Cherry Glazerr - Stuffed & Ready

I'm a sucker for 90s nostalgia, and in the current shitshow in which we live, it seems amazing to me now that angsty rock peaked well before the decade was over. Not that Cherry Glazerr is an exercise in nostalgia; while their music leans heavily on "grungy" loud-soft dynamics, it just as much recalls Japanese Breakfast's dream pop and Metric's synth rock. And, not to pigeonhole Clem Creevy, whose emotional palette is far from monochrome, but a pure strain of anger is a prominent part of it, and in the current state of things, it's hard to believe it ever went out of style. In the album's most cathartic moment, Creevy screams "I see myself in you and that's why I fucking hate you!" It's a sentiment that might look banal on paper, but when it comes around, it's earned. When Cherry Glazerr released its third album Apocalipstick in early 2017, Creevy was, in her own words, an overconfident teenager, and is now more world-weary and cynical. She conveys a relatable sense of wrongfootedness, her jabs tempered with self-effacing humour. Stuffed & Ready, however, is not the dirgy, mopey album it might sound like I'm describing. It's a pop album powered by genuine humanity and meticulous songcraft. I'd say it's "stuffed" with hooks and "ready" to rock you, but I'm not a complete and utter fuckwit. Instead I'll say that in a better world, Stuffed & Ready would be a massive hit, but paradoxically, a better world would be unable to produce it.

Lorelle Meets The Obsolete - De Facto

One thing I might not have noticed on my first listen had I not known already is that Mexican band Lorelle Meets The Obsolete's fifth album is sung entirely in Spanish. Lorena Quintinilla/Lorelle's vocals are typically half-whispered and placed low in the mix, so I have trouble understanding what she's singing anyway. This particular creative decision is a pointed response to the clusterfuck at the border. I don't speak Spanish, but "La Maga" doesn't need a translation.

2016's Balance introduced more streamlined songwriting to the band's palette; as in the past, and particularly on that album, elements of the band's songs are familiar, even radio-ready, but are used as springboards for songs with less conventional payoff. "Líneas En Hojas"'s bass line evokes "Billie Jean", but it's more of a trance than a floor-filler. "Resistir"'s chords would be at home as the intro to a garage rock song, but the song never progresses beyond them, instead gradually adding sound to ramp up the drama. De Facto walks a fine line, relatively immediate in its appeal without filing down the band's edges to the extent that it could be reasonably described as their "pop" album. It is both their strongest album melodically and their most abstract.

Spoon - Everything Hits At Once

In the scheme of things, a Spoon "best of" compilation isn't the worst thing that's ever happened, but it's legitimate to question whether it needs to exist in 2019. Streaming having taken over music consumption, you can listen to any of thousands of playlists on Spotify or dive into the band's catalogue itself.

As these things usually do, Everything At Once presents a skewed version of Spoon's history. Casual listeners can get by without hearing the band's first two albums Telephono and A Series of Sneaks and their least regarded album, 2010's Transference (none of which get a look-in here), and the band would prefer to steer the next potential super fan away from those albums while keeping the compilation concise. The selection is tilted disproportionately towards Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and They Want My Soul rather than consensus favourites Girls Can Tell and Kill the Moonlight. This might be the band's personal taste for their own work. When it comes to omitting the first two albums, the argument could be made those albums' comparative rawness would stand out, but it's harder to argue that "Anything You Want" or "All the Pretty Girls Go to the City" couldn't easily take the place of "Do You" and "Inside Out".

Purely on its merits as a collection of songs, Everything Hits At Once holds up. Quibbles over what could have been included or excluded only underscore the strength of Spoon's catalogue. Its sequence competently corrals a bunch of songs recorded over a 20 year period, but the title almost inadvertently alludes to one of its shortcomings; by design, everything hits not so much at once, but one after the other without reprieve. There's nothing wrong with that approach, but I prefer the push and pull of Spoon's albums, and you don't get that here without the minimalist atmospherics of songs such as "Paper Tiger" and "The Ghost of You Lingers" or acoustic numbers such as "10:20 AM" and "Vittorio E", but hopefully Everything Hits At Once will implore people to discover that for themselves.

Los Kowalski - Dejarte Ir

Mexico's Los Kowalski has had the labels Krautrock, shoegaze and psychedelia attached to it, among other genres. It's accurate yet reductive. Many inventive bands are described as familar-yet-original, but Los Kowalski really does have a knack for evoking the past to its advantage while seamlessly blending its influences in a way that defies comparison. Take two of the best songs on Dejarte Ir ("Let You Go"), for example: "Puente a la luna" ("Bridge to the Moon") is Krautrock on downers, coasting by on a slowed down motorik beat and a two note bass line and eventually subsumed by a wall of enveloping guitars; "Albatros" employs a faster, more elastic beat, and seems to be another one chord affair until a change that hits like Mjölnir. Dejarte Ir is a rare album that can somehow lull listeners into a reverie and keep them on their toes at the same time.

Petal - Magic Gone

The "confessional" album is sought after, but the human desire for secondhand absorption of the artist's personal turmoil allows empty posturing to slip through the net. Formless angst became an aesthetic, an affectation, because we let it; we made it profitable. Still, we know the real deal when we hear it. We treat such an album like a cipher through which the artist's psyche can be decoded.

Kiley Lotz would save you the trouble. She's been upfront about her struggle with mental illness which intensified in between Petal's debut Shame in 2015 and Magic Gone. The lyrics don't sugarcoat it and it's not a stretch to say you can hear it in her performance. In "Comfort", Lotz details in real time the point when she realised a long term relationship was over, and when she wails "I don't fucking care anymore!", you believe her. And yet Magic Gone never feels like a confrontational exercise, staring at you to see who blinks first, because Lotz's melodic acuity won't allow it. It's more downbeat than Shame, - never dirge-like in a way that would make a line such as "I wished the truck on the overpass would tumble down upon me" relentlessly morose, but never trivialising it either.

The Breeders - All Nerve

The Breeders are not a band burdened by the idea of a legacy. All Nerve comes ten years after the middling Mountain Battles and is just the band's fifth album in 28 years. It also makes this lineup - the same that recorded 1993's Last Splash - the first to record more than one album (although, including The Amps, everyone involved has appeared in at least one other iteration). Last Splash was commercially successful in large part due to a confluence of factors such as how "Cannonball" fit in perfectly with MTV's alt-rock agenda at the time and British label 4AD doubling down on its decision to sign American artists, but it endures because of Kim Deal's songwriting and the band's musicianship. 25 years later, there's still so much to unpack in "Cannonball", not to mention the sublime power-pop of "Divine Hammer", the batshit dirge "Mad Lucas" and the alternately boiling and simmering "Roi" and its brief reprise, the latter ingeniously placed at the end of the album after a cover of Ed's Redeeming Qualities' country & western song "Drivin' on 9". But for all that, All Nerve is no attempt to replicate past glory.

Free from expectations and historical context, All Nerve is free to take its time. Opening track "Nervous Mary" uses the same slow-fast structure as Last Splash's opener "New Year", and could have been recorded the day after that album's last session, but the album soon carves out its own identity and indulges in slower tempos more than any other Breeders album, never more so than "Dawn: Making An Effort", which creates a wall of noise out of delayed guitar and cymbal splashes. Josephine Wiggs' bass is prominent without being overbearing, and supplies an intangible, nervous energy, but her standout performance is on "MetaGoth", which puts her in front of the mic and pairs her on guitar with Kelley Deal. Co-written by Wiggs and Kim Deal, it recalls Deal's Pixies contribution "Into the White" in tone, but transplanted into darker, plodding Breeders territory and replete with ominous guitar figures. Wiggs' untarnished English accent and deadpan delivery only amplify the effect. A cover of Krautrockers Amon Düül II's  "Archangel's Thunderbird" keeps the album's back half from slipping from languid to sonorous, and is perhaps the highlight for Jim MacPherson, whose raw, spirited drumming has truly been missed. In fact the interplay between these four musicians has been missed, and it's easy to point to them collectively as the proximate cause for All Nerve being the most vital Breeders album in 25 years.

Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!

A Parquet Courts album produced by Danger Mouse is a no-brainer on paper - the pairing of a band not content to release the same album twice and a producer who's a popular choice for artists looking to switch up their sound. The good news is that Wide Awake! is a triumph in practice. The album revels in previously untapped influences that the band leans into to the point where if, say, "Violence" was the first Parquet Courts song you ever heard, you might well assume that these four white guys were always this indebted to black artists of the past. That one is a rumination on numbness to violence as an unfortunate but necessary response to its prevalence in present day America. Andrew Savage sounds like James Murphy after 12 cups of coffee, while musically it recalls Funkadelic, both in its specifics (especially the pitch-shifted monologue in the final stretch) and the way it makes an inherently bitter pill palatable. Unfortunately the Talking Heads pastiche title track is a bridge too far, which is odd considering how well they sell the almost Jackson 5 bounce of "Tenderness". The idea of weighty themes appealingly packaged is not new to Parquet Courts, but with their most eclectic set of tunes and broadest emotional palette, Wake Up! is the band's most engaging album.

Queens of the Stone Age - Villains

Queens of the Stone Age have carved out a comfortable position as elder statesmen of rock. Nobody expects them to flip their sound on its head at every turn. They could, if they wanted, give it just enough of a  perfunctory tweak to avoid being accused of repeating themselves, but of course they don't want to do that. Josh Homme is a songwriter's songwriter, always seeking new approaches even after having worked within his idiom with one band or another for nearly 30 years. The knee-jerk reaction is to call Villains QOTSA's pop album, given that Mark Ronson is producer, but if that's the case, they've arrived at it on their own terms. The album is full of the serpentine twists that have become the band's stock in trade, and the more floor-ready beats recontextualise familiar QOTSA tropes without compromising the muscularity of Homme's riffs. The result is less "Uptown Funk" than decadent disco. Villains forgoes the band's tradition of inviting high profile guests, which is not a decision that the first and so far only band to unite Trent Reznor and Elton John in the studio would make lightly. It shows they don't need a lot of help to pull off stylistic shifts such as this one - not that there's any reason to doubt it.

Béla Fleck & Abigail Washburn - Echo in the Valley

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn's personal r elationship goes back a decade and their professional relationship almost as far, but they hadn't recorded as a duo until 2014's self-titled album. Strictly a dual banjo and voice affair, it was more a showcase of their musical interplay than songwriting as they navigated how to work in that context, and it settled the question of whether Washburn, an excellent banjoist and Fleck, a virtuoso, could work as a duo. That's not to diminish its value as a fine collection of songs, but the point was occasionally a bit laboured - I personally didn't need a four and a half minute rendition of "Railroad" ("I've been working on the railroad...)".

Echo in the Valley builds on what the duo learnt the first time around and brings their songwriting to the fore. The first time around, Fleck and Washburn both wrote the bulk of the album, but did so separately on all but two songs; on Echo in the Valley, it's a collaborative effort all over. There's less reliance on both traditional material and traditional influences in general, but the album evokes a bygone era in less tangible ways.

Torres - Three Futures

Torres doesn't seem interested in staying in one place musically for too long, and it was anyone's guess what her third album was going to sound like. A focus on synths (and guitars run through synth pedals among other things) most obviously delineates Three Futures from its predecessors, but what strikes me about that move even more than its seamless and non-perfunctory integration is how necessary an evolution it was in order to convey Scott's ideas. Even if she could have conceived of "Concrete Ganesha" before, there was no way to render such a textural, glitchy piece with her old palette. Recognisable guitar lines don't prop up any of the songs, but rather snake in and out.

Torres' self-titled debut established Mackenzie Scott as a talented songwriter straight out of the gate; Sprinter expanded her purview and gave her many places to go. Three Futures isn't a step forwards, backwards or laterally, but downwards; it drags you down and traps you in its world and doesn't let you come up for air until it's over.

