Flock Of Dimes

The Life You Save

Jenn Wasner is a founding member of US indie group Wye Oak, but she also makes solo music. As Flock of Dimes, she shifts between synth and guitar, holding back on the shredded solos that distinguish Wye Oak. This solo output gives her an avenue to explore a different kind of music, more radically revealing, while exploring all facets of her taste. 

For her third album, Wasner has opted for a more folky sound. Synths, electronics and electric guitars still feature, but so too do acoustics, pedal- and lap-steel guitars, mandolin and more. Tracks deal with difficult and deeply personal issues – specifically, the ongoing fallout from having grown up in an environment defined by addiction and co-dependent relationships. Lyrically, Wasner never shrinks from her truth, but the album doesn’t feel like a misery memoir. It’s packed with lustrous melodies and Wasner’s voice is stunning. Channelling both Joan As Police Woman and Lucinda Williams, it’s grazed with hurt while exuding a kind of luminous resilience. 

Picking specific highlights is hard, but standout moments include the deceptively light and gleaming ‘Close To Home’ and ‘Pride’, with its head-nodding pace and a guitar part of heartbreaking soft strength.

Label: Sub Pop

Širom

In The Wind Of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper

Slovenian trio Širom have described their music as “imaginary folk”, a term borrowed from a French musicologist writing in the 1950s. It’s a neat way of explaining how their homeland’s musical traditions act as a frame for their artistry, rather than a foundation. Širom are not folk revisionists: community and connection are as important to them as songs and instrumentation, as is music’s transformative power.

All of this comes together on In The Wind Of Night…, the follow-up to 2022’s widely acclaimed album The Liquified Throne Of Simplicity. Its seven, largely instrumental tracks (the longest of which stretches to 19 minutes) exert a mesmeric power due to their linear melodic flows and repetitive rhythms, encompassing wordless incantations, complex fingerpicking and inspired interplay on dozens of esoteric instruments, including the balafon (West African xylophone) and morin khuur (Mongolian fiddle). 

This is timeless, sparse music that tends toward the haunted and forlorn, hinting at long, dark histories, but there is some uplift and sweetness in the hurdy-gurdy-driven closer, ‘For You, This Eve, The Wolves Will Be Enchantingly Forsaken’.   

Label: tak:til/Glitterbeat

Alfa Mist

Roulette

“I like asking questions on my albums and not necessarily providing answers.” So says London-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and MC Alfa Sekitoleko, whose thoughtful expositions have previously focused on his mother’s experience as a Ugandan immigrant to the UK and what it means to be a young, Black British man today. For his fifth LP, he’s moved from harsh reality to fanciful possibilities, taking reincarnation as his theme.

Self-produced, Roulette posits a future where the theory that people can live multiple lives has been scientifically proven. Across 15 tracks, he poses some of the philosophical and ethical questions that might arise in such a future. He does this with an eloquent and absorbing fusion of “blue” jazz, lustrous modern soul and modern classical, utilising keyboards, double bass, vibraphone, brass, woodwind, piano and cello in understatedly stylish orchestral arrangements, often with a vintage cinematic feel. 

There are touches of old-school hip hop (from NYC rapper Homeboy Sandman, on opener ‘Reincarnation’), plus notes of the grime that Sekitoleko grew up on (in the moody, Tricky-ish ‘Give Nothing’). There’s also a fine guest spot from London’s alt-soul artist Tawiah, too, on the shimmery yet yearning ‘All Time’.

Label: Sekito 

The Necks

Disquiet

It’s fair to say there’s no band quite like Australian trio The Necks. For almost 40 years, they’ve been playing a style of improv music that is not really jazz, nor minimalist, not quite ambient and not exactly avant-garde. They never rehearse. Instead, armed with piano/Hammond organ, double bass, drums and a heavy dose of seasoned intuition, they appear to conjure music out of thin air. 

Disquiet is their 20th album and further evidence that The Necks play by their own rules. A triple CD with a running time of three hours, over just four tracks, is perhaps a daunting prospect but since these discs aren’t numbered, listeners are free to roam across its seemingly infinite sonic fields. 

Hypnotic and calm in their gentle shape-shifting, pristine yet warmly human and sublimely suggestive (though it’s hard to say of what), these longform pieces recall traditional Indian ragas, the music of Alice Coltrane and Tortoise. The Necks’ mastery of space and quiet is peerless, so much so that the isolation of just a few notes or the brief silencing of one instrument can instantly tip the mood, as in ‘Rapid Eye Movement’, where at times an odd foreboding edges out tranquility.   

Label: Northern Spy