Nada Surf—Never Not Together

Hunchback’s 2019 album Heavens Above describes Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper as “…an outsider because of how together he has it.” Cooper, the album argues, opposes our notion of the outsider. The archetype is a tortured Sisyphean, perpetually reliving their own failures. Cooper is, for the most part, exactly when and where he needs to be; a duck whose feet invisibly massage the current.

It’s been made no secret of—we live in a fraught and divided time. Our general response has tended to “oh dearism”; an acceptance that something is vaguely wrong, and an accompanying inability to qualify causes or formulate solutions. Ubiquity fathers absence, though. The more pervasive this depressive artistic mode is, the easier (and more necessary) it’s become to ignore.

Nada Surf’s Never Not Together crystallises a worrying fact. Cooper has company—the outsiders are now the happy ones.

On first listen, Never Not Together feels confrontationally uncool; espousing platitudinal lines like, “live and learn and forget”, and smashing out feelgood riffs straight from the Dinosaur Jr. songbook. But this speaks more to a cultural phenomenon than it typifyies Nada Surf’s songwriting. The 70s were, or so I’ve been told, an almost unspeakably difficult decade to live though. Yet those years brought us disco, funk, and afrobeat; genres which approached hardship and social injustice with a defiant spirit; a call for unity, for love, for healing. It’s what Idles more recently called Joy as an Act of Resistance.

Happiness is increasingly conflated with cheese. The world’s moneymen profit off kid misery. But Nada Surf present an opportunity to give the powers that be the finger, listen to something shamelessly chintzy, and fucking enjoy yourself for once. We’re all in this together—that shouldn’t be such a lonely admission to make.

The first track from the new Nada Surf album 'Never Not Together' available February 7, 2020. Pre order now: https://nadasurf.lnk.to/nevernottogether Animated and edited by Jonny Sanders follow the youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/nadasurf http://www.nadasurf.com https://www.facebook.com/NadaSurf/ https://twitter.com/nadasurf https://www.instagram.com/nadasurf_official/

Never Not Together is released on 7th of February. Pre-order available here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Abronia—The Whole of Each Eye

Roger Ebert once described the setting of Westerns as a landscape “where the land is so empty, it creates a vacuum demanding men to become legends”. It’s no surprise, then, that the machismo of rock music so often finds itself there. Carlos Santana is the most well-known desert rocker, but its practitioners are too numerous to list. Something about the open spaces, the resonant canyons of the American frontier, invite a sound loud enough to fill them.

These things are always a balancing act—what may sound legendary to its performers can play as ludicrous to a crowd. But with The Whole of Each Eye, Abronia prove themselves to be up to the task. They achieve, but do not insist upon their own vastness. The band also incorporate a huge number ideas from unlikely sources, avoiding the anonymity of all those other grains of sand out there.

More so than Santana, Abronia resemble Malinese Tuareg band Tinariwen. Songs are driven by similarly hypnotic guitar-work and plodding beats that feel like they’re accompanying a caravan of travellers. Occasionally the pace increases for a Krautrock-inflected sojourn—such as on opener ‘Wound Site’—and the result is an apocalyptic treat; the climate-change-era Can. The sparsity of these moments, these oases of stormy weather in an arid world, underlines and emboldens them.

This confluence of styles paints Abronia’s desert as the desert of our future: a culturally amorphous landscape defined by long-forgotten traditions, the artefacts of which can be exhumed from the sand and assembled in new and exciting ways.

The Whole of Each Eye is available to purchase and stream here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Hainbach & My Panda Shall Fly—Borrowed Water

Borrowed Water, a collaborative LP between Hainbach and My Panda Shall Fly, is a project of two distinct sides. The best way to discuss it, then, is to deal with these sides separately.