Slowdive - Slowdive

So there's a new Slowdive album in 2017; it almost seems too pure for this sinful Earth, but I'll take it.

Of course, you don't want a Slowdive album compromised by two decades of cynicism and the world generally going down the shitter, so it comes as a relief that Slowdive, though recorded last year, could have been from 1994, a missing link between Souvlaki and Pygmalion, perfectly preserved in amber and discovered just when we need it most. Slowdive shouldn't be penalised for sticking to what works, because it does work; there hasn't been a time between their formation and now when their simple yet layered and meticulous compositions wouldn't have seamlessly blended into the musical landscape aesthetically while standing out in quality. Though it's no mere nostalgia trip, Slowdive nonetheless serves as a reminder of a time when there was assumed to be preordained limits on human ego, hubris and stupidity - that if we weren't already as low as we could go, we'd at least know when we got there. It's the album we need right now, even if it's not the one we deserve.

Benjamin Booker - Witness

A recently posted Instagram photo of Benjamin Booker from Christmas 2005 shows Booker with a Stratocaster. "My first Fender! White for Jimi and Kurt. Smashed on stage at Lollapalooza in the summer of 2014." Booker believes music is eternal, but instruments are ephemeral. That, or he just likes smashing shit. In any case, Booker embodies Cobain's punk spirit while being a student of classic rock, soul and blues. The sound of his debut could be compared to that of Chuck Berry fronting Nirvana, although his voice defies easy comparison. On Witness, Booker tempers the garage-punk sound on which he built his name, favouring those older influences, especially on the gospel-infused title track.

On his debut, Booker sang that "the future is slow coming", which recalled "A Change is Gonna Come" by Sam Cooke (who is evoked on Witness in the string intro to "Believe"). He wasn't contradicting Cooke's message, but adding "it's gonna take longer than we thought". Booker is the change he wishes to see in the world, and Witness is the sound of him settling in for the long haul.

Spoon - Hot Thoughts

A band that released its first album in 1996 shouldn't sound this vital in 2017. Hell, not in 2007. Having got this far with only one genuine aberration (2010's Transference), Spoon has earned the right not to be expected to still deliver era-defining albums and only needs to vary its sound just enough to avoid staleness.

Hot Thoughts incorporates synth elements that have existed in the Spooniverse (I'll see myself out) since Britt Daniel and Dan Boeckner's Divine Fits, but wisely doesn't mess with what's always worked about Spoon. Spoon's best songs are low key and moving in an esoteric way. "I Ain't the One" carries on this tradition with its simple keyboard chord sequence and swirling synth. Likewise, the centrepiece and the closing track, which are of a piece: "Pink Up", a slowly building composition of keys and thick percussion and "Us", a meditative brass jam on the former and a great finish to an album that consistently delivers and occasionally surprises.

50 Foot Wave - Bath White EP

Throwing Muses has existed as a three piece for some time now: Kristin Hersh and perennial drummer Dave Narciso along Bernard Georges on bass. 50 Foot Wave simply swaps Narciso for Rob Ahlers, but the differences are marked more by Kristin Hersh's shifted priorities. Too many artists get calmer as their career goes on, when they should get angrier. Hersh gets this, and 50 Foot Wave is Hersh's way of  indulging that without changing what Throwing Muses and her solo albums are about.

Though it once released a 25 minute standalone single, 50 Foot Wave is generally not a band concerned with making long and sprawling musical statements. As such, most of its releases are EPs. The title track's origins are in the ocean, which is an apt aural reference point for the EP in the way it subsumes the listener with sound and doesn't stay still. Bath White simultaneously complements 2011's With Love from the Men's Room EP and expands on it, and if you needed confirmation of Kristin Hersh's enduring importance, this is it.

Related:

50 Foot Wave - With Love from the Men's Room EP
Throwing Muses - Purgatory/Paradise
Flux Capacitor: Throwing Muses - Untitled

Laura Cantrell - Laura Cantrell at the BBC

Anyone familiar with Laura Cantrell knows that John Peel endorsed her in a big way. She's developed a proportionally bigger following in the UK than the US and even released her last album over there first. Properly released on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously but available at her recent UK shows and as a Record Store Day exclusive, Laura Cantrell at the BBC does what it says on the tin, collecting 15 performances from 2000 to 2005, 10 of which are from Peel sessions.

Cantrell's typically sparse live setup suits intimate venues, and she is as much in her element in a radio studio as in a cafe, bar or recording studio. The four performances from 2005 sound the best, showing a surefooted Cantrell in the early days of her longtime collaboration with guitarist Mark Spencer. The mortality-focused, piano-based "Bees" is all stringed instruments here, and loses none of its power. "Old Downtown" undergoes a more pronounced transformation from a rocker worthy of Lucinda Williams to just Cantrell and her acoustic guitar, and somehow also works.

Laura Cantrell at the BBC is not a live or studio compilation in the traditional sense of either word, It's not an ephemeral novelty either, though it is a unique entry in the Cantrell catalogue, combining the quiet and fidelity of the studio with the directness of live performance.

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Iggy Pop - Post Pop Depression

Iggy Pop doesn't sound depressed on Post Pop Depression, though he has every right to be. Most of the principal members of The Stooges have died, as well as Lou Reed and now David Bowie. As hard as it might be to imagine, Iggy won't be making music forever, and he's now said that he doesn't intend to try.

The opening track "I'm Gonna Break Into Your Heart" starts with Pop doubling Josh Homme's modal Eastern riff. It doesn't sound as though one is following the other, and it's a perfect microcosm of the album as a whole. Even the one misstep, the spaghetti western "Vulture", is made together. Homme's reputation as a meticulous tone chaser with a penchant for drop tunings can obscure his talent as a fluid and dynamic player, and in large part it's his adaptability that makes Post Pop Depression work. It seems as though he can complement just about anyone, while Pop can stamp his personality on just about anything. It makes for a great parting statement if he does intend to retire and a great avenue of inspiration if he doesn't.

Custard - Come Back, All is Forgiven

Custard didn't announce Come Back, All is Forgiven until it was recorded and a few months away from release, which was smart; enough time to adjust to the reality that 2015 will see a new Custard album, but not enough to build up unreasonable expectations.

The first thing that struck me about Come Back, All is Forgiven was how much like Custard it sounds like, which wasn't a given after 16 years away from the studio. It's an older Custard, obviously, and sounds like it. While the familiar wit lingers in the lyrics, a certain world weariness has crept in, while musically, a lot of the immediacy has been traded in for a more slow burning approach. It's a trade-off, but a worthwhile one. A younger Custard simply couldn't have conceived "We Are the Parents (Our Parents Warned Us About") and "Get In Your Car" among others. More than one song on Come Back, All is Forgiven addresses 90s nostalgia, but the album is far from an exercise in it.

Related:

Top 30 Albums of 2015

Kurt Cobain - Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings

If you have to ask yourself if you need this, you don't.  What was I supposed to do, not buy it? Not bloody likely.

For only two more dollars than the regular version would have cost me, I bought the deluxe edition - that's 31 tracks instead of 13. With 8 minutes of running time left, it's a wonder they didn't include a recording of Cobain scraping the bottom of a barrel with a guitar pick. It's natural to want a window into Cobain's mind - the global audience Nevermind gave him, whether he wanted it or not, had only two and a half years to get to know him, and many of his lyrics, even under the inevitable intense scrutiny following his death, remain oblique and elliptical. Home Recordings, however, is no magic cipher that will suddenly cast everything in a whole new light. It will not, as the fictitious Blaine DeBeers of iZombie claimed, fill gaps between Fecal Matter and Nirvana you didn't even know existed. While some of it is of academic interest, to claim to be able to draw a straight line between it and even Bleach would be like watching heretofore unseen footage of Jackson Pollock squeeze sauce onto a hotdog and claim the pattern to be a precursor to Blue Poles.

