Shriekback ‎– Oil And Gold (1985)

Style: New Wave, Synth-pop
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: Arista, Island Records,

Tracklist
A1.   Malaria
A2.   Everything That Rises Must Converge
A3.   Fish Below The Ice
A4.   This Big Hush
A5.   Faded Flowers
B1.   Nemesis
B2.   Only Thing That Shines
B3.   Health And Knowledge And Wealth And Power
B4.   Hammerheads
B5.   Coelocanth

Oil and Gold is surprising for several reasons. For one, the departure of singer/guitarist Carl Marsh midway through produced no noticeable dip in the record's quality. For another, live drums appear for the first time on a Shriekback album, thanks to Martyn Barker, a longtime associate who was added to the band at the tail end of the Jam Science sessions. Most surprising, though, is how much this album rocks out, particularly on the songs featuring ex-Damned guitarist Lu Edmonds. It even yielded an out of left field hit single in "Nemesis," which not only uses the word "parthenogenesis," but rhymes it successfully, and does so in the chorus. In truth, Oil and Gold is six-tenths of a great album. It leads off with the rip-roaring one-two-three punch of "Malaria," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and "Fish Below the Ice," all featuring Marsh on vocals. These are followed by "This Big Hush" and "Faded Flowers," two tremendously beautiful slow numbers sung by Barry Andrews, who took over for Marsh as lead vocalist. The B side (vinylly speaking) begins nicely with "Nemesis" and quickly falls apart, with the nadir being the clunkers "Health and Knowledge and Wealth and Power" (sung by Marsh) and "Hammerheads" (sung by Andrews). Still, Oil and Gold's highlights make it a rewarding listen.up, Inc.

Bill Cassel / AllMusic

Killing Joke ‎– Night Time (1985)

Style: Post-Punk
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: EG, Polydor, Virgin

Tracklist:
A1.   Night Time
A2.   Darkness Before Dawn
A3.   Love Like Blood
A4.   Kings And Queens
B1.   Tabazan
B2.   Multitudes
B3.   Europe
B4.   Eighties

Credits:
Bass – Paul Raven
Drums – Paul Ferguson
Guitar – Geordie
Keyboards, Vocals – Jaz Coleman
Producer – Chris Kimsey

Marking the full return from the band's out-of-nowhere hiatus in 1982, Night Time, following after a couple of test-the-waters EPs, finds the reconstituted Killing Joke, with Paul Raven in on bass but otherwise unchanged, caught between their earlier aggression and a calmer, more immediately accessible approach. This turned out to be the band's Achilles heel in the end, with later albums in the '80s evidence that the group had turned into an unbelievably boring, generic modern rock band. At this point, however, the tension between the two sides had a perfect balance, and as a result Night Time is arguably the quartet's freshest album since its debut, with a warm, anthemic quality now supplementing the blasting, driving approach that made the band's name, as songs like "Kings and Queens" demonstrate. Geordie Walker pulls off some jaw-dropping solos amid his fierce riffs -- check out his turns on the title track -- while Paul Ferguson mixes and matches electronic beats with his own very well (perhaps a little less intensely than before, but not by much). Jaz Coleman's experimentation with keyboards -- chopped-up vocal samples, calmer and sweet lead melodies -- is paralleled by his own singing, now mostly free of the treatments and echoes familiar from earlier days. He's got a great singing voice as it stands, and it's a treat to hear him let it flow forth without forcing it. "Eighties" turned out to be the retrospectively most well-known song, due to a surprising and not always remembered example of Killing Joke's influence -- Nirvana, of all groups, thoroughly cloned the watery guitar line at the heart of the track for "Come as You Are." "Love Like Blood" was the breakthrough single in the U.K., although -- and for good reason -- it managed the bizarre trick of slotting alongside Duran Duran for mainstream radio airplay while still sounding like nobody other than Killing Joke. A pity the group then spent some years doing pallid clones of the song.

Ned Raggett / AllMusic

The Blue Nile ‎– Hats (1989)

Style: Alternative Rock, New Wave, Ethereal
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: Linn Records, A&M Records, Virgin

Tracklist:
1.   Over The Hillside
2.   The Downtown Lights
3.   Let's Go Out Tonight
4.   Headlights On The Parade
5.   From A Late Night Train
6.   Seven A. M.
7.   Saturday Night

Credits:
Performer – Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore, Robert Bell
Songwriter – Paul Buchanan
Producer – The Blue Nile
Recorded By – Calum Malcolm

Paul Buchanan, the elusive and self-deprecating frontman of Scottish pop group the Blue Nile, once compared making records to falling in love. “You can’t do it every year,” he elaborated. Since forming in 1981, the Blue Nile have released only four albums, each one followed by a long period of silence. Their music is patient and understated. Their songs mostly explore the trajectory of relationships, from their glittery beginnings to their plateaus of contentment and their exhausted, haunted finales. Their stories are set in the smoky locales of noir: in ragtown, shantytown, tinseltown. It’s usually raining. To listen passively to the Blue Nile is to ride in a taxi through the city at night as familiar scenes blur outside your window. 

To listen closely to the Blue Nile is to become a part of the scenery. In this way, Buchanan’s metaphor about the time between albums comes alive. The long gestation of each record suggests, as in the early stages of a relationship, a sharpening of the senses, getting lost in a world that’s getting smaller around you. You want to do it right this time. The Blue Nile’s music also sounds like falling in love, slow and starry-eyed, with melodies that fizzle and glow like streetlights. By the time they released their sophomore album, Hats, in the autumn of 1989, Buchanan was 33 years old, and his songs, once littered with bold declarations of love, now seemed to be composed entirely of ellipses and question marks. 

The members of the Blue Nile met while they were students at the University of Glasgow. After graduating and easing into an uninspiring teaching gig, Buchanan says he and his friends turned to music in search of a career that they “could be instinctive about.” With Buchanan on guitar and vocals, Paul Joseph “PJ” Moore on keyboards and synth, and Robert Bell on bass, they recruited a drum machine as their fourth member. 

The Blue Nile’s first single—1981’s “I Love This Life”—is a catchy song about an up-and-coming rock band doomed to remain a cult act. Dreaming of adoring crowds and hit records, Buchanan sings with appropriate joie de vivre, but even on his first single, he sounds more like a veteran actor portraying a teenager. He has the type of pained, dignified voice, like Frank Sinatra or Johnny Cash, that makes it hard to imagine him ever actually being young. “I know I’m going out of style,” he sings and immediately asks, “Am I already out of style?” The song, paired with a downbeat B-side called “The Second Act,” became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the band continued in relative obscurity. 

Their debut album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, arrived in 1984 via the stereo equipment company Linn, who were looking to expand their reach by starting a label. (“Linn weren’t a record company and we weren’t a band,” Buchanan would later reflect in Elliot J. Huntley and Edith Hall’s biography From a Late Night Train.) Still, their unusual working relationship allowed the members of the Blue Nile to record in Linn’s studios and operate without a strict deadline. As so often happens with our first brushes of love, the band chased this experience the rest of their career. No pressure and no expectations—a creative process they could be instinctive about. 

Whittled down to seven songs, A Walk Across the Rooftops is a stately record that established the Blue Nile’s sound—a sprawling, sophisticated strain of ambient synth pop—and their major themes. “I am in love with a feeling,” Buchanan sings in “From Rags to Riches.” “Is there a place in this city/A place to always feel this way,” he asks in “Tinseltown in the Rain,” a minor hit in Holland and the closest thing the Blue Nile have to a signature song. The album, punctuated by Bell’s slap bass and a vibrant backdrop of keys and guitars, dazzled critics and established a small audience of devoted fans. 

Instead of rushing to make a follow-up, the Blue Nile studied where their music had taken them, as they traveled through America and Europe. “[O]ne of the best things we saw in our first trip to London,” Buchanan told NME after the album’s release, “Was a guy and a girl standing in Oxford Street… They were obviously having a moment—breaking up or something, something that was wrong—and you just looked at it and knew the feeling. It was a brilliant reminder of what’s worth all the hassle.” 

It was an omen. The five years between A Walk Across the Rooftops and Hats were trying times for the band. Relationships, both romantic and professional, crumbled around them. An album’s worth of material was scrapped—the feeling just wasn’t there—and the tapes were burned. Witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ decades-long marriage, Buchanan’s writing became increasingly sparse and tormented, like Raymond Carver stories stretched into the shape of torch ballads. 

At his mother’s house, Buchanan tracked a new song called “Christmas” that wouldn’t end up making the record. Its lyrics are a portrait of the least romantic kind of adult despair: money running out, children crying. But the song is a balm, smoother and sweeter than anything the band had ever recorded. At one point, Buchanan plays an uncharacteristic guitar solo and hums along sadly. “Take it easy,” he sings as if to himself, “I still love you. I believe in you.” 

