New on Shfl, August 2024

Jon Dale on Bubblegum, Hank Shteamer on Paul Motian, Rick Anderson on Ella Fitzgerald and Joshua Levine on Modern LA Funk, plus 15 new recommendations

Jon Dale on Bubblegum

In its creative voraciousness, it chewed up and spat out the music that surrounded it: in these songs, on these records, you can hear the spirit of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Beach Boys, and so many more, all placed in service of an ultimate pop spirit that drifted, in most welcome fashion, from the songwriter-auteur stylisation that was being developed by record companies, PR spin and a nascent rock music press.

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Hank Shteamer on Paul Motian

One measure of Paul Motian’s greatness is the sheer scope of his 50-year-plus career: just how many eras, projects and collaborations one has to reckon with in order to fathom the full extent of the late drummer-composer-bandleader’s genius.

Rick Anderson on Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald’s origin story is wonderful: scheduled to perform as a dancer as part of an Amateur Night program at the Apollo Theater in 1934, she found herself slated to follow the Edwards Sisters, whose skills were so advanced that she spontaneously decided to sing instead of dance when her turn came. She ended up taking first prize that night, and one of the most storied careers in the history of American music was born.

Joshua Levine on Modern LA Funk

Modern LA funk begins with the fragmentation of the genre into post-disco, boogie and electro in the early 1980s. Artists like Prince, Afrika Bambaataa and Egyptian Lover were pioneers of this spare, futuristic sound, using Linn drum machines and OB-X synths to replace traditional R&B band instruments. Those breakthroughs form the basis of modern funk’s musical style. But it also wouldn’t exist without the first two or three waves of local gangsta rap.

Reviews

Harold Heath

Alice Russell - I Am

Russell’s themes here are grief, struggle, healing and strength, and together with her long-time collaborator and co-producer TM Juke she’s produced an album of authentic, introspective contemporary soul that feels raw — its big themes of, literally, life and death unsurprisingly producing intense performances — but with the rough edges smoothed out, and with a gently glowing positivity emerging from the real-life drama she documents.

Brittany Howard - What Now

Singer, guitarist and songwriter Brittany Howard’s second album What Now is a dense, expansive and experimental R’nB/future-soul collection that confidently incorporates the soothing wash of sound bowls and grinding rock guitar elements with equal aplomb.

The Emperor Machine - Island Boogie

Island Boogie is perhaps the mostly perfectly realised EM project to date, a collection of eight lengthy club tracks, built from elements of various disco sub genres — space, Italo, dub, cosmic et al — and NYC punk funk, electro and boogie, all created with his extensive analog synth collection.

Ned Raggett

Cold Gawd - I’ll Drown On This Earth

It absolutely blasts out of the gate with “Gorgeous,” with a buried shout and a massive chug of a riff combining exultance and heaviness, with lead creative figure Matthew Wainwright’s sighing vocals adding a glistening beauty that even carries through the near black-metal screams later.

Tama Gucci - Notes To Self

Following a string of singles and EPs, 2024 saw the formal album debut of Miami-based Tama Gucci with a truly fantastic example of in-the-moment dance and r&b in happy queer-centered fusion with Notes To Self, a twelve-song, thirty minute example of the skill of brevity at work.

Zsela - Big For You

Zsela’s calm, focused keen of a voice is compelling – there’s a cool control that suggests everyone from Nina Simone to Q. Lazzarus – while the sense of controlled space and carefully placed silence throughout the album is a remarkable calling card.

Hank Shteamer

Don Caballero - American Don

But on American Don, the Pittsburgh instrumental outfit’s fourth album and final effort before their initial breakup, they made a definitive break with their past, shedding nearly all vestiges of metal-adjacent heaviness and in the process setting a new benchmark for outside-the-box underground rock.

Don Caballero 2

This was the effort where they leveled up masterfully from For Respect, their blunt yet brainy 1993 debut, and learned how to sustain compositional intrigue across lengthy forms.

Don Caballero - World Class Listening Problem

World Class Listening Problem marked the return of Don Caballero after a several-year hiatus, and if it wasn’t the radical step forward that its predecessor, American Don, was, it was still an enormously satisfying effort from the band that led a new wave of heavy, prog-descended instrumental rock in the ‘90s.

Joshua Levine

Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son

A labyrinthine concept album – both in plot and song structures – the album pushes all of Maiden’s archetypal song ideas to their limits.

Radio 4 - Gotham!

The ringing cowbells, distorted bass and analog handclaps typical of dance-punk are all consistently present, but less orthodox flourishes like conga-driven funk beats and lush synths push the mix into something approaching lurid, overcompressed psychedelic soul.

Ike & Tina Turner - Feel Good

The revelations of the monstrous abuse Tina Turner suffered at the hands of her then-husband Ike understandably tends to stain the duo’s output decades after its release, but the fact remains that taken on purely musical terms, Feel Good is not just a peak for Ike & Tina but for rock music as a whole.

Chris Catchpole

Prairiewolf - Prairiewolf

Bar the odd bit of pedal steel and some plucked acoustic on the light side of the moon escape of “Return To The Lonesome Prairie,” guitar is to a minimum as the sprightly click of a Rhythm Ace drum machine underpins twinkling synthscapes that shimmer, shift and undulate between komische, library and lounge sounds under a dreamlike haze of cosmic Americana.

Melanie De Biasio - No Deal

A classically trained flautist and jazz singer, Biasio has been likened to a Belgian Nina Simone, and while there are shades of Simone operating within No Deal’s smoky, late-night atmosphere (alongside Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry and even Eartha Kitt) and she masterfully tackles Simone’s “I’m Gonna Leave You,” the intoxicating spell Biaso casts on the likes of “The Flow”’s simmering spiritual jazz hoodoo is entirely her own.

English Teacher - This Could Be Texas

Over a backdrop that shifts between Pink Floydian piano revelry (“You Blister My Paint”), the rattle of early Smiths (“I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying”) Kate Bush-esque piano pop (the title track) and much more, Fontaine maps out a winningly original lyrical outlook that mixes absurdist surrealism with peculiarly northern English minutiae (the Magazine-like “The World’s Biggest Paving Slab” namechecks Charlotte Bronte, the Pendle witch trials and Dr Who actor John Simm).