The best new albums this week

Dean Blunt’s genre-defying Black Metal 2 album tops our list of hot picks

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Dean Blunt – Black Metal 2 (Rough Trade)

It’s been several months since the digital release of Black Metal 2, the sequel to Dean Blunt’s fifth album Black Metal, which was received to rave reviews for its unexpected pop angle. The leather jacket clad, ever-shaded producer and songwriter is known for defying expectation, but this year, he actually answered to preexisting expectation with an album that has been hotly awaited by fans; his @evilarrow1997 Twitter account announced the project ahead of time. 

Now, after a flurry of activity that has seen Dean perform several times in London in the space of just a few weeks, Black Metal 2 has been pressed to vinyl for the first time. It makes sense to time the release for now, given that Mr. Blunt still seems to walk in its shadow. At his most recent Corsica Studios takeover, he played the album’s second track, ‘Mugu’, to a small sea of adoring fans before dropping the mic and dipping. Despite his ever-present flightiness, the man seemed still enthusiastic and energised, and eager to perform to a crowd.

Behind all the smoke and mirrors, we can tell Dean Blunt is having fun, and that’s exactly the kind of sensibility we glean from both Black Metal albums. As if it weren’t obvious enough already, the black sleeve for album number 2 is now adorned with a green, Terminator-style font simply reading ‘2’ – a play on the font and design of Dr. Dre’s ‘2001’ cover. The mere allusion to such a ‘fun’ go-to party album should be evidence enough that not too much should be read into Blunt’s music, despite its neo-noir, patient, vignette-style instrumentals and its disjointed song structure. We need only look to his Wire interview, wherein he reacted harshly to an interviewer who drew the possible parallel between ‘Black Metal’ and the black co-opting of old white tropes, like the largely ‘white’ rock microgenre black metal – a relation he wholeheartedly rejects.

No – while it isn’t without its context and social commentary – Black Metal 2 is more or less a continuation of Dean’s favourite way of music-making: short pieces that rarely broach more than a couple of minutes each. Each narrative sounds like the faded memory of a troubled gang member, be they in a car, on a bike, or on a beach. ‘Sketamine’’s “gun on the beach, if you see what I mean” line is probably the most memorable of the lot, building a picture of uncanny violence in an idyllic scene. Not long afterwards, singer and collaborator Joanne Robertson’s vocals lift out from this nighttime indie rock soundscape with talk of a “halo in the river”, suggesting the innocent, grim demise of this track’s narrator. 

The follow-up, ‘Semtex’, is of equally dubious meaning. Its dark, hypnotic instrumental seems to pair the lyrics with images of a strange “shooter” and singer, who is “always ready”, yet not without feeling. Towards the track’s end, the narrator detonates some kind of emotional semtex after performing a song on his guitar, before looking behind him to witness the aftermath of his own explosion. It’s these kinds of short, flighty, unexplained, emotionally wrought sketches that build a picture of Dean Blunt as mysterious. Every story is clipped and unwilling to explain itself fully, despite Dean’s own monotone suggesting himself to be an all-knowing character.

Blunt’s focus on resonating with “young, black inner-city people” might best be represented on ‘Nil By Mouth’, which – despite reusing the title of a classic South London drama film – captures the cosmic joke of being young and broke in a city like London, where promises of brighter futures whizz past the ears at an arbitrarily young age, despite the artist’s own insistence that the “future’s bleak.” Meanwhile, Robertson’s voice peeks through the gaps between Dean’s, like an unwelcome, intrusive thought – “be uptight / with your friends”, she orders, suggesting a regrettable emotional response to dire straits.

By ‘The Rot’, the album rounds off on a note of calm, as the production quality grows more expansive and cinematic, instrumentally alluding to Blunt’s love for progressive rock acts like Coil, The Smashing Pumpkins and Genesis – all of whom employed deft string sections in their albums. The more thematically meditative the lyrics are, the less harsh and sparse the instrumentals become. By this end, Blunt has painted a complex picture of young, inner-city stress, which ends on the sinking feeling everyone who has lived in London has felt at some point – “down, down, down”.

JIJ

Motorbass – Pansoul (Ed Banger)

It feels surprising to chart French house music back and start running short of threads past 1996. It feels like, by the mid 90s, house music was already relatively mature, with Chicago jack tracks and New Jersey deep house intermingling with European acid weirdness as electronic music culture grew a thousand different heads. There were of course French artists pushing things before that, your Garniers, Navarres, Yellows, Sinclar’s et al, but 1996 is year zero for French house as a consolidated movement. In some ways, the sophistication of sound by that time compared to 10 years earlier suits the legacy of Paris-centered dance music, when they could sculpt something slicker than rugged, bleepy box jams.

