The best new albums this week
The albums our writers reckon you must hear
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
As we hurtle towards Xmas, the season of music writers compiling end-of-year lists is very much upon us. For me, 2022 is bookended by two releases that should be high on any discerning list. Leeds-based Yard Act blew a hole in January with their debut outing ‘The Overlord’, while Acid Klaus’ lengthily titled ‘Step on My Travelator: The Imagined Career Trajectory of Superstar DJ & Dance Pop Producer, Melvin Harris’ wins November. And rather neatly, they’re both on Yard Act’s own Zen FC label.
And they’re also releases that couldn’t be more different. ‘Step on My Travelator’ is a concept album from the warped mind of Sheffield-based wildcard Adrian Flanagan and it’s quite the show stopper. For those paying attention, Flanagan is Dean Honer’s partner-in-crime on a raft of brilliant projects including the excellent Desolate Spools label, The Eccentronic Research Council with pal actor Maxine Peake, the Fat White Family-wrangling The Moonlandingz, The International Teachers Of Pop… probably missed a few out, but you get the gist.
The whole Acid Klaus shebang came about during lockdown when Flanagan was listening to his old Street Sounds Electro LPs. One thing led to another and before you know it he’d rustled up a 303 belter, sent it to his pal Maria Uzor – of Norfolk post-punkers Sink Ya Teeth – who added her distinctive vocal and with ‘Party-Sized Away Day’ Acid Klaus was up and running.
The concept is that it charts the rise and fall of superstar DJ Melvin Harris’ fictitious career, taking the listener on a journey through dance music history complete with barbed observations about the excesses of dance music culture along the way. The album is also a collaborative offering and indeed it showcases a raft of storming vocal guests, such as Uzor (so good she appears twice, turning up again on the excellent ‘Crashing Cars In Ibiza’).
‘Bethlehem Or Bust’ finds Melvin playing a free Pagan festival in Wales where he mets a girl “spreading heather across the stage who demands to be allowed to MC over one of his tunes”. The vocal star turn comes entirely in Welsh from singer-songwriter Cat Rin. Turns out it’s a protest song about empire and expansionism, directed squarely at the English. Very clever.
‘Blow Your Speakers’ is Melvin’s crossover smash hit… “quite a solid banger of a tune”. Featuring Calder Valley songwriter Bianca “Soft Focus” Eddleston (“her voice is somewhere between mid-70’s Fleetwood Mac and early Madonna,” says Flanagan) it is indeed quite a solid banger of a tune.
The aforementioned ‘Crashing Cars In Ibiza’ sees Melvin in demand, jetting around the world, living fast and staring burn-out in the face. The wheels finally come off with pounding EBM of ‘Bad Club Bad Drugs Bad People’ and on ‘Elevate’ (featuring Ghost Of A Sabre Tooth Tiger’s Charlotte Kemp Muhl) where “debauchery was a sign on every restroom door”.
And then the pandemic strikes. The brilliantly titled ‘I Used to be a DJ in a Club (Now I’m Just a DJ in My Bedroom)’ is a swipe at who super-sized egos who couldn’t deal with being stuck home alone. Ironically, Kelvin quite enjoyed the downtime. So much so it marked the beginning of the end of his frontline career. The closer, ‘Eulogy To A Quiet Life’ featuring Maxine Peake, finds him buying a place “just down from Llandudno where he was never heard from again”. “All I want is a little house by the sea / To escape the sound of technology” intones Peake.
As well as an award for longest album title of the year, Acid Klaus could be slugging it out with Yard Act for the album of the year gong. Which would be quite the tale.
NM
Kerri Chandler – Spaces & Places (Kaoz Theory)
The long-awaited release of Kerri Chandler’s ‘Spaces & Places’ marks the culmination of an exhausting passion project for the New Jersey native. Chandler has been a larger-than-life presence in the deep house underground for pretty much as long as deep house has been a thing. Actively releasing trademark sonic textures for over thirty years, he’s produced more than his fair share of anthems, and his output – both from the studio and behind the turntables – commands a deservingly glowing respect among peers and fans alike. The new album features a whopping 24 tracks, each of which was recorded in situ at some of the world’s most iconic club venues utilising a portable studio set-up. From Ministry Of Sound to DC10, Knockdown Centre to Lux: Chandler chose a selection of his favourite dance crucibles, crafting the music in the very heart of the spaces it’s intended to fill while drawing on inspiration from nights spent enlivening those very floors.
