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Big Thief U.F.O.F. 4AD Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief has never feared darkness. She stared it down directly on the band’s debut, Masterpiece, and again on 2017 follow-up Capacity, with songwriting dredged through childhood trauma, domestic abuse and death. Darkness is as inescapable on U.F.O.F., their first full-length for 4AD, but here it manifests itself as the unknown, and it isn’t necessarily synonymous with dread. Here, Lenker is at peace with embracing the unfamiliar, be that the supernatural or the mysteries of the natural world. On Strange she sounds awed contemplating how suffering and beauty are inextricable with lines like “Iridescent thread, beautiful and dead/ Billions of worms were boiled to make the bed”. Lenker’s voice alone embodies this paradox, her tremulous tones at once painfully fragile and exquisitely gorgeous. That Lenker remains the focal point throughout is testament to the sensitivity with which these arrangements are executed. It’s even more impressive considering the variety of the collection, which extends from psych-folk (Century) and cascading dream-pop (U.F.O.F.) to brisk, Wilco-style Americana (Strange). Once again, Lenker proves that gazing into the abyss can be gainful employment. !
Gemma Samways
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Sammy Jones
Kelsey Lu Blood Columbia
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Show Me the Body Dog Whistle Loma Vista Former Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau displays tens of thousands of pairs of shoes that were taken from the 1.1 million people that were killed there. To promote this album, New York punk innovators and Jewish cousins Show Me the Body piled thousands of trendy sneakers in a shuttered warehouse, posting the image to Instagram. The band haven’t directly acknowledged the link, but with ICE holding more than 50,000 people in US detention centres, far-right groups on the rise, and inclusive communities like the band’s Corpus collective steadily being displaced, you can assume this chilling mirroring is deliberate. This is only the band’s second album despite their enduring spot in the New York scene, and it’s filled with bleak rage. Opening song Camp Orchestra, named for the imprisoned musicians of Auschwitz, features a haunting opening melody. The whole album pushes the idea of what hardcore should sound like. Just when you think you'll be getting a power chord-laden HXC prototype, they reel it back in, subverting the sound with electronics, vocoders or spoken word. Madonna Rocket, the standout single on this album of heavy thumpers, is all highfrequency post-punk guitars strained over pounding cymbals. By explicitly invoking the Holocaust to describe the current state of America, SMTB are trying to shake out repression-induced apathy. With the raw, provocative Dog Whistle, they've achieved this on every level.
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The Cinematic Orchestra To Believe Ninja Tune The world is a very different place now compared to 12 years ago, which is when The Cinematic Orchestra last released a new album. The weight of those changes is felt across To Believe, even if the central question being proposed by Dominic Smith and Jason Swinscoe is never addressed head-on. Instead, they ask us what belief means in a world characterised by its turbulent political landscape and social media pressures. Musically, though, it doesn’t feel like an especially profound leap forwards. The title track opens the record and will feel cosily familiar to the many fans who found them via their one big hit, To Build a Home – all stately strings and hushed vocals from Moses Sumney. The highlight guest turn comes via Roots Manuva’s contribution to the gripping A Caged Bird/ Imitations of Life (Smith and Swinscoe first worked with the South London rapper in 2002). The softly epic, reflective jazz of Lessons and Wait for Now/ Leave the World are deft in their execution but light on fresh ideas. It’s when they aim for pointed drama that they excel, as on the standout The Workers of Art, which thrillingly juxtaposes electronics and strings. To Believe is a welcome return, but seldom strives to break new ground. !
Joe Goggins
Weyes Blood Titanic Rising Sub Pop
Girl Unit Song Feel Night Slugs Girl Unit has been a constant fixture of the Night Slugs crew over the label’s near-decadelong existence, but the London DJ/producer hasn't had his own new release since 2012. Now, the label is closing the gap with his first full-length that's slowly been in the works this whole time. Song Feel is unmistakably a love letter to the American R&B and hip-hop canon, with cutting-edge beats that take it far beyond retro fetishism. The personalities of the featured vocalists are what give the LP its titular “song feel”. Previous collaborator Kelela opens the LP with WWYD, a tender jam echoing 80s West Coast electro and 90s G-funk, while Taliwoah soars like a radio diva atop the tropical dancehall of Stuck. Elsewhere, the four instrumentals range from the laid-back, Dilla-inspired Head to the skittering 130 BPM album closer Pure Gold, the most club-oriented track present. The record is a mixed bag stylistically – getting as raunchy as Lil Kim and as heartfelt as Mary J Blige – but Girl Unit's meticulous production provides a unified quality. !
Joey Hansom
Natalie Mering’s 70s-indebted psych folk project Weyes Blood has increasingly become an outlet for exploring life’s biggest questions: the difficulties of love, finding meaning, the fate of the planet. While her sentiments were often veiled in metaphor, her latest album Titanic Rising soars into certitude. Titanic Rising sounds cathartic and triumphant. Ethereal strings and slide guitars carry the atmosphere skywards and there’s a sense that Mering has been finding a lot of answers, both personally and artistically, to the questions she’s alluded to in previous work. Still, darker sentiments persist, with lines like “Got a lot of years of bad love to make OK/ It gets me every day/ Then again it might just be me”, from Everyday, making it clear that progress is always ongoing and salvation is never absolute. Mering’s otherworldly demeanour and rich, assured soprano creates a sense of removal. As a narrator, she seems to float above the unfolding drama without ever falling into self-indulgence. And while critics might label Mering a throwback on account of how heavily she mines 60s and 70s sounds, there’s always just enough of her own contemporary spin to mark her out as a truly unique voice. !
Steve Mallon
“Blood is a recognition of the Pain, the Horror and the Beauty of finding the ability to observe it all in order to move through it,” explains Kelsey Lu in a press release. After escaping a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing and finding solace in music, the North Carolina-born cellist and singer/songwriter – who has collaborated with Solange, Kelela and Sampha – is casting out her demons on one of the year’s most unique debut albums. There won’t be many pop-adjacent debuts in 2019 that begin with a solitary line of cello pizzicato. Kelsey Lu demonstrates a synergy with the centuries-old instrument that takes it to modern climes and sees her voice seamlessly run alongside the notes. The silky, driving soul of Due West features Skrillex as a producer, while Knock for You incorporates production work from Jamie xx, who sprinkles a layer of bleep-strewn electronic drift over Lu’s R&B-rich baroque pop. Since her 2016 debut EP Church, Kelsey Lu has infused her music with a deep sense of spirituality. This can be heard on Pushing Against the Wind, a minor-key folk reverie that was written after an ayahuasca ceremony. Meanwhile, Lu’s atmospheric cover of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love and the 80s pomp of Poor Fake suggest an older soul at play. Lu’s confessional outlook and openness to genreblending aligns Blood with the fluidity of the digital era. But there’s also a classic quality to what she is doing. Hers is a timeless soul that resonates beautifully with the cello’s ageworn timbre, one that won’t ever go out of fashion. !
April Clare Welsh
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