Music Now

Pop-punk, hardcore screamo, contemplative spoken-word, melancholic piano, hip-hop and more, it’s all happening in Scotland this month

Words: Tallah Brash

April was another busy month for releases, and we’ve found it hard to keep up. There were new albums from Withered Hand, Constant Follower and Jordan Stanley, and a brand new mixtape, LIFE WAS SHIT, IT STILL IS NOW, from Psweatpants. Singles, too, landed like they were going out of fashion. Highlights included NANI’s sublime Limbo, El Ghoul’s propulsive Head Song, the lilting Groovy Itch from Berta Kennedy, the gorgeous storytelling of Alice Faye’s Jamie, Sonotto’s comedic elastic breakfast bop The Dilemma, Neon Waltz’s anthemic Thoughts / Dreams / Regrets, Elisabeth Elektra’s 80s-tinged earworm The Dream, the bouncy swa er of AMUNDA’s Upside Down and newcomers neverfine have caught our attention with Silhouettes, straight out of the Italians Do It Better playbook.

This month, things aren’t slowing down. Earlier in the mag (p28) we speak to Comfort about new record What’s Bad Enough?, while on p35, Cloth’s Rachael and Paul Swinton talk us through their latest album, Secret Measure; read our full review of that on p52, before checking p53 for words on the exciting debut LP from Edinburgh’s Eyes of Others, ba y, trippy and acid-drenched in all the right places.

Ever wondered what it would sound like if The Futureheads, Devo and Blink-182 had triplets but they were Scottish? Well, imagine no more. On 19 May, Slime City enter the chat with their all-at-once familiar yet unfamiliar sound on Slime City Death Club. Opening with the gentle wash of the Windows XP startup sound, this Glasgow trio of Michaels quickly knock us for six with the punchy two-and-a-half-minute Last Generation Guaranteed To Die (In a Traditional Sense), perfectly setting the scene for the next 11 songs full of whoops, tongue-incheek takes, computer samples and more big riffs than should be legal.

Featuring classics like You and Everybody That You Love Will One Day Die, Dial-Up Internet’s The Purest Internet, I.D.S.T. and Glasgow Is a Shitehole, on new cuts, bold and brash existential pop-punk is still the order of the day. As the riffs continue, so too do the smirk-worthy song titles (see: Algorithm Is a Dancer and I Feel It Best When I Feel Nothing At All), while If I Eat Myself Will I Double In Size Or Disappear Completely offers some breathing space on the record, although leaves our brains a bit fried as one colleague su ests: “Wouldn’t we just be the same size, we’d just be inside out?” Um, maybe, idk?

More big riffs can be found this month on Moni Jitchell’s Unreal, with the comedy in this instance stopping at their name. This hardcore screamo two-piece make a serious amount of good noise, the kind that hasn’t been heard in Glasgow since Bronto Skylift. Set for release on 24 May, syncopated beats, time signatures hard to get your head around, often unintelligible screeched vocals, double kickdrumming, and 12-string guitar shredding combine to make for a chaotic sludge of unreal brain soup. At some points it’s hard to believe this pair will make it to the end of each song in one piece, but fasten your seatbelt and trust you’re in good hands.

From rip-roaring shreds to the contemplative spoken word of Imogen Stirling’s Love The Sinner (5 May). Set atop a gorgeously intricate backdrop of music from producer Sarah Carton, Stirling tackles the seven deadly sins across its seven tracks, with characters Sloth, Envy and Greed etc helping to explore everything from political apathy and everyday mundanity to the complexities of feminism. ‘Wrath can’t understand why she’s angry all the time’, Stirling declares on the do that/don’t do that rage of Wraith. ‘Don’t take up space, take up space, be a boss bitch / Be a feminist, don’t be a feminist, don’t call yourself a feminist […] Go out alone, don’t go out alone / Don’t walk home alone, text me when you get home’.

While not an original concept, Love The Sinner is a commanding piece of work. However, the influence of Kae Tempest is easy to hear, to the point that some may find it distracting, but those willing to lean in will reap rewards aplenty in the perfect interplay between Carton’s considered and precise production and Stirling’s effortlessly paced and thoughtful social commentary.

On 1 May, North Atlantic Oscillation return with United Wire, a record hard to put into words. Playing right through with no breaks, it’s an affecting chameleonic patchwork of captivating compositions, glitchy sounds and gorgeous vocals, with the kind of melancholic piano lines and electronics Thom Yorke would be proud to call his own. ngl, we’re a bit in love with this.

Elsewhere, on 5 May Erland Cooper releases Folded Landscapes, further exploring his relationship with the environment, while Glasgow rapper P CASO releases Mise En Scene, a bouncy seven-track EP produced by Kalum. Later, Edinburgh indie outfit Swim School release Duality (25 May), Billy Got Waves completes his triumvirate with Rocket Boy 3/3 (26 May), featuring lots of lush production from S-Type, and Tzusan and Shogun release the collaborative Lead Wetsuit Schematics (30 May). Plus there are brand new singles from PLASTICINE, Nikhita and Carla J. Easton.

