The best new albums this week

Our writers’ selection of the top album action this week

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Telefis- A hAon (Dimple Discs)

Without wishing to get all Carrie Bradshaw on you, this week I’ve been wondering if song titles are becoming a dying art. Have we perhaps reached peak song title? Are there so many songs that we don’t notice the good titles any more? Or have they just become markers, lacking in the sort of weight the music within often contains?

A decent song title is something of a marker in itself – the ones that stop you in your tracks tend to suggest that here’s an artist who likes to tangle with words. Before you’ve heard a note of ‘A hAon’, a debut collaboration between super producer Garrett “Jacknife” Lee and Microdisney/Fatima Mansions’ Cathal Coughlan, you want to hear what ‘Archbishop Beardmouth At The ChemOlympics’ or ‘There Goes Waterface’ have in store. More about all that in a moment.

First, the cast. Jacknife Lee caught the attention in the late 90s with his big beat broadside debut album ‘Muy Rico’. By by the time his self-titled third outing was released in 2007, his work with the likes of U2, REM, Biffy Clyro, Snow Patrol, Kasabian, Editors, The Killers, Two Door Cinema Club to name but a few, suggested his reputation as a producer was brewing nicely.

Following the demise of Fatima Mansions in 1995, Coughlan has been ploughing his own distinctive field, releasing a raft of fine solo albums, the most recent of which – 2021’s excellent ‘Song Of Co-Aklan’ – features a whole hog of collaborators, including Luke Haines (see below), Scritti Politti’s Rhodri Marsden, as well as Microdisney bandmate Sean O’Hagan and Eileen Gogan and Aindrais O’Gruama from Fatima Mansions.

Lee and Coughlan know each other from way back. From 1980s Dublin. In fact, while still in his early teens, Lee supported Microdisney before they headed for London and indie fame. The pair lost touch, but were reintroduced via Luke Haines (see above) who, it turns out, Lee had also been working with. Acquaintance renewed, with little to do during lockdown, the pair began trading files – Lee beavering away in Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains, Couglan back in Dublin. The result is ‘A hAon’.

‘Telefis’ is Gaelic for “Television” and the opening intro ‘Seo E Glor Na Telifise’ sets us up for a ‘Brazil’-like journey into a world where black and white TV screens flicker with innocent mass entertainment. The album is a sideways look at Irish history and their shared love of pop culture over the years, “corrosive nostalgia” they call it. The subject matter spans ‘Mister Imperator’ recounting the tale of a light entertainment pianist who appeared in the first TV broadcasts in Ireland in 1961, to ‘Sex Bunting’, the almost true story of hipster film crew slumming it in east London on a video shoot.

You can hear the influence of Jacknife Lee’s big beat days – fat synths, crashing funk-fulled rhythms, huge melodies. ‘Picadors’, with its haunting ‘Twin Peaks’ twanging and mournful brass is beautiful, while the urgent strings of ‘Stampede’ have the feel of Micheal Nyman about them. And, of course, Coughlan looms large. His distinctive vocal is pushed to the fore making his words as clear as a bell. He says the remote working process has “shaken loose many weird and hopefully wonderful things in my verbal workshop”. And indeed they have. It soon becomes clear you’re going to be listening again and again as you unpick the off-kilter tales. “Some of the vocals Cath sent over made me burst out laughing with giddiness and delight at the novelty of them. Mischievous, dark, arcane, crispy fresh, and always unexpected,” says Lee.

There’s some glorious lines. Sometimes it’s a startling set-up (“I know / What you’re thinking / It’s ‘There’s that guy who tried to poison me’” from ‘Mister Imperator’) or a showstopping conclusion ““Here’s the hell you asked for / A greasy diesel hotel / Serpent in a holdall” from ‘Sex Bunting’). Sometimes a stream of consciousness (“Culvert, truck bonnet, crazed mob, crowbars” from ‘Archbishop Beardmouth At The ChemOlympics”) or just a good flow (“He’s the flim-flam sober man / Hip flasks taped to cymbal stands” from ‘The Symphonies Of Danny La Rue’).

