The best new albums this week

by Juno Daily on 13.01.2023 at 17:24pm.
Last edited: 16.01.2023 at 11:22am.

The albums that matter from the past seven days

ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Billy Nomates? Guest appearance on Sleaford Mods’ ‘Mork n Mindy’, right? And that’s probably the extent of knowledge the passing observer has about Midlands-raised, Bristol-based Tor Maries. What the more eagle-eyed will have clocked is Geoff Barrow provided some production work on her 2020 self-titled debut album as Billy Nomates and wasted no time signing her to his excellent Invada label.

And if Geoff Barrow’s involved you’d be wise to listen. The rewards for doing just that with ‘CACTI’, the second Billy Nomates album, are great.

There’s a shift here from that self-titled debut – for a start the sound is bigger, fuller, with more of a band feel to proceedings. The press release talks about there being an “economy of sound” that Maries “achieves with her defiantly DIY approach”. While that may have been true for the debut, we’re moving into new territory here.

While ‘CACTI’ was conceived in her kitchen, it was brought to life at Invada Studios where Maries “raided the cupboards”. Imagine what Geoff Barrow has in his cupboards, and well, here it is, ‘CACTI’-shaped. Co-produced with the label’s in-house engineer James Trevascus, DIY this is not.

A track like ‘Blue Bones (Deathwish)’ has Maries coming on like late-period Fleetwood Mac. FLEETWOOD MAC! Think ‘Tango In The Night’, you know, ‘Big Love’, ‘Seven Wonders’, ‘Everywhere’. Maries voice sounds great too – she’s signing rather than the predominant sprechstimme of the debut. There’s a Stevie Nicks-like rasp on a track like ‘Spite’, which shimmers with Top 40 power chords and ripples with a bassline that wouldn’t be far out of place in 1980s Sheffield.

And that’s where ‘CACTI’ scores big. What Maries does, and she does it deliciously well, is mix these 80s AOR pop licks with some filthy synth work and basslines Cabaret Voltaire would’ve been very happy about. So she can get as 80s AOR she likes, but there’s a sensibility here that loiters in the post punk/no wave back streets and nods knowingly in very much the right direction. So a track like ‘Same Gun’ has such a glorious pop hook, but the bass is stripped bare, stalking, almost krauty. It makes me think of Pat Benatar for some reason. I know, I know.

Lyrically, Maries takes a step back from the ballsy front-foot lyrics of the debut album. Here she displays a more heart-on-the-sleeve venerability, prompted by the familiar wobbles cast by the lockdowns, which, looking back now were beyond weird. So into the trauma of the last couple years she wades, confronting uncomfortable truths or as Tor puts it, “70-80 per cent of being bold is about being vulnerable as hell.”

The hypnotic closer, ‘Blackout Signal’ lays out her thoughts on the matter. “I can’t wait for the blackout signal / I dream of shutdowns now”. It’s a cry for the peace and quiet of lockdown, for a return of the hope that when it was all over perhaps the world would change for the better. Fat chance. It’s a track that descends into a dark hole the longer it goes on with Maries howling the chorus into the void towards the end. Brilliant stuff.

There’s not a dud track – or one even approaching average – across the 12 offerings on ‘CACTI’. “There’s too much music in the world already,” believes Maries, “so everything I make has to count.” And count it does. January is always a bit early to be talking albums of the year, but this sets a very high bar that’s for sure.

Eddie Richards – After All Vol 2 (Repeat)

Genre definitions are funny things. Quite apart from the fact that their use has become increasingly perplexing as musical forms evolve, mutate and splinter off into novel territory, these stylistic terms mean different things to different people. Few such definitions in modern dance music appear as fraught with ambiguity, even controversy, as tech-house. To modern audiences, it conjures images of immaculately manicured, sleeve-tattoo-wearing and, most likely, super sexy jocks fist-pumping while Traktor mixes their freshly downloaded top 100 Beatport chart tracks for them. In these instances, the music tends towards the forgettable, an indistinct third cousin twice removed from what the tag once meant. Back in the ‘90s and ‘00s, the hybrid techno house sound championed by DJs and creators for whom techno was a touch too moody, house a little too saccharine, was positioned on the brightly burning vanguard of UK club culture. Propulsive and raw, crowed-enlivening but never cheesy, the sound balanced techno’s abstract abandon with the hooks and funk of house, and the events at which it was played were some of the most vibrant and unabashed of the time.

It’s hard to think of a single artist with whom the origins of ground-level tech house are more closely interwoven than Eddie Richards. Around and actively contributing to the UK’s house movement since its very beginnings, Richards was blazing a trail as far back as the halcyon days of rave in the ‘80s. He rose to greater prominence as one of the core protagonists of the then-burgeoning tech house sound, his Fabric residency the stuff of legends. German label Repeat have done a grand job re-issuing a selection of his finest works over three instalments. ‘After All Vol 2’ contains some of his very best, with each track a seductive banger. Whatever tech house means today, if you want to immerse yourself in or get to know the sound in its purest and most vital form, this is an excellent place to start.

Liela Moss – Internal Working Model (Bella Union)

If you’re going to have special guests, Gary Numan, Jehnny Beth and Dhani Harrison would do it. Welcome to ‘Internal Working Model’, the third solo album from The Duke Spirit’s Liela Moss.

We’re seeing a number of records that deal with the fallout of the last few years. Working with bandmate/real-life partner Toby Butler, Moss vents her “frustration at our disconnected culture”, you know, the way big business puts itself in the way of our basic needs. “There is very little work in the public interest. Self-interest reins supreme, and it’s toxic,” she offers. The antics of someone like Michelle Mone spring to mind, perhaps?

Moss talks about taking an interest in the work of people like Vandana Shiva, Gabor Mate, Bessel Van de Kolk and XR when she began work on the record and, now it’s finished and being released, how little seems to have changed.

The soaring ‘Vanishing Shadow’, where Gary Numan adds moody backing vocals, sets the tone for the record. ‘Ache In The Middle’, a powerful downtempo to-and-fro between Moss and Savages’ Jehnny Beth is perhaps the standout and came, apparently, as a total surprise. Moss had sent the track to Beth’s bandmate/partner Johnny Hostile for some advice. He asked for the lyrics, which struck her as odd, but you know. The track came back with Jehnny Beth all over it.

While ‘Internal Working Model’ shimmers under its dystopian sheen, it isn’t all dark corners. The closer is proper ray of sunshine. With bright modular synths arpegiating all over the place, ‘Love As Hard As You Can’ features Dhani Harrison (his dad was musician, you might have heard of him) is a proper hymn to, well, loving as hard as you can. Wise words in these difficult times.

Strategy – Unexplained Sky Burners (Peak Oil)

Over time Paul ‘Strategy’ Dickow has done enough to keep us guessing with each release. Sometimes we’re treated to aqueous ambience, sometimes looped up disco house with a minimal twist, elsewhere some live band jams with a kosmische bent. In amongst his considerable catalogue, Peak Oil has been an enabler in that regard, carrying a self-titled album way back in 2012 and the Pressure Wassure 12” a couple of years later, and the two records couldn’t be more different. Interestingly, Pressure Wassure carried some meaty garage flex which rears its head again on this first cassette release for Peak Oil – a tidy album of the kind of off beat, heartfelt electronic gear Dickow is loved for by those who know.

‘Frontiera’ is certainly not a conventional garage cut, but it swings on a 2-step beat and there’s some walloping sub bass, even if the synths are a fruitier flavour and everything has a roughshod charm. ‘Unexplained Sky Burners’ leans a little further into 140 dubstep realms and utterly succeeds, even while not sounding like any kind of typical dubstep you might have heard before. It’s the sound of someone who wholly feels and appreciates the music and choose to channel it through their own tool set rather than trying to seek out the ‘official’ sound palette, as it were.

Overall, Unexplained Sky Burners is a release with the spirit of the rave in its bones. The beats are strident and ready to party, the hooks direct and insistent. Dickow’s somewhat indie tendencies keep everything fresh and distinctive, even when samples like ‘that’ Yazoo laugh get dropped into the mix, and it winds up as an album which could very much be at home listened front to back on tape, as much as it could be mined by DJs looking for some non-cookie cutter wares with all the right chops and drops.

James Yorkston, Nina Persson and The Second Hand Orchestra – The Great White Sea Eagle (Domino)

This is one of those albums that just makes everything seem a little bit better. It’s the follow-up to 2021’s ‘The Wide, Wide River’, the first outing from Yorkston and Karl Jonas Winqvist’s Stockholm-based Second Hand Orchestra.

It seems that slowly but surely Yorkston has been adding people to his gang, although it was Winqvist who made the inspired suggestion to add The Cardigans’ Nina Persson.

The record follows the same path as ‘The Wide, Wide River’. None of the orchestra had heard the songs before arriving at the studio. Yorkston would play each song, with the other musicians joining in as and when. After three or four run-throughs they’d press record. “Everything was just happy. I love the wildness in it,” says Yorkston. You can hear it in the recording.

‘The Great White Sea Eagle’ feels mellower than its predecessor, more chilled out somehow. Maybe it’s just more sure of itself. The stall gets set out beautifully on the melodic almost sing-along opener, ‘Sam And Jeanie McGreagor’, where Persson takes the lead. You forget what a good band The Cardigans were. Her voice is terrific.

‘The Heavy Lyric Police’ is fit to burst with the entire orchestra seeming to scrap for space as it reaches its crescendo. It’s followed by ‘A Sweetness In You’, just Yorkson and a warm keyboard. These kinds of to and fro – from chucking everything at a song followed by a track that couldn’t be more minimal makes for a delightful listen.

Yorkson himself hits the nail on the head when he describes ‘The Harmony’, a beautifully intimate duet between him and Persson, as “woozy”. That’s exactly it. The whole thing is off-kilter in the most pleasing way. It’s a truly lovely record.

Wave Temples – Another Night In Peru (Possible Motive)

Operating in the mysterious zone otherwise known as the tape scene and with a catalogue reaching back more than 10 years, Wave Temples feels like an artist one stumbles across thanks to blind luck on some kind of intrepid journey. Of course such imagery is positively encouraged by whoever makes this music, in which exotica and tropical fauna are channeled in subtle rather than crass ways. The emphasis is on creating an eco system in the same mode as artists like Andrew Pekler and Tristan Arp, where the wonderment of the unknown is about fantasy lands rather than problematic cultural colonialism.

Not Not Fun picked recent Wave Temples releases and now another notable link up arrives courtesy of Possible Motive, who also put out the excellent X.Y.R. album Anciente and Ratkiller’s Leather Squeaking Softly. The sound conjured on Another Night In Peru is fascinating, putting field recordings on an equal footing with any melodic or rhythmic elements to create vivid and tangible scenes. There are some beautiful musical passages, but they seem to move in deference to the environment around them, as though emerging from the trees. If you’re a fan of this kind of ecological listening experience, Wave Temples can take you to a very happy place indeed.

This week’ reviewers: Neil Mason, Oli Warwick, Patrizio Cavaliere.