By Christina Sharpe rrrrr

A profound rumination on knowledge, loss, Black American life and memory, Christina Sharpe’s masterful Ordinary Notes is structured across various thematic chapters, each grappling with a different definition of a ‘note’ – ‘to consider or study carefully’ or ‘to make, or have the effect of a note’ – examining the ways in which these work to punctuate our lives.

The book itself is written in short-form notes, creating a long-form non-linear narrative that meanders through various topics, crafting a sense of deep intimacy, as if we have been invited to freely roam through Sharpe’s personal observations and private memories. By placing precious and cherished memories of her mother alongside academic criticism of the African American canon, Sharpe offers an imaginative scholarly work that does not draw a hierarchy between the individual and collective experience.

Sharpe continually points out white violence as a continuous violent note which strikes through the lives of Black Americans. She is unflinching in her observations that, even in attempts at reconciliation, white violence merely reconstructs and bolsters itself. In one striking moment, Sharpe interrogates the function of museums dedicated to preserving the memory of slavery in America, lest the country forget its brutality or destructive legacy, arguing that these museums merely permanently situate Black people in a narrative of victimhood, cruelty and passivity. Sharpe questions what effect these museums would have if they were structured around the violence of white perpetrators, rather than the suffering of Black people. Sharpe’s writing is not intended to always sit comfortably, but is instead a note to her own memory, intertwined with an unforgettable collective narrative. [Laila Ghaffar]

Daunt Books, out now

By Lynsey May rrrrr

Ellis’ life is falling apart. Her boyfriend of a decade has left her for a coworker and kicked her out of the flat they shared; she has no money or job security; her oblivious mother has plunged into a relationship with a younger man and her sister is angrier than ever. As if that isn’t enough, there is something wrong, again, with her ever-troublesome teeth.

Lynsey May’s debut taps into the voyeuristic pleasure of watching someone make all the wrong decisions, of witnessing – either with disbelief or recognition – another person’s attempt at coping with change and dysfunctional relationships. The extended metaphor hits the mark: like decaying teeth, trauma and mental illness also have deep unseen roots, and the consequences of leaving them unattended can be excruciatingly painful.

May has a keen eye for the manifestation of emotional complexity in all human interaction and a talent for dramatising it. Ellis’ anxiety, rage and paranoia jump out of the page with such vigour that it becomes almost easy to overlook the general flatness of the rest of the characters, who obediently serve the story but don’t do much more. Weak Teeth is compulsively readable, darkly funny, lighthearted and infuriating at times. It is an intimate look into the crumbling life of a woman as she rummages through the wreckage for the strength to bite back. [Venezia Castro]

By Heather Parry rrrrr

Where her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, asked questions of bodily ownership and public spectacle after death, Heather Parry’s newest collection, This is My Body, Given For You, turns unflinchingly to the spectacle of the living body. A six-armed wrestler binds his additional appendages into submission; a woman earns a precarious living as a live gynaecological demonstration doll; a father in mourning kidnaps a boy with his stillborn son’s eyes; a nun poisons an abusive congregation by spiking their food with her bodily fluids.

The author’s voice guides the reader through 15 tales of warped corporeality, prefacing the eight sections with a direct address; these are your tragedies, these are your love stories, this is your happy ending. Despite the reassurance that the collection is structured for your comfort, this insistent narrator creates an unsettling sense of being observed as you wade through her words. Although the stories drip with a dark surrealness, Parry’s unsqueamish descriptions of bodily functions are decisively familiar, from clotted vaginal discharge to the dead weight of an arm devoid of blood. In the collection’s epigraph, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that the body is not a thing, it is a situation. Similarly, Parry presents the body as experiential; something to be suffered through, rebelled against, or escaped from altogether. [Paula Lacey] Haunt

Fray

By Chris Carse Wilson rrrrr

A dead mother, a missing father, a searching child, a Highlands wilderness. With such a simple yet powerful set-up, Fray promises both mystery and melancholy. The surprise of Chris Carse Wilson’s beguiling debut, however, lies in the sheer weight of hallucinatory malevolence that lurks in its pages. An unnamed narrator arrives at an isolated cottage, tracing the steps of their father – missing since a grief-ridden confrontation. Inside, thousands of pieces of paper, fragmentary notes on the mother’s presence, strange experiments, and warnings of devilry. The child fears the worst for the father’s sanity; until new notes appear, with more urgent, personal warnings.

Wilson’s narrative, too, is made of fragments, interweaving the writings of father and child with a third, unnerving, voice. With this structure, Fray achingly captures the cruel rhythms of depression, and the circularities of grief; all trapped here in an unforgiving wilderness. We are immersed in a world of waterfall ‘scars’ and ‘laughing, scorning wind’ where ‘stones claw out of the ground’. When even the landscape begins to change and senses shift, the child must decide what they are willing to lose of themselves in their search for the missing. Written in secret 20-minute bursts over several years, this intriguing and unsettling debut pulses with the energy of dangerous patience and fractured time. [Jess Moody]