This is the tone of Hats: a series of hard-won love songs written like no one was in the room. Despite its long incubation, the music arrived fairly quickly once the band established its arc. The song that opened the creative floodgates was “The Downtown Lights,” a rush of images and emotions that flows at the deliberate pace of a steady walk through snow. Buchanan’s guitar has hints of Nile Rodgers’ palm-muted funk; Bell’s bass slides where it once popped. By the end of the song, Buchanan is bellowing and the band is locked into an airtight stride, accompanied by a string section woven so closely to the lyrics you might think they’re daydreaming it. 

Despite the movement of the music, Hats is an album in stasis. The Blue Nile understand that, like all good theater, relationships are inextricably linked to their setting, and the characters on Hats are prisoners to it, escaping only in fantasy. “Walk me into town/The ferry will be there to carry us away into the air,” Buchanan sings in “Over the Hillside.” “Let’s walk in the cool evening light/Wrong or right/Be at my side,” he pleads in “The Downtown Lights.” “I pray for love coming out all right,” he sings in the climactic final verse of “Let’s Go Out Tonight.” Then he cries out the title as one final desperate attempt to save something that’s already gone. 

The magic of Hats is how the music makes defeat sound euphoric. Depending on your mood, Hats can be an uplifting album (“It’s all right” serves as its rallying cry) or a uniquely devastating one. These are multi-dimensional portraits: colorful cities populated by lonely people, romantic gestures received by silence, beautiful evenings going nowhere. The most immediate tracks on the album shift between moods like a plane dipping through clouds. “Headlights on the Parade” rides its glowing new wave groove while Buchanan prods a lover that something isn’t right. “Over the Hillside” begins with a sad hospital pulse and his depictions of a long, sleepless night, but it transcends to feel like an invitation, like elegance—“Thunder Road” in a luxury car. “Tomorrow I will be there,” he sings proudly at the end, “Oh, you wait and see.” On some listens, you believe him. 

The Blue Nile are a band whose criticisms only draw fans closer. Sure, all their songs are about love. Yes, they have erred on the side of adult contemporary. It’s true that, in the ’90s, Rod Stewart and Michael McDonald sang Buchanan’s words as comfortably as their own. But just as Big Star became a symbol for the fame-averse underdog ideals of ’90s indie rock, the Blue Nile have proven newly influential. You can hear their heavenly chill on recent albums by Destroyer; their lowercase romance in the xx; their intense intimacy in Majical Cloudz. When Buchanan joined Jessie Ware to co-write a track on last year’s Glasshouse, it became clear how his band’s work had been reflected in pop music’s patient, moody turns. 

While their influence has long run deep, with outspoken fans including Vashti Bunyan, Phil Collins, and the 1975, to this day nothing sounds quite like Hats. The Blue Nile themselves never quite replicated it, opting for a loose, soulful atmosphere on 1996’s Peace At Last and a more sober approach for 2004’s High. Its closest companion is Paul Buchanan’s 2012 solo album Mid Air—a collection of near-demos on piano that further refined his sunken vignettes. “Tear stains on your pillow,” he sings in “Wedding Party,” “I was drunk when I danced with the bride.” The stories—as with most concerning the Blue Nile—are between the lines. 

It’s a shame that Hats was never a hit, but it also would have been a shame if it were. It’s hard to imagine being confronted by these songs in the wild. It seems inappropriate to even listen to it in the daytime. You carve out a place to hear Hats; you confide it in other people. An oft-repeated legend about the band involves Paul Buchanan at a Glasgow bar shortly after the release of their debut album. As he downs a few pints among the locals, the conversation turns to music, and someone recommends him a great new band from the area. They’re called the Blue Nile, they say. You’ll love them, I’ve got their tape in my car. 

The anecdote illustrates the overarching philosophy for Buchanan’s art, to be removed from it completely. “[Y]ou hope that someday in the future some kid will be walking along the beach and find a little piece of green glass that has been worn down by the waves,” he once explained to The Sydney Morning Herald. “He’ll pick it up and put it in his pocket, take it home and love it. He won’t necessarily know why he loves it, but he’ll love it. Those are the kind of records we try to make.” In another version of this metaphor, he relates a boy and a girl watching a film on their first date: “They are much more important to each other, hopefully, than the movie is to either one of them.” 

