Beck – Hyperspace
The 14th studio album by the evergreen artist is something of a mish-mash of styles, perhaps in part because more than half of it is has collaborative input and production by Pharrell Williams. This includes low-key R&B on the song See Through, or Saw Lightning's slide guitar, electronica and whooping. With Chris Martin, who has his own album out too, getting in on the act with some backing vocals, it's an odd mixture, experimentally slow and minimal at times, infused with melancholy (Everlasting Nothing) but far more spaced out than 2014's beautfully sun-bleached Morning Phase. But this is Beck. It’s out there. It’s cosmic. Is it Beck to the future. Not his most groundbreaking, but is never without great moments, such as on the rather Pink Floydish track Stratosphere, or Die Waiting, co-written with Cole MGN and Kossisko Konan. Out on Capitol Records.
Beck – Dark Places
Leonard Cohen – Thanks For The Dance
Posthumous albums are often a thin skim of what’s left, or a whimper rather than a scream, but these unreleased recordings by the artist who died three years ago is a fabulous memorial, crammed with deadpan lines and is a more than worthy follow-up to 2016's You Want It Darker. From the opener about his career, Happens to the Heart (“I was always working steady, I never called it art. I got my shit together, meeting Christ and reading Marx") to a song talking about German puppets who killed Jews, to beautifully mournful love songs (Moving On) to his old-age slowing down (“The system is shot / I’m living on pills”) on The Hills, it's a wonderfully paced treat from start to finish. A scholar and a poet, sadly missed. Out on Columbia.
Leonard Cohen – Moving On
Allison Moorer – Blood
Extraordinarily powerful work on the singer-songwriter's ninth album, addressing the childhood trauma of when she and her sister, the singer Shelby Lynne, experienced the sound and discovery of their father shooting their mother dead, and then himself in their home. Stark horror and emotions are laid bare in these 10 songs. Cold Cold Earth captures the final hours of her parents, and she moves between the perspectives of her father (I'm The One To Blame) to her mother (The Rock and the Hill). Moving between stormy keyboards and bare acoustic, viscerally powerful and profound. Out on Autotelic/Thirty Tigers
Allison Moorer – Bad Weather
Coldplay – Everyday Life
If you're already on the coffee table, how do you also get some cake and eat it? That is, how do you sell millions but also have artistic credibility? On this double album, Chris Martin and co are certainly trying to mix their stadium-filling mainstream fodder (lots of 2005’s X&Y sort of Yellowy repeated) with the strangely, but very safely experimental, such as dabbling variously in Mali-esque guitars inspired by Paul Simon's work, or Orphans which has Sympathy For The Devil 'woo-hoos' in a kind of euphoric 'let's party on the beach’ chorus. or writing a song about police brutality to keep it real. We'll corner any unreached market in these styles, it seems to say. For one of the biggest bands in the world, there remains this painstaking insecurity, that, dare I say it, very middle class problem of simply not really knowing who you are. Because of their sheer success, you suspect that Martin and co will never really know what everyday life is. Is it wrong to say you can't but cringe at everything they do? Out on Parlophone.
Coldplay – Orphans
Avalanche Party – 24 Carat Diamond Trephine
Explosive and fiercely articulate, but also humorous album by the garage-punk quintet from North Yorkshire who have echoes of Fat White Family, Viagra Boys and The Blinders about them, but clearly also channeling no shortage of Slade in a heady cocktail of indie glam rock meets punk. Definitely a must if you get a chance to catch them live. Out on So Knee Records.
Avalanche Party - Howl
WaqWaq Kingdom – Essaka Hoisa
You don't hear this kind of thing every week. It is nifty "minyo footwork" by renowned Japanese musicians Shigeru Ishihara (DJ Scotch Egg / Seefeel) and Kiki Hitomi (ex-King Midas Sound) under their mind-bending WaqWaq Kingdom disguise. Wonderfully quirky, catchy indie pop that also leaps nimbly into Jamaican dancehall and 8-bit techno, African polyrhythms and experimental electronica. From songs like Warg, Third Eye or Gift From God, everything is a joyful discovery of infinite offbeat jest. Find of the week. Out on Phantom Limb.
WaqWaq Kingdom – Doggy Bag
Slagheap – Slagheap
As their band name suggest, this is a feminist punk outfit of four fabulous women from Bristol. From Love Island to Catherine's Pranging Out to Horsey Girl, expect lots of down-to-earth filth and laughter and some top tunes inspired by the likes of The Slits and X Ray Spex. Out on Spurge Recordings.
Slagheap – Horsey Girl
Davido – A Good Time
Fancy a good time? All the time? Like easygoing afrobeat reggae dancehall infused with money and grasping the odd big booty, and no shortage of autotune? Then have a same good time all time with this, by the US-Nigerian artist. If not, and fair enough after a few seconds, then click on. Out on RCA.
Davido ft Chris Brown – Good Time
Various – Space Funk: Afro-Futurist Electro Funk in Space 1976-84
Compilation of the week is a glorious collection of rare and off-the-wall space funk and electro releases mostly released on small independent labels in the late 1970s and 1980s. Check out Santiago’s song Bionic Funk to Jamie Jupitor’s futuristic, drum-heavy Computer Power and the classic disco sounds of the 1978 Juju and the Space Rangers’ classic, Plastic. Out on Soul Jazz Records.
Juju and the Space Rangers – Plastic
This week's selection is by The Landlord.
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