New on Shfl, September 2024

Rick Anderson on western swing, Harold Heath on rare groove comps, Sean Wood on post-tonal music, Hank Shteamer on Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López, plus 15 new recommendations

Rick Anderson on Western Swing

One of the oddest, and yet most exciting and musically fertile, stylistic fusions to occur in American popular music was Western swing – a blend of hot jazz, old-time country, cowboy songs, and blues that emerged as a distinct genre in Texas and Oklahoma in the 1930s and came into full maturity over the course of the following decade.

Collections

Harold Heath on The Great Late ’80s Rare Groove Reveal

While many collectors and DJs may have been faintly horrified as records that had previously exchanged hands for hundreds of pounds were now freely available on a £6.99 album, for anyone else into funk and soul it revealed a treasure trove of astonishingly high quality and bizarrely overlooked music.

Hank Shteamer on Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López

The vocalist/guitarist partnership has been the engine of some of rock’s most iconic acts — Mick and Keith, Plant and Page, Axl and Slash, and so on. But far less common is the singer/six-stringer alliance that isn’t rooted to a single band, instead operating as a sort of movable cell, shuttling around among various groups while retaining some key collaborative essence.

Sean Wood on Post-Tonal Music

“Atonal” or “post-tonal” music is music without a major or minor key. While it is difficult to explain that in simple terms, the sound of atonal music is often instantly recognizable, characterized by a feeling of being unmoored and irresolute at every turn.

Reviews

Shy Thompson

PeanutsKun - BloodBagBrainBomb

PeanutsKun—a streamer who entertains with an unusual avatar—is an artist who has become a lightning rod that attracts the energy of Japan’s disparate Internet music scenes. His albums bring unlikely collaborators together under his banner, and for BloodBagBrainBomb he’s done it again.

The Velvet Underground - The Legendaly Guitar Amp Tapes

The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes, recorded at The Boston Tea Party on January 15, 1969, has a reputation for being a real blowout — but that might partially be due to how it was archived. A fan was permitted to record, but had to stand right next to Lou Reed’s amp.

Birdman, Young Thug, Rich Homie Quan - Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1

Thug and Quan, with minor hits to their name but still relatively unproven, joined their forces for a legendary mixtape of songs that still reverberate in the current consciousness of hip-hop.

Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Parus - Zara

Zara evokes the quiet solitude of dawn, as the fog lifts and each sound — darks barking in the distance, the rustling of leaves, the ticking of a clock — resonates through the stillness. But beneath the tranquil soundscape, a low, resonant hum pulls each track into shadowy, more introspective territories.

Okaidja Afroso - Àbòr Édiń (Àbɔɔ Édíŋ)

There are few sounds as laid back and serene as Ghanaian palm wine music. Just listen to Kwaa Mensah’s delicate guitar and wistful voice, and you can almost feel the pleasant, mellow daze of a boozy afternoon, and the soft embrace of a gentle breeze offering momentary respite from Ghana’s sticky humidity.

Ethnique Punch - Vinyet

Though chopped up, re-edited, and looped, the old bağlama samples and airy tanbur vibrations that Ethnique Punch (aka Al’Eksan) couples with twisting synth lines and woozy hip-hop rhythms conjure the same immersive, hypnotic energy of the Sufi traditions from which he draws. 

Jon Dale

Michael Brook, Pieter Nooten - Sleeps With the Fishes

Sleeps With The Fishes transcends expectations, though, a rare moment where collaboration creates something even more potent and evocative than hinted by its constituent parts. It has a dank, elegiac air which, nevertheless, isn’t ‘gothic’; nor is it ambient wallpaper.

Siluetes 61 - Siluetes 61

It says a lot about post-punk Germany that often the supposed ‘second-tier’ artists made albums that were just as richly compelling as bigger names like Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria! or Palais Schaumburg. The first Siluetes 61 album is a case in point.

Seefeel - Everything Squared

Everything Squared reminds of 1996’s (Ch-Vox) in both its brevity, and the overarching feeling that it’s a satellite from something more rigorously formed. In this case, it feels like a neat mini summation of the various things Seefeel do.

Andy Beta

Walter Bishop Jr. - Soul Village

Walter Bishop Jr.’s jazz bonafides go back to the source, banging bebop piano at Minton’s and making dates with the likes of Charlie Parker, being an original member of Art Blakey’s Messengers (the Jazz would be added later), and backing a young Miles Davis. Then a drug rap, loss of his cabaret license, and the ever-shifting sands of jazz led him to cool out on the scene and take up teaching music theory instead.

Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

Based in the UK, the Caribbean-Belgian musician toggles between harp and modular synth, the former an earthy, impressionistic string instrument that fellow harpist Alice Coltrane once likened to a sunset, while the latter conveys deep space and the precise lines of a sine wave.

Total Blue - Total Blue

Total Blue – an LA trio featuring Alex Talan, Nicky Benedek, and Anthony Calonico – suggest that the thrills of cheap ‘80s jacuzzi jazz and new age might soon bring about a reassessment of that long-disdained sound on their smooth debut.

Sean Wood

Leonard Cohen - Ten New Songs

After falling into the habit of downing three bottles of Chateau Latour on show nights in the early nineties, Leonard Cohen checked himself into the Mount Baldy Zen Center outside of L.A. in 1994 and lived there for five years as a Buddhist monk. When he returned from the mountain, he came with songs like stone tablets: chiseled, authoritative, and mysterious.

Leonard Cohen - Death of a Ladies' Man

People hate this record, and Cohen himself more or less disowned it – not a single track from it appears on The Essential Leonard Cohen, one of his best career retrospectives. But for me, the extravagance of Phil Spector’s production is a welcome sonic shift, if only because it is truly an eccentric outlier from the rest of the Cohen catalog.

Jonny Greenwood - Phantom Thread

Anderson’s 2017 fable of a creatively-brilliant and obsessively-controlling fashion designer received one of Greenwood’s most fulfilling and beautiful scores.

Robbie Robertson - Killers of the Flower Moon

While it is a score by a venerable classic rocker, it takes more cues from Bob Dylan’s latter-day amorphous, historically-ambiguous Americana soundscapes than from Scorsese’s trusty Stones needle drops. It didn’t get the Oscar it deserved, but it is a brilliant and forward-thinking last hurrah for the Robertson-Scorsese collaboration.