New on Shfl, October 2024
Ned Raggett on Coil, Jon Dale on Morton Feldman, Rick Anderson on Euro-Reggae, Alex Riggs on Sophisti-pop, Andy Beta on Lowell George, plus fifteen new recommendations
Ned Raggett on Coil
But the truth of their range and goals, informed further via overt resistance to mainstream heteronormative standards of love and sex as well as homophobia in general, connecting further to Balance’s deep interest in occult and esoteric practices, renders the group even more impossible to pin down, pursuing their own evolving vision as they chose.
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Jon Dale on Morton Feldman
There are a few things people often say about Feldman’s compositions. One is that they are very quiet. It is hard to deny this, given his fondness for the ppppp, or pianississississimo, indication on his scores. But this seems to me to be about a redirection of attention, as well, to listen carefully and intently. It also works at a level of intimacy, and Feldman’s move toward longer pieces in his later compositions seems to shadow this as well, with Feldman wanting to give the listener a chance to develop a closer, more one-to-one relationship with the work.
Rick Anderson on Euro-Reggae
Over the past couple of decades, as traditional reggae music has been displaced in Jamaica in favor of increasingly hard-edged dancehall and its various subgenres, interest in keeping the old-school sounds alive has grown in other parts of the world – certainly in the UK (home to the largest segment of Jamaica’s diaspora) but also in locations that might seem less likely: Germany, France, Austria, even Poland and Romania. Since the turn of the current century, serious reggae scenes have cropped up in cities as unexpected as Marseilles, Berlin, Vienna, and Geneva.
Alex Riggs on Sophisti-pop
Sophisti-pop is meant to describe something akin to adult alternative: music that has its hands in the pies of jazz, R&B, the glossy modern pop of the 1980s/early 90s. I like describing it as Bowie’s Young Americans played exclusively on MIDI instruments.
Andy Beta on Lowell George
With a singular style on slide guitar, George could deliver roadhouse boogie, nimble New Orleans soul, nuanced sunny pop, and California stompin’ garage rock.
Reviews
Phil Freeman
James Brown - Funk Power 1970: A Brand New Thang
This 1996 compilation was part of a series that allowed fans to explore specific eras of James Brown’s career in more depth than the incredible Star Time box set. The first was Roots of a Revolution: 1956-1963, the second was Foundations of Funk – A Brand New Bag: 1964-1969, the fourth was Make It Funky (The Big Payback: 1971-1975), and the last was Dead On the Heavy Funk: 1975-1983. This one came third, and was the fiercest of the bunch.
Miles Davis' Greatest Hits
This 1969 compilation is a weird curio, but one worth seeking out. It was released in 1969, when Miles Davis was about to begin a radically new phase in his career with the album In A Silent Way, and a new, loud live band featuring Chick Corea’s electric keyboards and Jack DeJohnette’s thundering drums.
Gang of Four - A Brief History of the Twentieth Century
This 1990 compilation captures Gang Of Four better than any of their albums. With 20 tracks in 76 minutes, it allows you to track their evolution from their 1979 debut album Entertainment! (six tracks are included, kicking off with the astonishing “At Home He’s a Tourist”) to the simultaneously funkier and noisier Solid Gold and the Another Day/Another Dollar EP (“To Hell With Poverty!” and a sandblasting live version of “What We All Want” are particular high points).
Joe Muggs
Ernest Ranglin - In Search of the Lost Riddim
Recorded in Dakar, Senegal, with members of Baba Maal’s band on traditional West African instruments, it brought everything from the previous two albums into a transatlantic mix – even bringing in the modernist rhythms of dancehall – less fusing styles than finding highest common factors between them, and again absolutely radiating joy in playing and discovery.
The Bug - Machine
This 2024 LP is the first The Bug LP as such not to use vocalists, and it continues to find ever more mileage in all of the above mentioned sounds, as well as the cyborg desert blues Martin explored in his 2018 collaboration with Earth. This is the sound of a fearsomely pure artistic vision that needs to be nothing else other than itself.
Gilli Smyth - Mother
The album stands up as one of the weirdest things in the entire Gong cinematic universe, which is saying something indeed, and if by the final nine-and-a-half-minute folk tale “Taleisin” your mind is still fully intact, you haven’t been listening closely.
Alex Riggs
Julie Doiron & Mount Eerie - Lost Wisdom Pt. 2
The mythical art of creating a sequel that holds up just as well as its predecessor is treacherous work with rare reward. But Phil Elverum has a habit of navigating the treacherous.
Owen Pallett - In Conflict
In Conflict finds Owen Pallett embracing exactly that; the conflict of the mundane and miserable with the beauty of making it through your 30s unscathed, if that’s even possible.
Low - Hey What
It’s impossible to write about HEY WHAT – let alone think about it – without thinking about the tragedy of Mimi Parker’s death that happened a year after its release, thus making it the final Low album and maybe giving the album an unfair air of finality. But even within that context HEY WHAT is an album that is unrelenting in its wounded beauty; bathed in maximum overdrive and lurching chords straight from the pages of doom metal, the cacophony never threatens to snuff out the glory of Parker and Alan Sparhawk’s harmonies.
Nate Patrin
Ol’ Burger Beats - 74: Out of Time
Norwegian hip-hop producer Ol’ Burger Beats gave himself a big conceptual challenge with this project: not only does 74: Out of Time invoke a year and a moment in jazz he wasn’t alive to experience firsthand, he channels his beatmaker/archive-raider fascination with this time period into an album where every single track is 74 BPM.
Khruangbin - A La Sala
Nearly ten years after debut album The Universe Smiles Upon You introduced them to an audience wider than their Texas home base — but not yet as wide as the international scope of their mellow, airy-yet-nimble global funk — A LA SALA positions Khruangbin as a band well-known enough to precipitate a bit of a shift to a back-to-basics mode. The trick here is what “basic” even means.
Ginger Root - Shinbangumi
Cameron Lew’s described his fine-tuned indie pop as “aggressive elevator soul,” a curious term steeped in a late 20th century idea of upscale commercial cheer at a time when current hauntology seems more fixated on dead-mall decline. But Ginger Root’s retro inclinations — derived from a trans-Pacific blend of city pop, new wave, and R&B — are backed up with a knack for hooky melodicism, carefree rhythmic drive, and memory-jostling atmosphere that leaves questions of genre and era compellingly hazy, familiar forms from an idiosyncratic and asynchronous perspective.
Jeff Treppel
Deja Vu - Baroque in the Future
The ominous omelette on the cover doesn’t exactly tell you what’s inside, but at least the contents are all they’re cracked up to be. In an eggshell: this is what you’d get if Keith Emerson composed music for Castlevania games.
Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere
They warned us. Ambient and death metal happily exist on opposing sides of the sonic spectrum. Blood Incantation found the luminescent bridge. The connective tissue? Weird seventies prog rock.
Gun - Gun
Album art done by Yes landscaper Roger Dean in his Hieronymus Bosch phase, The Gun’s debut album is mostly remembered for the oft-covered lead-off single “Race with the Devil,” a tune tackled by everyone from NWOBHM demolition women Girlschool to Japanese murder doom act Church of Misery. Strangely, it’s one of the less wild tracks on this heavy psych gem, although its insistent riff fires the bullet that would later hit speed metal’s bullseye.