The first—a futuristic, public information film-esque set of joyful ambient tracks—recalls the optimism and clarity of the early 1970s. But there’s some grit provided in analogue tape decay; fizzes and screeches which show the other face of the era. The rumble of impending nuclear armageddon, the first awarenesses of climate change. These tracks are touted as “an alternate soundtrack to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running”—a description which, while apposite, does not incorporate the album’s earthliness.

The squeak of synthesisers on Borrowed Water is like an aviary. Natural sounds take flight amidst concrete and cavernous textures. This music is practically a guided tour of the Barbican centre. It's stolid, urban, colourless, but full of both light and life all the same. Brian Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks explored an extraterrestrial landscape, in total solitude, marked by an absence of life. Borrowed Water is its opposite—work that’s grounded, deeply terrestrial, and that bursts with pleasant chatter.

The second side announces itself with ‘The Half and the Whole’, a track which makes striking use of negative space. Compared the what’s come before, it is alarmingly placeless. The track seems to stutter in and out of existence like a dodgy transmission. It's the gasp of a server room trying to compile its information into something soul-shaped. The coldest and most barren track on the album, this heaves meekly as an iron lung. Masterful and memorable, this track provides outstanding contrast at the perfect time.

The turning point signalled by ‘The Half and the Whole’ continues through a fractious and frictional second side. For the duration of the side, there is no floor—in direct opposition to the first, everything is without shape, unstructured. Use of disintegrated tape is much more extensive and a feeling of decay-decline is muscled to the foreground. Tracks resolve to absence and silence, exhausting themselves in their playing. This side is described as “stretch[ing] out through other dimensions”, but it’s lonely enough to stretch from the perspective of Bowie’s Major Tom. The loneliness reaches its zenith in ‘Glory’, an otherworldly coda which rounds out the record in a smattering of bells and garbled speech.

The contrast that Borrowed Water establishes between its sides prevents either of their approaches becoming belaboured. The record is a balanced experience which explores just about as far as you’d ever want in two opposite directions. A very pleasing cocktail of the domestic and the alien.

Borrowed Water is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Poliça—When We Stay Alive

The 2010s were defined by retrospectivity. A wave crashed on itself; churned a froth of remixes, re-imaginings, and reinterpretations of already-haggard ideas. But even this perpetual break was nothing new—merely the extension of a facsimile of past artists.

On When We Stay Alive, Poliça continue a pattern of being greater than the sum of their parts. Language may be well-worn, its clauses played-out. But Poliça exact such a successful blending of influences that those influences dissolve completely. This is not some kitschy nostalgia-act or Julee Cruise-a-like. When We Stay Alive constantly presents new ways to inflect old sounds.

The most immediate appeal of Poliça’s music, especially when compared to that of their dream-pop contemporaries, is its muscularity. Tracks are punchy, compact, concise. There is an appealing ugliness to When We Stay Alive. Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once criticised his vocals as being ‘too pretty’. This proves not to be a problem for Poliça vocalist Channy Leaneagh. She balances the natural delicacy of her own voice with a potent, almost frightening conviction of delivery—even if half the time it does still sound like she’s singing through a desk fan. Absent is the bubblegummy self-infantalisation and waftiness that made Grimes’ Art Angels such a chore.

Ryan Olson, on production duties, grounds Leaneagh’s work. When We Stay Alive has the feel of a Daniel Lopatin project; full of tenderness despite an artificial, sucked-up-through-a-straw feel and some inhumanly brawny bass. An array of sounds can be heard, but—as with their corralled influences—Poliça combine these into something which feels both singular and complete. It’s the most confident the band have ever sounded.

The title of When We Stay Alive supposedly refers to Leaneagh’s rallying from an accident which had left her gravely injured, and left her on the brink of shelving music altogether. A renewed awareness of her mortality (and a lot of time off work) inspired the construction of half of the tracks on this LP. But the title speaks to a broader kind of survival, too. Poliça were always more than the fashions around them—on When We Stay Alive, they’ve proved it. Let’s see if another wave comes up behind them.

When We Stay Alive is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe