The best new albums this week
From the deep house stylings of Park Hye Jin to the speed thrash of Wraith, they’re all here
Park Hye Jin 박혜진 – Before I Die (Ninja Tune)
Whatever the Ninja Tune office are putting on their cereal we’re keen to give it a go. The label has been releasing a relentless stream of essential albums and EPs over the last couple of years, clearly showing a collective ear not just for the sounds of now, but sounds we didn’t necessarily know were now, yet. Props to all those involved in cultivating the current roster, then, building on a decade-spanning reputation for unearthing and platforming cutting edge electronic beats, but arguably taking this to whole new levels of on-point in more recent times.
The long awaited debut LP from Park Hye Jin 박혜진 is a strong case in point. The South Korean-born, Los Angeles-based producer, songwriter, vocalist and DJ is a woman of many talents — hence the repertoire — and has approached her first foray into long-form releases in a way that celebrates each and every one of those attributes. In moments, relaxed to the point of making us visualise boat drinks off the Malibu coastline, at other times the kind of banging that can’t help but invoke images of the burgeoning Californian warehouse party scene, Before I Die makes for an impressive calling card to say the least.
Opening with the warm piano house of aptly-titled ‘Let’s Sing, Let’s Dance’, the beginning of the album is a blissful exercise in lounge sounds, delivering a string of six tracks that prefer the lackadaisical over the uptempo. Veering from the barely-there beat and guitar loops of ‘Me Trust Me’, and ‘I Need You’, which marries trap percussion with sweet, heartfelt vocals, it’s hard not to see this section as Chapter 1 of a wider story, which soon begins to unfold as the downbeat drums of ‘Where Did I Go’ fade like a Pacific sunset.
From there things start to get a little less chilled. First with the ear-worm hook of ‘Never Give Up’, which is as close to “traditional hip hop” as the record gets. ‘Can I Get Your Number’ then acts as a diversion into sleazy, sexually charged electro experimentations, bass reverberations underpinning suggestive lyrics that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Kitten set. This preps us nicely for the adventure that follows, which includes some of the greatest gems on the album.
‘Never Die’ is a stomping, energy-packed monster made of driving cymbals, hypnotic vocal loops and repetitive keys, filtered effects creating a sense of spiralling out of control. Giving way to ‘Hey Hey Hey’, toughest of these offerings, and you start to get a sense for exactly why Park Hye Jin 박혜진 has garnered such a reputation for decimating clubs. It’s pumping, jacking, but pared back and strangely futuristic, background white noises contrasting the joyful upfront voice stabs.
All in all, it’s this ability to straddle not just time signatures but attitudes that positions artist and album as so staunchly original and utterly repeatable. Each iteration of the producer’s work seems destined to be played again and again, whether that’s in order to savour the incredible detail in sample-based efforts like ‘Sunday ASAP’, bask in the infinitely inviting tones of ‘I jus wanna be happy’, or allow the smooth layers of sub-heavy head-nodder ‘Watchu Doin Later’ to smoothly wash over you. A testament to the collapse of genres critics have been writing about for a decade or more already, you can’t help but feel lucky to live in an age when difference and daring are finally being celebrated again in some corners of the music scene. So, best make the most of it then.
MH
Aho Ssan – Simulacrum (Subtext)
Move over Roly Porter and Richard Devine; the coveted crown for ‘best sound designer’ has been snatched.
‘Simulacrum’ is the debut LP by Aho Ssan, a name we’ve become subconsciously aware of in the past few years, like background radiation. His music sounds radioactive as much. Given the auditory shock of this stingingly shrill, pressurized and metallic ambient noise album, we’re amazed to hear that Ssan – real name Désiré Niamké, – is not a trained sound designer, but self-taught.
‘Simulacrum’ debuted at the 2019 edition of Berlin’s Atonal festival, and now comes to Subtext Recordings in all its twinging glory. Its inspiration lies in the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s text ‘Simulacres et Simulation’: an academic onslaught about simulated realities and dubious copies, which boldly claims that human society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs.
Ssan keeps this in mind while playing god with infinitely modulable wavetable synths, spanning almost every synthetic possibility – almost ‘pretending’ with sound, like sonic plasticine – in the space of seven ambient works. Whereas SOPHIE moved quickly between abstract synthesis and pop, Ssan stands firmly in the former camp, with each ‘Simulacrum’ movement building to a different kind of distorted, crunching elysium.
The period between the end of ‘I’ and ‘III’ sounds like climax in suspension, like an electrical storm in the wastes of a facile, future city’s outskirts. Informed by Niamké’s experience growing up as a young black man in the French suburbs, moods of desolation and rage permeate, like untapped energy reserves resting on dead air.
JIJ
Bummer – Dead horse (Thrill Jockey)
Following on from their immense split 7″ with post-everything mammoths The Body, Kansas City noise merchants Bummer return with a scathing, unhinged and hysterically pissed off sophomore full-length.