As expected — and as a series of sample EPs hinted at — the music is brilliantly executed and powerfully effective. From the soulful swells of opener ‘Back To Earth (Find Your Place)’ to the stripped, dub textures of closing track ‘The Box Frame’, the LP is packed with floor-focused fire. Yearning vocals make their collective presence felt at regular intervals throughout, with Chandler staying true to his soul-drenched roots for much of the collection. The honeyed lyrics of ‘Never Thought’ combine with shimmering piano and tough rhythms, while the evocative charm of ‘Tenacity’ brims with bygone US garage atmosphere. Chandler has been responsible for a fair few tough club jams over the years, and tracks like ‘Industria’ and ‘Dirty’ are every bit as raw and urgent as the most propulsive of his back catalogue. The album’s uniformly high-quality threshold makes it hard to pick a winner, but the striking disco version of ‘Kaiku’ is certainly hard to beat. Here, the emotion-rich orchestration of rousing strings, sparkling keys and harmonic guitar is blended to perfection over an irresistible rhythm, making it, if nothing else, one of the most dramatic phases of the wonderfully expansive album. Top marks for the one they call Kaoz, and surely one of the most complete house LPs of the year.
PC
What a sad difference a year makes. This time last year we were getting our first taste of Telefis, the genius sonic pairing of two Irishmen with intertwined roots but very different journeys. Cathal Coughlan (Microdisney, Fatima Mansions and solo), famed for his mastery of a caustic lyric and Jacknife Lee, producer and co-writer of hits to stars like U2 and Taylor Swift, had crossed paths in Ireland many years ago, but when Jacknife decided it was time to start making music to please himself again, Coughlan was top of his list. Through a reintroduction from Auteurs man Luke Haines, they were reunited and Telefis was formed, so named because their shared heritage meant they’d both been exposed to the weird, culturally warped world of the still religion-obsessed state TV station. Their debut ‘A Hon’ is a masterpiece of economic but often very beautiful electronics making space for Coughlan’s words to be heard and felt with a vividness they’d never been framed in before. Even better, the word was that a second album was already in the bag.
Between then and now, of course, has come the shockingly unexpected news of Coughlan’s passing, which can’t but cast a shadow over this second album ‘a Dó’. But it probably shouldn’t – while there’s plenty of poignancy going on here, Coughlan’s sense of mischief is at large too. On ‘The Catharginians’, to a backing that’s like Orange Juice doing slowed down electro, he pokes fun at the legions of bands (his own included, we suspect) travelling the length and breadth of the nation to entertain largely uncaring audiences. “Did you catch our name?” he asks in the chorus. “I don’t think anybody cares what you are called” replies the audience in unison.
Elsewhere, the guests line up for appearances – A Certain Ratio, Jah Wobble, Sean O’Hagan and Echo & The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant – but they all seem to be operating in the shadows of the Telefis sound. Other highlights? The pairing of ‘Strawboy Supernova’, with its pummeling, gnarly proto-acid house with the sublime vocal soaring of ‘Feed The Light’. The hip-hop shuffle of ‘Hare Coursing In Mayfair’, the New Order-esque ‘The Age of Cling’ are both great too, and ‘Space Is Ours’ is its most hilarious moment, painting a grotesque picture of billionaires and trillionaires leaving the earth to us suckers, uploading themselves to a future where they can still give keynote speeches, only with “optional skin and trademark grin”.
We’ll never know exactly what Coughlan knew about his own mortality when he wrote the words, but one thing we can be certain of – it’s a crying shame there’s no third album waiting in the wings.
BW
Patrick Cowley – Malebox (Dark Entries)
Disco pioneer Patrick Cowley will surely go down in history as one of the movement’s most adventurous and experimental producers. Though best known in the commercial sector for crafting hands-in-the-air club anthems, the prolificacy of his output meant that swathes of his productions never saw the light of day, while lesser-known side projects discreetly echoed in the esoteric outer reaches. The team behind US label Dark Entries made it their mission to shine light on some of these unheard and hidden gems, and have, since 2009, worked with Cowley’s loved ones to unearth the best of his secret archives. ‘Malebox’ features six recently discovered tracks recorded between 1979 and 1981 during one of the artist’s most riveting creative spells.
Almost every track included is a high-energy barnstormer, with rousing tempos and effervescent instrumentation very much a key feature. Fusing futuristic electronics with live instrumentation with effortless ease, each title stands up magnificently — towering over much of today’s over-polished nu-disco mediocrity. The gorgeous melodies and weightless harmonics of ‘Floating’ provide an early highlight, with dubbed-out delays and limber percussion adding character to the groove. Ratcheting up the energy, the stirring strings and rolling bass of ‘Love & Passion’ arrives as a latent anthem, hitting the sweet spot between accessible melodic charge and raw underground allure.