Whether we have or haven’t reached peak song title (next week I’ll be be tackling “Do we need a drama to make a relationship work?”), Telefis are not only leading the charge to keep the art alive, but musically and lyrically they’re kicking it around the room in some style. This is a firecracker of an album.

NM

Jimpster – Birdhouse (Freerange)

Producer, DJ, label boss and general jewel of the underground, Jimpster, takes a momentary sidestep from the dancefloor with his far-reaching new album, ‘Birdhouse’. The Freerange Records co-founder is best-known for his texture-rich deep house explorations, having forged a distinctive, UK-tinted sound that’s respectfully informed by US masters. Here, Jamie ‘Jimpster’ Odell embraces his early influences of jazz, 70’s fusion, library music, ambient and sample-based downtempo electronica to serve a spellbinding album that’s variously primed for at-home listening, weekend warm-ups, and twilight meditations.

The tone is well and truly set by the mesmerising opener, ‘Birdhouse’, where dramatic choral samples, sumptuous pads and psychedelic synths soar over hypnotic percussion. Next, the soul-searing vocals and rolling jazz-funk drums of ‘Ascension’ see live bass and Fender Rhodes accompaniment blissfully envelope the gloriously optimistic lyrics. ‘Voodoo’ represents a subtle change of tone, introducing contemporary street-soul swagger thanks, in equal measures, to Odell’s jagged drum programming, and New York-based MC YOH’s compelling lyrical flow. The glistening keys and scattered rhythms of ‘Still Believe’ are steeped in nostalgic atmospherics, while London-based vocalist Cairo’s heartfelt performance on the gently euphoric ‘Beautiful Day’ proves profoundly memorable, echoing over elegant trumpet and dextrous Rhodes solos. The poignant interlude ‘Heavy’ strikes an affecting chord, acutely conjuring the residual uncertainty of lockdown living, before the low-slung beats, rising strings and dazzling arpeggios of ‘Future Paradise’ majestically lift the mood. Protagonist of Clyde’s 2003 club bomb ‘Serve It Up’, Capitol A, dishes out his distinctive flow on the jazz-flecked hip hop strut of ‘Rain’, before Jimpster’s effortless genre-surfing continues via the rolling breaks of future jazz groover, ‘The Doors Of Your Heart’. Transposing through space, time and tempos, the horizontal flex of ‘Tell You’ sees infectious vocal chops permeate blunted beats and smoke-filled sonics. Finally, the psycho-spiritual swells of closing track ‘Full Circle’ allow for a blissful moment of reflection before dissipating into the eternal silence. This is genuinely breathtaking work from Jimpster. Deep, accessible and expansive in scope, the vastly talented producer shows strings to his studio bow that transcend club environs, expertly channelling his immaculately-crafted sound beyond the dancefloor and into the subconscious of a whole new set of listeners.

PC

Jeff Phelps ‘Magnetic Eyes’ (Numero Group)

Re-issue specialists Numero Group dig deep to revive this hard-to-find pearl from Jeff Phelps, applying a tasteful re-mastering touch to his 1985 collection, ‘Magic Eyes’. Given the unquestionable quality of the music, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that the album is Phelps’ solitary long-playing vinyl contribution. Stripped, searingly soulful, and laden in mid-’80s electro-funk charm, the 10 track work sounds remarkably on-point today. First published as a private pressing (and, therefore, extraordinarily rare and expensive to find in its original form), the album was recorded and produced by Phelps in his Missouri City bedroom studio. Among many highlights is the boogie-bred shuffle of the title track, with its jagged synth lines and floating chords blending majestically over scattered electro drums.