The simple, apt title of ‘Dead Horse’ speaks volumes when delving into the ruminations of mid-west Americana routed depression, the lack of opportunity for the current generation of the dust bowl, as well as the observant, absurdist commentary on rural xenophobia.
Vocalist/guitarist Matt Perrin gears the material toward a nexus of blistering, noise-rock laden hardcore-tinged grunge, with sludgy undertones and a manic vocal delivery to match. As a power trio, the chaotic blend of chunky, dissonant and fret-mangling riffs is offset by stomach churning bass rumbles and blitzkrieg breakdowns, culminating in a cacophony not quite unique, yet vehement and palpable.
Perrin’s endless cynicism also prevents the material from ever falling into utterly dour territory. Just look to titles and lyrics like those found on crushing opener ‘JFK Speedwagon’, or album highlight (and Juno song title of the year), ‘I Want To Punch Bruce Springsteen In The Dick’, and a pattern starts to emerge, one that paints the frontman in the light of an observational comedian, albeit one with a penchant for throat-shredding howls rather than jokes and routines.
ZB
Gong Gong Gong – Phantom Rhythm Remixed (Wharf Cat)
Gong Gong Gong have been making wonderful minimalist noise from their Beijing base since they first began releasing around five years ago. The duo, consisting of Tom Ng and Joshua Frank, released Phantom Rhythm in 2019: a drummer-less collection of soundscapes inspired by downtown no wave, back-porch blues, Sahelian guitar music and Cantonese lion dance percussion. Hidden within the music was a discreet techno thread, and here, the band have hand-picked a troupe of China-connected electronic music creators to rework the entire album. Catapulting the Gong Gong Gong sound signature into exciting new galaxies, ‘Phantom Rhythm Remixed’ showcases a broad spectrum of avant-garde revisions – taking in ambient, psych, and cinematic soundscapes along the way.
Opening with PE’s galloping interpretation of ‘Ride Your Horse’, the album wastes no time creating an impression. From the gentle distortion on Mong Tong’s brooding take on ‘Notes Underground’ to Yu Su’s seductive version of ‘Some Kind of Demon’, the boldly experimental collection makes for compelling listening throughout. Weaving a quasi-mystical spell as the varied but cohesive music unfurls, we’re transported through differing states of lucidity through abrasive psychedelics and club-ready breaks – with the Scattered Purgatory remix of ‘Hotpot (Chongqing)’, and Howie Lee’s bit-crushed rendition of ‘Gong Gong Gong Blues’ among the highlights from an altogether intriguing crop.
PC
Hey!Tonal – Hey!Tonal (Computer Students)
It doesn’t get much nerdier than this. Made by guitarists, multi-instrumentalists and sound designers Mitch Cheney and Alan Mills, Hey!Tonal can best be described as a series of “drummers’ perspectives”. It began with two recordists laying down drum parts, before replacing those parts with dulcimer and guitar sounds. As a result, drums acted as an impetus for melody, rather than the usual rock context of drums ‘responding’ to the harmonic glue of the guitar.
Beginning with Cheney messing about with MIDI patches in Reason in 2006, an obsession soon formed. By 2010, Hey!Tonal expanded into a vast collaborative empire involving Julien Fernandez, Chris Pyle and Kevin Shea. Constructing entire sections from bare-bones percussion, the resultant album gave rise to everything from free-form musical dustballs like ‘Smarmy Faulkner’, to progressive folk-metal tracks like ‘Kcraze’.
The aim was to edit sounds “into songs that were never really intended to be what they ended up turning into”. This oblique non-approach gave rise to sounds that were manipulated to sound like other instruments, as well as various happy accidents. On ‘Uppum’, the ‘bass’ is actually an electric. Meanwhile, many of the drum parts were digitally edited to sound more ‘live’ than before – while, at the same time, ‘live’ parts were played to sound electronic – thus blurring many nebulous conceptual lines.
The best track is by far ‘Carl Sagan Is The Long Form Of Bitchin’, which blends psychedelic intonation, plectra-struck dulcimers, and 4×4 dance into one heck of a 5-minute vortex. Sonically, this album could work for fans of Zammuto, Georgia, or Lightning Bolt.
JIJ
quickly, quickly – The Long & Short of It (Ghostly International)
Back in 2018 a beat mixtape showed up that many people didn’t fully ‘get’ first time round. Graham Johnson broke the mould with his quickly, quickly offering, but you really needed to listen deeply to understand what made it such a standout release. Not a million miles away from many instrumental-sample based, downtempo, could-be-hip hop collections, where the producer in question veered from the norm was in terms of process, rather than form.
Without getting too geeky about things (too late), the quickly, quickly tape was unrepentant in its refusal to rely on nice harmonies and safe drums. It was also crafted without the use of samples as such, despite what those loops may have suggested. Johnson played everything himself, then worked layer upon layer of those noises together to create these vivid, evocative and utterly original wholes. It was a triumph, and one that still impresses today.
Not that we still need to revisit. The Long & Short of It is the long-awaited (by us, anyway) full length debut from quickly, quickly, and my goodness it’s just as enjoyable a collection of work as the last time we met. Again, on the face of it you’ve probably been here before — lo fi funk (‘Interlude), jazz-infused soul (‘Leave It’ / ‘Phases’) — but there are also so many ideas happening here it would be ridiculous to suggest any of it suffers from over-familiarity. Deceptively quiet, despite the hushed nature of the vocal delivery, the unobtrusive harmonies and key lines, this is the kind of record that, much akin to Me-One, patiently allows its ideas to present themselves, one after another after another after another. Any more forceful, and we’d likely be overwhelmed, any less confident, our attention would be elsewhere. A lush treat of varied textures.
MH
Wraith – Undo The Chains (Redefining Darkness)
Indiana based retro-thrashers Wraith succinctly describe their sound as “no bullshit speed and thrash metal.” It’s a rather accurate description in some respects, but delve a little deeper into ‘Undo The Chains’, and an understated myriad of influences unburden themselves.
Following on from 2019’s horror-punk inflected ‘Absolute Power’, which even boasted a staggering cover of Misfits gem ‘Death Comes Ripping’, this third full-length comes down hard with a hardcore thrash crossover maelstrom that commands pummelling abandon with each crunchy, fuzzed out curbstomper of a riff.
With natural comparisons to modern thrash revivalists such as Power Trip, there’s far more to equate here to giants of a bygone era. The blackened thrash malevolence of Venom is a given, but the abrasive directness of the material grants equal credence to punk origins, with breakneck anti-anthems nodding to the old school heyday of Merauder or Bulldozer.
Cuts like ‘Dominator’ and ‘Gatekeeper’ conjure up images of a Megadeth or Motorhead gone very wrong, constantly twisting the familiarity of thrash, hardcore and black metal in and around itself, refusing to ever offer a firm bolthole across its brief half-hour runtime.
By the time the epic whiplash of closer ‘Terminate’ dissipates, the energy of ‘Undo The Chains’ commands you to do it all again, if your neck can handle another dose.
ZB
If algorithmic, hyper-programmed computer music often seems hard to grasp, then at least Mark Fell and Mat Steel created something so stark you could hear the machinations. When they started working as snd, such microscopic, intensely digital music was in its infancy. Some of the Warp Records clique were getting freaky with programming languages and making sound do exponentially weird things, but the lines were still often blurred between the good old outboard ways and the vast vistas of possibilities trapped inside the box. There was no confusion with snd – their music is so minimal in essence, you can hear every freeze, stutter and stretch as odd structural frameworks build out of a wilfully sparse palette.
One of the reasons snd’s music transcends the clinical pitfalls of so much proudly computer-based music is that the sounds they chose, few of them as there were, always gleamed with a brilliance which seemed to catch the light of the sun, as though transcending the trappings of more 1s and 0s to become something more elemental. You could say the same across any of their small but perfectly formed discography, but it’s especially pleasing to see the wonderful 4 5 6 getting reissued. It boils down the methodical process ethics behind Steel and Fell’s work, broken down into three separate parts which labour over variations and versions on particular themes. It’s not designed to be easily digestible – no, far too angular and monotonal for that – but it does intimate some of the human thinking behind the machine speaking. How many different ways can you approach a system and its attendant palette? What do the different results sound like next to each other? These are questions only the human mind can ask, the computer is just there to process the data and output the information.
OW
JOHN – Nocturnal Manoevures (Brace Yourself)
For their third full-length studio effort, London based post-punk act JOHN, appear to have finally all but embraced the plethora of intrinsic influences that has birthed their dynamic post-punk assault.
‘Nocturnal Manoevures’ is the fully realised sound of a band (duo to be precise) no longer concerned with labels or personal perception, this is an album about the music, maaan.
Following the lush post-rock twinged instrumental opener, ‘Return To Capital’, it becomes evident just how much of a a fake-out it was with each subsequent banger. ‘A Song For Those Who Speed In Built-up Areas’ thrums with a hypnotic, almost no-wave groove, while ‘Austere Isle’ wages a sonic war between ambient grunge, aggro post-rock-punk with just a tint of Mastodon-esque sludge. Keep in mind this is all within the course of a precisely three-minute track.
From touring with the likes of IDLES, Mclusky and Metz to name but a few, it’s not so brazen or bonkers to suggest that some influences have trickled down from their peers. For one, there’s a much clearer embracing of the two-piece approach than found on any of the duo’s earlier material. Imagine the dance-punk of Death From Above 1979, but the dance floor is a cavernous moshpit.
With a slightly delicate approach when compared to the blistering screech of a duo like Lightning Bolt, ‘Nocturnal Manoevures’ is a clear statement of maturity and intent from JOHN. One that knows just when to trade heft for melody, when to show aggression and when to be sincere.
ZB