Smoky sampling is the cornerstone of French house, and Motorbass established that keenly at the flash point. The duo was made up of Etienne De Crecy and Philippe Zdar, the latter of whom was also part of pioneering downtempo beatheads La Funk Mob. Zdar, who sadly passed away in 2019, is rightly hailed as one of the architects of this French house phenomenon thanks in so small part to his work in Motorbass. There were other important projects arriving at the same time – St. Germain, Pepe Bradock and Ark’s Trankilou – but Motorbass delivered something special on Pansoul which balanced this dusty, jazzy aesthetic into fiercely effective club tackle where sometimes the lounge lizard tendencies came in front of dancefloor functionality.

Pansoul is an album to get down to, exuding an inherent moodiness which contrasts with some of the quirkier, more playful fare from France. ‘Flying Fingers’, which shows off a pronounced hip hop schooling in its cuts, chops and exquisitely funky hooks, is still shot through with a low-key darkness. On every track, the patchwork of soul divas, instrumental snatches and less identifiable sample scrapes creates a magical frisson, a tasteful discord which keeps this record firmly in the murkier corners of the night, quite the antithesis of the technicolour glitterball preening which would become synonymous with the whole French touch thing once it had a name. Not that there’s anything wrong with all that fabulousness, but you just can’t beat the alchemy De Crecy and Zdar cooked up over their Akais when they made Pansoul.

OW

Regis / Female – Againstnature (Tresor)

When it comes to distilling the essence of the Brummie techno subculture, it can be quite tricky to pin things down. Such a formidable, forbidding creative stamp isn’t designed with footholds, accessibility and navigation in mind. It stands like a monolithic block of concrete, utterly opaque in its form and hewn into an unambiguous form, but on closer inspection you can see the grain and texture, the pockmarks and idiosyncracies. You wouldn’t conflate an early Surgeon record with something from Sandwell District, or mistake a Skirt release for something by British Murder Boys. But their individual ways feed into this whole, looming, ominous whole.

Birmingham’s techno contingent were already well-oiled by the mid 90s, but this particular collaborative album from Regis and Female is considered a benchmark in the establishment of the sound the city was exporting. It’s techno being tested to examine its industrial roots in grave, stark detail. But what’s fascinating, given the oceans of funkless monochrome tedium that have come in the wake of it, is how much of techno’s foundational funk is still folded into this forbidding, thunderous sound.

The big tracks on Againstnature are impenetrable, absolutely packed out and delivered as viciously honed units, but the interplay between the elements within these claustrophobic spaces is deceptively playful. The offbeat bass ruts at a devilishly funky angle compared to the kick, the hat lags with purpose to get the body jerking. The industrial tropes being summoned are not those of stiff linearity, which is perhaps a misnomer aimed at Brummie techno, but rather the nightmarish textures and tones – the tortured voice looping through ‘Hanoi Hanoi’, the creeping insectoid static that permeates ‘Join Us In Paradise’. Through it all, the rhythms bounce and roll with deadpan glee, revelling in the macabre juxtaposition of absolute sonic desolation and hip-swinging body music. There are other releases just as capable of surmising the Brummie techno mystery magic, but if you’re looking for a totemic example, Regis and Female have you covered here.

OW

Emmanuel Abdul Rahim – Harlem (Acid Jazz)

Renowned London-based label Acid Jazz dig deep to dust off the prized spiritual jazz masterpiece, ‘Harlem’ by Emmanuel Abdul Rahim. The astonishingly talented artist (also known as Juan Amalbert prior to his name change) is a composer, orchestrator, master percussionist, arranger, author and educator. He famously led The Latin Jazz Quintet throughout the ’60s and late ’70s, and during his glittering career he performed alongside a staggering number of jazz luminaries, including John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie among many, many others.

Though based in Denmark since the late ’70s, his birthplace was Harlem, New York, and it’s this vibrant and culturally rich borough after which his 1988 album ‘Harlem’ is named. Originally released on Danish label Olufsen Records, its resurrection here by Acid Jazz represents the first time the sought-after album has been re-issued since it was first published. Recorded in Denmark and featuring a lineup of locally-based players, the scintillating album blends stunning instrumentation and Rahim’s deft percussive drive with sophisticated arrangements and mind-blowing orchestration. The entire album is effectively a highlight, but the breathtaking African-inspired masterpiece ‘Kalahari Suite’ is arguably the brightest shining gem in an altogether dazzling collection of treasures. Essential collecting for dusty-fingered jazzers.