Elsewhere, the jazz-funk horns of ‘Wrong Space Wrong Time’ feel informed by the likes of Donald Byrd, while the street soul swagger of ‘Don’t Fall Apart On Me’ simultaneously homespun and pop-coated. The robotic flex of ‘Sometime Lover’ rings out as a relatable tale of unrequited love, as loose and limber synth lines combine over the steady machine drum rhythm. On the flip, the space-age synthwork of ‘Phase Shift’ is thick with gravitational pull, while the brooding bass and poetic vocals of ‘On The Corner’ see Phelps rise in like a futurist Gil Scott-Heron before serving a most contagious e-piano solo. Mechanical but loose, naive but musically rich, this heartfelt album is a must for fans of Dam Funk (who counts himself as a fervent admirer of Phelps), Psychic Mirrors and the like, and represents an excellent spot of resurrection from the Numero Group.

PC

Dorian Electra – Flamboyant (Dorian Electra)

The album that put Dorian Electra on the map is back. Long before their incel-themed image change and album ‘My Agenda’, ‘Flamboyant’ presented the lighter side of Electra’s palette, and dealt mainly in themes of deconstructed masculinity. Nearly every track – tinged with whacked-out vocal processing and glitzing production edges – explored either dated or hyped-up ‘man’ gender roles, from the towering sugar daddy (‘Daddy Like’) to the meek scene kid (‘Guyliner’) and the corporate climber (‘Career Boy’). Of course, they all came with music videos, cementing the new hyperpop artist as one who occupies a keen space on the image-centric net. More than anything, they’re now known as an extremely visual queer music artist, spanning both music and recorded, mega-colour-graded performance art.

But for the weirdo curio or true fan, this edition of ‘Flamboyant’ contains five new cuts, left over from the album’s recording sessions and yet again exploring several new pisstakey angles on overhyped masculine roles. ‘Tool For You’ is a janky and cranky post-SOPHIE pop bit, instrumentally resembling the original ‘Flamboyant’ – but rather than being about ostentation in personality, it concerns back-bending tendencies in men, via the ironic sexual glorification of mechanics and handymen – “You got a leak, I can stop it / You got a hole, I can fill it / You got a crack, let me seal it / You need to screw…”

‘Under The Armor’ is the spiritual successor to ‘Die By The Sword’, albeit swapping out the symbol of the phallic sword for the defensive trope of armor, which – along with the lyric “but you push me farther away” – could easily be read as an analogy for bottled up emotions. ‘Your Kinda Guy’, meanwhile, explores a horrific frat-bro cowboy crossover – “gettin’ rowdy”, “step into my truck” and “you only get one shot” being the clever quips that adorn the lyrics. The whole thing rounds off with a fantastic trap-donk remix of gay anthem ‘Adam And Steve’ by elven DJ Count Baldor, if that wasn’t enough glitz, trill and squelch for you. 

JIJ

Waveform* – Last Room (Run For Cover)

Waveform* are the understated writing duo of Blah and blah, combining elements of lo-fi emo, folk, and darkly tinted shoegaze musings.

Their material has been compared to the likes of Alex G, Teen Suicide, and Have A Nice Life, while the similarities are somewhat tenuous. Yes, there’s the telltale DIY lo-fi charm (all releases thus far have been self-produced and recorded via laptop) as well as the sudden sonic shifts in tone that resemble their peers, but there’s more to ‘Last Room’.

The duo’s third full-length, originally released in 2020, has been reissued by their new label home Run For Cover; arguably one of the main pillars of the current emo revival. Modern genre stalwarts such as Modern Baseball, Turnover, Pinegrove and Fiddlehead are examples of the past and present pedigree that this project now sits alongside.

It’s a well deserved signing as the emotive dynamism that Waveform* exude across the brief 26-minute runtime couldn’t feel more at home on the RFC roster. Acoustic post-folk ditties like the lush opener ‘Favorite Song’ or the melancholic ‘Hello Goodbye’ clash against the traditional Basement style emo-grunge leanings of ‘Tell You’ and ‘Blue Disaster’. Outliers, such as the somewhat haunting ‘Go To Bed’ and the hazy, dispondent closing title-track, recall Giles Corey in a slightly warmer, less caustic manner.