At the core of Hats is a heartbroken song called “From a Late Night Train,” featuring just piano, trumpet, and Buchanan’s vocals, all combining to sound like rain on the windshield of a parked car. “I know it’s over,” he sings in a low, beaten voice, “But I love you so.” It’s a song that illustrates the stakes of love, sung in the final moments of a relationship when there’s nothing left to say but the inevitable. On a record filled with questions—Where is the love? What’s so wrong tonight? How do I know you feel it? How do I know it’s true?—sits this gut-punch of an answer. You’re left broken, alone, and in love, looking into someone’s eyes and seeing the end of a dream.

Sam Sodomsky / Pitchfork

The Human League ‎– Dare! (1983)

Style: Synth-pop, New Wave
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: Edisom, Virgin

Tracklist:
01.   The Things That Dreams Are Made Of
02.   Open Your Heart
03.   The Sound Of The Crowd
04.   Darkness
05.   Do Or Die
06.   Get Carter
07.   I Am The Law
08.   Seconds
09.   Love Action (I Believe In Love)
10.   Don't You Want Me

Credits:
Synthesizer – Ian Burden, Jo Callis
Synthesizer, Other – Philip Adrian Wright
Vocals – Joanne Catherall, Susanne Sulley
Vocals, Synthesizer – Philip Oakey
Producer – Martin Rushent, The Human League

The Human League were deemed all but dead when the ‘musicians’ left to form Heaven 17. But Phil Oakey’s trip to his local Sheffield nightclub proved to be a very good idea, as he recruited a couple of schoolgirls who’d propel the band to new heights. Within a year Phil, Adrian, Joanne and Susanne (and later Ian Burden and Jo Callis) were to become the biggest band in the country and number one come Christmas 1981 with one of the top-selling singles of the decade. 

Dare, released in October '81, showcased the band’s growth from sinister-sounding electronics to a triumph of the new pop aesthetic arising from New Wave. With a high-gloss cover (which cost 50p more to keep it perfectly white) stolen from a Vogue fashion piece, Dare was heralded by a trio of successful singles – the clanking boom-crash of The Sound of the Crowd, the utterly wondrous Love Action (I Believe in Love) and the intense Open Your Heart. 

Older fans who might have been put off by this new ‘selling records’ approach were still catered for. Darkness practically invents electro goth, and I Am the Law is a perfectly ominous piece full of dystopian themes, with Phil giving it his best Judge Dredd. The album also touches on wish fulfilment with The Things That Dreams are Made of, explores JFK’s assassination on Seconds, and presents the Get Carter theme via a Casio VL-Tone – essentially a calculator with a samba preset. 

Martin Rushent’s enthusiasm for buying fancy new equipment, now at affordable prices, benefited Oakey’s quest for a fresh sound. But for all of Dare’s highs, its closer has proved to be The Human League’s deathless contribution to the eternal pop canon. Don’t You Want Me is a song that has taken a battering from keen karaoke amateurs since its release, but it remains one of the greatest chart-toppers ever. 

This reissue collects extended versions along with Hard Times, and includes Fascination, which was an import-only compilation of the next two singles – Mirror Man and the title-track – and respective B sides. Everything’s representative of the imperial phase of a band that genuinely had the world at its feet. Dare is a pop album so perfect that its makers could’ve easily left it there and their legacy would’ve been complete. That this music still sounds so incredible after 30-odd years is what makes it a classic.

Ian Wade / BBC Review

Fire! Orchestra ‎– Enter (2014)

Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label:  Rune Grammofon

Tracklist:
1.   Enter Part One
2.   Enter Part Two
3.   Enter Part Three
4.   Enter Part Four

Credits:
Alto Saxophone – Anna Högberg
Baritone Saxophone – Martin Küchen
Baritone Saxophone, Clarinet – Fredrik Ljungkvist
Bass – Dan Berglund, Joel Grip
Bass Clarinet – Christer Bothén
Bass Saxophone – Jonas Kullhammar
Cornet – Goran Kajfes
Drums – Andreas Werlin, Johan Holmegard, Raymond Strid
Electric Bass – Johan Berthling
Electric Guitar – Sören Runolf
Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar – David Stackenäs
Electric Piano, Organ – Martin Hederos
Electronics – Joachim Nordwall
Keyboards, Mellotron – Sten Sandell
Lap Steel Guitar – Andreas Söderström
Tenor Saxophone – Elin Larsson
Tenor Saxophone, Conductor – Mats Gustafsson
Trombone – Mats Äleklint
Trumpet – Emil Strandberg, Magnus Broo, Niklas Barnö
Tuba – Per Åke Holmlander
Voice – Mariam Wallentin, Simon Ohlsson, Sofia Jernberg
Composed By – Andreas Werlin, Johan Berthling, Mariam Wallentin, Mats Gustafsson

The big band has been part of jazz since the 1920s, but in the late 1960s a new kind of large ensemble began to emerge as part of the directions then taking hold in the music. These groups took a stand alongside other free and avant-garde jazz innovators of the time, their positions energised by the febrile socio-political atmosphere that gripped much of the USA and Europe. They outgrew traditional trio and quartet forms, in tacit acknowledgement that the most appropriate response to racism, oppression and the military-industrial complex was to organise along collective lines. 

In 1968, trumpeter Michael Mantler's forty-strong Jazz Composer's Orchestra released a sprawling self-titled double album with contributions by Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Charlie Haden and Mantler's then wife Carla Bley. A year later, Haden's own Liberation Music Orchestra released their debut album, also self-titled, while at the turn of the decade South African pianist Chris McGregor's Brotherhood Of Breath counted British free improv luminaries Evan Parker and Paul Rutherford among its members. As the 1970s wore on, Parker and Rutherford went on to play in Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra and Alexander von Schlippenbach's Globe Unity Orchestra, both of which survive to this day. 

With Enter, Fire! Orchestra extends its claim to form part of this illustrious lineage. Like its predecessors it has a strong musical personality as bandleader/conductor, in this case the Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. The ensemble began life as Fire!, the trio of Gustafsson, bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin, who released four albums of heady avant rock including collaborations with Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi. Consisting of the core trio, plus more than 20 fellow travellers from the vibrant Scandinavian avant/improv scenes, Fire! Orchestra made its vinyl debut last year with the live album Exit, and now, Enter is its first studio outing. 

The result is four sides of blissed-out transcendence, galvanised by an immediacy that anchors the ensemble to soul and free jazz even as its joyous riffing takes it in the direction of psychedelic and progressive rock. Opening with a hypnotic Fender Rhodes motif, 'Part 1' sees vocalist Mariam Wallentin (Werliin's partner in Wildbirds & Peacedrums) set out the Orchestra's vision in deep, soulful cries of "Let us all go… let them all go… let it all go… feel it all go…" Metallic sheets of electric guitar are joined by the Mellotron, no less, its distinctive frosty tone harking back to the late '60s as surely as do Wallentin's ecstatic vocals. 'Part 2' kicks in with another '60s reference, as a deranged take on the Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' morphs into a livid collision between guitar and electronics before giving way to a hymnal section for horns and brass. 

The album's episodic structure makes for a thrilling listen in which soloists and the full ensemble constantly reinforce and counterpoint each other. Gustafsson himself is a forceful presence, his tenor sax laying down some fearsome skronk over 'Part 3's infectious bass groove. Recalling his work with The Thing, the saxophonist alights with glee on a hook or phrase, gathers up his forces and transforms it into a juggernaut statement of intent. If there's a weakness to point out it's the voices of Sofia Jernberg and Simon Ohlsson, whose vocals lack the burning intensity of Wallentin's and occasionally descend into gimmicky abstraction and pompous rhapsodising respectively. 

Despite the Orchestra's evident liking for full-on collective freakouts, there are hooks and melodies aplenty here that drive the group's mighty impulse to communicate. That delicious opening Fender motif returns in 'Part 4', building joyfully with brass and horns as the three singers declare "This is not a dream, this is an awakening… so I have experienced both life and death". It's a powerful appeal to transcendence, one that's at once emotionally draining and utterly inspiring.

Richard Rees Jones / The Quietus

Arrigo Barnabé, Luiz Tatit & Lívia Nestrovski ‎– De Nada A Mais A Algo Além (2016)

Style: MPB
Format: CD
Label: Atração Fonográfica

Tracklist:
01.   Babel
02.   Ano Bom
03.   Tempo Meu
04.   Desamor
05.   Frente a Frente
06.   Baiar um Baião
07.   Luci Leão
08.   De Cor
09.   Dora Avante
10.   Valsa do Largo da Ordem
11.   Impassível
12.   Doroti
13.   Verde Louro
14.   O Dedo de Deus

Credits:
Direção de Produção - Wilson Souto Jr.
Produção Fonográfica - Atração
Produção Musical - Mário Manga
Engenheiros de Gravação  Alexandre Fontanetti e Bruno Fiacadori
Masterização - Carlos Freitas
Gravado ao vivo no Sesc Vila Mariana – São Paulo
Capa, fotos e projeto gráfico - Gal Oppido

Tony Allen, Jeff Mills ‎– Tomorrow Comes The Harvest (2018)

Style: Future Jazz
Format: Vinyl
Label: Blue Note France

Tracklist:
01.   Locked And Loaded (Edit)
02.   The Night Watcher (Edit)
03.   On The Run (Edit)
04.   The Seed (Edit)
05.   The Night Watcher (Instrumental / Edit)
06.   Locked And Loaded
07.   The Night Watcher
08.   On The Run
09.   The Seed
10.   The Night Watcher (Instrumental)

Credits:
Composed By, Drums – Tony Allen
Composed By, Programmed By – Jeff Mills
Keyboards – Jean-Philippe Dary
Vocals – Carl Hancock Rux
Mixed By – François Kevorkian, S.Vaughan Merrick
Producer, Executive-Producer – Eric Trosset

Nicolas Jaar ‎– Sirens (2017)

Style: Downtempo, Modern Classical
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Other People

Tracklist:
1.   Killing Time
2.   Wildflowers
3.   The Governor
4.   A Coin In Nine Hands
5.   Leaves
6.   No
7.   Three Sides Of Nazareth
8.   History Lesson
9.   America/I'm For The Birds

There are only about 45 seconds left on Nicolas Jaar’s new album Sirens when something astounding happens. Heralded by a selection of drums and birdcall synths, a gospel cry arrives, shrouded in distortion and punctuated by sharp arrhythmic drumming. The most useful words to describe this are the silliest and most hyperbolic: awesome, transcendent, timeless or more accurately, out-of-time. It begs for pretension, for the vocabulary of divinity and “high art,” for references to religious philosophers and poets of the West that you barely remember from college, Milton and Kierkegaard, Eliot and Blake. And though there are many similarly striking moments on Sirens, this one stands out for its brevity and particular beauty. It is a moment thoroughly earned by the album that precedes it, and in less than a minute, it’s gone. 

This moment—a supernova flash of prodigious skill—can be seen as something of a stand-in for Jaar’s career to date. In 2011, when Jaar was just 21, he released his debut album, Space Is Only Noise**, introducing a downtempo combination of psychedelia and dance music that vaulted him into the vanguard of the world’s electronic artists. The record came alive in a room, its amorphous body emerging from the stereo, its limbs unfolding into every corner. His ability to conjure up what seemed like an extra dimension in his music made you aware of the tautology: space was noise, but he made noise seem like space. 

The next year Jaar revealed the depth of his talent for collage with his Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1. These mixes are often superlative, but his felt more personal than most, even as it showcased his interest in referencing the texts of others. In one of many sophisticated in-jokes, Jaar, who is Chilean-American, introduced the operative sample from Jay Z’s “My 1st Song,” with Jay Z’s own voice. That vocal prepared listeners to hear the Black Album* *closer before Jaar dropped the original version, “Tu y Tu Mirar, Yo y Mi Cancion,” by the Chilean band, Los Ángeles Negros, in its place. The mix was filled with moments like these—jam-packed with allusions but still absorbing for those who didn’t catch the references. 

And then, Jaar shrank away from center stage. In 2013, he started his own label, Other People, partly to foster the careers of his musician friends. Jaar is a generous collaborator—artists like Dave Harrington, his partner in the duo Darkside, have been eager to credit his willingness to help them with their own work. But the instinct to work with others may not have been purely selfless. Jaar felt enormous pressure to replicate his early success. In an interview with Pitchfork in 2013, he confessed that he was scared of releasing music that wasn’t up to those standards: 

“For the first five years of making music, I did it because I had fun,” he said. “When it started to get real, I was like, ‘Now if I put out something else and it's not as good as what I did before, people will start thinking I suck.’” 

So Jaar produced others’ projects and made critically acclaimed records with Harrington under the Darkside moniker. But slowly, over the last two years, he’s been creeping back toward the microphone, using his own name. First there were some extraordinary singles. Then, last summer’s Pomegranates, a slippery alternate soundtrack to an old Russian film. Then *Nymphs—*an uncollected EP, maybe?—excellent, but difficult to evaluate holistically. 

*Sirens *represents a full reemergence, as close as he may ever get to kicking over the mic stand. He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other. Add the strands of political expression that are gathered on *Sirens, *often cloaked in odd textures, in Spanish, or in cryptic lyrics, and you have a record as compelling as any of Jaar’s other works. 

It opens with the track “Killing Time,” which feels like entering a labyrinth, or maybe a pyramid, something forbidding and funereal. The sound of a flag waves in the wind, keys like jagged wind chimes shatter on the floor. Nico is patient, but understands the need for progression, and though slower songs like this may linger in silence or briefly lavish attention on a particular effect, riff, or drum sound, they never stop moving. 

“Killing Time,” is silent, respectful, matching its lyrics (“We were just waiting…”) And then “The Governor” which shares a post-punk edge with another song, “Three Sides of Nazareth,” jolts the record into sudden motion. Those two tracks, with their driving rhythms and clear lyrics, are the easiest to glom on to on first listen. The words are more or less affixed to the music, in contrast with other tracks like “Killing Time” and parts of “No,” where lyrics seem to dwell in the spacious labyrinth evoked by the sound. On those tracks, you’re never sure exactly where you’re going to stumble upon a sudden string of words, of thoughts. 

"The Governor" is fast and loud and urgent. When I listened to it out of sequence, I wondered whether those qualities were imposed on “The Governor” because it's only fast and loud and urgent in comparison to “Killing Time,” or whether it actually is those things. These are the kind of thoughts that psychedelia provokes at its best, and Jaar adores these puzzles. It’s his obsession with setting up dichotomies and resolving them that places him firmly in a Western tradition. He’s able to work a kind of alchemy upon the raw elements of his music, making one thing into its polar opposite: hard into soft, ugly into pretty, slow into fast. Like the word “sirens” itself, (the ancient temptress, the modern alarms), his music is able to evoke opposing ideas at the same time. 

These contradictions give Sirens its strength, particularly during the album’s centerpiece, the song "No." It’s the only segment of music on the digital version of the album that includes a musical element not written, recorded, performed, mixed, and produced by Nico. (It’s a Chilean harp piece, “Lagrimas,” by Sergio Cuevas.) This section helps us to understand the mystery at the heart of Sirens, represented by the line of Spanish lyrics adorning its cover. The end of “Leaves,” the entirety of “No,” and the beginning of “Three Sides of Nazareth,” orbit around two conversations. The first seems to be a recording of a young Nico speaking with his father, the artist Alfredo Jaar. They discuss a statue being attacked by lions. 

The words of “No” are in Spanish, and they contain the second discussion, which serves as a parable that illuminates the first. An unhappy neighbor approaches Nico, and they discuss multiple contradictions—the far and the near, the inside and the outside. But the core of their conversation are the words from Sirens’ cover: “Ya dijimos no pero el si esta en todo.” This translates as: “We already said no but the yes is in everything,” a reference to the Chilean national plebiscite, a 1988 referendum on democracy in the country. In the referendum, on whether Chile should continue to be ruled by General Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power about 15 years earlier, voting “no” was voting “yes” to democracy. 

But if, as Jaar sings, “The yes is in everything,” the idea is that we don’t need to see the future to know that nothing ever really changes, that the cycle continues whether you vote for democracy or not. In turn, it suggests that the statue under discussion between little Nico and Alfredo, (whose own complicated politics are worth noting) could very well have been of Salvador Allende, who Pinochet ousted. 

There are plenty of extraordinary references on Sirens that I’m sure I missed. But, as with the Essential Mix, as with any collage, being ignorant of any of these things hardly lessens the weight of the music. What you pick up from the album is a real suspicion of power*, *from “The Governor” (“All the blood’s hidden in the governor’s trunk”) to “Killing Time” (“Money, it seems, needs its working class.”) And at the same time, Nico, through the music, exercises his own power, pulling on his listeners and compelling them to move, dance, think, and engage with one another, or sometimes to sit silently and take it all in. 

Nico's aversion to authority reaches a climax with that last track, “History Lesson,” which ends with those 45 transcendent seconds that I’m still failing to put into words. “History Lesson” takes its cues from old soul and doo-wop, like the Beach Boys at their most psychedelic. Think “Feel Flows” and those unfolding, enveloping missiles of soul.
The music on “History Lesson” is almost laughably gentle at first, and Jaar employs a trick favored by both John Lennon (“Run for Your Life”) and Paul McCartney (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), juxtaposing inviting music with disturbing lyrics. Here’s how his history lesson starts: “Chapter one: We fucked up/Chapter two: We did it again, and again, and again, and again/Chapter three: We didn’t say sorry.” And so on. The words are a harsh rebuke of any political system. But the music is tender. And the track is bleak and funny, and naïve and wise, and political and personal. It feels like everything all at once. It feels like Sirens.

Jonah Bromwich / Pitchfork

Four Tet ‎– New Energy (2017)

Style: Ambient, House, Techno, Minimal
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: Hostess Entertainment Unlimited, Text Records

Tracklist:
01.   Alap
02.   Two Thousand and Seventeen
03.   LA Trance
04.   Tremper
05.   Lush
06.   Scientists
07.   Falls 2
08.   You Are Loved
09.   SW9 9SL
10.   10 Midi
11.   Memories
12.   Daughter
13.   Gentle Soul
14.   Planet

Nearing 20 years as an ambassador between indie rock and dance music, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden has winnowed down the parts that clutter up music-making itself: He declines most interviews and still trots out the same publicity photo that accompanied his 2003 breakout Rounds. But after 2009’s sumptuous There Is Love in You, he took the reins himself, releasing a flurry of albums, experiments, collaborations, and singles on his own, and now keeps up a healthy social network presence on Twitter, Snapchat, and Soundcloud. With his legacy as one of the 21st-century’s finest electronic musicians all but assured, Hebden has become more of a populist, making few distinctions between working with Burial or Skrillex, Terror Danjah or Rihanna. 

His restless forward momentum and pursuit of new sounds make every Four Tet album distinct from its predecessor. But with Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You. 

”Alap” opens the album gently with plucked strings, alluding to its definition in Indian classical music as “prologue to the formal expression” of a raga. But as those glissading strings carry on into “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” Hebden yokes it to a beat that very closely recalls Rounds’ centerpiece, “Unspoken.” The opening third of New Energy hews to that album’s sensibilities, highlighting wistful and evocative melodies with breaks crunching beneath them. But despite Hebden’s look back, the strummed strings are more nimble here and the textures are more detailed.

Tempos notch upwards on early standout “Lush,” the gamelan-like tones and double-time shaker providing the velocity as Hebden strikes a balance between new age chill and dance-floor quickener. That mixture of extremes makes “You Are Loved” another clear highlight. The luminous drones at the start are folded into the sort of dusty break that defined so many early records on Stones Throw. But as Hebden dashes in an array of squiggles and blats, the track changes shape again into something heady and electronic, spacy and gravity-free. At times, his attention to textures comes at the cost of exploring new terrain. The wordless female voices and saxophones swirling around “Scientists” add new sonic wrinkles but don’t punch through into a revelatory new space. 

New Energy’s back half toggles between the type of club tracks that have become his forte (“SW9 9SL”) and interludes that give a breather before the next workout (“10 Midi”). It’s a shame that “10 Midi” lasts just under a minute-and-a-half, as its interplay between metallophone, piano, and bowed cello create a neo-classical restraint that remains one of the few places Hebden hasn’t explored. Same goes for the pure ambient waves of “Gentle Soul,” which flows into anthemic closer “Planet.” With its mix of carillon overtones, flickering strings, minced voices, and hiccuping garage thump, it suggests the very place where Steve Reich’s studied minimalism might meet adventurous bass music. 

The heart of the album occurs a few moments prior on “Daughter,” which again recalls Rounds. The tock of snare and bass drum, a vocal loop that just slips beyond comprehension, a dreamlike melody twinkling in the middle of it all—it hooks you while at the same time escapes your grasp. Four years ago, Hebden spoke about why his album Rounds remained a touchstone for all the music that came after: “I really connected with the idea that I needed to make something more personal, something real that counted. I started to give the songs titles that were a little more personal to me.” It’s hard to think of something more evocative than a father naming a piece of music for his daughter, a relationship that—no matter the passage of time—requires one to always remain present, giving, and open to something new.

 Andy Beta / Pitchfork

Alan Hawkshaw & Brian Bennett - Synthesizer and Percussion (1974)

Style: Jazz-Funk, Disco
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Themes International Music

A1 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Mon Amour
A2 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Oddball
A3 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Daytripper
A4 - Alan Hawkshaw - Mile High Swinger (Vers. A)
A5 - Alan Hawkshaw - Mile High Swinger (Vers. B)
A6 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Auto-Pilot
B1 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Pacesetter
B2 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Home Run
B3 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Driving Force
B4 - A. Hawkshaw / B. Bennett - Action Man
B5 - Alan Hawkshaw - Funky Chicken
B6 - Alan Hawkshaw - Jolly Roger
B7 - Alan Hawkshaw - Dumbo
B8 - Alan Hawkshaw - Plain Song
B9 - Alan Hawkshaw - Fanfair