Battles — Juice B Crypts

Battles have long lived in the shadow of their debut LP, Mirroring. The release was so refreshing in 2007 it felt like having the top of your brain taken out and scrubbed clean with a toothbrush. Since then, the band has lost two members. It's now comprised of polymath Ian Williams and legendary drummer John Stanier.

The band's downsizing has necessitated a shift in sound. On Juice B Crypts, electronics budge to the fore, and an increased number of guest vocalists appear. Oddball synthesisers and pedal effects substitute previous albums' crushing, math-inflected riffs. There are moments which recall Oneohtrix Point Never's Age Of, or even 80s pastiche act Com Truise.

This drastic switch-up was necessary in a band who had been beginning to stagnate. Though the joy and simulated spontaneity of Mirroring is never matched, this LP displays more than enough new strengths to carry it by. Juice B Crypts is Battles' first album which doesn't feel as though it is trying to simulate Mirroring. Its independence, experimentation, and freedom find the remaining band members in their element.

Stanier's drumming is, predictably, excellent. And Williams' performances are spirited and eccentric. So much of what always worked in Battles remains — but now it's reinvigorated; less risk-averse.

Perhaps the best example of how Battles' new, stripped-down lineup works is in the absence of vocals on Juice B Crypts. The whirring and clanging of the band's guitar work is thrown into new relief. A cold danger wraps itself around every second of charm on this album. While this may not sound like a positive quality, it's all set up for a surprising, warm and elliptical final minute (you’ll have to listen to find out). As it comes to its end, Juice B Crypts proves Battles still have a few surprises left.

Juice B Crypts is available to stream and purchase here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Raven — Jeté

Jeté begins in disarray. Three disjunct rhythms seem to jostle for supremacy. Gradually, from chaos, they coalesce. A track assumes form, 'U Should Have Told Me', which then barrels through its next seven minutes with unswerving momentum.

Jeté is an uplifting and tropical EP cast in the mould of Lone's Galaxy Garden. It begs to be blasted from speakers, danced to, and enjoyed as a somatic experience. The EP's title, meaning 'jump', should clue you in. Raven's four tracks comprise a thirty-one minute blowout that feels half that length.

Though brisk, Jeté makes time for intricacy. In 'Mifami' Raven a big pile of The Field in his washing machine with lone hardtechno sock. The result is summery but severe as two opposing tones bleed beautifully into each other. Something elusive and dangerous sits under the rhythms. It beckons like stinging nettles waving in wind.

'Floss', the EP's closer, is a filmic piece which showcases Raven's versatility. Its opening could soundtrack a Flamenco-themed Zelda dungeon. But this, and the many other moods of 'Floss', do not linger. They are introduced, given time to settle, and then supplanted by something new. 'Floss' is a track which retroactively complicates and enriches those before it. It turns attention to the EP's subtlety, its mastery; everything that its sheer entertainment value had you blind to before.

Jeté is a curiously emotive and loveable release. It swells the heart by urging the body into movement. As it winds down, you'll be left padding at your thunderous chest, contemplating just how similar exercise and exorcism can be.

Jeté will be released on 25th of October. Stream and pre-order here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Tindersticks — No Treasure But Hope

Tindersticks are industry veterans, now entering their second quarter-century as a band. Their latest album, No Treasure But Hope, arrives as its precedents: followed by a small but ardent fanbase. Musicians will cite the band as beloved influences. Among general listeners, however, they've never achieved a takeoff. Too artful for the charts, not weirdy-weirdy enough for the avant garde, Tindersticks perfectly define a niche act.

Their work conjures ancestral spirits from the annals of music history, drawing on lounge jazz, crooners and doo-wop. Understated production provides the base on which they construct their melodramatic fables. Everything about this band should be cheesy — but cheese is the very thing which, with every release, they dodge. Steeped in love for their forebears, Tindersticks are plaintive rather than parodic.

Whenever things threaten to get ropey, like the beginning of 'Trees Fall', the band yank us back on course. What resembles a Police demo in its first half unfurls at its mid-point in a gorgeous, brass-buoyed explosion.