PC

Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes – Sticky (International Death)

Frank Carter has clawed his merry way through quite the barrage of trials and tribulations. From creative differences to questioning the merit of fame and his own penchant for success and exposure, there have been times it really seemed like the foxy-haired frontman would walk away from the music life for good.

Since his departure from hardcore punk mainstays Gallows, and the somewhat questionable foray into classic rock via Pure Love, it has seemed paramount for Carter to work on his own terms, and within his own seemingly limitless confinement.

Regarding how quick the turnaround has been from the quiet family life to playing sold out shows in Ally Pally, if the Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes project has proven one thing above all else, it’s that folk find the tattooed charismatic frontman and his to the bone punk stylings to be a constant draw. 

Album number four, ‘Sticky’, embraces brevity and collaboration more than any previous Rattlesnakes work. Featuring the likes of up and coming electronic artist Lynks across the twenty-eight minute runtime, it’s the match made in modern punk heaven of lead single, ‘My Town’ with Joe Talbot of IDLES that serves as a swift haymaker to the increasing normalisation of closed-minded, xenophobic rhetoric. 

Not to mention Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream making a grand appearance on the urgent closer, ‘Original Sin.’ It’s a fitting end, and one that highlights ‘Sticky’ as a gleaming example of the respect and camaraderie that Carter seems to garner throughout several diverse scenes. 

Ever the downplaying everyman wordsmith, in his own words, Carter decidedly describes the mantra behind ‘Sticky’ as “that moment where you’re drunk at a bus stop at 3AM. You know there are no more buses, but you sit there anyway because you’re too fucked to figure out your options. Your kebab is on the floor, there’s a Stella in your pocket, and you’re woken up by a dirty little fox eating your shoes.”

If ever one needed to a soundtrack to that very specific, yet all too relatable scenario, then look no further. 

ZB

Tristan Arp – sculpturegardening (Wisdom Teeth)

Wisdom Teeth’s remit becomes clearer with every passing release, and so we reach Tristan Arp’s sculpturegardening and it’s hard to imagine it being released anywhere else. That’s largely thanks to the pin-prick melodies that dart and parry throughout the record, echoing the similar musical traits found in Facta and K-Lone’s respective LPs before this one. Mexico City artist Arp may be new to Wisdom Teeth, but he sounds like he’s always been here.

Of course Arp has his own artistic impetus to share – his palette is noticeably broad as piano, guitar and cello fold into the synthesis of his studio and back out again, but what’s most crucial here is the ornate beauty of what’s on offer. Whether the timbres are organic or synthetic, they’re guided in illustrious, graceful forms. On the gorgeous album closer ‘Cloud Surface’, the notes bloom and retreat with a lilt that seems to disarm any notions of sequencing, sounding more like the expressive swell of a harpist in full flight than anything that could be programmed in.

There are some sharper moments which nod to Wisdom Teeth’s club side. ‘From The Seams’ skips and jerks with a bounce which reminds of Steevio’s distinctive swing, and just occasionally a slither of hi-hat creeps into the mix, but mostly it’s just the plucks and drops of synth spelling out the groove. ‘Gypsum’ works around a discernible broken beat pattern, teetering on dembow but without the crunch on the offbeat (or in fact much drum presence at all). These tracks make clear Arp’s intention to create the energy in his tracks without relying on the well-worn crush of a solid drum. On the shorter pieces in between, he glides and twirls with curiosity and verve, creating something strikingly beautiful without defaulting to saccharine sentimentality. As such, it’s a perfect addition to the Wisdom Teeth oeuvre.

OW

Biffy Clyro – The Myth Of The Happily Ever After (Warner)

After two decades as a band, the sheer longevity and prolific nature of everyone’s favourite Scottish alt-grunge trio, Biffy Clyro, has been nothing short of exceptional.

Providing the soundtrack to the 2018 film, ‘Balance Not Symmetry’, the group returned to their disjointed, technical post-hardcore approach while also managing to explore epic, cinematic soundscapes akin to their melodious leanings (which have become second nature). 2020’s A Celebration Of Ending capitalised on the momentum, with a collection of material far more hopeful and exuberant than the narrative ties that weighed down their soundtrack project.

