The world could use a few more Esmé Pattersons. On her last outing, 2014’s Woman To Woman, the Denver songwriter built a record around one simple concept: the right-to-reply of some of pop’s most iconic (yet slandered) female characters, from Billie Jean to Jolene. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple and radical at the same time, you immediately wonder how it hadn’t already been done to death. Supposedly, the whole thing was recorded in a day. For new record We Were Wild, Patterson’s own voice returns to centre stage, and the results carry an insidious charm of their own.
At first glance, despite – or perhaps because of – their cosmopolitan glamour, The Kills appear to be a decidedly old fashioned proposition. Jamie Hince, he of the supermodel girlfriends and haircut reclaimed from the Cardiff Barfly’s 2005 heyday, still carries the same Lou Reid swagger, whittling the band’s blunt edges into something altogether more dangerous. Then there’s Alison Mosshart, her of the ink-black huskiness that made Jack White seem like the comic relief in The Dead Weather, a Nico in waiting. Fortunately for us, Ash & Ice continues to throw out all that lame, misogynist bathwater, while holding on to the rock’n’roll baby at the centre of their craft.
Against the odds, Tegan and Sara kind of rule the world now. Jack Antonoff, the guy from fun. and co-writer for the likes of Taylor Swift, recently described the phenomenon: “You would go into the studio with an artist and you’d be like, ‘What are you into lately?'” he says. “And they’d be like, Heartthrob. What kinda vibe do you wanna do? Heartthrob.” Now the Quins are reunited with pop genius Greg Kurstin (Adele, Sia, countless others), are they about to go stratospheric with eighth album Love You To Death?
“One thing Victoria and I can agree on is that our music is its own world. And, I think that’s very much what the ‘beach house’ feel is: going off to a different world. It’s not really a vacation; vacation for me is when you go away, but you’re still thinking about all the things you’ve left behind.”
– Alex Scally
Dream I: Auburn and Ivory
Victoria likes to sleep during the day, so that she dreams in warm colours; so that she wakes up at 4pm; so that the sweet sepia afterglow of the bonfires and apple orchards that scatter ashes and seeds through the scenery of her mind’s eye are briefly unanimous with the afternoon sun. Some days there are no pictures, just a particular warmth, or the scent of woodsmoke married with bourbon.
Today there is a ringing sound.
It calls out across the bonfire, and maybe it is the bonfire; every pitch slide and timbre feels like an auburn spark set to an starry night’s ivory flashes, flaring up as brightly as the echoes left behind it signal a darkness. It’s swirling round and round, there’s a fever to it now, and as the warm specks flicker up and fail, there’s another sound; a low, churning sound, like the mechanical waltz of a child’s music box. And suddenly it is a waltz, and suddenly the fire and the stars are flickering in unison, and they’re calling it a song.
“Real love,” Adrianne Lenker declares about 10 minutes into Big Thief‘s debut,“is a heart attack.” Hers is a lexicon of split lips, blackened lungs, all the interstitial cracks that provide rough outlines for a human body, the scribbles of a deity bent on gallows humour. Like so many of their Saddle Creek forebears, Big Thief can’t help but stare at your wounds; not because they’re sadists, but because they’ve noticed something incredible in the way you choose to cauterise them. It’s a shared experience, and one that Masterpiece documents with stirring emotional fortitude.
There are two kinds of strangers: the ones who arrive that way, and the ones whose shadows lengthen over the course of time. On the title track of Marissa Nadler‘s 7th album, we learn which of the two this record is primarily concerned with. “I am a stranger now,” she sighs, and it’s that temporal qualifier tacked on the end which pushes the album’s themes beyond an implied ending, and towards the wreckage left in its wake. What follows, both lyrically and musically, is a hugely accomplished addition to her brand of saloon-at-the-end-of-the-world Americana, and a worthy follow-up to 2014’s sumptuous July.
“But I think I’m gonna kiss you,” she says, finally, a dramatic pause teased out across eons. It’s the emotional money shot on “Winterbreak”, the highlight of MUNA‘s second – hell, let’s call it – their breakthrough EP, The Loudspeaker. The line follows a rhyme on “tentative ellipsis” and “parting of your lips,” which, frankly, is already enough to engage me in journalistic hyperbole mode: as much as I lost my shit alongside everyone else the first time I heard “The Mother We Share”, you start to feel like the perfect pop promise of a band like Chvrches could finally be realised in the dark, stormy-night elegies bequeathed to us here.
Ah, the soundtrack. Chances are your favourite band (or their increasingly disengaged guitarist) has indulged in a 40-minute laptop sojourn around a documentary about Indonesian sloth wrestling, before skulking back to the day job of arguing about drum fills. 10 years pass, and everyone quietly accepts that it happened without having to ever talk about it again. Not so for Mogwai, whose 2006 accompaniment to Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was considered such a triumph – and rightly so – that they wheeled it out for a string of dedicated live dates seven years later. 2013 also saw the band soundtrack French drama Les Revenants and find time for an 8th studio album, Rave Tapes. Now they’re back to score Atomic: Living In Dread And Promise, documentarian Mark Cousins’ sobering insight into the horrors and anxiety of the nuclear age.
In case you missed it, Peter Robinson wrote a rather excellent article earlier in the month discussing “post genre” bands, and the way in which millennials are acclimatised to consume all music without recourse to a genre-fixated cultural identity. It makes an awful lot of sense: as I write, a former member of One Direction is the cover star of this week’s NME. It also got me thinking back to the first time I saw Yeasayer covered on Robinson’s Popjustice blog. It seemed strange, then, that “O.N.E.” could be critically adored on Pitchfork, while simultaneously being enjoyed next to Alphabeat.
“We don’t want perfection because it’s boring,” Jennifer Clavin explained in the lead-up to Welcome the Worms, the second outing from her Los Angeles garage pop band Bleached. “We want to make music that’s as real as life.” It’s a bold statement, like announcing that you’ve arrived to kick ass and chew gum, and that you’re all out of gum, and that if anyone has any gum that would really be appreciated. It’s also fundamentally meaningless, presumably drawing on the vague notion that lo-fi recordings are more authentic – especially odd when you consider that they roped in Joe Chicarelli (Elton John, Morrissey) to produce this one. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of air-punching vacuity that permeates the entire record, like a car bumper plastered in driving slogans. You might as well say “keep on keepin’ on” and be done with it.
Matthew Neale 