed with the sound of drum machines!”) before ‘Honey Dripping Sky’ theatrically closes the album out. It feels like the first time in the album’s 13-track run that Georgia takes a breath (apart from ‘Ultimate Sailor’, perhaps) as she briefly steps back to let her vocals take centre stage.

As a standalone track, it’s not the album’s strongest but it does help crystalise her low-key range. From tender to deadpan, soaring to searching, it’s easy to overlook how varied her vocal delivery is on

Albums the back of the stellar production, but it’s even more impressive when you consider that she had to be cajoled from behind the bass drum to do it in the first place.

It’s unlikely she’ll ever truly step out from behind the kit (her live performances are a testament to “working hard” as she puts it) but the idea of transformation seems to be a pretty poignant one, even if cementing the transition from session drummer to solo artist in her own right has come down to a burgeoning sense of self-confidence and literally moving the drumkit a few feet to front and centre.

From the percussive, punkinflected pain of her debut to the transformative sound here, Seeking Thrills feels like the result of healthy release.

Like all the best pop albums, it doesn’t concern itself with being too clever, too cool or too serious, and it conveys that intent brilliantly: raising smiles, moving limbs, hearts aching for something more.

And when those themes of freedom and transportation – and the idea that on the dancefloor you can be whoever you want to be – are the driving force, it lends the album a carefree purity that’s your best mate harassing you until you get off the couch on a Friday night when you’re too tired, too poor and too lazy. It’s a rallying call for a lost weekend of hopeful promises you both know won’t be kept. But, ultimately, it’s the blissful knowledge that it doesn’t even matter. 8/10 Reef Younis

The Innocence Mission — See You Tomorrow (bella union) When Sufjan Stevens first covered The Innocence Mission’s 1999 folk classic ‘Lakes Of Canada’, very few would’ve sussed it wasn’t an original rendition. At the time, he’d described the band as, “moving and profound” and labelled Karen Peris’

lyrics as an, “economy of words, concrete nouns which come to life with melodies that dance around the scale like sea creatures.” Though abstract and passionate in his description, it’s a worthy portrait of a band who’ve long surpassed the borders of their humble existence.

Stretching as far back as 1989, The Innocence Mission’s expansive back catalogue has forever pondered the passing of time and how we and those around us interact with inevitable change and progression. Their twelfth album, See You Tomorrow, is an introspection of people and how life’s daunting uncertainty impacts the love and anxiety attached to those we cherish. It’s a reflection of chronology, echoing where and what we’ve come from whilst simultaneously gazing at the winding road lying ominously ahead.

Behind dulcet textures of chinking piano keys and nylon strings, Peris’ sleek and beckoning vocal transcends any usual dimension of melody, seeping between the cracks of winding arrangements and teaming with tragic awe and wonder. On ‘Movie’, sepia slides of moments captured forever flicker alongside to the unstoppable rush of time. ‘John As Well’ ebbs and swells, fantasising over deeper, more intimate connections and desperately yearning to be understood. It’s a body of work that envisions grandiose proportion, sonically embodying the complexity of what makes us unique and innately human. 8/10 Ollie Rankin

Akasha System — Echo Earth (100% silk) Ambient techno, with its roots in early electronic experimentation and later new age and built-for-purpose meditation guidance, reaches further back to the Romantics. At a time when the Enlightenment was enshrining

human experience within the rubric of logic, Keats, Turner and Constable placed the human subject within their environment in painting and poetry. Echo Earth, the first full-length proper by Pacific Northwesterner Hunter P. Thompson aka Akasha System since establishing a name with various techno collectives (Neo Violence, Elestial Sound), was seemingly composed if not directly under tree canopies then surely at a studio just down the dirt road. This is to say, the entirety of the LP’s runtime is quite lovely, with numbers like ‘Hawk Country’ and ‘Rain Theme’ invoking whispering tides and warm, welcoming drum circles.

But Thompson’s romanticism is tinged with loss, signposted by the gently receding instrumentals of ‘Sunken Relics’ and ‘Warped Shadow’. Sonically, Echo Earth could’ve just as easily been made in 1994 — a facet that can’t necessarily be considered a feat considering the more static, less innovative end of the ambient techno spectrum. What’s the use in re-hashing Aphex Twin when Richard D. James outdid his early sound long ago?

Nevertheless, what this LP does instead is invite a thematic fixation altogether more prescient to today’s conundrum. As artists and creators (and indeed writers), how do we best re-navigate our relationship with nature, when the 20th and 21st centuries have painfully demonstrated that we are not apart, but a part of our own environment? 7/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Andy Shauf — The Neon Skyline (anti-) Canadian singer-songwriter Andy 33 Shauf has been chipping away at his strand of storytelling for over a decade now. His previous solo album, The Party, featured sharp observations as its narrator tried his best to fit in at a house party. After making a record with his hometown band Foxwar-

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Albums ren last year, Shauf evolves his solo career with another intimate concept album, using a micro lens to explore universal emotions on The Neon Skyline.

The premise of the story is fairly straightforward: set in a small town, the narrator drags his friend out to the bar one evening before hearing that his ex is back in town. Thrown by this news, he looks back on moments from the relationship. At first closing his eyes and trying to recapture a faded feeling on the pensive ‘Clove Cigarettes’, he then dissects the break-up on the woozy ‘Thirteen Hours’.

Shauf echoes Kurt Vile on ‘Things I Do’ as he brushes the lead single along with simple piano and guitar accompaniments; there are also Soccer Mommy-sounding notes to the album’s mellow final phase.

Featuring a refrain that morphs in meaning as the song unfolds, ‘The Moon’ is seamlessly beautiful. Throughout the record, Shauf ’s warm melodies and dry humour make the atmosphere inside The Neon Skyline feel tangible. The brilliance of unrushed pub talk is captured on ‘Dust Kids’ (“Have I ever talked to you about reincarnation?”, a friend asks); and when the narrator’s old love finally arrives at the bar, the pair’s conversational missteps are delicately observed.

8/10 Jamie Haworth

Will Samson — Paralanguage (wichita) Some music lives in the background. You might not always notice it, but it’s there, providing a gentle little hum to everyday life. There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, some of the greatest records of all time intentionally take the backseat, offering the listener a chance to relax in a world becoming increasingly insane with every passing second.

Paralanguage, the fifth record

by Will Samson, jumps headfirst into

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the background, to mixed effect. The record slopes inoffensively in and out of consciousness throughout its duration, taking a hint of Radiohead here (‘Calescent’) and a touch of James Blake there (‘Triplet’) to create an album that gives more than a nod to electronic music’s modern heroes. When it works, it works well. Standout track ‘The Human Mosaic’ is whale music for the digital age, in the most brilliant way possible. Violins swoop in and out of focus while digital chills slowly build and build into a lake of rather glorious serenity. However, these moments are too few and far between. Samson’s soundscapes often lean too heavily into sort of watereddown, folky post-dubstep nothingness.

On ‘Ochre Alps’ the drums click and the synths swirl, offering nothing more than a strange sense of nostalgia for a far too recent past.

With Paralanguage, Will Samson has created a record that successfully occupies the background, it’s just unfortunate how rarely it thrives there.

5/10 Jack Doherty

Jamael Dean — Black Space Tapes (stones throw) So much recent jazz from both the UK and the States, while undeniably engaging, also feels so in thrall to its forebears that you start to wonder if some of the musicians involved realise we’re two decades into the 21st century.

LA pianist Jamael Dean, by contrast, not only knows what year it is, but also seems intent on only looking forwards.

Sure, he clearly knows his Sun Ra and Coltrane (as well as, pleasingly, his J Dilla and Avalanches), but, impressively, the musician that Black Space Tapes evokes most is Dean himself: he may be just 21, and this may only be his debut, but the nuance, musical sensitivity and depth of

personality on show here belies both his age and experience so dramatically that the record feels like a dazzling daydream.

The first half initially appears to be the sound of a band in a room, but reveals itself as a wonderfully knotty montage of lots of bands in lots of rooms, with Dean allowing the accidental juxtapositions to mesh organically, creating an imaginary psychedelic space full of fluttering flute harmonics, wordless coos and audacious piano runs. Then, when programmed beats arrive, Dean resists the urge to synch everything to a groove, instead maintaining the album’s bewitchingly loose feel of gentle metamorphosis and flow. Samples of his band drop in and out with a serene sense of serendipity, and the album closes with what appears to be the opening line of a new song. Such is Dean’s confidence, that feels entirely natural; such is Black Space Tapes’ engrossing brilliance, you can’t wait to hear more.

10/10 Sam Walton

Nolan Potter’s Nightmare Band — Nightmare Forever (castle face) There comes a time in every music writer’s ‘professional’ life when they have to assume that someone, somewhere, is taking the piss out of them. Which is to say: are Nolan Potter’s Nightmare Band having a laugh? Answer: please god, yes. Surely we can’t be living in a world where Dungeons and Dragons flute-rock is totally unironic. Considering the album includes a track called ‘Dosing the President’, I’m going to assume there’s at least a bit of tongue in the proverbial cheek here. Possibly. Nightmare Forever is a confusing beast.

Let’s go straight to the aforementioned ‘Dosing the President’ – just under three minutes of blues-y psych-punk about slipping the “Commander-in-

Albums Creep” a hefty dose of LSD “at the ass-end of the idiot right.” This is where Nightmare Forever is at its strongest, with a stomping beat and Jack White-esque guitar trickery. That also comes into play on lead single ‘Elf Curse’, making it a writhing, serpentine creature and the best of the album’s instrumental tracks.

‘Elf Curse’ packs a lot into a short space of time, building an expansive world in a nod to the band’s fantastical inspirations.

But Nightmare Forever is hard to categorise. For all its intriguing moments, there are others that are off-putting. The album runs in one continuous thread, making the softer tracks (like ‘Pity in the City’) feel like transitional filler.

Then there’s the overarching Dungeons and Dragons thing which, depending on how you feel about wizards and elves and their place in the musical canon, could go either way. Personally, I can’t say for sure but I think I’m starting to come around. It’s a weird new world out here.

6/10 Liam Konemann

Ut — In Gut’s House (out records) Originating within the short-lived yet potent no wave scene, Ut were integral members of the New York avant-garde for a while in the late ’70s. Pushing back against the perceived commercialism of new wave punk at the time, the trio of Nina Canal, Jacqui Ham and Sally Young influenced bands like Sonic Youth with their dissonant, abrasive sound and collective approach to improvisation.

They found common ground with the Au Pairs and the Slits when they moved to London in 1981, and went on to perform alongside bands like the Fall over the following decade.

A few chaotic live albums aside, Ut did not spend much time recording their material in the early ’80s. Because of this,

they arguably left less of a tangible legacy than many of their post-punk peers on both sides of the Atlantic. But just before disbanding in 1990, they did create two more fully-fledged studio albums that stand as proof of their daring and incisive approach to songwriting.

The first of those LPs, 1988’s In Gut’s House, saw Ut pin down their wiry sound in compelling fashion. Now reissued on Out Records, it is a fundamentally uncomfortable listen; the trio’s voices often sound warbled or snarled, while their restless instruments seem to grate against their instable surroundings before spiralling out of control.

On ‘Big Wing’, Canal’s foreboding drums bristle against a spiky guitar, before opposing forces fight for control on ‘Hotel’ – a strong track that holds back its driving riff until the halfway mark. A rare moment of clarity arrives on ‘Homebled’ thanks to more subdued instruments and expansive lyricism; the wriggling violins in the background, however, suggest that the peace won’t last long.

It’s a sign of their fierce drive to innovate that the album can develop an overarching mood even though its individual songs aggressively reject any notion of structure. Instead, the record is driven by Ut’s commitment to collective improvisation. As Canal, Ham and Young swap their instruments from one song to the next, the record gains a volatile unpredictability. Ut rewrote the songwriting rulebook to refine their sinister, mercurial vision. 7/10 Jamie Haworth

Basic Plumbing — Keeping Up Appearances (basic plumbing records) Ex-Veronica Falls drummer Patrick Doyle was working on new material when he died last year. It’s now being released under the name Basic Plumbing,

with profits from Keeping Up Appearances being donated to CALM and LA’s LGBT Center.

The ten tracks will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s heard Veronica Falls or Doyle’s other projects, including Boys Forever – an ode to the so-called golden age of indie. It pares back the harmonies of his former band but, with assistance from bassist Helen Skinner, it retains a similar sense of carefree melancholy.

An intoxicating cocktail of C86 and shoegaze, the guitars jangle with the energy of John Squire duelling with REM’s Peter Buck. Either one of them would have been pleased to have composed the pretty motif on ‘Constant Attention’, while the title track sounds like early Stone Roses minus the swagger.

The downbeat delivery, which occasionally recalls Ride’s Mark Gardener, lends the material some of its melancholy tone. Yet, addressing the end of a relationship, sadness imbues many of the lyrics as they float above bright ’60s organ (the psych-pop ‘Lilac’) or driving Mersey Beat (‘Bad Mood’).

His keening “it’s all over” lament was sadly prophetic, but ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ is a very worthy final instalment of Doyle’s modern indie pop legacy.

7/10 Susan Darlington

COMA — Voyage Voyage (city slang) Chirruping synths and melancholic electronica has always had a corner of the German underground roped off, where the rest of the world sometimes goes to visit to have a little – but always very cool – cry. The pleasant and understanding bouncer that invariably lifts that rope up for you has been City Slang.

At the turn of the new Millenium, indietronica was dictated on the terms of The

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Albums Notwist’s Neon Golden; a decade later, on Caribou’s Swim.

New City Slang signing COMA, comprising German duo Georg Conrad and Marius Bubat, buy into a rich history with Voyage Voyage, and it sometimes works. The propulsive FM funk of opener ‘Snurrebassen’ is everything authentic that Jungle have ever set out to achieve, compacted into six minutes of synth arpeggios and digital vocal modulations.

The downtempo melancholy of ‘Minor Matters’ seems to have clawed its way through the blinds of Low’s Double Negative, with occasional flickers of Alan Sparhawk’s rawest and most incantatory vocals. ‘Myopic’ is a rich highlight of digital and analog disparity, toying with a literally short-sighted refrain (“Don’t get closer/ you won’t see it”), but even that gets melodically wound up as you want it most to unspool.

It can get a little annoying elsewhere. The layers of tacky beats on ‘Inside Out’ do little to soften the blow of the slightly-too-whiny vocal effects. The insistent whimsical bounce of ‘A-Train’ doesn’t cover up its kitsch-romanticism.

‘Sparkle’ always sounds like it’s about to break into a chorus of The Temper Trap’s ‘Sweet Disposition’. There’s very little that makes Voyage Voyage more than a couple of really good songs; it’s always almost quite interesting, but its escapism is one dimensional enough that you’ll soon want to come back.

6/10 Tristan Gatward

Algiers — There Is No Year (matador) In case you hadn’t noticed, everything’s fucked. The climate crisis, Boris-TrumpBrexit, surveillance capitalism, SyriaYemen-Palestine – 2019’s particular tableau of apocalyptica is as rich and varied as any that have come before,

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and to add to the fun, there’s nothing you can do about it. Algiers, you sense, realise this: the cover of their third album features a photograph of a man in a business suit free-falling towards a murky city like a 9/11 jumper, his fate entirely knowable, unavoidable, and tragic, beside which are the opening 50 or so lines of an epic poem by lead singer Franklin James Fisher rhapsodising on men “made of skin and hair and nightmare designs” and an “alone and inevitable” death. (The remaining 700 lines, from which all the lyrics on There Is No Year are drawn, are reproduced inside). And if that already feels a little presentationally ripe, wait until you hear the record: we might be well aware we’re going to hell, but Algiers have arrived – TV On The Radio records in one hand, thesaurus in the other – to tell you exactly how, again and again, for 40 minutes.

Undeniably, this is the sort record we need right now – something urgent, aggressive, inflammatory and questioning of everything – but unfortunately Algiers seem have to have spent so long introspectively soul-searching about the end of the world that they’ve forgotten how to write much in the way of engaging music. Sure, both ‘Chaka’ and ‘We Can’t be Found’ have moments of pleasing musical nuance, but the rest is overblown and rather samey bombast, all plodding Doomy Reverb Piano and generic lyrics about fire raining down on the streets, that aims for the ominous but ends up more like the high-camp fauxepic soundtrack to a Sky Sports Super Sunday montage.

The aforementioned poem that inspires every word on There Is No Year, by the way, is titled Misophonia, which is also a neurological disorder where certain sustained or grating sounds trigger extreme responses, normally anger or panic, in the listener. That such a condition should inform an album as grindingly repetitive as this is too much of an irony open goal to prompt further comment, but it is nonetheless rather instructive of Algiers’ headspace: their highfalutin conceptual dismantling of the world’s ills may be self-soothing – even self-gratify-

ing – but in being impressed by their own reflection, they’ve forgotten to consider how it might sound to anybody else. 4/10 Sam Walton

Poliça — When We Stay Alive (memphis industries) When they released their deeply political last record, United Crushers, in the thick of the 2016 election campaign, Poliça broke with the form book. The two full-lengths that preceded it were largely heartbreak pieces, preoccupied with turning breakups into low-key synthpop bangers in the manner effectively trademarked by The xx. The crucial talking point with United Crushers was how striking that pivot was; the defining feature of the sound they’d cultivated previously was that everything was scored through with a chilly air, that everything was self-contained and a little bit arm’s-length. It was an uneven album, but the bravery involved in stepping outside of such a meticulously designed bubble shouldn’t be underestimated.

This time around, the Minneapolis outfit have been brought crashing back down to earth quite literally, by accident rather than design. Hanging heavy over When We Stay Alive are the serious injuries sustained by singer Channy Leaneagh when she fell from the roof of her house whilst clearing ice in February of 2018; less the incident itself and more the physical and psychological aftermath of it. Leaneagh was left partially immobile for a matter of months and there’s a sense across the album that it brought her back in touch with the simple things – the stuff she took for granted beforehand. Opener ‘Driving’ talks of second chances and of “(imagining) wanting life/ and the want remains.”

That kind of focus sets When We Stay Alive apart from its predecessors

Albums in that there’s an inherent universality to it; even United Crushers, to a degree, felt personal in its political approach, whereas this album is scored through with a soft urgency inspired by Leaneagh’s lifealtering spell in hospital beds and wheelchairs. It makes it all the more surprising, then, that half of the album’s ten tracks were penned before the accident, and it’s therefore a testament to the power of those that came afterwards that they’ve so dramatically coloured the pre-fall cuts.

It’s not that what happened to Leaneagh minimises what she’d been writing about beforehand; there is still power in her nervousness about being the breadwinner on ‘Steady’, her bitterness at the state of local politics on ‘TATA’, and in the stinging treatise on toxic relationships that is ‘Forget Me Now’. The newer songs put those ones in perspective, but more in the sense that the world keeps turning; none of those things stopped happening just because she’d been hurt.

Where the injury has influenced When We Stay Alive, though, is surely in the way it sounds. In another departure from convention, Poliça have subtly reconfigured their approach to place warmth at the centre of their sound. The aforementioned ‘Steady’ for instance, thoughtfully approximates the woozy sound of the slide guitar, which is not something you’d have anticipated for this group when you were navigating the quietly nightmarish Shulamith. The synths on ‘TATA’, meanwhile, conjure up steel drums, accentuating the superficially breezy air of the piece – scratch the surface, though, and there’s an anxiousness to the tempo that reflects the lyrics.

There’s similar understated tension in the throb of the beat on ‘Feel Life’, and in the low-level white noise in the background of ‘Little Threads’, which has Leaneagh at her most vocally mercurial; she’s borderline conversational one minute, and hitting swooping high notes the next.

Still, those flourishes won’t reveal themselves on first listen and, instead, you suspect that the casual takeaway from When We Stay Alive will be the poppy embrace of melody on tracks like closer ‘Sea Without Blue’, or the undulat-

ing harmonies that form the backbone of ‘Blood Moon’. Shulamith and, before it, Give You the Ghost were, in retrospect, fairly oppressive listens; claustrophobic and moody.

There’s points at which that particular spirit is summoned on When We Stay Alive – particularly the tumultuous ‘Fold Up’, which feels out of place – but a lot of the time the antithesis of that reigns; sonically, there’s spaces left empty to allow Leaneagh’s thoughts room to breathe (the final ninety seconds or so of ‘Be Again’ is a convincing case in point) and, accordingly, the songs are almost defined as much by the musical ideas that the band chose not to use. It’s an exercise in minimalism.

In an ideal world, Leaneagh would not have broken her back and it would be naive to glamourise, even for a second, the excruciating pain and suffocating anxiety that surely came with it. It does seem to have triggered a creative rebirth, though, one abundantly present in When We Stay Alive’s many nuances. After the soul searching of United Crushers, there’s a tranquility to Poliça here. It suits them.

8/10 Joe Goggins

Keely Forsyth’s — Debris (leaf) Keeley Forsyth’s Debris could easily be described as “haunting”, but that implies absence and Forsyth is most definitely here. The 39-year-old actor has arrived fully formed, certain of what she wanted her debut to be: melancholic, contemplative, and deeply devastating.

Her voice immediately strikes you, the aching vulnerability reminiscent of Nico or early Bon Iver, all the half-hit notes and breathing noises included to give honesty and humanity to tracks.

It’s like overhearing someone singing to themselves, too afraid to be heard but too lonely to stay quiet anymore.

Whilst the performance is very Nico, the lyrics are very Virginia Woolf, all fragments of lonely thoughts competing with each other, particularly evident on ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Black Bull’ (my two favourites). I will say that Forsyth has a comfort zone, and aside from ‘Start Again’’s ’80s synth pad, she rarely ventures outside of her lower-pitched songs of sorrow, which isn’t necessarily a criticism: the atmosphere is so well considered that a different sound for the sake of it would no doubt throw everything off balance. The production (commonly strings that devolve into feedback and thudding piano chords) gives an atmospheric fog which sometimes works too well, obscuring Forsyth’s fragile voice and therefore her strong lyricism. But again the atmosphere created is worth the sacrifice, and the pure vulnerability Forsyth shows makes this worth your while. If more debuts from 2020 are this good it’ll be a fine year. 8/10 Sam Reid

En Attendant Ana — Julliet (trouble in mind) Parisian quartet En Attendant Ana return with their second LP, a record that marries garage grunge with intelligent, melodic songwriting. Julliet is gutsy, determined, unpredictable; held together by the crystal clear vocals of Margaux Bouchaudon’s, which cut through the fuzzy backing with an effortless elegance.

Julliet was created in isolation, recorded over a single week in a studio in rural France; yet when it came to inspiration for the writing they cast a wide net, citing Cate Le Bon, Electrelane and Stereolab as influences. Named for the month of July, the record is alive with a sense of excitement and transition of the changing season – as the band surmise, “a symbol

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Albums of the end of something and the beginning of another one.”

Opener ‘Down The Hill’ is instantly grandiose, with the introduction of trumpets seconds into the record, as well as a four-bar motif that will recur throughout the track. Repetition is a central writing style on the record – be it of riffs or vocal ideas – which is at times extremely catchy, at others a little formulaic.

Nippy drums and driving base sustain through the first four tracks like a pulse, until ‘From My Bruise To An Island’ arrives midway through the record, casting a spell of its own. Beginning with a sparse soundscape and almost choral vocal melody, it builds to a swirling, brass-driven climax, before fading away to welcome back the solo voice. The record’s highlight arrives with ‘In / Out’, a dream-pop earworm imbued with such a carefree optimism that it is difficult not to nod along to. 7/10 Katie Cutforth

Wolf Parade — Thin Mind (sub pop) “How do you deal with the constant barrage of having your opinions swayed by all these different actors when you don’t know who they are or what their purpose is?” asks Wolf Parade’s Aren Thompson, discussing the Canadian group’s fifth album, Thin Mind. “There is no normal anymore.” This informs an album that looks at modern anxieties and darknesses of technology and pervasive anxiety at world events.

For the most part, it’s an expansive and vigorous listen. ‘Julia Take Your Man Home’ sees Wolf Parade look at toxic masculinity, with lyricists Spencer Krug and Dan Boeckner imaging the worst versions of themselves – the gurning party bore showing up their partner, but who will say sorry tomorrow morning. It’s relevant without being

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preachy or on the nose – and that propulsive bass groove!

Indeed, Thin Mind may see Wolf Parade at their lyrically most oblique and questioning, but sonically it’s unexpectedly anthemic, heavy on the shimmering synths and electronic drums, as on ‘Out of Control’, where Krug’s usually confident vocal allows itself to falter; reedy and affecting. “I don’t want to live in a static age,” he says on the soaring standout ‘The Static Age’, and he’s right – but how to deal with such flux is another question.

7/10 Fergal Kinney

Aoife Nessa Frances — Land of No Junction (basin rock) Trying to figure out what to compare Aoife Nessa Frances’s new album to is murder. I still haven’t cracked it: sometimes I think it’s Sea Change era Beck with its lyrics of loneliness above acoustic guitar fingering; sometimes I think it’s Emmy the Great due to her mellow melodic voice. I wanted to draw parallels to how it sounds like the Hawaiian riffs from Spongebob Squarepants but that just made me sound thick. What I’m trying to say is that this is a debut full of ideas: Frances’s influences are eclectic and her songwriting reflects her wide-ranging passions, all of which are explored with an unrestricted freedom.

‘Blow Up’ is titled after the 1966 film (Frances studied film at university) where the singer contemplates womanhood amid the Irish abortion referendum.

‘Here In The Dark’ is an infectious ode to unrequited, obsessive love. I took ‘In The End’ as an upbeat consideration of nihilism and the album caps with a lovely credits-rolling crescendo with the title track.

The album’s an easy (if sometimes unfocused) listen, Frances showing herself as an artist unafraid to fail. And luckily, she doesn’t. 7/10 Sam Reid

Nicolas Godin — Concrete and Glass (because) Nicolas Godin needs little in the way of introduction. As one half of seminal electronic duo Air, he has spent most of the last two decades as a dreamy, downtempo reference. In 2015 Godin made his solo debut with the Bachinspired Contrepoint, throwing himself into a technical challenge to reimagine the work of the classical composer in a contemporary way. If that project was a stylistically bold departure from what we’ve come to expect, he returns to type here on Concrete and Glass.

Taking inspiration from architectural reference points, it’s a concept that feels highbrow enough to reflect Godin’s own exacting style. A minimalist and a perfectionist, it’s not too much of a leap to parallel the similarities between the literal architecture he’s referencing musically and the craft and structure of his own music.

The record’s title-track is an elegant glimpse into the future, the vocoded vocals adding a space age quality that feels like an architect’s take on life on Mars, and ‘The Border’ feels equally timeless with its floating synths and ambient melodies as Godin’s vocals harking back to Air’s Moon Safari golden age.

But that sense of clarity feels clouded on the album’s guest collaborations with the vocals often unbalancing the crisp definition Godin seems so inspired to create. Even when it works, as it does on ‘Catch Yourself ’ featuring Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, it still doesn’t move with the weightless finesse of the tracks with a lighter vocal touch.

Still an effortlessly stylish listen, Concrete and Glass might be all blackrimmed spectacles and immaculate blueprints, but, amongst its clean lines and crisp arrangements, it just about retains enough of slow-burning warmth

Albums to be as instantly recognisable as Godin, even if it isn’t his grandest design.

6/10 Reef Younis

Yorkston/Thorne/Khan — Navarasa: Nine Emotions (domino) The Navarasa derive from an ancient Sanskrit theory of the performing arts and they are comprised of nine distinct sentiments or emotions. Suhail Yusuf Khan, one third of this now firmly established trio of global folk flame-preservers, is a New Delhi-based, eighth-generation hereditary musician whose familiarity with the Navarasa has given birth to this frankly outstanding collection of tracks. For each of the associated emotions of the Navarasa, Yorkston/Thorne/Khan have made a corresponding piece of music that delves deep into their respective bottomless wells of knowledge and experience of musical histories.

Their third album for Domino, they write and perform with such tightly embroidered harmony that their diverse backgrounds are now indissoluble. Khan’s Sufi and Indian classical roots, led by his mastery of the sarangi, a bowed instrument that mimics the human voice, James Yorkston’s expertise in Scottish folk and prowess with the Swedish hurdy-gurdylike nyckelharpa, and Jon Thorne’s affinity for meditative jazz interlock seamlessly – Yorkston describes the invisible bind between them their “dark happiness”.

Each of the nine evocations of the core emotional concepts is rendered with a delicate and unobtrusive touch. Take ‘Westlin’ Winds’, the representation of surprise, in which they splice together a Middle Ages devotional qawwali piece with the opening act of a Robert Burns poem, marrying together their respective epiphanies, finding the collective human wonder in each. ‘Darbari’

meanwhile, which represents peace, taps into the trio’s shared understanding of the hypnotising power of drone and repetition in music. Indeed, all nine pieces serve to demonstrate that what is common amongst these contrasted traditions is far greater than what divides them; a simple, intuitive truth that needs repeating more than it still should. 9/10 Max Pilley

Annie Hart — A Softer Offering (selfreleased) Putting out an album isn’t easy in any month, but in December it really isn’t easy. It’s the difference between going for a drive on an open road and swerving your reinforced tyres through a snow drift. Unless you’re a Hollywood sweetheart who loves the attention that singing Christmas songs in a top hat promises, is there any point competing?

There’s certainly a big-lunged pop song behind most of the nine tracks on Annie Hart’s new record, but the blizzard lights aren’t on full beam. The sonorously sparse folk of A Softer Offering is a stretch away from her work with synthesizer pioneers Au Revoir Simone, playing more like it’s been etched into the dewy breath of a bus window. It’s an oddly warm and comforting companion piece to the shorter days and colder nights.

‘Longing to Care Less’ sounds like a carefree attempt at a Caroline Polachek jam session. A dreamy mellotron glimmer plays through ‘Wilderness Hill’ to ‘Embrace The New Age’, all with a mumbled closed-mouth vocal that feels reassuringly incomplete. Even the most digitized and programmed riffs fizz through mumbled, mistaken notes and slight off beats, as if someone’s playing a New Year’s concert through a vacuum, or a toy piano tribute to Daniel Johnston.

The standout one-two of ‘Clean Floors’

and ‘Phoenicia No Coffee’ is a slow psychic rumination on withdrawal, complete with power line: “the Mefloquine made me crazy but I swear I’m coming back.” It thrums with a spaced out, hopeful energy that claws its way into being a foggy twochord strum; winter jacket buttoned up, thick gloves on. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Alice Boman — Dream On (pias) Alice Boman recorded her first demos in her bedroom, with no intention of releasing them to the public. When they were finally heard by Malmö-based label Adrian, it is said that “time itself stopped”, confounded by the profound, unspoilt beauty of Boman’s creations.

The Swedish artist’s long-awaited full-length debut is surely her best accomplishment yet. Dream On is utterly transporting, its ten sublime tracks almost blending into a single haunting experience. Certain tracks stand out: ‘Heart On Fire’ is an off-kilter, quietly devastating ode to a love so strong she wishes it had never existed, while ‘This Is Where It Ends’ is a slow-burner, beginning sparse and building to the record’s rousing climax, Boman simply repeating her declaration that “it’s over”.

Boman’s voice is hypnotic, ghostlike atop the music, and indivisible from the tender simplicity of her lyrics. The soundscapes she conjures are completely immersive, layering synths with pretty piano notes, guitars with haunting steel pan riffs, with a steady ambience and delicate romanticism reminiscent of the work of Cigarettes After Sex. A startlingly impressive debut, Dream On exudes an intimacy and emotion that seems limitless; that has the power to reverberate across continents, somewhere deep in the human psyche. 9/10 Katie Cutforth

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Albums

Dan Deacon — Mystic Familiar (domino) In over a decade of innovations and outside-the-lines musical thinking, we have never quite got to hear Dan Deacon’s voice. I’m not talking about the intangible representation of his creative character, but his actual, literal voice.

Whenever the Baltimore experimentalist’s larynx-based vibrations have been captured, it has been after some process of distortion or obfuscation, to fit with the strange, orchestrated artificiality of the alien worlds in which his records reside.

Settle in, then, for opening track ‘Become a Mountain’ here; a new frontier in the Deacon oeuvre. The first words nakedly sung by Deacon are, “I rose up, tired in my flesh.” It’s an attention-grabber. “On this day before me,” he continues, “will I seize it or scroll?” Suddenly we have an impossibly tangled mind spilling over with candour, and it takes some addressing. He goes on to introduce the titular ‘Mystic Familiar’, which Deacon suggests is a bodiless other figure that exists inside, or alongside, our own consciousness that only we can access. It binds the album’s eleven tracks together and offers Deacon a device to allow him to expand on matters of aging, loss and doubt.

The centrepiece is a four-part suite entitled ‘Arp’ that reflects a life cycle, taking the listener from a youth of blinking possibility, through the learning and repetition of maturity, to the uncertainty at the end of the road. The darting, clattering vivacity of the synths of the suite’s first half is rugby-tackled by the squirling chaos of Andrew Bernstein’s saxophone and the latter half ’s pounding nervousness of sub-bass rhythms. This is abstract storytelling of fairly high order and could exist as a release all of its own.

Matters of mortality return with album highlight ‘Fell Into the Ocean’, wherein our narrator and/or the Mystic Famil-

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iar are subsumed into the water’s cycle of life, soundtracked by synths that are now at peace and conjure beauty and wonder rather than fear or dread. Lead single ‘Sat By a Tree’ finds Deacon conversing in existential philosophy with said tree, as washes of electric ambience are propelled into dancing shapes by a galloping rhythm, almost evoking Stereolab. Moods shift significantly throughout Mystic Familiar, but the themes are constant. Dan Deacon has let us into his mind for the first time and it has only compounded his mystique.

8/10 Max Pilley

Robin Richards — Castel (prah) In the digital age the EP can be seen, perhaps unfairly, as a redundant format. Where it was once a place for artists to take the shackles off and mess around with new ideas, in many cases now, it’s been reduced to nothing more than a musical dumping ground; an attempt by labels to make a few quid by chucking together a few discarded b-sides and live recordings.

Castel, the debut EP from Dutch Uncles frontman Robin Richards, brings us back to the golden age of the format.

From the ethereal choral tones of acapella opener ‘Cofi’ to the kitchen utensil rave of ‘Gerfail Yr Ynys’, right the way through to the demented These New Puritans-esque glockenspiel terror of ‘B-R’ and Richards’s love for found sounds elsewhere, it’s clear that he means business here. Found in the middle of all of this insanity are the record’s two standout moments: the unnervingly orchestral ‘Arvo’ and ‘Toompea’ somehow manage to find a surprisingly beautiful sweetspot in between Howard Blake’s The Snowman soundtrack and John Carpenter’s Halloween score. It shouldn’t work, but as is the case with the rest of Castel, it really, really does.

It may not have been his intention, but with this debut collection, Robin Richards has proven that, with a sprinkle of invention, the EP can thrive in the digital age. 8/10 Jack Doherty

The Big Moon — Walking Like We Do (fiction) There’s a certain symmetry between The Big Moon and Girl Ray. Both bands issued their indie-pop, girl gang debuts in 2017. Within months of each other they’re releasing their followups, having scrapped initial demos that sounded too similar in order to stretch themselves as musicians.

In the process they’ve cleaned up their sound and become more unashamedly pop. Yet where Girl Ray have created a wonky amalgam of R&B and indie, The Big Moon have introduced musical maturity and space in their arrangements.

The London quartet have kept their infectious overlapping harmonies on Walking Like We Do but they’ve ditched the grungy guitars and sidelined tracks about romance. In their place are pianos, trumpet, flute, and songs that deal with social inequality (‘Dog Eat Dog’) and empowerment in times of social flux (‘A Hundred Ways To Land’).

It’s undoubtedly more professional than their debut, although Juliette Jackson’s vocal hiccup on the folk influenced ballad ‘Waves’ suggests they’re still not taking themselves too seriously. There’s also still plenty of feel good hooks, from the Franz Ferdinand indie-disco of ‘Don’t Think’ to the explosive uplift of ‘Your Light’, which sounds like a cousin to Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’ during the opening bars.

The second half of the album palls slightly, with ‘Barcelona’ lacking the band’s usual spark or playfulness and ‘Take A Piece’ being a slightly flat bridge

Albums to Love In The 4th Dimension. But overall Walking Like We Do signals a band growing up, having fun, and developing their sound. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Field Music — Making a New World (memphis industries) This seventh album from Field Music will be released ten days into the new twenties, which may have been a strategic move. They might, in ten years’ time, be able to claim it was the best concept record about war released that decade, which they wouldn’t have been able to say if it had arrived in 2019 because PJ Harvey put Let England Shake out in 2011. Making a New World emerged from a commission from the Imperial War Museum, and has blossomed into an album that the Brewis brothers themselves would be at pains to point out is not about war but rather the mundanity of its consequences.

Where Harvey’s masterpiece so intangibly evoked the quiet horror of the intrinsic link between battle and the British identity, Field Music zero-in on hyper-specifics, meaning we get tracks like ‘Money Is a Memory’, which conjures the administrative side of the fulfilment, in 2010 (!), of Germany’s final World War I reparation payment, or ‘A Change of Heir’, which reflects on show the brutality of combat effectively necessitated the invention of skin grafts. It’s a beguiling listen in that regard, and there’s a minimalism to the palette that they’re painting with that almost suggests they’re happy for the ideas to do the talking; quiet ambience defines the instrumentals of ‘A Common Language’, whilst even the barbed likes of ‘Beyond That of Courtesy’ are subtle in their spikiness.

It takes a band well-versed in nuance to pull off a project of this sophistication – which is probably why the museum

approached Field Music in the first place.

7/10 Joe Goggins

Daniel Lopatin — Uncut Gems OST (warp) For the last several years we have been amidst a renaissance for the film score. Thanks to the likes of Jonny Greenwood, Mica Levi and the duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, there’s more space than ever for contemporary, left-field musicians to create progressive and resonant soundtracks for some of the era’s most definitive films.

Among this growing crop of artists is Brooklyn-native Daniel Lopatin, perhaps better known by his genredefying electronic project Oneohtrix Point Never. In 2017 the 37 year-old won the Best Soundtrack award at Canne for his work on the Safdie brothers cult crime-thriller Good Time. The kaleidoscopic synths, adrenaline-scorching beats and warped melodies made for a primal experience that was as essential to the story as the dizzying visuals that unfolded on screen. So it feels only right that the Safdie’s have recruited Lopatin once again for their latest feature, Uncut Gems, which follows Adam Sandler’s jewellery salesman Howard on a bad trip through the underbelly of New York as he tries to repay (or outrun) his debts.

For this gritty urban tale, Lopatin draws from his recognisable stylistic palette to create something eclectic, grand and even holy at some moments...

Opening with the 8 minute ‘Ballad of Howie Bling’, Lopatin orchestrates a wondrous mixture of angelic choir chants and oceanic synths that hypnotically swell and bloom throughout. Bjork’s Utopia is recalled with the bird-like flutes on ‘Pure Elation’ and ‘High Life’, while ‘Smoothie’ and ‘Windows’ wouldn’t be out of place among the compositions of Nils Frahm.

Lopatin’s influence of video games, sci-fi and horror comes through strongest on ‘School Play’, which ushers in the nightmarish, nocturnal tone familiar to Good Time and 2018’s Age Of. Anxiety builds during its 6 minutes, making you feel as if you’re desperately trying to escape some sort of twisted arcade labyrinth. ‘The Fountain’ and ‘The Blade’ continue this atmosphere before the spacey title track closes the record in cathartic fashion.

Though not as immediate as Good Time, Uncut Gems has some equally breath-taking moments, treading new ground for the artist. Alongside Ben Sailsbury, Anna Meredith and others, Lopatin is helping to establish this exciting era of experimental soundtracks that are expressive and effective to the point of being characters within themselves.

7/10 Woody Delaney

Erin Anne — Tough Love (carpark) Queer commentary accelerated through potent folk expression and blaring punk rock capabilities, LA musician Erin Anne is no stranger to wrestling with her own identity. Having initially self-released this lo-fi, bedroom-crafted debut back in June 2019, she’s since landed a deal with Carpark Records and is digitally reissuing Tough Love with a few rounded tweaks and analogue synth renovations.

Retaining its rugged, uneven exterior, Tough Love is exploratory of Anne’s multifaceted persona as she contends with the uphill struggle of finding acceptance and becoming the truest version of herself. Frustrated by her own unapologetic masculinity, Tough Love tries to make sense of her many masks. Even when subdued, Anne’s frank, confessional lyrics are razor sharp, propping up explosive arrangements and occasionally

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Albums offering up a bloody, visceral pounding.

Screams of toxic love and staved affection flare up into nervous, unpredictable guitar twitches on ‘Gaslighter’ whilst on single ‘Bitter Winter’ stabbing riffs and vocals of angst are a whirlwind of Tough Loves’ erratic mood swings. She laments familiar racing thoughts of unease on ‘Seventeen’, where through not so rose-tinted goggles Anne reflects on her abiding inner doubt. Such a void of certainty in character is uniquely dark and disorienting amongst the rest of Tough Love’s labyrinthine disposition.

6/10 Ollie Rankine

Arms and Sleepers — Safe Area Earth (future archive) “The Earth is a place that could – and should – be safe for all, but depending on the pure chance of one’s place of birth, the personal relationship with the planet alters dramatically.”

Describing the semantic absurdity of the UN-designated “safe areas” during the Bosnian War in the 1990s – that these places had to exist in the first place, and that they actually housed some of the worst atrocities – Arms and Sleepers set out the personal and somber context for their new conceptual electronic project.

Safe Area Earth is the first of six planned releases in 2020 for the trip-hop duo, comprising three albums and three EPs, all based around Mirza Ramic’s childhood travelling the globe as a Bosnian refugee. It’s a return to the subtler sounds of their early releases. The beat-making of ‘Art and Scope’, ‘Ruined by Geography’ and ‘Open to the Elements’ is notably heavier than any of the chill-wave deep cuts of debut Black Paris 86, but shares the quieter moments of grainy distortion and static.

The exposition is unsettling: gently snapping electronics attempt to draw

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out the human anxiety that comes from recalibrating an identity within an involuntary nomadic upbringing, but their executions vary in success. Sofia Insua’s feature on ‘Leon’ is especially out-ofplace, sounding tagged on for a playlist algorithm. Transitions become hurried as the 17-track opus dwindles to an end. The strange highlight is a 21-second coded transmission (translated as “this is safe area earth”). It’s the one time where the composition is audibly grounded in the tumultuous world its trying to translate.

5/10 Tristan Gatward

Torres — Silver Tongue (merge) 2017’s Three Futures begat an individual artistic breakthrough for Mackenzie Scott. Across her first two albums, the woman known as Torres proved herself as a piercing storyteller, but her third sees her embodying her many characters through more than just a newfound sound. Now, sex emits from every last pore in the manner of oblique confessionals, and all the better for it. I defy anyone not to squeal joyously at “I am not a righteous woman/ I’m more of an ass man”.

Silver Tongue, her fourth, has some hang ups: it’s altogether less freewheeling, less salacious, a little more buttoned-up. Even where bodily intimacy is concerned, Scott is mostly feeling homely. “Build my house upon the hips/ Of the last forest of its kind,” she declares on ‘Last Forest’; “I tend to sleep with my boots on/ Should I need to gallop over dark water/ To you on short notice,” she sings on ‘Dressing America’.

But this isn’t to kink-shame; where her last LP tended to sag under its indulgence, Silver Tongue is tightly-coiled and whip-smart, rendered beefier than its scant 35 minutes by synth washes, esoteric percussion and, best of all, an

even more ruthless penchant for melody.

8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Burial — Tunes 2011-2019 (hyperdub) Burial makes music for people walking home alone at night. The images in his cinematic music are all shadowed – industrial estates, stark multi-storeys and the weeds growing on derelict lots, stolen dogs, the dazed faces of lost clubbers. Burial is the wraithlike loner in the background, listening for the echoes of old parties. When he stepped out from anonymity over a decade ago William Bevan simply described himself as a “lowkey person”.

The 2010s, despite never seeing a full-length Burial LP (it’s been almost 13 years since the release of his second Mercury-nominated album Untrue), have arguably given us his most important work. His music has long mined rave, garage, IDM and R&B, but this decade has seen him push further into ambient.

He makes this choice clear on this two CD, 17-song collection Tunes 2011-2019, with club-influenced tracks like ‘Rodent’ and ‘Pre Dawn’ mostly absent.

The few tracks on the compilation where Burial does explicitly work in this lane huddle for warmth in the centre of the tracklist, surrounded by long ambient and home-listening pieces (it opens with ‘State Forest’ and closes with ‘NYC’.

As the echoes of ’90s dance music grow more distant from the producer’s music, there’s the feeling that the man himself is pulling more into focus. A forthcoming third decade of Burial music still feels like a vital and exciting prospect.