And thankfully retained is the ineffable sadness of crooner music. 'For the Beauty' opens this album like a fairy-tale, but its delicate piano melody is soon undercut by dark, depressive lyrics. A sombre tone settles on everything that follows. 'Pinky in the Daylight' feels like Sinatra bellowed from a crackling PA into an empty Butlins bar. Blank walls spotted all colours by an impotently gyrating disco light. The stage for confessions of lonely, luckless drinkers.

This is all less dour than it might sound. Tindersticks are isolationists, but they're far from playing to an empty room. Their interiority in an increasingly performative and politicised world feels like the only protest left. Anchored by their own courage, Tindersticks have refused to engage with anyone's bullshit.

No Treasure But Hope will be released on Nov. 15th, and can be pre-ordered here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Richard Dawson — 2020

On 2020, Richard Dawson retains the extravagant and bristling sound of 2017's Peasant. And like Peasant before it, 2020 has been described as Dawson's most accessible work. Compositions have been further simplified and refined, a habit Dawson has tended towards with each successive release. This by no means portends a compromised or watered-down collection of material. Dawson has always left more than enough meat to reward attentive listeners.

In contrast to the frothing, fire-ant ridden compost-heap pastorality of Peasant, 2020 wanders into urban spaces. But it's still uncomfortable. What Dawson called its 'concrete grey' has acne scars of sad, brutalist decrepitude and quiescence. And Dawson's sound still has that timelessness to it — the result of his straddling of Britain's sonic history. One foot in the contemporary, the other in ancient British folk traditions.

Like its Celtic forebears, 2020 impresses by juggling pomp and earnestness. The LP's lead single, 'Jogging', is exceeded in honesty only by its own bombast. Songs run on for twice as long as you'd expect, muddling beautifully through their strange structures and arrangements. Dawson has a knack for swerving his material in the opposite direction you'd expect. He has always excelled in yanking the floor from his listeners, leaving them afloat and receptive.

This tailored vacuum is the scaffold under which Dawson builds his lyrics. To call his songs parables would imply they are didactic. Instead, Dawson’s tracks present focused and isolated flashes which, when combined, form a detailed whole. He does, with few and simple words, what barely any currently working songwriters can even aspire to.

Dawson never has to stretch to find the truth. He just talks about how he's feeling, and, almost by accident, keys into something universal. Lyrics which can, to new listeners, feel confrontational soon reveal themselves as affable. They find broadness in their specificity. 2020 is naked and forthright, but it's personal; never loaded with an agenda. Unless you count trying to raise money for the British Red Cross.

Richard Dawson’s 2020 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Corridor — Junior

In the promotion of Corridor's Junior, emphasis is placed on the band being Sub Pop's first francophone signing. On listening, it becomes immediately clear why the label broke with tradition. Opener 'Topographe', angular and aptly-named, jangles a melody you might find in a Panda Bear piece; one which bobs like the roll of a landscape. Sub Pop needn't have worried so much. Corridor translate themselves through their immediacy, fluent in the lingua franca of song.

Fellow Québécois Godspeed You! Black Emperor embody this power too. Despite bearing almost no comparison as bands, Godspeed's worldwide success could foreshadow Corridor's. Completely eschewing lyrics allowed Godspeed's thesis to be political, but not polemical. Fewer understood words afforded fewer opportunities for misunderstanding. Unilingual anglophones (a stereotype with innumerable real-world bases) may, as with Godspeed, focus on and infer meaning from Junior's formal qualities.

Good thing Junior is so pretty, then. Bright production and vocal harmonies sing like yawns meeting morning. With energy and jubilance Junior bounces uphill. But it's never chirpy or smug; still sadness suffuses every strum, and every rattling drum. It's a difficult sadness to place, stemming perhaps from songs' staticity as they loop to their beginnings to end; or the echoey, 'kid-lost-in-a-supermarket' production applied to their vocals.

Whatever the case, Junior is more complicated than it might at first seem. In action straightforward, after the fact it defies analysis. This state of ineffability grants the album staying power, and helps Corridor raise their heads above a crop of similar artists.

Junior, released on the 18th of October, will be available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe