El Khat
Mute
Formed in Tel Aviv and now based in Berlin, musical trio El Kat is led by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Eyal el Wahab, whose Yemeni roots are pivotal to their sound and practice. The group play stringed and percussion instruments wrought from cast-off scraps of metal, wood and plastic, which is not only resourceful but a kinship issue, too, acknowledging the often make-do, lo-fi nature of recordings by musicians in Yemen, through necessity.
Mute is the band’s third album, and its title is a huge misnomer. A compelling combination of archaic and modern, it features 10 raw and visceral tracks, a strangely heady mix of wooden banging, metallic clanging and microtonal strings with blasts of brass and haunted organ work, with el Wahab’s compellingly mournful vocals the binding agent. It’s bold, defiant music, as is shown by ‘Commodore Lothan’, with its lurching, stop-start momentum and the sinuous yet frantic ‘Zafa: Talaatam’. Mute is by no means a one-note set, however: ‘Tislami Tislami’ charms with its winding melodic lines and multi-vocal counterpoint, while the epic ‘Intissar’ features a good minute’s silence ahead of its finale, a poignant, slightly ragged instrumental.
Label: Glitterbeat
Mermaid Chunky
slif slaf slof
Originating from Gloucestershire, England and named after a type of knitting yarn, Mermaid Chunky (Moina Moin and Freya Tate) rehearsed for their debut show at a local poetry night, minus instruments, before graduating to saxophone, keyboard and drum machine. Their idiosyncratic image might suggest a project heavy on performance art, light and frivolous on the music, but this is not the case here.
Though it’s certainly quirky, the duo’s first album for hip US label DFA is also immediate, self-aware and celebratory: a smart, no-rules mix of wistful folk-pop, wonky electronica, Deep South disco-punk, jazz-adjacent soul and more, often in the same song. Recorders play a major role throughout. Several of its songs stretch over seven minutes, yet remain coherent - a testament to the band’s compositional skills, as well as their apparent appreciation of Animal Collective, Aphex Twin, Mort Garson and Peaches. Picking a single highlight is difficult but ‘Tiny Gymnast’, with its divinely moody, organ-and-sax intro, comical synth squelches and exaggeratedly enunciated narrative in the character of Henry VIII is certainly one of the album’s standout moments.
Label: DFA Records
My Brightest Diamond
Fight The Real Terror
The title track on Shara Nova’s latest album is both an acknowledgement of the late Sinead O’Connor’s bravery and an impassioned call-to-arms. “Oh, it’s easier to saint too late for such a catalytic act than to respect a living and furious woman,” she sings against sparse, darkly clamorous guitar, referring to the Irish singer’s infamous tearing up of a photograph of the Pope live on US television, before asking: “Who’s gonna stand with me shoulder to shoulder to take down another untouchable power?” As album openers go, ‘Fight The Real Terror’ lands quite a punch.
Nova, who has been releasing music as My Brightest Diamond since 2006, continues in a similar vein, focusing on the increasingly urgent need to conquer iniquity while acknowledging our vulnerability and remaining hopeful. Its songs are both warmly intimate and dramatically expansive: against saturnine, alt-rock tunes in lean arrangements, with minimal effects, her lustrous, extraordinarily powerful and classically-trained voice variously counsels vigilance (on the PJ Harvey-ish ‘Rocket In My Pocket’), considers death (in the exquisitely operatic ‘Have You Ever Seen An Angel’) and even gives 10-point dating advice (in the wry ‘Rule Breaker’). Six albums in, it seems her purpose burns brighter than ever.
Label: Western Vinyl
Sun Araw
Lifetime
“Sun Araw continues to investigate space as a motionless field against which many motions are observed!” So reads the statement from Texan native Cameron Stallones’ announcing his tenth album, another journey through the inner and outer cosmoses with psychedelic rock and experimental electronica his main forms of transport (exact destination: unknown).
On Lifetime, Stallones again channels elements of ambient, New Age and meditative music, whilst also circumventing those labels with his use of heavily treated vocals, his feeling for rhythm, and occasional use of something akin to pop structure. Each of the album’s eight tracks retains an independent identity, whilst also playing a part in a luminous, otherworldly whole. If the overall effect is of hallucinatory awe, rather than mellow comfort, there’s plenty of nuance: sun-warped experimental pop, psychedelic house, spiritual jazz and a kind of euphoric post-prog are all in play, creating shifting fields of sound – in the case of the dizzying ‘Zero Declination’, nine-minutes long – which refract light and deliver abundant loveliness. Stallones’ touchstones (Tangerine Dream, Pauline Anna Strom, Arthur Russell) and kindred spirits (Panda Bear, High Wolf) occasionally loom into focus, but his music oscillates on its own terms. “Many motions”, indeed.
Label: Drag City