Perhaps the only adequate comparison to the south London producer is Scottish duo Boards of Canada; a similarly self-erasing group who also explore forgotten memories and lost futures

Albums through haunted electronic music. Their Societas X Tape earlier this year gave listeners a privileged insight into the influence of psych, shoegaze and obscure experimental music on their discography. Tunes 2011-2019 does a similar yet no less impressive trick, in that it gives Burial a chance to move a decade of work into perfect order and say: this is what I meant. 10/10 Alex Francis

WIRE — Mind Hive (pink flag) With the exception of perhaps only the Fall, who else of the class of ’77 so ruthlessly refused to rub shoulders with their own past? Since that smirking group of art school idealists emerged with Pink Flag they’ve left the job of sounding like Pink Flag entirely to younger imitators – which they have done, with aplomb, ever since. Instead Wire have spent their career doing what all great bands do – treating successes and failures just the same. But this shouldn’t be confused with them being difficult, or willfully abstract, and their excellent new record Mind Hive proves exactly that.

Indeed, on their seventeenth album, Wire have turned in a record showing a band at their most pop, their most hooky, their most full-fat.

Take ‘Cactused’, a propulsive, ear-lodging groove complimented by a nervy croon from Colin Newman that brings to mind a heavily caffeinated Bryan Ferry – on both this and the atypically breezy ‘Off the Beach’ (acoustic guitars!), Wire are revelling in easy-toswallow ideas and sonic ticks that lodge in the mind on repeated listens. They pull off some entirely different tracks too – listening to the spacey atmospherics of ‘Unrepentant’, I was struck by quite how autumnal Newman sounds, all weathered and plaintive like Robert Wyatt. It’s

the album’s most straightforwardly pretty and affecting moment. There’s iron discipline also, as on the noise rock dirge of ‘Hung’, which simmers for eight minutes, remaining rhythmically rigid even as it threatens frequently to climax.

We are lucky to have Wire; we are lucky to have this album. 8/10 Fergal Kinney

Sarah Mary Chadwick — Please Daddy (sinderlyn) Breaking up her grunge group nearly a decade ago, sick of the compromise that collaboration entails, Melbourne-based New Zealander Sarah Mary Chadwick has been forging a solo career as singular as her voice. While 2019 saw her release the live album The Queen Who Stole the Sky – a stark record of sprawling numbers on a grand organ – her latest offering sees her return to the piano for a much more intimate and personal affair.

Completely coloured and shaped by the recent death of her father, Please Daddy is arresting, brutal and unflinching. On the title track, a horn-led chorus ushers in one of the record’s most disarming lyrics: “All the ones who died while trying/ Should I follow their lead and be done, daddy?”. To hear an artist bare all is in this way is difficult (sometimes too difficult) to listen to, but in pouring her heart so eloquently out, Chadwick invites us to share her grief and bring our own experiences of it with us.

Whilst the record is unquestionably no easy listen, there are rays of sunshine poking through the clouds at the end of the storm. The final track, ‘All Lies’, is perhaps the best example of this; Chadwick shares a ballad of acceptance and optimism atop gorgeous trumpet toots.

“I don’t worry about the end,” she resiliently cries, “death comes to all of us, my friend.” 7/10 Cal Cashin

U-Bahn — U-Bahn (melodic) Listening through U-Bahn’s self-titled debut, it’s hard not to go straight to the Devocomparisons. In fact that’s exactly what they do in the accompanying blurb to the release parading a Henry Rollins quote about them namechecking the legendary alt-pop group. From the cheese-wire thin guitars to the kitschy, primitive synth sounds, almost every song on this album sounds like a B-side from ‘Jocko Homo’.

Plus their live shows are similarly theatrical, for which they wear big bags, wigs and wraparound sunglasses.

However, after persevering with the more noticeable new wave influences, U-Bahn clearly have some interesting points that they’re getting across.

For one thing, the Melbourne band - who met when band leader Lachlan Kenny was flogging a drum machine on Gumtree are way more sex-obsessed than their red-hatted American counterparts.

‘Right Swipe’ is a takedown of throwaway dating culture, while ‘Turbulent Love’ celebrates the joys of kinky sex, as long as you remember to, “Wrap up and protect yourself from the dreaded southern lice”.

The album’s best moments come when U-Bahn deviate from the more traditional new wave mould. ‘Damp Sheets’, for example, is an instrumental jam filled with porno movie samples and recalls the twisted weirdness of the Avalanches. ‘Goodbye Placenta’ meanwhile, sees the band improbably stray into vaporwave.

Most of the time, though, the band crash through their source material like a drunk at a house party. Tumbling through vague no-wave soundscapes, it’s fun enough. Still, I can’t help but feel that U-Bahn lack the pure, freewheeling inventiveness of the bands they so want to emulate. 5/10 Dominic Haley

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Albums Live Sonic City Festival Kortrijk, Belgium 5 October 2019

Viewed from a train window, the Belgian town of Kortrijk doesn’t look like the kind of place for a ground-breaking music festival. The place may boast a delightful 14th-century belfry, but the respectfully quiet streets do feel better suited to a quaint folk festival than a weekend of cutting-edge experimental noise.

Yet, it’s here, in this little, unassuming corner of Flanders that Sonic City has found a home, and for the past 12 years the festival has garnered an impressive reputation. Working with curators such as Deerhoof, Savages and Liars, they’ve consistently delivered line ups that rival Meltdown in terms of the breadth of music on offer.

2019 has been a facelift year for Sonic City. In response, the organisers have opted for two creators instead of the normal one. On the face of it, a line-up that is half chosen by Cate Le Bon and half selected by Shame isn’t the most obvious pairing, but it turns out it’s actually inspired. If you drew a Venn diagram of the weekend, one bubble would be filled with gentle folktronica, quirky indie pop and pastoral noise; the other, hardcore, techno and the odd industrial sound-

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scapes. There’s only an overlap of postpunk and jazzy krautrock to provide a slither of common ground.

The festival’s location adds to the air of the surreal; it’s vast, empty carpark and adjacent dual carriageway giving off a Curries PC World vibe. However, the blend of drab office carpets and cold concrete walls fits the idiosyncratic nature of the line-up perfectly. It somehow manages to be cavernous enough to contain Thurston Moore’s equally monolithic-sounding noise rock but also intimate enough to handle the delicate off-kilter orchestralpop of Holly Herndon, who performs with singers dressed in traditional Bavarian peasant costume.

Thanks to the curator’s love of grassroots sounds, 2019’s Sonic City is also an incredible showcase of the UK’s DIY scene. PVA and Scalping impress with intense, immersive noise alongside American’s Boy Harsher, while more pop-orientated acts like Squid, Mannequin Pussy and Priests serve up sets that are effortlessly fun. It’s Shame, though, who really bring the house down, closing this year’s festival with an orgy of intense punk and stage diving.

It’s a raucous end to two and a half days that showed the exciting width of talent that is bubbling just underground at the moment. If this weekend is anything to go by, then 2020 is going to be one hell of a year. Dominic Haley

Pitchfork Paris Le Grande Halle de Villette, Paris 31 October – 2 November 2019

The area around le Grande Halle de Villette doesn’t really feel like Paris.

The new builds that line its bordering, manmade canal – mostly budget hotels, restaurants and the odd craft beer brewery – give this corner of the 19th arrondissement a modernist appearance that would more suit Berlin. As you approach the Grande Hall, it appears to have got the memo too – a ginormous expo centre of endless glass and neon signage. Look a little closer though and the building’s shed shape and iron bones give away its age and history, as a late 19th Century abattoir; the jewel in the crown of Paris’s slaughterhouse district.

Pitchfork Music Festival Paris forces its own presumption that it flattens as soon you enter the Grande Halle via a disproportionally small door. Vintage abattoir or not, and setting aside the festival’s previous eight years of undeniable alt. lineups, single-venue city festivals are, by their very nature, kinda stale places to be. It’s not the case here, though, where glowing oranges and yellows burn through dry ice on entry, with all that black void behind it. The Grand Halle is bigger than any equivalent space we have here in the UK, dissected by bridges that lead to a typically chic market stall area (full of independent designers selling €80 sweatshirts) and a roller disco. A pit in the middle of the room leads down to a small seated theatre, used for the first time this year. It’s the kind of hot down there where you can’t stop saying how hot it is, especially when The Comet Is Coming are zapping through their space jazz on the opening night.

Obviously, they sound incredible, but it’s, like, so hot. Genuinely hot, actually.

Back above ground level it’s not hot at all. It’s perfect. Through design or accident, the exact right number of people have turned up for Pitchfork Paris – way too many for an artist to say “you guys can come a little closer, y’know”, but not so many that, y’know, it gets really hot.

photography by jelena vojinovic

Albums Live Girl Band Electric Ballroom, Camden 5 November 2019

The main game is to slosh back and forth from one end of the room to the other, from the main stage to the secondary one, this year turned sideways in the space to create a more intimate alternative with the help of some clever strip lighting.

They fire consecutively, in a clockwork way that we’ll never manage in the UK; as soon as Kojaque’s mellow jazzy rap is done – which kicks into life halfway through, when he’s joined by his Green Diesel collaborator, fellow Irish rapper Luka Palm – Ezra Collective start up at the other end, defined not only by their virtuoso, danceable jazz, but by drummer Femi Koleoso’s vocal appreciation as he talks so warmly of respect and love of music between songs. They’re joined

by Shabaka Hutchings of The Comet Is Coming for their excitable rendition of Sun Ra’s ‘Space is the Place’.

If you are looking for a clash, your options are the theatre pit (but it’s really hot down there) or the Petite Hall, which is tucked around the side of the venue, and can hold around 400 people. Stars of that room are practically anyone who plays there, but especially Squid – the post-punk band of the moment on the continent as well as in the UK – and J-pop energy crew CHAI. Both play on the second evening of the festival: the “indie day”. The previous “hip-hop day” was crowned by the slowthai circle pit, where we all chased a man in a rabbit head while shouting along to ‘Doorman’, and

photography by alban gendrot

Skepta’s effortless main stage set, which proved how unfair it is that media buzz seems to have cast him aside once again.

On night two, Chromatics almost sound too good to be playing live, and they also make the most of the main stage’s video wall. The lyrics to their glistening tunes often repeat behind them, metres high, during an hour that leads not with new album material from Closer to Grey, but the big numbers from the incredible Kill For Love. Of course, they begin with ‘Tick of The Clock’.

Weyes Blood then outshines every other vocal performance of the weekend.

It’s not a show of charming chit-chat or anything out of the ordinary; simply the pure talent of Natalie Mering’s Carpenters-for-the-anxious songs, performed astonishingly enough to silent this massive space.

The festival closes with a night of pop and electro, from the hammering SebastiAn at its high point, who does French house in that hard, crunched, Justice way, and the intentionally confused algorithm band The 1975 at its low. And yet, as misplaced as their two synchronised dancers are, ill-fitting with all of their songs, which dart from Marilyn Manson to Busted, to Bieber, to Rick Astley within their opening run, even with that going on and nothing else, I enjoy being in this space. I enjoy how smart everything about this abattoir party is. Stuart Stubbs

Standing amongst the bustle inside the Electric Ballroom, there’s an unmistakable electricity whirring overhead. The last time Girl Band were on tour, fans feared it could well be their last. Frontman Dara Kiely’s struggles with mental illness have been well-documented and following an abrupt cancellation of shows back in 2017, the future really looked bleak for Dublin’s enigmatic noise rock outfit.

By the time they’ve arrived on stage, there’s a real sense of defiance behind the cacophony of industrial clanging. Though their recently released second album The Talkies continues to recount Kiely’s innermost insecurities, Girl Band look rooted, powerful and immense as a unit. Opening with debut album favourite ‘Pears For Lunch’, gripping his face and with eyes clenched, Kiely’s erratic and vicious vocals tear through the audience like a rusty butchers knife. Thrashing uncontrollably, yet rooted to the spot, the juxtaposition in temperament between band and frontman is haunting to observe. Steely faced and vacant, the rest of Girl Band create a symphonic hell for their protagonist to wander.

Rolling mercilessly through old songs and new, Girl Band feel detached from the usual constraints of genre.

Thick, looping guitar riffs twist and contort themselves into pulsating dance arrangements. It’s like listening to a club track that actively discourages you to dance to it. On ‘Salmon of Knowledge’, Kiely’s confessional calling, “feel like a chicken, act like a cock” is screamed back by hordes of transfixed and insatiable onlookers. Standing resolute before us, shaking in the currents of his own torment, he’s an unnerving reminder of a perpetual inner struggle. Yet for a style of music encompassing such cold isolation, we’re all here standing beside the next person’s chaos. Ollie Rankine

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FilmAlbums and Books

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (dir. terry gilliam) Don’t go near The Man Who Killed Don Quixote until you’ve seen Lost in La Mancha; until you’ve understood the level of Terry Gilliam’s 30-year obsession that has gone into making this loose adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes un-filmable novel.

Lost in La Mancha was released in 2002, intended as nothing more than a ‘making-of’ documentary. But as Gilliam’s initial attempt to film The Man Who Kill Don Quixote was mercilessly hit with a plague of unfortunate circumstances (fighter jets flying overhead, a flash flood destroying practically everything, serious illness befalling Jean Rochefort in the lead character of Quixote), it soon became a cursory tale of underfunding, the narrowest of margins, and just how instantaneously a whole film production can die. At the centre of it – alongside the then-cast Johnny Depp – was Gilliam; manic, unwinding, and yet refusing, as he always has, to admit defeat.

Until he finally had to.

The undeterred Gilliam attempted to restart the production an untold number of times, on different occasions casting John Cleese, John Hurt, Michael Palin and Robert Duvall in the role of Quixote, and Robin Williams, Ewan McGregor and Jack O’Connell as his sidekick Sancho Panza, originally played by Depp. Only that character – eventually played here by Adam Driver – isn’t quite Sancho Panza: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is, after all, not a page-by-page adaptation of the fantasy novel, but a Gilliam-fied one. Which is to say that’s it progressively crackers.

The Quixote is as real as ever; the delusional old man convinced that he is an honourable knight played so well by Jonathan Pryce that you do get genuinely fucked off with him. It is he who is convinced that film director Toby Grisoni (Driver) is his

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trusty squire Sancho Panza, while it’s clear from the off that the confusion is the fault of Grisoni, in Spain to film, you guessed it, a struggling production of Don Quixote.

The combination of a film within a film, the fantastical visions of Quixote, and the extra, meta layer of Gilliam losing his mind to eventually make this movie, serves the anxiety of Grisoni just as well at it arms Gilliam with a box of tricks that suits him so well – dreamlike set pieces of surrealism, perfect for his physical prop- and set-heavy approach to bizarre visions. The adventure barrels along too, feeling like it’s been written on the hoof, which you wouldn’t put passed a project whose stressful conception occasionally seeps into it’s viewing experience. Still, it’s finished! Stuart Stubbs

Jörg Heiser — Double Lives in Art and Pop Music (mit press) This November Solange Knowles debuted a new work at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles: an immersive, elaborately choreographed piece of performance art called ‘Bridge-s’.

Earlier this year, she also released a new album, When I Get Home, but apparently one brilliant, boundary-pushing project wasn’t enough for her 2019. The two pieces are a testament to her voracious, prolific creativity. It’s hard to think of a working musician today who so fully taps the expansive possibilities of the term “artist”. If you’ve seen a Solange performance, whether at a festival or, more likely, at a museum, it’s easy to tell that her work is as influenced as much by, say, architecture or colour theory as R&B. Knowles is the latest scion of a long tradition explored in the insightful new book Double Lives in Art and Pop Music

by Jörg Heiser. The book examines the various ways art and music come together

in particular projects and people. Solange doesn’t get any mention, but her brotherin-law Jay-Z does (remember when he rapped “Tom Ford” for hours on end alongside Marina Abramovic? Remember when she felt “completely used” by the experience?), as do some of the most famous artists from the past century – The Velvet Underground, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Kraftwerk – and more recent artists like Fatima Al Qadiri.

Double Lives approaches its subject more from art’s side of the coin. Heiser, who wrote the book over the course of 15 years, is the co-editor of the contemporary art magazine frieze. Though there’s a fair amount of shop-talk that may prove challenging to outsiders, it provides a fresh look on many musicians that have already been the subject of some million words. It’s interesting to consider, for example, not why the Velvet Underground influenced so many bands, but why Andy Warhol wanted to work with a band to begin with. The chapter on Yoko Ono is a highlight – Heiser offers a compelling overview of how her involvement with Lennon brought serious creative obstacles with it, which Ono navigated with underappreciated savvy. It’s an important contribution to the ongoing critical rehabilitation of an extraordinarily talented woman who was pegged for far too long as the woman who broke up the Beatles.

Throughout the stories Heiser tells and the points he makes, there’s something haunting these artists, musical or otherwise – capital. He rightly nods to the various ways money comes into play for everyone, from Warhol’s navigation of the upper echelons of the art world to Fatima al Qadiri’s dystopian soundscapes. But today, when art is used to store wealth as often as real estate, it’s worth considering why artists dabble in pop and vice versa. Ono is a model of integrity, as is Solange, though she escapes mention.

Jay-Z, however, is worthy of sharper scrutiny. In a musical vernacular that sets Basquiats alongside Bugattis, the relationship between art and pop is worth a critical look. Double Lives in Art and Pop Music is worth a read for that alone. Colin Groundwater

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Interview

Crowd

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Cover story

Control How the seven minds of BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD combined their extraordinary abilities to find collective spirit through experimenting with pop music, free jazz and post-rock,

by Daniel Dylan Wray.

Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

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Cover story

“Suck my prick, fuck mother!” screams an

irate man as he climbs out of his car window to hurl abuse at a passing vehicle. It’s what Black Country, New Road are greeted by the second they step out of their tour van at a service station just outside of Wales. Gravel spits and tyres squawk as one car screeches off in pursuit of the other. It’s not the only incident of road rage we’ll encounter. Later on the poor guitarist from The Claque and Girl Band has a man going apoplectic – bordering on violent – at him because their tour van is blocking his exit; then, an hour or so later, two cars lock into a fury of raging horns and shouting as they weave in and out of one another mindlessly on a main road. “There must be a dog milk shortage,” says the band’s singer and guitarist Isaac Wood.

Road rage and dog milk may seem an odd opening, as incongruous and irrelevant, but in the company of Black Country, New Road these little moments are jumped on and immediately worked into their lexicon. Talk of dog milk stems from a conversation earlier in the morning that got increasingly twisted, surreal and sketch-like, based on the fact that Wood is wearing, ironically, a ‘post-milk generation’ t-shirt. This soon set the band off down a rabbit hole of other dairy alternatives and potential slogans before they arrived on the idea of dog milk being a new craze.

Soon enough “fuck mother” and “suck my prick” appear in the band’s vocabulary as frequently as dog milk does, sitting alongside the endless quotes from stuff like Limmy’s Show, Athletico Mince and Nathan For You. Being in the company of these seven young people (aged between 20-21) for two days is a bit like being inside an ever-evolving sketch itself. There’s a constant barrage of humour, references, skits, bits, impressions and in-jokes; albeit interspersed with performances that make them one of the most exciting new bands in the UK. Along with Wood, the band is made up of Tyler Hyde (bass), Lewis Evans (sax), Georgia Ellery (violin), May Kershaw (keys), Charlie Wayne (drums) and Luke Mark (guitar). While they have only released two singles so far (‘Athen’s, France’ and ‘Sunglasses’), these combined with blistering live shows have resulted in the band feeling like both a success story of 2019 and a key new group for 2020. Also, along with the rising resurgence of genuinely excellent post-punk music, BCNR have found themselves lumped in as part of a scene that includes Black Midi, Squid and other bands usually found to be playing at the Windmill in Brixton in their early days. “It’s a great compliment to be put together with bands like Black Midi and Squid,” says Wood, as the band sit in a beer garden with pints on a Sunday afternoon in Birmingham. “They are incredible people and they are inspirations to us.” Evans echoes this too. “They push us to be better. Not better than them but to be better musicians and to write better songs.” Wood then adds: “You look at them and go, ‘ah, fuck, I need to go and practise.’”

To paint Black Country, New Road as simple post-punk revisionists would be to do them a huge disservice, though. They unquestionably possess the spirit, dynamism and sense of experimental momentum that the best and most out-there bands from the late 1970s possessed, but they also traverse through

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pop music, free jazz, post-rock and klezmer to arrive at something that feels distinctly modern, that eschews simple categorisation. Even if Slint have come up a few times as a comparison.

“Slint are an incredibly good band,” says Wood. “So I’m ok if people think we sound anything like them.”

The band’s debut single ‘Athen’s France’ was released on Speedy Wunderground and produced by Dan Carey, who immediately felt like he’d tapped into something special with them. “It was so refreshing to see a band who take everything so seriously and aren’t allowing themselves to be dragged in any direction by an external force,” he says. “They have this very strong idea and they seem intent on pushing it as far as they possibly can. The intensity with which they approach the music, combined with its unusual nature, is what makes them so great.”

The follow-up was ‘Sunglasses’ a sprawling 9-minute juggernaut of a track that builds and growls before it swoops and glides and then crashes and rises again. It’s as stirring a piece of music as any released in 2019 and, similar to Carey, producer Andy Savours felt he was witnessing something unique unfold.

“I was pretty blown away by the ambition and the power of the sound they were making,” he tells me. “Often bands with multiple members and unusual line-ups can be sonically messy and confused, particularly early on, but they sounded so focused and compact – like one raging beast. Even though ‘Sunglasses’ is a nine-minute epic there is no waste or excess. Working with people who’ve put that much thought and creativity into their music before coming in to the studio is such a pleasure. They can also really, really fucking play.”

— A difficult birth — Whilst the band have had a year that has been nothing but an upward trajectory (including the ‘Sunglasses’ 7” selling out three pressings and even bigger shows on the horizon), their birthing period was born out of difficulty. The majority of the band (minus Kershaw and Mark) were all in the hotly-tipped band Nervous Conditions when they were all teenagers. In January 2018 the band’s singer, Connor Browne, was accused of sexual assault. Days later, they announced they would no longer continue, stating via a Facebook announcement: “Nervous Conditions is something which we all care very strongly about, having put a huge amount of time and care into creating something genuine, new and exciting. However, given everything that has been brought to light in the past few days we no longer feel able to move forward with the group.”

It was decided early on that they would continue without Browne and try to do something new. It’s a period the band aren’t keen to go into in any detail but credit outside support as being key in helping them at the time. “Karl called all of us every day for about three weeks,” says Wood. Karl being Karl Hyde of Underworld – Tyler’s dad. “He just cares a lot,” she says. “He’s a massive fan and really supportive. He’d been to every single one of our gigs and couldn’t let it slide. None of us wanted to either but when you’re in the heat of that moment you

Cover story

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Cover story

“Songs about sex are never about sex. Just like songs about cars are never about cars – they are about sex”

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Cover story get hit with panic. Regardless of that I think we still would have kept going.”

The band decided to get together again and two tracks came out of that initial session. “We made a nice weekend of it and stayed in a house together,” says Hyde. “We cooked dinner, played games and wrote.”

“Coming back together was cathartic,” says Wayne.

“There was no pressure on us to even come up with anything. It was just the idea that we wanted to see each other outside of the context of what had happened.”

To have to go through such a thing is of course difficult for anyone but even more so when it’s public and you’re still so young. Yet the band are very keen to bat away questions on how it impacted them personally. “We’re not the victims of this story,” Wood states firmly. “It’s a hard thing to have happened but it is what it is.” So there were no worries about returning as a new band having been attached to Nervous Conditions? “There was no worry of guilt by association,” Wood says. “It’s a tough thing to happen but the world is generally pretty rational and I don’t think we were shit scared that people were going to blame us.”

I mention I’d heard about them working with Brian Eno before they had to end things suddenly, but this is met with universal laughter. “The only thing Brian Eno actually said about our music was: ‘wow, I can’t believe 40 years after I invented this genre people are still trying to do it,’” says Wood. “But that’s the same man whose advice to young musicians was to never get a job.”

As the band reach the other end of that transitional period they feel like they’ve come out more united. “The whole thing has made our friendship stronger,” says Hyde. “That’s the biggest thing.”

— To go faster — The weekend when we are spending time together happens to be a key one in the Brexit debacle, as Boris Johnson sends an unsigned letter to Donald Tusk requesting a withdrawal extension. The EU referendum is an issue that some of the band weren’t even old enough to vote on, and it’s not a conversation starter that seems to go down well off the back of the Nervous Conditions stuff. Wood’s head sinks and he says he didn’t vote even though he could, although Evans claims he went with him to do so. “Did I? I might have spoiled my ballot then.” It seems like there’s a desire to skirt the subject and Wood then ends the topic of how future touring in Europe will impact them by saying, “worse hurdles have met us,” which to be fair is likely true.

Perhaps it was a poor choice to open the interview – the band’s first ever interview – talking about Brexit and the difficult collapse of their previous band, as Wood grows visibly despondent and irritable by the way the interview is unfolding.

“I don’t know what people really gain from hearing about you so early on,” he says of the band’s avoidance of doing interviews to date. “If you have a song or two out and you play a live show people quite like, I’m not sure what you could have to give people talking about politics and influences and stuff like that. It seems

totally pointless to me to be honest. I’d be surprised if this came out as something that was interesting to a large group of people.

But the longer you leave it without speaking about things on your terms, you end up with these weird made up narratives.”

Initially there’s a slight brusqueness to Wood when we’re going down a path he’s not interested in but there’s also a passion and eloquence that appears when we go down one he does. He loosens and lightens as time goes on and we move further away from subjects that are uncomfortable.

The band’s musical background is mixed. Several members have been – and continue to be – in several other bands, and three of the members (Evans, Ellery and Kershaw) all have classically trained backgrounds and continue to finish degrees in both jazz and classical music. There’s clearly a lot of skill on hand, but with BCNR it’s never deliberately virtuosic or ostentatious. “I don’t think our abilities need to be part of the music,” says Evans. “I think there’s some certain music that has really exceptional playing that is played just for the sake of being really exceptional. Some of that I really dislike and I’m against.

Mainly I think it just enables us to do things quicker – to get to where we want to go faster.”

The range of music studied is crucial to the band’s style, though, which often flits between heritages and traditions.

“I was improvising with klezmer musicians at the age of 12,” recalls Evans of the Jewish music from Eastern Europe. “Often the way you begin improvising can impact on the way you write, so Jewish scales were always in my language and this comes out a lot. By the time I was 18 I’d played with Jewish folk musicians, Cubans, Nigerians, classical contemporary people. It was an amazing thing and it plunged me into the deep end when it comes to influence.” Ellery grew up playing in orchestras. “I was forced to play and it was bleak until I finally started doing it for myself,” she says, “which was around 15. I started when I was 4 so it was a good 10 years of hating it.” Kershaw too had a similar experience but is now in a position to look back more understandably. “It wasn’t always easy and there was some tense relations as a result but my parents came at it from a good place. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

The rest of the band comes from a more self-taught and bedroom practising background, and it’s this clashing of approaches that gives such a sparky rub off. “It’s totally integral and fundamental to the sound of the group,” says Wood. “I know that with Lewis – who I’ve been playing with the entire time I’ve been playing music in any capacity – that I can describe something to him in ridiculous laymen’s terms and he can understand. These guys are a wealth of knowledge and we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are or in the same sound world without them.”

So how did Wood, previously the guitarist, end up becoming the singer? (Front person really isn’t an applicable term here because he stands side of stage with violin and sax up front as a visual display of the band avoiding structural convention.)

It was his foray into songwriting via his solo project The Guest that propelled him to this role. “I’d never written a song before ‘Theme From Failure, Pt 1’ and I thought, ‘ok, I actually like

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Cover story

doing this.’” The track in question is more electronic-leaning but shares the same lyrical tone and approach that Wood has adopted in BCNR; delivered via spoken word and sounding as detached as it can highly emotional. The opening line (“This is the story of one Cambridge boy who despite all his privileges felt betrayed by the world”) kicks off a story that is both an external and internal exploration of vanity, self-reflection, self-deprecation and modern life. Wood’s natural gift for lyric writing is undeniable, but becoming a singer and being on stage is something he’s still getting to grips with. “It was a massively uncomfortable transition,” he says. “I mumbled all the way through the first gig and then because I was so disappointed with that I howled and yodelled through the second gig. It took until maybe just a few months ago to find a balance that I was even remotely happy with.”

— A new language — The band’s approach, along with Woods’ lyrics, feels like the formation of a new language; a distinctly Generation Z approach to musical overlap and hyper-awareness of the world around them as a result of a life lived in a forever switched-on digital age. The band are something of a hodgepodge ensemble

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Cover story

who don’t fit the conventions of a traditional band – aesthetically they resemble more school trip outing than they do polished unit.

There’s a sort of wide-open, anything goes approach to both music making and listening today, where genres and dividing lines are no longer seen as key contributors in the building of scenes and tribes as there were for generations before – now they’re unnecessary hurdles in the way of experimentation and wider-exposure.

And yet, when I ask if BCNR feel like they are making music that feels inherently and distinctly of their generation, they disagree and cite Gen X-er Father John Misty as a huge influence. “I haven’t written a song since I first started listening to him,” Wood says. “I only started a month or two ago. I was like, ‘oh no’. He’s fucking awesome. I’d be delighted to be half as funny and emotionally resonant as he manages to be.”

Whilst some think FJM’s raging narcissism and superiority complex prevent him from striking this balance Wood speaks of, it’s clear they share some of the same approaches when it comes to creating characters that test and prod people.

“I’m not saying that I myself am not arrogant as a character,” Wood says, “but I am putting on a slightly more arrogant persona.”

Occasionally Wood’s response to questions about his own lyrics and character creations can be as enjoyable as the initial words themselves. When asked about the role of sex in his lyrics (“Fuck me like you mean it this time, Isaac”; “She tries to fuck me, I pretend that I’m asleep instead”) and how they explore a seeming anxiety and discomfort around sex that’s belied by his ability to publically sing about it, he responds: “Songs about sex are never about sex. Just like songs about cars are never about cars – they are about sex. Like muscle cars and sex, things of great weight and fuel consumption tend to move us at speeds we cannot really control.”

