SONGHOY BLUES - Optimisme [LP/CD](Fat Possum/The Orchard)
For their third album the always promising Malian quartet get the mix of Blues, Modern music and their African roots perfect. There are few singles as bracing as “Worry” at the moment. Like The Blind Boys of Alabama, they attack the riff and you can hear them smiling as they sing. Producer Matt Sweeney’s command of the groups sounds and just the right placement of effects pushes them harder. Finally when they roll down the Pentatonic scale over those battering polyrhythms - it is impossible not to beat along on whatever is handy. Elsewhere, they are starting to sound more like a Rock band (“Badala”) but that does not mean their heartened vocalizing and neat trills (“Barre” played over a straight beat) are drowned out by the grind. It just means they are thrillingly loud, so when “Optimisme” plays anywhere - everyone is listening. (“Barre” played over a straight beat) are drowned out by the grind. It just means they are thrillingly loud, so when “Optimisme” plays anywhere - everyone is listening.
SEN MORIMOTO [LP/CD/CS](Sooper/Secretly/AMPED)
The sadboy scene has needed a jolt for a long while. It has paid off handsomely in Hip-Hop, but around the corner in Pop-the potential to shake up the waves of sunny, electronic-based jams are ripening fast. Sen Morimoto might just have the right stuff to breakthrough. Morimoto has an ear for indelible hooks (“Woof” toys with growth while beautifully playing it all against his sweet monotone and Hip-Hop groove.). While the imaginative fantasy “Jupiter” seems to pit Thundercat against The Flaming Lips and Morimoto’s chord changes are stunning. While the Yacht Rock-meets-slow jam fizz of “Deep Down” could have tumbled into some Mac Demarco-ish rut, but Morimoto knows exactly how to build up and break down without alerting you to the changes. “Sen Morimoto” is rich, psychedelic jazzy homegrown Hip-Hop Pop that makes you wish it was still summer.
MAGIK MARKERS - 2020 [LP/CD] (Drag City/Redeye)
If the year 2020 has taught us anything, it is to work within your limitations but use everything you have at your disposal. For the first time in seven years, Magik Markers return with a thought-provoking album that is one part Arthur Janov-esque primal howl at the universe (the Sabbath-esque “That Dream,”) one part confrontation and acknowledgement of the dark chapters of history (the beautiful Gothic sway of “Born Dead”) and one part sweeping epic psychedelia (the seven-minute mantra of “CDROM.”) “2020” is dangerous sprawling Rock that touches on Nico, Yoko and SST-period Sonic Youth. A stunner.
USA NAILS - Character Stop [LP/CD](Hex)
From the promising Hex Records of Portland (see also: the searing Exhalants’ album “Atonement”) here is the most exciting Post-Punk from the UK in a while. Noisy and boisterous like Girl Band, yet with buzzing guitars and a simple, pounding drum beat, USA Nails come on like a less slinky Gallon Drunk and a more vicious Idles-type band. “Character Stop” is a lot of shouting and sloganeering (mostly with a visceral sardonic bite,) but they layer their songs so densely that “Revolution Worker” comes at you like Fontaines DC without the anthemic thrust. The blistering “I Don’t Own Anything” is explosive highlighting that this band is at its best when parts compete with each other. Here’s to USA Nails’ continued effort to enervate and not cooperate.
KAHIL EL’ZABAR - America The Beautiful [LP/CD](Spiritmuse/Redeye)
On albums like Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “The Spiritual” or Ornette Coleman’s “Skies of America,” Jazz plays American music in a way that demands you change your perspective. Kahil El’Zabar has gathered a group of artists who can translate the experience of life in today’s America through these reinterpretations of traditional and well-known songs. As wildly percussive as AEC, this record has fun and funk built in (“Jump and Shout (For Those Now Gone)” captures a conversation because those who see light and those who feel the darkness.) but it also takes “standards” (John Coltrane’s “Afro Blue” and the patriotic title cut) to imaginative new places that perhaps even the composers would enjoy. The best aspect of “America The Beautiful” is that as a rich tapestry it is woven from everyone’s parts that participated - so, even if you do not like Afrocentric Free Jazz rooted in the Post-Traditional Seventies (a critic’s description,) expect to moved by horns and saxophones turning The Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” into a spiritual that will make you smile and weep.
JUNCO Y MIMBRE [LP](Hidden Track SPA)
Billed as a Spanish supergroup, the five-piece show some real promise in blending the tenets of early Nineties shoegaze (Lush) with a more modern series of Stereolab-ish sounds. Their production is shimmering and bright. “Paradis” explodes from the gate, while the album opens with the alluring almost-jangle of “Temps de no.” While the band sounds like a new Cocteau Twins in places, they know how to mix up changes and color their songs with haunting chords (“Inici d’aixo” does them both.) Vocalist Maria Espinoza is enchanting leading each song with her breathy words and skillful pauses. However, the whole band makes a fantastic case for their debut to be translated and brought to our shores soon.
THE FALL - The Frenz Experiment DLX [2LP/2CD](Beggars Arkive/Redeye)
Middle-period Fall records are a bit like a puzzle. The key to journeying into them is not what is there but what is missing. The early Fall records were built on layers of repetition. Mark E. Smith’s snarl only sharpens itself against new players and his Mancunian syllabic punctuation makes even the most unlikely words rhyme-ah.
The Brix Smith years were drawing to a close and while “Frenz” is a few shades lighter than its predecessor “Bend Sinister,” it feels like another epic swath similar to the classic “This Nation’s Saving Grace.” The boisterous “Carry Bag Man” is the truth about The Fall, MES only NEEDS a phrase to return to and you can literally sense him doing that when the band gets close to deviating.
“Get a Hotel” is put through a myriad of combinations with the band in call and response mode. “Athlete Cured” is the opposite. A return to poetry for MES. I would hesitate to describe it as a mere story. Instead, he attacks the words first before drifting off like a boxer who knows he can finish his competition off at any time with just one blow. Grant Showbiz and Simon Rogers adorn the production and change his voice as well, but “Athlete” is like a jazz musician playing the Blues. The riff is only to be sustained until they run out of tape. “The cure was in no pill.” (Bonus credit for the Folky simplicity of “The Steak Place” ending with MES trailing off while saying “I shall remain here.”
“The Frenz Experiment” premieres the toughness that is coming on “I am Curious Oranj” while gently moving the band from the John Leckie-ian thematic wash (think of how simple a song like “L.A” was) while still continuing their “tradition” and expansion of the form of “How I Wrote Elastic Man.” “Frenz” is in large part MES mining the past not for memories but lyrical slings and arrows.
Now for the bonuses and they run plentiful and in multiple directions. As “Frenz” was the Fall’s first top twenty album, the Deluxe edition is cool enough to include their maddeningly great singles (in multiple forms) “Hit The North (Part 1)” and “There’s a Ghost In My House” (a Northern Soul chestnut that was their highest charting single ever.). The B-sides to their American breakthrough cover of The Kinks’ “Victoria” are also included as well as a non-Peel BBC session plus a charity single version of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life.”
With his verbal attack back in place, MES and the Fall are about to turn the Art world on its ear with “Oranj” before a few years experimenting with Electronic music. “Frenz” while not quite the missing link between early Fall and their caustic Nineties output, is a great indicator of MES regaining full control even as the band continues to remain in a state of constant flux. As long as that dichotomy is there to generate tension, you are hearing progress. Long live The Fall.