The three-way combination of the gentle, traditional and abstract allows for ‘Last Room’ to feel expansive beyond its brevity, which is paramount to the strength of the duo’s writing and scope. Although it’s only now available on wax, with the album being two solid years old, here’s to hoping their recent signing means the wait for new material won’t be too far off.

ZB

Scalameriya – Aeon Core (Perc Trax)

Scalameriya (Nikola Grebovic) is a long-enduring name in the landscape of underground techno. In contrast to his standing, though, his sound has grown progressively more intense over the years, morphing out of the more aggressive ends of techno alongside collaborators such as VSK, and now into purer schranzy craziness, culminating in his second album, ‘Aeon Core’.

Fitting for an album that’s touted as Grebovic’s most developed artistic statement yet, we get a strong sci-fi influence between this one’s beats and themes. But it’s still a dance album at its core. Phat, crunching kicks with a searing non-dynamism are central, with every of these 8 tracks making the same use of that proto-hardstyle grit we all love. The track ‘Kiti Kimera’ seems to embody every fucked-up aspect of the pursuit of techno grandiosity; as kick drums and glitches intensify to brickwalled high heaven, deception voices repeat “power, honour, glory”, in typical post-apocalyptic, cyborgy fashion.

The latter half of the album deals in just as much armageddo-energy as the first. ‘Lake Of Wires’ is a strong exercise in between-the-beatery, as everything from synaptic electrical pops to glitching fish slaps writhe between the kick drum – seemingly the only regular element in Scalameriya’s music. The conceptual sci-fi basis ups its ante, meanwhile; ‘Solid Shards Of Time’ is by far the album’s most raucous track, recalling the rough 8th note glitches of Electromeca or the saturated dubstep sound design of Bare Noize. After this sound-designy moment, finally, comes the electrified closer ‘Warbeast’. A fierce yet robotic second LP from the Belarusian.

JIJ

Kelan – Downtown (Bristol Normcore)

Since he first came creeping onto the Bristol underground, Max Kelan has made a sizable impact on the city’s musical culture. His musical focus towards industrial sounds has merged with city’s noisy, punky, dubby traditions to the point where it’s hard to remember a time before the likes of Avon Terror Corps, the collective of sonic miscreants he is a central part of. In Bad Tracking he and Gordon Apps explore the fraught relationship between humans and technology through abrasive noise and provocative performance, while his poetry has already shaped out his solo artistic identity.

As a debut album, Downtown builds on the foundations of these practices with an incisive set of songs. For all his leftfield tendencies, Kelan has boiled this album down to punchy pieces loaded with intent. He’s mentioned elsewhere he was aiming for a pop sensibility, although that’s probably stretching it when you listen to him spit and snarl his politicised diatribes on ‘The Rag’.

The palette is a brittle, bashy kind of drum machine nihilism, but you can hear him testing his songwriting confidence as he lets a little melody into his voice on ‘Factory Of Sins’. It’s quite possibly pointing the way to a more pop-oriented direction as he grows as an artist, but for now his polemic is vital and assured enough, his musical vision intent enough, that Downtown marks a thrilling first release from Kelan as himself.

OW

Vlad Dobrovolski – Playbacks For Dreaming (Muscut)

Despite recent world events, Ukraine-native electronic musicians are still going fiercely and courageously strong. Muscut are a strong case in point, with label mainstay Nikolaienko recently releasing a collaborative EP with Aussie-via-Estonian artist Tapes only last week. This week, however, we delve even further into Muscut’s fore with a new album from Russian composer Vlad Dobrovolski, whose various projects include the label Gost Zvuk and the experimental tape-loopy band S A D – both routine experiments in sound archaeology and ethereal digitalia not common in the West.