If it’s cosmic chuggers you’re after, look no further than the aptly titled ‘Low Down Dirty Rhythm’, with its gloriously loose and limber groove driving space-age refrains and achingly soulful vocals over a psychedelic arrangement. Elsewhere, ‘Love Me Hot’, ‘If You Feel It’ and ‘Wicked Tool’ are each ripe for dancefloor hedonism, helping to ensure every inch of wax is utilised to the fullest on this most captivating of LPs. To top it off, the package also contains a letter from Patrick Cowley to French disco producer Pierre Jaubert as well as expansive liner notes and hand-written lyrics. Fittingly, ‘Malebox’ saw its release date set for November 12, marking the 40th anniversary of Patrick’s untimely passing.
PC
The Human League – The Virgin Years (UMC)
Spanning nine years and generating four albums and an extended EP, The Human League’s Virgin years were, in the grand scheme, time well spent. And while the centrepiece of those years is the stone-cold classic ‘Dare’, this five-disc, colour vinyl collection of their 1980s output has much else to enjoy.
As you move further away from ‘Dare’, which is obviously included here, there’s no denying their super powers diminish, but who’s wouldn’t when you’ve made one of the greatest album of all-time? Their Virgin swansong, 1990’s ‘Romantic!’, produced a solitary hit ‘Heart Like A Wheel’, but do check out the production credits as it saw the band reunite with Martin Rushent (there was a bust-up during the making of 1984’s ‘Hysteria’) and also features Warp’s Rob Gordon and Chakk/FON/Moloko’s Mark Brydon on production duties. Quite the line-up.
A close relative to ‘Dare’ is ‘Fascination!’, a seven-track EP that brought together post-’Dare’ singles, remixes and B-sides and a new track, ‘I Love You Too Much’. With Rushent still on board the highlights are two cracking versions of the brilliantly wonky ‘Fascination’.
Perhaps the best tale here centres around 1986’s ‘Crash’, which saw the band travel to Minneapolis to work with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. While it’s a great record – Jam and Lewis came to ‘Crash’ straight after Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’ and it shows – the band disowned it saying that while they enjoyed the experience “it just wasn’t our album”. As if to prove the point the album’s biggest hit, ‘Human’, was written by Jam and Lewis.
The aforementioned ‘Dare’ follow-up, 1984’s ‘Hysteria’, was fraught with difficulty seeing Martin Rushent walk out and his replacement Chris Thomas doing likewise. Despite which it’s a really great album. It was eventually seen over the line by Hugh Padgham and features three massive hits in the shape of ‘The Lebanon’, ‘Life On Your Own’ and ‘Louise’.
Good as these reissues are (this year’s RSD saw a white vinyl version of The League Unlimited Orchestra’s dazzling ‘Love And Dancing’ to complete the Virgin set), The League haven’t been spotted in recorded form since 2011’s ‘Credo’. High time there was a new record, eh folks?
NM
Contact-U – Dancing Inner Space 1982-1984 (Freestyle)
Go digging into the highways and byways of the early 80s electro-boogie explosion, and there are always exciting records to discover. The particular appeal can vary, from visionary creative ideas to surprisingly powerful studio heft, or sometimes just an impossibly funky groove. In the case of Contact-U, the unique appeal is something more like a minimalism which was rare for the time, which leaves you sometimes wondering whether you’re listening to a 21st Century Dam Funk production or something from way back in ’83.
Contact-U was a project from Richard De Jongh and Andy Sojka, who were busy as the 70s flipped to the 80s. Sojka in particular founded iconic British funk label Elite and formed part of Atmosfear, responsible for all-time boogie monster ‘Dancing In Outer Space.’ Challenge operated as a sublabel of Elite, where Sojka and De Jongh could indulge themselves with smaller projects such as this one, which has been picked out of Discogs obscurity and dusted down by Freestyle.
If you love boogie, you’re going to love every inch of the Contact-U sound, but even for those with a limited appreciation, there’s something compelling about these extended instrumental beatdowns which feels like the future beaming back to De Jongh and Sojka’s studio. For all the soul and funk touchstones in the sound, it’s music which celebrates the advent of the machine age, reveling in drum machines, synths and FX without the need to humanize anything. It’s charmingly wonky like any groove from the era should be, but it’s absolutely built for robots to get down to. Just port yourself back in time, lose yourself to the ‘Long Distance Version’ of ‘Dancing Inner Space’ and you’ll hear the shape of electronic dance music to come looming up before you.
