Drinks – Hippo Lite
A second collaboration between Cate Le Bon and former Fall member Tim Presley, this is another delightfully oddball collection of songs with all kinds of doorway squeaks, birdcall-like guitars and frog croaks, clever rhythms and vocals. Complex and yet in other ways ever so simple, it’s the sort of album that will yield fresh discovery on each listen. Out on Drag City.
Drinks – Corner Shops
Alexis Taylor - Beautiful Thing
The Hot Chip frontman’s foruth solo release, if you include EPs, is a step into even more personal, and gentle electronica, with eachoes of the dancefloor work of the past, but has a variety of heartfelt moments. For the first time he also brings in a producer – Tim Goldsworthy, co-founder of Mo Wax and DFA Recordings and member of UNKLE. Out on Domino.
Alexis Taylor - Oh Baby
Jeffrey Lewis – Works by Tuli Kupferberg (1923 - 2010)
The prolifitic singer-songwriter releases a charming and funny, long-planned project – a tribute recording of 15 songs by the American counterculture poet and frontman of The Fugs, who died in 2010 aged 86. Lewis has a real passion for such figures, and includes on this as a collaborator Peter Stampfel, who was in The Fugs in 1965. As Lewis puts it: “This is just a collection of interesting material created over decades by an interesting person who was not quite a songwriter but just a general creative, satirical, philosophical character, and a real New York City original.” Out on Don Giovanni Records.
Jeffrey Lewis - What Are You Doing After The Orgy?
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu – Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow)
The blind Aboriginal singer who died last year at aged only 46 had a remarkably beautiful voice, and this, his fourth album, produced and arranged by Michael Hohnen, is now reaching extraordinary commercial success - currently at number 1 in the Australian charts (the first by an indigenous artist) and coincides with the released of a documentary, Gurrumul. A child prodigy, and singing in the Yolngu language about animals, fish, birds and the lands of his ancestors, he is heroic figure in bringing indigenous artists to the fore in a country that has never been short of racial tensions, this release, with full orchestral arrangements rather than just guitar, will hopefully help bring his talent broader worldwide exposure.
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu - Djarimirri
Perel – Hermetica
The Hermetica are a series of Egyptian-Greek didactic texts, meant to help the willing student better understand the cosmos, divinity, and nature, and here they are brought to us by German producer Perel, aka Annegret Fiedler, takes the listener into deep space and explains it all. Over the course of nine tracks, she shares a striking amalgamation of house, new wave, and krautrock motifs, with the sound of mid-80s east Berlin very much an influence. Fascinating work, out on DFA Records.
Perel - Alles
Sting & Shaggy – 44/786 (A&M Records)
This is less a recommendation, more flagging up a strange and at times comical collaboration that ranges from the truly awful and embarrassing areas of pretentiousness and modern-world moralising to Sting’s white man’s reggae trying to channel Bob Marley (Just One Lifetime, for example, quoting Lewis Carroll does all of this), to the occasional bearable pop song with their two distinctive voices combining in an appealing way. Out on A&M Records.
Sting & Shaggy – Don’t Make Me Wait
This week's selection is by The Landlord.
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This is only a selection, not a catalogue of releases. Feel free to recommend more and comment below.