A good percentage of the tracks on Home Recordings are montages (duh) and monologues that don't bear repeated listens. "Aberdeen" is an anecdote about an abortive sexual encounter, one that Buzz Osbourne insists is spurious, along with most of the rest of the Montage of Heck documentary. Presented out of context, there's nothing to suggest it purports to be true. Little of the actual music is especially portentous either. The oft-released "Been a Son" gets yet another go-round in a version that makes the With the Lights Out recording sound polished and meticulous by comparison. Surprisingly, there's no version of "Polly", the most ubiquitous song in the Nirvana catalogue, to be had here, although there are plenty of four chord wonders that could have become a "Drain You" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had Cobain revisited them. There are a couple that did grow into something more substantial - the aforementioned "Been a Son" and a similarly inauspicious-sounding "Sappy". The With the Lights Out curio "Clean Up Before She Comes" appears here - a demo of a demo. Minus the pithy lyrics, harmonies and counter-melodies that form the song's hooks (I think there are four Cobains duking it out in there at one point in the better known version), it just doesn't connect. Some of the more abstract sketches might have had potential as well, such as "She Only Lies", which is just Cobain and a surprisingly clear-sounding bass. Perhaps the phone call that interrupted the dirgey "Burn the Rain" robbed us of a classic. One of the few songs I've revisited so far is the instrumental "The Happy Guitar". Known erroneously on bootlegs as "Black and White Blues" for years, it may be a tribute to Leadbelly, but it's closer to Lonnie Johnson, whose name you normally wouldn't associate with Cobain - therein lies the appeal.

I won't be the only one to quote that prescient line from "Aero Zeppelin" (from the genuinely valuable odds and ends collection Incesticide). "all the kids will eat it up if it's packaged properly". Just don't expect them to keep it down.

Motherfucker - Confetti

It would have been enough for Motherfucker to merely wake you from the pathetic stupor that most music seems determined to keep you in. Hell, if it was just good for a giggle because its name is a naughty word, that would have been better than nothing. Motherfucker's name is not an exercise in puerility or superficiality, however, but a portent of Confetti's unrelenting post-whatever-noise-rock-something-something - think the blunt assault of METZ delivered with the laser focus of Erase Errata. Confetti packs a lot into its 30 minutes, but has no time for moroseness, self-indulgence or half-assed bullshit.

Motherfucker on Bandcamp

Blur - The Magic Whip

Blur flip-flopped on whether or not it would continue to exist and in what capacity enough times over the 12 years since Think Tank that The Magic Whip was anything but inevitable. However, there's reason to believe it isn't intended as a one off. The album was produced by Stephen Street, the band's longest serving producer who worked with them from their stately Britpop era through to 1997's transitional self-titled album, suggesting another ongoing partnership might be in the works. More significantly, though, The Magic Whip has neither a sense of urgency nor finality to it. It neither bolsters nor tarnishes their legacy, but opens the door for the band to do either or both in the future.

No Blur album ever sounded like another, but Damon Albarn has been exploring new sounds with Gorillaz and as a solo artist, so carving out a distinct identity for The Magic Whip was never going to be easy. It's happy enough to revisit the past, but it's frustrating when some of its attempts to move forward have antecedents in the Gorillaz canon. But of course Albarn's world-weary sensibility ensures that the throwbacks are not mere exercises in nostalgia, and the more forward-looking material really resonates when it does work. The MVP "There Are Too Many of Us" starts with minor synth chords over a marching beat and some subtle, ominous bass work from Alex James and was inspired by the Lindt hostage crisis in Sydney. It's about the muted, impersonal reaction often inspired by watching a tragedy on TV; Albarn wrote the lyrics while switching between watching it that way and directly from a hotel room.

Sitting somewhere above Faith No More's new album and far below Swans' recent output, The Magic Whip has plenty to like about it. Whether there's Blur in our future is impossible to know, but the evidence presented suggests it's not a foolish thing to want.