“In the dark,” Hilary Woods sings, “our stars shine.” For an artist thrust into the spotlight at an early age – it’s easy to forget that Woods was still a teenager at the time she was touring the world with JJ72 – her spirit comes through most vividly in the dimly lit scenes that make up ‘Colt’, the immersive debut album she’s releasing on Sacred Bones. Following a couple of similarly stark EPs released over the years, it feels like an honest document for a musician more at home with the piano, more at home with something still and contemplative than indie-rock bravado.
Not that she couldn’t do both if she chose to; at this point, it seems the artist is capable of just about anything she puts her hand to. Between raising a daughter, studying for a degree, and occasionally performing in bands, Woods also spent a great deal of time painting, and one imagines her working from the same palette that her music draws from: pitch black, pallor white, bruise violet. Perhaps. Perhaps she just paints sunflowers.
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I’m sure there are worse offenders. Somewhere, across the unfathomable spread of corporate shindigs and boutique getaways that make up the modern festival scene, there has to be at least one line-up that reeks of IPA and second-hand Bill Hicks biographies more than this one; a metal weekender somewhere in Coventry, perhaps, or Kendal Calling.
The first time we fall in love, the world feels uncomfortably bright. Everyday life takes on an oversaturated quality, as if the scenes playing out before us were flecked with magentas and blues that don’t quite belong, a vividness distilled into one person. Like a chemical high — which love is, of course — we momentarily drift into a consciousness that we can’t quite contain. It’s a dream performed with eyes wide open.
The first time Joy Crookes laughs in the video for ‘Power’, it’s a disarming moment. The video, shot entirely in black and white, matches the song’s ele-gance in both purpose and style: classic yet modern, collective yet singular, softly spoken and sharp-tongued all at once. If that’s the case, it’s perhaps be-cause Crookes seeks to celebrate women, to exhibit joy, as much as denigrate those who seek to compromise their integrity. “You came here through a woman,” she sings. “Show some fucking respect.”
Whatever proximities we care to chart across the star maps of ambient and electronica, both share a light that typically burns in cooler shades. On 2013’s ‘Immunity’, Jon Hopkins supposedly charted the course of a night out; in utilitarian terms, the bangers were at the front. This year’s leitmotif is the intersection of city and forest, but if there’s a discernible change of pace on ‘Singularity’, it’s perhaps that the record’s harder and softer moments are less discrete.
Perhaps you blinked and missed it, but Tom Misch is kind of a big deal these days, already scheduled into festival slots above the likes of Flying Lotus and Mavis Staples this summer. For his debut album ‘Geography’, the 22-year-old has roped in several guest appearances, and across the duration of an LP, it becomes abundantly clear why: like fellow producer-turned- guitarist Mark Ronson, no-one’s really paying to hear him jam out Stevie Wonder covers.
There’s nothing accidental about the visceral associations of naming your record ‘Blood’. Like love, the word conjures both absolute vitality and the fear of losing it; when we envisage blood, it is usually spent in stains, drawn from a sullied life force. After extensively touring their widely adored debut ‘Woman’, it made sense that the next Rhye album would be informed by those live experiences. That album was defined by its intimate moments; something else that was susceptible to be lost.
Matthew Neale 