Now, only a year later, The Myth Of The Happily Ever After serves as sister album to its somewhat positive predecessor, and what a problem child it is. Sonically encapsulating the past two years of uncertainty and frustration, songwriter extraordinaire Simon Neil lets utterly loose across these eleven tracks, constantly warring with the delicate contentment we all strive to obtain. It’s the rug-pull sequel we don’t quite get nowadays.

Where cuts like ‘Instant History’ bolstered anthemic resilience, ‘A Hunger In Your Haunt’ is a start-stop jangly bastard of a track, seamlessly blending the strangest, most alien of a sinister dissonant build up before a chorus designed to transcend the most vast of stadium ceilings. The message to search for the motivation and drive within your own grief and despair, using the hunger for something better buried beneath what personally haunts us, is a powerful, painstakingly relatable concept, one that weaves its way throughout the tracklist.

What was initially intended to be a collection of b-sides, gestated over lockdown to become its own complex beast, and arguably some of the most potent material of the Biffy saga thus far.

From the heartfelt acoustics of ‘Holy Water’, to the soul-pop twinges of ‘Existed’, on album number ten, the Biff have shredded their own rulebook by subverting expectation at every sonic turn.

The slow burn of ‘Unknown Male 01’ from delicate balladry to post-math-rock crescendo upon crescendo is definitive testament to a seasoned trio of musicians, so in tune with their chemistry and nuance, that a five-minute track can paint a succinct audible image of everything there is to know of their ethos.

ZB

disrupt – Under Triple Suns (Zonedog)

Once known primarily as an 8-bit obsessed chiptune dub pioneer, disrupt has been actively evolving as an artist in the past few years. Based in Leipzig and with a modest but definable legacy behind him, Jan Gleichmar caught onto a genuinely inspired idea when he founded the Jahtari label and built up a community of artists making Game Boy-ready dub, steppas and more. There was a sincere soundsystem sentiment behind the aesthetic which lent the style legitimacy, avoiding the trap of gimmickry to produce some genuinely great music, and very much its own thing. However, the chiptune palette is still a fairly limited field, and it’s been great to see Gleichmar grow beyond it and create something totally distinct and just as strong.

This new direction came through on the 2018 LP Omega Station, and was expanded on with last year’s The Recreation Room. As Under Triple Suns confirms, the disrupt flights of fantasy have moved on from pixellated platform game shockouts to the plentiful, evocative pools of sci-fi. Narratives of downed ships and broken tech, alien atmospheres and pulp adventures now sit behind the music, still driven by the same bright and bold inspiration which powered the earlier music.

What Gleichmar has tapped into is a vivid seam of storytelling which is more like beatless cinema than ambient per se, where strong colours and expressive textures are used to sculpt a space. Sometimes there are beats too, and they fall in unshackled, funky formations that nod to the West Coast beat scene more than any dubwise sensibilities. In a more typically contemporary way you might imagine it to be sound design for a VR experience, but there’s enough of the old world in disrupt to keep this happily audio-only. You might get an accompanying zine or some theme-ready artwork, but that’s about it. Crucially, the sound is all you need, and the pictures Gleichmar paints with his palette are as wondrous and strange as the cover of any 70s sci-fi novel.

OW

Xenia Rubinos – Una Rosa (Epitaph)

For the uninitiated, Xenia Rubinos has done more across two albums and a decade than most musicians ever manage in their lifetime. Her 2013 debut, ‘Magic Trix’, seamlessly blended Latin funk and R&B with post-rock composition and led to a listening experience quite unlike anything else out there. 

Imagine Nelly Furtado meets Erykah Badu, but she’s a math-rock artist and you’ll (perhaps) have an idea.

Since her 2016 sophomore triumph, ‘Black Terry Cat’, Rubinos has toured extensively, garnered critical acclaim and even collaborated with the likes of Battles on their latest album.

Now after a lengthy five year wait, we arrive at ‘Una Rosa’, her most delicate and vulnerable offering yet.

With artwork and content inspired by a glowing, light-up plastic plant from childhood days in her grandmother’s home, the material here feels emotionally less focused, uncertain and sprawling, mirroring the collective inner turmoil the vast majority of us are continuing to presently experience.

Working with long-time collaborator, friend and drummer Marco Buccelli, who has been an intrinsic part of Rubinos’ process since her first full length, ‘Una Rosa’ proves utterly invigorating with its embellishments to her formula.