Former releases on Irish fixture 12th Isle, however, have cemented this album’s coming to be, continuing their unique new-agey electronic bent. Perhaps the sonic message of ‘Playbacks For Dreaming’ can best be summed up by the 5th track ‘La Llum’; flutes and pan-pipes dither and sway about the mix, exposing it, while sloshing arps and water trickling FX are slowly unleashed in a calm deluge of sound, making it difficult to discern where the digital parts end and the live-recorded parts begin.

Dobrovolski’s inspirations come from the real anxiety of life, which in his words, “does not let you calm down and beats with a key and a fountain inside”. ‘People Who Still Sleep’ resonates with this to a T: deep flowing sine pads, and undulating variations on a bass melody, seem to recall the mood of a man who has made peace with life’s nervous ebbs and flows, not resisting them but making peace with them. ‘Ugra Ice’ and ‘The Shadow Side Of Joy Fungi’ are further quasi acoustic go-tos, making the album sound more like an alien garden as it progresses. A must listen for any fan of Dobrovolski not used to his ambient side.

JIJ

Metoronori – Evenings (Glossy Mistakes) 

Odd as it sounds, we can’t recall a single other vocalist and producer working in this style. On her sixth album ‘Evenings’, Japanese artist Metoronori (Hikari Okuyama) melds lo-fi electronic beats with midnight key and synth melodies, her style remaining firmly in the camp of dry, melodic, subdued and nocturnal sound. The love-child of the UK’s ‘night bus’ or ‘city rivims’ microgenres, blended with classical and film influences, we’re not surprised that this album comes from Tokyo; a city often represented in pop culture as one of the most rain-drenched and melancholy urban centres, as worthy of late-night pining and night drives as its counterparts like London.

Born out of an “unstable few years” for Metoronori – in which she found herself wandering the streets and scouring the Tokyo Metro at night, taking in the atmosphere – this album is a gorgeous exercise in glowing warmth, with minimality representing the Tokyo cold, and each sound, free-jazzy or electronic, bubbling up like a flickery flame. Imagine the synthy arpeggiations of Colleen or Oklou, blended with the regional samplage of Foodman and the cute J-pop croons of HIkaru Utada. That’s ‘Evenings’. From the second track ‘Like A Lamp’ to the penultimate ‘Flesh Alone’, musical beauty always radiates; Okuyama’s musicianship is unparalleled, as every track either features a Rhodes flourish, arp twinkle, or strange curio sample, selected with care and precision.

JIJ

Grove – Queer + Black (Spinny Nights)

If you’ve caught the buzz building around Grove and proceeded to check their music, you’ll know the noise is all justified. For an artist seemingly realising themselves in the process of releasing a salvo of deadly EPs, their degree of creative intent is borderline intimidating. Having grown up in Cheltenham, they moved to Bristol to find a more inspiring scene to call home, and while they’ve already positively integrated with the city’s scene it feels like Grove is on a trajectory to somewhere which transcends geographical scenes.

Doing their own production (albeit with a little input from the likes of Robin ‘Giant Swan’ Stewart), they’re presenting a visceral twis’ up on dancehall, grime and straight-up rap which feels like someone manifesting their individuality in a way no one could dare to imitate. Their flows are honest and artful, playing around with rhythmic structure in that unschooled way which suggests no desire to imitate anyone else and simply running on instinct. On ‘Black’, they deliver a clear-eyed run on their heritage and place their racial identity right in the here and now (shouting out the toppling of the Colston statue in Bristol), with a guest spot from Griz-O.

At times the gnarly, nightmarish strain of dancehall calls to mind some of The Bug’s fiercest work, and they can play with sweetness and savagery in their vocal delivery like Miss Red, but those are only faint impressions. Grove’s power lies in their uniqueness, bringing an undeniable punk energy in their open attitude towards sampling, beat construction and track structure. It’s a high energy rush which peaks with ‘FUCK YOUR LANDLORD’, a bludgeoning protest song which further pushes Grove along the path to more widespread notoriety as one of the most vital young Black voices in Britain.

OW