April 2024

Billy Childish, Dubstep, Big Beat, ‘80s Japanese Art Pop, plus 18 new recommendations

Housekeeping

You might have noticed that Shfl has gotten a bit of a makeover - I hope you like the changes, should be easier to find things and use all the various features etc., plus it’s not such a shameful hairball on the backend which is nice for my ego :). I’d love any feedback, I know things have been moved around, some things added and a couple taken away, love to hear any impressions both positive & negative. There’s a short intro to how things work here. OK now on to the music :)

Phil Freeman on Billy Childish

Childish is an almost entirely self-taught painter; a poet and writer whose dyslexia went undiagnosed in childhood but has never hindered his ability to muster furious, heartfelt lyrics; and a rough, noisy guitarist and singer whose influences range from primitive country blues to cavemanlike garage rock.

Collections

Shy Thompson on ‘80s Japanese Art Pop

Japanese “art pop” doesn’t represent a specific style or thematic throughline; it expresses the vast universes of sound that were beginning to be explored as Japan’s economy thrived and culture was both exported and imported more than ever before.

Nate Patrin on Big Beat

Big beat’s peak wasn’t especially long. It was coined after the Big Beat Boutique in Brighton, a dance night helmed by polygenre beathead Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook, and ran in parallel to the mid-late ‘90s boom in what was (kind of cynically) marketed as “electronica.” But big beat’s style was its own thing — akin to breakbeat hip-hop, but with higher BPMs and a more post-techno sensibility to it, ecstasy washed down with lager.

Rick Anderson on Dark Dubstep

As all successful dance and club music genres do, dubstep has spawned an ever-proliferating family of stylistic offspring including riddim, neurostep, tearout, and the more pop-oriented (and mostly American) derivative often called “brostep.” Dubstep that harks back to the music’s original South London sound is now typically designated as “dark,” “deep,” or “minimal” dubstep – and although this old-school style has largely returned to the underground from whence it came, there to be appreciated mostly by dedicated aficionados, those darker sounds have never fully gone away.

Reviews

Ned Raggett

Lætitia Sadier - Rooting for Love

Working again with regular stalwarts of her solo career like Xavi Muñoz and Emmanuel Mario among others, as well as a new production/arrangement collaboration with Hannes Plattmeier, Laetitia Sadier created another lovely, quietly forceful effort with 2024’s Rooting For Love, one of the easiest listening meditations on the troubled state of the world as one might encounter.

Domenica Diavoleria - Orange Clearing

On her second full length album, 2024’s Orange Clearing, Washington-based artist Domenica Diavoleria practices her own brand of murmuring textures and suggestive collages referencing distant memories – if it’s something a UK artist might term hauntology, in Diavoleria’s hands it becomes something simultaneously mysterious and just a bit winsome around the corners, as the blend of darker and lighter sounds on “Friendship Chain” helps make clear early on.

Masaka Masaka - Barely Making Much

Finding a throughline from left-field 90s hip-hop and electronic production through to the present day, he creates a strictly instrumental effort that starts with the punchy complexity of “Mental Construct” and from there explores a series of engaging miniatures of arrangement and atmosphere.

Jeff Treppel

Necrot - Lifeless Birth

This celebrates everything great and grisly about the genre: grotesque lyrics, riffs that definitely didn’t skip arm day, and satisfyingly blunt compositions with titles like “Cut the Cord” and “Drill the Skull.”

Loudness - The Birthday Eve

Formed from the ashes of a label-dictated boy band called Lazy, it only took six months from Loudness’s conception to deliver debut The Birthday Eve. Van Halen were clearly one of the parents, especially evident in Akira Takasaki’s flying fretwork, but Rush, Scorpions, and Judas Priest could also lay claim to paternity.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Francis Bebey - Akwaaba: Music for Sanza

The 1985 Akwaaba: Music For Sanza represents a significant jump forward for Bebey compared to his earlier electronic experimentations of the mid 1970s. Rather than limiting himself to playing traditional instruments alongside modern technologies, he pays more attention to how all the different elements interact with each other, weaving extended, psychedelic tracks that get up to almost 10 minutes long.

Francis Bebey - Un Petit Ivoirien

Though he didn’t make a splash in the budding “World Music” industry, probably because of the prejudices around “contaminated” African music, his style went on to influence a whole generation of forward-looking African musicians, such as fellow Cameroonian Manu Dibango and Guinean kora player Mory Kante. The 1979 record Petit Ivoirien is not as well known as some of his others (he released over 20 albums on his Ozileka label), but it’s as fine an example of his early style as any other.

Ulyap Songs : Beyond Circassian Tradition

This record focuses on Ulyap, a village in the Russian Caucasus, and documents the ancient bards‘ chants and accordion and harmonica music that is still regularly played in the village bars and festivals. Drawing on both live recordings and archival material, the first section of the album captures the joyful, communal aspect of music-making in Ulyap, the clinking glasses and merry background chatter conjuring the feeling of a warm, boozy evening in a tavern.

Chris Catchpole

Four Tet - Three

Exquisitely put together, the record encapsulates so many of the sounds and textures Hebden has been perfecting over the past two decades that it almost plays out like a mood board greatest hits.

Sam Lee - songdreaming

Lee’s songs are dense with a somewhat wordy vernacular (“where England’s mist lifts from her greening, a curlew croons in delight of this revealing” he sings on “McCrimmon”) and his trilling delivery is firmly rooted in a trad end of the folk tradition, yet the record in imbued with a wild, untamed sense of wonder thanks largely to the song’s breath-taking arrangements, co-written by producer and former Suede guitarist Bernard Butler.

Joshua Levine

Playboi Carti - Whole Lotta Red

Carti and his large array of producers divide the songs into roughly even halves of noisy future-shock avant-rap and glittering, incandescent electronic devotionals.

The Raveonettes - Chain Gang of Love

…tension plays out in the dual vocals of Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo, which marry the close harmony of The Everly Brothers to erotically-charged pulp novel plots of crime, death, and lust.

Turnstile - Glow On

Turnstile attempts to have it both ways on Glow On, turning out songs that work as pummeling hardcore jams and as the post-genre vibes-first tracks beloved by their considerable Gen Z audience.

Harold Heath

Burning Spear - Garvey’s Ghost

The dub version of Burning Spear’s seminal roots album Marcus Garvey from 1976 is generally considered by reggae fans to be either diluted dub-lite or one of the finest dub albums of the time, with this writer falling in the latter category.

Ólafur Arnalds - re:member

Created using his Stratus software which generates additional notes on two self-playing semi-generative player pianos, it’s an album that cleverly and seamlessly blends the synthetic and organic.

Parcels - Day/Night

They flirt with various shades of disco including funky-guitar/opulent strings/sophisticated piano chords á la Chic, Philadelphia International soaring orchestration, and high-paced euphoric EW&F stylings as well as causally dropping deft little jazz jams or pastoral ballads.

Rick Anderson

Ralph Stanley

This self-titled album was recorded in 2002, when Stanley was 75 years old. He certainly sounds like a 75-year-old man, but his voice is as strong as it ever was, his intonation still solid, his ability to flutter gently and thrillingly around a note before landing on it undiminished.

The Clinch Mountain Boys, Ralph Stanley - Sing Gospel Echoes of the Stanley Brothers

His reedy voice and his penchant for melismatic melodic elaboration and raw, vinegary mountain harmonies could make your hair stand on end. And he never sounded better than when he was singing gospel music, as this 1973 recording makes clear.