Sporting an art-pop eccentricity, cuts like the two-minute electro-glitch cluster of ‘Working All The Time’, or the heavily percussive, Latina dreamwave of ‘Don’t Put Me In Red’, showcase an artist ready and willing to twist her own unique formula into even less familiar, expansive territory.

ZB

Wingtips – Cutting Room Floor (Artoffact)

In the last couple of years since the release of their debut album Exposure Therapy on Artoffact Records, Chicago duo Wingtips have since resurfaced in pursuit of futurist EBM aesthetics as Visceral Anatomy, where Hannah Avalon switched with Vincent Segretario as vocalist, as well as an impressive rendition of ‘Tears Of Pearls’ by Savage Garden. This wonderful cover version of the 1999 hit by the Australian pop legends would end up being the perfect segue into their sophomore effort offered up here.

There’s a broad sonic palette presented on Cutting Room Floor, from the blatant electro-pop antics of opening cut “Minimalistic”, and Avalon even appears on vocals for the first time on the airy electronics of ‘Run For Shelter’. Elsewhere, the breezy neon-lit synthwave of ‘Shrinking’ was definitely a highlight, and they certainly save the best for last on the bittersweet first single ‘Wish U The Best’, the perfect combination of ‘80s style synths and gated reverb, with Segretario’s sublime guitar work reminiscent of The Chameleons (said to be a big influence) and once again displaying his talented range as a vocalist. The duo’s usually saccharine take on darkwave has definitely taken on more of a bubblegum aesthetic which contrasts the heartbreaking lyrics, it’s a return to the sound Greyarea or ‘Relativity’ from a few years ago actually – and we’re loving it.

MS

Trip Shrubb – Trewwer, Leud un Danz (Faitiche)

The world of obfuscated loops is familiar territory for Jan Jelinek’s Faitiche label. Amongst its scattered interests in concept-loaded experimentation, exotic minimalism and modular meanderings, you can hear the fuzzy clicks and cycles of tape loops, not least with Nikolaienko’s Rings album from earlier this year. It is of course the practice Jelinek himself founded his creative path on, and it’s a practice which adeptly folds time between the earliest experiments with musical electronics and the unknowable futures experimental electronics still offer in the modern age.

Antiquity and modernism roll side by side on this album from Trip Shrubb, aka Germany’s Michael Beckett, although truthfully it feels more betrothed to the old days as we spool through shadowy corridors of looped sound. Rhythms abound in these pieces, but they’re more like impressions pushing against the gauze of Beckett’s construct – a yellowing, imperfect screen which encases his chosen sonic figures. Trewwer, Leud un Danz is a slow starter – an album which could easily slip by unnoticed in its modest shades and gentle murmurations, but a more engaged sojourn into Beckett’s world rewards you with an evocative experience, the real-world stains of his musical practice etched into these delicate cyclical compositions in a tangible, compelling way.

OW

Sega Bodega – Salvador (Heaven Edition) (Nuxxe)

Nearly two years have passed since Sega Bodega’s debut album ‘Salvador’, which not only showed off the best of the artist’s knife-edge emo, UK bass and pop production, but also his self-starting drive as a collaborator and performer (it came out on his own co-run imprint Nuxxe, along with fellow poststructuralist pin-ups Coucou Chloe, Shygirl, and Oklou).

A singer and producer by trade, Bodega has a passion for emotive vocal inflections and edgy, violent lyrics touching on themes of self-harm and excessive rumination. His vocals tend to flutter about, either robotized by autotune or spread across each mix like breathalized mists. This edition of ‘Salvador’ – the ‘Heaven Edition’ – includes one extra track that completely reframes the the album in this exact manner: ‘Heaven Fell’, which complements the track ‘Heaven Knows’ in a mood of choral reprise. 

While ‘Heaven Knows’ sounds like the fallout of a dastardly merging between Evanescence, Imogen Heap, and Vegyn – blending a driving trap beat with unparalleled vocal modulation, and an arpeggiating goth piano – ‘Heaven Fell’ is more of an ambient vocal swirl, with the vocals being much less clear. In typical Bodega fashion, only the word “struggle” can be made out – the star feature of this track is a restless, androgyne howl, that closes the album on a serious note – contrast to the ratchet humour of ‘U Suck’, ‘2 Strong’ and ‘Smell Of The Rubber’. 

JIJ

This week’s reviewers: Jude Iago James, Mike Sheely, Oli Warwick, Patrizio Cavaliere, Zach Buggy.