There’s always a great sense of humour running through everything with the band, both as a group and in Wood’s lyrics and in responses to being asked about them. This amalgamation of humour and seriousness, along with blurred lines between sincerity and irony, feels intrinsic to the band not only in terms of interpersonal relationships but their musical and lyrical approach too. One of Wood’s impressions he likes to slip into is the writer David Foster Wallace, but he also mentions a fondness for some of his writings exploring irony and sincerity. This dichotomy is something that feels prominent in the lyrics; the kind of words that possess a biting, caustic, cynical edge to them but also project a tenderness, vulnerability and complexity that squashes one-dimensional readings. “In some of the authors’ or lyricists’ songs that I really like, they are not necessarily giving a

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Cover story direct evaluation of the things going on around them but simply describing them,” says Wood. “If you describe being on your phone or your laptop, you can interpret that as me saying how stupid and vacuous and empty that is, but that’s not really what I’m saying, it’s just describing the world that exists around you.”

It’s a balancing act that is not only exciting to hear but also feels like it couldn’t come from anyone else other than a young person because the balance of perspective would be skewered too far – Wood strikes a thoughtful equilibrium between sneering, self-laceration and quiet hope. “It’s tricky,” he says.

“Quite often writing from a character that is representing the slightly worst, pessimistic side of myself can come across as being rude and brash. It sometimes ends up with quite regrettably one-dimensional female characters or it comes out as slightly arrogant or crass in a lot of weird and different ways when I’m switching characters, standpoint, voice and person all the time.

Some of the weird chant-a-long lyrics are written from the perspective of another person. I’ve always found it interesting when things aren’t necessarily directly obvious all the time, and what I might be making a joke out of and at whose expense.” He then concludes: “It’s normally mine.” Although when pressed if he enjoys the potential confusion or misreadings his lyrics might result in, he says that’s not his aim. “I don’t revel in any feeling of superiority if I believe someone has misunderstood something I’ve said. I see that as a fault in my communication.”

— For the love of Kanye — On stage Black Country, New Road further explore dualities, dichotomies and push-pull dynamics, both sonically and in the way they present themselves. Kershaw often uses her keyboard like a bored office worker would a desk, with her elbows propped on top looking around with seeming insouciance; Evans stands front and centre and has a child-like quality as his eyes often wander around the room as though chasing a butterfly; Ellery might have a sit down at some point if she feels like it, while Wood internalises his performance, his eyes roll manically and his face twitches and convulses as his body usually locks stiff and tight. There’s an essence of a young David Byrne about him at times; an awkwardness that is further emphasised in the way that clothes don’t really seem to fit him as much as they hang off him. But the music feels endlessly fluid and thoughtful, and contains room for all the band’s personalities to shine through.

The static indifference that the group project on stage has led to observations on YouTube like: “The violinist looks like she would stab someone for menthol cigarettes,” and, “they’re dope but the bass and piano players look like they’re being held at gunpoint.” One accurately describes Wood’s performance

as sounding like he’s “standing on a windowsill yelling at a police negotiator”.

Part of the band’s approach, and appeal, is that they are not pretending to be something they are not – which is far rarer than it sounds. They are not a message band, a political band, an issues band or one who wish to be seen as such in order to be relevant or on point. They are a group of middle class kids primarily from Cambridge and they are very aware of that. “Why pretend otherwise?” says Wood. “It’s who we are and it’s obvious.”

When asked what ties all seven of them together, he replies: “There’s not a single thing, I would say.” There’s some incredulous groaning and countering from the rest of the band and later on it’s decided that pop music and Kanye West are the universal connectors. “We are a pop band,” Mark says without hesitation. Kanye appears lyrically in a few songs too – most notably in the screeching proclamations of ‘Sunglasses’: “I’m more than adequate/ Leave Kanye out of this/ Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet.” “He’s an incredible recording artist,” says Wood simply of why he keeps appearing. “He’s got a good sense of humour, he’s obviously insane in a quite sad and unfortunate way for him at the moment. He’s said and done a lot of stupid stuff but I look at him almost like…”

“A father you never had,” chips in Wayne.

“It’s like you’re constantly batting for him but then he will always say something bad,” says Evans before extending his comment into a cricket metaphor that I don’t follow.

The overlap between sincerity, irony, humour and seriousness continues in the music they listen to. When in the van from Wales (where they played Swn festival in Cardiff) to Birmingham (where they play Future Days) the tour bus stereo is an eclectic and ever-changing mix: Wiley, Weyes Blood, Fontaines D.C., Arcade Fire, Cass McCombs, ABBA, Elvis and Madonna. During a rousing singalong to They Might Be Giants, Evans proclaims: “We basically want to be They Might Be Giants but with sax and violin.” It’s not the first time over the weekend I have to ask if they are serious. They are. “There’s some comical elements to their appearance and delivery,” says Wood, “but I think they are a fundamental symbol of what some people miss in music. I feel, maybe pointlessly and stupidly, rather proud that it’s something I don’t miss with them.” Every line to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Jungleland’ is sung along to with the same precision and passion as tracks by Charli XCX, Travis Scott and Elton John. Even the rotten Disturbed cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’ seems to be enjoyed on equal footing despite a knowing wink to its comical growling crescendo. There seems to be a complete eradication of compartmentalising music to them that also throws the idea of a guilty pleasure in the bin too – if something brings joy, whether sincerely or ironically, it’s the joy

“We basically want to be They Might Be Giants but with sax and violin” 56

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Cover story

that is focused on, not the source of it. This openness is crucial to BCNR because they are a band that are not only open to the idea of going anywhere musically but they are capable of going there in their abilities too.

After the gig in Wales, the evening was spent drinking tequila and sodas in the band’s hostel bar. After Birmingham we retreat to the dressing room as people pick at the rider and our time together comes to an end. Wood tries to balance out some of his initial reticence and disinterest in the interview and seems more relaxed in talking, explaining his slightly defensive stance earlier. “I just don’t want to push a narrative like this is some horrible thing we all went through and we’re the real victims of it,” he explains. “I think that would be offensive.”

Whether this piece remains as dull and pointless as he presumed it would be remains to be seen but we all depart on pleasant and friendly goodbyes and I leave them all having drilled Limmy’s ‘Wrong Way, Down A One Way Street’ song into my head for days on end. I travel on a train northbound and they in a van southbound. Arriving home however, there’s one last blast of road rage that I’m treated to as arguments and tempers flare between two people at a taxi rank. I guess word has spread of the dog milk shortage.

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Beverly Glenn-Copeland 60

Retold

By this point, Beverly Glenn-Copeland is used to waking up crying. Now 75, and in his 48th year practising Buddhism, the Canadian composer will often come to weeping for joy, “overcome with the beauty of being able to observe the universe.”

He adds with a laugh, “a little later on in the day I’ll be weeping because we’re ruining it, but whatever.”

You need spend no more than five minutes in BeverlyGlenn’s company to realise that he’s a deeply spiritual person.

Serene and refreshingly open, he radiates all the positivity and warmth of someone who’s both at peace with their past, and far too thankful for the present to allow banal, day-to-day gripes to become a burden. But then, as a cult figure in the fields of new age and electronic music – currently enjoying a late-career renaissance – and as one of the first openly transgender musicians, Beverly-Glenn’s life has been anything but ordinary.

Born Beverly Copeland in Philadelphia in 1944, he recalls a near-idyllic childhood with his Quaker parents, insulated from the racial discrimination routinely suffered by people of colour at that time. An early obsession with the European classical tradition led him to study the German Lieder singing style, and that in turn prompted his move to Montreal to study classical music at McGill University. A folk music career was begun and abandoned in the early ’70s, with Beverly-Glenn subsequently relegating music-making to a private hobby. And then, in the early ’80s, the advent of affordable personal computers facilitated a pivotal creative breakthrough.

“I’ve always been interested in speculative science,” he says. “And one of the things that was being talked about at that point was that the basics of life as scientists understood it were based on either carbon or silicon. And so, for me, when I understood that computers were based on silicon it was like, oh, so this is the beginning.

“I bought [a personal computer] from England, and it was this big exactly,” he explains, circling his palm. “It came in the mail and I wandered around with it going, ‘I just love it! This is amazing!’ But I couldn’t do a thing with it because I wasn’t a programmer. It wasn’t until about 1984 when I bought an Atari, and at the same time a [Roland] TR-707 drum machine and a [Yamaha] DX7 keyboard with all these interesting sounds in it, that I was off to the races. Because suddenly I had access to an approximation of acoustic sounds, plus all these sounds that no acoustic instrument could make.”

Filtering his classical training and folk sensibility through this rudimentary electronic palette, Beverly-Glenn created Keyboard Fantasies, a third album that felt as futuristic as it was transcendental. Self-released without fanfare, Beverly-Glenn pressed around 150 copies on tape and sold less than half. “Of

all the copies I sold, probably 30 were all to mothers who were putting their babies to sleep,” he smiles. “They would say to me, ‘Oh, this music is so calming to my little one.’ And it’s those very babies who are now buying tickets to my shows.”

Keyboard Fantasies is calming. Comprised of ambient instrumentals and serene devotionals, it’s since been hailed a new age classic, and retrospectively linked with releases by Laraaji and Pauline Anna Strom, plus the work of Japanese trailblazers Midori Takada, Mariah and Yasuaki Shimizu. Yet, even if there had been a precedent for Keyboard Fantasies, Beverly-Glenn wouldn’t have known.

“I know it’s not normal for most musicians, but I live in silence. I don’t listen to music at all unless something comes across my ears, and then I will listen to it exclusively for a year or two. I will study it. Not because I’m going to emulate it, but because it’s so profound that it’s feeding me on a spiritual level.

So, I didn’t really know what was going on in the world [at that time]. I might as well have been a monk. All I knew was that this [music] was coming through, coming through, coming through, and I was translating it as fast as I could.”

After its release, Beverly-Glenn simply moved on, making a living contributing music for, and performing in, children’s television shows like Mr Dress-up, Shining Time Station and Sesame Street. It wasn’t until Japanese record collector Ryota Masuko reached out on email in 2015, asking to buy any unsold copies of the album, that Beverly-Glenn had any idea of Keyboard Fantasies’ cult status. In the time since, Beverly-Glenn has toured Canada, the UK and Europe, and found himself the subject of several documentaries, including Posy Dixon’s recent film Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story.

There must be some satisfaction to be found in finally getting your dues, I suggest.

“It’s not like dues; we’re not due anything,” he responds gently but firmly. “Mostly it feels surreal because I think I stopped thinking that anything was going to happen with this music back around 1980. I didn’t need anybody to understand [my music] – I needed to write it, which was different. And because my great joy was in being able to write the music, I never thought about it in any other terms. But when it did eventually happen I remembered something. When I was young, I went to a palmist and he said to me, ‘Everything will happen in your life when you’re old.’

And when all this happened I went, ‘I get it! I’m old now!’”

— I love my parents — Remarkably, Beverly-Glenn has never made any room in his life for resentment, despite facing a catalogue of obstacles.

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Retold

“I know it’s not normal for most musicians, but I live in silence”

In Posy Dixon’s documentary, he speaks about the prejudice he faced at university without any self-pity whatsoever. Identifying as a lesbian at that time, Glenn was authentically himself at McGill, a whole nine years before homosexuality was decriminalised in Canada. Consequently, he was isolated from his peers and victimised by the Assistant Dean of Women, who worked tirelessly to have him expelled. Most shockingly, his parents were colluding with staff, culminating in him being signed up for electroshock conversion therapy without his knowledge. Fortunately, Beverly-Glenn realised and escaped before any irreparable harm was inflicted.

“Well you have to understand, I loved my parents,” he explains, when I marvel at the complete lack of anger with which he describes the episode. “I also understood that all the books they were reading were telling them that my behaviour was an abnormal disease that could be cured by electro-shock therapy.

“You have to understand that I’m a black person in a white culture in 1961/62/63. My grandmother was the first generation not born into slavery, and my parents were the second. So their feeling was that you have to be as normal as possible to be as safe as possible, because the general tenor of society towards black people was very hostile. My parents were just trying their best.

And I’m 75: if you’d asked me back then I’m sure I would have

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had much more anger. But I came to understand that my poor mom was suffering tremendously, feeling that I was not going to be safe.”

Due to the sheer lack of conversation around trans identities, it wasn’t until 1994 that Beverly-Glenn even possessed the vocabulary to describe himself as transgender, and then it took until 2003 for him to come out to the world at large. “But I think on the deepest level of ourselves we always know,” he tells me today. “My mom admitted to me that I told her I was a boy when I was three. But of course she didn’t have any language for that or any understanding so she dismissed it.”

There was no obvious precedent in the music industry either, though Beverly-Glenn says he’s “willing to bet that there were transgendered musicians at that time who, because of being a musician, were able to act out much more of their whole self.”

Today, there are many more prominent transgender and nonbinary figures, from ANOHNI and Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, to SOPHIE and Kim Petras, and to some extent BeverlyGlenn credits that increased visibility not just to changing attitudes but to the progressive mindset within the arts itself.

“Artists have always been considered to be aside from the norm,” he hypothesises. “And I think that’s because the arts are meant to talk about and show things that are not to do with the forebrain, that have to do with a more fundamental aspect of all of ourselves. These days you don’t even have to say if you’re this or that – it’s like I’m here on the spectrum today and then I’m back here somewhere, and then I’m experimenting over here.

There are so many people now who are gender non-descriptive and fluid.”

Just as a new, younger generation of listeners now look up to Beverly-Glenn, he draws as much inspiration from them.

“The audiences I’m playing to now are so loving,” he exclaims, clearly awed. “That’s what’s knocking me out. They put out such a beautiful energy, and that’s going back and forth between us onstage and them.

“I recently realised that one of my deepest anxieties was that I believed there wasn’t enough time, so I would go through life holding my breath to try to finish something. But now I wouldn’t say that I don’t think there’s enough time: what I’m experiencing is that this is the time. This is the time that I’m supposed to do this.”

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In conversation

Dan Carey A long talk with the producer who has bossed 2019,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Timothy Cochrane

It’s an early start in Streatham. As the dust of 2019 starts to settle for most of us, Dan Carey has his head in a fresh decade’s worth of projects, starting with a new Goat Girl album scheduled for release some time next year. He walks around his studio with a homely excitement, telling me about the different direction they’re taking with it, more based around electronics, but still recording it predominantly live.

The sun is rising outside against a so-marketed traditional Neapolitan pizza restaurant, a big Just Eat sign glaring opposite a local garage already thick with noise. Posters in a neighbouring shop I at first mistake for his studio advertise an RGA 10 Mass Spectrometer and a Pumping Trolley, with a couple of light-up reindeers grazing on the carpet at least a couple of weeks too early. Gentrification is coming slowly to South London, even if the pub across the road has more letters of its name scratched out than not.

Dan Carey has been the common thread behind many of the last decade’s most vital debut releases – Fontaines D.C., Black Midi, Squid, Kate Tempest. He’s also had a Top 10 hit with Kylie Minogue, but we don’t mention that. His own label, Speedy Wunderground, is a haven of chaos, free from protocol and rules, other than the ten very strict ones figuratively pinned to the wall. Writing, recording, mixing and mastering will be done in 24 hours without a lunch break. All recording sessions will be a live take recorded in the dark with smoke and lazers, and somewhere on each record the Swarmatron will make an appearance.

The studio itself is tucked away behind a residential gate, with a laminated sheet of baby pink paper requesting that you keep it closed at all times. A few hundred delay pedals are boxed underneath an array of synths and mixing desks with the kind of chaos befitting the living, breathing music he helps create.

An Everyman book of Leonard Cohen poetry lies next to him, bookmarked in the middle by a piece of string. He lives upstairs, which gives him a free pass to make as much noise as he likes.

How long have you been in this space? You were in Brixton before.

It feels so anomalous, that this space should exist so secretly in the middle of Streatham.

About ten years, twelve years. Quite a while. I’m really happy with it at the moment. I periodically move stuff around and redesign it. Up until about a year ago it was really weird, there was a big table coming out here which sort of cut the room in half [he gestures the shape of a rectangle in front of the swivel chair he’s sitting back on]. It felt a bit more claustrophobic, almost like

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I was hiding in this cave with all this gear really high up around me. You couldn’t see over anything; it was kind of cool. But then I thought this year to change it around so that everyone is kind of in the same space all the time.

In most photographs you see from sessions of bands recording in bigger studios, you kind of get used to seeing the musicians hiding behind this darkened mirror, and everything completely separated off.

Yeah, I hate that. I hate it. I’ve always felt really uncomfortable on either side of that glass. You know, if I’m playing and talking to someone, someone else will think you’re talking to them and you can’t hear them. It’s so unconducive to playing, whereas I think if everyone’s experiencing the same thing, it’s good.

Does it ever get a bit crowded? Some of the artists you’re recording have quite a full set-up. How is it having everyone active in the same space?

Yeah, it’s brilliant. It’s not too small if you think about it, you know, the most you’re likely to have is someone on drums, bass, maybe a guitar there and another guitar there [he gets up, imagining the next band to inhabit the space], maybe some keys there or there, and then I’m here. Then Lex, the engineer, sometimes he’s in here, or if we’re recording on tape he’ll be out in the back room. It’s never crowded. I mean, it is crowded, but in a fun way.

When I first met Fontaines D.C., it was really funny – they really wanted me to do their record and I came to see them, got on with them really well and was like, “yeah, let’s go.” But they really wanted to do it in a big studio. I was like, “no, I really think you should do it at mine,” and they were like, “no, we really want to do it somewhere big.” I’ve got all my gear here, so it takes ages to move it out, and I was saying to them, “just come round and have a look – it’s quite big, you know.” Anyway, they came round and were like, “oh my god, yeah, this is amazing”, and we did it here and it was fine. After I finished it I asked them why they were so keen to do it somewhere else, and they said that they’d seen a picture of it – I think it might have been on the Speedy Wunderground website, where I’d purposefully put everything on the floor in the middle of the room just to make it look kind of chaotic for a joke. But they didn’t think they’d have anywhere to stand. Maybe I need to get an estate agent round.

What was it like when you first heard Dogrel?

Even from a few seconds of watching them on video, you could

In conversation

just see that this is a fucking cool band. I just loved it straight away. I went and saw them at the Five Bells, and yeah I couldn’t believe it. It was so confrontational, slightly frightening, and then I met them afterwards and I think we pretty much decided we wanted to work together in one conversation. They wanted to get the energy into the record that their live performances had. I suggested to them that the feeling of power from watching the live show is partly volume, but also that it’s unstoppable, you can’t go back and do bits again. There’s tension there.

Normally if you’re recording, you can track everything separately – put drums down, put bass down – that gives you so much room to go in and it’s harder to get a connection between everything. The next step is to record it all together as a band.

It’s a trade off because someone might make a mistake, you might have to do it again. But then just to extend that whole thought, we said why don’t we divide the record into chunks.

We’ll record four songs to tape, and if there’s a mistake in the third we’ll just start over and wipe the tape.

How many times did you have to wipe the tape?

Not very many. I think only once or twice. Because obviously to make that work you need to be well rehearsed. I didn’t want to do the vocals live, I really saw his lyrics as something that needed to be separated from the music. I wanted it to sound like the band playing live at full level, really hard and loud, but the vocal was almost like someone – say, you’re watching the band there, and then someone’s next to you whispering in your ear.

It meant that they had to learn the songs instrumentally without there being a guide vocal or anything. That sounds easy, but so many of the songs have these long bits of groove just repeating. I went out to Dublin to their rehearsal room to have

a listen halfway through, and yeah, I couldn’t believe that they had it down so perfectly. When they came here they were so well practiced, so we added in a few new pedals and amps and guitars to inject it with a bit of confusion again. We connected together their guitar outputs and put them through a separate amp that was like a sixth member of the band just kind of going crazy in the corner. There was enough unexpected stuff happening that it never felt over-practiced.

Grian Chatten’s quite a percussive vocalist as well, it’s an interesting idea to make the band unlearn his pace. You watch them live and they’ll catch up with him, or slow down, based on his delivery. I guess it’s similar with Sinead O’Brien, who you’ve also recorded this year.

We actually tried something really strange on that – it was an experiment, it didn’t work actually but it’s an indication of what we were trying to do – we recorded the instrumental and then we recorded her doing the vocals, so in her headphones she could hear the instrumental, but then I faded it down so she couldn’t hear anything, and it was just free time. That was something we did with Kate Tempest and Rick Rubin. Rick had been trying to get us to break the rhythmic connection between the music and the lyrics so that the lyric would work on its own time and not have to be locked into the music. It took us four years to work out what he meant. He never just said “don’t rap to the beat.”

I thought a similar thing might work for Sinead, but I think it’s quite good practice to train your brain that the lyrics don’t have to be bossed around by the music.

How did the label Speedy Wunderground start? Was it meant to be a place for these kind of experiments?

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In conversation “It took us four years to work out what Rick Rubin meant”

I had this phase of slightly frustrating experiences. I was doing a lot for major labels: having a great session, recording something and then finishing it, sending it to the label and getting it straight back asking if I could make this louder or that quieter.

I was grumbling about that a lot, and then when it was finished, the song kind of just goes away and pops up nine months later.

And while it’s kind of nice to hear it when you’ve forgotten about it, I’d just watched some documentary of London in the 1960s, and Joe Meek who would record and cut a record, and the next day it would be on the radio. I thought that was so cool, and I really wished life was still like that.

Speedy Wunderground was never meant to be that serious a thing; we just set up some system where once a month I could get together with some people – usually people I was already working with – and we’d record on Friday and I’d master it on Saturday and it’d be done. One of the central ideas was that – once the track’s finished – there’s an agreement that no one can hear it until it comes out. There’s no temptation to fiddle with it.

I don’t stick to it so rigidly these days as we’re taking things a bit more seriously, but the first few releases were really funny. We’d mix it, do the remix, send it off and then I’d delete all the files from my computer. Then it’d come back on vinyl.

So you’re not sticking to the 24 hours without a lunchbreak anymore?

No, all of that’s still there. It’s rarely even 24 hours anymore, you know – we did the second Tiña last week in about six or seven hours. It’s just about the immediacy and the unfussiness of it.

There’s always a bit in the record that, if I had another go at mixing it, I might change, but sometimes those bits become your favourite things.

Have you ever ended the 24-hour period with something completely unworkable?

Yeah [he laughs], there was only one, but I’m not going to say who because he’d be so gutted. There was one session that we did that was just a big mistake. We did it, we kind of liked it and then the next day I called him and he called me and we both said, “yeah, let’s not do this.”

What was it about it?

[He carries on laughing] I’m not telling you. It was a cover, and I don’t think it was a great choice of cover. But that’s the only one.

On the opposite side to that – have there been any you’ve recorded where you’ve wished your own restrictions weren’t there?

That’s an interesting question. Not really. I think when I wish that I’d had more time with that person or that band we normally

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just end up doing an album together. Sinead O’Brien’s a good example. We just did that one song but next week we’re going to do an EP, and Squid obviously, and Black Midi, Black Country, New Road. The ones that feel really good tend to develop into something else.

The Squid EP was the first EP that Speedy has done. It sounds massive. How was that experience?

Yeah, it was so much fun. They’re such amazing people to work with, very democratic and all very intelligent musicians, so all of the ideas are going to be worth listening to. We really wanted to do an album with them. It’s funny actually, because we helped build their profile up with the Speedy thing, and we did ‘Houseplants’ as a sort of favour to them. And then it gets to doing an album, but everyone wants to do an album with them and we can’t really compete. I feel like I’ve made the perfect model for shooting myself in the foot. Help make something on peoples’ radar, and then yeah. I’m really pleased for them, though.

What do you think it is about the set-up here that’s getting these bands so much traction?

I don’t know. I think it kind of works both ways. I think the artists that have helped the label gain momentum a little bit all have a similar musical thread, so it’s easier for me to imagine something and how it might come out if we gave it the same attention.

One of the rules of Speedy Wunderground is that 250 copies of each release gets pressed on 7” vinyl. Is there a mystique you’re trying to hold onto? I guess when you’re recording Steve Mason or Loyle Carner you know they’re going to have an audience that will outsell that tenfold. But then you brought up Joe Meek earlier, the number of rare Freakbeat singles that are in existence somewhere – the excitement that might come from finding an old Jason Eddy and the Centremen 7”, or something – is that feeling something you’re actively trying to uphold?

Definitely. Because I think it’s nice to be reminded that music is a physical thing. Obviously, it exists in your mind really. But I just like the idea of there being 250 copies of something. And even though we do some of them digitally, they sound completely different. They sound weird. There’s a nice game to it. It’s frustrating on one level. There’s one of the records even – the Loyle Carner and Kate Tempest one – that I haven’t got a copy of.

There just aren’t any left. If I wanted a copy of it, I’d have to pay about £200 on eBay and that’s kind of annoying. But at the same time it’s quite satisfying.

How did you let all of them go?

I always keep a few back, but then you might have a party round here and everyone will be like, “oh do you have one of those Kate Tempest ones around here?”, and you’ll be like “yeaaaah!”

What kind of thing is it that you’re looking for when you get sent possible new music to record?

It’s different things. I guess it’s pretty simple. If the demo makes

In conversation so when he heard the album I think he was like “why are yu allways tor-king like that?” [he says, mimicking the rhythm of Kate’s South London accent].

He told us to think about Leonard Cohen and Neil Young and stuff. We’d prepared a little bit before we went. We thought he didn’t want to do anything with beats so we just brought an acoustic guitar. But we’d made the mistake of thinking that if you don’t have drums then it’s still okay to rap over guitar. We were missing the point. He’d just come in, say, “hmm, that’s not really what I was getting at”, and then just leave, and we thought he hated us. Then suddenly we did this thing where we didn’t record the music and words together, and it really opened it up. He asked us to go away and write a record like that. But we didn’t, because we already had most of Let Them Eat Chaos and wanted to explore that thing. He was so cool, and just said that once we’d done that, we should come back and then do what he said.

That was a long way of saying that when we came to Shangri-La this time we felt very at home. We knew the people and the lay of the land a bit. But it’s amazing. Here is obviously… I mean, I live upstairs. Me and Kate have written everything here, so it’s quite good to be suddenly put into a situation where you’re terrified. For anyone who hasn’t stood in a room playing Rick Rubin a full album, it’s really fucking frightening. But he’s only frightening because of who he is. He’s not acting frightening.

me want to play it over and over again. I do get sent a lot that I think is really good, but I might not be inclined to keep playing it. But then it’s more subtle than that. Sometimes I’d get a demo and I don’t really like the song but there’s something about the music that maybe I’d like to work with. Have you heard the latest one, by Pynch? That was the perfect example of something I wasn’t looking for. Spencer [Enock] sent over a demo while I was away, and I was just wandering around Berlin with the song stuck in my head, thinking about it in terms of Fleetwood Mac, which is so far removed from anything we’ve intended to put out on the label. I really like that.

On the subject of things far removed to the Speedy philosophy, how was going out to Shangri-La to record Kate Tempest’s latest album with Rick Rubin? It’s quite famously this space that seems to espouse the exact things that Speedy’s working against.

Yeah, I mean it’s a different world. But it’s amazing. There’s something completely magical about that place. We’d been there a couple of years before, he’d invited us over in 2015 when we were at SXSW. He’d heard Kate doing Brand New Ancients poetry, and then the first album we did together, Everybody Down. I think that he wanted her to be doing something with music – more like a record than poetry – but then he preferred her voice when she wasn’t rapping. He had more of an emotional connection to the music when she was speaking at her own pace,

Did you steal anything from the studio to take back here as a memento?

I think I took a phone charger by accident the first time, but I took it back the next year. It was useless because it was for an American plug. So I couldn’t even charge my phone on it. It’s funny actually, he’d labelled all of the instruments in the studio with his own name. Like, you’d walk in and there’s just a Mellotron that says ‘Rick Rubin’ on it.

Did you all have to be barefooted?

It kind of comes naturally, yeah. It’s quite different from Streatham. If you want a little break you can just go and lie on the grass outside and look at the sea. It’s also amazing because all of the engineers and assistants are all great musicians and producers. After work’s finished for the day, everyone has dinner and then goes into studios and starts jamming. We had some great psych jams in one of the rooms, and then we’d get a few guitars and just play until 1 or 2 in the morning. Then someone would take a recording of what we’d just done and turn it into some amazing trap beat.

When you took ‘People’s Faces’ back to Streatham, what did you want to draw out of that version?

I just wanted something with more of a rhythmic element to it really. When we’d originally thought of that song, we’d always imagined it with a big production, and then it just settled as this piano ballad. With the first round of demos before going out to Shangri-La, we’d tried putting strings on it, drums and everything, and we’d basically decided that we were wrong, as nothing

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In conversation

was working other than piano. People seemed to really like it when the album came out, but radio more or less refused to play it because it was so simple.

That moment was one of the standouts at this year’s End of the Road festival, when Kate played ‘People’s Faces’ and no one had really realised how affected they’d been by the set until that point.

And everyone was crying weren’t they?

Simultaneously. Even if they’d never heard it before.

It’s weird, isn’t it?

In the corner of the studio, a neon white light reproduction of the Speedy logo – grinning wolf leaning against hand-drawn vinyl – casts a slight shadow on the room. I mean to ask him who the wolf is on at least three occasions, but every time something more interesting comes up. Each year, the label distills its 7” output into a yearbook-like compilation album.

How’s this year’s compilation come along?

It’s my favourite one we’ve done. Just in the progress that the label’s made. I really like all of the others but by their very nature they sound like slightly random collections of things. You know, the whole idea of it being spontaneous and seeing who’s around on Friday…

I guess the first time Childhood and Kate Tempest have shared an album.

Probably the last time too. But I think this one has more of a thread running through it. And I suppose it’s quite a dark sounding record, but this is a pretty nasty time. So it’s fair enough.

How often do you find people come into this 24-hour haven and try and write/record something completely unlike anything they’ve done before?

You do find that. All We Are and Alex Kapranos is the main one that comes to mind – they came in with absolutely nothing at the

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start of the day, but Alex had this amazing writing process. We came up with the idea for the instrumental track quite quickly, and then Alex got a notepad and went round the room making us quick fire give him a line. Not like a line from a song, but like, “I’ll never make it to five!”. You know, and it was so quick that you didn’t have time to think about it, he’d just yell, “You! You!” and then wrote them all down.

It was slightly embarrassing at first. Lex didn’t think he was going to be involved as he was engineering, and then Alex pointed at him – “Lex!” Lex said, “I didn’t think I was going to be involved in this”, and that’s what he wrote down. And so we had these pages of like, “blow the top off! Get onto the beach!”

And then he said, “right, we’re going out for lunch”, and we went out for lunch and he gave everyone a notepad and the conversation took so many weird turns. We were talking about death and pain and like, whether if you experience extreme pain but if something causes you to forget that pain, did it really exist? Is a sensation that there’s no memory of still a sensation? When we came back here, he took all the notebooks and typed them up into his laptop. I printed them out and he cut them all up with scissors and there were lines everywhere and this song kind of came out. It was really good fun. We put a mic down in the middle of the room and everyone had to have a go at singing it.

Kind of like fridge magnet poetry.

Exactly.

At the beginning of December, the art collective TMBFY (This must be for you) will host a “disappearing exhibition”, with 15 Speedy Wunderground singles reproduced with new and unique artwork from other Speedy artists, which will then be raffled out for free, for charity.

Do you know which release you’ve been assigned?

I’ve already done it [he clambers up from his chair to find and open an envelope with his new artwork inside]. I’m doing black midi. It’s a negative of a flame. I nearly set fire to the studio. I made a camera obscura, got a big sheet of cardboard and put the lens there. Got all the chemicals needed for developing film and then set fire to things just here [he points, literally, at the middle of his studio].

What I found is that it’s really hard to set fire to small wooden things. Because I had this little house, and I thought it’d look really cool if it was on fire. And it just didn’t really burn.

Even little cardboard things didn’t really burn. So I got this, not lighter fuel, but tape head cleaner, squirted it on, and obviously spilt some and lit this – whatever it was – and it just went vooooom. So that was pretty worrying.

It’s ok. I’m probably exaggerating a bit, I had it under control. Yeah, so in the end, I’d ran out of things to burn, so this was just a little glass jar with some lighter fuel on fire. But Geordie [Greep, Black Midi] had this thing where he wanted to call the album Hell Fire. Throughout recording the whole album, he had this period where the only thing he’d say was “Hell Fire”.

Tell me about it

Princess

Nokia 70

Tell me about it

The personal achievements of Destiny Frasqueri, told in her own words, by Dominic Haley. Photography by Damien Fry

Just in from New York and Princess Nokia is clearly desperate for a cigarette. After opening the window in her label’s North London offices, she returns to the coffee table and snips half the filter off of a Silk Cut. “This is alright?” she asks, before shrugging, leaning out and sparking up. “I mean, I feel like everyone smokes in England anyway.”

Nokia, or Destiny Frasqueri as she introduces herself, is a hard person to pin down. In her black Vivienne Westwood dress and militant looking goth boots, she’s chatty and disarmingly cordial, but she’s also on guard. She’s surprisingly cagey when I open the interview with a question about New York’s ballroom culture. Featuring heavily in the video for her single ‘Sugar Honey Iced Tea (S.H.I.T.)’, the scene, inspired by 1960s-era Puerto Rican beauty pageants, sees different houses compete against each other in fiercely-contested voguing competitions. It forms a big part of Frasqueri’s artistic heritage; however, she’s adamant that she has no interest in taking credit for a longstanding part of LGBTQ+ culture. “It’s a small inspiration behind the video, and I don’t want it to be a focal point,” she explains .”It’s getting very popularised right now, and I don’t want to be a face for it.”

Frasqueri is notorious for not taking any shit. She has often been extremely outspoken in the past, accusing Ariana Grande of ripping off her sound and leaping off stage to punch misogynists during a charity show at Cambridge University.

There’s even a verse of ‘Sugar Honey Ice Tea’ that recounts a widely reported story of the time she threw a bowl of soup over a racist man on a subway train. Growing up in Harlem before losing her mother at aged 10, Frasqueri has learned to be a fighter. Passing through a succession of foster homes before running away to live with her grandmother in the Lower East Side, the skateboarding, emo-listening misfits she fell in with in high school helped her to find an outlet through music, and Nokia remains immensely proud of them.

Fresqueri’s first steps into music came in the early 2010s when she appeared as one of the standouts of the brief but inventive Soundcloud Rap scene. Experimenting with names such as Destiny and Wavy Spice before landing on Princess Nokia, she made a name for herself with tracks that ranged from the irreverent ‘Bitch, I’m Posh’ to the politically-charged ‘Yaya’. Intense label interest followed, resulting in her first album 1992 Deluxe

landing on Rough Trade in 2017 to rave reviews and comparisons to New York hip hop royalty including Nas and Feem. It didn’t take long for her independent streak to return, though.

Last year’s A Girl Cried Red saw Nokia moving way out to leftfield, serving up an album that owed as much to Fall Out Boy and Taking Back Sunday as it did to Odd Future and Frank Ocean (she wore a Slipknot tee on its cover). It may have confused many, but for Nokia it was the culmination of a deeply personal mission, who explained on a YouTube live stream that the record was a tribute to the bands that had helped to overcome depression and loneliness.

2019 had been relatively quiet for her, but in the autumn she unexpectedly returned with two new tracks that have seen the rapper back on a more straight-up hip hop footing. In typically unpredictable style, ‘Sugar Honey Iced Tea (S.H.I.T)’ finds Fresqueri hitting back at her haters and reaffirming her political stance. Follow up ‘Balenciaga’ is more of a dopey love letter to New York City’s thrift stores and the rapper’s unique sense of style. All this, of course, hints that Princess Nokia will be returning with a new mixtape in 2020. While at the time of writing the details on that are sketchy at best, there are three things I can say about it right now – it will be unexpected, break norms and be definitely individualist. Because at the end of the day, that’s what Princess Nokia is all about, who had this to tell me.

“There’s always going to be people who just don’t like you” I remember thinking, wow, people really don’t like me and I’m gonna have a little fun with it. I’ve never done anything for people not to like me. I have a good heart. I’m honest, and I love very deeply, and I’m a good person. The adult thing to do is keep [the hate] to yourself. But when people start projecting anger and hatred so, so aggressively and just so recklessly, then I have to call it out. I’m a person, and I bleed, and I cry, and I feel things. Why do I have to be the place for people to dump their garbage? Being Princess Nokia is all I’ve ever lived for; I don’t do it to be better than this person or that person. If your main goal is to be famous then perhaps being a successful musician isn’t for you. It’s like I say in the song, don’t do this shit to be famous; I do this shit ‘cos I love it. ‘Sugar Honey Iced Tea’ is about reminding people that I’m not going to let them dump their shit on me.

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Tell me about it “I’m not trying to be different, to make a point or a statement” It’s really all I know. In fact, for a long time I really didn’t think I was making a point ‘til I realised that people had started seeing me in a different way than I do. I have a very innocent view of how I got to be who I am because I’ve only worked with myself. I think people don’t expect to be around a woman so immersed in culture and I give you so much culture, reference and intellect.

In a way, I just follow my compass. It always points me north. My compass never steers me wrong. Yeah, I’m a little off-kilter. I make music that has a devoted fanbase that’s underground, but it still has incredible mainstream reach and value.

It’s like the very definition of who I am. I’ve made so many different types of music and art. I sing, and I act, and I model, and I photograph, and I write books. I’m a multi-faceted artist.

“My energy will not be spent on petty girl drama” Women can be so many things: healers, witches, goddesses, mothers; all these incredible, amazing things. But then also sometimes there’s just this really unnecessary conflict. I don’t take anything personally. I don’t write songs that are directed at

anyone; I’m more about talking openly about what I internalise and my experiences. I’m all about speaking my truth and letting my freak flag fly.

I’m in a place where my life is so happy, wholesome and healthy. Why should I sacrifice my peace y’ know? I came to realise recently that there are things I care about and things that I want to put my energy into. I’m a soulful, peaceful woman. My revolution is my revolution; I’m doing something very different from the status quo. It’s not like I’m trying to prove anything, it’s more about getting a point across, celebrating my individuality and having fun.

“People are still confused that I made an emo record” I’m like, ‘yeah, I made a rock record.’ As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always shared with the world what I’m into, and that’s always been one of my favourite genres. I was around at the peak of its height. Ten years later, and it feels like it’s all behind us now, but when I was in high school, I would listen to that shit all day long.

At the time, I was really sad. I was deeply antagonising over a lot of things, so I wrote a three-chord melodic rock

“I remember thinking, wow, people really don’t like me”

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Tell me about it album. I’m still so proud of that record because I loved the music.

I remember feeling so free while I was making it. I was thinking, if there’s anyone who should put an emo record out then it’s definitely me – I have something so different to offer. A lot of subjects covered in that genre come from a male’s perspective, and sometimes it can go way too dark. A Girl Cried Red is really a Christian rock album. It’s about redemption, finding god and finding yourself even through pain and sadness. It was like the coolest thing ever for me waking up and getting a message from Silverstein or Fall Out Boy; all the people I love and have inspired my music.

“My business pleases me” Whenever I walk into a meeting the first thing I say to my team is, how does this interest me? What does this do for me? If you can’t answer me that, then we’re just chit-chatting, so goodbye.

I think there are many ways to be business orientated. As a growing businesswoman and self-made success story, I have to be savvy in business. I can be laissez-faire about everything – my spirit free, how I make card is free – but I’ve learnt that I have to take care of myself. I have to take care of my assets. I have to take care of my music that I’ve made all myself; that I wrote and created on my own. I’m not a young, ignorant person who’s just going along for the ride or the money or the laughs. I’m deeply invested in this, and I have created a business that serves me and gives me the life that I wanted as a child.

“I’ve always worked. I always take care of myself and my family.”

That’s just what Caribbean people do. It’s in our ethics as people and especially as women to be hardworking. I wasn’t just going to wait around and collect checks and be a product of my environment; I want something more for myself. That’s why I took Princess Nokia to such a height; I really knew what it was to suffer and be alone and be financially dependent since I was 15 years old. Oh man, suffering as a young person sucks. There was no way I wanted to work in an office, so I said okay, I’m going to connect to the underground music thing and so far its worked out for me.

You know, there are some people from where I’m from who I don’t think have ever left the state. That’s not a reflection on them; it’s not their fault in so much that it’s a reflection of society and systematic oppression and marginalisation. I was fortunate as a child; I got some great glimpses into a more sustainable life, and I met people who offered me the opportunities to get what I have. I’m really grateful that I’ve been blessed to come from a very artistically supportive and nurturing family that didn’t put art down or put us down.

“I think people don›t realise how much I love music” I love all kinds of music, and I make music according to the type of music that I like. Like, most rappers make just rap or hip hop like it’s religious. I love other things. I mean, I love drum and bass and a trip-hop, so I did it. I love soul and basketball, so I did it. And I love hip hop, so I did it, and I did it really good. It was a

little off-kilter, sure, but that’s what made it so beautiful. Music is interchangeable, and it depends on what I’m feeling.

People tend to look at my music and go ‘she doesn’t make up her mind: she’s all over the place. She has a niche fan base, I don’t really know what she’s doing; is it rock? Is it hip hop?

What’s it going to be?’ I feel like I put out a really incredible rock album and half of the world got it and saw how genius it was for a Puerto Rican woman to put out the most successful female emo-rap album ever. But the proof is in the pudding. How many times have I saved someone’s life with that album? I know for a fact because people tell me. They write me all the time, even a year and a half later, on a daily basis to tell me how much that album changed their lives, gave them hope and made them not want to hurt anymore. That’s not what I wanted to do with that record, but it’s like, okay. I’m making this to help me heal, but if that helps other people heal, then that’s a success.

“Mostly though, I just don’t fucking care” And I say that with a really, really big smile on my face. I just don’t care about pleasing others to the point of making myself unhappy.

I don’t care about the things that people think about me or the negative things that they say about me. I just don’t care. People sensationalise me and discredit my work or give me half the credit, but I know. I know what I deserve, not coming from ego or anything like that, but as a hard worker and innovator.

I guess I lived my whole life in suffering, pain, depression, confusion, trauma, and I’m like I just don’t care anymore. Music has been the only place to truly get me out of the darkest places in my life, and I only care about music. I care about making great songs and great records, I care about bringing that to the mainstream and going, ‘look at what I can do’. I try not to have negative connotations about the industry, but I try not to pay too much attention to what’s going on around me. I just say it’s like a big cafeteria and I’m just going to sit my tray down. Some people are going to be drawn to me, and some people are gonna stay away from me; I’m just gonna sit in the same place and see what happens.

“My self-belief comes from my friends” That comes from ballroom culture. It comes down from emanating a fantasy that you’re not born into. When you walk, when you dance and when you present yourself as a queer person to the outside world you have an attitude and a sassiness that you develop from being a part of that world and gay culture. My friends taught me that.

John Carlos, as well as being one of my best friends, is the father of our house. It’s called the House of Mofongo, and we’ve been a family for ten years now. We decided to call ourselves a house even though we don’t compete, we just love our friends and family and take care of the younger kids. That has given me so much belief in myself. I’ve always been this awkward goth kid, but the gay side of me is like, pick it up. I got attitude, I got nerve, I got it all. It’s how you portray that fantasy that helps you to navigate life with courage and strength.

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True story: A friend of mine, called Dave Trendell, was at home with his parents who were watching Dad’s Army. “I like Dad’s Army,” he said in passing, which was a lie, but nobody had spoken in three hours. That Christmas, Dave unwrapped a VHS boxset of every episode of Dad’s Army. He was 13. Our other friend showed him how to put paper over the tabs so he could use the tapes to record Match of the Day. This is why mums are the best and the absolutely worst – because they actually listen to everything we say, partly because they’re constantly scanning conversations for what to buy people for Christmas.

95% of the sales of Robbie Williams’ The Christmas Present will be attributed to people not being able to sit in silence. It’ll happen during the Strictly results show, after your dad has mentioned how “talented” some of the female dancers are one too many times and the dog – or someone – has let off. Robbie’s on and you can’t take it anymore, so you say, “I quite like Robbie, he’s alright.” Well done, bozo. You now own a copy of The Christmas Present.

This is bad because it’s a record of Christmas songs, but they’ve all been sung by Robbie Williams. It’s a double album as well, so you’re not getting anything

else – it’s just this. Worst of all is how it looks. It features Robbie, of course, whose festive imagination stretches as far a him dressing like a Dickensian twit in a top hat. But sure, fair enough.

You may as well let slide how he is inexplicable rendered halfway between a photograph and an illustration too, because there’s much more to keep you awake here. Like how the store sign says ‘Teddy, Charlie & Coco’ on it. I knew what sickening token this would be before I confirmed it with my mad journalism skills but my stomach still flipped once I knew that yes, those are the names of Robbie’s children. I know it’s cute, and it’s Christmas, but no! Weird name for a shop too, which appears to be owned by Robbie, judging from the RWs either side of the windows, which clearly show this to be a toy store. Believe me, I don’t like sounding like Robert Mitchell, but why the fuck, then, has Robbie bought a copy of his OWN record in his OWN TOY store, which he’s now carrying home in the snow, unbagged!? It makes as little sense as the record he’s holding featuring the front cover that features the picture of him outside the shop holding the record.

And you and your big, polite mouth own this now.

Unless the spirits did it all in one night and it’s not too late, and you can change. You can keep shtum or, better still, casually mention how you like money.

What to do this Christmas if you’re unable to go to your mother’s

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illustration by kate prior

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