After moving to New York in the summer of 2014, Laura Gibson decided to take a step back from music, and promptly broke her foot. She’d just left behind the security of friends, family, and a long-term boyfriend back in Portland, and after spending the first two months hobbling around her new Manhattan apartment, it must have seemed like life had thrown all its upheaval at the artist at once. Or at least it could have, right up until the apartment was destroyed in a gas explosion the following March, killing two people. Gibson survived, despite being home at the time, though all her notebooks and song ideas had gone. Once again, it was time to start from scratch.
In 1978, harmonica player Eddie Gordon walks out on his Las Vegas family band, primarily a duo with wife Linda, called Love’s Lounge. Sometimes Leslie, their eldest daughter, gets roped in to perform too. But most of the time she’s upstairs in the hotel room, where a plastic “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle keeps her and little sister Jennifer sequestered in their own, private backstage party. Linda packs up and leaves Vegas, takes the girls to a town in the San Fernando valley, ekes out a living between waitressing and welfare. Not that it’s what keeps food on the table at home; Jenny’s been the breadwinner since pre-school. She’s a child actor.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: there are certain genre pointers that turn up in PR material that inspire the deepest, darkest ennui to rise up within me. Drone. Shoegaze. Psych (especially when preceding ‘rock’). Fuzzy. And it’s not because I don’t like all that stuff; I do. It’s that too many new bands employ those terms to suggest that their music is dense, and brooding, and intellectual, when in fact it is dense, and brooding, and shit. So I’d like to thank Wussy for restoring my faith. Because Forever Sounds incorporates all those elements, and it also happens to be an exceptional album.
Great prophets, from Jesus Christ to Rachel Stevens, have long sought to remind humanity of a painful truth: things are sent to try you. Death. Life. Divorce. Marriage. Children. Older children. Only one thing unites them all, and that is their eagerness to provide you with a swift kick between the legs whenever it seems like your yearly anxiety quota is running low.
I bet Merill Garbus is an absolute riot in the studio. It certainly sounds like everyone’s having a blast on A Man Alive, the 6th album from Thao & The Get Down Stay Down that seems to think it’s a debut, produced by the indefatigable genius behind tUnE-yArDs. At one point on “Fool Forever” it sounds like someone’s drumming on dustbin lids, and frankly, you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they were. It’s just the kind of free-spirited, Californian approach to songwriting that this lot deal in.
Låpsley sees you. She sees your tired ideas, your pop mythology 30 years past its sell-by date; sees you peering past her for the man at the mixing desk. And the prodigious 19-year-old, Southport’s most prominent post-dubstep auteur and yachting enthusiast, is calling you the fuck out. “You wouldn’t ask Caribou if he was a singer,” she told the NME last year. “He’d be like, ‘No, I’m a producer and a writer and I sing in my tracks.’ I’m more than just the face at the front of a band.” No one asks James Blake who produced his tracks, but they still ask Grimes. What Låpsley shares in common with both artists, whichever way you paint it, is that she’s also a pop star.
Roo Panes fell into a river as a child, earning him the nickname of a similarly unfortunate Winnie-the-Pooh character. He grew up playing classical music in Dorset, but got bored of reading from sheet music, and discovered a love of improvisation. He crafts tender folk songs with a rich, husky tenor. He is a male model. And as soon as the din of that fire alarm currently going off in your reproductive organs has died down, you should listen to his new album, Paperweights. Because, to top it off, he may also be responsible for the finest folk album of the decade.
I wasn’t there in 1977. I wasn’t there when punk tore a fresh hole in the stratosphere. I wasn’t there when The Clash landed, or the Sex Pistols. But we’re going back even further than that. True to the postmodern spirit that brought so much of this narrative to the fore, post-punk was always, as Simon Reynolds pointed out, “less of a genre of music than a space of possibility.” That space was never chronological: Television, Talking Heads, Suicide, and several others were creating post-punk music long before punk broke. I wasn’t there either.
When Silence Yourself arrived, I was there. The marriage between post-punk’s avant garde, bass heavy riffs and punk’s unrelinquished desire for melodic populism hadn’t really been found since Bloc Party‘s debut in 2004 (if we’re being generous), and certainly not perfected since the Manics put out The Holy Bible 10 years prior. There were no manifestos left in rock music, it seemed. No more heroes. Savages had a manifesto. They ran it on the cover of their debut album.
“Shut Up” remains the most exciting piece of guitar music created in the 21st century. Like Tarantino, it didn’t borrow from those existing tropes; it stole. It was Magazine‘s “Because You’re Frightened” frisked and shaken for everything it had, and it was still utterly loveable, because, frankly, no one else had the balls to do it.
Three years on, Savages remain a glorious anachronism. Fay Milton, drummer for the London four-piece, is in ebullient form when I speak to her. The band are notoriously careful about what is (and, more often it seems, what is not) disseminated to journalists; every step of their journey is meticulously planned, with lead singer Jehnny Beth casting a cautious tone across many of the band’s interactions with the press. I ask Fay what she’s been listening to recently: “Um… my last played song was “Nutz On Ya Chin” by Eazy-E.”
We both laugh. I feel like this might be a blessedly uncautious interview.
When did dream pop become this decade’s lingua franca for kids with keyboards? At some point in the last decade, something tripped: Beach House became critical darlings; Bat For Lashes got Mercury nomimated, twice; M83 actually had a Top 40 hit. Christ, even The Sundays are back together. All of which suggests that Love is a Fridge, the sophomore album from Berlin duo Me and My Drummer, may have arrived at something of a zeitgeist.
However many shades of scarlet you care to mark between them, there are essentially two kinds of break-up song. If you’ve ever heard Elvis Costello & The Attractions‘ 1986 marvel Blood & Chocolate, you’ll know that the divine form of each can be found there: both the giddy, sarcastic glee of “I Hope You’re Happy Now” and the devastating “I Want You”. And while it’s clear that Basia Bulat‘s Good Advice pitches for the former’s optimism, there is more than enough doubt cast in the record’s frailer moments to make this a complex, emotional affair.
Matthew Neale 