Guadalcanal Diary ‎– Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (1984)

Style: New Wave, Rock & Roll
Format: CD, Vinyl, Cass.
Label: Elektra

Tracklist
A1.   Trail Of Tears
A2.   Fire From Heaven
A3.   Sleepers Awake
A4.   Gilbert Takes The Wheel
A5.   Ghost On The Road
B1.   Watusi Rodeo
B2.   Why DoThe Heathen Rage?
B3.   Pillow Talk
B4.   Walking In The Shadow Of The Big Man (Part 1)
B5.   Kumbayah

Like R.E.M., the B-52's, and Pylon, this fine band hailed from the unlikely independent-rock hotbed of Athens, GA. The long jangle pop shadow of R.E.M. is extremely strong on this release, with seven of the ten tracks showing either full or partial influence of that group. Fortunately, the songs here are excellent, exhibiting much variety within this style. "Trail of Tears," a haunting antiwar number, sounds the most like their Athens counterparts. "Fire From Heaven" is more up-tempo, intense, and dynamic, while "Sleepers Awake" is an ominous, slowly unfolding song. "Ghost on the Road" is primarily a fast country-punk number that saves its R.E.M. stylings for its yearning chorus. "Gilbert Takes the Wheel" and the title track are jangly instrumentals, the former being a fast rocker with a thudding beat, the latter being a lengthy slow-tempo selection exhibiting noticeable psychedelic traits. Other territory is touched on as well. "Pillow Talk" is a winsomely energetic Everly Brothers-influenced song. The brilliant "Watusi Rodeo" is a jumpy pop number sporting over-the-top surf guitar licks and inspired hilarious-yet-uncomfortable lyrics about "Ugly American" cowboys in Africa. There's also an eccentric cover of the missionary hymn "Kum Ba Yah," complete with appreciative background audience shouting, an energetic drum solo, and extreme contrasts of loud and soft dynamics (sometimes within the same verse line). This odd yet strong album is well worth hearing.

David Cleary / AllMusic

Fatima ‎– And Yet It's All Love (2018)

Style: Hip Hop, Funk / Soul
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Eglo Records, P-Vine Records

Tracklist:
01.   Dang
02.   Westside
03.   Attention Span Of A Cookie
04.   I See Faces
05.   Take It All (feat. Roc Marciano)
06.   Somebody Else
07.   Caught In A Lie
08.   Waltz
09.   So Rite
10.   Movie
11.   Note To Self
12.   And Yet It's All Love

It only takes a couple of listens to start singing along with And Yet It's All Love, the second album from the Eglo artist Fatima. Where her breakthrough LP, Yellow Memories, impressed with its unorthodox approach to modern soul, the follow-up lands on a more modest, immediate sound that still oozes personality. She's assembled a mostly fresh production team for her latest LP, though she's retained the hip-hop beatmaker Flako. Having contributed two tracks to Yellow Memories, his increased prominence on And Yet It's All Love helps give the LP a more modern-sounding palette. There aren't flashy maneuvers like there were on "La Neta," which switched tempos and time signatures, stuffing 20-minutes' worth of ideas into six. The level of musicianship here is still high, but the focus is on making moving, memorable songs.  

All great singers, or rather, the ones who write their own music, have musical trademarks. There are motifs that crop up in many of Fatima's vocal melodies. What makes them uniquely hers is their jazzy ambiguity—instead of simple minor or major keys that might reference single-note emotions, her weird harmonies often suggest a tense counterbalance of conflicting feelings. "Attention Span Of A Cookie" is sexy, sassy and even a little sad, with strange minor intervals offset by a fun bassline. When a songwriter gives voice to that tension—not just multiple emotional notes but the semitones between them—that's when you start to hear the messy magic of real life.  

The LP has a wide range of moods, painting a lively and dynamic portrait of Fatima as a person. There are the hooky singalongs that DJs will love, like "Westside," "Caught In A Lie" and "Attention Span Of A Cookie," which benefit from the album's bass-boosted production. There are moments of audacious self-empowerment ("So Rite"), slow-burning sensuality ("Dang"), manic energy ("I See Faces") and clear-headed confidence ("May I"). There are curveballs where the album gently swerves off-piste, such as "Waltz," which is indeed a waltz, with its pum-pum bassline and sparkly fairytale synths. She closes out the album with the title track, and it's Fatima at her most virtuosic—not only does she have style and grace, but the vocal chops to bring all of her notes to life.

Max Pearl / Resident Advisor

thatmanmonkz ‎– Columbusing (2016)

Style: House
Format: CD
Label: Delusions Of Grandeur

Tracklist:
01.   Air [With] – Khalil Anthony
02.   Jus Anutha Wunna Deez
03    Boogie Down [With] – Erik Rico
04.   Sum Ol' Nex' Ish
05.   A Fly New Tune [with] – Ta'Raach
06.   Turn It Out[With] – Dave Aju
07.   Another Night Under The Glitterball
08.   I Can Hardly Breathe (With A Brother Is...)
09.   For Bae 6:30
10.   Moon On The Hill [With] – DJ Kali
11.   Vampires 3:51
12.   Baked [With] – Malik Ameer
13.   Take U 2 My House [With] – Khalil Anthony
14.   For Those I've Lost Along The Way

Credits:
Bass Guitar – Pete Simpson
Keyboards – Bennett Holland
Keyboards [Keys] – Antonio Salviato
Percussion – Xander Wright
Saxophone – Enrico Crivallero

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