I pace the floors counting milliseconds in macro until a reaction. Her passivity winds the little key in the back of my head that makes every increment ache. When I stop her stillness escalates, frozen in poised defence. I feel the itching shiver of churning gears in a grist free mill. I try and force my pacing into patience, sit, try waiting, but my skin is so coiled I can sense the life vibrating out of my grasp. Finally, her voice is pendulous and flat. ‘If you’re restless,’ she says, ‘maybe you should do something.’ A metronome in vacuum.
I keep thinking I’ll just be able to go home. I’ll open the door and she’ll be smiling at me. We’ll hold hands and talk about nothing like we used to, it’ll be easy, we’ll lock eyes and laugh. Later we’ll watch some rubbish cinema, I’ll lay my head in her lap and she’ll pat me absentmindedly while I let myself drift. The years will be a comfort that we share in, its lightness and its strength wrapped around us both. I can still feel it, refusing to be absent, and I keep forgetting what I no longer have.
Article originally appeared on The Music 20th Jan 2017
After years of featured cameos that almost incidentally highlighted his talent, everyone’s been waiting on Sampha’s debut LP.
While his Process contains the same exquisite delicacy of his previous appearances, here it’s built upon with an eclectic sense of intimacy and spacious arrangements. The album begs to be toured through a suite of perfectly furnished rooms while Sampha gently explains their purpose and inspiration.
Lead single, Blood On Me is easily the most raucous and obvious track of the lot, but the other cuts run much deeper. Where this song functions as an antagonistic shout, the rest are positive in rumination; it’s as though he put the anger part of sadness at the front so he could deal with what’s to come — a beautifully dissonant and unexpected approach that feels oddly comforting.
The instrumentation before and after these early upbeat tracks is rendered quite sparingly, with minuscule drum loops and sparsely picked keys layered with effortlessly intricate effects. Of course, this leaves most of the work hanging on Sampha’s delivery. Constantly treading a course between fortitude and fragility, like skimming a stone across a lake with no bottom, there’s just enough bounce in his voice to keep the stories spinning across the expanse.
Totally welcoming yet vaguely opaque, intimate but not exactly personal, Process never demands anything of you but has plenty to share. It’s well worth your time to check out what’s on offer.
Article originally appeared on The Music Jan 27th 2017
If you hold Duke Garwood up to the light, all you might see is the silhouette of some gothic country contemporaries. It’s easy to pick out those influences, but much harder to dig up the true meaning in his work. Whether celebratory or inflammatory, there’s a not-quite-resigned passivity there, almost nonchalance, and it can make you wish he were more chaotic and melancholic. Although full of sumptuous imagery and crafty instrumentation, Garden Of Ashes is slightly too delicate, too ‘take me as you will’, and Garwood’s crushed sandstone intonations often leave much of the emotion just out of reach.
I remember when we broke into that under construction building. We made love with my jumper as a buffer between the concrete and bare skin. I was disturbed by the structural skeleton we were in, the lack of romantic amenity and the fresh awkwardness of pre-acquaintance, not to mention the fine-grained grit of unpolished workmanship appearing in every crevice. She was very careful to show she didn’t notice and voraciously attentive in her caring. I was in pain for so long afterwards. They never did finish that building, I hear it’s still empty, incomplete and totally fitting.
Article originally appeared on The Music Jan 23rd 2017
Last year, members of Mogwai, Slowdive and Editors put together an album over the internet. What was built from shared digital snippets, and supposedly shaped as a noise-rock record with female-driven vocals, grew into Minor Victories. Released into the high middles of success, it ultimately lay just outside the expectations of each band member’s audience, and Minor Victories (Orchestral Variations) does it again. By not being a literal orchestral rework but rather a ground-up re-imagining, stripped of Rachel Goswell’s vocal presence and the vestiges of its prior construction, these variations are exquisitely rendered but vacuous portraits of space without stars.
I had my suspicions there were a couple valium tucked under the couch. They were either party relics or comedown figments but I had to know. So, I was on hands and knees when she found me, wrist deep in mystery. I turned up my charming face and met a Botticelli gaze far from grace. For a moment I saw her on that pedestal, it was right for her to be above me. ‘I can’t keep watching you destroy yourself,’ she said. So, don’t look, I told her, and kept fishing under the couch, hoping to find some relief.
I think I caught my brother crying today. He was watering his hydrangeas, so you could pass it off as moisture probably, but I often wonder how deep the distance between us goes, then I see his face like that, some carved fountain masonry, and I feel paralysed knowing I’ll never know what put that expression on there. A rime of superficiality grew up around us that makes getting underneath it all feel taboo. I asked if there was some way I could help, something I could do. He just shook his head and moved to wet the roses.
Carla not quite looking at me over the ridge of her glasses. ‘You know, not everybody makes it,’ she says, then waits as though I’d never considered my failures. ‘Maybe you’d be less depressed if you stopped trying to create something. Maybe you could get a trade, just be happy being normal.’ But I’m not, I tell her, happy or normal. I don’t know how to be either. Carla nods her head, the lenses in her glasses shifting sun rays up and down the table like searchlights without prey. ‘Maybe you could try,’ she says, ‘you know, for me.’
I wonder if you’re asleep by now. Probably a pillow curled against you, defence. Maybe one of your stuffed friends. It’s getting cold now, about the right temperature for you to want a hard spoon. Makes me wish you were here, though I’m sure you’d just get all elbows as usual. I picture you tangled up like you get, somewhere between hot and cold in a pollock of blanket. You look, well, rested I guess. What I wouldn’t give to be there, beside you, sharing air. Makes me wonder what it was like for you, that first night alone.
I’m on the couch considering my choices while Mikey watches one of those adventure chef shows. This one is roving Italy, north into the home of romance and risotto. ‘Ah, fair Verona,’ Mikey says, giving a little nudge and a large wink. ‘Good place to lay a scene that.’ I don’t want him having it, I’m still mad from before and not in the mood. Seems a bit tragic, I tell him, gorging yourself on empty imagery. Mikey twists his lips into a premature post-win grin. ‘Love,’ he says ‘looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.’
Article originally appeared on The Music Dec 19th 2016
Where Little Simz’s debut was a rough and ready statement of intent, her follow-up is the repercussive processing of that ambition. Stillness In Wonderland is both a pause in the maelstrom of success and a self-reflective retort. This is an artist actively questioning her art and managing to couch deeply personal sentiments inside brash statements. So, there’s still posturing, but the vulnerability beneath lends the brazen some much needed ballast. While on the surface Simz still cyphers formidably and spits rhymes as frenetically as ever, it’s in the stillness that her intentions are most clearly heard.
Article originally appeared on The Music 13th Dec 2016
If his work on the FX program Atlanta has shown anything, it’s that Donald Glover delights in defying expectation. Now, acting as Childish Gambino, it’s on display again – taking the roots of his earlier work on a surprising but enthralling trajectory. Much in the same way his show fuses magical realism with the absurd and high-human drama, so to does Awaken, My Love! fuse the best of some disparate elements into something far more, heading away from rap fundamentals and wandering closer to Zappa territory while wearing George Clinton’s soulful shoes. Full of howling passion and exemplary funk, this is not just some of Gambino’s best work, but some of the best out there.
We discovered it together, a chasm and a crossing, a tenuous bridge of rope and will. She was so excited, told me of every beautiful thing she believed we would find, and ran forward. I tried to follow her as best I could, but I’d barely found my footing before she was looking to cut the cords. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but if you’re not prepared to take that last step, then I need to move on.’ I looked into the ravine, told her I was coming, and didn’t move. ‘I can’t wait anymore,’ she said, always looking ahead.
Article originally appeared on The Music Nov 22nd 2016
Underpinning the tales of heartbreak and hope on Miranda Lambert’s sixth solo album is a lightness of instrumentation which bears the rustic weight of woe that gates the genre. Littered with anecdotal Americana, we’re delivered a full gamut of rural spiels, from the lonely gal at closing time to the long-suffering lover burning with doomed optimism. What’s really outstanding about Lambert’s latest is the complete lack of self-satire or post-ironic recognition throughout its exhaustive 24-track run, which has to say something about the credibility of the erstwhile reality TV star if not her unimpeachable drive and sincerity.
A Few Short Words 