Laurie Anderson
Amelia
Laurie Anderson is a celebrated polymath working in fields from performance art to sculpture, filmmaking and instrument invention. She’s perhaps best known as the musician/composer behind the eerie yet poignant 1981 hit ‘O Superman’. The track first showcased her accessible avant-garde sensibility, and it has also shaped her first album since 2018.
The album’s theme is aviator Amelia Earhart’s final flight, an attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. Its 22 tracks, many barely two minutes long, constitute a compelling narrative built from Anderson’s understatedly dramatic spoken words and hushed singing, with exquisite accompaniment from Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno.
They combine to lustrous, almost hallucinatory effect, a perfectly pitched mix of emotion and factual detail – “very hot air can make for the worst flying conditions” Anderson informs us in the brief ‘Badlands’, while in ‘This Modern World’ Earhart’s own words from a 1935 speech emphasise that “the modern world of science and invention is of particular interest to women”. Radio static and the droning buzz of her twin-engine Electra up the vividness ante. “Where did I get this obsession to hurl myself against the sky?” Anderson has Earhart wondering on ‘Fly Into The Sun’. Conjuring the sublime nature of her adventure is just part of this record’s irresistible power.
Released August 30.
Label: Nonesuch
Body Meat
Starchris
New York resident Chris Taylor has been making music as Body Meat since 2016, drawing inspiration from video games (in particular, role-playing titles) and establishing his alias as a cultish byword for categorisation avoidance. The practice of slamming together multiple different music styles isn’t new and he’s nowhere near pop duo 100 Gec’s level of Technicolor derangement, but he’s a skilled exponent, using everything from R&B to metal, trap, chiptune, hyperpop and techno, while pitch-shifting his light, forlorn vocals to high heaven.
The image of four Taylors inside a car on the album cover is a clear metaphor for the separate identities in play in the Starchris world, but a gaming predilection isn’t needed to appreciate the music. Though the 13 tracks play as a set piece, guiding listeners through the protagonist’s transformative journey from ‘A Tone In The Dark’’s strings-assisted dawning to sweetly solipsistic closer ‘Paradise’, there are highlights. Notably ‘Im In Pieces’, whose silvery, tiptoeing keys motif is rudely beaten down by a rush of super-crunched synths, and the glitchy, trap-indebted ‘High Beams’.
Out now.
Label: Partisan
Eve Maret
New Noise
When Maret describes herself as “a walking contradiction”, she isn’t amplifying different aspects of her personality for melodramatic effect, rather referring to the natural human condition – “a combination of opposing forces, spirit and body, that creates tension and mystery in my everyday life”.
On her sixth album, the US composer and multi-instrumentalist channels the energy generated by that tension, favouring in-the-moment adventurism over conventional song structure. If that suggests this set is chaotic, it’s certainly not. It’s an inspired fusion of the synthetic and the organic, classical music and futuristic pop, softness and abrasion, spaces both introspective and intergalactic, often within a single track. The brevity of the songs is invigorating, reflecting Maret’s shifts of focus in mood: from the hypnotic ebb and flow of ‘I Draw A Circle’ to the trippy ‘River Underground’, with its synth flashes and woodwind, and ‘Skeleton Woman’, where droning synth combines with multi-tracked vocals to seductively eerie effect. The title track is a standout: “I need a break from the noise,” intones Maret, referring to the blizzard of info and incessant chatter that surrounds us all. Here, for 26 minutes, her own “noise” is a kind of antidote.
Out now.
Label: Curious Music
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
Woodland
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings are individually distinguished songwriters/musicians and their acclaimed creative partnership stretches back to the early 1990s. Together they plough a furrow of lean-boned US country, folk and Americana, rooted in the Stanley Brothers’ bluegrass but bowing to Bob Dylan, Guy Clark and Neil Young: seemingly without effort, they manage the challenging feat of sounding both old-timey and thoroughly modern.
Recorded at and named after their own Woodland Sound Studios in Nashville, this is the couple’s first set of new songs since Welch’s The Harrow & The Harvest of 2011 and Rawlings’ Poor David’s Almanack from 2017 (rather confusingly, they collaborated on both records). Though the 10 songs don’t undermine their reputation as guardians of tradition, a number tilt toward more recent country-pop: the laid-back, bluesy twangle of opener ‘Empty Trainload Of Sky’ brings to mind JJ Cale, while ‘What We Had’ echoes Young’s ‘Lotta Love’ and there’s a whiff of Bonnie Dobson’s often-covered ‘Morning Dew’ about ‘The Bells And The Birds’. Elsewhere, touches of pedal-steel, organ and (on ‘Hashtag’) strings add meat to spare song frames. As always, elegance and simplicity rule, while the duo’s impeccable vocal harmonies work their characteristic charm.
Label: Acony