OW
Tsutchie – Samurai Champloo Music: Playlist (Flying Dog)
First aired between May 2004 and March 2005, Samurai Champloo is a Japanese animated historical adventure series set in a fictionalised Edo period, which in real life spanned 350 years or so, beginning in 1603 and ending in 1867, with the Tokugawa shogunate in power alongside around 300 regional feudal lords, or daimyo. Suffice to say, the cartoon interpretation isn’t all that accurate, especially in terms of its music.
Hip hop and Far Eastern cultures have a storied history — most notably in the Shaolin quan kung fu iconography and sound effects prominently employed by Wu-Tang Clan. Champloo instead opts for samurai as a focal point, but the Music: Playlist could easily be digested without you noticing that. Forget samples of altercations, stand-offs, martial arts pep talks and fight scenes, then, here we’re given clever and varied beats, breaks, and rhythms courtesy of Japanese production don Shinji “Tsutchie” Tsuchida, who first rose to prominence as part of the Shakkazombie hip hop group alongside Osumi and Hide-Bowie.
Offering an expansive aural adventure over no less than 18 tracks, tones range from the opening sweet piano stunner, ‘Thank You’, to raw, compressed percussion and hook-heavy efforts like ‘Flip’ and ‘Tuned’, e-funk wobbles on ‘Stretch Out’ and ‘Absolute, to uptempo breakbeat chaos with ‘Reflective’. Myriad styles all interconnected through studio excellence at the hands of the producer and his clear appreciation for funkier sides of hip hop that still make room for genuine experimentation, the result is a versatile collection of instrumentals that could serve for dinner and drinks or as the bones of a cut and paste DJ set. Impressively reflecting just a little of the Champloo musical universe (Fat Jon, Nujabes, and Force of Nature were also behind the original score), it makes you wonder why all soundtracks can’t be like this.
MH
Ulla Strauss steps back through the refracted portal of post-modern ambient used by her and her friends to gift us a curious beacon of light for shorter days. Around 3XL, Experiences Ltd. and this scattered network of experimentalists, fresh ideas seem to manifest at a steady clip and so it goes on the delightful foam. On this occasion, it appears Strauss has been particularly interested in sampling techniques, laying down takes of piano, guitar, singing and other such worldly material and setting the play-head off on a skittish ride across the waveform.
In comparison to some other works, Strauss sounds almost maximalist at times here. The jagged keys spring out of ‘song’ with a light-footed joie de vivre which instantly enamours you to the album, while ‘gloss’ comes on like deep cover Suzanne Vega put through a mincer and still manages to be quite joyous. There’s still plenty of passages of space and reflection, as on the dislocated ‘blush’, but pronounced figures of sound and speech continue to dance in the foreground. There is even the odd plaintive synth refrain – ‘scrubby’ is arresting in its simplicity, shaking off the glitches for a cute moment of simplicity amidst the more scattershot sample-a-delic moments.
OW
Photay with Carlos Niño – An Offering (International Anthem)
Opening with the sound of rain pouring and distorted instruments tuning up, An Offering instantly reveals itself as a deeply thoughtful album. A record that makes no apologies for sitting firmly in the avant garde of ambient electronica, but is determined to invite anyone within earshot in from that audible downpour.
Slowly dissipating, leaving behind a layered melodic loop, it’s not long before we start to warm up, harp strings contributed by New York talent Mikaela Davis marking the beginning of an expansive track, ‘C U R R E N T’, which then introduces subtle vocal details, as if the textures already there weren’t enough as it was. From here, we open into a vast but quiet sonic world, a place always evolving, but nevertheless incredibly still, or, at least, un-rushed.
Combing field recordings with structured instrumental elements, electronic and acoustic, it’s a combination of purposeful music and background atmosphere straddling experimental electronica, contemporary classical, and sonic art. Given this comes from two masters — East Coast percussionist and producer Photay and LA-based studio don Carlos Niño — perhaps we should have expected it to unfold in this way: so effortless, as though realised through an evolutionary process rather than planned design.
MH
E Ruscha V ft. Peter Zummo – Thinking A View (Fourth Sounds)
Having coursed through many a project in his time, cosmic traveller Eddie Ruscha seems in a comfortable rhythm of productivity these days, exploring sunkissed psychedelia from his base on the West Coast and inviting us all to bask in it. The previous appearances as E Ruscha V on Beats In Space and Good Morning Tapes have offered up balmy ambient-not-ambient, new-age-not-new-age sonics for those who enjoy chilling to electronic music played like traditional instrumentation, and so it continues as he stretches out into his own Fourth Sounds label.
2021’s Cosmic Harmonics was a treat, but the anticipation goes further here as Ruscha invites collaboration from a veritable NYC downtown legend, Peter Zummo. As a trombonist and restless experimenter, Zummo’s credits reach far and wide, and he offered some scattered parts to Ruscha to thread into this beautiful record. How the process went down isn’t exactly clear, but the combination feels entirely natural. The trombone melts between burbling synth lines of all shapes and sizes as Ruscha shapes up his dynamic, fantasy environs. Warmth radiates from every inch of the record, whether in the form of a weightless vignette or a slowly unfurling tapestry, and Zummo’s presence acts as a comforting, consistent presence.
OW
A Rocket In Dub – Ltd. (Krachladen Dub)
Stefan Schwander has enjoyed some kind of cult recognition in the past 10 years or so for his work as Harmonious Thelonious, but he has plenty of other ventures under his belt which reach back further and wider. Repeat Orchestra is an oft-overlooked outlet for sublime minimal house, and his work in The Durian Brothers with Don’t DJ and Marc Matter yielded some stunning polyrhythmic trysts. He also explored dub-informed approaches to his stripped down sound as A Rocket In Dub, and that project has since enjoyed a revival via a label on Schwander’s home turf of Düsseldorf – Krachladen Dub.
The tracks making up Ltd. are all fresh productions, but there’s a timelessness to Schwander’s style which could comfortably place these pieces anywhere in his career. These are far from dub-by-numbers exercises, but rather a variety of sprightly pieces pinging slight arrangements through generous delays. There’s rarely any attempt to emulate the code of sound system music, and so you might well here a skippy strain of deep techno or micro house passing through the mixer sends and returns, largely with sparkling results. There’s a lightness to Schwander’s sound which makes it go down very smoothly indeed, perhaps only slightly disturbed by the parp of trombone which crops up intermittently. It’s a stark choice to include in the sound palette which might ward some listeners off, but it does add a certain lively tone to the proceedings to break up the sleek patterns of interwoven synths and clicky percussion.
OW
Deep Nalström – Naissance Aux Mondes Invisibles (Slow Life)
When most contemporary electronic artists seem to deal in absolutes along the spectrum between dancefloor beats and blissful ambience, it’s a joy to hear the continued evolution of someone like Deep Nalström. The Bristol-based artist’s sound is a shoe-in for the backroom chill-out spaces of yesteryear, which everyone agrees we need more of, but he’s just as comfortable keeping a sense of movement and energy in his music, however mellow it gets. Following his first album on Natural Selections in 2019 and an EP on Nummer last year, Nalström arrives at S. Moreira’s Slow Life label with a fresh expanse of gentle, new age-dusted electronica.
There are different approaches being explored here, from the hand drums, bells and chiming tones fluttering around opening track ‘Transmutation’ to the oceanic rumble of low-end percussion powering ‘Treasure Below’. In each instance, the attention-grabbing sounds up front are ensconced in a richly detailed soundworld, where reverb is wielded with exacting intention to create a three-dimensional quality to the music. Even in the more outwardly ambient pieces like ‘Golden Hour’, there’s a constant, palpable sense of distance and space, which does wonders for the worlds Nalström is able to build with his music.
There’s a fine line to tread when taking cues from new age music, so often a harbour for saccharine compositions that veer into the banal, but Nalström maintains a sense of mystery and intrigue in his harmonic counterpoints at all times. As a result, Naissance Aux Mondes Invisibles maintains a soothing, tender quality without ever falling into the trap of being too tediously ‘nice’. This balance is also achieved by moving patiently between beats and a lack thereof, and album closer ‘Beyond The Barrier’ sums this up beautifully as a dubby undercurrent of rhythm intermittently strides up under a soaring ensemble of synthetic strings. The drums bring some welcome energy, and add a resounding lift to the blanket of melody at the front of the mix, all feeding into this moving, compelling concoction that reaches for true beauty without getting caught somewhere bland along the way.
OW
This week’s reviewers: Oli Warwick, Neil Mason, Patrizio Cavaliere, Martin Hewitt, Ben Willmott.