Flock of Dimes—Head of Roses

Head of Roses is a heartfelt and springly sophomore from Flock of Dimes (Jenn Wesner). Wesner is best-known as a member of Wye Oak but with this, and 2016’s If You See Me, Say Yes, she has carved a definitive, confident line as a solo artist.

What impresses immediately is Head of Roses’ broad soundscape. Every track on the LP does something to be sonically distinct—but none is an outlier or ugly duckling. “Price of Blue” and “No Question” are striking both in their differences and similarities. The former is a full-on Cocteau Twins-style ballad, lifted by exultant and airy strings; the latter is muggy, stripped-back and intimate, grounded by powerful brass. Their commonality is Wesner’s unique artistic sensibility, a quality as hard to describe as it is easy to recognise.

It’s lazy and flippant to compare acts like Flock of Dimes to Kate Bush. Bush, in opening the door for female-fronted pop to revel in its own weirdness and creative bravery, inadvertently became the yardstick by which all future attempts at such auteurship would be measured. But there are undeniably shadows of her style on Head of Roses. Most of these shadows are revealed by Wesner’s luminous vocals; in her voice-as-instrument approach, and the ease with which she leaps huge intervals between notes. The weightless, unpredictable journeys of these vocal lines keep you in a constant state of expectation and vulnerability; stumbling blindly into every next moment.

Head of Roses feels like it is unravelling or writing itself as every moment of listening unfolds. It holds the same tension as when a band improvises. The idea that everything will suddenly fall apart is suspended like a ten-ton block above the stage. And the more precarious, the more on-the-brink a band can make everything feel, the more electrifying their improvisation will feel. Head of Roses dutifully delivers that same spontaneous energy to a world that’s starving for it, and is as close to a live experience many will have felt in a long time.   

Head of Roses is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Benjamin Finger—Auditory Colors

Benjamin Finger’s Auditory Colors is a synaesthetic treat whose intricate texture rewards attentive listening. Ostensibly an ambient album, Auditory Colors is actually bursting with melody at every level of its rich and varied instrumentation. And whilst publishing as a solo project—composing and recording every track here—Finger has called on a number of collaborators who each enrich the album in their own unique ways.

The first thing you’ll notice is the LP’s imaginative use of loops and field recordings. Abstracted through post-processing and manipulation, these fragments of word salad and sonic texturing become melodic as they repeat and, in some cases, appear to provide the framework of entire songs. They give the album an enormous sense of character and intimacy—a comforting closeness which dodges claustrophobia by miles. The overall feeling they give is warm and nostalgic, with the earnestness and beauty of BBC Radiophonic workshop maestros like Delia Derbyshire and Malcolm Clarke.

More recently comparable could be William Basinski (in particular On Time Out of Time), and Brian Eno and Kevin Shields’ joint EP The Weight of History/Only Once Away My Son. In the case of Auditory Colors’ title track and latecomer ‘See See See’, you can feel a slight Jenny Hval vibe; these tracks both recall some of the ambient pieces from Hval’s Blood Bitch. This is in part due to haunting guest vocals from Inga-Lill Farstad, but also some gothic and ghostly hammering piano and concrète. This is more suggestive than Hval’s work, though, and less melodramatic. The thread which connects all this music—and which is so prominent in Auditory Colors­—is a spectral feeling. It’s the there-and-not-there of heavy summer air filling a room.  

Auditory Colors very regularly has this feeling of thick air. Electronic organ creates a fog which diffuses discrete musical shapes into blobs of colour. ‘Greef Signals’ uses some gentle noise structures to suggest rolling waves or hissing bellows—the cry of air as it is thrown unwillingly around. But melody always cuts through this thickness, intercepting it with joy, clarity and dissolving tension. Melodies are often so short as to resolve immediately, only to then loop right back round again. As a listener, this means you’re transfixed but constantly rewarded; lulled to a sense of calm. Auditory Colors is a rich, compelling and active listen; an audio cleanse that’s impossibly packed with ideas but never treads on its own toes.

Auditory Colors is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

John Carpenter—Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

To the uninitiated, John Carpenter’s music must sound like another kitschy experiment; a nostalgic attempt to recapture the appeal of 70s-and-80s creature features. But Carpenter is the real deal—the trailblazer who brought us those very features; (among others) Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York. His style was bold in its simplicity. Even the font used in his titles has become iconic and oft-imitated. Carpenter’s film and soundtrack work provided the still-indelible blueprint for any and all aspiring schlock doctors, and he remains as dark a shadow over Hollywood as ever.

Carpenter saw a late-career resurgence in the mid-2010s. Between playing video games he toured, produced new music and re-recorded old themes. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is his latest collection of new music. It follows two moodier recent albums with a bright, explosive celebration of horror excess and cheese. Carpenter’s trademark synths bubble over into symphonic grandiosity, where once they burbled and beckoned like a tar pit. ‘Weeping Ghost’ is the most riotously silly track Carpenter has recorded since his theme for In the Mouth of Madness, and sounds like Black Sabbath trying to summon demons to the disco.

Lost Themes III is bold and loose in composition, too. Tracks are mad and balls-out in an energising way. ‘Dead Eyes’ lopes in hunchbacked baroque, ‘Carpathian Darkness’ bastardises, corrupts, inverts and deep-fries Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’. Even when Alive After Death takes pause it does so in style. ‘Cemetery’ more resembles the ominous material of Lost Themes I and II. But it’s supercharged with crunchy electric guitar; less mood piece, more breakdown.

There are so many ideas bursting from this LP, so many perspectives of the macabre. When listening, it's impossible to ignore how enmeshed Carpenter is with the identity of screen horror as a whole. This feels like a victory lap in every sense. Carpenter has lived to see his own legacy and is relishing in it. From the outside, it feels like the director was bullied out of Hollywood for refusing to grovel for budgets, refusing to compromise creatively, refusing to temper his politics and his biting dark comedy. He produced masterpiece after masterpiece in a style nobody wanted to see. Now, desperate for cash, those same institutions recreate and imitate Carpenter’s work—which has become impossibly fashionable. The irony must make him chuckle. There is a wonderful sense of self-parody to Lost Themes III, and a signal from John Carpenter to the world: it’s been forty years, and you’re still playing catch-up.

Alive After Death is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Elori Saxl—The Blue of Distance

This debut LP from multidisciplinary artist Elori Saxl elegantly balances the sensory and conceptual. The album is ambient, if you want to pigeonhole it, but often feels too active to be constrained by this label. Rather than standing on the precipice of something, The Blue of Distance creates tension by repeatedly diving in and climbing back out. When not juggling discrete melodic and amelodic sections, it slips into the kind of in-betweeny spaces of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd; any number of tape-looping pioneers.

Saxl does not lean on these established sounds, using them instead as skeleton to support some stunning chamber orchestra arrangements. The oboe of Erin Lensing particularly impresses, repeating hypnotic phrases which transform into the heartbeats of tracks. Found sounds are folded into the mix, too. The most confronting example comes in ‘Wave II’, whose looped beat sounds like a little boat eternally hitting the same jetty. It’s one of many invigorating moments of trance-meets-concrète.

It’s not a surprise to learn Saxl has a background in film. The Blue of Distance is colourfully imagistic, and has some parity with Clint Mansell or Nicholas Britell in its blending of classical/electronic styles. For an album, The Blue of Distance is very visual. It would be impossible, even lacking track titles, not to associate this LP with water, memory, distance. The language Saxl uses is nonverbal, but as precise and intentional as a scalpel. The Blue of Distance uses some more superficial filmic vocabulary too in ‘Blue’, which boasts a desolate and monumental midsection that feels ripped out of a Western score.

The album’s grandness is tempered by a wobbly “information film” vibe. This hip, ultra-analogue hauntology isn’t lip service to a zoomer listening base. It interacts with—and enhances—the album’s themes of memory loss and nostalgia, while ensuring its more grandiose sections never succumb to schmaltz. Saxl is a thoughtful musician whose work achieves transcendence by never trying to force it.

The centrepiece of The Blue of Distance is ‘Memory of Blue’. This 11-minute track is constantly in flux—but it never digresses from or abandons its own fundaments. The track keeps switching things up, and is packed with ideas and experimentations. The tracks juxtaposing styles somehow stay complementary throughout. Its continuous development is impressive, and feels like watching someone play Jenga against themselves, stacking their tower impossibly high. ‘Memory of Blue’ also functions as a vertical slice of the album as a whole. Just as we inspect and distort our own memories, the track is in a beautiful sort of cubist argument with itself, dwelling on a single point from several contradicting perspectives. Its title forms a cheeky—probably unintentional—homage to Vangelis’ Blade Runner track, itself about the falsehood and distortion of memory. Forty years later these concepts still compel and puzzle us. This is a tremendous album whose conceptual richness will keep you coming back for a very long time.

The Blue of Distance is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Grandbrothers—All the Unknown

Electronic duo Grandbrothers’ rich sound isn’t quite new age—but it’s on the first steps of a pilgrimage there. Grandbrothers use minimal, computer-controlled piano arrangements to chalk subtle elaborations into a blueprint that has brought success to the likes of Nils Frahm, Bonobo and The xx. And just like those bands, Grandbrothers’ music is unashamedly insubstantial, bolstering its calculated straightforwardness with exceptional mixing and mastering and an elegant purity.

Contrary to Frahm et al. in All the Unknown is its pastoral cosiness. One often gets the impression such “beautiful” minimal acts seek fluidity in the concrete structures of urban spaces; they try to make neon spill from its own glass tubes. Artists cling to the cool and the urbane, insincerely repurposing new age tropes for city-dwellers. Conversely it feels as though Grandbrothers are finding the concreteness in nature and—in a way which recent events have made feel vital—welcoming the outside in. The result is an album which, if asked where it lived, would more likely be a neighbour to XTC’s Skylarking than its immediate musical family—a suburbanite with a dog and herb garden.

While Grandbrothers are far more concerned with timbre than melody, it must be mentioned that they can stretch ideas beyond breaking points. Many of this album’s thirteen tracks follow a near-identical compositional formula and, given this singular approach, you can’t help but wonder if they were all necessary. It is difficult to justify all fifty-eight minutes of an album’s runtime when so many of them are spent underlining and re-underlining a single point. All the Unknown isn’t quite as rapturous on a macro scale as it is when you dive into all of its itty-bitty details.

There has been some attention given to structure. Tracks take turns to imperceptibly ratchet things up—and the second half of All the Unknown is more dark and grand than its first. ‘Black Frost’ would feel incongruous and displaced at the opening of the album, but it fits its place in the tracklist perfectly as an escalation of everything that came before. This precision and control is worth complimenting but may well be responsible for why the album feels a static and staid at times. If this is the case, the album is wonderfully subtle in a way I cannot bring myself to fully appreciate.

All the Unknown felt best when railing at the edges of its own box. ‘Auberge’ is noteworthy for being perhaps the album’s slowest-and-lowest track, and its diminished energy slightly breaks with formula in a way that’s effective and memorable. It’s smartly walloped in the album’s centre and feels like an incorporeal aside; a sabbatical in which we visit windy Himalayan peaks, replete with chimes and proud swells of synth. ‘Silver’ goes the other way, and accelerates things until they feel self-interrupting and wildly energised. The prepared piano actually feels prepared in this track—but not in a way I can put my finger on. These stretches into sublimity fulfil the rest of the album’s promise and—while the full hour doesn’t quite sustain their highs—they elevate All the Unknown beyond the rest of the crop.

All the Unknown is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe