AC/DC – Power Up
After the death of de facto leader Malcolm Young, the retirement of bassist Cliff Williams, drummer Phil Rudd serving sentence and having a heart attack, and Brian Johnson, who could not longer sing with hearing problems with Axl Rose covering the remainder of the last tour, how is this even possible, even with Angus Young still jumping around like a schoolboy? And yet here they mostly all are, back and rocking, including Johnson, sporting some special hearing implant technology, with new album that mixes up older material and new work, but mostly just bashes along as before, with some classic AC/DC cliches but also gems, such as Kick You When You’re Down, or the single Shot In the Dark, a wistful Through The Mists of Time, but dodgier, unreconstructed territory on Money Shot. It ain't Back in Black, but they are certainly back, tearing up the highway, possibly to hell, and if not in black, still showing their old colours, like a reanimated monster with a few bits falling off, but still one you can't help but admire. Out on Columbia.
AC/DC – Shot In The Dark
Marika Hackman – Covers
To varying degrees there's always a twist of originality away from the originals, such as Radiohead’s 1994 number, You Never Wash Up After Yourself, which keeps the melancholy, and inserts piano and a strange insect buzz. Grimes's electro-pop Realiti becomes infused instead with low-key strings and rippling, gentle harp. Beyoncé’s All Night is really stripped back into a far more serene number with layered vocals, while Elliott Smith’s Between The Bars is fuller than the original, with a drone element. Never predictable in song choice or interpretation, Hackman is a wonderful oddball who even infuses covers with her own identity. Out on Transgressive.
Marika Hackman – All Night
Pa Salieu – Send Them to Coventry
Hard-hitting but unconventional debut LP by the rapper of Gambian heritage centred around his adopted home city, with an overriding theme of tough upbringing, racism and street violence, but adapting many of the usual bad boy braggadocio with some innovative sounds and rhythms and narratives, and a slew of guests, from the opener Block Boy to final track Energy. Several of his separately released tracks over the past 12 months are here, but not the catchiest, Bang Out. The soft keyboards and crisp rhythms of, for example, More Paper is an unusual juxtaposition for an angry song about chasing money. Overall, one of the more original of new rap releases this year, with a promising future. Out on Warner Records.
Pa Salieu – Energy feat Mahalia
Benee – Hey U X
The 20-year-old New Zealander Stella Bennett has a quite particular way of expressing melancholy with this fresh debut of lightly dusted funk pop, especially with the TikTok online hit number Supalonely, but also, perhaps more poignantly in Winter, another candid expression of worry and inadequacy, and opener Happen to Me, which explores the anxiety of overthinking. She also has an eccentric side, with Snail, simply an ode to the invertebrate. Most of the album is softer in style, but Kook combines hip hop with rock riffs. Guests include Grimes on the 90s house style Sheesh. Some of the album vocal sounds are a perhaps a little too distorted, but this is a very promising debut LP with buds of ideas beginning to open. Out on Republic.
Benee - Kool
Gwenifer Raymond – Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain
The Welsh guitarist follows up her acclaimed 2018 debut You Never Were Much of a Dancer, with something just as special - eight instrumentals recorded in lockdown in a Brighton basement flat that she describes as songs, perhaps because they very much tell a story with her instrument, taking the acoustic guitar to wonderful levels of tone, intensity and complexity, in works that truly sing with a full range of emotions and timbres, harmonics and counter melodies, from the purest to the most growling, the sweetest to the angriest. Standouts include Hell For Certain, Worn Out Blues and the title track, but this is an album you could listen to many times to discover further minute detail. Out on Tompkins Square.
Gwenifer Raymond – Hell For Certain
Katy J Pearson – Return
An ironic title for a debut album by the Bristol-based singer-songwriter, but a project that has taken over two years after a collaborative project with her brother fell through with a major label record deal. Jaunty, folk-country-pop is the result, mixing a flavour of the south-west of England with the US mid-west. Standout tracks include the singles Fix Me Up, Take Back The Radio, On The Road, and the slower Something Real. Out on Heavenly Recordings.
Katy J Pearson – Fix Me Up
Molchat Doma – Monument
This third album by Belarusian trio Molchat Doma is like a step into the past - a postpunk and new-wave era of early 80s, echoing the early electro pop work of Kraftwerk to Jean-Michell Jarre, Human League to Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark, but also with more conventional guitar, bass and drums with occasionally dark, mournful lyrics in their own language like an alternative universe Joy Division. It's like it's 1980 all over again, from opener Утонуть / Utonut' to Дискотека / Discoteque, to Ленинградский Блюз / Leningradskiy Blues. A joyful throwback of early synths and sounds from another time right in the present. Out on Sacred Bones Records.
Molchat Doma (Молчат Дома) - Discoteque (Дискотека)
Gillian Welch – Boots No 2: The Lost Songs, Vol 3
Even more gems revealed in this third instalment of lost songs all recorded and kept on tape over one weekend in 2002 in order just to fulfil a publishing contract, by the Nashville-based singer and her partner, David Rawlings. Most are unheard before, aside from One Little Song and Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor from 2003’s Soul Journey album, and of the 17 here standouts include Peace In The Valley, Changing Ground, the beautiful Strangers Again, the bluesy Sin City, and Wanted Man. Guitar and voice intertwine with wonderful clarity in narrative and emotion. Out on Acony.
Gillian Welch – Stranger Again
Faten Kanaan – A Mythology of Circles
A very absorbing, classical and electro-keyboard-based, otherworldly and cinematic, new album from Brooklyn-based composer and musical artist with a high concept with her first on Fire Records. In the 13 tracks harmony and counterpoint are composed intuitively and treated as narrative tools- with sound, silence, and the resulting mystical relationship between notes used as gestures to tell a wordless story. The album is separated into a ‘dusk to evening’ side, and an ‘underworld/dream-state’ side; highlighting the myths of Ishtar, Inanna, Orpheus, Persephone, and others. Night Tide/Anteros, The Archer, Erewhon, and The North Wind, among others, are guaranteed to take the listener to entirely new places. Out on Fire Records.
Faten Kanaan – The North Wind
This week's selection is by The Landlord.
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