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Steeped in alt-rock and new wave influences and "you can't prove this is about you" vagaries, Vu's full-length debut is just the right balance of melodrama, defiance, and inhibition.
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With Prioritise Pleasure, Rebecca Taylor has likely coined enough slogans to retire on t-shirt sales alone, but it’s also one of the most insightful pop records this year.
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Cheekily titled Let Me Do One More, the album stays true to Tudzin's self-proclaimed promise of delivering “all riprs and no more skiprs”—brimming with a joyful energy that feels equally confident and empowered. The album is a powerful declaration coming from a pop savant who is upping her songwriting chops behind deceptively simple songwriting.
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The immeasurable talent that hides behind Simbiatu Ajikawo's fourth LP's nineteen tracks confirms that she's one of the greatest artists of her generation. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is an open window into the deep and private thoughts the London-based wants to share with us, aware that there's strength in being vulnerable.
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Enter Spiral, Darkside’s triumphant return after an eight-year hiatus. Announced at the tail-end of 2020 with the release of lead single Liberty Bell, the album comes as both a pleasant surprise and a much-needed shot in the arm for 2021, pun completely intended. After two years of global turmoil (or, if we’re being more brutally honest, universal misery), hearing what these two virtuosic artists had been concocting whilst holed up in the studio with nowhere much else to go is, put bluntly, life-affirming. And that’s exactly what Spiral is: an alchemical concoction of beats, textures, sonic flourishes, and melodies that sound like they were recorded in a world that had no precedent.
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The long period leading up to this record – not to mention the time afforded for additional audio work due to the coronavirus pandemic – means Wilson has had the space to hone her sound and deliver upon the potential her earlier releases promised.
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New Long Leg was constructed in pieces on a wiped-down, passed-around tape deck—the new pandemic normal. It could easily have suffered for it, but the production is masterful. On Unsmart Lady, the tracks are layered so purposefully that when the guitar trickles away every few measures leaving a moment of bare bass, it’s like a curtain of water parting. It yields the floor for Shaw’s punchiest lyric (“If you like a girl, be nice/it’s not rocket science,”) before dissolving into a fiercely rugged but painfully short guitar riff that takes us breathlessly up and over the climax and into the denouement. This push and pull between instruments and vocals, cleverly punctuated with just the right amount of silence, is what gives New Long Leg its seductive tension.
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Probably the most self-evident thing about Ignorance is how full the arrangements of these songs are. There’s always a beat pushing these songs forward, clearly aided by the combination of Kieran Adams’ straightforward drum patterns and additional textures added by the auxiliary percussionists Philippe Melanson and Marcus Paquin. Grand pianos, Wurlitzer keyboards, and spiraling synthesizers swirl around together to create the song’s melodic foundations, while Christine Bougie’s guitar work often acts as a palm-muted counterpoint. On Seperated, a mid-album highlight, the electric guitar noodles all over the mix, adding quietly to the atmosphere. At the center of any song sits Lindeman’s silky voice, which contrasts nicely with her band’s danceable instrumentation.
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Four years on from the divisive Wildflower, and now almost two decades on from Since I Left You, it feels like—by setting themselves the impossible task of a return—The Avalanches have now freed themselves from any pressure at all. Just as with a night spent looking at the stars, nothing is guiding you to these conclusions. There’s nothing that directly references the struggles with loss or addiction that helped produce it, but yet it still somehow feels implicit. It might not sound like an invitation to the party, but it does the sound of walking the long way home—from the ringing ears to the heartbreak. We Will Always Love You is an impressive mediation on everything that matters, and of letting go of what doesn’t. Nevermind a normal band being able to create this; a normal band wouldn’t even attempt it.
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Like Dylan and Townes Van Zandt before her, Lenker is emerging as a songwriter who takes an idea and toys with it. She takes ancient paths to new destinations or revisiting her own previously blazed trails. Here, she proffers the glimmering anything as the next step from Masterpiece’s Paul and Capacity’s Mary. A verbose portamento tumble of vocals and chords implants the image of deep woods clearing: “circle of pine and red oak, circle of moss and fire smoke.” The childlike pat-a-cake cadence of half return is a furthering of abysskiss’ blue and red horses. The wind chimes and bird song backing of zombie girl make for a lovely reconstruction of Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man that Lenker sings gently into her subject’s ear.
